Podcasts by New Books in Psychology
Interviews with Psychologists about their New Books
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Further podcasts by Marshall Poe
Podcast on the topic Wissenschaft
All episodes
Making Meaning Episode 23: Limits and Love from 2023-02-26T09:00
We are finite creatures who struggle to accept our finitude. But if we can learn to embrace our limits, we will find that our relations with one another, the created world, and God allow us to expe...
ListenMaking Meaning Episode 22: Head and Heart from 2023-02-25T09:00
Meaning paradoxically has to be both made and discovered, an inescapable entanglement of the singular and the universal. And though the fruit of such wrestling may not be uncomplicated happiness, i...
ListenMaking Meaning Episode 20: Love, Work, and Play from 2023-02-23T09:00
Though life’s ultimate meaning may be elusive, the goods of love, work and play are so deeply rewarding that for most people they are sufficient for creating a happy life. And with new advances in ...
ListenMaking Meaning Episode 19: Mysteries and Metaphors from 2023-02-22T09:00
There is a deep mystery to the existence of the universe. And although a final answer to the question of meaning is not possible, it is our highest responsibility and greatest hope to seek one. Gue...
ListenMaking Meaning Episode 18: Unfolding Narratives from 2023-02-21T09:00
Meaning is less an objective thing to be discovered than a life-project, a narrative that unfolds over time. This doesn’t mean that every detail of our life fits a perfectly coherent plot, but rath...
ListenMaking Meaning Episode 17: Remaking the World from 2023-02-20T09:00
We inherit a world that is already made, full of stories and structures and significance. But all of us have the capacity to remake the world and the meanings available in it. Guest: Simon Critchle...
ListenMaking Meaning Episode 16: Passionate Engagement from 2023-02-19T09:00
Meaning is more than pleasure or even happiness—it is an intense and fulfilling engagement in projects and relationships that bring forth the best within us and disclose mysterious, beautiful world...
ListenMaking Meaning Episode 15: Subjectivity and Significance from 2023-02-18T09:00
We have a tendency to view our lives as meaningful only if we are involved in heroic acts of service, creativity, or achievement. But this is misguided. Even when we are ordinary, we are all, as li...
ListenMaking Meaning Episode 14: The Challenge of Choice from 2023-02-17T09:00
The vast range of choices we can make about our lives is one of the great blessings of modernity. But that very freedom makes it hard to know what to believe or where we belong. Even more difficult...
ListenMaking Meaning Episode 13: Flickers of Light from 2023-02-16T09:00
The realization that our lives are incredibly brief and we are almost certainly not going to be remembered by anyone 100 years from now can cause deep angst—but it can also liberate us to abandon w...
ListenMaking Meaning Episode 12: Expansion of Life from 2023-02-15T09:00
Experiencing a crisis of meaning, a time when our life and world no longer cohere, is painful and wrenching. But these encounters with the abyss can also be moments of rebirth and expansion, when w...
ListenMaking Meaning Episode 11: Living Music from 2023-02-14T09:00
Music is not merely entertainment—it is a living tradition, a connective tissue linking generations together in a shared pursuit of joy and significance. And through those links across time and spa...
ListenMaking Meaning Episode 10: Connection in Community from 2023-02-13T09:00
Meaning is more than an abstraction—it is a sense that we matter to one another, woven together with threads of reciprocity. But in those times when we feel lost and cut off from our sources of str...
ListenMaking Meaning Episode 9: Questing Spirits from 2023-02-12T09:00
The experience of existence is one of bewilderment and even anguish. Anguish because we feel that we are incomplete beings longing for completion, mired in immanence yet yearning for transcendence....
ListenMaking Meaning Episode 8: Gifts of Belonging from 2023-02-11T09:00
In music, Kimbra found a way to create and share gifts. And through that gifting, she provides space for others to find deep connection and belonging. But music also offers something more mysteriou...
ListenMaking Meaning Episode 7: Virtuous Stories from 2023-02-10T09:00
The human being is a storytelling animal, and no story is more important to us than our own. But we don’t write that story in a vacuum. We are born in media res and must develop ways of making sens...
ListenMaking Meaning Episode 6: Here and Now from 2023-02-09T09:00
It’s common to look beyond life—to eternity or God—for meaning. But as the experience of seeing a cherry tree in bloom reveals, there is deep value in the immanent, the immediate, the now. Guest: J...
ListenMaking Meaning Episode 5: Beyond Happiness from 2023-02-08T09:00
Organizing our lives around the pursuit of happiness—defined as positive feelings—can ultimately leave our souls hungry. Instead, we should try connecting ourselves to deeper things: compassion, co...
ListenMaking Meaning Episode 4: Weaving the World Together from 2023-02-07T09:00
Meaning is less a secret to discover than an emergent property, a byproduct of engaging with the world. Through experimentation and an orientation of openness, we can weave ourselves into a broader...
ListenMaking Meaning Episode 2: A Fortunate Coalescence from 2023-02-05T09:00
We’re often given the following choice: either there’s a cosmic, eternal purpose to our lives or nothing matters at all. But perhaps the meaning of life is the meaning in life—witnessing the dance ...
ListenMaking Meaning Episode 1: You Don't Have To Be Special from 2023-02-04T09:00
Feelings of meaninglessness often are caused by how we understand ourselves. If we change how we think about our worth, we’ll discover radiant meaning can be found in even the most ordinary aspects...
ListenDissecting Morality: What do Scientists Have To Say About Ethics? (Part 2) from 2023-01-28T09:00
Linking morality and science can conjure up disturbing histories around social Darwinism, eugenics, and genetically engineered humans. But scientists today are making discoveries that moral agents ...
ListenShifting Blame: What Should You "Own" and What Shouldn't You? from 2023-01-18T09:00
We claim to judge people for what they intentionally do, but accidents often influence our judgments. In our justice systems, people can be harshly and unfairly blamed for bad luck—but in our perso...
ListenShifting Blame: What Should You "Own" and What Shouldn't You? from 2023-01-18T09:00
We claim to judge people for what they intentionally do, but accidents often influence our judgments. In our justice systems, people can be harshly and unfairly blamed for bad luck—but in our perso...
ListenOn Sigmund Freud's "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" from 2022-11-18T09:00
Sigmund Freud is probably best known as the founder of psychoanalysis. In his clinical practice, he established theories on how the human psyche develops and behaves, and his 1905 text Three Essays...
ListenOn Victor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning" from 2022-09-14T08:00
Victor Frankl was a leader in 20th century psychiatry. In 1942, Frankl was sent to a concentration camp in the Czech Republic. Frankl was already influential in the field of psychiatry by the time ...
ListenOn Sigmund Freud's "Civilization and Its Discontents" from 2022-09-06T08:00
In 1930, Sigmund Freud wrote Civilization and its Discontents and laid out his theory of civilization: civilization’s a problem, and it makes us unhappy. Freud felt humans were aggressive creatures...
ListenTeletherapy from 2022-06-30T08:00
Hannah Zeavin talks about teletherapy, from Freud’s letters to suicide hotlines to therapy apps. If therapy is always mediated, teletherapy is any form of therapy in which that mediation is more cl...
ListenChristina Twomey, “The Battle Within: POWs in Postwar Australia” (NewSouth Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her new book, The Battle Within: POWs in Postwar Australia (NewSouth Books, 2018), Christina Twomey, Professor of History at Monash University, explores the “battle within,” the individual and c...
ListenAndrew Lees, “Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment” (Notting Hill Editions, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment (Notting Hill Editions, 2017) is a fascinating account by one of the world’s leading and most decorated neurologists of the profound influence...
ListenRadhule Weininger, “Heartwork: The Path of Self-Compassion” (Shambhala, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Dr. Radhule Weininger is a clinical psychologist and meditation teacher who integrates psychodynamic, Jungian and Gestalt psychotherapies with Buddhist psychology. In her new book Heartwork: The Pa...
ListenBetsy DiSalvo, et al., “Participatory Design for Learning: Perspectives from Practice and Research” (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Betsy DiSalvo, assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology, joins us in this episode to discuss the recently published co-edited volume entitled, P...
ListenAnita Johnston, “Eating in the Light of the Moon” (Gurze Books, 2000) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Anita Johnston, author of Eating in the Light of the Moon: How Women Can Transform Their Relationships with Food Through Myth, Metaphor, and Storytelling (Gurze Books, 2000), is an expert in the fi...
ListenKaren Neander, “A Mark of the Mental: In Defense of Informational Teleosemantics” (MIT Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The two biggest problems of understanding the mind are consciousness and intentionality. The first doesn’t require introduction. The latter is the problem of how we can have thoughts and perception...
ListenHoward I. Kushner, “On the Other Hand: Left Hand, Right Brain, Mental Disorder, and History” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the early twentieth century, Robert Hertz, a French anthropologist, and Cesare Lombroso, the Italian criminologist, debated the causes and consequences of left-handedness. According to Lombroso,...
ListenTy Tashiro, “Awkward: The Science of Why We’re Socially Awkward and Why That’s Awesome” (Harper Collins, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Some people can’t help but be ‘awkward’ despite their lifelong efforts to blend in. They feel ashamed of their social ineptitude and end up shying away from social situations, yet research offers i...
ListenRobert Meyer and Howard Kunreuther, “The Ostrich Paradox: Why We Underprepare for Disasters” (Wharton Digital Press, 2017)) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In The Ostrich Paradox: Why We Underprepare for Disasters (Wharton Digital Press, 2017), Robert Meyer and Howard Kunreuther summarize six major cognitive biases that explain why humans fail to adeq...
ListenErika Dyck and Alex Deighton, “Managing Madness” (U Manitoba Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Embracing a multi-perspectival authorial voice, Managing Madness: Weyburn Mental Hospital and the Transformation of Psychiatric Care in Canada (University of Manitoba Press, 2017), tells the story ...
ListenRoger Frie, “Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility After the Holocaust” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What if you suddenly discovered a cherished member of your family was a Nazi? How would you make sense of the code of silence that had kept an uncomfortable reality at bay? How would you resolve th...
ListenMark S. Hamm and Ramon Spaaij, “The Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism” (Columbia UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism (Columbia University Press, 2017), by Mark S. Hamm and Ramon Spaaij, identifies patterns among individuals that commit acts of terror outside of a group or network. H...
ListenChristian B. Miller, “The Character Gap: How Good Are We?” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Are we good people? Or do we just think we are? In his new book The Character Gap: How Good Are We? (Oxford University Press, 2017), author Christian B. Miller tackles these questions and more, bre...
ListenJason Lillis, “The Diet Trap” (New Harbinger Publications, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Obesity and weight loss are notoriously challenging areas of research and intervention. Traditional behavioral psychology methods for weight loss are known to be ineffective in the long-term for ma...
ListenKieran Setiya, “Midlife: A Philosophical Guide” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Middle-agedness is a curious phenomenon. In many ways, one is at one’s peak and also at the early stages of decline. There is much to do, but also dozens of paths irretrievably untaken. Successes, ...
ListenMario Luis Small, “Someone to Talk To” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Who do people turn to when they want to talk about serious issues in their life? Do they end up confiding in people they list as confidants? In his new book, Someone to Talk To (Oxford University P...
ListenOwen Flanagan, “The Geography of Morals: Varieties of Moral Possibility” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What is it to be moral, to lead an ethically good life? From a naturalistic perspective, any answer to this question begins from an understanding of what humans are like that is deeply informed by ...
ListenMargot Esther Borden, “Psychology in the Light of the East” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Psychology and spirituality have a complicated relationship. Dating back to ancient times, we see them treated as sister disciplines which inform and enhance one another. But at some point in the l...
ListenDaniel R. DeNicola, “Understanding Ignorance: The Surprising Impact of What We Don’t Know” (The MIT Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Epistemology is the area of philosophy that examines the phenomena of and related to knowledge. Traditional core questions include: How is knowledge different from lucky guessing? Can knowledge be ...
ListenMindy Fried, “Caring for Red: A Daughter’s Memoir” (Vanderbilt UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her new book, Caring for Red: A Daughter’s Memoir (Vanderbilt University Press, 2016), Mindy Fried shares her experiences with providing care for her father at the end of his life. With rich sto...
ListenJean Kazez, “The Philosophical Parent: Asking the Hard Questions about Having and Raising Children” (Oxford UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We all recognize that parenting involves a seemingly endless succession of choices, beginning perhaps with the choice to become a parent, through a sequence of decisions concerning the care, upbrin...
ListenJulia Beltsiou, “Immigration in Psychoanalysis: Locating Ourselves” (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Immigrant experiences are complex and varied. People who leave their home countries for a new one often feel torn between two identities and struggle to feel at home in either place. Dr. Julia Belt...
ListenDebra L. Safer, “Dialectical Behavior Therapy for Binge Eating and Bulimia” (The Guilford Press, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
For many people who binge eat, strong emotions can be a cue that leads to a pattern of maladaptive eating behaviors. Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is an evidence-based psychotherapy approach t...
ListenRon Mallon, “The Construction of Human Kinds” (Oxford University Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Social constructionists hold that the world is determined at least in part by our ways of representing it. Recent debates regarding social construction have focused on categories that play importan...
ListenLeigh Straw, “After the War: Returned Soldiers and the Mental and Physical Scars of World War I” (UWA Publishing, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her new book, After the War: Returned Soldiers and the Mental and Physical Scars of World War I (UWA Publishing, 2017), Leigh Straw, a Senior Lecturer in Aboriginal Studies and History at the Un...
ListenDeborah Parker and Mark L. Parker, “Sucking Up: A Brief Consideration of Sycophancy” (U. of Virginia Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Ever since Donald Trump was elected President, he’s created a non-stop torrent of news, so much so that members of the media regularly claim that he’s effectively trashed the traditional news cycle...
ListenNina Savelle-Rocklin, “Food for Thought: Perspectives on Eating Disorders” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The psychology of eating disorders is poorly understood. Recent trends in research and treatment focus near-exclusively on behaviors around food and weight without sufficiently attending to their p...
ListenRobert Wright, “Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment” (Simon and Schuster, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
All “true believers” believe their beliefs are true. This is particularly true of true religious believers: for Christians, Christianity is the true religion, for Jews, Judaism is the true religion...
ListenKristina Musholt, “Thinking About Oneself: From Nonconceptual Content to the Concept of a Self” (MIT Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When Descartes famously concluded “I think, therefore I am”, he took for granted his ability to use the first person pronoun to refer to himself. But how do we come to have this capacity for self-c...
ListenPatricia Gherovici, “Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference” (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Psychoanalysis is transitioning. Its history of pathologizing deviant sexuality is giving way to curiosity about the universal complexities and contradictions inherent in sex and gender. Yet it cou...
ListenSophie Egan, “Devoured: How What We Eat Defines Who We Are” (William Morrow, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Devoured: How What We Eat Defines Who We Are (William Morrow Books, 2017), food writer and Culinary Institute of America program director Sophie Egan takes readers on an eye-opening journey thr...
ListenGualtiero Piccinini, “Physical Computation: A Mechanistic Account” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
A popular way of thinking about the mind and its relation to physical stuff is in terms of computation. This general information-processing approach to solving the mind-body problem admits of a num...
ListenMark Solms, “The Feeling Brain: Selected Papers in Neuropsychoanalysis” (Karnac, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
If you steered yourself away from books about brain science because you were interested in something completely different–psychoanalysis–then this is the book for you! This book will renew your app...
ListenDaniel P. Keating, “Born Anxious: The Lifelong Impact of Early Life Adversity” (St. Martin’s Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Anxiety has become a social epidemic. People feel anxious all the time about nearly everything: their work, families, and even survival. However, research shows that some of us are more prone to ch...
ListenKees van Deemter, “Computational Models of Referring: A Study in Cognitive Science” (MIT Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Sometimes we have to depend on philosophy to explain to us why something apparently simple is in fact extremely complicated. The way we use referring expressions – things that pick out the entities...
ListenTheodore Burnes and Jeanne Stanley, “Teaching LGBTQ Psychology: Queering Innovative Pedagogy and Practice” (APA, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Despite the prominence of LGBTQ issues in our current social consciousness, many people still know little about the LGBTQ community, which means that teaching about this community and its issues is...
ListenBongrae Seok, “Moral Psychology of Confucian Shame: Shame of Shamelessness” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Shame is a complex social emotion that has a particularly negative valence; in the West it is associated with failure, inappropriateness, dishonor, disgrace. But within the Confucian tradition, the...
ListenShelvy Haywood Keglar, “Underdog to Top Dog: An Improbable Rise” (IBJ, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Most psychology books are written by experts with knowledge deriving from professional experience–for which we are grateful. Occasionally, a psychologist ventures to write a book that draws from in...
ListenOscar Fernandez, “The Calculus of Happiness” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The book discussed here is entitled The Calculus of Happiness: How a Mathematical Approach to Life Adds Up to Health, Wealth, and Love (Princeton University Press, 2017) by Oscar Fernandez. If the ...
ListenBeau Lotto, “Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently” (Hatchette Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We may think we see the world as it is, but neuroscience proves otherwise. Which is a good thing, according to neuroscientist and author Beau Lotto. In his new book Deviate: The Science of Seeing D...
ListenJon Mills, “Inventing God: Psychology of Belief and the Rise of Secular Spirituality” (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
There are many fronts in the argument against the existence of a god or gods and veracity of religious narratives. Some familiar approaches are to critique the philosophical underpinnings of religi...
ListenDavid Danks, “Unifying the Mind: Cognitive Representations as Graphical Models” (MIT Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
For many cognitive scientists, psychologists, and philosophers of mind, the best current theory of cognition holds that thinking is in some sense computation “in some sense,” because that core idea...
ListenBeth Kurland, "Dancing on the Tightrope: Transcending the Habits of Your Mind and Awakening to Your Fullest Life" (Wellbridge Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
If life can feel at times like a challenging tightrope walk, how do we face life's difficulties yet remain resilient and open-hearted? Rather than seeking "perfect" balance, or tiptoeing on our jou...
ListenJill Gentile, “Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire” (Karnac, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Psychoanalysis has a reputation for insularity, often limiting its interest and scope to events in the consulting room. But the origins of Freud’s notion of free speech bear meaningful similarities...
ListenPilar Jennings, "To Heal a Wounded Heart: The Transformative Power of Buddhism and Psychotherapy in Action" (Shambala, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Early on in her clinical practice, psychoanalyst Pilar Jennings was presented with a particularly difficult case: a six-year-old girl who, traumatized by loss, had stopped speaking. Challenged by t...
ListenMichael and Sarah Bennett, “F*ck Love: One Shrink’s Sensible Advice for Finding a Lasting Relationship” (Touchstone, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Most books on the psychology of love relationships emphasize feelings, but Michael and Sarah Bennett‘s new book F*ck Love: One Shrink’s Sensible Advice for Finding a Lasting Relationship (Touchston...
ListenJamie Merisotis, "Human Work in the Age of Smart Machines" (RosettaBooks, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Are robots going to be our overlords? In Human Work in the Age of Smart Machines (RosettaBooks, 2020), Jamie Merisotis says they don't have to be. We can make them our friends. Jamie Merisotis is a...
ListenCarrie Jenkins, “What Love is: And What it Could Be” (Basic Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Carrie Jenkins‘ new book is a model for what public philosophy can be. Beautifully written, thoughtful, and compellingly and carefully argued, What Love Is: And What it Could Be (Basic Books, 2017)...
ListenHilary Jacobs Hendel, "It’s Not Always Depression" (Random House, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Depression and anxiety are not what you think they are, according to my guest. Often thought of as presenting problems in their own right, it might make more sense to think of them as clusters of s...
ListenKathleen Collins, “Dr. Joyce Brothers: The Founding Mother of TV Psychology” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her book, Dr. Joyce Brothers: The Founding Mother of TV Psychology (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), Kathleen Collins presents an extensive history of the woman who is arguably the most famous tel...
ListenSteven H. Knoblauch, "Bodies and Social Rhythms: Navigating Unconscious Vulnerability and Emotional Fluidity" (Routledge, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Psychotherapy tends to be thought of as a verbal enterprise, wherein participants speak and construct meaning through words. However, much goes on between patient and therapist at an embodied, nonv...
ListenMichael Diamond, “Discovering Organizational Identity: Dynamics of Relational Attachment” (U. of Missouri, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Psychological and psychoanalytic principles are often associated with individuals and therapist-client pairs, though they have plenty to bear on understanding and helping organizations in trouble. ...
ListenGina Rippon, "Gender and Our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds" (Vintage, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
For decades if not centuries, science has backed up society’s simple dictum that men and women are hardwired differently, that the world is divided by two different kinds of brains—male and female....
ListenFeather Berkower and Sandy Wurtele, “Off Limits: A Parents Guide to Keeping Kids Safe from Sexual Abuse” (Safer Society Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
April is “Child Abuse Prevention Month,” and parents and child professionals may be curious to know what they can do to help keep their children safe from childhood sexual abuse. Feather Berkower i...
ListenMarta Zaraska, "Growing Young: How Friendship, Optimism, and Kindness Can Help You Live to 100" (Appetite/Random House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Today I interview Marta Zaraska about her book Growing Young: How Friendship, Optimism, and Kindness Can Help You Live to 100 (Appetite/Random House, 2020). Now you may be thinking to yourself, “10...
ListenDanielle Knafo and Rocco Lo Bosco, “The Age of Perversion: Desire and Technology in Psychoanalysis and Culture” (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The wish to transcend one’s mortality, and the anxiety associated with being unable to do so, are universal human experiences. People deal with these in their idiosyncratic ways, often by transgres...
ListenLi Zhang, "Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy" (U California Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The breathless pace of China’s economic reform has brought about deep ruptures in socioeconomic structures and people’s inner landscape. Faced with increasing market-driven competition and profound...
ListenLinda Craighead, “The Appetite Awareness Workbook: How to Listen to Your Body and Overcome Bingeing, Overeating, and Obsession with Food” (New Harbinger, 2006) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Many people who either overeat, chronically diet, or feel a loss of control over food, have reduced awareness of their body’s internal signals of hunger and fullness. As children, most of us tend t...
ListenMichael E. McCullough, "The Kindness of Strangers: How a Selfish Ape Invented a New Moral Code" (Basic Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Why Give a Damn About Strangers? In his book The Kindness of Strangers: How a Selfish Ape Invented a New Moral Code (Basic Books, 2020), Michael E. McCullough explains. McCullough is a professor of...
ListenRobert Jervis, “How Statesmen Think: The Psychology of International Politics” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Robert Jervis is the author of How Statesmen Think: The Psychology of International Politics (Princeton University Press, 2017). Jervis is the Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Politics...
ListenRobert Plomin, "Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are" (MIT Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Have you ever felt, “Oh my God, I’m turning into my mother (or father)!” ? Robert Plomin explains why that happens in Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are (MIT Press, 2019). A century of genetic ...
ListenBrent Willock, et.al. “Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Identity and Difference: Navigating the Divide” (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Literature and training in diversity and multiculturalism typically emphasize cultural differences–how to identify them, and the importance of honoring them. But does such an emphasis neglect other...
ListenWilliam P. Seeley, "Attentional Engines: A Perceptual Theory of the Arts" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How do we distinguish art from non-art artifacts, and what does cognitive science have to do with it? In Attentional Engines: A Perceptual Theory of the Arts (Oxford University Press, 2020), Willia...
ListenDamion Searls, “The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and the Power of Seeing” (Crown, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his new book The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and The Power of Seeing (Crown, 2017), Damion Searls presents the first biography of Hermann Rorschach and the history of the Rorsc...
ListenTamara McClintock Greenberg, "Treating Complex Trauma: Combined Theories and Methods" (Springer, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Relationship problems, struggles with substance abuse, poor memory, and difficulties with emotions are typical symptoms of complex trauma—yet many traumatized individuals have no idea their symptom...
ListenDavid F. Lancy, “The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings” (Cambridge UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Developmental psychology seems to tell us how to best to raise our children into competent and decent adults. However, comparing our theories and practices to those of other cultures raises questio...
ListenKat Arney, "How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do - And What It Says About You" (HMH, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We gravitate toward people like us; it's human nature. Race, class, and gender shape our social identities, and thus who we perceive as "like us" or "not like us". But one overlooked factor can be ...
ListenJo Frasca, “Delving Deeper: Understanding Diverse Approaches while Exploring Psychotherapy” (Jo Frasca Pubs, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Psychotherapy is a form of treatment for human suffering that is increasingly misunderstood by the people who seek it. Once the dominant force in psychology, it now gets confused with or supplanted...
ListenChris Heffer, "All Bullshit and Lies?: Insincerity, Irresponsibility, and the Judgment of Untruthfulness" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The implied answer to the titular question of All Bullshit and Lies? (Oxford University Press 2020) is no, it’s not. In this book, subtitled Insincerity, Irresponsibility, and the Judgment of Untru...
ListenMical Raz, “What’s Wrong with the Poor: Psychiatry, Race, and the War on Poverty” (UNC Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In What’s Wrong with the Poor: Psychiatry, Race, and the War on Poverty (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), Mical Raz offers a deep dive into the theoretical roots of the Head Start program...
ListenEric Weiner, "The Geography of Genius: Lessons from the World’s Most Creative Places" (Simon and Schuster, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Living, as we do, in a time in which a U.S. president anoints himself “a very stable genius”, we are particularly appreciative of Eric Weiner, a former foreign correspondent for NPR who writes with...
ListenBerit Brogaard, “On Romantic Love: Simple Truths about a Complex Emotion” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Why is falling in love so exciting and painful at the same time? And what explains our longing for people who are bad for us or no longer love us back? In her book On Romantic Love: Simple Truths a...
ListenDavid Barash, "Threats: Intimidation and Its Discontents" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What are the similar ways in which animals and people try to intimidate others? In his new book, Threats: Intimidation and Its Discontents (Oxford UP, 2020), David Barash explains. Barash is a rese...
ListenAlison Miller, “Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control” (Karnac, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control (Karnac, 2011) is a practical, task-oriented, instructional manual designed to help therapists provide effective treatment for survi...
ListenBerit Brogaard, "Hatred: Understanding Our Most Dangerous Emotion" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What is it that makes hatred so addicting? In her new book Hatred: Understanding Our Most Dangerous Emotion (Oxford University Press, 2020), Berit Bogaard explains. Berit is a Professor of Philosop...
ListenPolly Buckingham, “The Expense of a View” (U. North Texas Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Mental illness and other emotional troubles are relatable experiences for Polly Buckingham, author of the new collection of short stories, The Expense of a View (University of North Texas Press, 20...
ListenFrans de Waal, "Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves" (Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves (W. W. Norton & Company) is a fascinating exploration of the rich emotional lives of animals, beginning with Mama, a chimpanze...
ListenAndrew Scull, “Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity” (Princeton UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The wish to understand mental suffering is universal and requires an appreciation for its history. Since Biblical times, humans have understood madness, or other deviations from normal mental funct...
ListenWendy Wood, "Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick" (FSG, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Today's guest is psychologist and behavioral scientist, Wendy Wood. She is currently a professor of psychology and business at the University of Southern California, and a visiting professor at the...
ListenJennifer Greenwood, “Becoming Human: The Ontogenesis, Metaphysics, and Expression of Human Emotionality” (MIT, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Psychological and philosophical theories of the emotions tend to take the adult emotional repertoire as the paradigm case for understanding the emotions. From this standpoint, the emotions are usua...
ListenDr. Christopher Harris on Teaching Neuroscience from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Dr. Christopher Harris (@chrisharris) is a neuroscientist, engineer and educator at the EdTech company Backyard Brains. He is principal investigator on an NIH-funded project to develop brain-based ...
ListenPhilip Rosenbaum, “Making our Ideas Clear: Pragmatism in Psychoanalysis” (Information Age Publishing, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Pragmatism, as a philosophical concept, is often misunderstood and misapplied. Fortunately, I had the chance to speak with Philip Rosenbaum, psychoanalyst and editor of the book Making our Ideas Cl...
ListenTimothy R. Clark, "The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation" (Berrett-Koehler, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How does any organization invite the true, full participation of its members? In his new book The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation (Berrett-Koehler, 2...
ListenClaudia Malacrida, “A Special Hell: Institutional Life in Albertas Eugenic Years” (U of Toronto Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In A Special Hell: Institutional Life in Alberta’s Eugenic Years (University of Toronto Press, 2015), Claudia Malacrida explores the practices of the Michener Center in Red Deer, Northern Alberta, ...
ListenLinville Meadows, "A Spiritual Pathway to Recovery from Addiction: A Physician’s Journey of Discovery" (The Meadows Farm, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Addiction occurs among physicians at the same rate as in the general population, about 10%. Unlike the general population, however, an intensive rehabilitation program, geared specifically for thei...
ListenAnn Bracken, “Mind, Body, Baby” (Yellow Kite Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When trying to conceive doesn’t go as planned, many women and couples are faced with difficult decisions about which interventions to pursue. Treatment of infertility, whether natural or high-tech,...
ListenDiana Greene Foster, "The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having—or Being Denied—an Abortion" (Scribner, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What happens when a woman seeking an abortion is turned away? Diana Greene Foster, PhD, decided to find out. With a team of scientists—psychologists, epidemiologists, demographers, nursing scholars...
ListenScott Selisker, “Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons, and American Unfreedom” (U. Minnesota Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons, and American Unfreedom (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), Scott Selisker offers readers a fascinating new history of American anxieties along the...
ListenRobert Kolker, "Hidden Valley Road: Inside The Mind of An American Family" (Doubleday, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Hidden Valley Road: Inside The Mind of An American Family (Doubleday, 2020) is the story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became ...
ListenAndy Clark, “Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and Embodied Mind” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The predictive processing hypothesis is a new unified theory of neural and cognitive function according to which our brains are prediction machines: they process the incoming sensory stream in the ...
ListenDavid Livingstone Smith, "On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The Rwandan genocide, the Holocaust, the lynching of African Americans, the colonial slave trade: these are horrific episodes of mass violence spawned from racism and hatred. We like to think that ...
ListenAlisha Brosse, “End the Insomnia Struggle” (New Harbinger, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Every night around the world, millions of people lie in bed at night, struggling to fall asleep. Experts suggest that about one in three people struggle with at least mild insomnia. Paradoxically, ...
ListenJoseph E. Davis, "Chemically Imbalanced: Everyday Suffering, Medication, and Our Troubled Quest for Self-Mastery" (U Chicago Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Everyday suffering—those conditions or feelings brought on by trying circumstances that arise in everyone’s lives—is something that humans have grappled with for millennia. But the last decades hav...
ListenJoe Solmonese, “The Gift of Anger: Use Passion to Build Not Destroy” (Berrett-Koehler, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Anger has acquired a bad reputation in our culture. It is an emotional state that can lead us to say and do things we later regret, particularly when our emotion overrides reason. But anger has the...
ListenSue Stuart-Smith, "The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature (Scribner, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Sue Stuart-Smith, who is a distinguished psychiatrist and avid gardener, offers an inspiring and consoling work about the healing effects of gardening and its ability to decrease stress and foster ...
ListenSherry Amatenstein, “How Does That Make You Feel?: True Confessions from Both Sides of the Therapy Couch” (Seal Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
If you have ever wondered what your therapist is really thinking, then my interview with Sherry Amatenstein will satisfy your curiosity. She sat down with me to discuss her new book, How Does That ...
ListenNick Chater, "The Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Psychologists and neuroscientists struggle with how best to interpret human motivation and decision making. The assumption is that below a mental “surface” of conscious awareness lies a deep and co...
ListenOrna Ophir, “On the Borderland of Madness: Psychosis, Psychoanalysis, and Psychiatry in Postwar USA” (Routledge, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When it comes to the history of psychoanalysis and psychiatry in the United States, to paraphrase Luce Irigaray, one never stirs without the other. While Freud sent Theodore Reik across the ocean t...
ListenKatherine Kinzler, "How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do - And What It Says About You" (HMH, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We gravitate toward people like us; it's human nature. Race, class, and gender shape our social identities, and thus who we perceive as "like us" or "not like us". But one overlooked factor can be ...
ListenClaudia Kalb, “Andy Warhol was a Hoarder: Inside the Mind of History’s Great Personalities” (Natl Geographic, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
All humans endure their private struggles, but rarely do we know what troubles our most famous public figures until now. In her recent book, Andy Warhol was a Hoarder: Inside the Mind of History’s ...
ListenRoger Kennedy, "The Power of Music: Psychoanalytic Explorations" (Phoenix House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Today I discussed why music so powerful in eliciting emotions with Roger Kennedy, the author of The Power of Music: Psychoanalytic Explorations (Phoenix Publishing House, 2020) Now at The Child and...
ListenGail Hornstein, “To Redeem One Person Is to Redeem the World: The Life of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann” (Other Books, 2005) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The life of the German-born, pioneering American psychoanalyst, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, is intriguing enough in itself, but in the biography, To Redeem One Person Is to Redeem the World: The Life o...
ListenRodrigo Quian Quiroga, "NeuroScience Fiction" (Benbella Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In NeuroScience Fiction (Benbella Books, 2020), Rodrigo Quian Quiroga shows how the outlandish premises of many seminal science fiction movies are being made possible by new discoveries and technol...
ListenAdam Benforado, “Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice” (Penguin Random House, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Why is our criminal justice system so unfair? How do innocent men and women end up serving long sentences while the guilty roam free? According to law professor and scholar Adam Benforado, our syst...
ListenPaul Offit, "Overkill: When Modern Medicine Goes Too Far" (HarperCollins, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Why Do Unnecessary and Often Counter-Productive Medical Interventions Happen So Often? Today I talked to Paul Offit about his book Overkill: When Modern Medicine Goes Too Far (HarperCollins, 2020)...
ListenDaniel Rechtschaffen, “The Way of Mindful Education: Cultivating Well-Being in Teachers and Students” (W.W. Norton, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Time and resources are scarce for many teachers. Often times, these same teachers are under immense pressure to produce higher test scores and severely constrained with the actions they can take in...
ListenMel Schwartz, "The Possibility Principle: How Quantum Physics Can Improve the Way You Think, Live, and Love" (Sounds True, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How would you like to experience your life? It’s an intriguing question, and yet we’ve been conditioned to believe our life visions and goals are often unattainable—until now. With The Possibility ...
ListenJames Pennebaker and Joshua Smyth, “Opening Up by Writing it Down: How Expressive Writing Improves Health and Eases Emotional Pain” (Guilford Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Many people carry around unresolved feelings and thoughts tied to difficult experiences, with no idea what to do with them. When left unattended for too long, these pent up feelings can lead to a v...
ListenLisa Bortolotti, "The Epistemic Innocence of Irrational Beliefs" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
There is something intuitive about the idea that when we believe, we ought to follow our evidence. This entails that beliefs that are the products of garden varieties of irrationality, such as delu...
ListenKenneth Schaffner, “Behaving: What’s Genetic, What’s Not, and Why Should We Care?” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the genes vs. environment debate, it is widely accepted that what we do, who we are, and what mental illnesses we are at risk for result from a complex combination of both factors. Just how comp...
ListenMark Borg, Jr., "Don’t Be a Dick: Change Yourself, Change Your World" (Central Recovery Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When we are hurt, we hurt others—yet when they hurt us back, we wonder why. This is one of the central phenomena addressed by Mark Borg, Jr. in his new book, Don’t Be a Dick: Change Yourself, Chang...
ListenGreg Eghigian, “The Corrigible and the Incorrigible: Science, Medicine, and the Convict in Twentieth-Century Germany” (U. of Michigan Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When I first read Foucault’s Discipline and Punish as an undergrad, I remember wondering, “What does this look like, though? How might the disciplining of the body play out in different places?” Gr...
ListenNick Morgan, "Can You Hear Me? How to Connect with People in a Virtual World" (HBRP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How is communicating virtually Is like eating Pringles forever? Find out as I talk to Nick Morgan about his new book Can You Hear Me? How to Connect with People in a Virtual World (Harvard Business...
ListenAndrew Schulman, “Waking the Spirit: A Musician’s Journey Healing Body, Mind, and Soul (Picador 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What do the musical compositions of Bach, Gershwin, and the Beatles all have in common? Besides being great pieces of music, according to Andrew Schulman, they promote healing in intensive care (IC...
ListenGyörgy Buzsáki, "The Brain from Inside Out" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In The Brain from Inside Out (Oxford University Press, 2019), György Buzsáki contrasts what he terms the ‘outside-in’ and ‘inside-out’ perspectives on neuroscientific theory and research methodolog...
ListenDiane Ehrensaft, “The Gender Creative Child: Pathways for Nurturing and Supporting Children Who Live Outside Gender Boxes” (The Experiment, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The gender binary is recently giving way to gender infinity, and our youngest members of society are both driving and benefiting from this evolution. They’re finding novel ways of expressing their ...
ListenMark Winborn, "Jungian Analysis: Art and Technique" (Routledge 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Engaging with one’s patients is one of the most complicated aspects of being a psychoanalyst. Going well beyond simply processing information and spitting out a ready-made answer for them, it invol...
ListenMartha Nussbaum, “Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice” (Oxford UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Anger is among the most familiar phenomena in our moral lives. It is common to think that anger is an appropriate, and sometimes morally required, emotional response to wrongdoing and injustice. In...
ListenJoy Knoblauch, "The Architecture of Good Behavior" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Inspired by the rise of environmental psychology and increasing support for behavioral research after the Second World War, new initiatives at the federal, state, and local levels looked to influen...
ListenCarol Gignoux, “Your Innovator Brain: The Truth About ADHD” (Balboa Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What exactly is ADHD, and is it time to update our ideas about it? In her new book, Your Innovator Brain: The Truth About ADHD (Balboa Press, 2016), Carol Gignoux turns our ideas about Attention De...
ListenJohn R. Hibbing, "The Securitarian Personality: What Really Motivates Trump’s Base and Why It Matters for the Post-Trump Era" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What are the policy implications due to a fundamental distrust and dislike of “outsiders”? Today I talked to political scientist John R. Hibbing about his new book The Securitarian Personality: Wha...
ListenJonathan Garb, “Yearnings of the Soul: Psychological Thought in Modern Kabbalah” (U. of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Yearnings of the Soul: Psychological Thought in Modern Kabbalah (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Jonathan Garb, the Gershom Scholem Professor in the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebre...
ListenArt Markman, "Bring Your Brain to Work: Using Cognitive Science to Get a Job, Do It Well, and Advance Your Career" (HBR Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What does it take to both fit in and yet also prosper and grow as a person in the workplace? In today's interview, I discuss this question and others with noted psychologist Arthur B. Markman. Mark...
ListenMark Borg, et. al. “Irrelationship: How We Use Dysfunctional Relationships to Hide from Intimacy” (Central Recovery Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Why do relationship partners so often feel isolated and unsatisfied despite all their efforts to show love and caring to one another? And how do they break out of the self-defeating cycles that get...
ListenJeffrey J. Kripal, "The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge" (Bellevue Literary Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
A “flip,” writes Jeffrey J. Kripal, is “a reversal of perspective,” “a new real,” often born of an extreme, life-changing experience. The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge (Belle...
ListenSabine Arnaud, “On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category between 1670 and 1820” (U. of Chicago Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Sabine Arnaud‘s new book explores a history of discursive practices that played a role in the construction of hysteria as pathology. On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category between 1670 an...
ListenDanielle Giffort, "Acid Revival: The Psychedelic Renaissance and the Quest for Medical Legitimacy" (U Minnesota Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Psychedelic drugs are making a comeback. In the mid-twentieth century, scientists actively studied the potential of drugs like LSD and psilocybin for treating mental health problems. After a decade...
ListenSamuel Morris Brown, “Through the Valley of Shadows: Living Wills, Intensive Care, and Making Medicine Human” (Oxford University Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Conversations about death during hospitalization are among the most difficult imaginable: the moral weight of a human life is suspended by stressful conversations in which medical knowledge and per...
ListenStuart Ritchie, "Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype in Science" (Penguin Books, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
So much relies on science. But what if science itself can’t be relied on? In Science Fictions: Exposing Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype in Science (Penguin Books, 2020), Stuart Ritchie, a profess...
ListenSaul J. Weiner and Alan Schwartz, “Listening for What Matters: Avoiding Contextual Errors in Health Care” (Oxford University Press 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When clinicians listen to patients, what do they hear? In Listening for What Matters: Avoiding Contextual Errors in Health Care (Oxford UP, 2016), Saul Weiner and Alan Schwartz provide a riveting a...
ListenMonica Coleman, "Bipolar Faith: A Black Woman’s Journey with Depression and Faith" (Fortress Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Monica A. Coleman's great-grandfather asked his two young sons to lift him up and pull out the chair when he hanged himself, and that noose stayed in the family shed for years. The rope was the vio...
ListenRoy Fox, “Facing the Sky: Composing Through Trauma in Word and Image” (Parlor, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
All of us experience trauma at various points throughout our lives. On one end of the spectrum, we have negative experiences from which we tend to think we can recover quickly. This might include a...
ListenNicole Piemonte, "Afflicted: How Vulnerability Can Heal Medical Education and Practice" (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Afflicted: How Vulnerability Can Heal Medical Education and Practice (The MIT Press), Nicole Piemonte examines the preoccupation in medicine with cure over care, arguing that the traditional foc...
ListenEmily Troscianko, “Kafka’s Cognitive Realism” (Routledge, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her first monograph, Kafka’s Cognitive Realism (Routledge, 2014), Emily Troscianko set out to answer a brief, cogent question: “Why is Kafka so brilliant? Why do I still want to read his work af...
ListenCary Cooper, "The Apology Impulse: How the Business World Ruined Sorry and Why We Can’t Stop Saying It" (Kogan Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What are best-practices for alleviating stress in the workplace? Today I talked to Cary Cooper about his new book The Apology Impulse: How the Business World Ruined Sorry and Why We Can’t Stop Sayi...
ListenRebecca Lemov, “Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity” (Yale University Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Rebecca Lemov‘s beautifully written Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity (Yale University Press, 2015) is at once an exploration of mid-century social science through paths less t...
ListenM. C. Stevenson et al. (eds.), "The Legacy of Racism for Children: Psychology, Law and Public Policy" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When children become entangled with the law, their lives can be disrupted irrevocably. When those children are underrepresented minorities, the potential for disruption is even greater. The Legacy ...
ListenHeather Vacek, “Madness: American Protestant Responses to Mental Illness” (Baylor UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Should the member of a Christian congregation be injured in a car accident, that person will likely be the subject of public prayers and hospitality. But if that same person suffers a mental breakd...
ListenTelory Arendell, "The Autistic Stage: How Cognitive Disability Changed 20th-Century Performance" (Sense Publishers, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In The Autistic Stage: How Cognitive Disability Changed 20th-Century Performance (Sense Publishers, 2015) (Sense Publishers, 2015), Telory Arendell creates a revolutionary fusion of disability stud...
ListenColette Soler, “Lacanian Affects: The Function of Affect in Lacan’s Work”, trans. Bruce Fink (Routledge, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Affect is a weighty and consequential problem in psychoanalysis. People enter treatment hoping for relief from symptoms and their attendant unbearable affects. While various theorists and schools o...
ListenNir Bashan, "The Creator Mindset: 92 Tools to Unlock the Secrets to Innovation, Growth, and Sustainability" (McGraw-Hill, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Why is the corporate fallback being “analytical” (as opposed to nurturing creativity)? Today I talked to Nir Bashan about his new book The Creator Mindset: 92 Tools to Unlock the Secrets to Innovat...
ListenPrakash Mondal, “Language, Mind and Computation” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
My instinct as a researcher is usually to shy away from confrontation about foundational issues in the philosophy of language, which is probably why I do what I do (that is to say, from a generativ...
ListenBradley Lewis, "Narrative Psychiatry: How Stories Can Shape Clinical Practice" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Psychiatry has lagged behind many clinical specialties in recognizing the importance of narrative for understanding and effectively treating disease. With this book, Bradley Lewis makes the challen...
ListenRonald Chase, “Schizophrenia: A Brother Finds Answers in Biological Science” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his book, Schizophrenia: A Brother Finds Answers in Biological Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), biologist Ronald Chase explores the frequently misunderstood condition through an e...
ListenMia Birdsong, "How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community" (Hachette, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
After almost every presentation activist and writer Mia Birdsong gives to executives, think tanks, and policy makers, one of those leaders quietly confesses how much they long for the profound comm...
ListenGeorge Makari, “Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind” (Norton, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his new book Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind (Norton, 2014), the psychoanalyst and innovative historian, George Makari speaks to us about the dramatic history of the invention of ...
ListenSuri Hustvedt, "Memories of the Future" (Simon and Schuster, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How Do We Write Our Personal History at the Same Time That It’s Written for Us? Today I talked to Suri Hustvedt about this question and others as we discuss her book Memories of the Future (Simon a...
ListenAbram de Swaan, “The Killing Compartments: The Mentality of Mass Murder” (Yale UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
For a couple of decades, scholars have moved toward a broad consensus that context, rather than ideology, is most important in pushing ordinary men and women to participate in mass murder. The “sit...
ListenFay Bound Alberti, "A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Before the global pandemic of Covid-19 arrived, public health experts in the U.S. and U.K. were warning of the epidemic of loneliness. Loneliness steals more years of life than obesity. Loneliness ...
ListenErik Linstrum, “Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire” (Harvard UP, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire (Harvard University Press, 2016), Erik Linstrum examines how the field of psychology was employed in the service of empire. Linstrum explores the ...
ListenCaroline Stokes, "Elephants Before Unicorns: Emotionally Intelligent HR Strategies to Save Your Company" (Entrepreneur Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How does avoidance of conflict ultimately create more conflict in the workplace? Today I talked to Caroline Stokes, author of Elephants Before Unicorns: Emotionally Intelligent HR Strategies to Sav...
ListenChristopher Bollas, “When the Sun Bursts: The Enigma of Schizophrenia” (Yale University Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his second visit with New Books in Psychoanalysis, Christopher Bollas elucidates his thinking about schizophrenia. But he also does more than that; because his beginnings as a clinician are inti...
ListenSaul J. Weiner, "On Becoming a Healer: The Journey from Patient Care to Caring about Your Patients" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Medical students and physicians-in-training embark on a long journey that, although steeped in scientific learning and technical skill building, includes little guidance on the emotional and interp...
ListenDarian Leader, “Strictly Bipolar” (Penguin, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
To those unfamiliar with psychodiagnostics, Bipolar 3.5 might sound like the latest Apple software. To psychoanalyst Darian Leader it is indicative of the relatively recent proliferation and growin...
ListenEvy Poumpouras, "Becoming Bulletproof" (Atria Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Former Secret Service agent and star of Bravo’s Spy Games, Evy Poumpouras, shares lessons learned from protecting presidents, as well insights and skills from the oldest and most elite security for...
ListenLisa Tessman, “Moral Failure: On the Impossible Demands of Morality” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Moral theories are often focused almost exclusively on answering the question, “What ought I do?” Typically, theories presuppose that for any particular agent under any given circumstance, there in...
ListenS. Moskalenko and C. McCauley, "Radicalization to Terrorism: What Everyone Needs to Know" (Oxford UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Terrorism and radicalization came to the forefront of news and politics in the US after the unforgettable attacks of September 11th, 2001. When George W. Bush famously asked "Why do they hate us?,"...
ListenDana Suskind, “Thirty Million Words: Building a Child’s Brain” from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We may disagree about whether phonics or whole language is the better approach to reading instruction or whether bilingual education or English immersion is the better way to support English langua...
ListenCharlene Li, "The Disruption Mindset: Why Some Organizations Transform While Others Fail" (IdeaPress, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What does it take for a company’s culture to enable ongoing growth? Today I talked to Charlene Li, author of The Disruption Mindset: Why Some Organizations Transform While Others Fail (IdeaPress, 2...
ListenEugene Raikhel, Todd Meyers, Emily Yates-Doerr, “Somatosphere.net” from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Somatosphere is “a collaborative website covering the intersections of medical anthropology, science and technology studies, cultural psychiatry, psychology and bioethics.” Founded in July 2008, So...
ListenPehr Granqvist, "Attachment in Religion and Spirituality: A Wider View" (Guilford Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Attachment theory is a popular lens through which psychologists have examined human development and interpersonal dynamics. In Attachment in Religion and Spirituality: A Wider View (Guilford Press,...
ListenM. Chirimuuta, “Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Color in Philosophy” (MIT Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What is color? On the one hand it seems obvious that it is a property of objects – roses are red, violets are blue, and so on. On the other hand, even the red of a single petal of a rose differs in...
ListenBen Cohen, "The Hot Hand: The Mystery and Science of Streaks" (Custom House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
For decades, statisticians, social scientists, psychologists, and economists (among them Nobel Prize winners) have spent massive amounts of precious time thinking about whether streaks actually exi...
ListenCass Sunstein, “Choosing Not to Choose: Understanding the Value of Choice” (Oxford UP, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The political tradition of liberalism tends to associate political liberty with the individual’s freedom of choice. The thought is that political freedom is intrinsically tied to the individual’s a...
ListenCressida J. Heyes, "Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience at the Edge" (Duke UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How should we think about the relationship between subjectivity and experience? In Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience at the Edge (Duke University Press, 2020), Cressida J. Heyes appro...
ListenCarolyn Pedwell, “Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What are the multiple meanings, ambivalences, possible risks, and potentials for transformation that arise from interrogating empathy on a transnational scale? Carolyn Pedwell (University of Kent) ...
ListenE. Lonergan and M. Blyth, "Angrynomics" (Agenda/Columbia UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How are we going to address inequality and put the economy on a sounder footing? Today I talked to Eric Lonergan and Mark Blyth about their new book Angrynomics (Agenda Publishing/Columbia Universi...
ListenWilliam Davies, “The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being” (Verso, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Are you happy? In his new book The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being (Verso, 2015), William Davies, a senior lecturer at Goldsmiths’ College, University of ...
ListenJ. Weinberger and V. Stoycheva, "The Unconscious: Theory, Research, and Clinical Implications" (Guilford Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The concept of the unconscious has a complicated place in the history of psychology. Many areas of study ignored or outright denied it for a long time, while psychoanalysis claimed it as one of its...
ListenChad Engelland, “Ostension: Word Learning and the Embodied Mind” (MIT Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How do we learn our first words? What is it that makes the linguistic intentions of others manifest to us, when our eyes follow a pointing finger to an object and associate that object with a word?...
ListenZena Hitz, "Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life" (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Do you have an active intellectual life? That is a question you may feel uncomfortable answering these days given that the very phrase “intellectual life” can strike some people as pretentious or s...
ListenHelen de Cruz and Johan de Smedt, “A Natural History of Natural Theology” (MIT Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In A Natural History of Natural Theology: The Cognitive Science of Theology and Philosophy of Religion (MIT Press, 2015), Helen de Cruz of the VU University Amsterdam and Johan de Smedt of Ghent Un...
ListenDavid R. Grimes, "The Irrational Ape: Why Flawed Logic Puts Us All at Risk, and How Critical Thinking Can Save the World" (Simon and Schuster, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What are some of the prevalent ways in which we lie to ourselves and limit our flexibility? Today I discussed this and other questions with David R. Grimes, the author of The Irrational Ape: Why F...
ListenJ. Bronsteen, C. Buccafusco, and J. S. Masur, “Happiness and the Law” (U Chicago Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In their new book Happiness and the Law (University of Chicago Press 2014), John Bronsteen, Christopher Buccafusco, and Jonathan S. Masur argue through the use of hedonic psychological data that we...
ListenKurt Braddock, "Weaponized Words" (Cambridge UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Kurt Braddock's new book Weaponized Words: The Strategic Role of Persuasion in Violent Radicalization and Counter-Radicalization (Cambridge University Press, 2020) applies existing theories of pers...
ListenMatthew M. Heaton, “Black Skin, White Coats” (Ohio UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Black Skin, White Coats: Nigerian Psychiatrists, Decolonization, and the Globalization of Psychiatry (Ohio University Press, 2013), Matthew M. Heaton explores changes in psychiatric theory and p...
ListenLori Gottlieb, "Maybe You Should Talk to Someone" (HMH, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
From a New York Times best-selling author, psychotherapist, and national advice columnist, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, HER Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed (HMH, 2019) is a hila...
ListenWayne Wu, “Attention” (Routledge, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The mental phenomenon of attention is often thought of metaphorically as a kind of spotlight: we focus our attention on a particular item or task, our attention is divided or diffused when we try t...
ListenCasey Schwartz, "Attention: A Love Story" (Pantheon, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Combining expert storytelling with genuine self-scrutiny, Casey Schwartz details the decade she spend taking Adderall to help her pay attention (or so she thought) and then considers the role of at...
ListenRick Strassman, “DMT and the Soul of Prophecy” (Park Street Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
DMT and the Soul of Prophecy:A New Science of Spiritual Revelation in the Hebrew Bible (Park Street Press, 2014) asks a number of provocative questions about drugs, consciousness, prophecy, and the...
ListenSusie Hodge, "The Short Story of Architecture" (Laurence King Publishing, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What makes a building’s design come alive as it helps shape our existence? Listen in as I discuss this and other questions with Susie Hodge, author of The Short Story of Architecture: A Pocket Guid...
ListenDonna J. Drucker, “The Classification of Sex: Alfred Kinsey and the Organization of Knowledge” (University of Pittsburg Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Donna J. Drucker is a guest professor at Darmstadt Technical University in Germany. Her book The Classification of Sex: Alfred Kinsey and the Organization of Knowledge (University of Pittsburg Pres...
ListenKenneth Womack, "Solid State: The Story of Abbey Road and The End of The Beatles" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
To what degree did each of The Beatles exhibit emotional intelligence in the band’s final year? You'll find out in the discussion I had with Kenneth Womack about his new book Solid State: The Story...
ListenEvan Thompson, “Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy” (Columbia UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The quest for an explanation of consciousness is currently dominated by scientific efforts to find the neural correlates of conscious states, on the assumption that these states are dependent on th...
ListenB. J. Pine II and J. H. Gilmore, "The Experience Economy: Competing for Customer Time, Attention, and Money" (HBR Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How is the retail sector going to be best able to survive the Amazon juggernaut? I address this question with B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore in a discussion of their book The Experience Eco...
ListenJoelle Proust, “The Philosophy of Metacognition: Mental Agency and Self-Awareness” (Oxford University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Metacognition is cognition about cognition – what we do when we assess our cognitive states, such as wondering whether we’ve remembered a phone number correctly. In The Philosophy of Metacognition:...
ListenS. E. Schier and T. E. Eberly, "How Trump Happened: A System Shock Decades in the Making" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How did Donald Trump’s leveraging of emotions get him to The White House? Today I discussed this question with Steven E. Schier and Todd E. Eberly, co-authors of the new book How Trump Happened: A ...
ListenAnne Jaap Jacobson, “Keeping the World in Mind” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Some theorists in the cognitive sciences argue that the sciences of the mind don’t need or use a concept of mental representation. In her new book, Keeping the World in Mind: Mental Representations...
ListenBrian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics, a...
ListenMarcin Milkowski, “Explaining the Computational Mind” (MIT Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The computational theory of mind has its roots in Alan Turing’s development of the basic ideas behind computer programming, specifically the manipulation of symbols according to rules. That idea ha...
ListenElizabeth A. Stanley, "Widen the Window" (Avery Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Stress is our internal response to an experience that our brain perceives as threatening or challenging. Trauma is our response to an experience in which we feel powerless or lacking agency. Until ...
ListenElizabeth Lunbeck, “The Americanization of Narcissism” (Harvard University Press, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
“It is a commonplace of social criticism that America has become, over the past half century or so, a nation of narcissists.” From this opening, Elizabeth Lunbeck‘s new book proceeds to offer a fa...
ListenCailin O’Connor, "The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread" (Yale UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Why should we care about having true beliefs? And why do demonstrably false beliefs persist and spread despite bad, even fatal, consequences for the people who hold them? In The Misinformation Age:...
ListenJakob Hohwy, “The Predictive Mind” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The prediction error minimization hypothesis is the first grand unified empirical theory about how the brain implements the mind. The hypothesis, which is as bold as it is controversial, proposes t...
ListenB. Earp and J. Savulescu, "Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships" (Stanford UP, 2020) ) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Consider a couple with an infant (or two) whose lives have become so harried and difficult the marriage is falling apart. Would it be ethical for them to take oxytocin to help them renew their emot...
ListenSharon K. Farber, “Hunger for Ecstasy: Trauma, the Brain, and the Influence of the Sixties” (Aronson, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It may seem silly to ask why we seek ecstasy. We seek it, of course, because it’s ECSTASY. We are evolved to want it. It’s our brain’s way of saying “Do this again and as often as possible.” But th...
ListenLeslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. Brophy, is the first edited collection of schola...
ListenPaula A. Michaels, “Lamaze: An International History” (Oxford UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The twentieth-century West witnessed a revolution in childbirth. Before that time, most women gave birth at home and were attended by family members and midwives. The process was usually terribly ...
ListenRichard G. Tedeschi, "Posttraumatic Growth: Theory, Research and Applications" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
During this global pandemic, many of us will experience trauma, which the authors define as a severely stressful life-altering event. A traumatic event is like an earthquake, shattering an individu...
ListenBenjamin Radcliff, “The Political Economy of Happiness” (Cambridge UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Americans are very politically divided. Democrats say we need a more powerful welfare state while Republicans say we need to maintain the free market. The struggle, we are constantly informed, is o...
ListenBaptiste Brossard, "Forgetting Items: The Social Experience of Alzheimer’s Disease" (Indiana UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Alzheimer's disease has not only profound medical consequences for the individual experiencing it but a life-changing impact on those around them. From the moment a person is suspected to be suffer...
ListenAdrienne Martin, “How We Hope: A Moral Psychology” (Princeton UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
From political campaigns to sports stadiums and hospital rooms, the concept of hope is pervasive. And the story we tend to tell ourselves about hope is that it is intrinsically a good thing — in ma...
ListenPeter Carruthers, "Human and Animal Minds: The Consciousness Questions Laid to Rest" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Do nonhuman animals have phenomenally conscious mental states? For example, do they have the types of conscious experiences we have when, in our case, we experience the smell of cinnamon or the red...
ListenAneta Pavlenko, “The Bilingual Mind And What It Tells Us about Language and Thought” (Cambridge UP, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Big ideas about language often ignore, or abstract away from, the individual’s capacity to learn more than one language. In a world where the majority of human beings are bilingual, is this kind of...
ListenGeorge Scialabba, "How To Be Depressed" (U Penn Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
George Scialabba is a prolific critic and essayist known for his incisive, wide-ranging commentary on literature, philosophy, religion, and politics. He is also, like millions of others, a lifelong...
ListenGeorge E. Vaillant, “Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study” (Harvard UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
There are very few studies like the Harvard Grant Study. Started in 1938, it has been following its approximately 200 participants ever since, analyzing their physical and mental health and assess...
ListenAmy Koerber, “From Hysteria to Hormones: A Rhetorical History" (Penn State UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode of New Books in Language, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they) interviews Dr. Amy Koerber (she/hers), Professor at Texas Tech University, on the groundbreaking book From Hysteria to Hormones: ...
ListenJohn Hibbing et al., “Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences” (Routledge, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
John Hibbing, Kevin Smith, and John Alford are the authors of Predisposed: Liberals, Conservatives, and the Biology of Political Differences (Routledge, 2013). Hibbing is professor of political sci...
ListenAnna Arstein-Kerslake, "Restoring Voice to People with Cognitive Disabilities: Realizing the Right to Equal Recognition Before the Law" (Cambridge UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The right to decision making is important for all people. It allows us to choose how to we our lives – both on a daily basis, and also in terms of how we wish to express ourselves, to live in accor...
ListenCarlo C. DiClemente, “Substance Abuse Treatment and the Stages of Change: Selecting and Planning Interventions” (Guilford Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this episode, I talk with Carlo C. DiClemente, a Presidential Research Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Maryland- Baltimore County, about his co-authored book, Subs...
ListenRay Dorsey, "Ending Parkinson's Disease: A Prescription for Action" (Public Affairs, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Brain diseases are now the world's leading source of disability. The fastest growing of these is Parkinson's: the number of impacted patients has doubled to more than six million over the last twen...
ListenMichael Pettit, “The Science of Deception: Psychology and Commerce in America” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Parapsychology. You may have heard of it. You know, telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis. Spoon-bending and that sort of thing. If you have heard of it, you probably think of it as ...
ListenOwen Whooley, "On the Heels of Ignorance: Psychiatry and the Politics of Not Knowing" (U Chicago Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Psychiatry has always aimed to peer deep into the human mind, daring to cast light on its darkest corners and untangle its thorniest knots, often invoking the latest medical science in doing so. Bu...
ListenAlistair Knott, “Sensorimotor Cognition and Natural Language Syntax” (MIT Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When big claims are made about neurolinguistics, there often seems to be a subtext that the latest findings will render traditional linguistics obsolete. These claims are often met with appropriate...
ListenBaptiste Brossard, "Why do We Hurt Ourselves? Understanding Self-Harm in Social Life" (Indiana UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Why does an estimated 5% of the general population intentionally and repeatedly hurt themselves? What are the reasons certain people resort to self-injury as a way to manage their daily lives? In W...
ListenGabriel Finkelstein, “Emil du Bois-Reymond: Neuroscience, Self, and Society in Nineteenth-Century Germany” (MIT Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
“A good wife and a healthy child are better for one’s temper than frogs.” For Gabriel Finkelstein, Emil du Bois-Reymond was “the most important forgotten intellectual of the nineteenth century.” M...
ListenMatt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn't require tangibles, like ra...
ListenLawrence J. Friedman, “The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet” (Columbia UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Erich Fromm, one of the most widely known psychoanalysts of the previous century, was involved in the exploration of spirituality throughout his life. His landmark book The Art of Loving, which sol...
ListenGreat Books: Peter Brooks on Freud's "Civilization and its Discontents" from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We want to be happy, we want to get what we want, we want to love and be loved. But life, even when our basic needs are met, often makes us unhappy. You can't always get what you want, Freud noted ...
ListenMarga Vicedo, “The Nature and Nurture of Love” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Between WWII and the 1970s, prominent researchers from various fields established and defended a view that emotions are integral to the self, and that a mother’s love determines an individual’s emo...
ListenElise Berman, "Talking Like Children: Language and the Production of Age in the Marshall Islands" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Since World War II, the fate of the Marshal Islands has been tied to the United States. The Marshalls were a site of military testing, host a US military base, and many Marshallese migrate to the U...
ListenA. David Redish, “The Mind Within the Brain” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Free will is essential to our understanding of human nature. We are masters of our own fate. We chart our own course. We take our own road. In short, we decide what we are going to do. There seems ...
ListenPhillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Phillipa Chong, assistant professor in sociology at McM...
ListenTadeusz Zawidzki, “Mindshaping: A New Framework for Understanding Human Social Cognition” (MIT Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Social cognition involves a small bundle of cognitive capacities and behaviors that enable us to communicate and get along with one another, a bundle that even our closest primate cousins don’t hav...
ListenSarah Fawn Montgomery, "Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir" (Mad Creek Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
If you live in America, chances are good you’ve heard the term “mental health crisis” bandied about in the media. While true that anxiety, depression, and other mood disorders seem to be on the ris...
ListenJerome Kagan, “The Human Spark: The Science of Human Development” (Basic Books, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On the day you were born, you arrived with your own unique biology and into your own unique social and cultural context. It would have been impossible to predict on that day how your life would unf...
ListenMatthew Gutmann, "Are Men Animals? How Modern Masculinity Sells Men Short" (Basic Books, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Are Men Animals? How Modern Masculinity Sells Men Short (Basic Books, 2019), Matthew Gutmann examines how cultural expectations viewing men as violent and sex driven becomes a self-fulfilling pr...
ListenHannah S. Decker, “The Making of DSM-III: A Diagnostic Manual’s Conquest of American Psychiatry” (Oxford UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Like it or not, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) has an enormous influence in deciding what qualifies as a mental health disorder in the United States ...
ListenCarol Gilligan and Naomi Snider, "Why Does Patriarchy Persist?" (Polity, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Activists have been working to dismantle patriarchal structures since the feminist and civil rights movements of the last century, and yet we continue to struggle with patriarchy today. In their ne...
ListenCarlos Montemayor, “Minding Time: A Philosophical and Theoretical Approach to the Psychology of Time” (Brill, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The philosophy of time has a variety of subtopics that are of great general as well as philosophical interest, such as the nature of time, the possibility of time travel, and the nature of tensed l...
ListenDavid Adger, "Language Unlimited: The Science Behind Our Most Creative Power" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
David Adger is Professor of Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London, where he is Head of the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film. He has served as President of the Linguistics Associat...
ListenKelly McGonigal, “The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It” (Avery, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Get more exercise, clean out the garage, quit smoking, put down the pint of ice cream… Most of us have behaviors wewant to change, projects we keep putting off, and bad habits we should stop. We kn...
ListenK. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. However, if you’ve spent the last several years work...
ListenEric Simons, “The Secret Lives of Sports Fans: The Science of Sports Obsession” (The Overlook Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In October 2007, journalist Eric Simons sat in the stands of Memorial Stadium in Berkeley, Calif., to watch his beloved University of California Bears take on Oregon State University in football. I...
ListenEleanor Gordon-Smith, "Stop Being Reasonable: How We Really Change Our Minds" (PublicAffairs, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
With today's furious political and cultural divisions, it's easy to shake our heads in exasperation at those who disagree with us. In this episode with Australian writer and philosopher, Eleanor Go...
ListenGary Greenberg, “The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry” (Blue Rider Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It is common today to treat depression and other mental disorders as concrete illnesses – akin to having pneumonia or the flu. In fact, being prescribed a pill after complaining to your family doct...
ListenJodie Jackson, “You Are What You Read: Why Changing Your Media Diet Can Change The World” (Unbound, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The old mantra “if it bleeds it leads” is alive and well in today’s media landscape. In fact, social media and up-to-the-second news have made it easier than ever to ingest a constant stream of inf...
ListenNancy Segal, “Born Together-Reared Apart: The Landmark Minnesota Twin Study” (Harvard UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Identical twins, separated at birth, raised in different families, and reunited in adulthood. In 1979, psychology researchers in Minnesota found some twins who had been reunited after a lifetime of...
ListenChristina Adams, "Camel Crazy" (New World Library, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Today I’m speaking with author Christina Adams, and Adams has something of a surprising muse: camels. That’s right, camels. One hump, two humps, crossing the Egyptian desert or the Siberian tundra....
ListenLawrence R. Samuel, “Shrink: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in America” (Nebraska UP, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Before the Second World War, very few Americans visited psychologists or psychiatrists. Today, millions and millions of Americans do. How did seeing a “shrink” become, quite suddenly, a typical par...
ListenNicci Gerrard, "The Last Ocean: A Journey Through Memory and Forgetting" (Penguin, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Dementia provokes profound moral questions about our society and the meaning of life itself. How much are we connected to one another? In what ways are we distant and separated? What does it mean t...
ListenSuzanne Corkin, “Permanent Present Tense: The Unforgettable Life of the Amnesia Patient, H.M.” (Basic Books, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
If you have studied neuroscience, memory, or even basic psychology, it is likely that you have heard of the famous amnesic patient Henry Molaison, or “H.M.” as he was known during his lifetime. In ...
ListenRachel Chrastil, "How to Be Childless: A History and Philosophy of Life Without Children" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this episode, Jana Byars talks with Rachel Chrastil, Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences and member of the history department at Xavier University, about her newest book, How to Be Childless: A ...
ListenStephen Crain, “The Emergence of Meaning” (Cambridge UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It’s not surprising that human language reflects and respects logical relations – logic, in some sense, ‘works’. For linguists, this represents a potentially interesting avenue of approach to the m...
ListenJonathan Erickson, "Imagination in the Western Psyche: From Ancient Greece to Modern Neuroscience" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Imagination is one of the most important elements of being human, but is most often assumed we know what it is, while rarely being analyzed. Here with me today is Jonathan Erickson to discuss his r...
ListenHelen Longino, “Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate Aggression and Sexuality” (University of Chicago Press, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What explains human behavior? It is standard to consider answers from the perspective of a dichotomy between nature and nurture, with most researchers today in agreement that it is both. For Helen ...
ListenBabette Becker, "I Should Have Been Music" (Page Publishing, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Dr. Babette Becker’s memoir I Should Have Been Music (Page Publishing, 2018) recounts her experience as a patient in four different mental hospitals from 1957 to 1960. It was a time when little was...
ListenSam Sommers, “Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World” (Riverhead Books, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Human behavior is notoriously complex and difficult to predict. For decades, social psychologists have been exploring situational variables and how they impact our behavior. We might like to think ...
ListenTaylor Pendergrass, "Six by Ten: Stories from Solitary" (Haymarket Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Long-term solitary confinement meets the legal definition of torture, and yet solitary confinement is used in every state in the United States. People are placed in solitary confinement for a varie...
ListenStephen E. Nadeau, “The Neural Architecture of Grammar” (MIT Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Although there seems to be a trend towards linguistic theories getting more cognitively or neurally plausible, there doesn’t seem to be an imminent prospect of a reconciliation between linguistics ...
ListenSarah Handley-Cousins, "Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North" (U Georgia Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
All wars, in a practical sense, center on the destruction of the human body, and in Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North (University of Georgia Press, 2019), Sarah Handley-Cousins, a c...
ListenJesse J. Prinz, “The Conscious Brain: How Attention Engenders Experience” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
For decades now, philosophers, linguists, psychologists and neuroscientists have been working to understand the nature of the hard-to-describe but very familiar conscious experiences we have while ...
ListenAlberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, infographics, and diagrams ubiquitous?and easier to sh...
ListenPeter Gray, “Free to Learn” (Basic Books, 2013) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his book Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life (Basic Books, 2013), Peter Gray proposes the followin...
ListenNir Eyal, "Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life" (Bloomsbury, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
A former advisor to tech companies on how to make their products habit-forming, Nir Eyal found that his own smartphone use was adversely affecting his family life. He took a deep dive into research...
ListenWillem J. M. Levelt, “A History of Psycholinguistics: The Pre-Chomskyan Era” (Oxford UP, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The only disappointment with A History of Psycholinguistics: The Pre-Chomskyan Era (Oxford UP, 2012) is that, as the subtitle says, the story it tells stops at the cognitive revolution, before Pim ...
ListenSusan Opotow, "New York After 9/11" (Fordham UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The impact of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the country have been widely discussed—but what about the impact on New York City, specifically? In their new anthology, New York After 9/11 (Fordham Uni...
ListenTony Veale, “Exploding the Creativity Myth: The Computational Foundations of Linguistic Creativity” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In these days of increasing automation, the prospect of obsolescence is an alarming one for those of us who make a living by stringing words together instead of doing something demonstrably useful....
ListenRichard Robb, "Willful: How We Choose What We Do" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Tired of the mechanical, narrowly rational human behavior of the Chicago school, but not exactly comforted by the emphasis on irrational activity in behavioral economics? So am I. Richard Robb, pro...
ListenSandra Aamodt and Sam Wang, “Welcome to Your Child’s Brain: How the Mind Grows from Conception to College” (Bloomsbury, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Many parents are interested in learning about how their children develop, and pretty much all parents want to do a good job with their kids. So, often they turn to parenting books. Unfortunately, m...
ListenBrett Kahr, "Bombs in the Consulting Room: Surviving Psychological Shrapnel" (Routledge, 2019 from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
"I’m very happy to say I really really do love psychoanalysis. I think the insights are absolutely genius and I don’t think that I would be able to do any of my work if I didn’t have those ideas re...
ListenGiusi Tamburello, “Concepts and Categories of Emotion in East Asia” (Carocci editore, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What is the relationship between language and the emotions? Where ought we look for evidence of emotion in historical and literary texts? Is it possible to talk about the emotional states of entire...
ListenWendy Gonaver, "The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840–1880" (UNC Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Dr. Wendy Gonaver discusses her book, The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840-1880 (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), the Eastern Lunatic Asylum in Virginia, and...
ListenKristin Andrews, “Do Apes Read Minds?: Toward a New Folk Psychology” (MIT Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The ability to figure out the mental lives of others – what they want, what they believe, what they know — is basic to our relationships. Sherlock Holmes exemplified this ability by accurately simu...
ListenClaire Edington, "Beyond the Asylum: Mental Illness in French Colonial Vietnam" (Cornell UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Both colonies and insane asylums are well known institutions of power. But what of asylums in Europe’s early 20th-century colonial empires? How did they operate? Who was confined in them? Who worke...
ListenCharlotte Pierce-Baker, “This Fragile Life: A Mother’s Story of a Bipolar Son” (Lawrence Hill Books, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When a mother listens to the beats of her own heart, where angst, fear and fortitude compete, and then beautifully weaves emotion into a story about her ongoing journey to support a bipolar son, th...
ListenCarlo Bonomi, "The Cut and the Building of Psychoanalysis, Vol. I," (Routledge, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Carlo Bonomi's two-volume set dreams the foundation of psychoanalysis as it writes its history. The work animates the reader's imagination, inviting them to journey the interwoven paths of Sigmund ...
ListenBarry Schwartz, “The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less – How the Culture of Abundance Robs Us of Satisfaction” (Harper Perennial, 2003) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Is there such a thing as too much choice? In The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less – How the Culture of Abundance Robs Us of Satisfaction (Harper Perennial, 2005), author Barry Schwartz answers w...
ListenKathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trade books in that most of them are what you might...
ListenDavid Linen, “The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning, and Gambling Feel So Good” (Viking, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What happens in our brains when we do things that feel good, such as drinking a glass of wine, exercising, or gambling? How and why do we become addicted to certain foods, chemicals and behaviors? ...
ListenIra Helderman, "Prescribing the Dharma: Psychotherapists, Buddhist Traditions, and Defining Religion" (UNC Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In today's podcast, I speak with American professor Ira Helderman about his newly published book, Prescribing the Dharma: Psychotherapists, Buddhist Traditions, and Defining Religion (University of...
ListenPaul Thagard, “The Cognitive Science of Science: Explanation, Discovery, and Conceptual Change” (MIT Press, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We’ve all heard about scientific revolutions, such as the change from the Ptolemaic geocentric universe to the Copernican heliocentric one. Such drastic changes are the meat-and-potatoes of histori...
ListenJ. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude that developing expertise requires -- do not nec...
ListenChristopher Mole, “Attention is Cognitive Unison: An Essay in Philosophical Psychology” (Oxford UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Chris Mole‘s book, Attention is Cognitive Unison: An Essay in Philosophical Psychology (Oxford University Press, 2011) provides a wonderfully elegant answer to a deceptively simple question: What d...
ListenLogan Thompson, "Beyond the Content: Mindfulness as a Test Prep Advantage" (Kaplan Publishing, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Most test prep books, textbooks, and classes miss the mark by only focusing on strategy and content. This essential guide tackles the other half of test prep: mindfulness and your mental performanc...
ListenChristopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, “The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us” (Broadway, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
You might think that if you were watching a basketball game and a person in a gorilla suit walked through the game, you would notice. Or that if you were talking to someone and turned away for a se...
ListenChristopher Willard, "Raising Resilience, The Wisdom and Science of Happy Families and Thriving Children" (Sounds True, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In every spiritual tradition, we find teachings on the virtues and qualities that we most want to pass on to our kids?such as generosity, kindness, honesty, determination, and patience. Today, a gr...
ListenShelley Carson, “Your Creative Brain: Seven Steps to Maximize Imagination, Productivity, and Innovation in Your Life” (Harvard Health/Jossey-Bass, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The creative ability of human beings is remarkable. Evidence of this can be seen in beautiful and unique works of art and music, innovations in architecture and technology, and daring new scientifi...
ListenMatthew McKay and Aprilia West, "Emotion Efficacy Therapy" (Context Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Having emotions is part of being human. And yet, at times we may find emotions overwhelming, or find ourselves acting in ways that are out of alignment with our values, especially when we are emoti...
ListenUriah Kriegel, “The Sources of Intentionality” (Oxford UP, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
It’s standard in philosophy of mind to distinguish between two basic kinds of mental phenomena: intentional states, which are about or represent other items or themselves, such as beliefs about you...
ListenEmily Oster, "Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, From Birth to Preschool" (Penguin, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
As any new parent knows, there is an abundance of often-conflicting advice hurled at you from doctors, family, friends, and strangers on the internet. From the earliest days, parents get the messag...
ListenRaelynn Maloney, “Waking Up: A Parent’s Guide to Mindful Awareness and Connection” (Companion Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Parenting books touting new philosophies are widely available. Raelynn Maloney’s book, Waking Up: A Parent’s Guide to Mindful Awareness and Connection (Companion Press, 2011) is not that kind of bo...
ListenJudith Grisel, "Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction" (Doubleday, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Not a lot of authors go from spending their early twenties homeless and addicted to cocaine to becoming one of the world’s leading researchers on the neuroscience of addiction. But Dr. Judith Grise...
ListenTheo van Leeuwen, “The Language of Colour: An Introduction” (Routledge, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Theo van Leeuwen comes to the academic discipline of social semiotics – the study of how meanings are conveyed – from his previous career as a film and TV producer. His interest in the makings of v...
ListenSteven C. Hayes, "A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters" (Avery Group, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In his landmark new book, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters (Avery Publishing Group, 2019), Dr. Steven C. Hayes, the originator and pioneering researcher into Acceptance and Commit...
ListenSusan Schneider, “The Language of Thought: A New Philosophical Direction” (MIT Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In 1975, Jerry Fodor published a book entitled The Language of Thought, which is aptly considered one of the most important books in philosophy of mind and cognitive science of the last 50 years or...
ListenChiara Russo Krauss, "Wundt, Avenarius and Scientific Psychology: A Debate at the Turn of the Twentieth Century" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
At the start of the 19th century, the field we now call psychology was still the branch of philosophy that studied the soul. How did psychology come to define itself as a separate area of inquiry, ...
ListenEric Schwitzgebel, “Perplexities of Consciousness” (MIT Press, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How much do we know about our stream of conscious experience? Not much, if Eric Schwitzgebel is right. In his new book Perplexities of Consciousness (MIT Press, 2011), Schwitzgebel argues for skept...
ListenHarriet Washington, "A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind" (Little, Brown Spark, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Environmental racism is visible not only as cancer clusters or the location of grocery stores. It is responsible for the reported gap in IQ scores between white Americans and Black, Latinx, and Nat...
ListenJonathan Metzl, “The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease” (Beacon Press, 2010) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Schizophrenia is a real, frightening, debilitating disease. But what are we to make of the fact that several studies show that African Americans are two to three times more likely than white Americ...
ListenHolly Rogers, "The Mindful Twenty-Something" (New Harbinger, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her book, The Mindful Twenty-Something (New Harbinger, 2016), Holly Rogers presents a unique, evidence based approach to help you make important life decisions with clarity and confidence. As c...
ListenD. Berry and M. Borg, "Relationship Sanity: Creating and Maintaining Healthy Relationships" (Central Recovery Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Relationships are hard, and it’s often because we defend ourselves against the very intimacy we seek by getting locked into problematic patterns of compulsive caretaking. Such was the topic of Mark...
ListenMike Jay, "Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic" (Yale UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Psychedelics are not terribly new. And the drug mescaline is certainly not new. Mike Jay's new book, Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic (Yale University Press, 2019), tells two tr...
ListenMatt Oram, "The Trials of Psychedelic Therapy: LSD Psychotherapy in America" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Are we in the midst of a psychedelic renaissance? If so, what can we learn about the present moment through the history of psychedelic experiments in the past? Matt Oram discusses contemporary deba...
ListenQuassim Cassam, "Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Sometimes people are blameworthy or otherwise not admirable because of what they believe. And sometimes they are blameworthy or otherwise not admirable because of how they believe – broadly, their ...
ListenNaftali Rothenberg, "Rabbi Akiva’s Philosophy of Love" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Is love between man and woman the source of wisdom and the cornerstone of moral life? Naftali Rothenberg says it is, based on the works and life of the first century Jewish scholar and sage, Rabbi ...
ListenAnthony Ryan Hatch, "Silent Cells: The Secret Drugging of Captive America" (U Minnesota Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Over the past forty years, U.S. prisons and jails have used various psychotropic drugs. In this interview, Anthony Ryan Hatch discusses the need to think deeply about mass incarceration, pharmaceut...
ListenJeff Warren, "Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-to Book" (Spielgel and Grau, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
ABC News anchor Dan Harris used to think that meditation was for people who collect crystals, play Ultimate Frisbee, and use the word “namaste” without irony. After he had a panic attack on live te...
ListenSusanna Schellenberg, "The Unity of Perception: Content, Consciousness, and Evidence" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How does perception result in thoughts about items in the world (such as dogs or flowers) and in conscious states of many kinds (such as experiences of seeing red)? How does perception provide evid...
ListenWilliam R. Stixrud, "The Self-Driven Child" (Penguin, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Nowadays it seems that even high-performing kids are acutely stressed and lacking motivation. Many feel that they have no control over their own lives. Some stumble in high school, or hit college a...
ListenMichael E. Kerr, "Bowen Theory’s Secrets: Revealing the Hidden Life of Families" (Norton, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
A pivotal development in the history of psychology was the invention of family systems theory by psychiatrist Murray Bowen. He was among the first to observe families in a naturalistic setting, and...
ListenChristian List, "Why Free Will is Real" (Harvard UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Given our modern scientific view of the world, how is freedom of the will possible? That is the classical problem of free will. Strategies for addressing this problem include the flat denial of f...
ListenLouise Hayes, "The Thriving Adolescent" (Context Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Adolescence is a unique developmental period of life, during which we face the challenges and pressures of moving from childhood into independent adulthood. Evolutionarily, adolescence is a time of...
ListenMorgan Marietta, "One Nation, Two Realities: Dueling Facts in American Democracy" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
American society is deeply divided at this moment—not just on values and opinions but on basic perceptions of reality. In their latest book, One Nation, Two Realities: Dueling Facts in American Dem...
ListenDerek Gaunt, "Ego, Authority, Failure: Using Emotional Intelligence Like a Hostage Negotiator to Succeed as a Leader" (New Degree Press, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
On this episode, Dr. Lee Pierce (she/they)--Asst. Prof. of Rhetoric in the Department of Communication at the State University of New York at Geneseo—is joined by co-host and recent Geneseo Graduat...
ListenNicholas Shea, "Representation in Cognitive Science" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In order to explain thought in natural physical systems, mainstream cognitive science posits representations, or internal states that carry information about the world and that are used by the syst...
ListenDonnel Stern, "The Infinity of the Unsaid: Unformulated Experience, Language, and the Nonverbal" (Routledge, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Donnel Stern has been a key figure in the advancement of interpersonal and relational psychoanalysis since his initial writings on unformulated experience in the 1980s, in which he offered a fresh ...
ListenJill Stoddard, "The Big Book of ACT Metaphor" (New Harbinger Publication, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a cutting-edge and evidence-based form of cognitive behavioral therapy. ACT concepts and principles help us heal from pain, make life affirming choices, a...
ListenLara Fielding, "Mastering Adulthood: Go Beyond Adulting to Become an Emotional Grown-Up" (New Harbinger Publications, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Whether graduating from college, starting a career, trying to gain financial independence, or creating meaningful relationships—entering into the world of grownups can be more than a little overwhe...
ListenT. J. Kasperbauer, "Subhuman: The Moral Psychology of Human Attitudes Towards Animals" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Non-human animals are companions, research subjects, creatures we fear, creatures we eat. Why do we put other animals in the various categories we do, and treat them in the various good and bad way...
ListenVivian Percy, "Saving Jenny: Rescuing Our Youth from America's Opioid and Suicide Epidemic" (Radius Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Normal turned to PTSD and a substance abuse nightmare for Jenny the instant a taxi struck her, catapulting her twenty feet across a busy New York City street. Jenny is one of the lucky ones to have...
ListenRalph James Savarese, "Classic Novels, Autistic Readers, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor" (Duke UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
From the earliest days of medical research into autism, both psychologists and the general public have characterised those on the autism spectrum as literal-minded, unimaginative and lacking in emp...
ListenJules Evans, "The Art of Losing Control: A Philosopher's Search for Ecstatic Experience" (Canongate Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
People have always sought ecstatic experiences - moments where they go beyond their ordinary self and feel connected to something greater than them. Such moments are fundamental to human flourishin...
ListenJamieson Webster, "Conversion Disorder: Listening to the Body in Psychoanalysis" (Columbia UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Entering into psychoanalysis takes courage, for patients and analysts alike. When it does what it’s supposed to do, it changes one’s relationship to the bigger questions in life—transforming a sear...
ListenDiscussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more democratic. How can publishers and authors contri...
ListenAmit Pinchevski, "Transmitted Wounds: Media and the Mediation of Trauma" (Oxford UP, 2019) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What does it mean to consider trauma and media from the perspective of technology and not from that of the subject of trauma, the clinician or the witness? In Transmitted Wounds: Media and the Medi...
ListenElizabeth Schechter, "Self-Consciousness and Split Brains: The Mind's I" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Human brains have two hemispheres whose major connection is the corpus callosum, which enables information to be shared between the hemispheres. Split-brain subjects are people whose corpus callosu...
ListenEmily Baum, "The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China" (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Emily Baum’s The Invention of Madness: State, Society, and the Insane in Modern China, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018 as part of the Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Inst...
ListenDJ Moran, "Committed Action in Practice: A Clinician’s Guide to Assessing, Planning, and Supporting Change in Your Client" (Context Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Most of us have behavior changes we would like to make, but behavior change can be hard! In this motivational interview, cross-posted from the podcast Psychologists Off The Clock, Dr. Diana Hill in...
ListenGreg McKeown, "Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less" (Currency, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Essentialism is a systematic discipline designed to support making life decisions that help you to make your highest possible contribution towards the things that really matter. In this episode, cr...
ListenDaniel Goleman and Richard Davidson, "Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body" (Avery, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Emotional Intelligence involves self awareness, self control, relationship management and social awareness. Being emotionally intelligent can make you a better leader, parent, friend and partner. I...
ListenChris Germer, "The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion" (The Guilford Press, 2009) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Increasing self-compassion and compassion for others, may just be the key to your well-being. In this this interview, cross-posted from the podcast Psychologists Off The Clock, Dr. Diana Hill inter...
ListenSusie Orbach, "In Therapy: How Conversations with Psychotherapists Really Work" (Profile Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
When Susie Orbach set out to depict how psychotherapy sessions really work, she did not want to go the conventional route—that is, taking real case material and distorting and disguising it into a ...
ListenDave Chase, "The Opioid Crisis Wake Up Call: Health Care is Stealing the American Dream. Here is How We Take It Back" (Health Rosetta Media, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The opioid crisis in America is considered by many to be the worst national public health crisis in the last 100 years. In his new book, The Opioid Crisis Wake Up Call: Health Care is Stealing the ...
ListenBenoît Majerus, "From the Middle Ages to Today: Experiences and Representations of Madness in Paris" (Parigramme, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
With Paris as the organizing locus of his new book, Du moyen âge à nos jours, expériences et représentations de la folie à Paris [From the Middle Ages to Today, Experiences and Representations of M...
ListenMaria Kronfeldner, "What's Left of Human Nature? A Post-Essentialist, Pluralist, and Interactive Account of a Contested Concept" (MIT Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Much of the debate about the roles of nature vs. nurture in the development of individual people has settled into accepting that it's a bit of both, although what each contributes to a given trait ...
ListenMichele Gelfand, "Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World" (Scribner Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World(Scribner Books, 2018), Dr. Michele Gelfand leverages cultural psychology research to examine social norms and their implic...
ListenSteve Stewart-Williams, "The Ape That Understood the Universe: How Mind and Culture Evolve" (Cambridge UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this episode, cross-posted from from the podcast Psychologists Off The Clock, Dr. Yael Schonbrun takes a dive into evolutionary psychology with professor and author, Dr. Steve Stewart-Williams. ...
ListenEmily K. Sandoz, "Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Eating Disorders" (New Harbinger, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Most of us can be self-critical about our bodies sometimes. At the extreme, painful thoughts and emotions about body image can lead to emotional suffering and even impact quality of life. In this e...
ListenStephan J. Guyenet, "The Hungry Brain: Outsmarting the Instincts That Make Us Overeat" (Flatiron Books, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this this interview, cross-posted from the podcast Psychologists Off The Clock, Dr. Diana Hill talks with Dr. Stephan J. Guyenet, neurobiologist and obesity researcher, about the unconscious sys...
ListenJoshua Eyler, "How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories behind Effective College Teaching" (West Virginia UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What is learning? There is a robust body of literature that seeks to tell us what the most effective classroom techniques and strategies are, but Joshua Eyler goes further. In his new book How Huma...
ListenMcKenzie Wark, "General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century" (Verso, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
McKenzie Wark’s new book offers 21 focused studies of thinkers working in a wide range of fields who are worth your attention. The chapters of General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty...
ListenKelly G. Wilson, "Mindfulness for Two: An Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Approach to Mindfulness in Psychotherapy" (Guilford Press, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this this interview, cross-posted from the podcast Psychologists Off The Clock, Dr. Diana Hill talks with Dr. Kelly Wilson about kindness and the common humanity of feeling inadequate and broken...
ListenCarrie Figdor, "Pieces of Mind: The Proper Domain of Psychological Predicates" (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We’re all familiar with cases where one attributes certain psychological states or capacities to creatures and systems that are not human persons. For example, your cat might prefer a certain vari...
ListenEckhard Roediger, "Contextual Schema Therapy" (Context Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this episode, cross-posted from the podcast Psychologists Off The Clock, Dr. Yael Schonbrun talks with expert and author Dr. Eckhard Roediger about the ins and outs of contextual schema therapy....
ListenMark J. Blechner, "The Mindbrain and Dreams: An Exploration of Dreaming, Thinking, and Artistic Creation" (Routledge, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Sigmund Freud may have been the first to popularize the study of dreams, but several scholars since Freud have advanced our understanding of dreams in revolutionary ways. Among them is Mark Blechne...
ListenMichael E. Staub, “The Mismeasure of Minds: Debating Race and Intelligence Between Brown and The Bell Curve” (UNC Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision required desegregation of America’s schools, but it also set in motion an agonizing multi-decade debate over race, class, and IQ. In The Mismeasure of ...
ListenSteven Shaviro, “Discognition” (Repeater Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Steven Shaviro’s book Discognition (Repeater Books, 2016) opens with a series of questions: What is consciousness? How does subjective experience occur? Which entities are conscious? What is it lik...
ListenRichard S. Marken, “Doing Research on Purpose: A Control Theory Approach to Experimental Psychology” (New View Publications, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Listeners familiar with our recent podcasts exploring the remarkable legacy of William T. Powers revolutionary Perceptual Control Theory of human behaviour, including its contribution to cognitive ...
ListenMichelle Fine, “Just Research in Contentious Times: Widening the Methodological Imagination” (Teachers College, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What can a researcher do to promote social justice? A conventional image of a researcher describes her staying in the ivory tower for most of the time, producing papers filled with academic jargons...
ListenShannon Spaulding, “How We Understand Others: Philosophy and Social Cognition” (Routledge, 2018)) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Social cognition includes the ways we explain, predict, interpret, and influence other people. The dominant philosophical theories of social cognition–the theory-theory and the simulation theory–ha...
ListenDavid P. Barash, “Through a Glass Brightly: Using Science to See Our Species as We Really Are” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Human beings have long seen themselves as the center of the universe, as specially-created creatures who are anointed as above and beyond the natural world. Professor and noted scientist David P. B...
ListenMatthieu Villatte, “Mastering the Clinical Conversation: Language as Intervention” (Guilford Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Humans are the only animals that can use language processes to create abstract, symbolic thoughts. This is both a blessing and a curse. Although symbolic processes have many benefits to humans, the...
ListenNathan Kravis, “On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud” (MIT Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Sometimes, a couch is a only a couch, but not in Dr. Nathan Kravis’s new book, On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud (MIT Press, 2017). In a live interview con...
ListenAvigail Lev and Matthew McKay, “Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Couples: A Clinician’s Guide” (Context Press, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this episode, cross-posted from the podcast Psychologists Off The Clock, Dr. Yael Schonbrun discusses common struggles in adult romantic relationships with Dr. Avigail Lev, co-author (with Matth...
ListenJ. Eric Oliver and Thomas J. Wood, “Enchanted America: How Intuition and Reason Divide Our Politics” (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Magical thinking lies at the heart of J. Eric Oliver and Thomas J. Wood’s new book, Enchanted America: How Intuition and Reason Divide Our Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Oliver is pr...
ListenPamela Woolner, ed., “School Design Together” (Routledge, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Pamela Woolner, senior lecturer in education at Newcastle University, joins us in this episode to discuss her edited volume, School Design Together (Routledge, 2014). Pam is an expert in understand...
ListenWarren Mansell, “A Transdiagnostic Approach to CBT using Method of Levels Therapy: Distinctive Features” (Routledge, 2012) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
To many, the title, A Transdiagnostic Approach to CBT using Method of Levels Therapy: Distinctive Features (Routledge, 2012) , may seem incongruous with a podcast channel called “New Books in Syste...
ListenMiriam Liss and Holly Schiffrin, “Balancing the Big Stuff: Finding Happiness in Work, Family, and Life” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Balancing work and a personal life can be a challenge for many of us, and we often make things worse by buying into myths that interfere with our effectiveness and happiness but are unsupported by ...
ListenTheodore M. Porter, “Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity” (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity (Princeton University Press, 2018), Theodore Porter uncovers the unfamiliar origins of human genetics in the asylums of Europe and...
ListenHervé Guillemain, “Schizophrenics in the Twentieth Century: The Side Effects of History” (Alma, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Schizophrènes au XXe siècle: des effets secondaires de l’histoire [Schizophrenics in the Twentieth Century: The Side Effects of History] is a strong argument in support of the history of psychiatry...
ListenS. Hayes and D. S. Wilson, “Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science: An Integrated Framework for Understanding, Predicting, and Influencing Human Behavior” (Context Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Evolution science and behavioral science both have strong theories that can help us understand humans in context, and yet, until now, the two fields have been mostly separate. In this episode, cros...
ListenS. Hayes and S. G. Hofmann, “Process-Based CBT: The Science and Core Clinical Competencies of Cognitive Behavioral Therapies” (Context Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this inspirational episode, cross-posted from the podcast Psychologists Off The Clock, Dr. Diana Hill interviews Dr. Steven Hayes, co-developer of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), about ...
ListenDan Siegel, “Aware: The Science and Practice of Presence” (TarcherPerigee, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this episode, cross-posted from the podcast Psychologists Off The Clock, Dr. Diana Hill interviews Dr. Dan Siegel about his new book, Aware: The Science and Practice of Presence (TarcherPerigree...
ListenRebecca Reich, “State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature and Dissent After Stalin” (Northern Illinois UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her new book, State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature and Dissent After Stalin (Northern Illinois University Press, 2018), Rebecca Reich argues that Soviet dissident writers used literary narra...
ListenDeirdre Fay, “Attachment-Based Yoga & Meditation for Trauma Recovery” (Norton, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this this interview, cross-posted from the podcast Psychologists Off The Clock, Deirdre Fay, LICSW discusses how she integrates yoga, meditation and attachment theory into healing trauma. Ms. Fa...
ListenJulia Miele Rodas, “Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe” (U Michigan Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Ever since the first clinical account of autism was published by Dr. Leo Kanner in 1943, Western culture has tended to mythologise the disorder as impenetrable, non-verbal and characterised by sile...
ListenVeronica Raggi, “Exposure Therapy for Treating Anxiety in Children and Adolescents: A Comprehensive Guide” (New Harbinger, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
While most children experience some fear and anxiety, some develop more extreme forms of anxiety that can impair their daily functioning. In this episode, cross-posted from the podcast Psychologist...
ListenSusan Greenfield, “You and Me: The Neuroscience of Identity” (Notting Hill Editions, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What makes you who you are? What makes you distinct from me? What is identity? In the book You and Me: The Neuroscience of Identity (Notting Hill Editions, 2016), Baroness Susan Greenfield scientif...
ListenMichael Kearney, “The Nest in the Stream: Lessons from Nature on Being with Pain” (Parallax Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this episode, cross posted from the podcast Psychologists Off the Clock, Dr. Diana Hill interviews Dr. Michael Kearney, a palliative care physician who takes an interpersonal, integrative approa...
ListenBarry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe, “Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing” (Riverhead Books, 2011) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this episode, cross-posted from the podcast Psychologists Off The Clock, Dr. Yael Schonbrun interviews Dr. Barry Schwartz, co-author (with Kenneth Sharpe) of the book Practical Wisdom: The Right...
ListenDamien Riggs, “The Psychic Life of Racism in Gay Men’s Communities” (Lexington Books, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In order to fully grasp the workings of racism, we cannot limit ourselves to examining it within majority cultures. Racism exists in minority cultures, such as the gay community, but the intersecti...
ListenRussell Kolts, “Experiencing Compassion: Focused Therapy from the Inside Out” (The Guilford Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In this this interview, cross-posted from the podcast Psychologists Off The Clock, Dr. Diana Hill interviews Dr. Russell Kolts, expert in Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) about his new workbook for...
ListenEdward Khantzian, “Treating Addiction: Beyond the Pain” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Treatment of addiction often focuses on abstinence or ‘harm reduction.’ While many people benefit greatly from such approaches, the underlying pain and heartache often go untreated, leaving individ...
ListenJames M. Jasper, “The Emotions of Protests” (U Chicago Press, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How do emotions affect participation in protests, and in politics more generally? In The Emotions of Protests (University of Chicago Press, 2018), James M. Jasper develops a solid critique to appro...
ListenSandra Allen, “A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise: A True Story about Schizophrenia” (Scribner, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
What is it really like to have a family member with serious mental illness? Sandra Allen’s unique book, A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise: A True Story about Schizophrenia (Scribner, 2018), addresses t...
ListenAlex Pang, “Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less” (Basic Books, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Our modern culture prompts us to work ever harder. But it turns out the most successful and creative among us don’t just work hard, they actually rest more skillfully. In this this interview, cross...
ListenJohn Forsyth, “Anxiety Happens: 52 Ways to Find Peace of Mind” (New Harbinger, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Everyone experiences anxiety and worry sometimes. However, when anxiety controls your life, it pulls you away from things that you care about. In this this interview, cross-posted from the podcast ...
ListenJonathan W. Marshall, “Performing Neurology: The Dramaturgy of Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot is perhaps most well known today from the images of his “hysterical” female patients featured in Bourneville’s Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière. ...
ListenRuth G. Millikan, “Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language, and Natural Information” (Oxford UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Kant famously asked the question, how is knowledge possible? In her new book, Beyond Concepts: Unicepts, Language, and Natural Information (Oxford University Press, 2018), Ruth Garrett Millikan res...
ListenJohn J. Pitney, “The Politics of Autism: Navigating the Contested Spectrum” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Autism as a condition has received much focused attention recently, but less attention has been paid to its politics. It is a condition that necessitates significant accommodations and intervention...
ListenRichard S. Marken and Timothy A. Carey, “Controlling People” (Australian Academic Press, 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The word “control”, with its seemingly instantaneous mental associations with forms of top-down oppression, is one that makes even some cyberneticians nervous and is often downplayed in contemporar...
ListenOmina El Shakry, “The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt” (Princeton UP, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Often, when writing the intellectual history of the Middle East, we make assumptions about the influence of ideas from other places on the Middle East itself. We assume what ideas are being adapted...
ListenEric Yarbrough, “Transgender Mental Health” (American Psychiatric Association, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
How and where do transgender and gender non-conforming (TGNC) people find good mental healthcare? And how can psychotherapists and other mental health professionals become competent in this kind of...
ListenEva Ritvo, “Bekindr: The Transformative Power of Kindness” (Momosa Publishing, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
After working clinically with patients for over 25 years, it’s natural that one would learn something about what heals or harms humans. Such is the case with Dr. Eva Ritvo, who discovered through h...
ListenSam Kean, “The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons” (Little, Brown and Co., 2015) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
Early studies of the functions of the human brain used a simple method: wait for misfortune to strike—strokes, seizures, infectious diseases, lobotomies, horrendous accidents-and see how the victim...
ListenGloria Origgi, “Reputation: What it is and Why it Matters” (Princeton UP, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
We all put a great deal of care into protecting, managing, and monitoring our reputation. But the precise nature of a reputation is obscure. In one sense, reputation is merely hearsay, a popular pe...
ListenRobert Pearl, “Mistreated: Why We Think Were Getting Good Health Care and Why We’re Usually Wrong” (PublicAffairs, 2017) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
The biggest problem in American health care is us. Do you know how to tell good health care from bad health care? Guess again. As patients, we wrongly assume the best care is dependent mainly on t...
ListenGina Biegel, “Be Mindful and Stress Less: 50 Ways to Deal with Your (Crazy) Life” (Shambhala, 2018) from 2021-01-31T22:10:42.023393
In her book, Be Mindful and Stress Less: 50 Ways to Deal with Your (Crazy) Life (Shambhala, 2018), Gina Biegel shows how the demands and pressures of everyday life can really stress you out! She sh...
ListenJonathan Metzl, “The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease” (Beacon Press, 2010) from 2011-05-04T18:25:26
Schizophrenia is a real, frightening, debilitating disease. But what are we to make of the fact that several studies show that African Americans are two to three times more likely than white Americ...
ListenJonathan Metzl, “The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease” (Beacon Press, 2010) from 2011-05-04T18:25:26
Schizophrenia is a real, frightening, debilitating disease. But what are we to make of the fact that several studies show that African Americans are two to three times more likely than white Americ...
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