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Phil Stutz and Barry Michels discuss their groundbreaking approach to therapy. In The Tools: Transform Your Problems into Courage, Confidence, and Creativity they present five tools that can bring about dynamic change. In their approach, obstacles become opportunities—to find courage, embrace discipline, develop self-expression, deepen creativity.

Does technology hurt a child's character development? Psychotherapist Sheri Noga believes there are potentially negative sides. As she sees it, today’s technology amplifies the mindset of immediate gratification; and that can be bad for children, parents and the world.

The next time your children get filthy playing in the riverbed or taking apart the remote control, stop before you scold. Scientists say that this kind of play is actually like hands-on science experimentation for your kids; they're learning to decipher the world around them through exploration. Alison Gopnik, professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, explains how these findings should change how we educate our children.

Leonard Mlodinow explores how we misperceive our relationships with family, friends, and colleagues; how we misunderstand the reasons for our investment decisions; and how we misremember important events. Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior explains how the unconscious mind shapes our experience of the world.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions, from our intuitions to our morality to our “groupishness.” In The Righteous Mind he investigates Why our political leaders can’t seem to work together to deal with threats and problems and why people so readily assume the worst about their fellow citizens.

T. M. Luhrmann, psychological anthropologist and a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University and author of When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God, talks about her book on the science of how evangelicals experience a relationship with God in the brain, and why some connect more through prayer than others.

Iain McGilchrist, a former consultant psychiatrist, looks at why the brain is divided into two hemispheres. In his book, The Master and His Emissary, he draws on case histories and other brain research to show how different the right and left sides of our brains are, what each side helps us do, and why the left hemisphere is taking more precedence in the modern world.

Charles Duhigg, New York Times staff writer and author of The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, joins us to talk about the importance of habitual behavior and the role it plays in our lives both on and offline.

Sharon Begley, science journalist at Reuters and Richard J. Davidson, professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who co-wrote The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live--and How You Can Change Them, talk about their discoveries about emotions and the brain and the implications for treatment.

Whether through hours of rote memorization or mnemonic devices, there's no real "secret" behind making or keeping a memory. Conversely, the best way to forget something painful has been a source of endless cliche and conjecture — until now. New developments in the understanding of the brain have made it possible to help trauma patients erase specific memories. When a memory is formed, new linkages are held together by PKM-zeta. To undo these connections, the enzyme only needs to be blocked.

Gary Marcus, professor of psychology and the director of the NYU Center for Language and Music and author of Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning, talks about how his day job as a scientist informed his efforts to learn the guitar at 40.  Have you learned a new language or musical instrument as an adult?

Event: What Does it Take to Become Musical? with special guests, Terre Roche of The Roches and Afro-Jersey. January 19, 2012, 7pm, 19 West 4th St Room 101, New York, NY 10003.

What would it take to make you do something truly awful? One day, psychology professor David Buss headed to a friend's house for a party. But when he arrived, his friend--a mild-mannered fellow professor--wasn't there to greet him. As David explains to producer Pat Walters, his friend was upstairs in ...

Almost everyone has closets full of stuff, favorite mementos, and expanding collections of books or shoes or spices or hotel shampoos. But sometimes our emotional attachments to stuff can spiral out of control, and people become not just pack rats but compulsive hoarders. Dr. Robin Zasio, therapist who specializes in treating hoarding and other anxiety-related disorders, explains what compulsive hoarding is and how to treat it. She’ll also give advice about how to live a less-cluttered, better-organized life. She’s the author of The Hoarder in You: How to Live a Happier, Healthier, Uncluttered Life.

Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga argues against the common belief that physical laws govern our behavior and that there’s no such thing as free will. In Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain shows how determinism weakens human responsibility, and he shows that the latest insights into the mind reveal that we are responsible for our actions, not our brains.

Andres Breivik, the 32-year-old Norwegian man who killed 77 people and injured 151 others in July, was declared insane by state psychiatrists in Oslo on Tuesday. After planting a car bomb near government buildings in Oslo that killed eight people on July 22, Breivik drove to a political youth camp on Utoeya island and gunned down 69 people, many of whom were teens. In an online manifesto that was found later, Breivik claimed to be defending Europe from an Islamic invasion enabled by Norway's Labour Party and the European Union. Alexander Levi, a lawyer in Oslo, discusses the likelihood of Breivik facing a prison sentence after being declared insane.

Academy Award-winner Goldie Hawn talks about her days as a dancer, her acting career, taking on the roles of producer and director, and her interest in meditation and the mind. Her latest book, 10 Mindful Minutes  is about the Hawn Foundation’s MindUP program, which teaches children social and emotional skills. She explains the positive effects of mindfulness, compassion, and kindness.

Asti Hustvedt tells about the three young female hysterics who shaped our early notions of psychology. Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris  tells the story of the lives of Blanche, Augustine, and Geneviève, patients in the hysteria ward of the Salpetrière Hospital in 1870s Paris. Hustvedt also investigates what exactly they were suffering from.

Licensed clinical psychologist with a private practice in New York City, on the board of advisers of the National Association of Cognitive Behavioral Therapists, and contributing editor to Psychology Today, Dr. Nando Pelusi visits weekly to talk therapy. This week: how to gracefully handle Thanksgiving stress.

Daniel Kahneman, who received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his seminal work in psychology that challenged the rational model of judgment and decision making, talks about how we think. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, he looks at how intuitive and emotional thinking and slower, more deliberative, and more logical thinking shape our behaviors, judgments, and decisions.