On Being

Wayne Curtis and Myrtle Thompson are the co-founders of Feedom Freedom Growers. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Grace Lee Boggs — A Century in the World." Find more at onbeing.org.

Few features of humanity are more fascinating than creativity; and few fields are more dynamic now than neuroscience. Rex Jung is a neuropsychologist who puts the two together. He's working on a cutting edge of science, exploring the differences and interplay between intelligence and creativity. He and his colleagues unsettle long-held beliefs about who is creative and who is not. And they're seeing practical, often common-sense connections between creativity and family life, aging, and purpose.

Rex Jung is an Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. He's a Distinguished Senior Advisor to the Positive Neuroscience Project, based at the University of Pennsylvania. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Rex Jung — Creativity and the Everyday Brain." Find more at onbeing.org.

We were made and set here, the writer Annie Dillard once wrote, "to give voice to our astonishments." Katy Payne is a renowned acoustic biologist with a Quaker sensibility. And she’s found her astonishment in listening to two of the world’s most exotic creatures. She has decoded the language of elephants and was among the first scientists to discover that whales are composers of song.

Katy Payne is a visiting fellow with the Bioacoustics Research Program at Cornell University's Laboratory of Ornithology. She was part of the research team that produced the original recording "Songs of the Humpback Whale." Her book is "Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants." This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Katy Payne — In the Presence of Elephants and Whales." Find more at onbeing.org.

John O'Donohue was a poet and philosopher. He authored several books, including "Anam ?ara," "Beauty," and "Echoes of Memory," a collection of blessings published posthumously. He died on January 4, 2008. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "John O'Donohue — The Inner Landscape of Beauty." Find more at onbeing.org.

Genetics describes DNA sequencing, but epigenetics sees that genes can be turned on and off and expressed differently through changes in environment and behavior. Rachel Yehuda is a pioneer in understanding how the effects of stress and trauma can transmit biologically, beyond cataclysmic events, to the next generation. She has studied the children of Holocaust survivors and of pregnant women who survived the 9/11 attacks. But her science is a form of power for flourishing beyond the traumas large and small that mark each of our lives and those of our families and communities.

Rachel Yehuda is Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience and the director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Rachel Yehuda — How Trauma and Resilience Cross Generations." Find more at onbeing.org.

Poetry is something many of us seem to be hungry for these days. We're hungry for fresh ways to tell hard truths and redemptive stories, for language that would elevate and embolden rather than demean and alienate. Elizabeth Alexander shares her sense of what poetry works in us — and in our children — and why it may become more relevant, not less so, in hard and complicated times.