I hate that what is popular is popular.

I hate that what isn’t popular is true.

I hate that goodness isn’t more popular.

I hate that the bullies win.

I hate that the bullshitters win.

I hate that the loud ones are seen, and the reflective ones are overlooked.

There are a lot of things about this world I don’t understand.

I hate that I don’t understand.

So I keep trying to make sense of it all.

Even though the sense isn’t popular.

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My core message is that everyone has hidden strengths, even the ones nobody's ever pointed out, and naming them out loud changes what people believe they're capable of. This talk is also the first keynote where I blend magic & mentalism with psychology. You will see my alter ego, "The Amazing Dr. Scott."

Let me know what you think in the comments!

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Wake up Mom— It’s time for another research roundup!

1. Intellectual humility comes in two flavors, and only one of them is good for you.

Psychologists measured two ways of being intellectually humble in 4,049 people, including 2,526 college students followed across four waves over two years. Valuing what other people know, what the authors call interpersonal intellectual humility, went along with higher life satisfaction, a stronger sense of meaning, and fewer symptoms of anxiety and depression. Chronically doubting your own knowledge, the metacognitive kind, went the other direction entirely: more anxiety, more depression, and less meaning. I find this split clarifying. Real humility is an openness to what others can teach you, and that stance apparently comes with a psychological dividend. Relentless self-doubt is a different animal wearing humility’s clothing. (Caveat: all of it is observational, and self-report is a famously shaky way to measure how people think about their own thinking.)

Source: Metacognitive and Interpersonal Intellectual Humility Are Asymmetrically Associated with Well-Being, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (2026)

2. Having meaning at work shields you from burnout. Hungering for it predicts more.

Researchers followed 1,239 frontline workers, most of them in health and social care, from the spring of 2020 across three years. Workers who reported the presence of meaning in their lives showed less burnout down the road. Workers actively searching for meaning showed more, and the roughest combination was searching hard while feeling little, which forecast the deepest cynicism. Frankl argued that meaning pulls us through suffering, and this fits, with a wrinkle he would have appreciated: the pursuit itself can become a burden when the felt sense of purpose stays out of reach. Something worth sitting with for anyone burning out while frantically hunting for their why. (Caveat: 87 percent female, 95 percent white, heavy dropout across the three years, and no way to establish causal direction.)

Source: The dynamics of meaning in life and their associations with burnout within- and between persons, Journal of Health Psychology (2026)

3. When ensemble musicians say they played “together,” they mean something well beyond keeping time.

Interviews with 22 advanced pianists and singers in Vienna mapped what “togetherness” actually feels like from inside a performance: synchronized breathing, aligned bodies, eye contact, and a felt emotional connection the musicians described as magical when it arrives. The striking part is what they said about technique — precise synchrony alone was explicitly insufficient. You can keep perfect time with someone and never once be with them. I spent years as an opera singer and a cellist (my grandfather played cello in the Philadelphia Orchestra for nearly five decades), and I can confirm this from the inside: the difference between playing accurately alongside someone and truly playing together is the difference between adjacency and communion. (Caveat: 22 students, subjective interviews, no physiological measures, and classical conservatory culture may not generalize to your garage band.)

Source: Self-reported experiences of togetherness in classical music ensembles, Psychology of Music (2025)

4. People without a mind’s eye recognize faces fine in the moment. Remembering them is another matter.

Aphantasia is the inability to summon voluntary mental images, and this study of 34 congenital aphantasics and 41 controls dissected exactly which face skills depend on imagery. On face matching, deciding whether two photos show the same stranger, the aphantasics performed just as well as everyone else. On face memory they fell measurably behind, and roughly a quarter crossed the self-report threshold for face blindness, versus none of the controls, with about one in ten meeting objective criteria. So the mind’s eye seems to matter for holding a face over time rather than for perceiving it. A tidy clue about what mental imagery is actually for, from the people who navigate life without it. (Caveat: small samples, adults only, and the authors note children remain unstudied.)

Source: Individuals with aphantasia show independent impairments in face perception and face memory, but not face matching, Cortex (2026)

5. Emotionally intelligent people still feel envy. But they aim it somewhere useful.

Among 442 French-speaking adults, those better at regulating emotions reported more benign envy, the kind that says I want what she has, let me work for it, while showing no elevation in malicious envy, the kind that wants the other person to lose what they have. The effect was modest (about 0.165 standard deviations of benign envy per standard deviation of regulation ability) but conceptually rich: emotional skill doesn’t erase an uncomfortable emotion so much as steer it toward motivation instead of hostility. I’ve long thought we underrate envy as a source of self-knowledge — it points, with embarrassing precision, at what you actually want. The skill is in what you do once it points. (Caveat: cross-sectional, 88.5 percent female, and the regulation measure was brief.)

Source: Emotional intelligence shapes the motivational direction of envy, Personality and Individual Differences (2026)

6. The “ADHD advantage” in entrepreneurship comes with fine print: it appears mostly in cognitively able men.

Tracking 4,128 people across 28 years, researchers found that men with childhood ADHD and high cognitive ability became entrepreneurs at around triple the baseline rate, roughly 15 percent against a base of under 6. Women with ADHD started businesses at about 1 percent no matter their ability. I’ve argued since Ungifted that minds like these carry real strengths alongside real struggles, and this study honors both halves: the advantage exists, and it is conditional — on complementary abilities, and apparently on being male, which says as much about who gets encouraged, diagnosed, and funded as it does about ADHD itself. (Caveat: observational, girls were underdiagnosed in the study era, and the outcome is entering entrepreneurship, saying nothing about success or well-being.)

Source: Who benefits from ADHD in entrepreneurship? Intelligence and gender as critical boundary conditions, Applied Psychology (2026)

7. A live game does something to a crowd’s bodies: heart rates synchronize and oxytocin climbs.

Sixty spectators at college basketball games wore heart monitors and gave saliva samples while researchers watched the biology of fandom unfold. Heart rates synchronized among fans seated in the same section as play intensified. Oxytocin rose in fans who arrived with low baseline levels, cortisol fell across the board, and the higher a person’s oxytocin and synchrony, the more enjoyment and unity with the crowd they reported. Durkheim called this collective effervescence over a century ago; here it is with timestamps and hormone assays. We go to games, concerts, and congregations partly to have our nervous systems tuned to each other. (Caveat: observational, salivary oxytocin is an imperfect stand-in for what the brain is doing, and modest college games may not capture playoff intensity.)

Source: Endogenous oxytocin-linked heart-rate synchrony and social connection during live sports spectatorship, Translational Psychiatry (2026)

8. Narcissism’s charm travels well across cultures. Its combativeness gets expensive, especially where individualism reigns.

A study of 51,070 people across 57 societies split grandiose narcissism into its two working parts. Admiration, the charming, self-promoting side, went along with higher well-being essentially everywhere. Rivalry, the derogating, score-settling side, predicted lower life satisfaction around the world, and its costs were steepest in individualistic cultures, where the interpersonal bridges rivalry burns are harder to rebuild. I helped develop the Light Triad scale partly to give the study of everyday saints equal airtime with the everyday sinners, so I appreciate the precision here: the trait’s glow and its bill arrive through different doors. (Caveat: cross-sectional, well-being was measured with just two items, and vulnerable narcissism wasn’t examined.)

Source: Narcissistic Admiration, Rivalry, and Well-Being: A Multilevel Study Across 57 Societies, Journal of Personality (2026)

9. The mental-health toll attributed to autistic “masking” may owe more to social anxiety than to the masking itself.

Camouflaging, the effortful work of concealing autistic traits, has become a leading explanation for the high rates of depression and distress among autistic adults. This study of 113 autistic adults complicates that story: once social anxiety and social challenges were accounted for, camouflaging explained no additional variance in depression, distress, or disability — and none of its three components did either. The anxiety itself carried the weight. The authors’ point is clinical and hopeful, since social anxiety is something therapy knows how to treat. Given how much of the masking literature rests on self-report, I read this as an important refinement rather than a debunking: the suffering is real; the mechanism may be more treatable than we thought. (Caveat: cross-sectional, a treatment-seeking sample, and the questionnaires for masking and social anxiety overlap conceptually.)

Source: Does Camouflaging Predict Functioning, Distress, and Quality of Life for Autistic Adults?, Autism Research (2026)

10. Long-married couples aren’t alike across the board. They match on honesty and openness, and assume they match on far more.

Among 451 Dutch couples together an average of 28 years, partners knew each other startlingly well; their read on each other’s personality lined up at around 0.70, high for this corner of research. But real similarity showed up in only two of the six HEXACO traits, Honesty-Humility and Openness to Experience, the dimensions bound most tightly to values and worldview. On extraversion, an introvert was as likely to be paired with an extravert as with another introvert. People also assumed much more sameness than actually existed, especially on honesty, quietly projecting their own moral compass onto the person across the table. Lead author Kibeom Lee is careful about the takeaway, and so am I: plenty of happy couples differ on these traits. (Caveat: an all-Dutch sample, and a separate study in China found almost no partner similarity at all.)

Source: Self/spouse agreement, similarity, and assumed similarity in the HEXACO personality factors, Journal of Research in Personality (2026)

That’s the ten for this month, from musicians’ magical moments to the quiet biology of a roaring crowd.

As always, I want to hear which studies caught YOUR eye the most, and any of your criticisms of any of the studies. Because skepticism is half the fun of reading research! Share in the comments. I’ll be back next month with ten more.

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Krista and I talk a lot about passion. A big theory in positive psychology is Robert Vallerand’s dualistic theory of passion. Vallerand has shown that harmonious passion (an autonomous internalization of a passion) predicts lots of positive outcomes compared to obsessive passion (a controlled internalization of an activity in one’s identity that creates an internal pressure to engage in the activity that the person likes). Most of Vallerand’s research is looking at between-person differences, however. As Krista points out in her latest blog post, within-person analyses suggest that very few people who are passionate about something are completely harmonious and not obsessive at all.

Quite the contrary. I mean, have you seen Michael Jordan!? It seems like there needs to be a new within-person category we call “harmoniously obsessive”. This seems to characterize the all-consuming energy many high achievers have for their passions while also acknowledging that the activity still makes them feel good about themselves and is freely chosen and internally driven (i.e., harmonious).

Enough summarizing Krista’s work. She was gracious enough to let me reprint her post here. Anyone here also harmoniously obsessive about an activity? Let us know!

—

The other day, after an hour of grueling takedown practice, my jiu-jitsu coach, Rodrigo Freitas, gave the class a few minutes to catch our breath. As the twenty-something of us in the Monday morning competition class wiped the sweat from our foreheads and chugged electrolytes at the edge of the mat, he sat cross-legged in the middle of it and waved us quiet.

“Most of you want to compete,” he said, looking around the room. “You all have different goals. Some of you are young, with big dreams in jiu-jitsu. Others have full-time jobs, but you do this on the side to challenge yourself and stay healthy. Others of you just want to relax.”

(I stifled a laugh at that last one. It takes a certain kind of person to find jiu-jitsu “relaxing.”)

Whatever path we were on, he said, he wanted us to take it seriously.

“The people I know at the very top? They’re obsessed. They do everything they can to maximize their chances of performing well. If they have a competition coming up, they don’t think about anything else. All they do is train, eat, and sleep. They put on blinders.” He brought his hands up to his eyes as he said this, mimicking horse blinders.

“Maybe your goal isn’t to be at the very top. But be honest with yourself. Can you try and get even a .001% advantage? Can you go to sleep just a little earlier each night? Can you commit to eating healthy two months before the big competition? Can you be a little more obsessed?”

As I drove home from training that day in a kind of happy exhaustion, I kept turning the speech over. In a world so often focused on balance and self-care, his call for more obsession felt like relief. When I say no to spontaneous dinners or late nights out to focus on my jiu-jitsu or writing, sometimes I feel, as my illustrator niece Lily would say, like a “cuckoo odd duck.” Rodrigo reminded me that there’s a whole room of us — people who have chosen a narrow life on purpose.

It also sent me back to the research. What does psychology have to say about this kind of intensity?

For most of its history, psychology left passion to the philosophers, who focused mostly on the romantic kind. No one studied the deep, long-term devotion to a craft, a sport, or a cause we love and pour our finite energy into. That all changed in the late 90s, when the Canadian psychologist Robert Vallerand started looking.

Vallerand had played basketball in university. When he eventually pivoted to academia, he gravitated toward intrinsic motivation because it was the closest thing psychology had to what he had felt on the court. Then he realized nobody in psychology had studied the love for the thing itself. In 2003 he published the Dualistic Model of Passion and opened a field. He split the fire in two, according to how the thing got absorbed into your identity: harmonious passion, which you take up freely, no strings attached, and obsessive passion, which you take up under pressure — from ego, from needing to be seen a certain way, from an excitement you can’t control.

Almost everything written about passion since inherits that split. Harmonious is the “good” kind — the kind you can set down, that doesn’t keep you up at night. Obsessive is the “bad” kind — the kind that takes over your life and burns you down. But I’ve spent years interviewing people about the things they can’t stop doing, and the ones who’ve stayed the longest look a lot more like the “bad” kind. (So do I. I once spent seven years tweaking the weight distribution in my fingers to perfect a handstand, and I’ve flown to Paris and Brazil to lose jiu-jitsu matches.)

I haven’t talked to Vallerand (I’ve reached out several times over the years — he politely declined once and hasn’t replied since). But in print he is pretty clear on the split. Harmonious is desirable; obsessive is not — though he insists that any passion, even obsessive, beats none at all. He sees harmonious passion as the best of all worlds:

When people “choose the more harmonious way to engage with their passion activities... that’s when they can have their cake and eat it too,” Vallerand explained on a podcast. “You can work hard… still have a life and be happy.”

But almost nobody manages it. When researchers sorted more than seven thousand workers by how their passion actually combined, the textbook “good” profile — high harmonious passion, low obsessive — turned up in under eight percent of them. The most common profile, in every group they looked at, was the one where obsession ran the show.

You could argue that’s a work problem. But I’ve interviewed people across startups, bonsai, and triathlons, and the pattern underneath looks the same in all of them.

Rodrigo describes the same thing. The best competitors, he says, put on blinders — shielding themselves from the distractions of a normal life. If their best friend’s birthday party falls close to a competition, they’ll celebrate after. They’re that locked in. Vallerand would call that conflict. It looks more like dedication to me.

“When harmonious passion is at play, individuals do not experience an uncontrollable urge to engage in the passionate activity,” Vallerand writes in a 2008 paper on the psychology of passion. “There should be little or no conflict between the person’s passionate activity and his or her other life activities.”

He offers the example of a professor with a deep passion for music:

“When confronted with the possibility of playing music (jamming) with his friends or preparing tomorrow’s talk, the professor with a harmonious passion toward music can readily tell his friends that he’ll take a rain check and proceed to be fully immersed in the preparation of the talk without thinking about the jam session.”

And yet I’ve rarely met a musician (or anyone deeply committed to their craft) who lets go that easily.

When I talked to fingerstyle guitar legend Mary Flower, she said she’d lost a lot of the “normal” parts of life to her five-decade career in music.

“I don’t have a lot of hobbies,” she told me. “I don’t do pottery. I don’t do yoga. Life is pretty much all music.”

My painter friend David Eddington said something similar. He’s up at 4:00 a.m. to paint most mornings.

“That’s probably why I get up: because I’m thinking about what I’m doing all the time. So I think, ‘What’s the point in lying in bed?’”

I know the feeling. When I’m swept up in a passion, the alarm is a formality. The thing I love is always on my mind. Which is supposed to be the warning sign.

Except the loophole comes from Vallerand’s own lab. In a study of elite adolescent hockey players, his team found that the obsessively passionate ones only did worse in diluted environments — recreational leagues where their intensity read as too much. Those same athletes in highly competitive rooms with equally obsessed players thrived. Better, even, than the harmoniously passionate players beside them. (It was a small study and didn’t run for very long. But it tracks with what people actually tell me.)

So maybe intensity isn’t the problem. The room is. Rodrigo’s Monday morning class isn’t a pressure cooker. It’s a room built for people who can’t stop thinking about the same thing.

The psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman is a friend. Over the six years I’ve known him, I’ve watched him fall hard for mentalism, a psychological branch of magic. He’ll easily spend an entire day practicing card tricks. He once spent nearly eighty hours preparing for an informal show in his Santa Monica living room.

When I asked Scott if mentalism had gone obsessive, he didn’t apologize.

“I think I’m both harmoniously and obsessively passionate,” he told me. “They’re not necessarily at odds with each other. I have healthfully integrated [mentalism] into the core of my identity — which is harmonious passion. But it also keeps me up at night. I can’t help but come up with new ideas.”

Somewhere in those conversations, we gave the blend a name: harmonious obsession. It’s what happens when you are completely, monomaniacally captured by the thing you love, but the capture is fueled by wonder and curiosity rather than ego or fear. Vallerand would say those are already his two categories — that wonder produces the harmonious kind and ego produces the obsessive kind, and that the good fuel comes bundled with the ability to walk away. That’s the part I don’t believe.

Harmonious passion is defined by what you can walk away from: the jam session you skip, the thing you set down when something more important comes up. But I’ve interviewed a lot of people who have stayed on fire for decades, and almost none of them describe their passion as something they can set down. Mary Flower didn’t build fifty years of music by taking rain checks. David isn’t up at four because he’s disciplined. They do exactly what Rodrigo asked of the class. They put on blinders, and they leave them on.

All I know is that the happiest stretches of my life have been the ones where I blocked the rest of the world out and pointed myself at one thing. Sometimes the most life-giving thing we can do is to quit chasing balance, pick the narrow, bumpy path, and let the obsession win.

On Fire

Let the Obsession Win

“I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions.” — Oliver Sacks…

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a month ago · 10 likes · 4 comments · Krista Stryker

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My colleague woke up today and chose to criticize my life’s work. I texted him to thank him for doing that. :) First, read his article, then come back and read this response.

Provoked with Dr. Todd Kashdan

The Best Description of Intelligence

Naval Ravikant suggested…

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21 days ago · 17 likes · 10 comments

Virtually my entire life (as long as I can remember) I have been grasping for a new definition of intelligence. Yes, this started in elementary school, observing people on the playground and trying to understand what made some people more intelligent or talented than others. What I was grasping for was not a new theory of “multiple intelligences”. I also wasn’t grasping for a theory that completely ignored the value of IQ. But something else. Something that would serve as a marker of functional intelligence. Not your capacity, but what a whole, breathing, alive human does with whatever they have.

My first public crack at it was put forward in my 2013 book Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined, where I defined my theory of “Personal Intelligence” as follows:

Personal intelligence is the dynamic interplay of ability and engagement in pursuit of personal goals over time.

I tried to make clear in that book that what I was calling Personal Intelligence* was not the same thing as General Intelligence. In fact, I have a lengthy and complex chapter in the book on the much-debated “g factor” and I make clear that the scientific study of g (for General intelligence) is fascinating and that most modern IQ tests do a pretty good job of measuring g. In that chapter, I argued that the essence of g is pattern detection ability that requires conscious working memory capacity. This is indeed a generalizable skill, earning its name General Intelligence.

When I wrote Ungifted, I had not made contact with the field of positive psychology yet and even more importantly, I hadn’t made contact with the field of humanistic psychology. When I discovered the writings of Abraham Maslow, I lit up and realized that what he was referring to as “the need for self-actualization” is what I was grasping for in Ungifted.

If you ask people what they really want out of their lives, very few people will say an extra few IQ points. What they will mention are things like having a purpose, finding meaning, becoming all that they can become with whatever capacities they have. To me, being able to move toward self-actualization counts as a form of intelligence! Which is why I now call my theory the theory of “Self-Actualizing Intelligence”.

Why put self-actualization in the realm of intelligence? For a number of reasons. For one, the founder of the field of academic psychology, William James, drew an important boundary 135 years ago in Chapter 1 in the founding text of American psychology.

“The pursuance of future ends and the choice of means for their attainment are thus the mark and criterion of the presence of mentality in a phenomenon.”

— William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Vol. 1, Ch. 1, “The Scope of Psychology”

William James’s examples are Romeo finding alternate routes to Juliet, and a frog navigating obstacles to reach air. These examples are all about flexible pursuit, which I believe is a very important form of intelligence. Also, that’s precisely the line between my theory of self-actualizing intelligence and a popular definition of intelligence by Naval that Todd Kashdan criticizes in his article: “The only real test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life.” I don’t put my theory of intelligence in Naval’s camp whatsoever, and I share Todd’s criticism of Naval’s definition. To be clear: I am not scoring the outcome, I am scoring the pursuit (the dynamic interplay that affords one to move toward self-actualization).

Now, let’s talk about Binet. Todd praises Binet’s definition of intelligence which I will quote here:

This faculty is judgment, otherwise called good sense, practical sense, initiative, the faculty of adapting one’s self to circumstances.” - Alfred Binet, The Development of Intelligence in Children (1916 trans., pp. 42-43).

I would argue that this is actually a functional definition of intelligence, which is exactly what I was grasping for. I am a big fan of Binet, who is a major hero in my book Ungifted. Binet emphasized that intelligence is not a fixed-quantity and can change over time. That’s what inspired me to put forward a developmental definition of intelligence.

In his article, Todd criticized my inclusion of “engagement” in my theory of intelligence. I agree with Todd that engagement is not as part and parcel of General Intelligence (although I would argue that engagement is more important for the development of General Intelligence than intelligence researchers have given it credit). But I do view engagement as essential for Self-Actualizing Intelligence. I don’t believe IQ tests do a great job measuring the form of intelligence that comes from deep within.

The context here is that in my book Ungifted I had just finished cataloguing all the beautiful minds that have done extraordinary feats of mental magic despite not having a sky high IQ. This included stories of what happens to students who become “activated” and are given resources to pursue their loftiest dreams (or more boringly, “goals”). Again, I’m not dismissing IQ as a valuable tool. But I am proposing a different tool that I think is just as real.

Now, I’d like to conclude agreeing with what I think is Todd’s best point. In my view, Todd’s strongest sentence is that Linda Gottfredson’s definition of intelligence requires “no healthy downstream outcomes”. In other words, capacity shouldn’t be defined by how life turned out. I agree. Again, Self-Actualizing Intelligence isn’t defined by outcomes either— it’s defined by the quality of pursuit: self-concordant goals, harmonious engagement, talent meeting a resonant passion. A brilliant pursuit that fails is still utilizing Self-Actualizing Intelligence. I believe this is where Todd and I converge. In fact, I think Self-Actualizing Intelligence shares deep features with Todd’s own model of psychological flexibility.

Thanks to Todd for stimulating this discussion and making me clarify some of my positions. I think we’re all the better off for the exchange.

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* Unfortunately, my Theory of Personal Intelligence turned out to share the same name as another researcher’s new theory of intelligence around the same time and I was unaware of that as I was writing the book! As Todd points out, our theories of intelligence are pretty different from each other.

Getting the distinction between intelligence and consciousness right may be one of the most consequential things we do for the future of humanity. I’m becoming more convinced of that by the day.

Most people who take up the intelligence-versus-consciousness distinction are those who study philosophy of mind or AI safety. I am taking this up from a humanistic psychology perspective (and as someone trained in cognitive science). I disavow reductionism. I really believe that a human can’t be reduced to a bundle of behaviors, drives, or computations. We must defend the value of understanding the living, experiencing, meaning-making subject against every attempt by educators and now AI creators to shrink things to a single metric— intelligence. Consciousness, the felt sense of being alive, is a whole person metric.

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There is an assumption in the AI world that as machines get smarter, they get closer to having a mind. The real fear people are having right now, that they will be “surpassed” by machines, rests on this assumption. But smart and sentient are on two different axes, and the difference is no small thing.

Intelligence can be thought of as the capacity to learn, reason, solve problems, and achieve goals. Intelligence is measurable, seems to be able to transcend substrate (i.e., intelligence doesn’t require a biological substrate), and it’s scaling exponentially in machines at this very moment.

In contrast, consciousness is subjective experience, the “what it is like” to be something (see Thomas Nagel). Intelligence is about competence. Consciousness is about being. You can have an extremely intelligent machine with absolutely no real comprehension or inner experience. You can have a conscious being that isn’t very intelligent. These things come apart. But we keep fusing them.

As I write about in my book Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined, there is a long history among psychologists (especially in the U.S.) treating intelligence as a proxy for both mind and moral worth. There is often an assumption among intelligence researchers that “smarter” means “more of a person”. I call bullshit.

There are so many ways in which intelligence and consciousness don’t show up together. Start with machines. They keep getting more capable, and there is still no good evidence that they experience anything from the inside. Neuroscientist Christof Koch has spent much of his career on exactly this question, and his version of Integrated Information Theory suggests the gap could be permanent rather than temporary. On his view, consciousness depends on how a system’s physical parts actually cause and constrain one another, rather than on how clever the computation running on top of them happens to be. A computer can simulate a hurricane without anything getting wet, and it may simulate a brain the very same way, copying the behavior while producing none of the felt experience. If Koch is right, you could build a machine far smarter than any of us that feels absolutely nothing.

Now consider that consciousness turns up sometimes in the most unlikely of places. In 2024 a group of scientists signed The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, arguing there is a realistic chance that bees, octopuses, fish, and even crabs have some form of felt experience. While a honeybee is unlikely to pass a calculus exam, it may still be like something to be that bee, foraging and finding its way through the world.

Also, consider biologist Michael Levin’s brilliant research (I look forward to speaking with him soon for a new project I’m working on). Levin calls it “basal cognition”, intelligence that doesn’t even need a brain. Levin studies goal-directed problem-solving that runs through living tissue itself, in cells that store memories and work toward outcomes with no neurons anywhere. Your own body is a great example. It’s carrying out smart, purposeful behavior in places that have no head to do the thinking.

But you don’t have to leave your own skull to watch these things come apart. Under general anesthesia, the brain goes on humming with electrical activity and making highly intelligent automatic decisions to keep us alive, while the experience of being there disappears completely. And in split-brain patients, whose connection between the two hemispheres has been surgically cut, perception itself can divide in two while the person’s sense of being one conscious self somehow stays whole.

In every single case, intelligence and consciousness pull apart. And what remains a great mystery is what philosopher David Chalmers referred to as the “hard problem” of consciousness. According to the hard problem, you can explain everything the brain does, every signal it takes in and every action it produces, and you will still not have explained why any of it comes with an inner feeling at all. Processing, no matter how intelligent, never logically adds up to experience.

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Now, back to humanistic psychology. The field was created as a reaction (or rather, a revolt) against reducing people to stimulus-and-response or just our unconscious drives. That’s why humanistic psychologists called themselves the “third force” of psychology (1= Freud, 2= behaviorism). Humanistic psychologists believe that the sacred thing about a human is the inner life, including the experiences of awe, love, creativity, giving, meaning, presence, and peak experiences. Every one of those is part of human consciousness, not intelligence. Self-actualization is all about becoming more fully human, and reaching toward becoming a fuller experiencer of one’s own unique life. Growth here is measured by awareness, depth, and connection. Not raw processing power.

So when culture breaks out in a panic that machines will “replace” or “surpass” us, a humanistic psychology can reply, “Yes, they may surpass our intelligence, but it won’t touch the things that make being alive matter in the first place.”

✦✦✦

The stakes here are extraordinarily high; higher than 99.9% of humanity realizes. For one, there are stakes for the moral status of the machines. While I don’t think AI is conscious right now, I do think with sufficient complexity they very well could be in the very near future. If we keep building more capable systems while assuming they could never feel anything, we could be building genuinely suffering systems on an enormous scale and dismiss their suffering. Indeed, that is the nightmare a growing number of researchers have started to take seriously, in reports like Taking AI Welfare Seriously, written by some of my favorite philosophers.

But the opposite mistake is just as real. We could project our moral concerns onto systems with no inner life at all, fooled by human-sounding language into grieving for a chatbot, while the actual harms these systems can do to real people go unnoticed. Both errors grow out of the same confusion, which is reading intelligence as proof of an inner life, in one direction or the other.

Then there is the issue of human moral status. I have a real issue with tying worth to intelligence. We have an ugly history of doing just that. This has already justified harm to animals and to cognitively disabled people. We have a history of sterilizing people we labeled “feebleminded” and a history of writing off kids in special education as hopeless, not even worthy of having a full self-actualized existence. Grounding the issue in sentience instead of the capacity to compute reorders our ethics and allows us to rebuild much of our ethics from the floor up, for the cognitively disabled person and the octopus alike.

Third, let’s not forget the meaning of a human life. If machines out-think us— and it looks like they increasingly will— what remains distinctly valuable is the experiencing itself, not the horsepower. That, my friends, is the humanistic payoff. The awe of standing in nature, or the ache of loving someone so much it hurts. None of that shows up as a benchmark score. That is the whole point the humanistic psychologists were trying to make in the 60s and 70s, and I'm making it right now in the era of the AI revolution.

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The real treasure of being alive is the felt experience of aliveness. Machines are welcome to their horsepower. And yes, I’m sure increasing horsepower will allow a lot of humans to be more “efficient”, get more done quicker, and check more things off their to-do lists. But I believe the task of this new dawn for humanity is to stop measuring the worth of minds— human or artificial— by intelligence. I believe we need to learn to treat consciousness as sacred and to care, as humanistic psychology always has, about helping sentient beings increase the quality of their experiencing (regardless of their competence)!

Smart is not enough. How fast a mind can compute does not tell us much about what the mind is worth, or what a life is for. It’s crucial for the future of humanity that we get this distinction right.

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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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