psychology

Most importantly, folktales and fables do not create the same level of connection between storyteller and audience as a personal story.

‘There is nothing I need so much as nourishment for my self-esteem.’

The frontier also tends to forge tribes that are more democratic and meritocratic (and less status-conscious), have fewer laws and policies, and bias toward empiricism over theory (because theory encodes facts about older environments). All of these cultural institutions help keep tribes more flexible, so they're more able to adapt when change

Deepak Malhotra tells his students is the most important part of a salary negotiation: they have to like you.

Psychologist Ivan Pavlov trained his dogs to drool. He did this by ringing a bell before they were fed. The dogs learned to associate the sound of the bell with an imminent meal, which triggered a salivary response.

controls. And it’s not just lumberjacks. In dozens of studies in dozens of fields, Latham and Locke found that setting goals increased performance and productivity 11 to 25 percent. That’s a fairly extraordinary boost.

We were not the first to notice that people become risk seeking when all their options are bad, but theory-induced blindness had prevailed.

Finally, dopamine, like all neurochemicals, amplifies memory.5 This, too, is automatic. A quick shorthand for how learning works in the brain: the more neurochemicals that show up during an experience, the more likely that experience will move from short-term holding into long-term storage. Memory enhancement is another key role played by

Making your own schedule works well for two reasons. The first is sleep. The freedom to control your schedule gives you the best chance of getting a good night’s rest. The research shows that we all need seven to eight hours of shut-eye a night.9 We’ll explore this in further detail later, but here, know that without proper sleep we experience a