This week we talk about why certain days of the week “feel” differently than others, and what we can do to help ourselves optimize each day.
Reading and Child’s Brain
What’s going on inside a child’s brain when you read to them? Get a little insight in this week’s episode of Two Guys.
Rewarding Mediocrity
The ups and downs of rewards that praise participation in this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke.
Expectations, Goals, and Happiness
Why is it that we’re not always as happy as we think we should be when we accomplish our goals? In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about the concept of The Hedonic Treadmill, and what we can do to set ourselves up for a happier life.
The Value of Failure
Failure is a word that carries a lot of baggage, arousing emotional responses that we’d usually rather avoid.
What about success? Why does the thought of success conjure images and feelings of comfort and satisfaction. This week, “Two Guys on Your Head” examine how the heights of success and the “training wheels” of failure impact our everyday lives.
We’re wired with a dopamine reward system that releases positive or negative chemical affect in our brains depending upon the success or failure of our efforts. Success feels good, while failure feels bad. So we tend to seek success and avoid failure. It’s simple.
But, how can you determine how much exertion to expend toward reaching a particular goal if you’ve never failed at something? You might just run yourself into the ground trying to avoid failure, but it’s better to let failure experiences happen and serve to help you gauge your efforts.
Failure is a learning mechanism, like training wheels on a bicycle. Our little mistakes serve to build up a framework of experience that allows us to more proficiently navigate our lives.
The fear of failure is a very challenging obstacle to overcome. To some, fear of failure can be immobilizing. When we legislate ourselves rigidly against the negative feelings aroused by the experience of a mistake, we are short-changing ourselves. Failure-driven learning mechanisms are not being utilized because our society reinforces a desire to avoid mistakes.
The Yuck Factor
In this episode of Two Guys on Your Head Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about the “yuck factor” and morality.
Diets, Dieting, and Food Rituals
In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke, talk about the complex metabolic system that goes into how we eat and process food, and the benefits of food rituals and eating together, not only on our bodies, but on our brains as well.
Sarah Hepola
Sarah Hepola’s new memoir, Blackout: Remembering Things I Drank to Forget, chronicles her addiction to alcohol with brutal honesty and brilliant humor. The book is gaining critical acclaim from reviewers in The New York Times, The Washington Post, LA Times, and Kirkus Reviews. Entertainment Weekly observed, “It’s hard to think of another memoir that burrows inside an addict’s brain like this one does.”
Blackout was named one of Amazon.com’s Best Books of June 2015, People Magazine’s Best Books of the Summer, and won a spot on the New York Times Best Sellers List.
Hepola recently joined us on The Write Up to discuss the memoir. We also chat about her work as an editor at Salon and as a freelance writer, and the complicated ways alcohol affected her writing and life.
Hepola cut her literary teeth as a writer for the Austin Chronicle in the late nineties and early 2000s. She made a national name for herself as a cultural journalist and personal essayist with Slate, The New York Times, and The Morning News online magazine. Her brand of red-hot wit and self-deprecating honesty earned her admirers and writing jobs. But as her career slowly grew, so did her dependence on alcohol.
From the backyard parties of Austin to basement bars of New York City and the sidewalk cafes of Paris, Hepola tracks her drinking bouts and the blackouts that followed. Many mornings she woke up alone with a cloudy head, mysterious bruises, and black space where the last several hours should have been. On more terrifying occasions, Hepola woke up in bed with someone she didn’t recognize.
It wasn’t until confronted with crumbling friendships and a stalled career that Hepola took the courageous step of getting sober. Hepola’s memoir does not stop there. She describes the struggle to rebuild her mental and physical health, her return to Texas after years in New York, and her discovery that her writing voice did not depend on an open bottle.
Blackout also touches upon the bizarre and sometimes wonderful experience of online dating, the undulations of adult friendship and the pressures of being a professional woman in the once male-dominated world of journalism.
Hepola speaks of her life and writing with an unmasked candor and humor. Her research and insights also enable her to link her own story to cultural trends in dating, women’s liberation, and America’s obsession with alcohol.
On the podcast, Hepola shares the difficulty of transitioning from personal essays to a book-length memoir, the allure alcohol seems to have for so many writers, and necessity of releasing one’s inner editor while writing a first draft.
Find out more at sarahhepola.com
Virtual Therapy
In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke discuss the purposes of therapy and provide some perspective on the roles virtual therapy can and can’t fill.
The Imposter Syndrome
In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke, talk about The Imposter Syndrome. What is the real problem when you feel inadequate? How can you help yourself overcome it when you recognize it?
Pain Killers, and Pain as Retribution
In this episode of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke, conclude our series on pain with a discussion on some interesting findings in psychology as to how pain killers work in the brain, and they talk about the cultural and biological evolution of inflicting pain as retribution.
Emotional Pain and Memory
In this episode of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke, add to the series on pain and the brain, with a discussion on emotional pain and memory.
Phantom Pain
In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke, kick off our three-part series on “Pain and The Brain” with a discussion of “Phantom Pain”. What it is, and how psychologists are finding new ways of helping patients who suffer with it.
Summer and Time
In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about organizing time to make the most of time off.
Kari Anne Roy
K.A. Holt loves middle grade novels and poetry and has a gift for both.
Her novel Mike Stellar: Nerves of Steel won praise from middle grade readers all over the nation. Her poetry shines in her collection Haiku Mama: Because 17 Syllables is All You Have Time to Read, written under the name Kari Anne Roy, is a collection of haikus hilariously bemoaning the struggles and joys of parenting.
In 2010 Holt combined the two genres and started writing middle grade novels in verse. Her first, Brains for Lunch (A Zombie Novel in Haiku?!), followed the misadventures of a preteen zombie dealing with all the romantic challenges of middle school while also being one of the living dead.
Rhyme Schemer follows a middle school bully with a secret passion for poetry. In her forth coming novel in verse, House Arrest, a young boy journals about his struggles through a year of probation and his younger brother’s health crisis.
Holt’s anti-heroes pop with life (even the undead ones). She depicts the emotional and social pre-teen challenges of her young characters with pitch perfect humor and riveting authenticity. She manages to avoid ever condescending to her readers or artificially endowing her middle grade characters with adult takes on the world. She nails the wildly turbulent thoughts and feelings of a 7th grader – and does it in verse.
Holt has a knack for bringing poetry to surprising places. In 2013 Holt and fellow Austinites Jodi Egerton, Sean Petrie and David Fruchter took a love of vintage typewrites and public poetry and formed Typewriter Rodeo. The group can be found at music concerts, museum openings, and SXSW parties banging out spontaneous poems on old school typewriters.
Holt, again writing as Kari Anne Roy, is also a celebrated blogger known for fearlessly diving into difficult issues ranging from abortion legislation to CPS investigations. Her insights are supported by relentless honesty and a wry wit. More than one entry on her blog www.haikuoftheday.com has gone viral and emerged on the national scene.
It’s a true pleasure to get to sit down with Holt on The Write Up and discuss her craft and career and how she balances daily life, deadlines, and being a mother of three. Join us as we chat about the attraction of writing for a younger audience, her love for underdogs and preteen ne’er-do-wells, and the allure of poetry.
Teaching The Process of Science
In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke, talk about why it’s more important to teach the process of science, as opposed to just the outcomes science has produced.
Communicating Science
In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke talk about thinking scientifically, and some of the problems with communicating science to the general public.
Seeing and Perception
In this edition of Two Guys on Your Head, Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke, talk about how we see with our brains, and some problems that can cause.
What Are We Eating?
This episode explores historical and contemporary attitudes about the food industry and our food traditions. Our discussants share the major topics that affects the food industry today.
The Discussion
Tom Philpott is a Food and Agriculture Correspondent for Mother Jones. While studying food and cooking traditions around the world, Tom noticed that American food traditions were being lost to fast food and food processing companies. Tom questions how we can hold onto our food traditions when so much of our food industry is controlled by a small number of companies and their lobbyists that manipulate the federal government. Tom discusses the regulation systems in place that still allow for potentially harmful additives in our food.
Raj Patel is a research professor in the LBJ School of public affairs at UT-Austin, and the author of “Stuffed and Starved” and “The Value of Nothing”. Raj encourages the globalization of food traditions, emphasizing that many food traditions evolved out of the mixing of cultures. Raj also focuses on issues of food and national identity.
Marla Camp is the owner and editor of Edible Austin. She is motivated to bring awareness about food back into the community surrounding and connect them back to where their food comes from. Marla emphasizes education as a way to strengthen people’s relationship to their food and to the understanding about the true value of food to our body.
What is your perspective?
Food traditions shift and change to adapt to the systems in place to get it to our dinner table. How will the food systems in place today affect our food traditions of tomorrow?
With all the information out there about what to eat and what not to eat, how do you approach the food that ends up on your dinner table?
Defiance
Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke discuss the psychology of defiance.