Earlier this year, a Kickstarter campaign for a documentary film called “In Pursuit of Silence” raised $35,371, exceeding its goal in just a few weeks. On a crowdfunding platform where a new film proposal can pull in nearly 100 times that amount—for Zach Braff’s follow-up to “Garden State,” precisely $3,105,473—the financing feat was modest. Still, [...]

We often can’t rely on ourselves to act rationally. We know this, but much social science has a bad habit of ignoring it. A more realistic role for rationality is needed to grasp the unhidden but unmodeled relationship between decisions and actions. We evolved to frequently act without deciding. The widely used Rational Actor Model [...]

Flourishing should be the new happiness. What most pursue now ignores old wisdom and the logic of our biology. A verb capturing the required recurring effort is better than a noun describing the desired static state—by nature, not a thing we can be or get but that we do. It is perhaps better harvested than [...]

“…henceforth, space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union between the two will preserve an independent reality.” This now iconic quote spoken by Hermann Minkowski in 1906 captured the spirit of Albert Einstein’s recently published special theory of relativity. Einstein, in a [...]

Memories are story shaped. As are understandings. To remember, or make sense of, a thing is to have a story about it. Colonoscopies and correcting cathartic errors can probe the inner workings of these stored stories. Memories aren’t machine-like recordings. They resemble movies more than raw footage. They are carefully lit and edited. Daniel Kahneman [...]

Star Trek needs more advanced cognitive science. The work of Kahneman can augment one of its central philosophical themes. We now have less warped models of intuition, logic, and morality. Take one small but telling example from the latest Star Trek movie: Kirk, in a dire spot, says he wants to be more like Spock: [...]

“Let’s say you have an axe. Just a cheap one, from Home Depot,” opens the horror-comedy novel John Dies at the End. “On one bitter winter day, you use said axe to behead a man.” This blow splinters the axe’s handle – so the story goes – so you get the hardware store stick a [...]

Like many psychiatrists, I have been amazed by the debates surrounding the DSM-5, the first major revision of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in nearly twenty years, which was just released. Never before has a thick medical text of diagnostic nomenclature been the subject of so much attention. Although [...]

The word rational is widely misused. Scientists often apply it unnaturally, in ways that conflict with our biology. Nobel laureates Daniel Kahneman and Gary Becker, and their respective schools of thought, are on opposite sides of this breach with our nature. They revive an old struggle between prudent empiricism and blinkering “theorism” (an overreliance on [...]

Recall this pivotal scene from the 1997 movie, Men in Black. James Edwards (Will Smith, or Agent J) arrives at the headquarters of MiB – a secret agency that protects Earth from extraterrestrial threats – to compete with “the best of the best” for a position. Edwards, a confident and cocky NYPD officer, completes various [...]