Author name: Will Baum

The Moral Life of Babies

Do we start out with a sense of right and wrong or not?  A long exploration in the NYT Magazine: [T]he current work…on baby morality, might seem like a perverse and misguided next step. Why would anyone even entertain the thought of babies as moral beings? From Sigmund Freud to Jean Piaget to Lawrence Kohlberg, psychologists

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On Placebos

Olivia Judson looks at the placebo effect.  Regarding the testing of an ulcer drug versus a placebo: Intriguingly, the results varied from country to country, with Brazilians showing no placebo effect and Germans having a strong one. Why? No one knows, but it doesn’t appear to be because of anything inherently German: trials of drugs

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Parental Estrangement

Tara Parker-Pope looks at a “silent epidemic“–children who refuse all contact with their parents. “It’s possible for a parent to feel like they were doing something out of love,” he said, “but it didn’t feel like love to that child.”  Friends, other family members and therapists can often help a parent cope with the loss

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Green Exercise

A study says exercising for just a little bit–but outdoors, in nature–is good for mood and well-being. Green areas with water added something extra. A blue and green environment seems even better for health…From a health policy perspective, the largest positive effect on self-esteem came from a five-minute dose.  

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Precision Change

OCD meets CBT:  The Data Driven Life profiles people precisely measuring what’s going on in their lives. A few months ago, Barooah began to wean himself from coffee. His method was precise. He made a large cup of coffee and removed 20 milliliters weekly. This went on for more than four months, until barely a

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The Middle-Aged Brain

The middle-aged brain is “better than ever,” says Barbara Stauch, author of a book on the subject: The thing the middle-aged brain shares with the teenage brain is that it’s still developing. It’s not some static blob that is going inextricably downhill…during this period…we’re better at all sorts of things than we were at 20.

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Mind-Body Media

Once you begin considering that many physical symptoms may be stress related, not only do you react to your own aches and pains differently, the news starts to take on a different meaning.  That’s why Dr. David Schechter repeatedly asks in his  MindBody Workbook what kind of messages you’ve been getting in the media about

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