Loyalty is an interesting and elusive concept. As much as we may profess our loyalty to a certain organization, institution, person, belief system, etc. if that bond–as Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about in this episode of Two Guys on Your Head, –is only as strong as your last dissenting act, it may be time to rethink that relationship.
Feeling Positive Emotions
Are extroverts really happier than introverts? It turns out, maybe, but there is more to the story.
In the third installment of our Two Guys on Your Head series on attributes of mental wellness, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about a subcomponent of the personality characteristic of extroversion that has to do with feeling positive emotions.
Openness To Feelings
It turns out that being open to feelings–happy, sad, angry, uncomfortable…– is an important element of mental wellness. But there is a lot to unpack.
In the second installment of KUT’s Two Guys on Your Head series on the characteristics of mental wellness, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about a facet of the personality trait of “openness to experience” that has to do with “openness to feelings.”
Characteristics of The Mentally Well
A recent study suggests there are 4 characteristics that mentally well people share: openness to feelings, openness to emotions, truthfulness, and they’re not neurotic. But what does that really mean?
In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke unpack this study and talk about what it can teach us about understanding our own and others’ mental health.
Money and Happiness
The idea that money doesn’t make you happy is easy to get behind if you have it, but if you don’t it’s a hard one to buy into (pun intended). Yet the correlation between money and happiness is more complicated than one might think.
In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke explain the relationship between money, security, opportunity, and happiness.
Sugar and The Brain
Why is it hard to have just one of those delicious slices of pound cake over the holidays? Well, it turns out it has less to do with the creamy butter and more to do with the way our brains react to those sweet white grains of sugar.
In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke discuss the ways our brains respond to sugar by releasing dopamine. While we may think this dopamine is supposed to make us feel good, what the chemicals in our brains are trying to do is to teach us that this sugar is a good thing and that we want more of it for our survival. This might have been beneficial to us 150,000 years ago, but with sweets in every candy dish, gas station, and coffee shop, craving sugar has its consequences.
Compliments
Giving someone a compliment is more complicated than it might seem, but as Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about in this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, the benefits of compliments are extensive.
How vs. Why Knowledge (Rebroadcast)
Because we know “how” things work sometimes we think we understand “why” these things work as they do, and that can be a problem.
In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about the difference between “how” vs. “why” knowledge, and why it’s important to recognize what you really need to know.
Repressing Emotions
It doesn’t feel good when you can’t express your emotions, but the effect of repressing emotions can have reproductions far beyond just feeling bad.
In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about the psychology of repressing emotions.
Hope: Frances Moore Lappé
“[Hope] is a key source of energy to enable us to seek solutions together.” -Frances Moore Lappé
Hope is different from faith in that we need to act in hope as opposed to just having faith that everything will be okay. But in acting, when it comes to food, we are doing so and operating in a system where we know too much about food and the pesticides in our food system, the inequity, and injustice. So how can we have hope and what is hope?
For the ancient Greeks, “Hope” was a type of self-deception; one of the evils of Pandora’s box. To the Christians, it was one of the 3 virtues. Kant asked, ‘what may I hope?’ whilst Nietzsche thought of “Hope” as the worst of all evils prolonging the torment of man. Yet even for those critical of hope like Camus, who said “hope is tantamount to resignation and to live is to not be resigned,” there was agreement that life was impossible without it.
In the reissue of Diet For A Small Planet, 50 years on our guest today Frances Moore Lappé turns to “Hope” as an antidote to many of the ills and devastating problems we face.
In this edition of The Secret Ingredient, Raj Patel of the Lyndon Baines Johnson School of Public Affairs, Tom Phillpot of Mother Jones Magazine, and Rebecca McInroy of KUT Radio will ask her, why?
In 1971, “Diet for a Small Planet” broke new ground, revealing how our everyday acts are a form of power to create health for ourselves and our planet. This extraordinary book first exposed the needless waste built into a meat-centered diet. Now, in a special edition for its 50th anniversary, world-renowned food expert Frances Moore Lappé goes even deeper, showing us how plant-centered eating can help restore our damaged ecology, address the climate crisis, and move us toward real democracy. Sharing her personal journey and how this revolutionary book shaped her own life, Lappé offers a fascinating philosophy on changing yourself—and the world—that can start with changing the way we eat.
Frances Moore Lappé is the author or co-author of twenty books about world hunger, living democracy, and the environment, that all started with Diet for a Small Planet that has now sold over three million copies. The revised and updated version is out now from Penguin Random House and features eighty-five updated plant-centered recipes, including more than a dozen new delights from celebrity chefs including Mark Bittman, Padma Lakshmi, Alice Waters, José Andrés, Bryant Terry, Mollie Katzen, and Sean Sherman.
Anger Management
One could ask, if we need anger management why don’t we also need management for other emotions? Turns out anger management isn’t a new thing at all and, as Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about in this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, for good reason.
Anger and Motivation
We might not have the most positive associations with anger, and for good reason. Anger can be threatening and lead to destruction, but it can also move us to get off the dime and do something.
In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about anger and motivation.
Math, Music, and The Brain
There are some things that just feel like they’re true. For example, the idea that people who are gifted musicians are also good at learning math, or vice versa.
However, there isn’t any data that suggests that there are any links in the brain between these proclivities. As Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about in this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, we underestimate the role emotions play in what we believe to be true.
The Language of Emotion
We have a limited number of ways to experience the world psychologically, but many ways to interpret that experience. In that interpretation, the words we use are very important and perhaps in surprising ways.
In this episode of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about the language we use to describe emotions and why we should be paying more attention to it.
Outcome Bias
A listener wrote in: “Please take a moment to address why September 11, 2001, is still a cultural touchstone, but February 26, 1993, was so easily forgotten.”
Thank you for the question Bob M. In this episode of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about remembering 9/11 and outcome bias.
Remembering 9/11
When we live through a profound and historic event we have a different understanding of it than if we just read about it. That has a complex and interesting significance on how we see the world.
In this episode of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about the psychology of remembering 9/11.
Learning Conflict Resolution
As humans, we don’t come ready to interact with the world when we are born. We have to learn a language, we have to learn how to roll over, to walk, to hold things, we have to learn all kinds of things. One thing that psychologists have been asking for a long time is how this learning happens.
The work of one researcher, the late Albert Bandura, who passed July 26, 2021, was integral in understanding the role observation plays in this learning process.
In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke remember the work of Bandura and discuss what his findings tell us about how children learn conflict resolution.
Bad Science (Rebroadcast)
Why do we continue to believe in ideas that sound scientific long after they have been scientifically proven to be incorrect? That is the question that Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke take on in this episode of Two Guys on Your Head.
Lila Gleitman
Lila Gleitman was an American professor of psychology and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. who passed on August 8, 2021, at the age of 91. She was an internationally renowned expert on language acquisition and developmental psycholinguistics, focusing on children’s learning of their first language.
In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman, and Dr. Bob Duke it’s Lila Gleitman; her work, her creativity, and her legacy.
The Story of COVID and Processing Grief
We make sense of things by creating stories about them; our brains want to connect the dots. But it turns out that life has its own sequence that sometimes doesn’t make much sense. This brings us to COVID and the illogical logic of the evolution of the virus that keeps going even after some thought things would get back to “normal” with a vaccine.
In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about how the emotional rollercoaster of living with COVID mirrors the grieving process, and how to navigate it.