When people have trouble with their emotions – a bout of anxiety or depression, say, or seasonal gloominess - they often want science to pinpoint an offending neurotransmitter in the way that a witness picks the perp out of a lineup. Is it excessiv...
While genes are pivotal in establishing some aspects of emotionality, experience plays a central role in turning genes on and off. DNA is not the heart’s destiny; the genetic lottery may determine the cards in your deck, but experience deals the ha...
My heart broke not only for the daughter who already was forced to become her mother's alarmingly narrow ideal, but also for the middle daughter who knew that her in mother's mind she had already failed.
Although she was gregarious, she inadvertently separated herself from people because she was so often inside her own head, focusing on her creativity.
Being an outsider doesn't necessarily indicate any sort of social failing. We do not view a tuba player as musically challenged if he cannot play the violin.
Too many parents fail to understand that there is a difference between fitting in and being liked, that there is a difference between being "normal" and being happy. High school is temporary. Family is not.
Nonconformists aren't just going against the grain; they're going against the brain. Either their brains aren't taking the easy way out to begin with, or in standing apart from their peers, these students are standing up to their biology.
The 1970s, fewer than 25% of US residents lived in counties in which the presidential candidate won by landslide. 30 years later, that percentage has nearly doubled.
Alpha sets the scale of nature -- the size of atoms and all things made of them, the intensity and colors of light, the strength of magnetism, and the metabolic rate of life itself. It controls everything that we see. ... In 137, apparently, science ...
The freer an economy is, the more this human diversity of knowledge will be manifested. By contrast, political power originates in top-down processes-governments, monopolies, regulators, and elite institutions-all attempting to quell human diversity ...
Statements of fact are after all statements, which presumes a number of questionable judgements: that those statements are worth making, perhaps more worth making than certain others, that I am the sort of person entitled to make them and perhaps abl...
Shifting the frame only slightly, the choice of a theory from among the range of always ideologically founded theories is itself necessarily ideologically motivated. Positioning is unavoidable; positioning is the result of choice from among a range o...
Traditional journalism, where reporters deliver information in a balanced and unbiased fashion, is rapidly fading into obscurity. This is especially evident on television where high profile reporters become bigger than the story, delivering news with...
Unfortunately, mainstream news has become infotainment, sharing more in common with the entertainment industry than with traditional journalism. Gossip, characterizations and injections of drama are subtly infused with facts, altering the truth in a ...
Subjective storytelling is now almost as common in the news media as it is in feature films, TV dramas, novels or theater shows. Journalists at their worst are self-centered storytellers who either knowingly or unknowingly bend truths into stories th...
For [Wolfgang] Pauli the central problem of electrodynamics was the field concept and the existence of an elementary charge which is expressible by the fine-structure constant ... 1/137. This fundamental pure number had greatly fascinated Pauli, .......
What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school... It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don't understand it. You see my physics students don't understand it....
A third reason scientists are reluctant to examine paranormal phenomena is that they appear to contradict known physical laws. What is the point of studying the impossible? Only a fool would waste his time. The problem of data in conflict with existi...
Giving her ten thousand Lifeless is enough to make even me consider my drunk-monkey theory.” “The one who chooses names and titles of the Returned?” “Exactly,” Lightsong said. “I’ve actually considered expanding the theory. I am now pro...
I have been scientifically studying the traits and dispositions of the “lower animals” (so-called,) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result profoundly humiliating to me. For it obliges me to renounce my all...
Quite recently the human descent theory has been stigmatized as the 'gorilla theory of human ancestry.' All this despite the fact that Darwin himself, in the days when not a single bit of evidence regarding the fossil ancestors of man was recognized,...
