Psychology

Anxiety is a feeling problem, and basically, you need to speak to that feeling problem with a feeling solution. You can't fix a feeling problem with a thinking solution, which is, I think, why most traditional therapies fail. They try and talk you out of a feeling, which never works.

As soon as you get close to this thing we need to heal, the anxiety comes up to try to pull us away as it did when we were a child, and that's why anxiety is so hard to heal. Because as soon as you get close to it, you want to pull away.

Anxiety isn't one thing, it's two. It's the anxieties of the mind, but it's also this alarm state, this state of constant protective hyper vigilant alarm, physiological activity in the body. And each of them energises the other.

I think when you have early trauma that gets disrupted, your mind gets separated from your body. Your mind becomes this sort of distracted, dissociated place to go when this alarm in your body—if your parents are screaming at each other or your dad's an alcoholic—there's only so much a child can take.

If you step back and zoom out, and ask yourself: why are video games so powerful in the first place? The answer is that they're a digital manifestation of play. Video games are simply a digital form of that. They're one of the most effective and, from an evolutionary perspective, one of the most fundamentally human ways of engaging the brain — of connecting with who we are as a species.

The truth is, any book about pets is really a book about humans. It's not about the pets themselves. I'm always amused when friends send me pictures of their dog or cat, because I'm tempted to write back and say, 'If you're not in the picture, it's a misrepresentation of what's going on.'

Canadian science communicator and former host of Daily Planet

But when it comes to claims like 'pets alleviate depression,' there's really no solid evidence. In fact, the findings so far are pretty ambiguous. And in one study that found no significant overall effect, cat owners were actually more depressed than the control group.

Canadian science communicator and former host of Daily Planet

When you gaze into your dog's eyes, your oxytocin level—the so-called 'love hormone'—rises, and the same thing happens in your dog. It's a powerful pair bond. More recently, though, researchers have found the same effect with cats.

Canadian science communicator and former host of Daily Planet

A true pet's value lies entirely in its relationship with us, and vice versa. The first fossil evidence of that bond goes back around 30,000 to 40,000 years: dogs buried with humans, including one remarkable case of a dog that had survived two bouts of canine distemper, presumably because its human companion cared for it.

Canadian science communicator and former host of Daily Planet

It forces you to confront the fact that we know almost nothing about the true nature of reality. Whatever image you have of what's real or possible is obliterated in an instant. You're faced with a world that isn't just strange, but so utterly incomprehensible that it transcends imagination.

We never have direct access to the world in itself; we only have access to the model our brain is constructing. It works as a sort of 'best guess.' The brain isn't trying to find the absolute truth or create a perfect replica of the outside world's structure.

Music ties into memory in two ways. First, music itself can be tremendously impactful, so we remember it — and we also remember everything happening around us when we heard it.

Neuroscientist & author of "This Is Your Brain on Music

In real life, emotions rarely arrive in neat, isolated packages. They're layered, overlapping, constantly shifting. Pure happiness, for instance, is rare; most of the time it's tinged with something else. And music, more than words, captures that mixture.

Neuroscientist & author of "This Is Your Brain on Music

We tend to remember the things in life that deliver the biggest emotional wallop. The death of a family member, the birth of a child, a wedding, an accident, an injury, or a major global event.

Neuroscientist & author of "This Is Your Brain on Music

Music is often better than speech at conveying and understanding emotion, because music has a kind of openness and ambiguity to it. Words, on the other hand, tend to put things into boxes.

Neuroscientist & author of "This Is Your Brain on Music

It might feel—if you haven't yet learned the rules of these hidden markets—that the outcomes are based on luck, chance, or things beyond your control, but you actually have a lot more agency in them than you think.