Imagine, for a moment, that you recently discovered you are an opera lover. A friend dragged you to “Aida” last year and you were enraptured. The same friend took you to “Don Giovanni” and you melted as the first ominous notes of the overture filled the hall. You’d like to harness your new-found ...

Recent studies suggest that Americans might be the worst research subjects on the planet. As Ethan Watters put it recently, “social scientists could not possibly have picked a worse population from which to draw broad generalizations. Researchers had been doing the equivalent of studying penguins ...

A few years ago, at mile 20 of my second marathon, I promised myself I would never again run a 26.2 mile race. I had trained impeccably, ran my first mile a little slower than goal pace, as everyone advises, and was primed to shave seven minutes off my previous time and traverse the five boroughs ...

Since the standards-based model of education overtook American public schools a generation ago, the answer to this question has been simple: prepare students for college and get them ready to be productive participants in the workforce. The new Common Core Standards Initiative — already adopted by ...

What's the Big Idea? A few milestones in the short but storied history of machine translation: in 1939, Bell Labs presented the first speech synethesizing device, the Voder, at the World's Fair in New York. In 1978, the first spoken words were transmitted across the Internet. June 2012 saw the ...

When I heard the news of Jonah Lehrer’s fabrications on Monday — indiscretions that led to an apology and his resignation from the New Yorker on Tuesday — my jaw fell. Like Michael C. Moynihan, who exposed Lehrer in an article in Tablet, I was “completely fucking mystified” why the Rhodes scholar ...

What's the Big Idea? Forget coffee and crosswords. If you want to supercharge your brain, you have to change your lifestyle. But only a few things about it. Here, we lay to rest some of the well-worn myths of power thinking, and give you the facts on what you can do to actually improve mental ...

"We don't really want what we think we want," says philosopher Slavoj Žižek. It's a strange, almost exotic thought at a time when many of us are inundated daily with the prospect of infinite choice. You can no longer buy a product, it seems, without expressing your opinion. (Do you want whiter ...

“So here’s the thing to recognize about your bad habit.  You cannot eradicate your bad habit.  If you just try and say, ‘ I’m going to use willpower to make this behavior go away,’ it’s not going to work.  And we know this from study after study.  Every scientist who works on habits will tell you ...

What's the Big Idea? Margaret Moore is the founder and co-director of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital. Paul Hammerness, MD, is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Together, they hope to get at the physical and psychological roots of chaos. In a recent interview ...

Can the way we think actually change the wiring, activation patters, and physical landscape of our brains? In other words, can our mind, in a sense, control or at least influence the direction of our brain? Our brains are incredibly flexible. Long after the exuberance (fast growth) and the ...

“Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners.” –Shakespeare’s Othello, I.iii Admittedly, the messenger quoted above is Shakespeare’s arch-villain Iago. But when the message is right, it’s right. Neuroscience and psychology have identified willpower, largely a co ...