essay is adapted from a talk in which Fritjof Capra discusses some of the findings described in his latest book, Learning from Leonardo: Decoding the Notebooks of a Genius (2013: Berrett-Koehler Publishers). Leonardo da Vinci, the great genius of the Renaissance, developed and practiced a unique synthesis of art, science, and technology, which is not only extremely interesting in its conception but also very relevant to our time. As we recognize that our sciences and technologies have become increasingly narrow in their focus, unable to understand our multi-faceted problems from an interdisciplinary perspective, we urgently need a science and technology that honor and respect ... posted on Apr 21 2014 (19,769 reads)

Fundamental forces of physics somehow determine everything that happens — as my guest today, Leonard Mlodinow has written — “from the birth of a child to the birth of a galaxy.” I’ve been puzzling over this especially since my conversation with Brian Greene. And Leonard Mlodinow weighs into this puzzling in intriguing ways. He is a physicist ready to openly reflect on the gap between theory and reality — and the fascinating interplay between a life in science and life in the world. He’s co-written books with Stephen Hawking — and Deepak Chopra. He’s written for television — “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” ... posted on Jul 15 2014 (25,867 reads)

100 solutions to climate change. Despite his accolades, Paul is softly spoken. He gives opinions tentatively and without bravado. Just a few days before we spoke, US President Donald Trump had pulled out of the Paris climate accords. I don’t ask Paul whether this makes him feel pessimistic, because I know the answer. That day in Portland, he told the graduates, “When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: ‘If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic you don’t understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and y... posted on Apr 13 2018 (13,461 reads)

and on Refinery29. It was the centerpiece film for the first annual 50/50 Day, which had over 11,000 screenings around the globe, all linked together in an online discussion about what it will take to move to a more gender-balanced world. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tiffany and I spoke about her unusual approach of using short films as a centerpiece to a social change strategy and movement. We talked about her short film, The Science of Character, and also the social science and neuroscience behind character, how you can embody different virtues by working on developing specific character strengths. We also talked about her discovery of the importance of a tech... posted on Aug 11 2018 (5,898 reads)

are and where we came from, we will have failed.” This must be what Rilke, too, had at heart when he exhorted us to live the questions. And yet if there is one common denominator across the entire history of human culture, it is the insatiable hunger to know the unknowable — that is, to know everything, and to know it with certainty, which is itself the enemy of the human spirit. The perplexities and paradoxes of that quintessential human longing, and how the progress of modern science has compounded it, is what astrophysicist and philosopher Marcelo Gleiser examines in The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning (public library). Partway bet... posted on Mar 16 2015 (18,241 reads)

thinkers and activists. More about the site here.  Dr. Diana Beresford-Kroeger, botanist, medical biochemist, writer and broadcaster, combines medical training with a love of botany. She is an expert on the medicinal, environmental and nutritional properties of trees, and author most recently of The Global Forest. When her parents died, she was raised by an uncle who taught her everything from physics to Buddhism and Gaelic poetry. She was one of only two women to graduate in science from University College Cork in 1963, where she had taken on a "crushing load of studies in classical botany, molecular biology, mathematics, and medical biochemistry".  In t... posted on Sep 12 2019 (6,772 reads)

Feeling as the Moving Force in All Life For 150 years, biology, the ‘science of life,’ made no great effort to answer the question of what life really is. Biologists had a concept they thought to be sufficient for their research: Most of them assumed organisms to be tiny machines. Today, this belief has been shaken. Only a few years ago we witnessed researchers celebrating the ‘decoding’ of the human genome as a secular breakthrough. They seemed to be on the verge of unraveling the mechanics of life. But not much has happened since then. The boom has come to a standstill. We don’t hear much from geneticists these days. Certainly, they have been ... posted on Jun 29 2021 (3,716 reads)

call alternative healing, and in ancient wisdom traditions, and modern spiritual practices. I first met Lissa about 10 years ago in the living room of a mutual and very dear mentor and friend, Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, who has been a true pioneer and inspiration for an integrative health movement, someone who has widened the path that Lissa and I have walked. I just wanna take this moment to recognize her and all those who have done work in healing the earth, healing ourselves, expanding science, spreading wisdom and love on all sides of the bedside, so to speak, because we're really all learning and growing and healing together. It is a pleasure, Lissa, to be in conversation w... posted on Aug 28 2023 (3,344 reads)

place in me, a place of fellow feeling, of feeling traveling, of journeying together in some mystery that I know we share. I can “be not afraid” even while I have fear. If we could reclaim the sacred—simple respect—in education, how would it transform our knowing, teaching, and learning? I would like to suggest several answers, but I want to preface them by telling a story, not from the world of religion, not from the world of education, but from the world of science, because I think there is much for us to learn from the world of science about the very things that we care about. Science is not the enemy, not great science. I want to tell you about a gr... posted on Aug 25 2017 (15,292 reads)

science we cover here on Greater Good—aka, “the science of a meaningful life”—has exploded over the past 10 years, with many more studies published each year on gratitude, mindfulness, and our other core themes than we saw a decade ago. 2012 was no exception. In fact, in the year just past, new findings added nuance, depth, and even some caveats to our understanding of the science of a meaningful life. Here are 10 of the scientific insights that made the biggest impression on us in 2012—the findings most likely to resonate in scientific journals and the public consciousness in the years to come, listed in roughly the order in which they were publ... posted on Mar 13 2013 (19,264 reads)

favorites. A few months later, Gemma Elwin Harris, the editor who had envisioned the project, reached out to invite me to participate in the book’s 2013 edition by answering one randomly assigned question from a curious child. Naturally, I was thrilled to do it, and honored to be a part of something as heartening as Does My Goldfish Know Who I Am? (public library) — a compendium of primary school children’s funny, poignant, innocent yet insightful questions about science and how life works, answered by such celebrated minds as rockstar physicist Brian Cox, beloved broadcaster and voice-of-nature Sir David Attenborough, legendary linguist Noam Chomsky, sci... posted on Sep 1 2014 (15,295 reads)

run any such risk, perhaps not even for his own child.” The second take away comes from close study of Darwin’s Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, published one year after Descent of Man. There, Darwin details descriptions of emotions such as reverence, love, tenderness, laughter, embarrassment and the conceptual tools to document the evolutionary origins of these emotions. That led me to my own work on the physiology and display of these remarkable emotions, and to the science-based conclusion that these emotions lie at the core of our capacities for virtue and cooperation. DISALVO: You recently wrote an article with the provocative title “In Defense of Tea... posted on Oct 19 2013 (26,863 reads)

Yes. It was kind of formative, I think. RW: What do you think made it such an important memory? Peter: That's a good question. There was a feeling of loneliness and alienation, but also a sense of questioning the way we're living. It was kind of waking up a bit, coming out of this sense of everything having to be the way it is. You know? Sometimes it's hard to imagine things being another way because we get so used to them. RW: How did your interest in science evolve? Peter: When I was a kid I was good at math and science, and I got a lot of validation. I'd get the good grades and the teachers would like me, so I think I got a little addicted... posted on Oct 11 2020 (17,680 reads)

languages of these two geniuses into my perspective is: we were going too fast. We are still going too fast. When we rush, we make decisions that lack information, lack proper reflection, and ultimately make the problems of humanity worse. In my opinion, the problem lies not in the contribution to human knowledge of talented minds like Einstein and Feynman, but the uses to which those contributions were put. Now is the time to slow down, to take a pause, to rethink the purpose of science and education and to cultivate our critical thinking—and our critical feeling. It is time to combine science with the soul: science as the sustainable, collective and critical developmen... posted on Jul 10 2017 (6,653 reads)

His book, It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle, is the winner of the 2016 Silver Nautilus Book Award in Psychology. Mark specializes in working with depression, anxiety, obsessive thoughts, fears, panic disorders, self-injury, chronic pain, and persistent symptoms and conditions. In this conversation, we talk about how unexplained symptoms can often be linked to inherited family trauma. Mark helps us understand the science behind this, and more importantly, how becoming aware of these patterns is the first step in the very important healing we all need to do, so that we can receive the love and support of our fa... posted on Dec 4 2020 (9,491 reads)

research that you were doing before, because this is cool stuff.” So I was encouraged, and I started up again. But I almost left the whole thing. I didn’t want anything to do with this kind of work again [laughs]. EM Well, that landmark study you described—published in Nature in 1997—was dubbed the “wood-wide web,” and it really created a wave of interest around the world and a ripple effect, and not just from reporters and academia and the science community but people all around the world. So I wonder, for those who don’t know the intricacies of what you discovered, if you could just briefly explain what your study showed. SS&n... posted on Aug 16 2021 (7,143 reads)

with my mother that I once trudged with tiny feet beside her, astonished at the flood of long-ago feelings rushing in with each step, astonished too at how effortlessly I navigate these routes I have not walked in decades. The psychological, neurocognitive, and geophysical underpinnings of these astonishments are what M.R. O’Connor explores in Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World (public library) — a layered inquiry into the science and cultural poetics of how we orient in space and selfhood, illuminating the stunning interpenetration of the two. “View of Nature in Ascending Regions” by Levi Walter Yagg... posted on Sep 26 2021 (4,151 reads)

back at 10 years of writing about the science of human goodness for Greater Good, Jeremy Adam Smith discovers that the bad and good—and the inner and outer—go hand in hand. I’ve been covering the science of human goodness, off and on, for almost 10 years. In that time, I’ve seen a dramatic transformation in the way scientists understand how and why we love, thank, empathize, cooperate, and care for each other. Of course, “goodness” doesn’t seem like a very scientific concept. It sounds downright squishy to many people, and thus unworthy of study. But you can count acts of goodness—and all science begins with counting. It&rsquo... posted on May 24 2015 (14,941 reads)

a Greek citizen (laughing). I was free to explore Nature on my own. I got to climb high trees, to cross fences that said "No Trespassing," and to walk on thin ice, with no grownups watching. I noticed that my own grandchildren didn't have that freedom in Nature, that they were always watched, and it drove me a little nuts at times. It’s not the same world. We can't trust our children to Nature in the way my parents could, when I was a child. I wanted to study science. My parents, however, said science was a boy's subject. I finished high school at 16 and they said, "No, art school --- art and music and culture and things like that." I got mys... posted on Aug 11 2017 (11,187 reads)

past few years have been marked by two major trends in the science of a meaningful life. One is that researchers continued to add sophistication and depth to our understanding of positive feelings and behaviors. Happiness is good for you, but not all the time; empathy ties us together, and can overwhelm you; humans are born with an innate sense of fairness and morality, that changes in response to context. This has been especially true of the study of mindfulness and attention, which is producing more and more potentially life-changing discoveries. The other factor involves intellectual diversity. The turn from the study of human dysfunction to human s... posted on Jan 23 2014 (127,980 reads)