You may have seen the news at the start of this academic year that the University of Michigan has decided to withhold grades from some members of the incoming first-year class to support their transition and mental health (Arsenault, 2026). On the face of it, this might not be a terrible idea. The transition to…
Many of us regularly make aesthetic choices. We buy paintings, music, and novels; we visit concerts and galleries. Aesthetic buying refers to buying things just because they are pleasing to the eye, not for their utility. Visually appealing products stimulate the brain’s reward system, triggering dopamine and offering instant gratification. Buying things that look good…
Procrastination, from the Latin word for “tomorrow” (as in, “I’ll get to it tomorrow”), is perhaps the most common behavioural affliction in the modern world. As example, around 90% of college students report some procrastination tendencies and around 25% have procrastination tendencies severe enough to make it very difficult for them to ever attain a…
Most of us go through life assuming that what we see around us is reality. That’s a table. There’s a tree. We hear words spoken to us. An hour passes on the clock we see. Our brain takes in all of this, and we experience it. Except, from the standpoint of neuroscience, that’s not really…
A father recently came into my office consumed with anxiety. “I’m having trouble sleeping,” he told me. “My high schooner is an exceptionally talented soccer player and her ill-equipped coach is messing with her confidence. Every suggestion I make only makes things worse.” Kids in sports can bring valuable lessons and blessings, and at the…
PowerBars. That’s what did me in. A few protein-packed energy bars on a shelf actually triggered that ugly scene at our local market. The one where I abandoned the cart of groceries in the middle of the aisle, ran out into the parking lot, sobbing and snivelling until my eyes were red and swollen, my…
In one of my research interviews, a nonprofit leader described returning from a national conference with other executives who did work similar to his. Meeting these other executives was energising, not because any of them introduced a revolutionary new leadership technique, but because he simply spent time with people who understood the challenges that came…
For most of AI’s modern rise, the guiding question was relatively simple: what can we optimize? Pattern recognition improved prediction. Automation removed friction. Processes became faster, cheaper, and increasingly personalized. Then AI acquired agency. By September 2026, advanced systems can browse, code, operate software, and pursue objectives through sequences of actions. That shift has produced…
“What we speak becomes the house we live in.” These words, attributed to the 14th-century poet Hafez, could be a modern dictum of a good life. What we speak—the words we string together day after day, silently or stridently, to ourselves or to others—is how we communicate. Yet communication is hardly the first thing that…
In Slow Medicine, physician Victoria Sweet delineates two ways of making sense of the human body. Modern medicine views it as a machine. You just need to find the broken part, repair or replace it, and the job is done. But Sweet, inspired by the writings of the 12th-century abbess Hildegard of Bingen, resuscitates an…
