by Rick Hanson | Oct 3, 2010 | Blog
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have dueling rallies in DC coming soon. Stewart’s is the “Rally to Restore Sanity” and Colbert’s is the “March to Keep Fear Alive!” Obviously, Colbert is a great satirist who is poking fun here, since...
by Rick Hanson | Aug 5, 2010 | Blog
There is a natural balance within us all between the desire for joining and the desire for separation, between the desire for closeness and the desire for distance. These two great themes – joining and separation – are central to human life. Almost everyone wants both...
by Rick Hanson | Jul 19, 2010 | Blog
My recent posts have highlighted two very powerful, yet opposing forces in the human heart: in a traditional metaphor, we each have a wolf of love and a wolf of hate inside us, and it all depends on which one we feed every day. On the one hand, as the most social and...
by Rick Hanson | Jul 5, 2010 | Blog
Empathy is unusual in the animal kingdom. So empathy must have had some major survival benefits for it to have evolved. What might those benefits have been? Empathy seems to have evolved in three major steps. First, among vertebrates, birds and mammals developed ways...
by Rick Hanson | Jun 21, 2010 | Blog
I once heard a teaching story in which an elder, a grandmother, was asked how she had become so wise, so happy, and so respected. She answered: “In my heart, there are two wolves: a wolf of love and a wolf of hate. It all depends on which one I feed each day.” This...
by Rick Hanson | Jun 7, 2010 | Blog
How did we evolve the most loving brain on the planet? Humans are the most sociable species on earth – for better and for worse. On the one hand, we have the greatest capacities for empathy, communication, friendship, romance, complex social structures, and altruism....
by Rick Hanson | Apr 22, 2010 | Blog
How much change in the brain makes a difference in the mind? That’s the issue raised by a very interesting comment regarding my previous blog, “The Brain in a Bucket.” So I’ve taken the liberty of posting the comment here (hoping that’s...
by Rick Hanson | Apr 7, 2010 | Blog
Have you ever seen a real brain? I remember the first time I saw one, in a neuropsych class: the instructor put on rubber gloves to protect against the formaldehyde preservative, popped the lid off of a lab bucket, and then pulled out a brain. It didn’t look like...
