For some people, tapping their foot to the beat is a challenge at a fundamental level.

A few months ago, I conducted an early Thanksgiving experiment on myself. I was in Reykjavik, Iceland, on a lecture trip. My morning was free, and I took it to write two pages about how lucky I am—something, I’m embarrassed to say, that I had never done before. Here is one thing I wrote: “I’m looking out at a sky that Vikings would have seen. I get to do this—me.” Writing it all down felt very good.

The technology pages of news media can make for scary reading these days. From new evidence of government surveillance to the personal data collection capabilities of new devices, to the latest leaks of personal information, we hear almost daily of new threats to personal privacy. It’s difficult to overstate the implications of this: The separation of the private and public that’s the cornerstone of liberal thought, not to mention the American Constitution, is being rapidly...

The Senate report released Tuesday on the CIA’s use of harsh interrogation techniques during the George W. Bush administration comes at a time when Americans’ support for such techniques are at a high point. The report exposes new details about the agency’s secretive use of particularly brutal interrogation methods — including sleep deprivation, waterboarding and sexual threats — but it may not shift public opinion.

Flemming Rose has been called a Nazi, a Muslim-hater, and a Danish Satan. He has been simultaneously targeted with death threats and blamed for the deaths of 200 or more innocent people around the world. Since September 2005, when he commissioned now-infamous cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed for the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, Rose has been a focal point for the tension between respect for cultural diversity and the protection of democratic freedoms.

Chris Ashcroft was 11 when he heard God calling him. The boy with the full head of angelic, golden curls was standing among a crowd of thousands at the Sydney Showground. It was 1959, and American evangelist Billy Graham was beseeching them to follow God or face hellfire. As the choir sang The Lord's Prayer, Ashcroft went forward, along with his parents and two siblings. It was the start of a long and, at times, painful journey. The family's Sundays were soon consumed with church attendance...

Today, Fred Stockwell, a white-haired Englishman, is the only Westerner out on the landfill, patrolling the garbage in a dusty pickup. The squatters, migrants from Myanmar, just across the border, come out of their bamboo and steel shacks and make hand signs for the boots, batteries, and medicine stacked in the truck bed. Stockwell tells me last week a woman gave birth in the truck; the next morning he filled it with kids and drove them to school.

Researchers can’t seem to get enough of mindfulness. Studies have linked it to heightened creativity, improved concentration, lower stress, better working memory, and increased compassion. Now, new research also shows that it helps us overcome biases we’re not even aware we have.

At TED 2009, now halfway through the near-weeklong binge of activities and presentations, Juan Enriquez energized and perhaps terrorized attendees with his brief look into the future of human affairs, and indeed, of the human species. What made Enriquez' presentation so engaging was that his vision wasn't that far off, this sci-fi future that he spoke of; it's the future that is unveiling itself right before us, a future that we will all likely watch arrive, and our children will come to know...

As a young writer growing up in Caserta, a suburb of Naples, I felt myself getting more and more angry. There was a war going on between two mafia clans for control of the territory, and violence between them spilled into the streets. I wanted to tell the world what this war zone was like: the victims’ families tearing their clothes, the stink of piss from a man who knew he was going to die and couldn’t control his fear, people shot in the street because they looked like the intended victim.

Nothing obstructs access to the truth like a belief in absolute truthfulness.

For thousands of years, people have speculated that there’s some correlation between sadness and creativity, so that people who are a little bit miserable (think Van Gogh, or Dylan in 1965, or Virginia Woolf) are also the most innovative. Aristotle was there first, stating in the 4th century B.C.E. “that all men who have attained excellence in philosophy, in poetry, in art and in politics, even Socrates and Plato, had a melancholic habitus; indeed some suffered even from melancholic disease.”

The other day, I pointed out the pink sunset between the cluster of bare winter trees behind our house to my five-year-old daughter, and she turned to me, her face blank and said, “Is that real?” “What do you mean, honey? It’s the sunset.” “No, I mean is that fake, like is this something we see on TV, or is it actually happening?”

I met my first savant 52 years ago and have been intrigued with that remarkable condition ever since. One of the most striking and consistent things in the many savants I have seen is that that they clearly know things they never learned. Leslie Lemke is a musical virtuoso even though he has never had a music lesson in his life. Like “Blind Tom” Wiggins a century before him, his musical genius erupted so early and spontaneously as an...

Some people are the unfortunate owners of faces that just look guilty, while others have faces that help them get away with stuff, according to the results of a study led by Brian C. Holtz of Temple University, published recently in the journal Personnel Psychology. In a series of three experiments, Holtz found that people were less likely to blame others who have more "trustworthy" faces. More specifically, we judge whether a person's actions were fair and done with the best of intentions...

There are three Friday the Thirteenths this year, and if that worries us, we might have to blame a group who were the sworn enemies of all superstition.

I am a Libra of Libras, an inveterate balancer of opinions. My scales rarely tip to one side; my cons stack up against my pros. Count on me to discern the downside to upside, and the upside to down. If you want an unequivocal statement, I’m not your fellow — at least not usually. At work, an ambivalent disposition can be an obstacle. Employers want to see passion. If you don’t love your job, you’re expected to act as if you do, and every so often...

There’s a scene in Stanley Kubrick’s comic masterpiece “Dr. Strangelove” in which Jack D. Ripper, an American general who’s gone rogue and ordered a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, unspools his paranoid worldview — and the explanation for why he drinks “only distilled water, or rainwater, and only pure grain alcohol” — to Lionel Mandrake, a dizzy-with-anxiety group captain in the Royal Air Force. Ripper: “Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation? Fluoridation of water?”

It is believed that the success of humans as a species depends to a large extent on our ability to cooperate in groups. Much more so than any other ape (or mammal for that matter), people are able to work together and coordinate their actions to produce mutual benefits. But what do we base our decisions on when we know whatever we do will affect those around us?

The value -- and sometimes high cost -- of being social animals.