Meaning Lab

Last week I wrote about Wellness, the book I've recommended most over the past year. But of the books I finished in the last calendar year, it wasn’t my favorite. Without a doubt, that would be Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. I had never read Henry James before. I was more familiar with his brother, William James, who published the Principles of Psychology in 1890. William James is considered the founder of experimental psychology, my field of training.

The book I’ve recommended most over the past year is Nathan Hill’s latest novel, Wellness. I don’t like to make general recommendations. I think people are often too quick to recommend a book just because they’ve read it, rather than considering whether the person they’re talking to would actually get something out it. But no matter the conversation, I find myself coming back to this book. Whenever I mention the title to people, they ask if it’s non-fiction. It sounds like a self-help book.

In 2001, the psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues published a paper that’s become a modern classic in the field. It’s called “Bad is Stronger than Good.” Their argument is that wherever you look in psychology, people are more sensitive to bad things than good ones. For example, a classic finding in psychology is what’s known as propinquity: the biggest predictor of whether we make friends with someone is how close we live to them.

Ludwik Zamenhof was born in 1859 in a small city in Poland. His family was Jewish, and the area he grew up in also had factions of Germans, Russians, and Poles, all of whom mutually distrusted one another. During his childhood, Zamenhof developed a theory: these groups would never get along without a common, neutral language to communicate with people in the other groups.

I traveled to Bhutan in January of this year and am just now getting around to writing about it. This is the first in a three-part series I’ll publish on this fascinating and hard-to-visit country.

It’s a common sentiment among researchers that science requires them to move more quickly than they would like. There’s a sense of urgency to get research out right away—to publish as much as possible, as quickly as possible. There isn’t sufficient time to think through things deeply. In an ideal world, a scientist would be allowed the time to move at their own pace. This would allow scientists to work on deeper, more meaningful problems. According to this way of thinking, science moves too quickly.

The field of artificial intelligence has often used what we know about human intelligence as a template for designing its systems. But for the most part, AI has always drawn on a view of the mind in social isolation, disconnected from the community of other minds. Yet one of the big insights of modern psychology—for example in work on embodied cognition—is that thinking doesn’t just take place between an individual’s ears. Human cognition is shaped by social and culture forces.