Words matter. These are the best Robin Marantz Henig Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
There’s very little about being in a functional-M.R.I. scanner that is natural: you are flat on your back, absolutely still, with your head immobilized by pillows and straps. The scanner makes a dreadful din, which headphones barely muffle.
The limbic system explodes during puberty, but the prefrontal cortex keeps maturing for another 10 years.
Even though loneliness affects so many of us, it has gotten scant research attention compared to related conditions like depression or anxiety.
Biology sets the context, and that is critical, but obesity still boils down to whether a person eats too much or exercises enough.
The chance you passed up or missed could have had any number of different outcomes, and it’s easy to fantasize about how much better every one of those outcomes would have been.
Alright, alright, I admit it: my husband is the quiet, kind, accepting parent, and I’m the one who wants so much to be part of our two daughters’ lives than I can’t even let them finish a story without interrupting.
Parents bobble between a nostalgia-infused yearning for their children to play and fear that time spent playing is time lost to more practical pursuits.
Many of us are tethered to bodies that sabotage us in our struggle to keep from getting fat, or to slim down when we do.
Kids don’t shuffle along in unison on the road to maturity. They slouch toward adulthood at an uneven, highly individual pace.
I’m always made a little uncomfortable by studies that assert that Millennials are the most narcissistic generation in history. To me, being young has always meant being self-absorbed; in many ways, that’s what youth is for.
Elderly parents tend to think their relationship with their middle-aged children is smoother than the children do. Adult grandchildren, who have little stake in pulling away from their grandparents, tend to describe that relationship as less rose-colored than do Gram and Gramps.
I regret not working harder to create true friendships with other couples, not seeking out people with whom to go do things and go places – people with whom to have a few crazy, memorable bonding adventures.
The music that was popular in your youth seems to be the music you recall most vividly – and most nostalgically – for the rest of your life. But so is the music that was popular in your parents’ youth.
It’s almost a rite of passage for the middle-aged, it seems, to invent generational stereotypes for dumping on the young.
Anxiety is not fear, exactly, because fear is focused on something right in front of you – a real and objective danger.
Whatever the reason for any one individual’s tendency to gain weight, the only way to lose the weight is to eat less and exercise more.
To me, it’s always interesting to see what people end up regretting, as a way maybe to avoid such regrets in your own life.
Lies can be verbal or nonverbal, kindhearted or self-serving, devious or bald-faced; they can be lies of omission or lies of commission; they can be lies that undermine national security or lies that make a child feel better. And each type might involve a unique neural pathway.
Beliefs about how lying looks are plentiful and often contradictory: depending on whom you choose to believe, liars can be detected because they fidget a lot, hold very still, cross their legs, cross their arms, look up, look down, make eye contact or fail to make eye contact.
Angels, demons, spirits, wizards, gods and witches have peppered folk religions since mankind first started telling stories.
As the brain matures, one thing that happens is the pruning of the synapses. Synaptic pruning does not occur willy-nilly; it depends largely on how any one brain pathway is used.
I’m a freelance writer, and I work alone at a big desk in the living room of my apartment. There are many days when I don’t utter a single word to anyone but my husband.
The human brain has evolved the capacity to impose a narrative, complete with chronology and cause-and-effect logic, on whatever it encounters, no matter how apparently random.
If you’re satisfied with your social life, according to psychologists, you tend to be satisfied with life in general.
In the modern world, the anxious temperament does offer certain benefits: caution, introspection, the capacity to work alone. These can be adaptive qualities.
In the womb, humans are free of microbes. Colonization begins during the journey down the birth canal, which is riddled with bacteria, some of which make their way onto the newborn’s skin.
When a trait is universal, evolutionary biologists look for a genetic explanation and wonder how that gene or genes might enhance survival or reproductive success.
The English language has 112 words for deception, according to one count, each with a different shade of meaning: collusion, fakery, malingering, self-deception, confabulation, prevarication, exaggeration, denial.
Some of my happiest moments are the ones I spend with my husband, a few close relatives, and a handful of very good friends who know me well and like me anyway.
The essence of play is that the sequence of actions is fluid and scattered.
