I was never in a fistfight as a kid, but I was in a lot of finger fights. Or should I call them by their official name: tickle fights. I more or less broke even in these bouts of hysteria, but win or lose, I had the same experience after each one: utter relaxation. It was as if every iota…
Growing pains. No pain, no gain. A pain in the neck. No matter how you say it, pain hurts. But being able to feel pain is vital to our survival; that’s why we have millions of pain receptors all over our bodies. Pain helps us learn to avoid what can hurt us. It also alerts us to conditions that may…
This past summer I decided to have a small dinner party. I planned on inviting six friends over, but as summer drew to a close I realized there were many other people I wanted to see. Before I knew it, my party had grown from six to thirty-five. In order to accommodate all the guests, I needed to rent some…
It’s a theme that has played out in myriad books and movies and even a Pussycat Dolls song, and I learned it the hard way: In order to get what you want, you have to give up what you wanted. My tale began one crisp January morning in 2011 when I decided to write a book. Up to that point…
Are your habits hijacking your brain’s functionality? While sleep deprivation and other exhausters have an impact on brain efficacy, eating habits have the largest effect on how you boost or deplete your brain activity. With a well-chosen plan to ingest, manage, and maintain the #1 brain fuel, you can enhance how well you remember, learn, concentrate, and behave. According to…
We’re almost at the end of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, but there’s an important aspect of the disease I’d like to discuss that many of us forget about: breast cancer in men. Granted, it’s about 100 times less common among men than women, but it does strike more than 2,000 men in the United States alone each year. I…
Nelson, a musician, was a lifelong smoker and had tried to quit many times. He also struggled with a tendency to overeat and had attendant blood sugar issues. He had tried so many diets that he said he was pretty sure he could write a book about nutrition. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know what to do to improve…
We’re celebrating our 6-month anniversary with a second look at the most popular articles on the site so far. Check them out and let us know which is your favorite! Rewiring Hate. To a degree, we’re wired to identify enemies and hate them. But to an even greater degree, we’re wired not to hate, to accept ambivalence and embrace com- plexity. In other words,…
Last winter, three developers at a weekend hackathon in Vancouver presented their first-person videogame “Auti-sim,” designed to simulate the experience of sensory overload as it’s experienced by an autistic child. In their one-minute prototype (below), the player’s point of view lurches around a playground. The visual field is filled with undifferentiated faces and unfocused images; the colors are supersaturated and the…
