In his new book One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life (Crown Publishing Group), Mitch Horowitz tells the fascinating story of the “loosely knit band of psychical researchers and religious philosophers, mental-healers and hypnotists, Mesmerists and Spiritualists, Unitarians and Transcendentalists, suffragists and free-love advocates, black liberationists and Christian socialists, animal-rights activists and Biblical communists, occultists and Freemasons, artists and…
Recently I interviewed neuropsychologist Rick Hanson about his specialty: hardwiring happiness. Using neurological techniques, Hanson says, you can change the structure of your brain by building neuropathways for feeling good. “When it comes to negative experiences, your brain is like Velcro,” he said. “With positive experiences, the brain is like Teflon.” He went on to explain that for survival purposes,…
For over two decades I’ve tried to maintain a civil relationship with my sister-in-law, my husband’s brother’s wife. Without dredging up a lot of toxic memories, let’s just say we never hit it off. Both of us, however, have consistently tried to at least tolerate each other. Even so, we’ve had several major fallouts, which have put a strain not…
What do books about dog brains, a year spent in a tiny French village, mindfulness at work and in our daily lives, and new perspectives on mental and physical health have in common? They all involve some sort of transformation—to our thinking, to our behavior. Here’s a list of some of the Rewire Me editors’ favorite books of 2013. How…
Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor of Louisiana, was named Piyush by his Indian immigrant parents and raised as a Hindu. His conversion to Christianity, he told an interviewer from Christianity Today, took seven years. It began when his grandfather died and he turned to books for insights into the mysteries of life and death—first the Bible, then the writings of…
