Amy Alkon's HumanLab: The Science Between Us

Welcome to Amy Alkon's HumanLab: The Science Between Us, a weekly show with the luminaries of behavioral science. =

Join us tonight as twins researcher Dr. Nancy Segal tells fascinating stories about twins and explains what her research on twins has to tell us about how we come to be the people we are. Some of the questions she'll answer: 

•How much do our genes determine who we are? 

•Can we shift our environment to make the best of the genes we have? 

•Where do our personalities come from? 

•Why are some sisters so different from one another? 

•How much does having rotten parents affect your chances for success? 

•Why do some abused children grow up to be criminals and why do some become productive individuals? 

Dr. Segal has a brand new book, just out, Twin Mythconceptions: False Beliefs, Fables, and Facts About Twins. It's fascinating and entertaining and busts every myth out there about twins.

Join me and all my fascinating guests every Sunday, 7-8 p.m. PT, 10-11 p.m. ET, at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.

Support the show (and change your life!) by buying my "science-help" book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence."

HumanLab -- The Science Between Us, a weekly show with the luminaries of behavioral science.

Noted social scientist Dr. Adam Galinsky takes on the long-running debate about whether it's best to be self-interested or other-interested--a question Galinsky says misses the mark. 

Delving into recent research, Galinsky explains why maximizing our potential for success takes doing both -- sometimes cooperating, sometimes competing (and sometimes doing a little of each). He'll also offer some extremely valuable tips on how you can win at work and in many competitive situations through understanding and managing the nuances on cooperating and competing.

Galinsky's book, co-authored with Dr. Maurice Schweizer, is Friend & Foe.

Join me and all my fascinating guests every Sun from 7-7:30 pm PT and 10-10:30 pm ET, at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.

Please support the show by buying my science-based, funny book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence."

Amy Alkon's HumanLab -- The Science Between Us, a weekly show with the luminaries of behavioral science.

We have a depression epidemic in this country, now affecting more than 15% of the population, and it’s striking people at younger and younger ages. It seems clear that our current modes of understanding and treating depression just aren’t working.

My guest tonight, psychologist Dr. Jonathan Rottenberg, draws on research to show why we are failing to help depression sufferers and turns to our evolutionary roots to offer a nuanced understanding of why we get depressed, explaining why our modern environment’s mismatch with our evolved psychology can drag us depression. All of this leads to insights on how we might help depression sufferers get better, or, at the very least, not lead them to feel defective and broken because they are depressed. 

His inspiring and scientifically rigorous book we’ll be discussing tonight is The Depths: The Evolutionary Origins of the Depression Epidemic. 

Join me and all my fascinating guests every Sun from 7-7:30 pm PT and 10-10:30 pm ET, here at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.

Support my show by buying my "science-help" book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence." It lays out the PROCESS of how you can transform to live with confidence, plus countless tips for habit change, productivity, and more.

Welcome to Amy Alkon's HumanLab: The Science Between Us, interviewing the luminaries of behavioral science.

Developmental psychologist Dr. Peter Gray explainswhy our current educational system is actually counterproductive to educating kids. Our way of schooling kids ignores our evolved psychology and how children actually learn, and removes children’s natural joy of learning from them in the process. 

It turns out that schooling based on the principles of a democracy -- applied to children -- is highly effective schooling for keeping kids engaged, helping them develop self-control, and helping them develop to their fullest and become highly productive adults living meaningful lives.

Peter’s fascinating book: Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. 

Join me and all my fascinating guests every Sunday, 7-8 p.m. Pacific Time, 10-11 p.m. Eastern Time, at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.

Please support this show by buying my new science-based and funny book, Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence.

Welcome to Amy Alkon's HumanLab: The Science Between Us, a weekly show with the luminaries of behavioral science.

We like to believe our decisions are rationally driven and make sense. But constantly, our perception and decision-making are clouded by illusions we aren't even aware we have. Some of these include illusions of accuracy in our attention, memory, confidence, and knowledge. These illusions can lead us to make costly - and even deadly - errors.

The good news is, by understanding what these illusions are and how we fall prey to them, we can avoid doing it (or do it far less), make more rationally-based decisions, and live smarter overall.

To help us do that, my guest tonight, psychologist and researcher Dr. Christopher Chabris is half of the team (with psychologist and researcher Dan Simons) who did the famous and hilarious "invisible gorilla experiment." It's also the title of their fascinating book, "The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us."

Tonight, we'll be discussing this experiment and others, why we're so convinced we're perceiving situations correctly when we're doing anything but, and how we can stop and live like the rational animals we believe we are.

Join me and all my fascinating guests every Sunday (at our new half-hour time), 7-7:30 p.m. Pacific Time, 10-10:30 p.m. Eastern Time, at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.

Please support the show by buying my "science-help" book on the PROCESS of transforming to live with confidence, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence."

Amy Alkon's HumanLab -- The Science Between Us, a weekly show with the luminaries of behavioral science.

Tonight’s show is on why friendships matter more now than ever, the ways friends can make us better people, and how to have more satisfying friendships and ditch the dark ones.

My guest is Carlin Flora, the fantastic editor I worked with at Psychology Today, and her book is Friendfluence: The Surprising Ways Friends Make Us Who We Are.

Flora is one of the few non-scientists to appear on my show, but her book is research-driven and I found her to be very solid on science, and this should be a compelling show. 

Join me and all my fascinating guests every Sun from 7-7:30 pm PT and 10-10:30 pm ET, here at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.

Please support the show by ordering my "science-help" book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence."

Why low-carb, high-fat eating is the healthiest kind and how to go about it
Welcome to Amy Alkon's HumanLab: The Science Between Us, a weekly show with the luminaries of behavioral science.

Dietary researcher Dr. Jeff Volek lays out the science behind why you should declare your independence from dietary carbohydrates -- sugar, flour, starchy vegetables like potatoes, apple juice -- that cause the insulin secretion that puts on fat. Not only that, he explains why eating enough fat -- the right kind of fat -- is essential to getting and staying healthy.

Dr. Michael Eades calls Dr. Volek's book (co-authored with Dr. Stephen Phinney) "the best low-carb book in print."

Join me and all my fascinating guests every Sunday, 7-8 p.m. Pacific Time, 10-11 p.m. Eastern Time or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.
Please buy my "science-help" book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence.

HumanLab -- The Science Between Us, a weekly show with the luminaries of behavioral science.

Psychologist Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky, who researchest happiness, explains that we are actually very poor predictors of what makes us happy or unhappy. Of course, it doesn’t help that we’ve been stuck with a lot of cultural myths about what things and situations should and shouldn’t.

On this show, which focuses mainly on relationships, Dr. Lyubomirsky lays out the realities shown in the research and also give us simple, practical ways to be happier -- as well as practical thinking on how to assess when that’s just not possible and it’s time to get out.

Dr. Lyubomirsky's book: The Myths of Happiness: What Should Make You Happy, but Doesn't; What Shouldn't Make You Happy, but Does.

Join me and all my fascinating guests every Sun from 7-7:30 pm PT and 10-10:30 pm ET, at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.

Please support the show by buying my "science-help" book, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence."

Welcome to Amy Alkon's HumanLab: The Science Between Us, a weekly show with the luminaries of behavioral science. 

This is a show on how the negative can be positive -- on how we actually need the emotions that make us uncomfortable. They make us whole, balancing the "positive" emotions. Dr. Todd Kashdan will lay out the science on how anger, anxiety, and other "negative" feelings can actually be motivating, illuminating, and helpful -- giving us our best shot at success and fulfillment.

Dr. Kashdan's myth-busting book he'll be discussing, co-authored with Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener, is “The Upside of Your Dark Side: Why Being Your Whole Self--Not Just Your ‘Good’ Self--Drives Success and Fullfillment.”

Join me and all my fascinating guests every Sunday, 7-7:30 p.m. PT, 10-10:30 p.m. ET, at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.

Please support my show (and increase your confidence and become more productive) by buying my new "science-help" book, Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence.

Welcome to Amy Alkon's HumanLab: The Science Between Us, a weekly show with the luminaries of behavioral science.

On this show, Dr. Jonathan Gottschall talks about his foray from bummed out adjunct English professor to the Mixed Marshall Arts world and his big cage fight -- along with the psychology driving violence and the fight rituals that actually contain it. His fascinating book we'll be discussing on the show: The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch.

Join me and all my fascinating guests every Sun from 7-7:30 pm PT and 10-10:30 pm ET, here at blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon or subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher.

Please support the show by buying my "science-help" book on the PROCESS of living with confidence, "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence."