One of the things that women really excel at is reading and reacting to subtle cues. We've always had to do that because men don't have to.
Three-card monte is one of the most persistent and effective cons in history. The games still pop up along city streets. But we tend to dismiss the victims as rubes.
The best confidence artist makes us feel not as if we're being taken for a ride but as if we are genuinely wonderful human beings who are acting the way wonderful human beings act and getting what we deserve.
It may be that learning to do creative work of any kind - not just direct imagery exercises - may help combat writer's block.
In real life, having your poetry criticized by T.S. Eliot could cause you to doubt your poetic gifts. But imagining it in a dream has the opposite effect. That dream could become the source for a story.
The cognitive skills that underpin resilience, then, seem like they can indeed be learned over time, creating resilience where there was none.
Storytelling is the oldest form of entertainment there is. From campfires and pictograms - the Lascaux cave paintings may be as much as twenty thousand years old - to tribal songs and epic ballads passed down from generation to generation, it is one of the most fundamental ways humans have of making sense of the world.
The more extreme the story, the more successful it becomes. Emotions on high, empathy engaged, we become primed to help.
The problems of reporting a bully - or, if you are a bully, of becoming less of one - become much more intractable, because your reputation surrounds you, and behavioral patterns are harder to escape.
Before the Internet, bullying ended when you withdrew from whatever environment you were in. But now, the bullying dynamic is harder to contain and harder to ignore.
Many adult bullies hide behind the idea that bullying happens only among children. They conceive of themselves as adults who know better and are offering their hard-earned wisdom to others. The Internet makes that sort of certainty easier to attain: looking at their screens, adult bullies rarely see the impact of their words and actions.
Admiration is seen as a noble sentiment - we admire people for admiring others, detecting, in their admiration, a suggestion of taste and humility.
Benign envy can sound a lot like admiration. The difference is that, while admiration feels good, envy is painful.
It's strange, when you think about it, that we spend close to a third of our lives asleep. Why do we do it? While we're sleeping, we're vulnerable - and, at least on the outside, supremely unproductive.
The fact that insomnia is associated with depression suggests that sleep might help us deal with emotionally stressful or otherwise disruptive events.
We don't remember everything that happens to us on a given day: sometimes, we remember something simply because it's emotional, while, at other times, we work our way through mundane details to figure out why something matters.
A wide array of factors can determine just how quickly you'll be able to drift off to sleep when you choose to do so.
Some of the elements of sleep hygiene are basically the same as good health practices. Nicotine, caffeine, and alcohol all negatively impact sleep, the more so the closer they're consumed to bedtime.
Light helps the body predict the future: it's a sign of how our environment will change in the coming hours and days, and our bodies prepare themselves accordingly.
