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Put Away The Bell Curve: Most Of Us Aren’t ‘Average’

For decades, teachers, managers and parents have assumed that the performance of students and employees fits what’s known as the bell curve — in most activities, we expect a few people to be very good, a few people to be very bad and most people to be average. The bell curve powerfully shapes how we [...]

A Step Forward For Gene Therapy To Treat HIV

Millions of people around the world are living with HIV, thanks to drug regimens that suppress the virus. Now there’s a new push to eliminate HIV from patients’ bodies altogether. That would be a true cure. We’re not there yet. But a report in Science Translational Medicine is an encouraging signpost that scientists may be [...]

Fetal Attraction

There you are, inside the placenta, all cozy and wrapped; mommy all around you — this is nice. Except for the occasional leak. Six years ago I reported on Morning Edition that whenever a woman gets pregnant, some of the baby’s cells slip through the placental wall into the mother’s blood and settle down for [...]

Robots Win Battle For Attention At Science Fair

Kids love robots. A family visit to the USA Science and Engineering Festival in Washington this weekend drove that point home again and again. There were robots everywhere. We saw robots designed by high-schoolers to shoot baskets. There was a wheeled R2-D2 robot at the CIA’s booth, complete with the agency’s logo on the wheels. [...]

A Most Peculiar Sunset

You wouldn’t know it, not right away, but there is something strange about this picture. It’s a sunset, yes, but notice the blush of color right above the sun. It’s blue. And as you look up, the blue fades into a faint rose or pink. Now think about the sunsets you’ve seen, how often the [...]

To Predict Dating Success, The Secret’s In The Pronouns

On a recent Friday night, 30 men and 30 women gathered at a hotel restaurant in Washington, D.C. Their goal was love, or maybe sex, or maybe some combination of the two. They were there for speed dating. The women sat at separate numbered tables while the men moved down the line, and for two [...]

Weekend Special: Books So Good You Want To Become Them

I don’t remember who told me this tale, but it begins with a little boy, maybe 4 or 5, who is given a book. He opens it, begins to read, curls into it, won’t look up, can’t stop, looks at the pictures, turns the pages, keeps turning, turning, turning, until all too quickly, he’s done, [...]

Why Do We Cheat?

Part 1 of the TED Radio Hour episode Our Buggy Brain Despite our best efforts, bad or inexplicable decisions are as inevitable as death and taxes and the grocery store running out of your favorite flavor of ice cream. They’re also just as predictable. Why, for instance, are we convinced that “sizing up” at our [...]

What Do We Value Most?

Part 2 of the TED Radio Hour episode Our Buggy Brain Why do we like an original painting better than a forgery? Psychologist Paul Bloom argues that human beings are essentialists — that our beliefs about the history of an object change how we experience it, not simply as an illusion, but as a deep [...]

What Makes Us Happy?

Part 3 of the TED Radio Hour episode Our Buggy Brain Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our “psychological immune system” lets us feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned. Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, says our beliefs [...]