Stanford Experiment Quotes

Jerry-5486: "The most apparent thing that I noticed was how most of the people in this study derive their sense of identity and well-being from their immediate surroundings rather than from within themselves, and that's why they broke down—just couldn't stand the pressure—they had nothing within them to hold up against all of this.

In a now famous commencement speech at Stanford University, Steve Jobs urged the graduating class to “stay hungry. Stay foolish.” Never let go of your appetite to go after new ideas, new experiences, and new adventures. Compete with yourself, not with others. Judge yourself on what is your personal best and you’ll accomplish more than you could ever have imagined. Life stops for no one, so keep moving. Stay awake and stay alive.

Carol Dweck, a prominent Stanford psychologist, has found that people who believe their intelligence is fixed and unchanging have a very difficult time learning. The moment these people experience any form of difficulty or negative feedback, they mentally break and give up. Conversely, people who believe their intelligence is fluid and malleable are far more likely to grow and change. They are clay that can be transformed through experience, especially challenging and new experiences.

At that moment, the Stanford Prison Experiment was changed into the Stanford Prison, not by any top-down formal declarations by the staff but by this bottom-up declaration from one of the prisoners themselves.

Almost any experience is improved by paying full attention to it. —Kelly McGonigal, Lecturer in Management, Stanford School of Business

Our ability to leave our physical bodies and travel to other places has been demonstrated in controlled laboratory experiments by researchers with good academic credentials. These include Charles Tart at the University of California in Davis, and Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff at the Stanford Reesearch Institute. Russell Targ's research of "remote viewing" involves two people. The "viewer" stays in a carefully controlled laboratory environment while a "beacon" person is located somewhere outside that vicinity. A computer then selects a location that is unknown to the viewer. The beacon person is secretly notified where he or she is to go, based on the computer's random selection of a site. After the beacon person gets to the site, the viewer is asked to describe what the beacon person is seeing. The distance between the beacon person and the viewer appears to have no significant effect on the viewer's ability to accurately describe the site; the distance between them can be a few blocks or many thousand miles. In several successful attempts, a Soviet psychic not only accurately described the location of Targ's associate Keith Harary who acted as a beacon, he also described what Harary would see at the next computer-selected site--even before he got there or knew what he would see!

Neel cuts in: "Where'd you grow up?" "Palo Alto," she says. From there to Stanford to Google: for a girl obsessed with the outer limits of human potential, Kat has stayed pretty close to home. Neel nods knowingly. "The suburban mind cannot comprehend the emergent complexity of a New York sidewalk." "I don't know about that," Kat says, narrowing her eyes. "I'm pretty good with complexity." "See, I know what you're thinking," Neel says, shaking his head. "You're thinking it's just an agent-based simulation, and everybody out here follows a pretty simple set of rules"-- Kat is nodding--"and if you can figure out those rules, you can model it. You can simulate the street, then the neighborhood, then the whole city. Right?" "Exactly. I mean, sure, I don't know what the rules are yet, but I could experiment and figure them out, and then it would be trivial--" "Wrong," Neel says, honking like a game-show buzzer. "You can't do it. Even if you know the rules-- and by the way, there are no rules--but even if there were, you can't model it. You know why?" My best friend and my girlfriend are sparring over simulations. I can only sit back and listen. Kat frowns. "Why?" "You don't have enough memory." "Oh, come on--" "Nope. You could never hold it all in memory. No computer's big enough. Not even your what's-it-called--" "The Big Box." "That's the one. It's not big enough. This box--" Neel stretches out his hands, encompasses the sidewalk, the park, the streets beyond--"is bigger." The snaking crowd surges forward.

One of the most bizarre and intriguing findings is that people with brain damage may be particularly good investors. Why? Because damage to certain parts of the brain can impair the emotional responses that cause the rest of us to do foolish things. A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, and the University of Iowa conducted an experiment that compared the investment decisions made by fifteen patients with damage to the areas of the brain that control emotions (but with intact logic and cognitive functions) to the investment decisions made by a control group. The brain-damaged investors finished the game with 13 percent more money than the control group, largely, the authors believe, because they do not experience fear and anxiety. The impaired investors took more risks when there were high potential payoffs and got less emotional when they made losses.7 This

Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want.

Tinkerers built America. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, all were tinkerers in their childhood. Everything from the airplane to the computer started in somebody's garage. Go back even further: the Industrial Revolution was a revolution of tinkerers. The great scientific thinkers of eighteenth-century England couldn't have been less interested in cotton spinning and weaving. Why would you be? It was left to a bloke on the shop floor who happened to glance at a one-thread wheel that had toppled over and noticed that both the wheel and the spindle were still turning. So James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, and there followed other artful gins and mules and frames and looms, and Britain and the world were transformed. By tinkerers rather than thinkerers. "Technological change came from tinkerers," wrote Professor J.R. McNeill of Georgetown, "people with little or no scientific education but with plenty of hands-on experience." John Ratzenberger likes to paraphrase a Stanford University study: "Engineers who are great in physics and calculus but can't think in new ways about old objects are doomed to think in old ways about new objects." That's the lesson of the spinning jenny: an old object fell over and someone looked at it in a new way.

Create a failure résumé. Most of us have a résumé—a written compendium of jobs, experiences, and credentials that demonstrate to prospective employers and clients how qualified, adept, and generally awesome we are. Tina Seelig, a professor of practice at Stanford University, says we also need a “failure résumé,” a detailed and thorough inventory of our flops. A failure résumé offers another method for addressing our regrets. The very act of creating one is a form of disclosure. And by eyeing your failure résumé not as its protagonist, but as an observer, you can learn from it without feeling diminished by your mistakes. A few years ago, I compiled a failure résumé, then tried to glean lessons from the many screwups I’d committed. (Disclosing these embarrassments to myself will be sufficient, thank you very much.) I realized I’d repeatedly made variations of the same two mistakes, and that knowledge has helped me avoid those mistakes again.

Democracy “Democracy is the most fragile thing on earth, for what does it rest upon? You and me, and the fact that we agree to maintain it. The moment either of us says we will not, that’s the end of it. It doesn’t rest on anything but us; it doesn’t rest on armed force, the moment it does it isn’t democracy. It isn’t something to kick around or experiment with.” —Allen Drury, Stanford University (age 19)

Jim Clark was interviewed at an event held at Stanford University. At some point in the interview, the topic turned to social media. Clark’s reaction was unexpected given his high-tech background: “I just don’t appreciate social networking.” As he then clarifies, this distaste is captured by a particular experience he had sitting on a panel with a social media executive: [The executive was] just raving about these people spending twelve hours a day on Facebook . . . so I asked a question to the guy who was raving: “The guy who’s spending twelve hours a day on Facebook, do you think he’ll be able to do what you’ve done?

Man was considered until the 20th century to include women by implication. They were referring primarily to males. It is now frequently understood to exclude women. This had real consequences. They are endless, but a few come to mind. Heart attacks were described by how they affected men, so that women's symptoms were less likely to be recognized and treated. A situation from which many women died. Crash test dummies replicated male bodies, meaning that vehicular safety design favored male survival and women died at higher rates. The Stanford Prison experiment of 1971 presumed that the behavior of young men at an elite university could be universalized to stand for that of all humanity.

The outlook embedded in these three words does more than connect us in some ineffable fashion. According to Dr. Laura Carstensen, an influential psychology professor who runs the Stanford Life-span Development Laboratory and Stanford Center on Longevity, it also has the power to help us to live in the present, forgive more easily, love more deeply, and experience more gratitude and contentment, and less stress and anger.

Zimbardo’s Stanford colleagues Jennifer Aaker and Melanie Rudd found that an experience of timelessness is so powerful it shapes behavior. In a series of experiments, subjects who tasted even a brief moment of timelessness “felt they had more time available, were less impatient, more willing to volunteer to help others, more strongly preferred experiences over material products, and experienced a greater boost in life satisfaction.

[ Dr. Lois Jolyon West was cleared at Top Secret for his work on MKULTRA. ] Dr. Michael Persinger [235], another FSMF Board Member, is the author of a paper entitled “Elicitation of 'Childhood Memories' in Hypnosis-Like Settings Is Associated With Complex Partial Epileptic-Like Signs For Women But Not for Men: the False Memory Syndrome.” In the paper Perceptual and Motor Skills,In the paper, Dr. Persinger writes: On the day of the experiment each subject (not more than two were tested per day) was asked to sit quietly in an acoustic chamber and was told that the procedure was an experiment in relaxation. The subject wore goggles and a modified motorcycle helmet through which 10-milligauss (1 microTesla) magnetic fields were applied through the temporal plane. Except for a weak red (photographic developing) light, the room was dark. Dr. Persinger's research on the ability of magnetic fields to facilitate the creation of false memories and altered states of consciousness is apparently funded by the Defense Intelligence Agency through the project cryptonym SLEEPING BEAUTY. Freedom of Information Act requests concerning SLEEPING BEAUTY with a number of different intelligence agencies including the CIA and DEA has yielded denial that such a program exists. Certainly, such work would be of direct interest to BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, MKULTRA and other non-lethal weapons programs. Schnabel [280] lists Dr. Persinger as an Interview Source in his book on remote viewing operations conducted under Stargate, Grill Flame and other cryptonyms at Fort Meade and on contract to the Stanford Research Institute. Schnabel states (p. 220) that, “As one of the Pentagon's top scientists, Vorona was privy to some of the strangest, most secret research projects ever conceived. Grill Flame was just one. Another was code-named Sleeping Beauty; it was a Defense Department study of remote microwave mind-influencing techniques ... [...] It appears from Schnabel's well-documented investigations that Sleeping Beauty is a real, but still classified mind control program. Schnabel [280] lists Dr. West as an Interview Source and says that West was a, “Member of medical oversight board for Science Applications International Corp. remote-viewing research in early 1990s.

Three researchers at Stanford University noticed the same thing about the undergraduates they were teaching, and they decided to study it. First, they noticed that while all the students seemed to use digital devices incessantly, not all students did. True to stereotype, some kids were zombified, hyperdigital users. But some kids used their devices in a low-key fashion: not all the time, and not with two dozen windows open simultaneously. The researchers called the first category of students Heavy Media Multitaskers. Their less frantic colleagues were called Light Media Multitaskers. If you asked heavy users to concentrate on a problem while simultaneously giving them lots of distractions, the researchers wondered, how good was their ability to maintain focus? The hypothesis: Compared to light users, the heavy users would be faster and more accurate at switching from one task to another, because they were already so used to switching between browser windows and projects and media inputs. The hypothesis was wrong. In every attentional test the researchers threw at these students, the heavy users did consistently worse than the light users. Sometimes dramatically worse. They weren’t as good at filtering out irrelevant information. They couldn’t organize their memories as well. And they did worse on every task-switching experiment. Psychologist Eyal Ophir, an author of the study, said of the heavy users: “They couldn’t help thinking about the task they weren’t doing. The high multitaskers are always drawing from all the information in front of them. They can’t keep things separate in their minds.” This is just the latest illustration of the fact that the brain cannot multitask. Even if you are a Stanford student in the heart of Silicon Valley.

IN 2012, researchers at the University of Rochester, altered the 1968 Stanford Marshmallow experiment in one crucial way. One group of children experienced a broken promise before the marshmallow test was conducted. The researchers left the room and said they would return when the child rang the bell, but then didn't. The other group of children were told the same, but when they rang the bell, the researcher returned. The children in the latter group where the researcher came back, were willing to wait up to 4 times longer - 12 minutes - for a 2nd marshmallow, than the children in the broken promise group.

I am very often asked why, at the age of eighty-five, I continue to practice. Tip number eighty-five (sheer coincidence that I am now eighty-five years old) begins with a simple declaration: my work with patients enriches my life in that it provides meaning in life. Rarely do I hear therapists complain of a lack of meaning. We live lives of service in which we fix our gaze on the needs of others. We take pleasure not only in helping our patients change, but also in hoping their changes will ripple beyond them toward others. We are also privileged by our role as cradlers of secrets. Every day patients grace us with their secrets, often never before shared. The secrets provide a backstage view of the human condition without social frills, role-playing, bravado, or stage posturing. Being entrusted with such secrets is a privilege given to very few. Sometimes the secrets scorch me and I go home and hold my wife and count my blessings. Moreover, our work provides the opportunity to transcend ourselves and to envision the true and tragic knowledge of the human condition. But we are offered even more. We become explorers immersed in the grandest of pursuits—the development and maintenance of the human mind. Hand in hand with patients, we savor the pleasure of discovery—the “aha” experience when disparate ideational fragments suddenly slide smoothly together into a coherent whole. Sometimes I feel like a guide escorting others through the rooms of their own house. What a treat it is to watch them open doors to rooms never before entered, discover unopened wings of their house containing beautiful and creative pieces of identity. Recently I attended a Christmas service at the Stanford Chapel to hear a sermon by Rev. Jane Shaw that underscored the vital importance of love and compassion. I was moved by her call to put such sentiments into practice whenever we can. Acts of caring and generosity can enrich any environment in which we find ourselves. Her words motivated me to reconsider the role of love in my own profession. I became aware that I have never, not once, used the word love or compassion in my discussions of the practice of psychotherapy. It is a huge omission, which I wish now to correct, for I know that I regularly experience love and compassion in my work as a therapist and do all I can to help patients liberate their love and generosity toward others. If I do not experience these feelings for a particular patient, then it is unlikely I will be of much help. Hence I try to remain alert to my loving feelings or absence of such feelings for my patients.

Dr. Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, Stanford University, notes that “There was a time when the purpose of taxes was to pay the inevitable costs of government. To the political left, however, taxes have long been seen as a way to redistribute income and finance other social experiments based on liberal ideology.”3 The consequences for the rising generation and future generations of the statists’ immoral, politically expedient, and economically ruinous behavior and policies are unambiguous as evidenced by statistic after statistic, which are mainly ignored, discounted, or excused by most of the media, academia, and, of course, governing statists. Nonetheless, there is no mistaking the eventual societal turmoil these facts and figures portend—evidence all Americans, and especially younger people, must heed.

Throughout college, my monastic, scholarly study of human meaning would conflict with my urge to forge and strengthen the human relationships that formed that meaning. If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining? Heading into my sophomore summer, I applied for two jobs: as an intern at the highly scientific Yerkes Primate Research Center, in Atlanta, and as a prep chef at Sierra Camp, a family vacation spot for Stanford alumni on the pristine shores of Fallen Leaf Lake, abutting the stark beauty of Desolation Wilderness in Eldorado National Forest. The camp’s literature promised, simply, the best summer of your life. I was surprised and flattered to be accepted. Yet I had just learned that macaques had a rudimentary form of culture, and I was eager to go to Yerkes and see what could be the natural origin of meaning itself. In other words, I could either study meaning or I could experience it.

When I met Dr. Phil Zimbardo, the former president of the American Psychological Association, for lunch, I knew him primarily as the mastermind behind the famous Stanford prison experiment.7 In the summer of 1971, Zimbardo took healthy Stanford students, assigned them roles as either “guards” or “inmates,” and locked them in a makeshift “prison” in the basement of Stanford University. In just days, the “prisoners” began to demonstrate symptoms of depression and extreme stress, while the “guards” began to act cruel and sadistic (the experiment was ended early, for obvious reasons). The point is that simply being treated like prisoners and guards had, over the course of just a few days, created a momentum that caused the subjects to act like prisoners and guards. The Stanford prison experiment is legendary, and much has been written about its many implications. But what I wondered was this: If simply being treated in a certain way conditioned these Stanford students to gradually adopt these negative behaviors, could the same kind of conditioning work for more positive behavior too? Indeed, today Zimbardo is attempting a grand social experiment along those lines called the “Heroic Imagination Project.”8 The logic is to increase the odds of people operating with courage by teaching them the principles of heroism. By encouraging and rewarding heroic acts, Zimbardo believes, we can consciously and deliberately create a system where heroic acts eventually become natural and effortless. We have a choice. We can use our energies to set up a system that makes execution of goodness easy, or we can resign ourselves to a system that actually makes it harder to do what is good. Ward’s Positive Tickets system did the former, and it worked. We can apply the same principle to the choices we face when designing systems in our own lives.

A different approach was taken in 1972 by Dr. Walter Mischel, also of Stanford, who analyzed yet another characteristic among children: the ability to delay gratification. He pioneered the use of the “marshmallow test,” that is, would children prefer one marshmallow now, or the prospect of two marsh-mallows twenty minutes later? Six hundred children, aged four to six, participated in this experiment. When Mischel revisited the participants in 1988, he found that those who could delay gratification were more competent than those who could not. In 1990, another study showed a direct correlation between those who could delay gratification and SAT scores. And a study done in 2011 indicated that this characteristic continued throughout a person’s life. The results of these and other studies were eye-opening. The children who exhibited delayed gratification scored higher on almost every measure of success in life: higher-paying jobs, lower rates of drug addiction, higher test scores, higher educational attainment, better social integration, etc. But what was most intriguing was that brain scans of these individuals revealed a definite pattern. They showed a distinct difference in the way the prefrontal cortex interacted with the ventral striatum, a region involved in addiction. (This is not surprising, since the ventral striatum contains the nucleus accumbens, known as the “pleasure center.” So there seems to be a struggle here between the pleasure-seeking part of the brain and the rational part to control temptation, as we saw in Chapter 2.) This difference was no fluke. The result has been tested by many independent groups over the years, with nearly identical results. Other studies have also verified the difference in the frontal-striatal circuitry of the brain, which appears to govern delayed gratification. It seems that the one characteristic most closely correlated with success in life, which has persisted over the decades, is the ability to delay gratification. Although this is a gross simplification, what these brain scans show is that the connection between the prefrontal and parietal lobes seems to be important for mathematical and abstract thought, while the connection between the prefrontal and limbic system (involving the conscious control of our emotions and pleasure center) seems to be essential for success in life. Dr. Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, concludes, “Your grades in school, your scores on the SAT, mean less for life success than your capacity to co-operate, your ability to regulate your emotions, your capacity to delay your gratification, and your capacity to focus your attention. Those skills are far more important—all the data indicate—for life success than your IQ or your grades.

Meanwhile, scientists are studying certain drugs that may erase traumatic memories that continue to haunt and disturb us. In 2009, Dutch scientists, led by Dr. Merel Kindt, announced that they had found new uses for an old drug called propranolol, which could act like a “miracle” drug to ease the pain associated with traumatic memories. The drug did not induce amnesia that begins at a specific point in time, but it did make the pain more manageable—and in just three days, the study claimed. The discovery caused a flurry of headlines, in light of the thousands of victims who suffer from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). Everyone from war veterans to victims of sexual abuse and horrific accidents could apparently find relief from their symptoms. But it also seemed to fly in the face of brain research, which shows that long-term memories are encoded not electrically, but at the level of protein molecules. Recent experiments, however, suggest that recalling memories requires both the retrieval and then the reassembly of the memory, so that the protein structure might actually be rearranged in the process. In other words, recalling a memory actually changes it. This may be the reason why the drug works: propranolol is known to interfere with adrenaline absorption, a key in creating the long-lasting, vivid memories that often result from traumatic events. “Propranolol sits on that nerve cell and blocks it. So adrenaline can be present, but it can’t do its job,” says Dr. James McGaugh of the University of California at Irvine. In other words, without adrenaline, the memory fades. Controlled tests done on individuals with traumatic memories showed very promising results. But the drug hit a brick wall when it came to the ethics of erasing memory. Some ethicists did not dispute its effectiveness, but they frowned on the very idea of a forgetfulness drug, since memories are there for a purpose: to teach us the lessons of life. Even unpleasant memories, they said, serve some larger purpose. The drug got a thumbs-down from the President’s Council on Bioethics. Its report concluded that “dulling our memory of terrible things [would] make us too comfortable with the world, unmoved by suffering, wrongdoing, or cruelty.… Can we become numb to life’s sharpest sorrows without also becoming numb to its greatest joys?” Dr. David Magus of Stanford University’s Center for Biomedical Ethics says, “Our breakups, our relationships, as painful as they are, we learn from some of those painful experiences. They make us better people.” Others disagree. Dr. Roger Pitman of Harvard University says that if a doctor encounters an accident victim who is in intense pain, “should we deprive them of morphine because we might be taking away the full emotional experience? Who would ever argue with that? Why should psychiatry be different? I think that somehow behind this argument lurks the notion that mental disorders are not the same as physical disorders.

One compelling explanation for the elders’ greater contentment comes from the psychologist Laura L. Carstensen, founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity. Her hypothesis, which she gave the wonky name “socioemotional selectivity,” is that older people, knowing they face a limited time in front of them, focus their energies on things that give them pleasure in the moment, whereas young people, with long horizons, seek out new experiences or knowledge that may or may not pay off down the line. Young people fret about the things they don’t have and might need later; old people winnow the things they have to the few they most enjoy. Young people kiss frogs hoping they’ll turn into princes. Old people kiss their grandchildren. “It’s hard to get an eighty-five-year-old to take inorganic chemistry,” Carstensen said. Maybe old people live literally like there’s no tomorrow.

Brian Chesky sends to all Airbnb employees is a powerful one. “You have to continue to repeat things” Brian told our class at Stanford. “Culture is about repeating, over and over again, the things that really matter for your company.” Airbnb reinforces these verbal messages with visual impact as well. Brian hired an artist from Pixar to create a storyboard of the entire experience of an Airbnb guest, from start to finish, emphasizing the customer-centered design thinking that is a hallmark of its culture. Even Airbnb conference rooms tell a story; each one is a replica of a room that’s available for rent on the service. Every time Airbnb team members hold a meeting in one of those rooms, they are reminded of how guests feel when they stay there. At Amazon, Jeff Bezos famously bans PowerPoint decks and insists on written memos, which are read in silence at the beginning of each meeting. This memo policy is one of the ways that Amazon encourages a culture of truth telling. Memos have to be specific and comprehensive, and those who read the memos have to respond in kind rather than simply sit through some broad bullet points on a PowerPoint deck and nod vague agreement. Bezos believes that memos encourage smarter questions and deeper thinking. Plus, because they’re self-contained (rather than requiring a person to present a deck), they are more easily distributed and consumed by a wider population within Amazon. The late Steve Jobs used architecture as a core part of his deliberate communications strategy at Pixar. He designed Pixar headquarters so that the front doors, main stairs, main theater, and screening rooms all led to the atrium, which contained the café and mailboxes, ensuring that employees from all departments and specialties would see people from other groups on a regular basis, thus reinforcing Pixar’s collaborative, inclusive culture.

Allen Barbour, an internist at Stanford University, had said that depression isn’t a disease; depression is a normal response to abnormal life experiences.

But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to shift a person’s motivation. In the short term, in fact, it can be surprisingly easy. Let’s stay in the candy aisle for a bit longer and consider a couple of experiments done decades ago involving IQ and M&M’s. In the first test, conducted in northern California in the late 1960s, a researcher named Calvin Edlund selected seventy-nine children between the ages of five and seven, all from “low-middle class and lower-class homes.” The children were randomly divided into an experimental group and a control group. First, they all took a standard version of the Stanford-Binet IQ test. Seven weeks later, they took a similar test, but this time the kids in the experimental group were given one M&M for each correct answer. On the first test, the two groups were evenly matched on IQ. On the second test, the IQ of the M&M group went up an average of twelve points—a huge leap.

However, Pauling’s interest in these carotenoids and flavonoids was confined to their chemical structures and the influence of structure on optical properties; he did not address their health functions. In 1941 Pauling was diagnosed with Bright’s disease, or glomerulonephritis, which was at the time an often-fatal kidney disorder. On the advice of physicians at the Rockefeller Institute, he went to San Francisco for treatment by Thomas Addis, an innovative Stanford nephrologist. Addis prescribed a diet low in salt and protein, plenty of water, and supplementary vitamins and minerals that Pauling followed for nearly 14 years and completely recovered. This was dramatic firsthand experience of the therapeutic value of the diet. Revelations When Pauling cast about for a new research direction in the 1950s, he realized that mental illness was a significant public health problem that had not been sufficiently addressed by scientists. Perhaps his mother’s megaloblastic madness and premature death caused by B12 deficiency underlay this interest. At about this time, Pauling’s eldest son, Linus Jr., began a residency in psychiatry, which undoubtedly prompted Pauling to consider the nature of mental illness. Thanks to funding from the Ford Foundation, Pauling investigated the role of enzymes in brain function but made little progress. When he came across a copy of Niacin Therapy in Psychiatry (1962) by Abram Hoffer in 1965, Pauling was astonished to learn that simple substances needed in minute amounts to prevent deficiency diseases could have therapeutic application in unrelated diseases when given in very large amounts. This serendipitous and key event was critically responsible for Pauling’s seminal paper in his emergent medical field. Later, Pauling was especially excited by Hoffer’s observations on the survival of patients with advanced cancer who responded well to his micronutrient and dietary regimen, originally formulated to help schizophrenics manage their illness.19,20 The regimen includes large doses of B vitamins, vitamin C, vitamin E, beta-carotene, selenium, zinc, and other micronutrients. About 40 percent of patients treated adjunctively with Hoffer’s regimen lived, on average, five or more years, and about 60 percent survived four times longer than controls. These results were even better than those achieved by Scottish surgeon Ewan Cameron, Pauling’s close clinical collaborator, in Scotland. After a long and extremely productive career at Caltech,

had studied the “The Stanford Experiment” before, but this new book by Phil Zimbardo, “The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil” added enormous detail. The Guards took on their roles seriously and within 5 days were involved in a degrading treatment of Prisoners. Five of the kids chosen to be prisoners experienced emotional breakdowns. It could clearly be seen that institutions have a lot of power to change human behavior. What I did not know until Zimbardo wrote his recent book was that he was not the one that stopped the experiment. His fiance and now current wife came to visit him on the fifth night, saw what was going on and said “What are you doing?

But even drugged to the gills, I remained filled with dread about the impending book tour, so I went also to a young but highly regarded Stanford-trained psychologist who specialized in cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT. “First thing we’ve got to do,” she said in one of my early sessions with her, “is to get you off these drugs.” A few sessions later, she offered to take my Xanax from me and lock it in a drawer in her desk. She opened the drawer to show me the bottles deposited there by some of her other patients, holding one up and shaking it for effect. The drugs, she said, were a crutch that prevented me from truly experiencing and thereby confronting my anxiety; if I didn’t expose myself to the raw experience of anxiety, I would never learn that I could cope with it on my own.

Many people think that designers are lone geniuses, working in solitude and waiting for a flash of inspiration to show them the solution to their design problem. Nothing could be further from the truth. There may be some problems, such as the design of a stool or a new set of children’s blocks, that are simple enough to be tackled by an individual, but in today’s highly technical world, almost every problem requires a design team. Design thinking takes this idea even further and suggests that the best results come from radical collaboration. Radical collaboration works on the principle that people with very different backgrounds will bring their idiosyncratic technical and human experiences to the team. This increases the chance that the team will have empathy for those who will use what they are designing, and that the collision of different backgrounds will generate truly unique solutions. This is proved over and over again in d.school classes at Stanford, where graduate students create teams of business, law, engineering, education, and medical students that come up with breakthrough innovations all the time. The glue that holds these teams together is design thinking, the human-centered approach to design that takes advantage of their different backgrounds to spur collaboration and creativity. Typically, none of the students have any design background when they enroll in our classes, and all of the teams struggle at first to be productive. They have to learn the mind-sets of a designer—especially radical collaboration and being mindful of process. But once that happens, they discover that their abilities as a team far exceed what any individual can do, and their creative confidence explodes.

One of the most interesting experiments in this area came in 2011 when Sebastian Thrun, a top artificial intelligence researcher (and one of the main people behind Google’s driverless car), announced with a single email that he would be teaching his graduate-level AI course not only to students at Stanford but also as a MOOC available for free over the Internet. Over 160,000 students signed up for the course. Tens of thousands of them completed all exercises, exams, and other requirements, and some of them did quite well. The top performer in the course at Stanford, in fact, was only the 411th best among all the online students. As Thrun put it, “We just found over 400 people in the world who outperformed the top Stanford student.

Supporters of the psi-mediated instrumental response (PMIR) model and first-sight model and theory (FSMT) would probably say yes. PMIR is a model for channeling experiences that happen spontaneously in daily life. It proposes that people unconsciously get information that is relevant to what they need. They then unconsciously use this information to modify their behavior to meet their needs (Stanford 2015), just like I was unconsciously late and avoided a car accident. PMIR refers to the psychological ways that channeling might function in a person’s life that serves their inherent qualities of mind and character and needs. It basically says that you use channeling without any conscious effort or awareness that it is even happening. Similarly, the first-sight model and theory (FSMT) proposes that it is in your essential nature to participate actively, all the time, and unconsciously in your world. And that your world is much larger in time and space than your immediate boundaries. All of your experiences and behaviors result from unconscious psychological processes that are acted out based on multiple sources of information, including those beyond your traditional five senses (Carpenter, n.d.). FSMT proposes that channeling is not an ability that needs to be nurtured or trained or coaxed into working but an innate universal characteristic of all living organisms.

Social networks bring in another dimension of stimuli: social pressure. People are keenly sensitive to social status, judgment, and competition. Unlike most animals, people are not only born absolutely helpless, but also remain so for years. We only survive by getting along with family members and others. Social concerns are not optional features of the human brain. They are primal. The power of what other people think has proven to be intense enough to modify the behavior of subjects participating in famous studies like the Milgram Experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment. Normal, noncriminal people were coerced into doing horrible things, such as torturing others, through no mechanism other than social pressure.

President Kennedy used his intellectual and political skill to steer his advisers and the two superpowers away from an apocalyptic nuclear conflict. His experience in the South Pacific had convinced him that war, even without atomic weapons, was too unpredictable and destructive to be successfully controlled by any leader or government. A Cold War hawk in public, he distrusted the military, was skeptical about military solutions to political problems, and horrified by the prospect of global nuclear war.

These experiments showed that there was a region on the X chromosome that was vitally important for X inactivation. This region was dubbed the X Inactivation Centre. In 1991 a group from Hunt Willard’s lab at Stanford University in California showed that the X Inactivation Centre contained a gene that they called Xist, after X-inactive (Xi) specific transcript10. This gene was only expressed from the inactive X chromosome, not from the active one. Because the gene was only expressed from one of the two X chromosomes, this made it an attractive candidate as the controller of X inactivation, where two identical chromosomes behave non-identically.

Dr. Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, Stanford University, notes that “There was a time when the purpose of taxes was to pay the inevitable costs of government. To the political left, however, taxes have long been seen as a way to redistribute income and finance other social experiments based on liberal ideology.”3

When I work with experimental gadgets, like new variations on virtual reality, in a lab environment, I am always reminded of how small changes in the details of a digital design can have profound unforeseen effects on the experiences of the humans who are playing with it. The slightest change in something as seemingly trivial as the use of a button can sometimes completely alter behavior patterns. For instance, Stanford University researcher Jeremy Bailenson has demonstrated that changing the height of one's avatar in immersive virtual reality transforms self-esteem and social self-perception. Technologies are extensions of ourselves, and, like the avatars in Jeremy's lab, our identities can be shifted by the quirks of gadgets. It is impossible to work with information technology without also engaging in social engineering.

Failure can feel like the ultimate death sentence, but it’s actually a step forward. When we fail, life is pushing us in a different direction so we can experience something new. One adventure has ended and another is about to begin, because it must. Think of your activities in life as scientific experiments. Scientists expect the vast majority of their tests to fail, but they still view each test as a step forward, regardless of the outcome. This is because each failed test rules out that particular approach, narrowing the remaining scope of potential solutions. You might be thinking, “What if all of my experiments fail until the day I die?” Great question. That might happen, depending on how you define failure and success. Here’s the magical solution to that problem: The results of your experiments are of little consequence. Only the experiments themselves matter. The old platitude is true: It’s about the journey, not the destination. Doing experiments will account for 99% of your time on this earth. That’s the journey. The result of your experiments is the other 1%. If you enjoy 99% of your life (the time spent in experimentation), who cares about the results? This is how to remove the problem of failure. Failure is just a temporary result. Its effect is as big or as small as you allow it to be. Elon Musk is becoming a household name. He cofounded Paypal. He now runs two companies simultaneously. The first, Tesla Motors, builds electric cars. The second, SpaceX, builds rocket ships. Many people think of Elon Musk as a real-world Iron Man—a superhero. He’s a living legend. He works extremely hard, and he’s brilliant. Did you know that Elon Musk never worked at Netscape? This is interesting because he actually wanted to work there very badly. He applied to Netscape while he was in grad school at Stanford, but never received a response. He even went to Netscape’s lobby with resume in hand, hoping to talk to someone about getting a job. No one in the lobby ever spoke to Elon that day. After getting nervous and feeling ashamed of himself, he walked out. That’s right. Elon Musk failed to get hired at Netscape. The recruiting managers didn’t see a need for him, and he was too ashamed to keep badgering them. So what happened next? Well, we know what happened from there. Musk went on to become one of the most successful and respected visionaries of our time.[30] Take a deep breath and realize that there are no life-ending failures, only experiments and results. It’s also important to realize that you are not the failure—the experiment is the failure. It is impossible for a person to be a failure. A person’s life is just a collection of experiments. We’re meant to enjoy them and grow from them. If you learn to love the process of experimentation, the prospect of failure isn’t so scary anymore.

In 1990, Elizabeth Newton earned a Ph.D. in psychology at Stanford by studying a simple game in which she assigned people to one of two roles: “tappers” or “listeners.” Tappers received a list of twenty-five well-known songs, such as “Happy Birthday to You” and “The StarSpangled Banner.” Each tapper was asked to pick a song and tap out the rhythm to a listener (by knocking on a table). The listener’s job was to guess the song, based on the rhythm being tapped. Over the course of Newton’s experiment, 120 songs were tapped out. Listeners guessed only 2.5 percent of the songs: 3 out of 120. But here’s what made the result worthy of a dissertation in psychology. Before the listeners guessed the name of the song, Newton asked the tappers to predict the odds that the listeners would guess correctly. They predicted that the odds were 50 percent. The tappers got their message across 1 time in 40, but they thought they were getting their message across 1 time in 2. Why? When a tapper taps, she is hearing the song in her head. Go ahead and try it for yourself — tap out “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It’s impossible to avoid hearing the tune in your head. Meanwhile, the listeners can’t hear that tune — all they can hear is a bunch of disconnected taps, like a kind of bizarre Morse Code. In the experiment, tappers are flabbergasted at how hard the listeners seem to be working to pick up the tune. Isn’t the song obvious? The tappers’ expressions, when a listener guesses “Happy Birthday to You” for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” are priceless: How could you be so stupid? It’s hard to be a tapper. The problem is that tappers have been given knowledge (the song title) that makes it impossible for them to imagine what it’s like to lack that knowledge. When they’re tapping, they can’t imagine what it’s like for the listeners to hear isolated taps rather than a song. This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind. The tapper/listener experiment is reenacted every day across the world. The tappers and listeners are CEOs and frontline employees, teachers and students, politicians and voters, marketers and customers, writers and readers. All of these Groups rely on ongoing communication, but, like the tappers and listeners, they suffer from enormous information imbalances. When a CEO discusses “unlocking shareholder value,” there is a tune playing in her head that the employees can’t hear.

IN THE SCHOOLS Memorizing multiplication tables may be a seminal school experience, among the few that kids today share with their grandparents. But a Stanford University professor says rapid-fire math drills are also the reason so many children fear and despise the subject. Moreover, the traditional approach to math instruction — memorization, timed testing and the pressure to speedily arrive at answers — may actually damage advanced-level skills by undermining the development of a deeper understanding about the ways numbers work. “There is a common and damaging misconception in mathematics — the idea that strong math students are fast math students,” says Jo Boaler, who teaches math education at the California university and has authored a new paper, “Fluency Without Fear.” In fact, many mathematicians are not speedy calculators, Boaler says. Laurent Schwartz, the French mathematician whose work is considered key to the theory of partial differential equations, wrote that as a student he often felt stupid because he was among the slowest math-thinkers in class.

Memorizing multiplication tables may be a seminal school experience, among the few that kids today share with their grandparents. But a Stanford University professor says rapid-fire math drills are also the reason so many children fear and despise the subject.

Research has linked such feelings of powerlessness to the kinds of health problems plaguing Bayview and many other communities around the world. This research shows that members of poor communities do not merely experience higher levels of violence; they are also more likely to have high blood pressure and frequent periods of increased heart rate, which contribute to a higher mortality rate. What’s more, similar health problems have been shown to afflict the least powerful members of nonhuman primate species. Taken together, these and other findings suggest that the psychology of powerlessness can wreak havoc on people who sit low on the totem pole of any social structure. “Poverty, and the poor health of the poor, is about much more than simply not having enough money,” says Robert M. Sapolsky, professor of neurology at Stanford University. “It’s about the stressors caused by a society that tolerates leaving so many of its members so far behind.

Our ability to tap into the senses of others is not limited to hypnotic states. In a now famous series of experiments physicists Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ of the Stanford Research Institute in California found that just about everyone they tested had a capacity they call “remote viewing,” the ability to describe accurately what a distant test subject is seeing. They found that individual after individual could remote-view simply by relaxing and describing whatever images came into their minds. Puthoff and Targ's findings have been duplicated by dozens of laboratories around the world, indicating that remote viewing is probably a widespread latent ability in all of us.

In 1980, Stanford University internist and epidemiologist James Fries recognized that modern medicine was not extending the human lifespan, and yet survival curves were changing. More people were living vitally until eighty-five or ninety, and then dying quickly, like the wonderful one-hoss shay in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s poem, which ran perfectly for a hundred years and then fell apart all at once.2 Fries called this phenomenon “compression of morbidity.”3 In 1900, because most deaths were premature, the human survival “curve” was a diagonal line; now it is more of a rectangle—especially if you have no risk factors (Figure 7.1). In 2040 there will be ten times as many eighty-five-year-olds as there were in 1990. This is not because the normal human lifespan is any longer than it was, but because fewer people will die before eighty. After eighty the lifespan will reflect little increase. Medical advances like antibiotics, new cancer treatments, and kidney transplants all serve to decrease premature death. But they do not alter the fact that the bodies of most of us, like the one-hoss shay, have not evolved to live past one hundred.

Zimbardo demonstrated this in the early 1970s when he carried out his infamous Stanford Prison Experiment. The mock jail he set up in Stanford’s psychology building, where “guards” abused “prisoners” with impunity, revealed the speed with which ordinary people can begin to carry out depraved acts in a toxic environment.

Let go of wanting to rule the Stanford Experiment, and counteract the peer-pressure of the Milgram Experiment.

What’s fascinating is that most guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment remained hesitant to apply ‘tough’ tactics at all, even under mounting pressure. Two-thirds refused to take part in the sadistic games. One-third treated the prisoners with kindness, to Zimbardo and his team’s frustration. One of the guards resigned the Sunday before the experiment started, saying he couldn’t go along with the instructions. Most of the subjects stuck it out because Zimbardo paid well. They earned $15 a day–equivalent to about $100 now–but didn’t get the money until afterwards. Guards and prisoners alike feared that if they didn’t play along in Zimbardo’s dramatic production, they wouldn’t get paid. But money was not enough incentive for one prisoner, who got so fed up after the first day that he wanted to quit. This was prisoner number 8612, twenty-two-year-old Douglas Korpi, who broke down on day two (‘I mean, Jesus Christ […] I just can’t take it anymore!’21). His breakdown would feature in all the documentaries and become the most famous recording from the whole Stanford Prison Experiment. A journalist looked him up in the summer of 2017.22 Korpi told him the breakdown had been faked–play-acted from start to finish. Not that he’d ever made a secret of this. In fact, he told several people after the experiment ended: Zimbardo, for example, who ignored him, and a documentary filmmaker, who edited it out of his movie.

Research conducted at Stanford points to two very different ways people tell their identity story and the effect that can have on how we experience criticism, challenge, and failure. One identity story assumes our traits are “fixed”: Whether we are capable or bumbling, lovable or difficult, smart or dull, we aren’t going to change. Hard work and practice won’t help; we are as we are. Feedback reveals “how we are,” so there’s a lot at stake.

If we want to compare a computer algorithm with nature, we must consider that a lot of the algorithms that are dictating international issues, politics, capitalism, culture and ultimately the content of human attention, were basically programmed by young men fresh out of Stanford, Harvard and MIT. So the experience behind these algorithms is basically puberty and then some, whereas the experience behind nature goes all the way back to the big bang.

In longtime meditators, such as Tibetan monks who have meditated for over 10,000 hours, the parietal lobe shows greatly reduced activity during meditation. While the brain’s energy usage only fluctuates around 5% up or down each day, in these adepts it drops up to 40% as they enter an altered state of consciousness. People who are isolated and lonely show the opposite effect. Their parietal lobes may be highly active. Feelings of loneliness and isolation are increasing in our fragmented society, according to a number of studies, and they have detrimental effects on our health. We are social beings, and a sense of connectedness translates into overall physical and emotional well-being. In a meta-analysis of 148 studies with a total of 308,849 participants, the researchers found “a 50% increased likelihood of survival for participants with stronger social relationships. This finding remained consistent across age, sex, initial health status, cause of death, and follow up.” Even when the researchers corrected for behaviors such as smoking, obesity, and lack of exercise, the effect remained consistent. Think back to the times of your life when you were happiest. For most of us, special moments with family and friends come to mind. We may have been on vacation with loved ones or enjoying a meal or a joke with friends. It may have been singing carols during the holidays, when billions of people join in affirming “peace on earth, goodwill to men.” What’s common to all those happy times is that your attention was fully in the present moment, the “timelessness” of Chapter 2. You weren’t worrying about the past or stressing over the future, the way you might be doing if you didn’t have precious people to engage your thoughts. Time and space receded as the love-filled present occupied your attention. Only in the present moment can you escape the demon’s obsession with the mistakes of the past and the problems of tomorrow. Experiences of timelessness, as the parietal lobe shuts down, shape our perception of the world and how we act in it. A Stanford study of people who experienced “the deep now” found that it changed their behavior.

In longtime meditators, such as Tibetan monks who have meditated for over 10,000 hours, the parietal lobe shows greatly reduced activity during meditation. While the brain’s energy usage only fluctuates around 5% up or down each day, in these adepts it drops up to 40% as they enter an altered state of consciousness. People who are isolated and lonely show the opposite effect. Their parietal lobes may be highly active. Feelings of loneliness and isolation are increasing in our fragmented society, according to a number of studies, and they have detrimental effects on our health. We are social beings, and a sense of connectedness translates into overall physical and emotional well-being. In a meta-analysis of 148 studies with a total of 308,849 participants, the researchers found “a 50% increased likelihood of survival for participants with stronger social relationships. This finding remained consistent across age, sex, initial health status, cause of death, and follow up.” Even when the researchers corrected for behaviors such as smoking, obesity, and lack of exercise, the effect remained consistent. Think back to the times of your life when you were happiest. For most of us, special moments with family and friends come to mind. We may have been on vacation with loved ones or enjoying a meal or a joke with friends. It may have been singing carols during the holidays, when billions of people join in affirming “peace on earth, goodwill to men.” What’s common to all those happy times is that your attention was fully in the present moment, the “timelessness” of Chapter 2. You weren’t worrying about the past or stressing over the future, the way you might be doing if you didn’t have precious people to engage your thoughts. Time and space receded as the love-filled present occupied your attention. Only in the present moment can you escape the demon’s obsession with the mistakes of the past and the problems of tomorrow. Experiences of timelessness, as the parietal lobe shuts down, shape our perception of the world and how we act in it. A Stanford study of people who experienced “the deep now” found that it changed their behavior. They “felt they had more time available . . . and were less impatient . . . more willing to volunteer their time to help others . . . preferred experiences over material products . . . and experienced a greater boost in life satisfaction.” A quiet parietal lobe promotes empathy, compassion, relaxation, appreciation, connectedness, and self-esteem.

Internal locus of control is a learned skill,” Carol Dweck, the Stanford psychologist who helped conduct that study, told me. “Most of us learn it early in life. But some people’s sense of self-determination gets suppressed by how they grow up, or experiences they’ve had, and they forget how much influence they can have on their own lives. “That’s when training is helpful, because if you put people in situations where they can practice feeling in control, where that internal locus of control is reawakened, then people can start building habits that make them feel like they’re in charge of their own lives—and the more they feel that way, the more they really are in control of themselves.

If we try to standardize happiness… a kind of uniform container for human experience… people themselves will become more standardized.

In an experiment she conducted while still a graduate student, Cheryan commandeered space in Stanford’s Gates Computer Science Building, creating what she called a “stereotypical” classroom and a “non-stereotypical” classroom. The stereotypical classroom was filled with soda cans, books of science-fiction fantasy, and Star Trek and Star Wars posters. The non-stereotypical classroom featured accoutrements like nature posters, literary novels, and bottles of water. After spending time in each room, undergraduates were surveyed about how interested they were in computer science and how well they thought they would perform in that discipline. Following a few minutes in the stereotypical room, male students reported a high level of interest in pursuing computer science; female students indicated much less interest than their male counterparts. But after they spent time in the non-stereotypical room, women’s interest in computer science increased markedly—actually exceeding that of the men. Subsequent research by Cheryan has found that women exposed to a non-stereotypical classroom are more likely to predict that they will perform well in computer science courses, whereas men tend to predict that they will succeed regardless of which room they encounter. That’s important, says Cheryan, because “we know from past work in psychology that how well you expect to do in a certain environment can determine how you actually perform.

We’ve confirmed the Stanford prison experiment.” Bruce crinkled his brow, then took a sip of coffee. “The one where they arbitrarily split students into either prisoners or guards?” Danica nodded. “And each student seamlessly assumed his or her assigned role—to the point where the guards were enforcing authoritarian measures and subjecting their fellow students to psychological torture.

Social psychologists have long known that the roles people fulfill—daughter, husband, lifeguard, boss, volunteer—have real-world impact on their behavior. Classic evidence for this comes from Phil Zimbardo’s famous Stanford Prison Experiment, in which Zimbardo took a group of Stanford undergraduates and assigned some to be prisoners and others to be prison guards. The scenario extended over several days and the guards became increasingly abusive. They forced prisoners to do large numbers of push-ups; they interrupted their sleep and isolated them. Remember, these “guards” had been right-minded undergraduate students only days earlier.

Consensus has emerged from major psychology departments throughout the U.S. (e.g. James Garbarino, then at Chicago, now at Cornell; Mark L. Lepper, at Stanford; Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, at Rochester; Teresa Amibile, at Brandeis) that creativity, interest, subjective satisfaction, persistence, and overall productivity all decline when a task is done for the sake of an external, extrinsic reward. The only sphere in which "material rewards do seem to be necessary" is that of the dull jobs "that make very little of use of their abilities" (Ryan Equality, 1981). But that is precisely the type of work that is much less necessary now that technology has created robots and servomechanisms. The time may have come to ask whether the price we pay in violence and unhappiness is worth the reward of keeping some groups of people in menial jobs that we could easily do without. Another relevant research program consists of studies investigating the degree of satisfaction or happiness that whole groups of people experience under differing conditions of income distribution. The consensus is that people located at every point on the status scale in the unequal income communities — whether at, above, or below the average — reported less personal happiness and subjective satisfaction than those in communities in which income was distributed equally (Furby, "Satisfaction with Outcome Distributions," 1981).

Stanford marshmallow experiment was a study on delayed gratification in 1972 led by psychologist Walter Mischel, a professor at Stanford University. In this

talk a lot about a ketogenic diet in this book because of the miraculous health benefits it provides. This is a diet that helps shift your body’s metabolic engine from burning carbohydrates to burning fats. Interestingly, the cells of your body have the metabolic flexibility to adapt from using glucose for fuel to using ketones, which are a byproduct of breaking down fats. We will talk about this more in the cancer section of this book, but cancer cells do not have this metabolic flexibility to use fat as energy. They require glucose to thrive, which makes a ketogenic diet so effective for treating and preventing cancer.   A ketogenic diet calls for minimizing carbohydrates and replacing them with healthy fats and moderate amounts of high-quality protein. A ketogenic diet requires that roughly 50 to 70 percent of your food intake come from healthy fats, such as avocado, coconut oil, grass-fed butter, organic pasture raised eggs, and raw nuts. This diet will also help optimize your weight and prevent virtually all chronic degenerative diseases. Because you are minimizing carbs and replacing them with healthy fats, your body will shift from burning carbs as your primary fuel to burning fat.   Dr. Peter Attia, a Stanford University trained physician specializing in metabolic science, applied the ketogenic diet to his lifestyle to see what would happen. He essentially used himself as a lab rat and received incredible results. Although he was an active and fit guy, he always had a tendency toward metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of conditions – increased blood pressure, high blood sugar, excess body fat around the waist, and abnormal cholesterol or triglyceride levels – that occur together, increasing your risk of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes. He decided to experiment with the ketogenic diet and see if it could improve his overall health status.

The gestalt of living in the desert, surrounded by the desert, was a big influence in my life and in the lives of other artists in this community. There are many artists and musicians who grew up as lonely kids in the desert with nothing to do, and who chose to channel their focus inward. In the Mojave Desert, numinous, mystical experiences are not as rare as one might think. The numinous is a part of the whole artistic experience for the desert artist.

At first, I thought I would use photography and the collage and montage possibilities of Photoshop strictly for visualization in preparation for my paintings. But after I experimented with Photoshop and digital photography, I soon discovered new possibilities and found exciting new ways of presenting ideas. I soon found that I was more interested in pure image-making than I was in actually painting the images. Digital Camera, 2017

Claude Steele, this time joined by Geoffrey Cohen, offers important insights. To investigate how a teacher might gain the trust of a student when giving feedback across racial lines, they created a scenario in which Black and White Stanford University students were asked to write essays about a favorite teacher. The students were told that the essays would be considered for publication in a journal about teaching and that they would receive feedback from a reviewer who they were led to believe was White. A Polaroid snapshot was taken of each student and attached to the essay as it was turned in, signaling to the students that the reviewer would be able to identify the race of the essay writer. Several days later the students returned to receive the reviewer’s comments, with the opportunity to “revise and resubmit” the essay. What was varied in the experiment was how the feedback was delivered. When the feedback was given in a constructive but critical manner, Black students were more suspicious than white students that the feedback was racially biased, and consequently, the Black students were less likely than the White students to rewrite the essay for further consideration. The same was true when the critical feedback was buffered by an opening statement praising the essay, such as “There were many good things about your essay.” However, when the feedback was introduced by a statement that conveyed a high standard (reminding the writer that the essay had to be of publishable quality) and high expectations (assuring the student of the reviewer’s belief that with effort and attention to the feedback, the standard could be met), the Black students not only responded positively by revising the essays and resubmitting them, but they did so at a higher rate than the White students in the study.66

Many scientists and psychologists had been presenting depression as an irrational malfunction in your brain or in your genes, but he learned that Allen Barbour, an internist at Stanford University,15 had said that depression isn’t a disease; depression is a normal response to abnormal life experiences. “I think that’s a very important idea,” Vincent told me. “It takes you beyond the comforting, limited idea that the reason I’m depressed is I have a serotonin imbalance, or a dopamine imbalance, or what have you.” It is true that something is happening in your brain when you become depressed, he says, but that “is not a causal explanation”; it is “a necessary intermediary mechanism.

When I spoke to Greg Walton one fall afternoon in his office at Stanford, he explained that freshman year of college, especially, is full of these ambiguous moments, and students generally don’t have enough context to figure out on their own how to interpret them. The point of his experiment with Cohen, and others like it, is to steer students, in these moments of uncertainty, toward a story that is going to help them rather than hold them back.

The more that children are being monitored, the more opportunities they have to build their self-control. Parents can guide them through the kind of willpower-strengthening exercises we’ve discussed earlier, like taking care to sit up straight, to always speak grammatically, to avoid starting sentences with “I,” and to never say “yeah” for “yes.” Anything that forces children to exercise their self-control muscle can be helpful: taking music lessons, memorizing poems, saying prayers, minding their table manners, avoiding the use of profanity, writing thank-you notes. As they strengthen their willpower, children also need to learn when not to rely on it. In Mischel’s marshmallow experiments near Stanford, many children tried to resist temptation by staring right at the marshmallow and willing themselves to be strong. It didn’t work. Staring at the forbidden marshmallow kept reminding them of its allure, and as soon as willpower slackened for a moment, they gave in and ate it. By contrast, the children who managed to hold out—who waited fifteen minutes in order to get two marshmallows—typically succeeded by distracting themselves. They covered their eyes, turned their backs, fiddled with their shoelaces. That marshmallow experiment caused some researchers to conclude that controlling attention is what matters, not building willpower, but we disagree. Yes, controlling attention is important. But you need willpower to control attention.

Staggering in scope and breadth, 'God 4.0' is the culmination of Ornstein’s work on the psychology of consciousness. Connecting the latest research from archeology, religious history, psychology and brain science, the authors extend a timely invitation to explore a latent, intuitive faculty we all share – one that can moves us beyond belief, faith, and doctrine to a wider perception of who we are and who we could become. — David D. Sobel, MD, MPH, Stanford University School of Medicine

Analysis of thousands of survey responses found that when people in different countries were asked to rate how desirable and appropriate it is to experience varying psychological states, positive states like joy and affection were rated more desirable and appropriate in Australia and the United States than in Taiwan and China. Cross-cultural research by Jeanne Tsai of Stanford University has also found that European Americans place the highest value on specific forms of happiness, idealizing states like enthusiasm or excitement, termed high arousal positive states. By contrast, Chinese and other Asian test subjects place the highest value on other forms of happiness, idealizing states such as calm and serenity, termed low arousal positive states. Mauss and colleagues found that some people put an especially high value on happiness, endorsing items like, “If I don’t feel happy, maybe there is something wrong with me”; and “To have a meaningful life, I need to feel happy most of the time.” Surprisingly, women who said that they valued happiness more were actually less happy than women who valued it less.