Sublime

I’d read a report from the Mayo Clinic which found that chronic insomnia, long assumed to be a psychological problem, is often a breathing problem. The millions of Americans who have a chronic insomnia disorder and who are, right now, like me, staring out bedroom windows, or at TVs, phones, or ceilings, can’t sleep because they can’t breathe.

Tomasello’s great innovation was to create a set of simple tasks that could be given to chimps and to human toddlers in nearly identical form.53 Solving the task earned the chimp or child a treat (usually a piece of food for the chimp, a small toy for the child). Some of the tasks required thinking only about physical objects in physical space—for

Another fascinating early study had been carried out with identical twins. As soon as one twin closed his eyes and his brain electrical rhythms slowed to alpha waves, the other twin’s brain also slowed, even though his eyes were opened wide.9

Children, in particular, have suffered a grievous decline in just the goods that are most important to them: adult time, energy, and company. The child-rearing work that men and women and an extended family did a hundred years ago, and that women did thirty years ago, has to be done somehow by someone. The scientific moral is not that we need exper

referred to as the strange situation test (the version described here is an abbreviated version of the test). Mary Ainsworth was fascinated by the way in which children’s exploratory drive—their ability to play and learn—could be aroused or stifled by their mother’s presence or departure. She found that having an attachment figure in the room was e

The second candidate for sustaining within-group coordination is the mirror neuron system.