by Jason Boulware and Jean Matelski Boulware Amishi Jha is an associate professor in the department of psychology at the University of Miami. The Jha lab explores the stability and mutability of attention and working memory. With large contributions to the field of contemplative practice, her research...

By Benedict Carey, The New York Times Like any other high school junior, Wynn Haimer has a few holes in his academic game. Graphs and equations, for instance: He gets the idea, fine — one is a linear representation of the other — but making those conversions is often a headache. Or at least it was. For...

By Colin McGinn, The New York Review of Books 3/24/2011 Excerpt: Is studying the brain a good way to understand the mind? Does psychology stand to brain anatomy as physiology stands to body anatomy? In the case of the body, physiological functions—walking, breathing, digesting, reproducing, and so on...

Barry Schwartz, TED Talk A summary: In an intimate talk, Barry Schwartz dives into the question "How do we do the right thing?" With help from collaborator Kenneth Sharpe, he shares stories that illustrate the difference between following the rules and truly choosing wisely. See the talk ....

From the New York Times A summary: Scientists have found indications that your ability to jump to intuitive answers — what they term the “Aha!” moment — may be affected by your mood. After watching a humorous video, brain imaging and test results of subjects suggested that a positive mood prepares the...

By Benedict Carey 12/6/2010, The New York Times The puzzles look easy, and mostly they are. Given three words — “trip,” “house” and “goal,” for example — find a fourth that will complete a compound word with each. A minute or so of mental trolling (housekeeper, goalkeeper, trip?) is all it usually takes...

by Katherine Harmon, Scientific American Gray Matter Shows Introspective Ability Is Not Black and White When answering a question, your accuracy in assessing whether you have gotten the answer right—or wrong—might depend on the volume of gray matter in a certain part of your brain, according to a new...

by David Munger from Seed Magazine "Medical writer Tom Rees devotes his blog Epiphenom to the scientific study of religion. Last week he examined a study on the relationship between intelligence and religious belief. Published in Social Psychology Quarterly , this study by Satoshi Kanazawa replicated...

by Adam Hadhazy from Scientific American "As Olympians go for the gold in Vancouver, even the steeliest are likely to experience that familiar feeling of "butterflies" in the stomach. Underlying this sensation is an often-overlooked network of neurons lining our guts that is so extensive...

by Melinda Wenner from Scientific American " Fantasizing about sex gets more than just your juices flowing—it also boosts your analytical thinking skills. Daydreaming about love, on the other hand, makes you more creative, according to a study published in the November 2009 Personality and Social...

In the United States, various forms of character education have become popular in both elementary and professional education. They are often criticised, however, for their reliance on Aristotle, who is said to be problematic at several points. In response to these criticisms, I argue that Aristotle’s...

“Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 percent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself—and there isn’t one.”― Wei Wu Wei These are two paragraphs from my almost finished book- Realizing our Original Mind . ‘While the self seems real and substantial, our dis-identification practice...

The Buddha's Radical Psychology: Explorations My newest book now available is titled, The Buddha's Radical Psychology: Explorations.The Buddha's teachings are, at heart, a way of life based on a revolutionary psychology which emphasizes the cultivation of wisdom and compassion. Through an...

Since I first posted about the publication of my newest Book- The Buddha's Radical Psychology: Explorations , I have had numerous inquirers asking about the content of the book. I thought the quickest look at the book contents would be to list the Table of Contents. You can find it on Amazon, Good...

There is confusion among professionals about the meaning and application of the practise of Mindfulness. This 'blog' explores that topic and comes to the conclusion that the Buddha meant Sati or Mindfulness to mean a function similar to what is now called meta-cognition or executive brain function...

My new book incorporates the writings of contemporary Buddhist scholar, psychologists, cognitive scientists and physicists to provide a fascinating and authoritative framework for the interpretation of the Buddha's teachings. In this revised and expanded edition, the Eightfold Path and the practice...

If Social Constructionism does not prefer monistic Postmodernism over dualistic Modernism, it should include, next to living expressions and spontaneous gestures, criticism into its process model, occurring as independent confirmation and implying coordinated reflection between the knowing organism and...

By Antonino Raffone, Angela Tagini, and Narayanan Srinivasan Abstract: Mindfulness can be understood as the mental ability to focus on the direct and immediate perception or monitoring of the present moment with a state of open and nonjudgmental awareness. Descriptions of mindfulness and methods for...

By D. Larriviere and M. A. Williams Abstract: Neuroenhancement (NE) refers to the use of prescription medications by healthy persons to boost their cognitive skills. This growing phenomenon represents a potential market not only for pharmaceutical manufacturers but also for physicians who might enter...

by Torsten Zesch and Iryna Gurevych In this article, we present a comprehensive study aimed at computing semantic relatedness of word pairs. We analyze the performance of a large number of semantic relatedness measures proposed in the literature with respect to different experimental conditions, such...