Here’s your August Research Roundup! These are hot-off-the press research studies that I think are well done and caught my eye based on my own research interests (which I assume are well aligned with YOUR interests). Enjoy!

1. Your specific mental strengths, not just your overall IQ, help shape where you end up in life.

Researchers took two big, representative U.S. samples (the NLSY 1979 and 1997) and ten aptitude tests, and pulled general intelligence (g) apart from three specific abilities they call tech, speed, and math-verbal. Those specific abilities, measured back in youth (ages 14 to 22), predicted later education, income, and occupational status. The links even held between siblings, which controls hard for the family you grew up in. The usual claim is that specific abilities add little once you know someone’s g; here they carried 30 to 57 percent of g’s importance. Occupation profiles tracked the stereotypes, too: mechanics and engineers scored high in tech, doctors and computer scientists high in math-verbal. Colin DeYoung, a frequent collaborator of mine, is a co-author, and the finding is consistent with something I’ve argued for years — that intelligence isn’t one thing, and squashing it into a single score buries the strengths that actually allow a person to achieve their most personal goals. (Caveat: these are population-level patterns, not any one person’s ceiling, and ability is tangled up with opportunity, so environment runs through the whole story.) Source: More Than General Intelligence: Cognitive Abilities and Class Structure, Intelligence & Cognitive Abilities (2026)

2. When you read a poem for its beauty, your brain briefly turns down the volume on language.

Using a cap of light-based sensors that tracks blood flow, researchers watched 35 students read classical Chinese poems either for facts or for beauty. The aesthetic readings unfolded in three parts. For the first ten seconds, the language-processing regions of the left temporal lobe grew more active as readers decoded the words. Between ten and thirty seconds, activity in those same regions dropped, a dip the team called semantic inhibition. In the final stretch, the temporal regions came back online alongside a surge in the left prefrontal cortex, a region tied to personal memory, mental imagery, and empathy. Readers with the deepest dip and sharpest rebound reported the most appreciation. I love this finding because it maps onto something I care about: the mind stepping past the literal to make room for imagery and feeling. (Caveat: only 35 people, and the sensors read the surface of the brain, so a dip in blood flow doesn’t prove the brain is suppressing anything.) Source: Neural Dynamics of Aesthetic Appreciation: fNIRS Evidence from Poetry Reading, NeuroImage (2026)

3. Classic psychedelics keep showing up alongside more openness and less neuroticism.

A systematic review pulled together 48 studies (14 controlled trials and 34 observational ones) on psilocybin, LSD, and ayahuasca. The most consistent pattern was higher openness to experience and lower neuroticism, strongest for psilocybin and ayahuasca, and these shifts sometimes held for months after a session. Changes in the other traits were all over the place. One honest detail: a person’s baseline personality shapes the trip, with high-openness people more likely to have a meaningful experience and high-neuroticism people more prone to a frightening one. The Openness finding is consistent with my work with Colin DeYoung on the imaginative, idea-hungry side of personality, so I read this with real interest. (Caveat: most of the data is observational and self-reported, and open people may be more drawn to psychedelics in the first place, so cause and effect is tangled.) Source: Classic psychedelics and personality: An updated systematic review, Journal of Psychopharmacology (2026)

4. Two brains falling into sync doesn’t mean the team is playing well.

We hear a lot about “brains in sync” as the signature of good collaboration, so researchers had 33 pairs of strangers play cooperative Tetris while sensors tracked both brains at once. The brains did synchronize more during teamwork, especially in the prefrontal cortex. But the pairs with higher prefrontal synchrony pulled off fewer of the complex, high-scoring combination moves. Using magnetic stimulation to nudge a social brain region up or down changed neither the syncing nor the performance. People rated their partners as more likable afterward no matter how badly they’d played. The team’s read is that synchrony may reflect the effort of figuring out your partner rather than the payoff of nailing the task. (Caveat: small sample, a single video game, and both players watched identical falling blocks, which can mimic “sync” without any real social meeting of minds.) Source: Inter-brain synchrony during collaborative gaming, NeuroImage (2026)

5. Loneliness and personality feed each other, in both directions.

Drawing on 63,502 people across three long-running panel studies in Australia, the United States, and the Netherlands, researchers asked whether personality shapes loneliness or the reverse. The answer was both. When people were higher than their own usual level on extraversion, conscientiousness, and emotional stability, they tended to be a little less lonely four years later. When they were lonelier than usual, those same traits tended to dip four years down the line. The effects were small but ran in a real loop. I appreciate research that refuses the either/or. Personality is not a fixed entity that dooms you to isolation, and it isn’t infinitely moldable either. It shapes your circumstances and bends back in response to them. (Caveat: all self-reported and drawn entirely from Western countries, with very small effect sizes, so hold it loosely.) Source: Identifying Robust Longitudinal Transactions Between Loneliness and the Big Five, Journal of Personality (2026)

6. Fluid and crystallized intelligence carry opposite genetic links to psychiatric conditions.

A large genome-wide study refused to treat intelligence as one score, splitting it into reaction time, fluid reasoning (solving novel problems), and crystallized knowledge (accumulated facts and vocabulary), then mapping each against genetic risk for five conditions. The patterns pulled in different directions. Genetic risk for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder tracked with lower processing speed and fluid reasoning but higher crystallized knowledge. ADHD risk with faster reaction time but lower reasoning. Autism risk with higher crystallized knowledge. Alzheimer’s risk with lower fluid reasoning alone. The authors read the schizophrenia and bipolar pattern as possible “antagonistic pleiotropy”: the same gene variants that raise risk may also carry a knowledge advantage, which could be why they’ve stuck around. I find that a humane way to see it, a genetic vulnerability arriving bundled with a real strength. (Caveat: these are genetic correlations across large, almost entirely European-ancestry populations, describing statistical overlap, not any individual’s fate.) Source: Crystallized and fluid cognitive abilities have different genetic associations with neuropsychiatric disorders, Nature Communications (2026)

7. Brain health can measurably improve at any age, and the people who start lowest gain the most.

Nearly 4,000 adults, ages 19 to 94, spent three years on an online program of short daily brain-health strategies (5 to 15 minutes) plus occasional coaching. Their scores on cognitive clarity, emotional balance, and social connectedness climbed steadily. The people who began with the lowest scores improved the most, while even high starters kept rising, with no ceiling in sight. Younger and older adults gained at similar rates. There was even a rebound effect, with people using their new strategies to hold or grow their brain health through job loss, illness, and caregiving. As the lead researcher, Sandra Bond Chapman, put it, “our brain is not defined by age, it is defined by possibility.” I love this! That word, possibility, has been at the center of my work for a long time. (Caveat: a single-arm study with no control group and a highly educated sample, so some of the gain could be practice rather than the training itself.) Source: Measuring and increasing the brain health span across adulthood, Scientific Reports (2026)

8. Raw speed peaks in your twenties, but overall psychological functioning peaks around 55 to 60.

Two researchers combined data across nine capacities — cognitive tests, the Big Five, emotional intelligence, moral reasoning, financial literacy, resistance to common thinking traps — and asked when human functioning actually peaks. Processing speed and fluid reasoning fade after early adulthood. But crystallized knowledge keeps growing, emotional intelligence peaks in the mid-40s, financial literacy in the late 60s, and moral reasoning deep into later life. Blend it all together and the high point of psychological functioning falls around 55 to 60, right when people tend to reach the top of their careers. This is the multi-dimensional mind I wrote about in Ungifted: different capacities ripen on different timelines, so a single “peak age” is the wrong question. (Caveat: this stitches together many separate datasets and leans on cross-sectional snapshots, which can confuse real aging with generational differences.) Source: Humans peak in midlife: A combined cognitive and personality trait perspective, Intelligence (2025)

9. A single mindful day can ripple through your mood for the better part of a week.

Researchers pinged 264 students four times a day for eight weeks, tracking mindfulness, mood, and the mental states in between. A more mindful day predicted less rumination and fewer intrusive worries the next day, which predicted better mental health the day after that, a chain unfolding over time. Two facets of mindfulness worked through different doors. Accepting your experience without judgment settled rumination, while observing your thoughts fed self-compassion and flashes of awe and joy. Cutting intrusive worry turned out to be the strongest route of all, and the benefits echoed forward for up to four days. As someone who takes the inner life seriously, I found the mechanism more interesting than the usual “mindfulness is good for you” headline. (Caveat: the participants were college students taking remote classes during the pandemic, and they answered only about 46 percent of the check-ins.) Source: Free Your Mind and Mental Health and Wellbeing Will Follow, Mindfulness (2026)

10. Leaning on reminders gets the task done now but may weaken the memory muscle underneath.

We offload constantly, dumping our intentions into phone alerts and calendar pings. Researchers ran two experiments (108 and 280 people) where participants had to remember to do things, with some tasks propped up by an obvious reminder. While the reminder was there, performance was near perfect. Afterward, once the reminders were gone, the people who had relied on them remembered fewer future tasks than those who’d used their own memory the whole time, dropping below even the no-reminder baseline. The authors tie it to “desirable difficulties,” the idea that the effort of remembering unaided is what builds durable memory in the first place. I’m not anti-reminder (I’d lose track of my own book titles without mine), but the trade-off is worth knowing. (Caveat: an online study with students, testing short-term memory, so it can’t tell us what years of leaning on reminder apps does in real life.) Source: Offloading Reduces Prospective Memory Learning, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition (2026)

That’s August, folks! What do you think of these studies. Which ones most caught your eye? Which ones surprised you the most? Which ones are you the most skeptical of? Tell me in the comments. More soon.

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Last night I suddenly got an idea. I opened up Claude, the overly-friendly neighborhood AI bot, and asked it: “Hey buddy, write the most creative sentence you possibly could.” Claude almost immediately responded:

“She kept her childhood in a jar of fireflies and opened it only on the nights the dark felt honest.”

Cringe!

Really, Claude? That’s literally the best you can do? So I decided to go even bigger and give it another chance. The biggest, in fact: “You know what, write the most creative sentence ever written in human history!” A few seconds later, Claude responded:

“The universe wrote itself into being one lonely word at a time, and named the ache between the words you.”

Bigger cringe!

How can this be? The second prompt, which was about ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY was even worse than the first! So this led me down a whole rabbit hole linking this to my lifelong research on the science of creativity and what you get is this 100% human-written post. Let’s go.

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Sixty years ago, the creativity researcher E. Paul Torrance was frustrated that the field of psychology was neglecting the study of creativity. Psychology was so focused on IQ (hello Lewis Terman and his obsession with gifted children with high IQs) that barely any researchers found creativity important enough to study. Enter Torrance.

He created his legendary “Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking”, which measures creativity along four major dimensions:

• Fluency: The sheer quantity of meaningful responses. For example, if the question is “list all the uses for a paperclip”, 30 responses in the span of a few minutes would demonstrate high fluency.

• Flexibility: The ability to shift categories. For example, a high flexibility score would include uses that cross categories such as office supplies (holding documents together), tools (picking a lock), hygiene (toothpick), and arts/crafts (making a paperclip sculpture).

• Originality: The statistical rarity of the ideas. Most people would immediately think of “hold paper together” but an original response would be “bend it into a miniature replica of the Empire State Building”.

• Elaboration: The depth and detail of the ideas. An example of high elaboration would be something like “Use it as a plant support system to train and support young seedlings. You can stretch out the paperclip and bend it into an elongated “S” hook, sticking one end into the soil next to the stem and wrapping the upper loop gently around the plant. This provides rigid vertical stability to prevent the stem from snapping while allowing the plant to grow naturally.”

Torrance used his tests to follow children from elementary school all the way into adulthood to see how well they predicted creative life outcomes. One follow-up study by Jonathan Plucker found that just under half of the variance in adult creative achievement is explained by his creativity test scores, with the contribution of Torrance’s tests being more than three times that of IQ scores.

Clearly there are deep implications here for human intelligence. But in this article I want to explore something that isn’t explored nearly enough, and that’s the deep implications for artificial intelligence.

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Let’s zoom in on two of the major scoring dimensions: fluency and originality. Torrance’s brilliant observation, which has been empirically supported by many years of creativity research, is that fluency and originality are partially separable aspects of creative thinking. Yes, they are positively correlated with each other (people who can come up with a lot of ideas tend to also come up with more original ideas overall), but this isn’t necessarily the case. They are worth measuring separately.

Now let’s return to Claude’s responses and how it actually got more predictable when I asked it to be more creative. When Claude raised its weights to the maximum of creativity— the most creative sentence in all of human history— Claude went right to the dead center of the archetypical “profound sentence” cluster of its training: the cosmos, loneliness, love, the intimate second-person perspective. To Claude, the deepest thing it could come up with is an assemblage of a million things that have already been labeled deep during the course of human history. So the bigger the demand for originality, the harder the machine regressed to the average of what it thought “genius” is supposed to sound like. In a nutshell: It literally gave me the most average version of profundity imaginable with only a few seconds of processing.

Here’s the incredible irony as I see it: AI just isn’t built for rarity, which is literally the definition of “genius”!! Turn the creativity dial to maximum and you can pulled as close as possible to the average of “sounds like genius”, but you get something that clearly is not genius.

Now let’s analyze for a moment why neither sentence it gave me is actually creative (and why that’s actually built into the very nature of AI). According to Torrance and modern-day creativity researchers, creativity involves both novelty and meaningfulness. Just originality and you get a schizophrenic word salad. Just meaningfulness with no originality a you get an everyday thought. A sentence is only creative if it says something the way almost nobody else would say it in a way that people (even if it’s only domain experts) can comprehend. But current AI models are built entirely from phrases and images that lots of people already reach for when they’re trying to sound deep or creative.

Take: “She kept her childhood in a jar of fireflies and opened it only on the nights the dark felt honest.”

The idea of putting a memory in a jar is a common convention for creative writers. This is Hallmark Greeting Card common. “Fireflies” are the go-to image for a wistful childhood. We’ve all seen it a thousand times. “The dark felt honest” may on the surface sound meaningful but take a moment and ask yourself: What the hell does that actually mean??! It’s literally a mood pretending to be a thought. The key here is that nothing in this creative attempt could actually be true for any one real human living person. There is no specific memory here, and no real detail. Anyone could have written it.

I only discovered Claude recently, and I’ll be honest: At first, I did think some of its editing of my drafts were profound. Wow, that’s so clever to add the word “quiet” there, wish I thought of that myself! But then it started replacing my writing with the same words over and over again to the point where I would keep banning it from using certain words because they became so grating to me.

Also, I would tell Claude to try some actual variety, but it just couldn’t. It’s almost as though it couldn’t process what “variety of word choice” even means. I’ve become so frustrated by just how unoriginal and repetitive AI really is that I decided to break up with Claude. I told it that. I will have it let me know if I have any spelling mistakes or hugely egregious errors in reasoning but I don’t want it touching any of my human-made sentences ever again!

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I want to end this article on a note that illustrates why current AI models will not be taking over human writing anytime soon. Here’s the thing: What I am writing right now at this very moment comes from MY heart. Not the average heart of human history, but my fucking heart (and yes, Claude would never spontaneously come up with a curse word in that context. Most people don’t put the word “fucking” before the word “heart”).

The thing that makes human writing so special is that we can write from a real lived human experience and we can choose to deliberately create sentences and use word choices that are infinitely original and interesting. AI models in their current LLM instantiation are built to NOT be capable of doing that because statistical rarity is the opposite of what it’s grasping for when it composes sentences.***

Interestingly enough, the way AI detectors work is by analyzing how much a certain chunk of text is predictable. Because that’s all AI knows how to write. Just for kicks, I went onto Pangram and put this Claude-generated text in there:

“She kept her childhood in a jar of fireflies and opened it only on the nights the dark felt honest. The universe wrote itself into being one lonely word at a time, and named the ache between the words you. Grief moved into the guest room and paid rent in small forgettings.”

It came back: “100% of this text is AI.” I then replaced it with a paragraph from this very article, and it came back: “100% of this text is Human Written”.

Isn’t that interesting? I don’t think the value of human writing is going away anytime soon. I, for one, am going to stick to my own soul revealing itself on the paper. Not only does that feel more fun and meaningful, but I also bet that sentence right there is probably actually more creative than any other sentence ever written in human history (according to Claude).

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*** Just as this article was going to press, Cameron Berg (an AI researcher I’m interviewing) told me that Claude is the best AI writer he’s used. I don’t doubt that. But “best writer” is meant here as fluency, not originality. Philosopher Henry Shevlin frames the distinction nicely using Margaret Boden’s three types of creativity . LLMs handle combinatorial and exploratory creativity, but transformational creativity (radically new ideas that redefine an entire domain) is exactly what they can’t do (yet).

There’s a finding in the science of well-being that the self-development world has spent twenty-five years tiptoeing around at best and completely ignoring at worst. It isn’t that happiness is impossible to cultivate. It is. It isn’t that positive psychology interventions don’t work. They often do. It’s something else, something the field knows but mentions only in footnotes, and something that — left unsaid — has produced a culture that blames people for the temperament they were born with.

Here it is: a substantial portion of how happy you are is the luck of the genetic draw.

This is the taboo. And the longer we refuse to say it plainly, the more harm the not-saying does.

What Maslow already knew — and didn’t dare publish

Abraham Maslow himself — the founder of humanistic psychology, the architect of the hierarchy of needs, the man whose entire body of work was an argument for human potential — wrote a chapter about exactly this in 1969 and chose not to publish it. When I stumbled upon the headline doing research for my book Transcend, I nearly fell off my chair. Then once I picked myself off the floor I devoured the essay and became totally fascinated by his argument and the implications.

The essay was titled, with his usual willingness to call a thing by its right name, “Biological Injustice and Free Will.” It sat in a drawer for nearly thirty years until it appeared posthumously in Future Visions: The Unpublished Papers of Abraham Maslow, edited by Edward Hoffman.

Maslow’s opening line is the one the modern positive psychology orthodoxy will not let itself say:

“It is important to take up the various questions related to individual capability and achievement. Essentially, it is a matter of accepting the reality of biological injustice and unfairness: that some babies are born healthy and others unhealthy, some smart and others stupid, and some beautiful and others ugly. This is a matter of luck, gratuitous grace, fortune, or misfortune. It is not something that we can do anything about. It is determined. It is a limitation on free will.”

He named the thing the field would later spend decades euphemizing. And he understood, in 1969, exactly why nobody would want to talk about it:

“Social injustice is easier to accept psychologically than biological injustice, which is a blank wall about which nothing can be done.”

That sentence is doing extraordinary work. Maslow is observing that we have built a whole moral vocabulary for social unfairness — blame, redress, structural critique, advocacy. We have built almost no vocabulary for biological unfairness, because there is no one to redirect the blame at, no policy to fix the cards. The blank wall is intolerable, and the cultural response has been to pretend the wall isn’t there.

In a companion essay also published posthumously, “Humanistic Biology: Elitist Implications of the Concept of ‘Full-Humanness,’” Maslow makes the silencing explicit:

“I have not even dared to publish my theories or my exploratory data about the topic for fear of their being misused by others. I am afraid that if I raise the problem of the survival of the fittest simply for the sake of discussing it… then many nonscientists will seize on the issue for their own selfish purposes. Indeed, this situation is exactly what happened in the post-Darwin era of the late 19th century.”

So the founder of humanistic psychology, the person with the most credibility to talk about this, deliberately chose silence because he correctly feared what would be done with the material. The taboo isn’t a 21st-century accident. It’s the founder’s drawer — kept closed by everyone who came after.

He had the right fear. He may have had the wrong response. Fifty-seven years of silence has done its own damage, and at this point the cost of not saying it has overtaken the cost of saying it.

What the science actually shows

The empirical line of research that vindicates Maslow’s intuition starts with a 1996 paper by David Lykken and Auke Tellegen titled, with admirable understatement, “Happiness Is a Stochastic Phenomenon”. They studied several thousand middle-aged twins, including identical twins reared apart. The results were striking: Socioeconomic status, education, income, marital status, religious commitment — each accounted for less than 3 percent of the variance in subjective well-being. Each. Meanwhile, 44–52 percent of the variance was associated with genetic variation, and the heritability of the stable component of happiness — your set point, the level you keep returning to — approached 80 percent. That’s right, 80%!

Three decades of follow-up has refined the picture. The most thorough recent meta-analytic review, by Ragnhild Bang Nes and Espen Røysamb in the Journal of Happiness Studies, puts heritability of overall happiness in the 32–40 percent range, and of the stable trait of well-being in the 70–80 percent range. The most current synthesis, in the World Happiness Report 2022, states the conclusion in language Maslow would have recognized: “some people will be born with a set of genetic variants that makes it easier to feel happy, while others are less fortunate.”

Less fortunate. Maslow’s “gratuitous grace” or “misfortune.” Fifty-seven years apart, the same finding in the same moral register.

One nuance that’s almost never emphasized: momentary positive affect — the joy you feel in a particular moment — is almost entirely environmental. Genes don’t determine whether you can feel happy right now. They strongly shape where you keep coming back to.

Depression — the steepest gradient

Nowhere is the genetic gradient steeper, or the cost of pretending it isn’t there higher, than in depression.

The foundational meta-analysis by Sullivan, Neale, and Kendler in The American Journal of Psychiatry put the heritability of major depressive disorder at roughly 37 percent. Subsequent twin work has pushed the estimate higher for women (around 49 percent), for recurrent episodes, and for the severe and chronic forms of the disorder. The contemporary picture is a vast polygenic landscape: the 2019 Nature Neuroscience meta-analysis of 807,553 individuals identified 102 independent genetic variants associated with depression. The most recent trans-ancestry study, published in Cell in 2025 from a sample of 688,808 cases and over four million controls, found 697. The picture is not “a depression gene.” It is hundreds of inherited variants, each of small effect, distributed unevenly across the human population.

What that means in plain English: some brains arrive in the world with a brain chemistry that makes sadness much closer to their resting state than yours is to theirs. They didn’t earn it. They can’t gratitude journal their way out of it. And here is the moral failure of contemporary self-help culture: when their gratitude journaling produces the predictable modest movement and not a transformation, they are obnoxiously told they didn’t do it right.

I have heard from lifelong depressives who have been handed every intervention in the positive psychology toolkit and have been made to feel, by the architecture of how those interventions were offered, that the persistence of their pain was their fault. “Just write in your gratitude journal more.” It is hard to think of a sentence more grating to someone whose temperament was shaped, before they were born, by hundreds of inherited variants pushing against the very response the journal is trying to elicit.

Yes, gratitude practices can help. Medication can help. Therapy can help. Exercise can help. Social connection can help. And for some people, all of these stacked together produce a meaningful but incomplete shift — because they are working against a gradient steeper than the gradient most people work against.

Compassion for that fact isn’t permission to give up. It is the precondition for sustainable effort. Telling someone the truth about their gradient is the only honest way to ask them to keep walking up it.

What the silence does to people

I have spent a lot of years in correspondence with readers and students. A pattern shows up. People who have struggled with happiness their whole lives — through gratitude journals, through meditation apps, through cognitive worksheets, through retreats and supplements and morning routines — eventually arrive at a conclusion about themselves: I must be doing it wrong. Or worse, I must be the kind of person who doesn’t deserve to be happy.

They are not doing it wrong. They are, very often, doing the work conscientiously, and the work is producing the kind of modest movement the science would predict — a few degrees of warmth, not a transformation. The story they were told was that the transformation was available if they just applied themselves. The story was incomplete. The completion includes the part where some people are working uphill against a steeper gradient than others, for reasons that are not their fault and never were.

This is what Maslow’s blank wall does when we pretend it isn’t there. The cruelty is not subtle. We have built a self-help industry that tells people they can choose their happiness, and then blames them when the choice doesn’t take. It is the entrepreneurial-victim-blame version of the prosperity gospel.

Genetic inequality — the conversation we still won’t have

We talk freely about social inequality. We talk about economic inequality. We barely talk about genetic inequality — even though, as Maslow saw clearly, it is just as real and considerably less reparable.

Almost nobody is having that conversation publicly. The exception worth naming is the behavior geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden, whose important book The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality argues — from an explicitly progressive frame — that ignoring the genetic contribution to life outcomes doesn’t make the inequality go away; it just lets us blame people for their starting position. The same argument applies to happiness. If your friend has been walking up a five-degree grade and you have been walking up a twenty-five-degree grade, the right response to your slower progress is not try harder. It is an honest reckoning with the grade.

The good news, and it really is good news, is that environmental interventions can significantly compensate for genetic inequality. A recent econometric study found that an additional year of secondary education reduced the gap in obesity-related outcomes between people at high and low genetic risk from 20 percentage points to 6. Social policy can do something that individual willpower can’t: it can make the genetic lottery matter less. The same logic plausibly applies to happiness — interventions and environments designed with the most genetically vulnerable in mind raise the floor for everyone.

What Maslow did with the limit

Maslow named biological injustice as starkly as anyone ever has, and then he refused to surrender to it. From the same 1969 essay:

“Granted the fact that one may be born with good luck or bad luck, yet there remains a great deal of leeway for free will, responsibility, and becoming an active agent rather than a pawn in life… What I do with my genetic endowment and my body is definitely more important than merely the given of my biological inheritance. I had nothing to do with its creation. But what I make of my genetic endowment, my body, and whatever was given to me is my responsibility. And that, in a different sense, is a matter about which I can feel pride, shame, or guilt.”

And:

“In this sense, I can accept both the facts of biological justice and injustice, good luck and bad luck, and also of free will, personal responsibility, and of being an active agent rather than just letting myself drift into becoming a pawn. I am certainly not responsible for having strong lungs, but I am responsible for having made the best of them and not hurting them.”

This is the both/and the contemporary research permits and the contemporary culture has lost. The contemporary research now has a name for what Maslow was intuiting: differential susceptibility, and its sunnier sibling vantage sensitivity. Some of the same genetic variants that confer vulnerability under harsh conditions confer heightened responsiveness to supportive ones. The biology that makes you fragile in the wrong context makes you bloom in the right one. Maslow framed it in his own vocabulary:

“Fate, genetics, and biology indeed set limits for me — limits beyond which I can do nothing. But within those limits, I inhabit a realm in which I can accomplish either a great deal or very little. This is the realm of free will and self-choice and, therefore, of responsibility…”

And:

“I am the caretaker of my talents, capacities, and bodily organs and can do either well or badly with them.”

The caretaker, not the architect.

What compassion actually looks like

In Rise Above, I tried to make a case for what I called honest love — the rejection of both coddling (which doesn’t take a person seriously enough to tell them the truth) and tough love (which doesn’t take a person seriously enough to extend them grace). The happiness taboo is a place where the culture has been doing both at once: coddling people with the promise that their happiness is fully in their hands, then tough-loving them when the promise doesn’t deliver.

Maslow’s honest love version, also from the unpublished chapter, is the most generous formulation I have read of what the genetic gap actually permits:

“Anybody, any person whatsoever, under any circumstances whatsoever, can be a psychological success — at least in the above sense, of doing the best that one can and doing fully what one can — to be himself or herself and to accept the reality of himself or herself.”

And the line that I think should sit at the end of every conversation we have about who is and isn’t allowed to feel okay about their lives:

“The individual does not have to be victorious to be accepted by the gods.”

Read that line again (I’ve already read it a hundred times). Genes contribute substantially to your happiness baseline. If you have been struggling — if you have done the work and the work hasn’t taken — the explanation is partly that you are climbing a gradient your friend isn’t climbing. Not entirely. Partly. That is real, and it is not your fault, and acknowledging it is the beginning of self-respect, not the abandonment of it. And the same research tells us your set point is not a fixed prison. The interventions move it, sometimes meaningfully. The environmental fit you find — your work, your relationships, your physical place in the world — moves it. The slow cultivation of a life that matches your genotype, not the optimized human template the productivity literature is pushing, moves it.

The luck of the genetic draw matters. Maslow knew. He hid the chapter because he was afraid of what would be done with it, and his fear was not unreasonable. But fifty-seven years of silence has done its own damage, and the people paying for it are the ones who needed honesty most.

We can do better. We start by bringing the truth into the light.

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“People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.” ~ Simon Sinek

“Connection is not about how much time we spend together. It’s about how much joy and meaning we create together.” ~ Adam Grant

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” ~ James Clear

“Vulnerability is not winning or losing; it’s having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome. Vulnerability is not weakness; it’s our greatest measure of courage.” ~ Brené Brown

This rhetorical move has taken over the bestselling tier of self-help writing in the last decade. And it’s driving me bonkers!!!! I’m reminded of this brilliant meme:

The formula is everywhere. And I mean everywhere— in a TED talk, or a new subtitle of a book, or the close of a paragraph. Often it is the entire structure of an argument — an old idea named, a new idea installed, the door shut behind it. The author looks like a person who has Figured Things Out. They smile smugly. I mean, you thought it was that, but this person really knows it’s this. The reader gets a clean takeaway. The book sells.

I think the formula is cheap rhetoric, and I think we should all stop respecting it.

It is not cheap because the underlying claims are always wrong. Sometimes they are partly right. Practice does matter more than talent in the long-run. Willpower does have limits, and systems do help. Identity does matter more than goals for some forms of behavior change. Tone can shift the impact of a message. Each of the individual claims, taken loosely, is often defensible.

The formula is cheap because it pretends that the world is two-positioned when it isn’t. It pretends that one thing is true and the other thing is false, when both things are usually true at the same time. It models, for the reader, a kind of binary cognition that life simply does not run on. And it does this in service of selling books and Instagram quote-cards, not in service of describing reality.

What the binary flip is doing under the hood

The “it’s not X, it’s Y” formula is a compression device. It takes a complicated truth — say, the relationship between willpower and behavior — and replaces it with the appearance of a clean reveal. The reader feels they have learned something. The writer feels they have taught something. The book feels readable. Everyone walks away artificially satisfied.

The price, which most readers don’t notice because the trick is so smooth, is that the actual relationship between the two things has been erased. Willpower AND systems both matter. Heck, they even interact and can compensate for each other across time. The deeper question — when willpower runs out, what kinds of systems work for which kinds of people, where the fine balance between effort and structure actually lies — has been replaced by a punchline.

There’s no doubt it sells. Binary flips are screenshot-friendly. They quote well. They fit on Instagram and get noticed easily on LinkedIn. They get retweeted. They appear on book covers as subtitles. The genre rewards them, the algorithm rewards them, the reader has been trained to look for them.

It’s the same with the constant trope that it’s not talent but practice. In truth, talent multiplies the capacity for practice. It’s both. Talent and practice operate in a complex interplay that constantly fuel and drive each other. That’s just the truth. But that just doesn’t make as catchy a bumper sticker.

I could go on and on with examples. When you read enough of these articles or books, you stop being able to think about willpower and systems or talent and practice at the same time. You start to believe, dimly, that every psychological concept is in competition. That is not because you are a worse thinker than you used to be. It is because the books have trained you to expect a winner. (Doh, I did it again!)

Most of life is YES/AND

After twenty-five years of studying human potential, I’ve come to believe that the most important things in a human life are almost always both, not either. They are and, not or. They are held in tension, not resolved by choosing a side.

Creative people, in the research my collaborator Carolyn Gregoire and I gathered for Wired to Create, are not focused OR open. They are focused AND open, alternately, on demand. Mindful AND mind-wandering. Playful AND serious. Sensitive AND resilient. The paradox is not a problem to solve. The paradox is the truth.

The empowerment mindset I wrote about in Rise Above is structurally a yes/and. Yes, I have suffered AND I am still responsible for what I do next. Yes, the world has treated me unfairly AND I am not absolved by that unfairness from doing my own work. The yes/and is the mindset that lets you take both halves of the truth at the same time without collapsing one into the other. It is the difference between a person stuck in a story and a person growing through one.

Maslow’s later work, which I tried to update for the twenty-first century in Transcend, is structurally a yes/and. Yes, the lower needs — safety, belonging, esteem — matter, real and ongoing across a whole life. AND, the higher needs — growth, self-actualization, self-transcendence — are not earned by completing the lower ones. They work in tandem. Both, dynamically, across a lifetime.

The world is full of yes/and structures: nature and nurture, head and heart, work and rest, selfishness and altruism, optimization and soul. The list goes on. The humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow argued that the hallmark of “transcenders” is the capacity for dichotomy transcendence, to be able to integrate dualities into superordinate wholes and see the bigger picture sitting above the false binaries. It’s not our default way of thinking about anything, but in my humble opinion it should be our default way of thinking about everything!

What we lose

Here is what I think is at stake.

When the binary flip becomes the dominant register of self-help, two things happen.

The first is that readers stop being able to hold contradictions. The capacity to keep two things true at the same time — which is, by the way, the basic precondition for any kind of mature thought — gets trained out of people. Every paragraph teaches them to expect a winner. The world doesn’t have winners. The world has dynamic relationships. People who can no longer think in dynamic relationships do not grow.

The second is that the actual debates that matter get cheapened. The real arguments inside contemporary psychology — about how to integrate trauma without collapsing into victimhood, how to honor sensitivity without pathologizing it, how to value optimization without worshipping it — are subtle, contested, and often unresolved. They cannot be summarized as “it’s not X, it’s Y.” When the genre demands that they be, they stop being available to general readers. The conversation flattens.

Both are losses. Both are happening.

And now the machines have learned it from us

Here’s the part that turned my annoyance into something closer to alarm. That “it’s not X, it’s Y” move is now the single most recognizable fingerprint of AI writing. The Atlantic just ran a whole piece on it. The detection company Pangram finds the construction shows up about three times as often in AI text as in human text. One analysis clocked it more than quadrupling in corporate communications between 2023 and 2025. Every major chatbot reaches for it, constantly. AI is beyond obsessed with this way of talking. And you know whose fault that is? It’s our fault!!!!

These models were built by digesting the internet — including a decade of exactly the bestselling self-help prose I’ve been complaining about. When human reviewers scored the machines’ drafts, they kept rewarding “it’s not X, it’s Y,” because it feels like insight — the same reason the genre has rewarded it for years. The machine picked up the hollow reveal from the loudest and most confident voices in the room, and then it handed that reveal back to all of us at industrial scale.

AI trains on text soaked in the formula, which deepens its taste for the formula; the internet fills with more of that text; and researchers are already catching the cadence creeping into ordinary human speech. We taught the mirror to talk, and the mirror is teaching us back.

Which lands somewhere strangely hopeful. If you want AI to write with more soul, look at what we feed it — because the training data is us. The register we make dominant is the register the machines will hand our kids. So for me this stopped being a matter of style. How we choose to write is now, in a small but genuine way, how we shape what these systems become. The “and” has to start with the humans.

The yes/and as the better default

Here is what I want to propose, and what I will try my best to model in my own writing from here on out (although I'm pretty sure I’ll slip up sometimes). In fact, the irony did not escape me (and I even chuckled) realizing that the title of this essay — 'Most of Life Is And, Not Or' — is itself an 'it's not X, it's Y' construction! Caught me. The formula is so embedded in the English-language rhetorical machinery that it sneaks in even when you're arguing against it.

Truth is, Yes/and is much harder to write. It requires the writer to hold the complexity in their own head before sending it to the page, rather than offloading the work onto a rhetorical formula. It produces sentences that are sometimes longer. It produces takeaways that are sometimes less clean. It does not retweet as well.

But it is often closer to the truth (although I do admit that sometimes some things really are this, not that). And in a culture that is exhausted by being lied to in carefully arranged ways, closeness to the truth is itself becoming a competitive advantage.

So: yes, the binary flip is a useful rhetorical tool in small doses. AND, it has been so overused that it now obscures more than it reveals. Yes, some self-help writing requires compression to reach a broad audience. AND, that compression has a cost the genre rarely acknowledges. Yes, I am annoyed by the formula. AND, I have probably used it myself more often than I want to admit, and I am putting myself on notice along with everyone else.

You, the reader, can handle nuance. I am going to stop pretending you cannot. I hope the self-help industry (and AI chatbots) can do the same.

— — —

If this resonated, share it with one person you suspect has also been annoyed by the formula. And tell me in the comments: what’s an “it’s not X, it’s Y” line you’ve heard recently that you think is missing the and?

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In the late 1950s, the humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow set out to study the people he thought were doing the most fully human version of being human. He wasn’t looking for the happiest, the most successful, the most accomplished, or the most visible person. He was looking for what he eventually called the “self-actualizing person.”

He cataloged what he found. Sixteen characteristics, more or less, depending on which paper you read. Some are familiar from the textbooks. A clear and accurate perception of reality. Acceptance of self and others. Spontaneity. Creativeness. In 2018, I published an update in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology called “Self-Actualizing People in the 21st Century,” where I found that 10 of the sixteen characteristics that Maslow proposed held up under the scrutiny of the modern scientific method.

But buried in his 1962 book Toward a Psychology of Being, and again in the 1971 posthumous Farther Reaches of Human Nature, there is an observation that should have changed how an entire era understood human flourishing. It didn’t.

Maslow’s self-actualizing people, he wrote, had a strong “need for privacy and detachment.” They preferred solitude to crowds. They were comfortable being alone in a way that the average person was not. They didn’t need constant social input to know who they were.

While the need for privacy and detachment didn’t survive as its own characteristic in my 2018 update, the closest survivor is what I call “authenticity” — staying true to yourself and your values without being overly shaped by external pressures. Which may be the same thing Maslow was seeing from a different angle: his actualizers didn’t need the crowd’s signal to know who they were. Maybe underneath the solitude — what is not so readily observable — is the authenticity. From the outside, the self-actualizing person may appear “detached” from society, but what is not seen is the vibrant inner life and creative flow that doesn’t depend on visibility for depth.

Which raises a question that has become harder to ask in 2026 than it was the year Maslow first asked it. If connectivity, accomplishment, and visibility aren’t the indicators of an actualized life, then what is?

We have built a culture, and an attention economy, and a series of platforms, around a single confused theory of what the indicator is. We have decided, more or less without arguing about it, that an actualized life shows itself in visibility. In the social network. In how many conversations a person is inside of at any given hour. In how present they are across the dizzying and ever-growing ways of displaying themselves online in public life. The unspoken theory is that depth, if it exists in someone, will radiate outward as connectivity and output. That somehow the deeper the well, the louder the signal.

There is one serious problem with this theory: It isn’t what Maslow found. And it isn’t what every contemplative tradition that predates the attention economy found either. And it isn’t what you find, if you look honestly, in the lives of the people you most respect.

What you find instead is that the connectivity isn’t the signal. In a lot of cases it’s a perfectly competent disguise for the absence of the thing the connectivity is supposed to indicate. Hyper-connectivity is the indicator nobody is reading correctly.

Maslow had a word for the actual indicator: “Being-cognition,” or “B-cognition” for short. It is a kind of perception that doesn’t run every encounter through a strategic filter. You meet a person and you actually meet them. You walk into a room and you’re actually in the room. The sunset on Tuesday evening isn’t reduced to a photo opportunity, or to content, or to a memory filed for some later moment when it might be useful. The sunset is the sunset, and you are there for it.

He contrasted this with “Deficiency-cognition,” or “D-cognition” for short. In the realm of D-cognition, perception is driven by what’s lacking. D-cognition is useful. It runs projects. It accomplishes goals. It scans rooms for opportunities and threats. It is also, Maslow noted, exhausting as a permanent operating system. The people he studied could shift in and out of B-cognition. They didn’t have fewer problems. They had a different relationship with the problems they had.

The real indicator of self-actualization is the capacity for B-cognition — being present in a way that doesn’t require the moment to be on its way to something else. Visibility can't show it. Neither can your output or the size of your network.

You can see why this never became a self-improvement franchise. There is no product to sell. There is no metric to optimize. Instagram and LinkedIn reward visibility and the size of the network, not the depth of one’s soul. There is simply no way to demonstrate, on a feed, that you have a deep relationship with your own inner life. That category doesn’t produce content. The Being-cognition newsletter is the one nobody can write, because the practice is the opposite of the writing.

What strikes me about this moment in particular is how visible the confusion has become. The most successful operators in the contemporary attention economy openly perform the appearance of inner life. Morning walks. Gratitude rituals. “I’ve been thinking about this all week” preambles introducing whatever the person was always going to say.

The performance has gotten so sophisticated that it sometimes looks indistinguishable from the real thing. Except for one detail: It sits inside a frame of constant transmission. The morning walk is content. The gratitude is content. The “I’ve been thinking” is the lead-in to a takeaway. An inner life — the kind Carl Rogers drew in his portrait of the "fully functioning person" in his 1961 book On Becoming a Person, someone open to their own experience rather than performing it, and the kind Maslow also named when he spoke of “openness to experience” — is the part of a person that doesn't need to be transmitted. It is what is happening when no one is watching.

To be clear, I’m not arguing that connectivity is bad. I am very much online myself. But when you go looking for evidence of an actualized life — in yourself, in the people you admire, in the people you might want to learn from — stop using visibility as the proxy. It is the wrong measure.

The right one is harder to see. It shows up in how someone treats the person in front of them when no one is watching the encounter, in whether they can be in the room without managing it, in whether the person can sit comfortably with their daydreams and even enjoy them, and in whether every quiet moment has to become something else, or whether they can just let it be quiet.

The actualized person can be visible but the visible person isn’t always actualized. Sure, the two overlap but they aren’t necessarily in the same category. And confusing them is part of what’s making this era harder than it needs to be.

The indicator is the depth. It always was.

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Today is Pub Day for Leading for Tomorrow: Unlocking Human Potential in the Era of Continuous Change and Endless Possibility! 🎉🎉🎉

It was an absolute honor working with Chris Shipley to edit this compilation of essays that chart a pathway to an understanding of what it takes to lead people effectively in the modern era. In a world defined by relentless change, leading by operational efficiency alone is no longer enough. Leading for Tomorrow gathers a remarkable group of thinkers and practitioners to chart a more human-centered path forward—one built on adaptability, agency, and a new hierarchy of human needs.

You’ll explore the latest leadership styles and strategies, learning how to lead yourself, lead others, and lead organizations. You’ll also discover how to harness the principles of self-actualization, manage mental health challenges in yourself and others, and identify the qualities that help you get and stay motivated at work. This book is perfect for managers, executives, business leaders, or anyone seeking to improve their ability to lead, inspire, and motivate others.

To celebrate this exciting book launch, we decided to host a free virtual summit on July 19th from 10am PT- 11:30am PT / 1pm-2:30pm ET live on Zoom!

In this live conversation, leading business thinkers will share the ideas at the heart of the book, along with stories and practical takeaways for anyone who wants to lead—and live—more fully in the years ahead.

Free to attend. BONUS: Register and we will give you the foreword and introduction to the book for free!

Register for Free Summit

Summit Agenda:

✦ Welcome, with your hosts, Scott Barry Kaufman and Chris Shipley

✦ Opening Conversation: Why Human-Centered Leadership, Why Now
Scott Barry Kaufman & Chris Shipley (editors)

✦ Leadership at the Crossroads of Disruption
Tom Kelley, Frans Johansson discuss why human leadership matters as disruption accelerates

✦ Wisdom, Inquiry, and Navigating Uncertainty
Chip Conley, April Rinne, and Hal Gregersen talk about cultivating wisdom, embracing uncertainty across cultures, and reclaiming the art of asking good questions in an age of instant AI answers

✦ The Human Heart of Leadership
Nancy Duarte, Lisa Kay Solomon, and Jean Oelwang explain why empathy, futures-thinking, and meaning-making are essential leadership tools.

✦ Short Break: Add your questions to the queue for the closing Q&A

✦ Meaning, Fear, and Common Ground
Jennifer Aaker, John Hagel, and Jonathan Haidt share what matters most under pressure: meaning-making, moving past fear, and bridging divides.

✦ Live Audience Q&A

✦ Closing Remarks

See you there!

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Every few months I get a version of the same question: now that AI can sound like anyone, can it be anyone? Can a large language model take on a personality the way a good actor does, and reason the way that kind of person actually reasons?

A new paper out this month in Ethics & Behavior put that question to the test, and it did so on territory I care about. A team led by Nuermaimaiti Wubuli compared how dark and light personality traits shape moral judgment in two very different kinds of minds: 404 human participants, and 2,092 responses generated by large language models (GPT-4.1 and DeepSeek).

To measure the bright side of human nature, they used a scale I built with my colleagues back in 2019, the Light Triad — humanism, Kantianism, and faith in humanity — the prosocial counterweight to the Dark Triad of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy (plus, in more recent work, sadism).

They scored everyone’s moral choices using the CNI model, a clever tool that pulls apart three things people are usually doing all at once in a moral dilemma: their sensitivity to consequences, their sensitivity to moral norms, and their general preference for inaction over action.

Here is the first finding, and I will admit it was nice to see. In the human sample, the pattern held the way the theory predicts. People higher in dark traits were less sensitive to moral norms. People higher in light traits were more sensitive to them. Machiavellianism and sadism pulled norm-sensitivity down; Kantianism pulled it up. And people high in faith in humanity were more willing to act when a dilemma landed in front of them, which makes a lot of sense: if you trust that people are basically good, you are more likely to step in. This was a sample collected in China, on the other side of the world from where the scale was built, and the structure mostly carried.

But the part I keep thinking about is the AI.

When the researchers prompted the models to “be” a high-Machiavellian, or a deep narcissist, or a profoundly humane person, and then run the same dilemmas, something revealing happened: The machines matched only the direction of the human pattern — dark prompt, lower norm-sensitivity; light prompt, higher — and missed almost everything underneath it. Their dark characters didn’t just score low on moral norms. They scored close to zero, in a flat, absolute way that no actual human being does. The responses were rigid, extreme, and cartoonish.

And here is the kicker: The models couldn’t tell the dark traits apart. Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism are four distinct constructs with four distinct inner logics, and they all came out as basically the same response pattern. Same story for the light traits. The researchers handed the models careful background on what makes each trait different, and the models still collapsed them into one generic “bad person” and one generic “good person.” Their own conclusion: today’s LLMs show “only a preliminary simulation capacity” and “fail to reflect the complex features of personality and moral judgment.”

Now, the lazy version of this take is “AI bad, humans good,” and that is not what I think. The models got the direction right, which is genuinely useful. As the authors point out, that makes them a decent tool for a rough first pass, a way to guess which way an effect might lean before you go collect real data. Yes, and: a rough first pass is not a person.

What the machine reproduced was the stereotype of a personality. What it could not reproduce was the texture. A real Machiavellian and a real narcissist walk into the same moral dilemma and come out at different places. A genuinely humane person sometimes breaks a rule precisely because they care about a human in front of them. An actual person integrates this specific situation with a lifetime of accumulated experience, and the result is particular in a way that resists averaging. The models had read everything ever written about narcissism, and they still couldn’t do narcissism — because doing it takes something other than having read about it.

I have been reading a lot lately about how so much AI-generated prose feels empty even when it is perfectly fluent, and this study points at that same emptiness from another direction. A language model hands you the average of what a “cruel person” or a “passionate person” sounds like. The thing it overlooks is the only thing that was ever interesting in the first place: the particular human, with their particular history, doing the unaverageable thing in a particularly morally-challenging situation.

I don’t take this as a warning about machines so much as a reminder of what we are. Your conscience is the running, lived, context-soaked work of a single irreplaceable life, and at least for now, the most sophisticated models on earth keep quietly averaging that part away.

Which is worth thinking about. The most human thing about your moral life may turn out to be exactly the thing no one has figured out how to fake.

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Friendly reminder: Registration for The Science of Living Well — my 8-week live course — closes tonight. We begin Wednesday, July 8, and I’m shutting the doors a few days early so everyone can get settled before our first session together.

If you’ve been on the fence, this is the moment. It’s live, it’s interactive, there’s a real group of people doing the work alongside you, and every week pairs the science of well-being with a Growth Challenge you actually do — not just read about.

→ Reserve your spot

And if it’s not your season, no hard feelings at all — the newsletter stays free, and I’ll be right here every week. But if some part of you has been quietly waiting for a nudge: consider this it. I’d love to have you in the room.

— Scott

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I’m excited to announce a new series I created on the Waking Up app.

You can be happy without realizing your full potential. You can be successful without being fulfilled. You can be productive without feeling connected. So what does it actually mean to live well?

In The Science of Flourishing, I explore that question through the lens of humanistic psychology, a tradition that looks at the whole person: our needs, emotions, relationships, and opportunities.

Seen this way, the good life is not the absence of suffering, but the ongoing process of developing our strengths, connecting with others, and becoming more fully ourselves.

You can try the Waking Up app for 30 days for free by going to my Waking Up page: https://www.wakingup.com/scottbarrykaufman.

May you all live well,

Scott

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Here's July's Research Roundup! Every month I do a thorough search of new scientific studies and then pick the ten I found most captivating. Every so often, one that caught my eye is a little older than this year — but when it's foundational, I'll sprinkle it in anyway.

Enjoy!

1. Reading on paper, not a screen, lets your brain build a story with less effort.

When 25 readers worked through the same manga half on paper and half on a tablet, accuracy came out the same — but the paper-first readers answered the hardest “connect-the-two-halves” questions faster, and their brain scans showed less activation in the left language-integration regions. Tablet readers had to recruit extra right-hemisphere support to reach the same understanding. The researchers’ read: physical pages give you stable spatial anchors — the heft of what you’ve already read, the fixed spot of a panel — so your brain spends less to map the narrative. It’s a small, clever study, and it can’t tell us whether decades of screen reading reshape anything lasting. But it fits something I keep coming back to about the inner life: the body is part of how we think, not just a courier carrying messages to the brain. (Caveat: twenty-five readers and comics, not novels, so treat it as a first clue.) Source: Manga reading on paper vs. digital devices, PLOS ONE (2026)

2. A 23-year study upends the assumption that bright autistic kids will necessarily struggle with everyday life.

Researchers followed 92 autistic people with average-or-higher IQ from age 2 into adulthood. The common belief is that high cognitive ability sits uncomfortably alongside weak daily-living skills — cooking, money, getting around. Instead, 57 percent showed life skills that climbed right alongside their intelligence the whole way, with no gap ever opening. For the other 43 percent, the gap wasn’t there at age 2; it emerged slowly through childhood. Interestingly, which group someone fell into predicted no difference in adult employment, independent living, friendships, or happiness. Lead author Elaine Clarke’s takeaway is that autistic people can learn life skills, and IQ alone is a poor way to guess what someone will become. That’s the asynchrony idea I’ve spent years on — a mind develops on its own timeline, and a single test score never tells you where it’s going. (Caveat: the cohort enrolled in the early 1990s, so diagnostic norms have shifted since, which is worth holding in mind with the adult outcomes.) Source: Limited Discrepancy Between Cognitive Ability and Daily Living Skills in Autism, Autism Research (2026)

3. The impulsivity in ADHD can also show up as a willingness to take risks for other people.

We hear endlessly about the dangerous side of teenage impulsivity. So researchers had 104 teens — 50 with a clinical ADHD diagnosis, 54 without — rate how likely they’d be to take three kinds of risk. The ADHD group reported more prosocial risk-taking: standing up for a bullied classmate, speaking out against an authority figure, giving away their own money. There was no group difference on the negative risks here. And the driver wasn’t empathy, oddly — the researchers point instead to a heightened sense of fairness, an impulse to right a wrong. I find this genuinely useful. The same fast, unfiltered wiring that gets a kid in trouble can be the very thing that makes them jump in when someone needs defending, which says the work is to aim that wiring somewhere worth going, rather than just sanding it down. (Caveat: small sample, hypothetical scenarios rather than observed behavior, and a likely high-functioning slice, so it needs replicating before anyone over-claims.) Source: The Upside of ADHD-related Risk-taking, Journal of Attention Disorders (2025)

4. Bilinguals build grammar with one shared piece of mental machinery, whatever language they’re speaking.

Using MEG, which tracks the brain millisecond by millisecond, researchers watched highly fluent Spanish–English bilinguals turn singular nouns into plurals. In both languages, the same left-side fronto-temporal network handled the grammatical move, kicking in about a tenth of a second after the cue. The pattern held across both languages, across different ways of forming plurals, and even for invented pseudowords the brain had never seen before. That last part is the kicker for me: it means the brain isn’t just memorizing forms, it’s running an abstract, reusable operation — building the new from a rule, on the fly. That’s the generative mind I find endlessly fascinating, the same capacity that sits underneath creativity and imagination. (Caveat: a tightly controlled task with proficient bilinguals on a single grammatical feature — elegant, but a narrow slice of the messy whole of language.) Source: A Shared Neural Mechanism for Abstract Grammatical Computations Across Languages in Bilinguals, Journal of Neuroscience (2026)

5. Intellectual humility means hunting for the criticism you can actually use.

Across three experiments (97, 196, and 441 participants), people higher in intellectual humility were more receptive to harsh feedback, but with a precise catch. In the second study, that openness only showed up when the feedback came with a hint for how to improve. A bare “you got it wrong, here’s your low score” did nothing for them. In the third, given the choice, the humble folks actively picked the slower, more detailed feedback over the quick verdict, even when it meant sitting longer with their own failure. So they aren’t simply thick-skinned; they’re selectively open — to the version of the bad news that has a door in it. This is close to my own lane on growth: the kind of openness that counts is an appetite for criticism you can actually do something with. (Caveat: cross-sectional and self-reported, with most people clustered at the high end of the humility scale, so the genuinely closed-minded weren’t well represented.) Source: Intellectual humility predicts receptivity to negative feedback that supports learning, The Journal of Positive Psychology (2026)

6. Your specific mental strengths each carry their own genetic signature — they’re not just spillover from general intelligence.

I’m highlighting a study from 2022 here because it’s foundational to a question I’ve spent my career on. Pulling together 77 publications and more than 747,000 twin comparisons, researchers found that specific cognitive abilities — reading and writing, quantitative skill, processing speed, and others — are about 56 percent heritable on average, a touch higher than general intelligence itself. Here’s the striking part: even after statistically stripping out “g,” those abilities stayed around 53 percent heritable. It seems each talent has its own genetic roots, not merely a slice of some single general smarts. One surprise I loved — the school-taught domains like math and reading were more genetically influenced than “innate-seeming” fluid reasoning. This is consistent with my argument in Ungifted: intelligence isn’t one thing, and people carry customized cognitive profiles that a one-size education tends to flatten. (Big caveat: heritability describes variation across a population, not “half of any one person’s mind,” and this meta-analysis was published in 2022, so I’m featuring it as foundational rather than brand-new.) Source: The genetics of specific cognitive abilities, Intelligence (2022)

7. People who hold themselves to the same standard they demand of others show a more active moral-control region — and nudging it made them fairer.

This one is bold, in both senses. Researchers in China started from a familiar human failing: we tend to judge others harshly for the very things we excuse in ourselves. They found that people who are morally consistent — applying one standard to themselves and everyone else — showed greater activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a hub for weighing value and exercising self-control, while the morally inconsistent showed less. Then they did something striking. Using gentle, non-invasive stimulation to raise activity in that region, they actually increased people’s moral consistency. That hints at something causal, and at a hopeful idea: that fairness toward others may be less a fixed trait and more a capacity we can strengthen. It speaks to a thread I keep pulling on — the distance between performed virtue and the real thing. (Caveat: this leans on fMRI, which the field reads with real caution, and the samples were small, so hold the brain story loosely; the behavioral pattern is sturdier.) Source: Moral inconsistency and the vmPFC, Cell Reports (2026)

8. We’re more rattled by people we think are wrong than by people who are merely different.

Across four studies with 2,027 U.S. adults, the familiar “we just prefer like-minded people” story took a hit. What actually drove the distress and the urge to avoid someone — to block them, to not want them as a neighbor or coworker — wasn’t difference of opinion. It was the conviction that the other person held a false belief. The more certain people were that someone was flat wrong, the stronger their negative reaction, while certainty that someone was merely different predicted nothing. In one experiment, simply reframing an identical disagreement as “incorrect” rather than “different” raised the temperature on its own. The authors think false beliefs threaten our sense of a shared reality. I’d set it beside the old humanistic idea of transcending dichotomies: a lot of what we call disagreement is really our discomfort that the world has stopped making sense the way we need it to. (Caveat: recalled and hypothetical scenarios with U.S. online samples, so real-world conflict may run hotter or cooler.) Source: The misery of misbelief, Political Psychology (2026)

9. Toddlers who pretend more tend to have fewer emotional and behavioral problems years later.

Drawing on 1,426 Australian children tracked from ages 2–3 to 6–7, educators rated each toddler’s pretend play — feeding a stuffed animal, turning a box into a house, playing make-believe with other kids. Stronger early pretend play predicted fewer emotional and behavioral difficulties later, and it held up even after accounting for family income, the mother’s mental health, language ability, and attachment. The twist: emotional regulation, the obvious candidate, did not explain the link, which sent the team toward embodied cognition — the idea that acting things out with the body builds the flexible thinking that supports mental health. As someone who treats imagination as a serious human capacity and not a cute phase, I find that unexplained gap honest and interesting. (Caveat: observational, with pretend play captured by just three educator-rated questions, so it can’t prove play causes the better outcomes, and the arrow could partly run the other way.) Source: Longitudinal Evidence of the Relationship Between Pretend Play and Mental Health in the Early Years, Early Childhood Education Journal (2026)

10. Parenthood barely moves day-to-day happiness, but it deepens the sense that life is meaningful.

A cross-cultural study of 5,556 people across ten countries — China, Japan, Peru, Poland, the UK, and more — separated parenthood from being in a relationship, a confound older studies often missed. Once relationship status was accounted for, parents and non-parents looked nearly identical on everyday happiness and life satisfaction. What differed was meaning: parents reported a slightly greater presence of meaning in life, mothers more so. The author calls it a “neutrality paradox” — evolution would predict joy, yet baseline happiness stays flat — and suggests our emotional spikes around our kids are built to be temporary motivators rather than a permanent mood lift. It maps cleanly onto the meaning-versus-happiness distinction I keep drawing: a life can be demanding, even costly to your daily mood, and still be one of the most meaningful things you ever do. (Caveat: self-reported, convenience samples, and it didn’t measure children’s ages or numbers, so the everyday texture of parenting is beyond its reach.) Source: Is Parenthood Contributing to Emotional Wellbeing? The Neutrality Paradox, Evolutionary Psychology (2026)

That’s the ten for this month. I’m curious which one surprised you, and even more curious which ones you’re skeptical of! Tell me in the comments. I’ll be back next month with ten more.

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A thoughtful reader sent me this research and I was so excited about it I wanted to write a brief post about it.

Here is the backdrop: If you read my recent piece on why mindfulness researchers have the wrong brain villain, you know my quarrel with the popular story that the default mode network (what I prefer to call the Imagination Network) is the enemy of a good life, the thing meditation exists to switch off. The usual evidence is that experienced meditators show reduced default-mode activity. Quiet the network, quiet the suffering. Case closed.

Except the case was built almost entirely on one type of meditation. The neuroscientist Fred Travis and the philosopher Jonathan Shear have argued that meditations actually fall into three different categories: focused attention (hold the mind on one object), open monitoring (watch whatever arises), and automatic self-transcending (let the practice settle the mind on its own). Most of the "meditation quiets the DMN" research studied the first two. (Open monitoring turns out to have its own intriguing relationship to creativity, but that's a post for another day.) The third one behaves very differently.

Enter Transcendental Meditation, the textbook example of “automatic self-transcending.” The findings keep converging from different directions:

• In a 2010 EEG study (general-audience summary here), default-mode activity during TM was actually higher than during ordinary eyes-closed rest. That’s the opposite of suppression of the default mode network!

• In a 2017 follow-up, Fred Travis and Niyazi Parim found the default-mode hubs (the posterior cingulate and precuneus) stayed active during TM, and concluded that it does not belong in the focused-attention category at all.

• In a 2018 fMRI study, blood flow rose in attention and executive areas while dropping in arousal areas, the brain signature of attention deployed with almost no effort.

(A longtime TM practitioner has also gathered several of these findings in one place, if you want a lay tour of the literature.)

Put these findings together and you get a striking picture: During this practice, the imaginative, self-referential network is not switched off. It is engaged, alongside the attention system, in a low-effort, restful-alert state. The dreaming and the steering, online together, with the strain turned way down.

Why does this thrill me? Because it’s consistent with where I keep arguing the field needs to go: meditation is not one thing. Different practices do genuinely different things to the brain, and lumping them together confounds the science, a point Travis makes directly. If one kind of meditation turns the Imagination Network down and another turns it up, then “meditation quiets the default mode network” is not a fact about meditation. It was a fact about a subset of meditation.

It also fits the larger story I keep telling. The Imagination Network is not a villain to be silenced. It is the seat of your daydreams, your autobiographical memories, your sense of self, your ability to imagine a future, and your ability to take the perspective of another person. A practice that deepens your contact with that inner ground, instead of evicting you from it, is doing something worth understanding rather than something to suppress.

And this isn't only a neuroscience story. The contemplative traditions that mindfulness was distilled from is not meant to delete the mind's inner life either. The Buddhist scholar B. Alan Wallace — who spent fourteen years as a monk before earning his PhD — describes a classical practice he calls settling the mind in its natural state, in which "whenever any type of mental event is observed — be it a thought, an image, a feeling, a desire, and so on — one simply takes note of it… without trying to suppress or sustain it." You turn toward the stream of thoughts and images and watch them "arise and pass of their own accord," rather than evicting yourself from them. The aim is not an empty mind. It’s a steady one — steady enough to make use of the inner life instead of being tossed around by it.

One honest caveat, because I care about getting this right: this body of work comes largely from a single research program, the Center for Brain, Consciousness, and Cognition at Maharishi International University, which is institutionally tied to the TM movement. The convergence across EEG and fMRI is encouraging and the methods are sound, but findings this clean deserve replication by independent labs with no horse in the race. So I am holding their findings as genuinely exciting and provisional at the same time.

Still, the core lesson is one I will keep banging my imaginary drum about. The most useful question is not whether meditation is good for the brain, full stop. It is which meditation, doing what, to which network, for whom. The inner life is not noise to be filtered out. Sometimes the entire point is to turn toward it.

Thank you to the reader who sent this my way. This is exactly the kind of note that makes my writing here worth it.

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Short note today.

Registration for the 8-week live course — The Science of Living Well, starting July 8 — is open, and the early-bird rate closes Sunday, June 28. It’s $395 now, $497 after.

It’s live, it’s interactive, every week comes with a Growth Challenge you actually do (not just nod along to), and you’ll be in it with a real group of people, not watching alone.

I’ve taught this course at Columbia for years, and finally getting to take it from that classroom out to everyone — not just enrolled students — has me more excited than I’ve been about anything in a long while.

→ Reserve your spot

And if now’s not your time, you lose nothing. The newsletter stays free, I’m here every week regardless. Either way — thank you for reading. Truly.

— Scott

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Before we dive in today — a quick heads-up: I'm going live with David Epstein, author of the new bestseller Inside the Box, on Friday, June 26 at 3:30pm PT. (If you caught some duplicate invites a few days ago — sorry, I’m still figuring out how to set these up — this is the real one →) https://substack.com/live-stream/249996. Add it to your calendar and come hang out with us!

I want to clear up a misconception I see everywhere in cognitive neuroscience, including in published papers that really should know better.

The misconception goes like this: There’s a seesaw in your brain between the Default Mode Network, which I prefer to call the Imagination Network, and the Executive Control Network. More technically, the idea is that these two networks are “anticorrelated”: The more you turn inward to your rich imagination, the story goes, the more you inhibit your capacity to focus and execute. And the more you engage your executive control, the more you mute your inner stream of consciousness. Inner life and getting things done, locked in opposition.

Guess what? It ain’t true.

The real seesaw isn’t between the Imagination Network and executive control. It’s between the Imagination Network and the Dorsal Attention Network, the system that activates when you direct your attention outward, onto a task in the world in front of your eyes. Those two networks do tend to sit at opposite ends of the seesaw when the brain is at rest. So the basic finding is real. It just had been pinned on the wrong network!

Why does this matter? Well, here is where things get genuinely interesting. A beautiful study by Matthew Dixon, Jessica Andrews-Hanna, Kalina Christoff, and their colleagues (NeuroImage, 2017) took this supposed iron law and actually tested how stable it is. They found it is far more flexible than most neuroscientists assumed.

Three findings stood out.

First, the Dorsal Attention Network is only anticorrelated with the core of the Imagination Network, the part recruited when you reflect on your autobiographical self. It is not anticorrelated with the other subsystems, the ones involved in mentalizing (thinking about other minds) and the retrieval of deeply personal memories. So even the real seesaw is partial. Most of your imagination isn’t even on it.

Second, the anticorrelation that does exist varies enormously depending on what you are doing. The networks slide between competing and cooperating across different cognitive states, and even moment to moment, flipping between anticorrelation and positive correlation over time, far more than the tidy “competing systems” story allows.

Third, and this is my favorite part: what predicts whether the two networks compete or cooperate is the frontoparietal control network, the executive system itself. It acts as the moderator, deciding when to pull the networks apart and when to integrate them, depending on what the task actually demands.

What does all of this mean in plain English? A few implications off the top of my head:

1. Executive control is not just for the outside world. The Executive Control Network gets described as the network responsible for paying attention to what’s outside of you. But that is actually the Dorsal Attention Network’s job. Your executive control can focus you on your inner stream of consciousness just as powerfully as on external input. I was mentored in graduate school by Jerome L. Singer, the father of daydreaming research, who found that we can be intensely mindful of our daydreams and put them to remarkably productive and creative use. Focus and imagination are not enemies. They are collaborators.

2. There is no strict wall between inner and outer processing. Even the Dorsal Attention Network can couple with the Imagination Network, especially the mentalizing and memory subsystems. Think about it this way: the network that holds your most personal memories can steer your attention out into the world. Walk into the kitchen of a grandparent who has passed, and your memory of baking with them there pulls your eyes straight to their old mixing bowl on the shelf. A deeply personal recollection, reaching outward to aim your attention at something real in front of you.

So these supposedly “opposed” systems actually work together quite often, and the executive network is what flexibly keeps them apart or brings them together, depending on what the moment calls for.

3. The anticorrelation we do have is mostly a gift. I actually think it is a good thing that the core of the Imagination Network and the Dorsal Attention Network tend to sit on opposite ends of the seesaw. As Andrews-Hanna and colleagues suggest, this shielding may protect your abstract self-reflection from being constantly interrupted by raw perceptual input. In other words, it may be part of how you keep “what I am seeing out there” distinct from “my sense of who I am.”

I have written about this link between creativity and mental illness for many years: in Scientific American, in Psychology Today, in a scholarly piece with the philosopher Elliot Samuel Paul in Frontiers in Psychology, and among many other publications on the topic. The common thread across all my articles on the topic: creativity and psychosis-proneness seem to share an underlying ingredient, a reduced ability to suppress the precuneus, a hub of the Imagination Network, so that more raw material floods into conscious awareness.

That porousness is a gift when you can steer it and a hazard when you cannot. What turns the same flood into creativity rather than chaos is the executive steering we have been talking about, the protective control that selects the useful ideas and lets the rest go. So my hunch is that when the separation between these streams breaks down too far, as it may in conditions like schizophrenia, they become genuinely hard to tell apart.

There are many more implications than I can fit here, but the headline is simple, and it matters: your imagination and your ability to focus were not designed to be at war. The brain that dreams and the brain that steers are built to work together, and most of the time, they do it beautifully (this is a great example of an article perfectly dovetailing with the title of this newsletter).

This is exactly why I keep arguing that the Imagination Network is the protagonist of your inner life, not its villain. And it is why creativity, in the research I have done with the neuroscientist Roger Beaty and others, turns out to depend on these networks coupling into an integrated whole rather than one “defeating” the other.

The seesaw is real. We have just been watching the wrong end of it.

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On Friday, June 26 at 3:30pm PT (6:30pm ET), I’m going live with David Epstein — author of Range and the brand-new bestseller Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. We’ll get into why imposing limits actually fuels creativity and performance and what it all means for becoming more fully yourself and for the future of our species!

It’s live, so you can join in real time and drop your questions in the chat — I’ll take some at the end if we have time. Here’s the live link.

To join: make sure you’ve got the Substack app with notifications on — you’ll get a ping the moment we go live, and it’ll land in your inbox too. Add it to your calendar so you don’t miss it.

Hope to see you there.

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Hi friends, here’s a free Growth Challenge from my upcoming “Science of Living Well” 8-week virtual course. No strings, takes about fifteen minutes, and it’s almost embarrassingly simple: go for an awe walk.

That’s the whole instruction. You go for a walk — anywhere — but instead of walking to get your steps in or to grind through your mental to-do list, you walk to be surprised. You deliberately go looking for things that are bigger than you. The scale of an old tree. The architecture of a cloud. A kid noticing something you stopped noticing decades ago. The point isn’t to find something Instagram-worthy. It’s to let your attention widen past yourself for a few minutes.

Here’s why it works, and it’s not woo: Dacher Keltner’s research on awe has found that even small, ordinary doses of it do something measurable: awe quiets the ego — the “small self” — and, paradoxically, that’s what leaves people feeling more connected, more generous, and happier afterward. In one study, older adults who took a weekly awe walk reported more joy and more compassion than those who just walked. Same walk. Different attention.

That’s the secret, really. Most of us move through extraordinary things on autopilot. Awe is a way of paying attention you can switch on — on a Tuesday, on your own street. You don't have to go anywhere to find it.

Try it this week. Leave the phone in your pocket. See what’s been there the whole time.

p.s. — This is a taste of what we do in my live course, The Science of Living Well, starting July 8 — the week on awe and peak experiences is one of my favorites. Early-bird runs through next Sunday, June 28, if you want in. But the walk above is yours to keep either way.

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Look, we don’t usually file a good dumb joke in the same drawer as a Rothko. One you snicker at on the subway; the other you contemplate in a hushed museum. But a delightful new preprint by my friend Paul Silvia, with Vi Bui, makes the case that they belong together. Humor, they argue, is an aesthetic experience, and you can study a joke the way you’d study any work of art: by looking at the product, the experience, and the audience.

This isn’t a new idea so much as a forgotten one. Daniel Berlyne, the founder of the modern psychology of aesthetics, thought humor was central to the whole project. He wrote that there are “affinities between the lowliest joke and the sublimest art.” Then the two fields wandered into separate rooms and mostly stopped talking to each other. Silvia and Bui are trying to get them back in the same conversation, and the trip turns out to be a lot of fun.

Start with the funniest unit of language

Humor researchers have a “fruit fly” they study the way geneticists study Drosophila: the single word. And it turns out some words are simply funnier than others. The funny ones in English (jiggly, waddle, smooch, upchuck, giggle) tend to be short, a little rude, about people, and stuffed with unusual sounds. The effect is so basic that it even holds for fake words. People reliably rate woomy, wombo, and cloof as funnier than arthen or ressed, mostly because they’re packed with improbable letters. There is, apparently, a music to silliness.

Then there’s the humble, much-maligned pun. (“What’s green and likes to insult people? A provocado.”) A study of thousands of puns found something I love: the funniest puns keep the sound close to the original word (provocado is barely a step from avocado), while the funniest wordplay jokes shove the meaning far apart. Sound near, meaning far. Both at once. The joke lives right in that gap.

A joke can land a dozen ways

Here’s where the aesthetics lens really earns its keep. We tend to assume humor produces one feeling: amusement. But just as a painting can move you, bore you, or genuinely unsettle you, a joke can land as delight, or confusion, or irritation, or full-body cringe. The psychologist Willibald Ruch’s model maps exactly this. When a joke misses, it doesn’t land in neutral. It curdles into boredom, or “I don’t get it,” or “I can’t believe you just said that.” Anyone who has watched a joke die at a dinner table knows the silence has a flavor.

Your sense of humor is a personality test

And then there’s you. The single biggest variable in whether something is funny is who’s listening. The paper gathers the research, and frankly, it confirms what we already suspected. People high in sensation-seeking love absurdist, no-resolution humor. People high in the “Dark Tetrad” (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism) are the ones who enjoy cruel and disparaging jokes, rate sexist humor as “less serious,” and drift toward online trolling. You’re taking a personality test every time you laugh.

On the wholesome end sits the dad joke, that pun-loving, aggressively clean genre your father will not stop deploying. When researchers text-mined Reddit’s r/dadjokes, the people who found them funniest skewed more affluent, educated, religious, conscientious, conservative, and (naturally) parents. The corny joke at the dinner table and the dark joke in the group chat are doing the same psychological work. They’re both quietly telling you who someone is.

Why I love this

I have a soft spot for this paper for a personal reason. Years ago I co-wrote a piece called “The Tears of a Clown” about the minds of comedy writers, so I’ve long believed comedy deserves to be taken seriously as a creative act. But the deeper reason is this: humor is one of the most democratic forms of creativity we have. You don’t need a studio, a gallery, or a grant. You need a friend, a moment, and a slightly improbable word. Every time you make someone laugh, you’ve made a tiny work of art that existed for one second and then dissolved.

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P.S. I'm bringing my Columbia course, The Science of Living Well, to the public this summer — learn with me: scottbarrykaufman.com/livingwell.

When I was a kid, I was placed in special education. Recurrent ear infections had left me with a central auditory processing disorder, and the school’s verdict was that I was a slow learner who needed to be sorted into the room for slow learners. I stayed there for years. I was the opposite of the gifted child.

So you can imagine the feeling of reading a long New York magazine essay by Katie Arnold-Ratliff arguing that “giftedness itself is a lie.” But what you imagine is probably wrong. Because instead of ending up as a warrior against gifted education, I’ve actually become a fierce advocate of gifted education. Here’s why.

***

I’ve spent my entire adult life studying the question what is intelligence, really? I went on to study cognitive science, earn a Ph.D. at Yale, and write a book called Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined, all of it driven by a desire to redefine intelligence. So I came in sympathetic to her critique, I really did. The trouble is that the part she’s right about and the part she’s wrong about are two different claims, and the entire essay depends on us not noticing the difference.

What does she get right? Well, some things. Testing a four-year-old once and stamping “gifted” on them for life is bad science: a child’s scores keep moving as they develop. What’s more, the equity numbers are a disgrace: about 60 percent of kids in gifted programs are white in a system that’s roughly 40 percent white, and of the 781 students admitted to Stuyvesant last year, eight were Black. None of that is defensible. The machinery we use to find gifted kids is broken in ways that should embarrass everyone who runs it.

But watch what she says next: She goes from the way we identify gifted kids is broken to giftedness is a lie, and those are wildly different sentences. The first is about a measurement. The second is about reality. You can demolish the SAT without proving that some kids don’t read at three; you can expose a rigged casting process without proving that talent doesn’t exist. The lie isn’t giftedness. The lie is the essentialist label: the fantasy that a Tuesday-morning test reveals a fixed kind of person, a caste you’re assigned at five and can never leave, or (in my case) a caste of ungifted that you can never escape.

Here’s where the argument actually breaks down, claim by claim.

***

Let me first say something very clearly, as someone who has spent a career publishing on this exact question: for all its length and confidence, the NY Mag piece is scientifically thin. It’s a beautifully written personal essay that leans on a handful of selectively chosen criticisms and almost none of the actual data: the decades of evidence on how ability is measured, how it develops, and how much of it our current system misses. That matters, because this is at bottom an empirical question, and you can’t settle an empirical question with a well-told story. The real science is more nuanced, and frankly more hopeful, than the piece lets on.

She writes that the whole pro-gifted story, that you can put a number on a child’s intelligence and that bright kids benefit from enrichment, contains “not a single part” that’s true. That claim is simply false. Cognitive ability is one of the most reliably measured and predictively valid constructs in all of psychology. The longest-running study of intellectually precocious kids, the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, has tracked its participants for nearly half a century and finds that ability spotted in childhood predicts patents, doctorates, and creative work decades later, far above base rates. And the claim that enrichment doesn’t help runs straight into one of the most lopsided literatures in all of education: the evidence that well-designed acceleration works is about as settled as anything we have. You can argue we find the wrong kids. You cannot argue the ruler measures nothing.

Then there’s her best material, which is about instability. She quotes a test-maker mocking the old belief that a child found gifted at four is gifted for life “just like you have curly red hair,” and notes that scores shift over time. She’s right, and honestly, I part company here with the people loudly defending the tests too, because I am not an advocate of early one-shot tests.

But here’s some really interesting nuance. On the one hand, it’s actually possible to detect at least some signs of giftedness in infancy. The data here is kind of remarkable. Brief tests of infant attention (basically, how fast a baby gets bored of a picture it’s already seen) predict adult IQ and academic achievement years later, at around .3, and independent of how educated the parents are. IQ at age three already tracks IQ at twenty-one at about .7. So no, this isn’t nothing. There’s real signal there, even that early.

On the other hand, those same scores are nowhere near fixed. Follow the same kids over time and you’ll watch IQ swing around quite a bit, especially in childhood and adolescence. In one study of teenagers, a full third showed a clear change in IQ: one kid’s score jumped 21 points, another’s fell 18. Intelligence in those years is tied to the dynamic way the cortex is still maturing, not to some fixed quantity you’re handed at birth. As my mentor, the British IQ researcher Nick Mackintosh, used to say, if you scored the same at forty as you did at ten, something would have gone badly wrong in your life.

So which is it, real or a mirage? Both, and neither, which is precisely the nuance the article never reaches for. The early signal is real, and a single early score is still no verdict. You have to hold both of those at once. That’s not fence-sitting. That’s just what the actual data require.

                                                                      ***

The fix: stop betting a child’s future on one test at age four. It’s exactly why I’ve argued for re-screening kids and assessing them over time instead of a single dramatic moment. And I’m the evidence for that, too: my own ceiling was set wrong by people holding a clipboard, and then it moved.

Arnold-Ratliff also calls intelligence tests “unreliable,” and that’s the wrong word for the real problem. There’s a difference between a bad way to make a high-stakes decision and an unreliable measure, and she’s collapsed the two. One number, caught on one morning, isn’t noise. The mistake is treating it as a verdict on a whole human being and what they are capable of becoming in life.

The biggest contradiction in the piece is quieter. Arnold-Ratliff writes that a gifted child is just one who performs differently from peers, “rather than any inherent characteristic,” as if the category were drawn in sand. And then, a few paragraphs later, her own reporting blows that up. She notes that highly intelligent kids are far more likely to be diagnosed with autism and ADHD, and she quotes a neuropsychologist describing their “overexcitability,” brains “firing nonstop,” acutely sensitive to everything around them. One of her own sources says she doesn’t think there are “truly gifted neurotypical children.” Friends, that is not the description of a mirage: That is the description of a real, embodied, neurologically distinct way of moving through the world! It is, in fact, the twice-exceptional and asynchronous development I’ve spent years studying, and that I lived. You cannot call giftedness a social fiction in one breath and describe its neural fingerprints in the next.

So what do we actually do? Not what she suggests, which is to wave the existence of giftedness under the rug. In my view, we need to do the opposite. We look harder, and we look wider.

***

Start with the disparities, because they’re the strongest part of her case and they point somewhere she doesn’t go. Most gifted programs are entered through referral. A teacher or a parent has to flag the child first, and referral is precisely where bias lives. The fix for a biased front door is not to brick up the building. It’s universal screening: test every child instead of waiting for an adult to notice them. When districts have actually done this, they’ve found the low-income, Black, and Hispanic gifted kids who were sitting in the same classrooms the whole time, invisible to a system that was never pointed at them. The cleanest demonstration is Card and Giuliano’s research, which showed exactly that. Universal screening is the single most pro-equity reform available in this entire debate, and somehow it’s the one almost nobody is shouting about. (Years ago I surveyed how states actually define and identify giftedness, and the variation is staggering, which tells you most of this is a policy choice, not a law of nature.)

Second, widen what counts. Here’s an irony: the U.S. government’s own 1972 definition of giftedness was already broad, naming six dimensions including creative thinking, leadership, and ability in the visual and performing arts. We just stopped looking for most of them and kept the slice that fits on a Scantron. The cost is enormous. The creativity researcher E. Paul Torrance estimated that identifying gifted kids by IQ and achievement alone misses about 70 percent of the most creative children, partly because creative kids tend to be unconventional and teachers reliably nominate the pleasers instead. And unlike IQ tests, creativity measures show almost no ethnic gap. Sit with that. We have a whole category of real creative giftedness that’s far more equitably distributed, and we mostly don’t bother to look for it.

I want to name the other error too, the one being made by the people firing back at this article, because I find their rebuttal a little boring even though it isn’t technically wrong. They’re answering with eminence statistics: “BUT identified-gifted kids become professors and prizewinners at many times the base rate, so the label works!” OK, fine. But that quietly accepts her terms, that giftedness only counts if it cashes out later in achievement. It doesn’t. Giftedness is a trait, not a trophy. A gifted child who never becomes eminent was not a mirage. They were a gifted child. We understand this everywhere except the intellect. Nobody writes “the myth of athletic giftedness.” Nobody runs an exposé on basketball camps for talented twelve-year-olds, or calls a kid’s jump shot a fraud because she didn’t reach the WNBA. We see the gift, we feed it, and we don’t need it to ripen into fame to call it real. The talent is real now. Measuring a child by the output they might someday produce is the same mistake we keep making with worn-out adults: confusing a person for their productivity.

The most revealing moment is Arnold-Ratliff’s own moment. She adored her gifted years, the tidepooling, reading The New Yorker during silent reading, the night hikes built to teach courage, and she also lets slip that she may never have actually qualified for the program. Read that again. The education that changed her life was never causally connected to the test that supposedly justified it. That is the whole argument, made by accident. The problem was never the enrichment. It was the gate. So tear down the gate, not the education. Give every child the enrichment they need, when they need it.

                                                                     ***

Which brings me back to where I started. The article spends thousands of words on what the gifted label does to the kids who carry it. It never once asks what the other label does, the one I wore, the quiet verdict handed to the kids left behind that they’re the limited ones. I know that label from the inside, and I know what undid it. In ninth grade, a special-education teacher pulled me aside and asked, in effect, why I was still in her class. It had genuinely never occurred to me that I had a choice. That one question moved my ceiling more than any test ever did, and everything I’ve done since, Cambridge, Yale, a career spent studying the very intelligence I was once presumed to lack, started with a single question by a single compassionate teacher who really saw me and my potential. So when smart people decide the compassionate move is to throw out the entire idea of human potential, I get twitchy, because the kids who pay for that are never the ones at the citywide gifted school. They’re the ones nobody bothered to look at.

So, is everyone gifted? Probably not. Not everyone is gifted at everything, and a word that includes everyone describes no one. But far more kids are gifted than the gate ever lets in. In Ungifted I define intelligence as “the dynamic interplay of engagement and abilities in pursuit of personal goals.” Not an ability devoid of passion and interest. Not a fixed quantity issued at birth. A trajectory you’re allowed to be on, if someone bothers to put you on it. Somebody finally bothered with me. I want to pay this forward.

The gifted child isn’t a mirage. What’s a mirage is the velvet rope we strung around an education that should have belonged to all of them. Take down the rope, widen the lens, screen every kid, and I promise you’ll be astonished by how much was sitting in the room the entire time.

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P.S. I'm bringing my Columbia course, The Science of Living Well, to the public this summer — learn with me: scottbarrykaufman.com/livingwell.

- “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind.” — Killingsworth & Gilbert

- The default mode network is “the narrator who won’t stop talking.” — Judson Brewer

- Psychedelic “ego-dissolution” tracks the disintegration of the default mode network — Robin Carhart-Harris

- "All these thoughts and feelings may be the products of an overactive default mode network, that tightly linked set of brain structures implicated in rumination, self-referential thought, and metacognition—thinking about thinking."— Michael Pollan

HATERS GONNA HATE.

And reader — to borrow a phrase from Michael Jordan: I took it personally.

I’m a creativity researcher who has spent years studying the upside of the wandering mind — positive-constructive daydreaming: the playful, exploratory, future-oriented inner life that fuels imagination and insight. And Jerome L. Singer, the “father of daydreaming” who pioneered that whole line of work, became a close personal friend and sat on my dissertation committee. He is, I’m quite sure, rolling in his grave every time he hears a mindfulness researcher hate on the cognitive machinery behind daydreaming.

So when the field brandishes the brain network behind all of that as the prime suspect in human misery? I have SO MUCH to freaking say about this one. If I sound super-duper passionate in a way some of my other posts maybe don’t sound, well, that’s just the truth of how I am feeling about this topic!

They’ve got the wrong villain.

Meet the accused

The “default mode network” (as cognitive neuroscientists like to call it) is the system that’s most active when you turn inward — when you stop chasing an external goal and start to drift, remember something personal, imagine your personal future, reflect, and wonder. The textbooks file it under “task-negative,” as if it only switches on when nothing important is happening. I’ve spent my career arguing the exact opposite, which is why I call it the Imagination Network: because what it’s doing is anything but nothing!

Here’s the résumé of the accused — the actual jobs this “villain” performs:

• It writes your story. It builds your autobiographical memory and stitches it into the running internal narrative that makes you you across time.

• It travels through time. It lets you step out of the present to imagine your future self, rehearse your goals, and run the “what if” scenarios that planning a life requires.

• It reads other minds. It’s the seat of perspective-taking, empathy, and theory of mind — how you climb out of your own head and into someone else’s, modeling what another person thinks, wants, and feels.

• It incubates your best ideas — and powers creative flow. Daydreaming and mind-wandering, its signature activities, are essential creative insights. And when you drop into creative flow— improvising, generating, making without self-conscious effort — this network is right there, driving the spontaneous, self-generated stream that flow is made of.

• It can work in cooperation with other brain networks. In research I’ve published with Roger Beaty, creativity depends on this network coupling with the brain’s executive-control system — the dreaming and the steering, firing together to turn an inner vision into a meaningful creative result.

Now read that list again. These are not idle defaults or bugs to be patched out. In my view, they are the soul of human existence! They are the most personal functions we have — the very machinery of selfhood: who you’ve been, who you might still become, how you reach other people, what you create. Strip them away and there’s no inner life left to speak of. They are, in the most literal sense, essential to self-actualization itself.

And here’s the part the mindfulness zealots keep missing: the network they smear as the self-absorbed “me” network is also the “us” network. Perspective-taking, empathy, connecting, inhabiting another person’s mind — that’s the same machinery. What the mindfulness researchers view as self-obsession is the very faculty that lets you get out of yourself and into someone else. It’s not just how we daydream. It’s how we connect — and how we love.

This brain network is irreducibly personal and contextual — built from your memories, your people, your imagined future, and meaningful only in the situation you’re actually in. There’s no universal verdict to hand down on a network that is, by definition, about you. Which is exactly what makes “just turn it down” such a category error.

That is not the résumé of a villain. That’s the résumé of the most human part of the human brain.

The real culprit was never the network

So why does the network keep showing up at the scene of every crime? Because it also hosts rumination — the stuck, repetitive, self-attacking loop where the same dark thought circles the drain for the hundredth time. Rumination is real, and it is genuinely a source of suffering.

But here’s the irony I learned the hard way on the cushion: rumination isn’t even really wandering. When you ruminate, your mind isn’t roaming free — it’s locked in, grinding one groove, doing the precise opposite of what an unleashed imagination does. So rumination is one mode of the Imagination Network that got stuck on another network (such as the amygdala), not the network itself.

The science actually backs this up if you read past the headlines. “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind” turned out to be far more nuanced than the title promised: whether mind-wandering lifts or sinks your mood depends on its content and type. Spontaneous, negative, can’t-stop-it wandering hurts. Deliberate, prospective, playful wandering — the kind that solves problems in the shower and writes the next paragraph for you — helps.

The crime isn’t wandering. It’s getting trapped in your wanderings, and losing the freedom to wander back out.

The irony that gives the whole thing away

Here’s the part I find almost funny. The people prosecuting the Imagination Network keep, in the same breath, marveling at its gifts.

Robin Carhart-Harris’s own data describes the psychedelic state as a wider, more flexible, dreamlike repertoire of mind — an “entropic brain” overflowing with novel connections. That is not the absence of the imagination network’s contribution. That’s imagination, unleashed.

And Pollan? For most of How to Change Your Mind, the default mode network is the ego to be vanquished — he credits it with mental time-travel and the very sense of self, then celebrates the dissolution of his own ego, on psilocybin and toad venom alike, as the breakthrough: I dissolved my ego and found God. In his last chapter (a point in which I chucked my Kindle into the ocean), Pollan closes with a coda titled “Going to Meet My Default Mode Network,” in which he straps on a 128-electrode cap in Judson Brewer’s lab to drive down activity in his posterior cingulate cortex — a major hub of the Imagination Network. The triumphant finish? Recalling a psychedelic vision of his ego as an empty steel pylon drifting away, he sends the readout plunging below baseline and signs off “squinting to make out something wondrous.” The whole arc of the book seems to point to this defining moment where he considers the whole journey a success because he silenced his Imagination Network!

Brewer describes that exact brain region as the place where we “take something personally” — the brain’s “But enough about you” center. So the field’s most beloved narrator goes looking for transcendence by switching off the part of his brain that takes things personally. Reader, you already know how I took that. As I’ve argued repeatedly, a strong sense of self is a very different thing than a strong ego. You can have a quiet ego and maintain a strong sense of who you are, what you value, and who you wish to become.

And what’s the deal with his epilogue?! The richest irony: in his epilogue titled In Praise of Neural Diversity, he gives a plea to value many modes of mind. Which is, of course, my whole point. They are all standing over the thing they claim to have defeated, in awe of everything it gave them. After nearly four hundred pages prosecuting the default mode network, Pollan ends the book in rapture over a sustained mental space where ideas drift in and out and “you can launch a topic or change it, like a channel” — a state in which, he admits, “the ego is not entirely absent” and “a certain kind of mental work is getting done,” one that keeps handing him “usable ideas, images, or metaphors.” He calls it “one of the great gifts” of the whole journey.

Folks: that’s positive-constructive daydreaming!!!! That’s the Imagination Network, doing the very thing I’ve spent my career documenting. He demonizes it for nearly four hundred pages, then ends his book in awe of it.

You don’t have to dissolve the imagination to be free. You have to free it.

To be fair to the prosecution

I’m not here to tell you meditation doesn’t work. Meditation can be deeply meaningful and transformative. I’m a regular mindfulness meditation practitioner myself. I did the full eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction course, sat about forty minutes a day, and came away genuinely changed: my grip on my own anxiety loosened, and I wrote up the whole journey as a skeptic who became convinced in the merits of a regular mindfulness practice.

The benefits are real, and meditation is excellent training for the executive attention network— the brain’s ability to flexibly control one’s attention. But the single deepest thing I learned on the cushion is the very point of this essay: mindfulness is not the opposite of mind-wandering.

If that sounds like a contradiction — a meditator defending the very network meditation is supposed to quiet — it isn’t. It’s a yes/and. A regular meditation practice doesn’t delete the imagination network; it tunes it, calming the self-critical, ruminative parts while leaving the imaginative ones free to roam. Regulation isn’t suppression — it’s the freedom to choose when to focus and when to wander.

My quarrel is with the story: the triumphalist framing that the default mode network is the enemy of a good life, the thing to suppress, dissolve, or “defeat.” (I’ve made this case to Jud Brewer directly more than once, and I’ll happily keep making it.) Because here’s what that story misses.

It’s the integration, not the war

In a whole separate line of research, my colleagues and I have been showing that higher-level creative cognition requires a very strong integration between the executive attention network and the Imagination Network — the steering and the dreaming, firing together. Divergent thinking and openness to experience lean hard on Imagination Network processes: daydreaming, imagining the future, visualizing your future self, reaching back into your most personal memories. In our work, the Imagination Network isn’t the villain. It’s the hero!

The receipts, if you want them: default–executive coupling supports creative idea production (in Nature’s Scientific Reports); openness to experience and default-network efficiency; how eminent and non-eminent thinkers differ in brain activity and in large-scale network interactions during creative thought; brain morphometry and creative achievement; and Roger Beaty’s elegant recent work showing that “control-default hubs” act as an integrative core supporting complex cognition and creativity.

Put the two literatures in the same room and the resolution is obvious: the goal was never to crown one network the hero and the other the villain. It’s all about the integration.

And I suspect that’s the real reason the default mode network keeps getting cast as the enemy. Underneath the neuroscience sits an older ideology — that the self is the problem, and the destination is no self at all: dissolve the ego, silence the narrator, erase the “me.”

But run that program to completion and you don’t get a sage. You get a freaking zombie! No inner life, no rich imagination, no thoughts of the future, no contact with your own deepest memories, and no self left to actualize. Who, exactly, wants that? (The opposite extreme is no prize either: all imagination and no control is just aimless mind-wandering and that can certainly be quite frustrating.) The whole game is the two networks working together — and keeping the strong sense of self the mindfulness researchers seem so eager to delete.

Honestly, meditation researchers and creativity researchers should be running more studies together — instead of casting the same brain network as savior or saboteur depending on which conference they’re standing in.

A different goal

In my view, the aim of a life well-lived is not a quiet mind. It’s a free one — a mind that can drop fully into the present when the present is what’s called for, and roam the past, the future, and the wildly possible when that’s what’s called for, and move flexibly between the two.

So no — I won’t be “defeating” my default mode network. I’ll keep it, thank you very much! The rumination I’ll work on. The imagination I’m keeping for good.

The Imagination Network isn’t the villain of your inner life. It’s the protagonist.

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P.S. I'm bringing my Columbia course, The Science of Living Well, to the public this summer — learn with me: scottbarrykaufman.com/livingwell.

Okay, I’m genuinely thrilled to announce this one.

This summer, I’m bringing my popular Columbia course — The Science of Living Well — out of the university and straight to you!

The most common email I get goes something like this: “I wish I could take your course. Is there any way someone outside the university could?” For years the answer was no. So I’m finally doing the thing people keep asking for. I’m teaching it live, online, outside the ivy walls.

Here’s the structure: Eight weeks, one live 90-minute session every Wednesday, starting July 8. It’s built on humanistic psychology and the science of well-being and self-actualization, and we move through the essential human needs: security, growth, mindfulness, healthy self-esteem (not the narcissistic kind), connection, love, creativity, purpose, and the peak and transcendent experiences that remind you what it means to feel fully alive.

But the part my students kept coming to office hours about wasn’t the lectures. It was the Growth Challenges. Every week pairs the science with one small, real-life experiment that gets you out of your comfort zone and helps you grow as a whole person. Because here’s the dirty secret of self-help: The shift doesn’t come from just reading the books, it comes from actually doing something with what you know. So that’s how the whole course is built. You don’t just learn it. You live it.

This whole thing is live. We’re in a room together. There’s a group of people doing the work alongside you (we call everyone “Transcenders”, affectionately), and former students tell me that part mattered as much as anything I said. There will also be an additional group coaching session each week with one of our world-class faculty members.

It's $395 to register early, through Sunday, June 28. After that it's $497, and there are a few financing options at checkout if you need them. Which, for the record, is a lot less than four years of Ivy League tuition — same professor, none of the student debt.

Reserve your spot here

And if the timing’s not right, genuinely no worries. Everything I write here stays free, always. But if you’ve ever finished one of these essays thinking “I’d love to actually go deep on this with him” — well, this is the deep version. I’d love to have you in the room.

— Scott

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