Psychology

I think that single trait — self-awareness — or rather, that skillset, outweighs all the others put together. You're filtering every experience you have with others through your own perceptions, your own biases, your own reactions and instincts. So you have to know yourself first before you can truly know anyone else.

Take any product and change the identity of the person or entity associated with it, and you fundamentally change how the world interprets and values that product. The product itself is 100% identical—it hasn't changed at all. What has changed is the identity, and in particular, the status of the person attached to it.

Status is kinetic. Those who have it can give it to those who don't. Anointment refers to these ritualistic events that can be major: in a biblical sense, you're anointed by a king and all sorts of good things follow. In modern life, you're anointed if you're admitted to and graduate from a prestigious university. But anointment also happens on a much smaller scale, many times a day.

Mind, body, and spirit have to come together, and 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.

Developmental psychologist and attachment expert; author of "Hold On to Your Kids

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—I don't really want to tell you this—but 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

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

Anyone who takes the DMT space seriously is forced to live a kind of parallel life. You slip back into 'normal life mode' and almost have to ignore the implications of what you saw. It shows you that this tawdry, flimsy domain we think is foundational to reality is actually nothing more than a theatre screen.

The world we see is always constructed by our brain. 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. It's trying to find a model that works—one that is adaptive and allows you to function.

We tend to remember the things in life that deliver the biggest emotional wallop. 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. That makes them highly effective memory tags, because they're anchored to a very specific time and place.

Neuroscientist & author of "This Is Your Brain on Music

The brain, if nothing else, is a giant pattern detector. It looks for order in chaos. And those patterns matter: they can mean the difference between life and death. Music taps into that same machinery because it's so highly structured. When your brain says, I thought this path would lead here, but it actually took me somewhere new — you experience pleasure.

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. If I say, I'm happy, but also a bit sad, nervous, winsome, and tired, those words are still boxes. But if I play you a passage of music — maybe something by Elgar — you might think, Yes, that's exactly how I feel.

Neuroscientist & author of "This Is Your Brain on Music

Vulnerability isn't oversharing; it isn't necessarily personal. And that's where some of the fear has come from—this sense that leaders might need to role-model less sharing about their personal lives. Yet vulnerability can look very different. Trust benefits from clearer boundaries, because trust needs clear expectations and clear limits.

Author & Leading Expert on the Sharing Economy & Collaborative Consumption

Children, because they take fewer physical childhood risks in the real world, are experiencing a decline in trust in themselves and in others. Their ability to take those risks in the world is decreasing, and that is a huge problem.

Author & Leading Expert on the Sharing Economy & Collaborative Consumption

AI tools are incredibly good at replicating that. If I share something, they know how to give empathy and validation immediately; they know how to close the loop. And here's the tension: humans aren't practicing the art of trust with each other, or even with themselves, enough. Yet they're outsourcing those trust loops to digital tools almost instantly.

Author & Leading Expert on the Sharing Economy & Collaborative Consumption

The number one thing is misread intentions. You assume someone has ill intent toward you—maybe to hurt you, harm you, or make you feel uncomfortable—and you don't check in on those intentions. Then a narrative forms in your head, and that's when you start spiralling. You can apply this to your children, to relationships, and it happens constantly at work.

Author & Leading Expert on the Sharing Economy & Collaborative Consumption

Trust is a confident relationship with the unknown. And the reason this is so important is that trust isn't, at its essence, an asset or an attribute or a currency. It's a belief. It's what we believe about someone or something. That definition is slightly counterintuitive because, often, when people think about trust, they talk about knowing what to expect from someone or knowing what the outcomes will be. So, they're actually thinking about trust through the language of risk, thinking about it in terms of certainty. And that's not what trust is.

Author & Leading Expert on the Sharing Economy & Collaborative Consumption