Scott Barry Kaufman

Aspen, Colo. — A couple of days ago I took a walk down a narrow, somewhat perilous mountain trail with Scott Barry Kaufman, scientific director of the Imagination Institute. The trail began near the Aspen Institute’s campus here in this immensely beautiful, immensely wealthy town, where the institute holds its annual ideas festival, a gathering of scientists, artists, corporate executives, and miscellaneous thinkers who mull such topics as the future of smart cities, the …

In the most-watched TED talk of all time—viewed, as I write this, more than 26 million times—Sir Ken Robinson says the following:

There’s a shaft of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain called the corpus callosum, and it’s thicker in women. … I think this is probably why women are better at multitasking. Because you are, aren’t you? There’s a raft of research, but I know it from my personal life.

He goes on to mention how his wife can cook dinner while doing a million other things. Thi…

Pretty much everyone seems happy. In Australia, 93 percent of the population is either happy or very happy. In China, it’s 85 percent. Jordan: 86 percent. They’re chipper in Colombia at 92. Belarus is below average, at 64, but it still has a solid majority of happy campers. In the United States, 90 percent of us are happy and presumably steering clear of the sour-faced 10-percenters.

Those figures come from the latest round, released in April, of the World Values Survey, which has been tracking…

Kierkegaard took long walks in the afternoon. Dickens once hoofed it 30 miles from London to his country home. Diogenes’ advice was said to be “solvitur ambulando”—it is solved by walking around. In Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit unpacks the appeal of perambulation: “Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.”

That sounds nice. But is there really a mind-foot conn…

Zooey Deschanel (Dimitrios Kambouris, Getty Images)

We live in the golden age of cute. As one scholar recently put it, cuteness has become a “dominant aesthetic category in digital culture.” Hard to argue with that. Even if you steer clear of toddler pics on Facebook, even if you’ve never clicked on Reddit’s popular “aww” category, your elderly former neighbor will still email you a random photo of, say, three adorable piglets peeking out of a coffee mug.

That last one may be specific to me, but…

I wandered into a session on embodied cognition at last week’s Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference, and I walked away thinking what I heard can’t possibly be true.

I mean, it just can’t be. Can it?

Research on embodied cognition—the idea, basically, that the body strongly influences the mind in multiple ways we’re not aware of (though not everyone agrees with that definition)—is a fairly new field, and in the last few years it has produced a number of head-scratching resu…

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Whether violent video games make you more aggressive has been much debated. Much less discussed is whether video games make you an atheist.

OK, not make you an atheist—that’s too strong. But a new study in the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion does find that playing video games reduces a sense of the numinous, i.e., the feeling that there is a force out there beyond ourselves and the physical world.

In the study, two Canadian researchers first had 56 undergraduates ta…