People have long tried tricks to aid their memories. One of the most useful of these so-called mnemonic devices, I’ve found, involves associating names with word pictures or with other people you know well. I was just at a party, for example, and met a man who shared a last name with someone I’ve known [...]

Peter West makes his living working with explosives, but for a long time he did his job despite a terrifying handicap: tremors. His hands would twitch and shake, his head would bob, his speech would become garbled. Sometimes he could barely pour milk from a pitcher—the milk slopping over the side of the glass. “At [...]

A few years ago, James Gurney, a celebrated artist and author, stood before his easel to paint a deli in Poughkeepsie. Surveying the scene before him, he was immediately overwhelmed with literally millions of details. People strolled by. Insects fluttered overhead. Signs poked out from the store and up from the street. Every tree had [...]

People are particular about their things. Property—who owns it or did what with it—is the subject of many a legal battle. It’s odd to me how attached people get to objects and how emotional they become when someone messes with their stuff. Yet we take notions about sharing and rules such as “don’t take what [...]

Guest Blog by Jamil Zaki* Earlier this year, Senator Tom Coburn published a report called “Under the Microscope,” in which he criticized the funding of any research he couldn’t immediately understand as important. Of particularly dubious value, in Coburn’s opinion, are the behavioral and social sciences—including my own field, psychology. Following his report, Coburn proposed [...]

In the U.S., 90 percent of us get married—and usually without a whole lot of thought. We may do it for love, which is fine, but arguably a dubious reason to tie the knot. You can love someone perfectly well without marrying him, after all. We get married because, that’s what people do. For women [...]

Desire. When you have it, nobody questions it. When it is absent, it can be tricky to talk about. After all, the subject is delicate, and what is the point? You probably have little clue what is going on anyway. Luckily, scientists are looking out for you—because it is not even close to being just [...]

ASPEN. When I arrived at the Aspen Meadows Resort for the Second Annual Aspen Brain Forum last Thursday evening, Goldie Hawn was getting out of a vehicle near the entrance. I knew she was about to give the keynote address, but I was startled to practically run into the actress. A grandmother now, Hawn looked [...]

A decade ago, we lived in an apartment tower in Jersey City overlooking the Hudson River. We had a panoramic view of Manhattan—and of planes flying in and out of the nearby airports. After several years there, I got used to rolling my eyes as my husband pontificated on the make, or approach, of various [...]

Money can bring you happiness, studies show, but not as much as you might think. The richer you get, the happier you get, but the returns diminish after you reach a certain standard of living. (See Do We Need $75,000 a Year to Be Happy?) One of the reasons for this finding might be that [...]