A New Form of Speaking?
Has anyone studied in depth how electronic communication—emails and texting––is changing language? The obvious difference is that it’s not verbal, but written. This means that the physical clues we pick up from being in the presence of someone––body language, mannerisms, speech patterns, tone of voice, etc.––are absent. But exchange of physical gestures is not the […]
Exposing the Joint: Techniques of Cross-Examination
Lawyers look forward to cross-examination since at least there’s some sense of being on the attack. For the first time, you’re permitted to be overtly adversarial. Attacking the witness’s credibility, confronting the witness’s ability to see, hear, perceive, or know, condemning the witness for failing to consider those facts most supportive of your side of […]
On the Art of Living Well…with Chronic Back Pain
Enervating, irksome, debilitating, back pain––particularly severe back pain––can significantly affect the quality of one’s hours and days. The trick is to live well notwithstanding its presence. This requires both patience and impatience: patience, to allow the body time to heal; impatience, to alleviate at once its most acute symptoms. Living well implies not allowing the […]
The Analytics of Imagination
Daydreaming is condemned as a waste of time, yet we place value, often great value, on new ideas. Why this dichotomy? The trouble with imagination is that it’s untethered and unstructured. There’s no rhyme or reason––it’s easy to become lost. We need an analytics of imagination. But how? Is imagination a skill? Can it be […]
On Elastic and Inelastic Negotiation
Negotiation has become commonplace, but like driving a car it’s easy to mistake competency for proficiency. Perhaps negotiation is best viewed through the lens of how opposing forces work in nature. An “inelastic” collision occurs when two bodies collide, and there’s no bounce. An “elastic” collision is just the opposite––two bodies collide, and there’s bounce. […]
The Reign of Sadness
Young people seem to be naturally drawn into the harmonics of happiness, finding joy in the smallest of pleasures, structuring their hours in exhilarating ways. Sadness, even momentary sadness, the young person believes, is to be repelled and resisted, as if sadness were an abnormal state, something akin to an illness or disease. As one […]
Making Sense of the Unknown Knowns
On February 12, 2002, then Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, famously stated: Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some […]
Neuro-immune Interactions in Health and Disease
Is good health nothing more than a state of mind? Can thought alone prevent serious illness? Conventional wisdom, of course, says no. The breakthroughs of the future, we are told, will derive from basic research. All else can be charitably categorized as “holistic” or “homeopathic.” Today’s medicine focuses on what can reliably be tested and […]
Complications Arise
“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” –Hippocrates Food, and our relationship to it, has become a complex subject. A growing body of medical literature seeks to understand the science of nutrition, including eating disorders. Conventional wisdom has at times been shown to be incomplete and, quite often, simply incorrect. One […]
Neuroprediction and the Risk of Future Injury
There’s an emerging science known as “Neuroprediction” which uses data derived from brain-imaging studies to predict future outcomes and behavior. The idea is that certain findings on brain scans correlate with certain behavioral or neurologic outcomes. For example, a recent article establishes a link between amygdala hyper-activation and those who later will develop depression. “This […]
