We think what we speak

Each language has a toolkit to help us learn what to pay attention to.
So argues Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky during this episode of the Stanford University radio show Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature) (website, iTunes).
Boroditsky studies how the languages we use influence the way we think. And she’s come up with some startling [...]

Freud was wrong about catharsis

Why does the “talking cure” pioneered by Sigmund Freud and his students help relieve anxiety, depression and other mental illnesses?
Freud famously taught that psychotherapy helped the patient achieve catharsis, or purging of the emotions. This was helpful, Freud thought, because he imagined that our emotions exist in a closed hydraulic system like a steam [...]

Are we a ‘touch-starved’ culture?

UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner thinks we Americans are definitely touch-deprived.  In lecture 8 of his excellent course Human Happiness (feed),  Keltner presents evidence that when we touch each other, we feel less stressed, more altruistic and well — happier. He’s talking here about casual everyday touches, everything from a bear hug to [...]

Treasure trove of courses at UCSD

University of California San Diego is offering a record 63 courses available for free download on its podcast website this quarter, enough to fill your mp3 player for months to come. But carpe diem, seize the day. Most of these riches will only stay on the website until the end of the quarter (roughly mid-December), [...]

Human happiness

UC Berkeley psychology professor Dacher Keltner is the real deal — the kind of professor I wish I’d seen more often in my university days. Not only is he a cutting-edge researcher in the field of human emotion, he’s also a gifted teacher, who gives well organized, interesting lectures and who has a flair for [...]

Want to improve your memory? Get some sleep.

Psychologist Matt Walker has some bad news for students who don’t crack the books until the night before the big exam. Not only are students who “pull an all nighter” groggy and punch-drunk the next day, they also significantly degrade their memory circuits and impede the learning process.
That is the big take-home lesson in Walker’s [...]

Two promising psych courses

The fall 2009 semester at UC Berkeley is in full swing and I am newly returned from a trip to Europe. Here are a couple of promising courses I’ve been sampling as I’ve been recovering from jet lag.
Psychology of Dreams (website, feed).
Are dreams a window into the spirit world, a key to the unconscious or [...]

Pondering a leap of faith

If you’ve been following UC Berkeley Professor Ron Hendel’s excellent course The Bible in Western Culture (feed), you know that he’s been looking at understandings of the Bible, beginning in ancient times and moving through the Middle Ages into modernity. In the last couple of weeks we watched as Enlightenment thinkers like Spinoza and Herder [...]

Arming the donkeys

Dan Ariely, a best-selling author and professor of behavioral economics at Duke University, is always fun to listen to. He has a lilting, mischievous voice with just a hint of a Hebrew accent– rather like an Israeli leprechaun.
He often appears on American Public Media’s daily news show Marketplace, explaining how people are “predictably irrational,” which [...]

Time is running out for UCSD winter 09 courses

The last day of class for winter 2009 at UCSD is Friday, March 13. Soon after that most of the course podcasts at the UCSD podcast website will disappear.
Some courses you might want to grab before it is too late:
Enlightenment, Romanticism, Revolution/1660-1848 (website, feed) Eric Watkins.
This interdisciplinary course covers the philosophy, literature, science and art [...]