Mind & Brain

We love the arts but can consider them an indulgence. We need not do so. Art not only reshapes individual minds. Because art facilitates shared attention and emotional contagion, it...

From the Iliad onwards, via Aristophanes and the gospel of Matthew, to Augustine and beyond, Greek and Latin texts in many genres are constellated with dream-descriptions. The best ancient minds,...

As a graduate student at Harvard University, I worked with B. F. Skinner, the preeminent behaviorist of the 20th century. Although my dissertation was about discrimination learning by pigeons, Skinner's...

I hold that to be ignored and rejected by others means psychological death. Around page 225 in the book, I illustrate this idea by what I understand to be the...

AsylumsIn the early nineteenth century, America, like much of Europe in the same period, embraces the idea that the proper response to serious forms of mental disorder is to put...

Copycats and Contrarians explores our instincts to follow others from a uniquely multidisciplinary perspective. It draws on insights and evidence from economics, finance, psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and behavioral ecology....

Today’s approach to conceptualizing mental illness, embodied in DSM-IV, is subject to intensifying criticism from multiple quarters. How did such a presumably flawed approach become so immensely influential? The answer...

I think of my book as a kind of literary ethnography. It roughly resembles the sort of work that made the late neurologist-writer Oliver Sacks famous. In the preface to...

Why have we, as a culture, ignored the intimacy in boys’ friendships for so long, despite the fact that research has revealed such intimacy among boys over the past century? And...

We humans are so proud of our big brains because it "feels" like brain size must be an advantage, but is it? As some of the essays in this book suggest, a lot of bad behavior and negative thoughts come out of those big brains as well. We feel superior to other animals who are doing just fine in their particular habitat, and we often feel it is our "right" to rule everything on the planet. Our big brains might, in the end, be our downfall

I don’t believe in coincidences, at least not big ones. That’s why the sea change the sister arts of poetry, painting, and music underwent at the turn of the 20th...

We have a misconstrued perception of who the “bad guys” are. In reality, (almost) all of us are violators of laws, regulations, contracts, and ethical norms. Various studies on the...

Translating Happiness celebrates the idea that untranslatable words – terms without an exact equivalent in our own language – can expand our emotional, intellectual, and even experiential horizons. Such words...

In Political Affect I address human nature as bio-cultural. Each one of us is a “body politic” that connects the social and the somatic. I avoid the extremes of social...

A half century ago a “radical caucus” formed in the American Psychiatric Association. The group, while somewhat small, felt that mental medicine needed to change in the US. The caucus...

Many people are fully convinced that animals such as dogs, cats and other mammals are conscious, but what about all the others? What about, birds, fish, octopuses and even crabs and insects? If a dog is conscious, what about the fleas living in the dog’s fur?

I’ve always had an affinity for older people. My first job as a teenager was working in a nursing home where I met a woman who had what was then...

A Synthesizing Mind is my intellectual memoir. It’s a ‘memoir’ in the sense that I reflect on my life; it’s ‘intellectual’ in that it focuses chiefly on my life as...

Curious readers who start with the first chapter are introduced to a puzzle that seems trivial yet is such a mystery that science still doesn’t have a full answer to...

If a reader wanted to browse my book, a number of strategies suggest themselves. The introductory chapter is quite brief, but sets out the range of topics I plan to...

What if religious belief is less like accepting a fact and more like a grand game of make-believe? Drawing an analogy from children who form groups around imaginary heroes, a philosopher argues that "religious credence" is a distinct mental attitude—chosen, bound up with sacred identity, and, unlike ordinary belief, largely immune to evidence.

The decade-long, vituperative debate about the aggression instinct is the subject of chapter 5. The earlier chapters, 1 through 4, provide the lead-up, introducing the characters and the stakes on...

Music, Math, and Mind is written for musicians and music lovers, and will take them through a journey that uncovers the science of music and sound. Because artists and art...

The book is a social history of the science of the body’s inner senses. We think we know about the five senses that Aristotle had identified and placed into a...

The Genius Checklist addresses the most essential questions about identifying, developing, and manifesting creative genius. Some of these questions have been examined by thinkers for centuries. These recurrent issues include:...

In On the Origin of Stories I asked why we are storytelling and especially fiction-making animals. It’s a fat book, a fairly comprehensive book. But to be truly comprehensive about...

Most New Year's resolutions are gone by February—and Jobert E. Abueva argues the problem is the approach, not the goals. The Janus Plan, named for the two-faced Roman god of thresholds, insists you cannot design a meaningful future without first taking an honest look at your past. Built around a six-step framework and the metaphor of weaving, it is a book meant to be read slowly.

Almost all discourse about nature and nurture only focuses on genetics when it comes to the nature side of things, ignoring natural selection, adaptation, and the fundamental goal of all living things...

I would hope someone stumbling upon That’s Disgusting in a bookstore either first thumbed through the chapter on horror and perverse pleasures (Chapter 6, “Horror Show”), or the chapter on...

All computational models of the brain and cognitive activity produced so far are either idealizations, making the models hypothetical, or approximations, making the models inexact descriptions of their target phenomena,...

Another big reason is that people underestimate how positively the other person will respond when we reach out to connect with them. People are reluctant to engage a stranger in conversation. If they think the other person doesn't want to talk to them, they often underestimate how interested the other person is in talking to them. We're reluctant to engage in deep conversation ...

Who, if anyone, is right, and how can we tell? Do we learn everything from scratch, or could some knowledge be innate? Is our brain one big network, or is it built out of modules, language being one of them?

I teach a course on the neural architecture of language at the University of California, Irvine. The first assignment I give my students is to pick a day and see how long they can go without using language: insert some earplugs and carry on with no talking, no texting, no reading, no language-based media. Most give up before the day is half over, reporting frustration, boredom, and isolation...

The Mirror and the Mind traces the history of the mirror self-recognition test—the experiment of placing subjects in front of a mirror and looking for signs of self-recognition—showing how it...

I found that synthetic intimacy is not emerging in a vacuum; it is meeting a real, unmet need, or perhaps more cynically speaking, entering and widening a wound that was already there, exacerbated by elements like the loneliness epidemic. That is why it is so powerful, and also why it is so complicated.

Good Vibrations builds on a scientific and cultural shift in how we understand music. For a long time, music was considered “just entertainment”: pleasant, but biologically unimportant. In the book,...

Dress, Dreams, and Desire is a book on the cultural history of fashion and psychoanalysis. It traces how psychoanalytic ideas have influenced fashion and how we interpret fashion. On the one hand, you have Freud's writings, where he barely mentions clothing or fashion at all. Just tiny little intriguing slivers, like the libido for looking, or the attraction of concealment. And yet, when you look at his...

Psychopathy Unmasked is a book about “psychopaths.” But it’s not your ordinary run-of-the-mill account that repeats the well-worn story of violent people naturally disposed to wreak havoc in our society. Instead,...

The book is based upon four scientific principles. The first is the principle of human evolution. It was Darwin, in fact, who first suggested that a belief in gods might be a result of “structure of brain heredity.” The book uses modern neuroscience

My book examines the tricks of the trade and forms of collective support for crafting our largely unconscious practices of hearing. As we live our daily lives, our hearing generally...

Deep brain stimulation can restore motor control in people with Parkinson’s disease. Yet access to information about a person’s brain from neuroimaging...

"Not only do humans sleep the least of any primate, but we have the most REM, proportionally. So we have this really special, unique kind of sleep architecture relative to other primate species."

Most people don’t try to parse cuteness. Like pornography, we know it when we see it. With a bit of examination, however, cuteness has easily quantifiable aesthetics. Take a moment...

Multitasking isn’t something new to the twenty-first century: our species was designed for it! On the cognitive, linguistic, and social level, humans are highly adapted to doing and thinking about...

Stunning beauty abounds in nature. We see it everywhere we look. The brilliant colors and dances of butterflies and fishes, the songs of crickets, frogs, and birds, and even the...

Radical Thinking is a book about how we make sense of the world, and how we can make more sense of it. But it’s not a typical ‘critical thinking’ book. It’s ‘radical’ (from the Latin radic, meaning ‘root’) because it’s about the roots - the foundations - of what we think. In other words, it’s about the things that shape our thoughts...

You might not realize it, but you are a creature of an imaginative realm called Storyland. Storyland is your home and before you die you will spend decades there. If...

Using the Iron Man suit (if it existed) would require a technological interface bridging the gap between our nervous systems and devices like computers and robots. Let’s say that was...

The standard view of medicine holds that observant clinicians discover diseases in nature. Accordingly, psychiatrists are no different from other doctors. They, too, discern forms of pathology arising from dysfunctions...

Embodied Visions is a pathbreaking explanation of how films are crafted to activate innate features of our brains and bodies. The book is based on cutting edge neuropsychology and evolutionary...

The idea of Snake Detection actually took me by surprise. I wasn’t looking for it. I was instead pursuing answers to questions that were more consistent with my academic background...

We love the arts but can consider them an indulgence. We need not do so. Art not only reshapes individual minds. Because art facilitates shared attention and emotional contagion, it...

From the Iliad onwards, via Aristophanes and the gospel of Matthew, to Augustine and beyond, Greek and Latin texts in many genres are constellated with dream-descriptions. The best ancient minds,...

As a graduate student at Harvard University, I worked with B. F. Skinner, the preeminent behaviorist of the 20th century. Although my dissertation was about discrimination learning by pigeons, Skinner's...

I hold that to be ignored and rejected by others means psychological death. Around page 225 in the book, I illustrate this idea by what I understand to be the...

AsylumsIn the early nineteenth century, America, like much of Europe in the same period, embraces the idea that the proper response to serious forms of mental disorder is to put...

Copycats and Contrarians explores our instincts to follow others from a uniquely multidisciplinary perspective. It draws on insights and evidence from economics, finance, psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and behavioral ecology....

Today’s approach to conceptualizing mental illness, embodied in DSM-IV, is subject to intensifying criticism from multiple quarters. How did such a presumably flawed approach become so immensely influential? The answer...

I think of my book as a kind of literary ethnography. It roughly resembles the sort of work that made the late neurologist-writer Oliver Sacks famous. In the preface to...

Why have we, as a culture, ignored the intimacy in boys’ friendships for so long, despite the fact that research has revealed such intimacy among boys over the past century? And...

We humans are so proud of our big brains because it "feels" like brain size must be an advantage, but is it? As some of the essays in this book suggest, a lot of bad behavior and negative thoughts come out of those big brains as well. We feel superior to other animals who are doing just fine in their particular habitat, and we often feel it is our "right" to rule everything on the planet. Our big brains might, in the end, be our downfall

I don’t believe in coincidences, at least not big ones. That’s why the sea change the sister arts of poetry, painting, and music underwent at the turn of the 20th...

We have a misconstrued perception of who the “bad guys” are. In reality, (almost) all of us are violators of laws, regulations, contracts, and ethical norms. Various studies on the...

Translating Happiness celebrates the idea that untranslatable words – terms without an exact equivalent in our own language – can expand our emotional, intellectual, and even experiential horizons. Such words...

In Political Affect I address human nature as bio-cultural. Each one of us is a “body politic” that connects the social and the somatic. I avoid the extremes of social...

A half century ago a “radical caucus” formed in the American Psychiatric Association. The group, while somewhat small, felt that mental medicine needed to change in the US. The caucus...

Many people are fully convinced that animals such as dogs, cats and other mammals are conscious, but what about all the others? What about, birds, fish, octopuses and even crabs and insects? If a dog is conscious, what about the fleas living in the dog’s fur?

I’ve always had an affinity for older people. My first job as a teenager was working in a nursing home where I met a woman who had what was then...

A Synthesizing Mind is my intellectual memoir. It’s a ‘memoir’ in the sense that I reflect on my life; it’s ‘intellectual’ in that it focuses chiefly on my life as...

Curious readers who start with the first chapter are introduced to a puzzle that seems trivial yet is such a mystery that science still doesn’t have a full answer to...

If a reader wanted to browse my book, a number of strategies suggest themselves. The introductory chapter is quite brief, but sets out the range of topics I plan to...

What if religious belief is less like accepting a fact and more like a grand game of make-believe? Drawing an analogy from children who form groups around imaginary heroes, a philosopher argues that "religious credence" is a distinct mental attitude—chosen, bound up with sacred identity, and, unlike ordinary belief, largely immune to evidence.

The decade-long, vituperative debate about the aggression instinct is the subject of chapter 5. The earlier chapters, 1 through 4, provide the lead-up, introducing the characters and the stakes on...

Music, Math, and Mind is written for musicians and music lovers, and will take them through a journey that uncovers the science of music and sound. Because artists and art...

The book is a social history of the science of the body’s inner senses. We think we know about the five senses that Aristotle had identified and placed into a...

The Genius Checklist addresses the most essential questions about identifying, developing, and manifesting creative genius. Some of these questions have been examined by thinkers for centuries. These recurrent issues include:...

In On the Origin of Stories I asked why we are storytelling and especially fiction-making animals. It’s a fat book, a fairly comprehensive book. But to be truly comprehensive about...

Most New Year's resolutions are gone by February—and Jobert E. Abueva argues the problem is the approach, not the goals. The Janus Plan, named for the two-faced Roman god of thresholds, insists you cannot design a meaningful future without first taking an honest look at your past. Built around a six-step framework and the metaphor of weaving, it is a book meant to be read slowly.

Almost all discourse about nature and nurture only focuses on genetics when it comes to the nature side of things, ignoring natural selection, adaptation, and the fundamental goal of all living things...

I would hope someone stumbling upon That’s Disgusting in a bookstore either first thumbed through the chapter on horror and perverse pleasures (Chapter 6, “Horror Show”), or the chapter on...

All computational models of the brain and cognitive activity produced so far are either idealizations, making the models hypothetical, or approximations, making the models inexact descriptions of their target phenomena,...

Another big reason is that people underestimate how positively the other person will respond when we reach out to connect with them. People are reluctant to engage a stranger in conversation. If they think the other person doesn't want to talk to them, they often underestimate how interested the other person is in talking to them. We're reluctant to engage in deep conversation ...

Who, if anyone, is right, and how can we tell? Do we learn everything from scratch, or could some knowledge be innate? Is our brain one big network, or is it built out of modules, language being one of them?

I teach a course on the neural architecture of language at the University of California, Irvine. The first assignment I give my students is to pick a day and see how long they can go without using language: insert some earplugs and carry on with no talking, no texting, no reading, no language-based media. Most give up before the day is half over, reporting frustration, boredom, and isolation...

The Mirror and the Mind traces the history of the mirror self-recognition test—the experiment of placing subjects in front of a mirror and looking for signs of self-recognition—showing how it...

I found that synthetic intimacy is not emerging in a vacuum; it is meeting a real, unmet need, or perhaps more cynically speaking, entering and widening a wound that was already there, exacerbated by elements like the loneliness epidemic. That is why it is so powerful, and also why it is so complicated.

Good Vibrations builds on a scientific and cultural shift in how we understand music. For a long time, music was considered “just entertainment”: pleasant, but biologically unimportant. In the book,...

Dress, Dreams, and Desire is a book on the cultural history of fashion and psychoanalysis. It traces how psychoanalytic ideas have influenced fashion and how we interpret fashion. On the one hand, you have Freud's writings, where he barely mentions clothing or fashion at all. Just tiny little intriguing slivers, like the libido for looking, or the attraction of concealment. And yet, when you look at his...

Psychopathy Unmasked is a book about “psychopaths.” But it’s not your ordinary run-of-the-mill account that repeats the well-worn story of violent people naturally disposed to wreak havoc in our society. Instead,...

The book is based upon four scientific principles. The first is the principle of human evolution. It was Darwin, in fact, who first suggested that a belief in gods might be a result of “structure of brain heredity.” The book uses modern neuroscience

My book examines the tricks of the trade and forms of collective support for crafting our largely unconscious practices of hearing. As we live our daily lives, our hearing generally...

Deep brain stimulation can restore motor control in people with Parkinson’s disease. Yet access to information about a person’s brain from neuroimaging...

"Not only do humans sleep the least of any primate, but we have the most REM, proportionally. So we have this really special, unique kind of sleep architecture relative to other primate species."

Most people don’t try to parse cuteness. Like pornography, we know it when we see it. With a bit of examination, however, cuteness has easily quantifiable aesthetics. Take a moment...

Multitasking isn’t something new to the twenty-first century: our species was designed for it! On the cognitive, linguistic, and social level, humans are highly adapted to doing and thinking about...

Stunning beauty abounds in nature. We see it everywhere we look. The brilliant colors and dances of butterflies and fishes, the songs of crickets, frogs, and birds, and even the...

Radical Thinking is a book about how we make sense of the world, and how we can make more sense of it. But it’s not a typical ‘critical thinking’ book. It’s ‘radical’ (from the Latin radic, meaning ‘root’) because it’s about the roots - the foundations - of what we think. In other words, it’s about the things that shape our thoughts...

You might not realize it, but you are a creature of an imaginative realm called Storyland. Storyland is your home and before you die you will spend decades there. If...

Using the Iron Man suit (if it existed) would require a technological interface bridging the gap between our nervous systems and devices like computers and robots. Let’s say that was...

The standard view of medicine holds that observant clinicians discover diseases in nature. Accordingly, psychiatrists are no different from other doctors. They, too, discern forms of pathology arising from dysfunctions...

Embodied Visions is a pathbreaking explanation of how films are crafted to activate innate features of our brains and bodies. The book is based on cutting edge neuropsychology and evolutionary...

The idea of Snake Detection actually took me by surprise. I wasn’t looking for it. I was instead pursuing answers to questions that were more consistent with my academic background...