“Once upon a time.” Four words. I don’t need to say anything more, and yet you know at once what it is you’re about to hear. You may not know the precise contents. You may not recognize the specific characters. You may have little notion of the exact action that is about to unfold. But [...]

In 1927, Gestalt psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik noticed a funny thing: waiters in a Vienna restaurant could only remember orders that were in progress. As soon as the order was sent out and complete, they seemed to wipe it from memory. Zeigarnik then did what any good psychologist would: she went back to the lab and [...]

Stories are all around us. But what is it about the story that holds such a powerful grip on the human imagination? That’s the question that Jonathan Gottschall tackles in his new book, The Storytelling Animal. Stories can change our behavior. They can influence our perceptions. They may even have the potential to, quite literally, [...]

When I was seven years old, my mom took me to see Curly Sue. Though I don’t remember much of the movie, two scenes made quite the impression: the first, when James Belushi asks Alisan Porter to hit him on the head with a baseball bat, and the second, when Bill, Sue, and Grey sit [...]

A stylized apple with a bite taken out of its right side: chances are, even if you don’t own a single Apple product, you would still recognize the ubiquitous logo. But have you ever paused to consider the symbol’s origin? Perhaps it’s Adam and Eve and the quest for knowledge, the apple a symbol of [...]

Walter Mischel was nine years old when he started kindergarten. It wasn’t that his parents had been negligent in his schooling. It was just that the boy couldn’t speak English. It was 1940 and the Mischels had just arrived in Brooklyn; they’d been one of the few Jewish families lucky enough to escape Vienna in [...]

My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky: So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man; So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die! The Child is father of the Man; I could wish my days to be Bound each [...]

W.J. was a veteran of World War II. He was gregarious, charming, and witty. He also happed to suffer from a debilitating form of epilepsy—so incapacitating that, in 1960, he elected to have a drastic form of brain surgery: his corpus collosum—the connecting fabric between the left and right hemispheres of the brain that allows [...]

Creativity: now there’s a word I thought I wouldn’t see under attack. Don’t we live in a society that thrives on the idea of innovation and creative thought? The age of the entrepreneur, of the man of ideas, of Steve Jobs and the think different motto? Well, yes and no. That is, indisputably yes on [...]

Writing at the close of the nineteenth century, William James, the father of modern psychology (and Henry’s brother), observed that, “Whilst part of what we perceive comes through our senses from the objects around us, another part (and it may be the larger part) always comes out of our own head.” We now know that [...]