Today we have the pleasure of welcoming the professor of the most popular course at Yale, and host of the fantastic Happiness Lab podcast: Dr. Laurie Santos.
Laurie Santos is a Professor of Psychology and Head of Silliman College at Yale University. She’s also the director of the Comparative Cognition Laboratory at Yale, which explores the evolutionary origins of the human mind – including what makes our minds unique – by comparing the cognitive abilities of human and non-human primates. Her fantastic TED talk, “A Monkey Economy as Irrational as Ours” is a great introduction to some of the material the Cognition Lab focuses on.
Speaking of labs, Laurie is also the host of the critically acclaimed podcast The Happiness Lab, which is loosely based on her course at Yale “Psychology and the Good Life” – which is the most popular class in the university’s history. It’s now available for free online as “The Science of Well-Being,” and almost two million people have taken it around the world.
Key Topics:
- 2:00: Key resources for happiness during pandemic.
- 6:00: Understanding and combating logical errors.
- 10:00: How to stay strong during a crisis.
- 14:30: Developing an internal orientation toward positivity.
- 17:15: Key misconceptions about happiness.
- 20:30: Intrinsic and extrinsic rewards.
- 22:45: Self-compassion.
- 24:30: What can we learn from monkeys?
- 31:00: Why didn’t “errors of reasoning” evolve out of us?
- 34:15: Liking vs. Craving.
- 37:00: The critical role of lasting learning.
- 48:00: A lesson to your younger self.
