Szalavitz's latest book is Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential — and Endangered. It is co-written with Dr. Bruce Perry, a leading expert in the neuroscience of child trauma and recovery.
Every day, some 60,000 patients enter a state more like coma than sleep when they undergo general anesthesia — according to an unsettling study published Dec. 30 in the New England Journal of Medicine.
(Updated) Almost everyone drinks too much on New Year’s Eve — which is why AA members (and future members) often scorn it as amateur’s night. But how do you know when you’ve turned from being a “moderate” drinker to a dangerous one?
So you’ve made the decision to quit. Congratulations! Now you’ll need a few tried-and-true ways to change your bad habit — whether it’s problem drinking, eating or smoking — and stick with it.
Quitting isn’t easy, but buck up: staying on the wagon gets a lot more manageable over time. Here are some proven pieces of advice to help you stay the course.
It’s the pause that doesn’t refresh, the awkward moment that you relive over and over and over after you’ve realized that once again, you’ve put your foot in it.
Got a big social network? Then you probably have a large amygdala, according to a new study that found a connection between the size of this brain region and the number of social relationships a person has.
Physicians have long believed that some form of deception is essential to the placebo effect: after all, if you tell people that you’re giving them a fake drug, why would they respond by getting better?
Holiday memories are often laced with the scent of spices: for me, a whiff of baking gingerbread can bring back the comforts of childhood in an instant. But a rash of recent media reports suggests that the allure of gingerbread …
In what seems like an unrelenting year of bad news, the Economist has a lovely and uplifting feature headlined “The U-Bend of Life.”
(Updated) The image of the ancient but youthful-looking sage meditating on a mountaintop might be closer to reality than you think, according to a new study that found that after a three-month stay at a meditation retreat, people …
The hormone oxytocin — known as the “love drug” or “cuddle chemical” — plays an important role in pair-bonding, child-rearing and social behavior. Now researchers are discovering that it could also help explain the effects of …
Ecstasy (MDMA) is known as the “love drug,” because it prompts cuddles, hugs and, often, a sense of deep understanding between people.
Dr. Ben Goldacre is best known for his “Bad Science” column in the British newspaper the Guardian, in which he skewers, with almost unseemly glee, misguided science reporting and the misleading marketing of medical treatments and …
