___
I still remember the time I tried to comfort one of my best friends when her father died. Because I’d lost my own parents years before, I thought I understood her pain. But, when I offered sympathy, she balked. Her father’s death had been transcendent, filled with love and family connection. She didn’t feel pain; she felt at peace. [Read more…] about Study finds the limits of putting oneself in another’s shoes (instead, ask and listen)
If you’ve spent any time on YouTube over the last few years (and you know you have), you’ve likely seen the video of the invisible gorilla experiment (if you’ve somehow missed it, catch yourself up here). The researchers who conducted that study, Dan Simons and Chris Chabris, didn’t realize that they were about to create an instant classic—a psychology study mentioned alongside the greats, and known well outside the slim confines of psych wonks. Milgram taught us about our sheepish obedience to authority; Mischel used marshmallows to teach us about delayed gratification; and Simons and Chabris used a faux gorilla to teach us that we are not the masters of attention we think we are.
The duo’s new book [Read more…] about Did You See the Gorilla? An Interview with Psychologist Daniel Simons
In 1993, Paramount Pictures released Searching for Bobby Fischer, which depicts Joshua Waitzkin’s early chess success as he embarks on a journey to win his first National chess
championship. This movie had the effect of weakening his love for the game as well as the learning process. His passion for learning was rejuvenated, however, after years of meditation, and reading philosophy and psychology. With this rekindling of the learning process, Waitzkin took up the martial art Tai Chi Chuan at the age of 21 and made rapid progress, winning the 2004 push hands world championship at the age of 27.
After reading Joshua’s most recent book The Art of Learning, I thought of a million topics 
I wanted to discuss with him–topics such as being labelled a “child prodigy”, blooming, creativity, and the learning process. Thankfully, since I was profiling Waitzkin for an article I was fortunate enough to get a chance to have such a conversation with him. I hope you find this discussion just as provocative and illuminating as I did.
The Child Prodigy
S. Why did you leave chess at the top of your game?
J. This is a complicated question that I wrote about very openly in my book. In short, I had lost the love. My relationship to the game had become externalized-by pressures from the film about my life, by losing touch with my natural voice as an artist, by mistakes I made in the growth process. At the very core of my relationship to learning is the idea that we should be as organic as possible. We need to cultivate a deeply refined introspective sense, and build our relationship to learning around our nuance of character. I stopped doing this and fell into crisis from a sense of alienation from an art I had loved so deeply. This is when I left chess behind, started meditating, studying philosophy and psychology, and ultimately moved towards Tai Chi Chuan.
S. Do you think being a child prodigy hurt your chess career in any way?
J. I have never considered myself a prodigy. Others have used that term, but I never bought in to it. From a young age it was always about embracing the battle, loving the game, and overcoming adversity. Growing up as [Read more…] about Learning about Learning: an Interview with Joshua Waitzkin
Where does our “Feeling of Knowing” come from? Have you ever felt certain that you knew an answer even though you couldn’t think of it right off? Where does that “feeling of knowing” come from? The answer to this question is the focus of neurologist Robert Burton’s new book On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not
I recently reviewed Dr. Burton’s book on the Brain Science Podcast and last week I had the opportunity to interview him for the show. He explained that one of the origins for his book was his experience with patients with conditions like Cotard’s syndrome (where the patient thinks he is dead or does not exist). What Dr. Burton calls the “feeling of knowing” is so strong that people consistently trust it even when their beliefs contradict the evidence. At first it might seem surprising that this feeling is generated at an unconscious level in our brain, yet the same sort of processing creates the world we see and hear. It is well-known that what we see is not what enters our eyes, but [Read more…] about On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not
(Editor’s Note: Should Hamlet be living with us now and reading bestsellers, he might be wondering: To Blink or not to Blink? To Think or not to Think? We are pleased to present, as part of our ongoing Author Speaks Series, an article by 
Madeleine Van Hecke, author of Blind Spots: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things
To Think or to Blink?
- By Madeleine Van Hecke, PhD
Is thoughtful reflection necessarily better than hasty judgments?
Not according to Malcolm Gladwell who argued in his best-selling book, Blink, that the decisions people make in a blink are often not only just as accurate, but MORE accurate, than the conclusions they draw after painstaking analysis.
So, should we blink, or think?
When we make judgments based on a thin slice of time a few minutes talking with someone in a speed dating situation, for example are our judgments really as accurate as when we analyze endless reams of data?
[Read more…] about To Think or to Blink?
