Tippett: Genetics describes DNA sequencing, but the new field of epigenetics sees that genes can be turned on and off and expressed differently, through changes in environment and behavior. And Rachel Yehuda is a pioneer in understanding how the effects of stress and trauma can transmit biologically, beyond cataclysmic events, to the next generation. She’s studied the children of Holocaust survivors and the children of pregnant women who survived the 9/11 attacks. But her science is a form of power for flourishing beyond the traumas, large and small, that mark each of our lives and those of our families and communities. I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On ... posted on Jul 25 2020 (6,800 reads)

celebration of their new plantcentric books, Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging and The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth, authors Jessica J. Lee and Zoë Schlanger sat down for ranging conversation about emerging science, plant intelligence, culture, memory, botanical belonging, and how our houseplants may influence our thinking. --------------------- Jessica J. Lee: Both of our books center on plants, but come at the topic from a specific angle. Why did plant intelligence capture your attention?  Zoë Schlanger: Plant intelligence is not an intuitive proposition. As humans we’re te... posted on May 22 2024 (1,278 reads)

clouds, before Georgia O’Keeffe extolled the beauty of the Southwest skies, before scientists figured out why cloudy days help us think more clearly, the great ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes wrote: “They are the celestial Clouds, the patron goddesses of the layabout. From them come our intelligence, our dialectic and our reason.” Indeed, there is a singular quality of prayerfulness to clouds — a certain secular reverence undergirding their allure to both art and science. No poetic titan was more enchanted by the prayerful art-science of clouds than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who wrote: To find yourself in the infinite, You must distinguish and the... posted on Nov 5 2015 (16,010 reads)

been an avid hiker my whole life. From the time I first strapped on a backpack and headed into the Sierra Nevada Mountains, I was hooked on the experience, loving the way being in nature cleared my mind and helped me to feel more grounded and peaceful. But, even though I’ve always believed that hiking in nature had many psychological benefits, I’ve never had much science to back me up…until now, that is. Scientists are beginning to find evidence that being in nature has a profound impact on our brains and our behavior, helping us to reduce anxiety, brooding, and stress, and increase our attention capacity, creativity, and our ability to connect with other peo... posted on Mar 20 2016 (27,123 reads)

stories and social media posts inundate us every day with tips for greater happiness, health, and general well-being. But who has time to fit them into our already packed schedules? Recently, though, my research has led me to believe that one simple prescription can have transformative effects: look for more daily experiences of awe. This doesn’t require a trek to the mountains. What the science of awe suggests is that opportunities for awe surround us, and their benefits are profound. Explore awe in depth at The Art & Science of Awe, an inspiring day-long event on June 4 at UC Berkeley or via webcast. Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast... posted on Jun 2 2016 (16,777 reads)

many ways, 2016 was a banner year for books related to our themes of compassion, kindness, empathy, happiness, and mindfulness. Judging from the number of books to arrive at our office, the science of a meaningful life is hitting its full stride, with more and more people recognizing how to apply new insights to our daily lives. Yet, while the number of books was encouraging, many of them seemed to repeat old themes and research, without offering much new in the way of insight. That’s why many of our favorite books of 2016 do something a little bit extra: They take our science to a new level, looking at how schools, organizations, and society at large can appl... posted on Dec 23 2016 (29,640 reads)

is the critical decade. This is the critical decade where it’s not game over.” In your language, “It’s game on.” In the previous podcast we recorded on Drawdown, those were the words you used—“Game on.” So where do you feel we are right now here in 2021 in terms of the timeline and the climate crisis? Paul Hawken: Good question. It’s lovely to be with you. Yes, it’s easy to be a doomsayer about where we are because the science is incredible. The rate of change surpasses earlier predictions—that is, what’s happening with warming, Arctic ice melting, temperature changes, fires, droughts, etc. All this is h... posted on Sep 29 2021 (2,921 reads)

to activate all their core childhood wounds, and they may act out those wounds on the patients, rather than expressing the empathy, compassion, and nurturing that helps suffering patients heal. Whenever inquiries stray in the direction of  phenomena that scientists can’t explain or understand, people tend to split into two polarized camps — the rational, skeptical, debunking-of-all-things paranormal, materialist scientist camp and the gung ho “woo woo” “science can’t keep up with us” New Age spirituality and anti-science camp. There are good and bad actors in science and there are good and bad actors in spiritual circles, alternative m... posted on Jul 7 2022 (7,161 reads)

practices for thousands of years independently. When you find a common ground across independent pursuits, E.O. Wilson, the sociobiologist, who passed recently, he names that “consilience.” So that’s a beautiful term from E.O. Wilson’s bringing back from the 1800s actually, that word, consilience. So the Indigenous teachings from millennia, from thousands of years ago, contemplative teachings, have taught about the oneness of things. Now, in modern times, in science, for example, modern Western-based science, we have the field of anthropology, which might say there’s an individualism within, for example, the United States. Then, there’s collec... posted on Mar 10 2023 (2,331 reads)

people I know, including Marc Lesser, CEO of ZBA Associates, a management consulting and coaching firm. It almost sounds like a joke: "A CEO and a Zen master walked into a room..." We got everyone together and we figured it out. Knowledge@Wharton: What tools and techniques did you use to teach emotional intelligence in your curriculum? Which ones worked best and why? Meng: If you want a strong curriculum for emotional intelligence, it is important to base it on neuroscience and data. It's important not to be fluffy; if you're fluffy, you lose people. For example, if everybody sits around in a circle, talking about emotions and bringing awareness to their ... posted on Jul 11 2012 (21,421 reads)

Bennett-Goleman and Daniel Goleman explain the science behind "mind whispering"—a technique for overcoming self-defeating habits of mind. Tara Bennett-Goleman and her husband Daniel Goleman form a kind of intellectual dream team—one almost exclusively preoccupied with emotions. In best-selling books like Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence, Daniel Goleman has laid out the cognitive science and theories behind our emotions and social interactions. In her work as a psychotherapist and in her best-selling book Emotional Alchemy, Bennett-Goleman has applied those theories to overcoming self-defeating habits of mind and improving our relationships. ... posted on Oct 6 2013 (30,684 reads)

Will Make You Smarter: 151 Big Thinkers Each Pick a Concept to Enhance Your Cognitive Toolkit The importance of “the umwelt,” or why failure and uncertainty are essential for science and life. Every year for more than a decade, intellectual impresario and Edge editor John Brockman has been asking the era’s greatest thinkers a single annual question, designed to illuminate some important aspect of how we understand the world. In 2010, he asked how the Internet is changing the way we think. In 2011, with the help of psycholinguist Steven Pinker and legendary psychologist Daniel Kahneman, he posed an even grander question: “What scientific concept will improve... posted on Jan 14 2014 (34,961 reads)

Van Slambrouck is a distinguished journalist. He began working for the Christian Science Monitor in 1976. From 1989 to 1997 he was with the San Jose Mercury News. In 1997 he returned to the Monitor as San Francisco bureau chief. In 2001 he was made the editor-in-chief of the Monitor. He is currently an associate professor of Mass Communication at Principia College, a correspondent for the Monitor, a contributing editor for works & conversations and a volunteer with ServiceSpace. Paul entered my life in 2006 thanks to his offer to help me in my struggle as an independent publisher. It was a pivotal moment for me, and for the magazine I founded. Part of our connection involved a mu... posted on Apr 18 2014 (9,044 reads)

it astonished the whole intellectual world. For many people it was –and still is– a shattering realization to think that humanity is never going to know reality as it is. Some people fell into despair. RW: I think of “the death of metaphysics” as being connected with Kant. JN: Yes—metaphysics considered as the knowledge of reality independent of our perception, the universe as it really is. As Kant put it, metaphysics used to be the queen of the sciences and now it no longer has that status. He was trying to account for the fact that there is certainty. But it’s only the certainty that we put into the world, not certainty about the worl... posted on Jun 11 2016 (17,230 reads)

science is realizing that the world is a living network – with profound implications, says Fritjof Capra. One Earth, One Humanity, One Future, the theme of the recent gathering to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the launch of Resurgence, is one that has been conveyed by poets, philosophers and spiritual teachers throughout the ages. One of its most beautiful expressions is found in the celebrated speech attributed to Chief Seattle of the Suquamish and Duwamish tribes of what is now the state of Washington in the north-west of the USA: This we know: all things are connected like the blood that unites one family... Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons an... posted on Jan 31 2017 (18,462 reads)

my religious and spiritual background is sort of stereotypical for my generation — born in 1963 to parents who were first generation. All four of my grandparents were born in Russia and Poland, came to New York, worked in the garment industry, loved Roosevelt, union organizers. My parents moved, raised me in Scarsdale, New York. I was very assimilated — I have a strong sense of being Jewish as my culture, but not as, really, as a religion. As a kid who always loved science, and when I first read the bible in college, the Old Testament, I was horrified when I read the whole thing. And so I went through the phase that many young scientific types go through. I&rsqu... posted on Sep 21 2018 (17,318 reads)

do we live in? Where are we going? Because we are confronting the limits of the Earth’s ecosystem to carry the burden of humanity, we are also confronting our assumptions about the nature of the Universe and our evolutionary journey. Do we continue our rapid march into materialism, grounded in the assumption that we live in a Universe that is indifferent to humanity and comprised mostly of dead matter and empty space? Or do we open to a transforming insight from the combined wisdom of science and the world’s spiritual traditions: The Universe is not dead at its foundations but is profoundly alive and we humans are an integral part of that larger aliveness? In the words of Pla... posted on Apr 30 2018 (15,132 reads)

that his answers carry a heavy burden, as people around the world look to his findings for miracle cures. Norman is wary of presenting neuroplastic interventions as working for all people, all the time, but rather as a profoundly beneficial re-imagining of how our minds work and their potential to heal and self-improve. I’ve re-read this conversation at least a dozen times and each time I engage with another layer of thought I hadn’t picked up the first time around. From God to science, we put walls around what we think we know so that we may contain the panic stemming from uncertainty. Perhaps the most profound thing I learned from Norman is how to cultivate the open mind, ... posted on Nov 10 2021 (11,679 reads)

the chances of future generations. In our attempts to build and nurture sustainable communities we can learn valuable lessons from ecosystems, which are sustainable communities of plants, animals, and microorganisms. In over four billion years of evolution, ecosystems have developed the most intricate and subtle ways of organizing themselves so as to maximize sustainability. There are laws of sustainability which are natural laws, just as the law of gravity is a natural law. In our science in past centuries, we have learned a lot about the law of gravity and similar laws of physics, but we have not learned very much about the laws of sustainability. If you go up to a high cliff ... posted on Feb 26 2014 (26,794 reads)

yet we continue to long for the secrets of that ever-elusive eternity. For nearly a decade, Brooklyn-based artist, photographer, and Guggenheim Fellow Rachel Sussman has been traveling the globe to discover and document its oldest organisms — living things over 2,000 years of age. Her breathtaking photographs and illuminating essays are now collected in The Oldest Living Things in the World (public library) — beautiful and powerful work at the intersection of fine art, science, and philosophy, spanning seven continents and exploring issues of deep time, permanence and impermanence, and the interconnectedness of life. Llareta 3,000 years | Atacama Desert,... posted on May 29 2014 (19,956 reads)