“Hello there, how do you do? My name is Mr. Facebook, I’m sure you know me. Look, do you wanna check your new notifications, perhaps scroll through interesting feeds?” “Don’t listen to him! He is distracting you. Instead listen to me, my name is Instagram, and I’m...
Everyone looks at the world through a lens built in high school. No one intends to, but neuroplasticity peaks in puberty so our core neural pathways develop at that time. Humans are not born hard-wired like smaller-brained creatures. We’re designed to wire ourselves...
We are influenced by social comparison more than we like to admit. When you see what others enjoy, you may suddenly feel that you need that to be happy. You don’t want to think this way. Like a child who urgently wants the red cupcake after another child chooses it, a...
I just got back from Mexico, where I presented the Spanish translation of my book Habits of a Happy Brain. Here I am on the Mexican equivalent of The Today Show, after furiously working on my Spanish for a few weeks. A few reporters showed up with dog-eared copies of...
Imagine yourself getting great news on your phone. It stimulates your dopamine, which paves a neural pathway connecting your phone to your dopamine. The great feeling of dopamine tells your brain “this meets my needs.” Of course you don’t consciously think...
“Wild” means meeting your own needs. We don’t feed wild animals because it undermines their ability to meet their own needs. I was reminded of this by a blog warning to tourists in Costa Rica: “Don’t Feed the Monkeys. Conditioning them to expect human handouts...
Positive psychology can help recovering addicts discover their power over old habits. A positive approach to recovery can make an important contribution to a field that can be unwittingly negative. Despite good intentions, many treatment strategies weaken a recovering...
Do you feel like we’re at a turning point in history? Every who has ever lived has felt that way because the brain sees the world with itself at the center. We think its wrong to be self-centered, so we tend to overlook this core facet of cognition. The mammal brain...
Serotonin may seem like the opposite of conflict since it produces a pleasant feeling. But animal studies show that this pleasantness is the expectation of social dominance. Citations A landmark serotonin study put a one-way mirror between an alpha monkey and his...
I find inspiration in the history of psychology. A hundred years ago, the fight-or-flight response was explained by the research of Walter B. Canon. I saw this discovery through his eyes in his autobiography, “The Way of an Investigator: A scientist’s...