In 1950, the psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson, in a famous treatise on the phases of life development, identified wisdom as a likely, but not inevitable, byproduct of growing older. Wisdom arose, he suggested, during the eighth and final stage of psychosocial development, which he described as “ego integrity versus despair.” If an individual had achieved [...]
Several years ago, around the time the Food and Drug Administration was considering the use of human growth hormone to treat extremely short but otherwise normal children, researchers were working up the results of a large-scale psychology experiment involving hundreds of middle-school and high-school students in the Buffalo area – including some who were extremely [...]
In the spring of 1992, out of the blue, the fax machine in Richard Davidson’s office at the department of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison spit out a letter from Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. Davidson, a Harvard-trained neuroscientist, was making a name for himself studying the nature of positive emotion, [...]
It had been yet another miserable, nose-dripping, red-eyed spring a couple of years ago, when I finally went to see an allergy specialist. I’ve been battered by seasonal allergies all my life but relied on family doctors and, more recently, ”primary-care physicians” for relief. In a kind of a pharmaceutical version [...]
On a wet, blustery April morning, mist blowing sideways across the docks marking the lower end of Union Street on the Brooklyn waterfront, 17-year-old Alice Warren-Gregory races down the steps from her family’s third-floor apartment a little after 5:30 a.m. Clutching a calculator and a copy of ”The Great Gatsby,” she hurries up the [...]
Almost every weekday morning, usually before 10:30, an overnight delivery truck with an unusual cargo negotiates the hilly streets on the outskirts of Worcester, Mass., and comes to a halt in front of a brick-and-tinted-glass building called Biotech Three. The courier disappears into the building with one or two large gray containers and drops them [...]
On an insufferably muggy afternoon in July, with the thermometer pushing 90 degrees and ozone alerts filling the airwaves, Alexander Bregstein was in a foul mood. He was furious, in fact, for reasons that would become clear only later. Working on just three hours of sleep, and having spent the last eight hours minding a [...]
At a few minutes after 4 on a Sunday afternoon in January, when most of New York was tuning in to the playoff game between the Jets and the Broncos, I had something else on my mind. More precisely, I had something around my mind, namely the 1.5-ton magnet of the magnetic [...]
It was a beautiful, springlike day in early December, and as Ruth Lippin sat in an examination room at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, waiting for her very interesting brain to be scanned in the adjoining neuroimaging suite, she gazed out the window and took in what was once for her a bloodcurdling [...]
In death as in life, Jason Altom managed to be both extremely methodical and extraordinarily good-hearted. On the warm, humid day in mid-August when he ended his life, he walked up to the third-floor bedroom of the Somerville, Mass., house he shared with two fellow graduate students at Harvard University, drank a liquid laced with [...]