Last week, I learned that I was awarded the Wolf Prize in Agriculture. I wondered what had enabled a kid that grew up in a low-income neighborhood in Jerusalem to receive this award from the Israeli president. Of course, there are the usual suspects – loving and supportive parents and family, excellent primary and secondary … Continue reading »
Flying while blind
I am not only an experienced traveler; I am an experienced blind person.
Maintaining an active brain and body — even with cancer
In 2015, I retired after an enjoyable and rewarding career as a member of the faculty in the Department of Psychology at UC Berkeley. My goal during retirement was to stay active and become a freelance writer in the hopes of sharing my interests to a general readership. Along with my wife, Helen, and Kazuko, … Continue reading »
Don’t beat yourself up — be kind to yourself
When people experience a setback at work—whether it’s a bad sales quarter, being overlooked for a promotion, or an interpersonal conflict with a colleague—it’s common to respond in one of two ways. Either we become defensive and blame others, or we berate ourselves. Unfortunately, neither response is especially helpful. Shirking responsibility by getting defensive may … Continue reading »
Lifelong learning and active brains: Let’s get started!
With the luxury of smartphones, binge TV watching and internet shopping, it has become exceedingly easy to live in comfortable laziness. Yet we all realize that both physical and mental activity are essential for successful aging and healthy brains. We’ve all heard the saying, use it or lose it, but we are rarely given advice … Continue reading »
Illusions of control
Most elevators have some form of a “close door” button. Impatient elevator riders the world over push that button when they want the elevator to get moving. Unbeknownst to them, their button-pushing efforts are useless. The vast majority of building managers and elevator programmers think they know when the doors should close, and have deactivated … Continue reading »
The Irish family planning tragic comedy
As has been widely reported this week, people flew to Dublin from as far away as Brazil to vote in Friday’s referendum on abortion. In 1983 the Constitution had been amended to give a fertilized egg the same right to life as the woman carrying the embryo. Today (Saturday) the majority of constituencies have reported … Continue reading »
Facebook and the humanities: Pondering what would Oedipus do
No less disturbing than the recent news that the personal data of millions of Americans was culled from Facebook by the shady research firm Cambridge Analytica and provided to the Trump campaign, has been the behavior of the masters of Silicon Valley. The CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, has so far been mostly silent. This … Continue reading »
Overconfidence
Overconfidence is the mother of all psychological biases. I mean that in two ways. First, overconfidence is one of the largest and most ubiquitous of the many biases to which human judgment is vulnerable. For example, 93 percent of American drivers claim to be better than the median,[1] which is statistically impossible.[2] Another way in … Continue reading »
Study: Mom’s pot use doesn’t hurt kids’ future grades?
For the last several weekends I saw the following advertisement (disclaimer: I am a lifelong subscriber and avid supporter of our local newspaper — the San Francisco Chronicle): Of course, being the father of three children, the lower right corner caught my attention: “Study: Mom’s pot use doesn’t hurt kids’ future grades—Fears of maternal cannabis … Continue reading »
Counting all homeless youth today so we may no longer need to tomorrow
The following has been adapted from a forthcoming op-ed publication in the Journal of Adolescent Health, with the permission of the authors and the journal. Somehow we have come to accept homelessness in the U.S., including youth homelessness, as an inevitability of modern urban life. Yet, anyone born before 1980 has lived in a world … Continue reading »
Sex, power and the systems that enable men like Harvey Weinstein
When I first heard accounts of film producer Harvey Weinstein’s predatory behavior, my mind devised punishments fitting for Renaissance Europe or the film A Clockwork Orange: Cover his face with a shame mask widely used centuries ago in Germany; shock his frontal lobes so that he’d start empathizing with the women he’s preyed on. When we learn … Continue reading »
Stopping college football is a moral imperative
The University of California, Berkeley must stop systematically and irrevocably damaging the human brain. It is unethical. Cal should cease supporting American football. Earlier this year we learned that 110 out of 111 former American football players had evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Early last week we learned that young boys playing American football … Continue reading »
The false media focus on violence: If it bleeds it still leads
On Sunday, August 27, in downtown Berkeley, I witnessed thousands of protesters raising their voices against a planned white supremacist “Patriot Prayer” rally. In my decades as a documentary filmmaker of activism and now an academic studying movements and media, it was one of the most positive, diverse and unifying gatherings I ever experienced. While … Continue reading »
What is your purpose in the face of white supremacy?
Yesterday, I published an essay in UC Berkeley’s Greater Good magazine about how the science of purpose can help explain the rise of white supremacy. Writing that piece led me to explore my own sense of purpose — which the research helped me see is tightly linked to my identity. I am a writer and … Continue reading »
Senate Republicans’ health bill especially hurts the lowest-income Californians
Co-authored by Ken Jacobs, chair of the UC Berkeley Labor Center The health bill released by Senate Republicans today would be devastating to low-income Californians and their access to health coverage. While the proposed Senate bill, the Better Care Reconciliation Act, is largely similar to the American Health Care Act passed by the U.S. House … Continue reading »
Energy drinks are killing young people. It’s time to stop that.
Co-authored by Wendi Gosliner, a project scientist at the Nutrition Policy Institute. Last week, a 16-year-old tragically lost his life after consuming an energy drink, a soda and a latte — drinks routinely consumed by and often intensively marketed to youth — all within a few hours. According to the coroner, the boy’s heart simply … Continue reading »
Gamification for global health
Gamification is popping up everywhere in our daily lives, with applications to management, commerce and health. Why? Because the evidence suggests that it works. Now it’s being studied in an HIV prevention program for young gay and bisexual men.
The sick logic behind the Republican health care plan
The AHCA would not only change how many people have health insurance, it would also affect who has health insurance and at what cost. The bill would make coverage more affordable for those who are younger and healthier—and prohibitively expensive for many who are poorer, older, or have pre-existing conditions, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office
This NIH program is crucial to global health — and its future is in danger
Co-authored with Madhukar Pai, MD, a Canada Research Chair in Epidemiology and Global Health at McGill University in Montreal. A little-noticed cut in President Trump’s proposed “budget blueprint to make American great again” would eliminate the Fogarty International Center, which is part of the National Institutes of Health. That would be a big mistake for the … Continue reading »