Human Potential Lab

Today we have Dr. Jordan Peterson on the podcast. Dr. Peterson has taught mythology to lawyers, doctors and business people, consulted for the UN Secretary General, helped his clinical clients manage depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, and schizophrenia, served as an adviser to senior partners of major Canadian law firms, and lectured extensively in North America and Europe. With his students and colleagues at Harvard and the University of Toronto, Dr. Peterson has published over a hundred scientific papers. Dr. Peterson is also author of two books: Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief and 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, which is a #1 bestseller.

In this wide-ranging conversation we discuss the following topics:

– Why “learned irrelevance” is incredibly important

– Why creativity requires keeping a childlike wonder

– How hallucinogens clear the “doors of perception”

– The “shared vulnerability” model of the creativity-mental illness connection

– The neuroscience of openness to experience

– The personality of personal correctness

– The practical implications of gender differences

– The function of the state in helping to make sure there is equality of individual expression

– How agreeableness and conscientiousness orient us differently in the social world

– The difference between pathological altruism and genuine compassion

– The link between pathological altruism and vulnerable narcissism

– The difference between responsibility and culpability

– How to help people take responsibility and make their lives better

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Three time bestselling author and human guinea pig Tim Ferriss discusses how to become top 5% in the world with a new skill in just 6-12 months. Scott and Tim debunk the 10,000 hour rule, discuss general principles for accelerated skill acquisition, consider what it means to live the good life and take a sneak peak at Tim’s new show The Tim Ferris Experiment.

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A pioneering researcher in the psychology of self-compassion, Dr. Kristin Neff provides deep insight into the incredible healing power of being your own ally. In this episode, we cover some immediately useful ways to practice self-compassion and gain its many benefits. Self-compassion has been linked to reductions in anxiety, physical pain, depression and the stress hormone cortisol. It’s been shown to increase motivation, improve a mastery mindset, and enhance well-being. There’s a great deal of levity in this episode as we discuss how we can benefit from learning to care for ourselves the way we care for others.

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Today we have Robert Greene on the podcast. Robert is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The 48 Laws of Power, The 33 Strategies of War, The Art of Seduction, and Mastery, and is an internationally renowned expert on power strategies. His latest book is The Laws of Human Nature.

In this episode we discuss:

• What is human nature?
• How to transform self-love into empathy
• The deep narcissist vs. the the heathy narcissist
• Abraham Maslow’s encounter with Alfred Adler
• How to confront your dark side
• Returning to your more authentic self
• How people who are one-sided are concealing the opposite trait
• The importance of not taking yourself too seriously
• How to see through people’s masks
• The importance of assessing people’s actions over time
• Why toxic types have a peculiar sort of charm
• Healthy people-pleasers vs. toxic people-pleasers
• How to get in deep contact with your purpose
• The importance of becoming aware of the “spirit of the generation”
• How to confront your mortality and open your mind to the sublime

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We are especially grateful (and giddy) to be sharing this episode with our listeners! Brene Brown’s work really gels with our core interests here on The Psychology Podcast, and the resulting conversation contains some enthusiastic and empirically informed banter that is sure to inform and delight. We geek out over some counter-intuitive findings, like how incredibly compassionate people have a tendency to set the most boundaries and say “no.” We discuss the power of being vulnerable and how the data suggests that it is one of the best predictors of courage. We chat about how trying to be cool is the enemy of truly being cool, how we can enrich future generation’s learning with wholehearted living, and how ignoring our creativity defies our essential nature. It’s ~45 minutes of two experts in the field sharing data, and themselves, and it’s one of our favorite episodes yet.

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Best-selling author Susan Cain shares her personal philosophy and the research that started a movement to empower introverts! For this episode, we wanted to share ourselves – We discuss our values, epiphanies and perspectives on the good life. We also shed light on introversion across a range of topics, including vocations, testing and the differences between scientific and cultural conceptualizations of introversion.

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Today it’s a delight to have David Vago on the podcast. Dr. Vago is Research Director of the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He also maintains an appointment as a research associate in the Functional Neuroimaging Laboratory at Harvard Medical School. David aims to clarify adaptive mind-brain-body interactions and their therapeutic relevance in health-care settings. In this context, David has been specifically focusing on the study of mindfulness-based interventions in clinical settings, and the basic cognitive and neuroscientific mechanisms by which mindfulness-based practice function.

In this episode we discuss:

• What is contemplative science?
• History of the idea of “contemplation”
• Including intuition under the umbrella of contemplative practice
• The aim of mindfulness
• Pop writers on mindfulness vs. scientists of mindfulness
• What do we know after 25 years of mindfulness research?
• The link between mindfulness and how we cope with pain
• The link between mindfulness and reducing anxiety
• The link between mindfulness and improving depression
• How there are a lot of crap studies out there on mindfulness
• What are the potential adverse effects of mindfulness?
• Why it’s difficult to look at the link between mindfulness and cognitive outcomes
• Mindfulness and its impact on impulse control
• The impact of mindfulness on attention
• The need for better measures of outcomes in mindfulness research
• The link between mindfulness and creativity
• The false narrative about mindfulness and mind wandering (and the default mode network)
• The relationship between mindfulness and wisdom
• The main challenges of investigating mindfulness through neuroscience
• Why mindfulness is not the end all and be all
• The usefulness of taking an evidence-based approach to looking at the benefits of mindfulness

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Today it’s great to have Christian Miller on the podcast. Dr. Miller is A.C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University and Director of the Character Project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation and Templeton World Charity Foundation. He is the author of over 75 papers as well as the author of Moral Character: An Empirical Theory, Character and Moral Psychology, and most recently, The Character Gap: How Good Are We? 

In this episode we discuss:

• The main aims of the Character Project

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oday with have Brian Nosek on the podcast. Nosek is co-Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Open Science (http://cos.io/) that operates the Open Science Framework (http://osf.io/). The Center for Open Science is enabling open and reproducible research practices worldwide. Brian is also a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 2002. He co-founded Project Implicit (http://projectimplicit.net/), a multi-university collaboration for research and education investigating implicit cognition–thoughts and feelings that occur outside of awareness or control. Brian investigates the gap between values and practices, such as when behavior is influenced by factors other than one’s intentions and goals. Research applications of this interest include implicit bias, decision-making, attitudes, ideology, morality, innovation, and barriers to change. Nosek applies this interest to improve the alignment between personal and organizational values and practices. In 2015, he was named one of Nature’s 10 and to the Chronicle for Higher Education Influence list.

In this episode we discuss:

• The genesis of Project Implicit
• The current state of the field of implicit bias
• Overuses of the Implicit Association Test (IAT)
• The common desire people have for simple solutions
• The potential for misuse of the IAT for real-world selection
• How hard it is to study human behavior
• What the IAT is really capturing
• How the degree to which the IAT is trait or state-like varies by the topic you are investigating
• Cultural influences on the IAT
• Brian’s criticism of implicit bias training
• The latest state of the science on implicit bias
• How our ideologies creep in even when we are trying to be unbiased
• The difference between implicit attitudes and conscious attitudes
•  What would an equality of implicit associations look like?
• Why bias is not necessarily bad
• The genesis of The Reproducibility Project
• What are some classic psychological studies that haven’t replicated?
• The importance of having compassion for the scientist
• The importance of having the intellectual humility of uncertainty
• The importance of cultivating the desire to get it right (instead of the desire to be right)
• What is open science?
• What is #BroOpenScience?
• How hostility on social media can cause us to lose the view of the majority
• The importance of balancing getting it right with being kind to others

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“Don’t be afraid. You are not alone.” – Michael Pipich

Today we have Michael Pipich on the podcast. Pippich is a licensed Marriage and Family therapist, and has treated a wide range of mental disorders and relationship problems in adults and adolescents for over 30 years. Michael is also a national speaker on Bipolar Disorder and has been featured on radio and in print media on a variety of topics. His latest book is Owning Bipolar: How Patients and Families Can Take Control of Bipolar Disorder.

In this episode we discuss:

• The main characteristics of bipolar disorder
• The three main types of bipolar
• The suicidal potential among bipolar
• Michael’s three-phase approach to treat patients with bipolar
• The benefits of mania
• The link between bipolar and creativity
• How people with bipolar can thrive
• Taking responsibility for your bipolar
• How loved ones and family members can support those with bipolar
• Linkages between bipolar and the different types of narcissism
• Reaching out to help others

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