This episode of On Being aired a few weeks ago, so I am late getting to this. Van der Kolk's include Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on the Mind, Body and Society and, most recently, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (which I will be reviewing soon).

Enjoy the conversation.

Bessel van der Kolk — Restoring the Body: Yoga, EMDR, and Treating Trauma

October 30, 2014
Photo by Aaron Feen


Human memory is a sensory experience, says psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk. Through his longtime research and innovation in trauma treatment, he shares what he's learning about how bodywork like yoga or eye movement therapy can restore a sense of goodness and safety. What he’s learning speaks to a resilience we can all cultivate in the face of the overwhelming events — which, after all, make up the drama of culture, of news, and of life.

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Guests



Bessel van der Kolk is medical director of the Trauma Center at the Justice Resource Institute in Brookline, Massachusetts. He’s also professor of Psychiatry at Boston University Medical School. His books include Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on the Mind, Body and Society and The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.

This week on NPR's On Being, Jonathan Haidt is the guest. He is the author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, as well as Professor of Ethical Leadership at The Stern School of Business at New York University. In this conversation, he talks about the psychology behind morality.

Jonathan Haidt — The Psychology Behind Morality

On Being | June 12, 2014
Krista Tippett

The surprising psychology behind morality is at the heart of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s research. He says “when it comes to moral judgments, we think we are scientists discovering the truth, but actually we are lawyers arguing for positions we arrived at by other means.” He explains “liberal” and “conservative” not narrowly or necessarily as political affiliations, but as personality types — ways of moving through the world. His own self-described “conservative-hating, religion-hating, secular liberal instincts” have been challenged by his own studies.


Photo courtesy of TED
Listen

• Radio Show/Podcast (mp3, 51:00)
• Unedited Interview Jonathan Haidt  (mp3, 1:49:21)
• Transcript

Voices on the Radio

Jonathan Haidt is the author of the bestselling book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. He is Professor of Ethical Leadership at The Stern School of Business at New York University.

Production Credits

• Host/Executive Producer: Krista Tippett
• Executive Editor: Trent Gilliss
• Senior Producer: Lily Percy
• Technical Director: Chris Heagle
• Associate Producer: Mariah Helgeson

Like-Minded Conversations

Kwame Anthony Appiah — Sidling Up to Difference: Social Change and Moral Revolutions
How can unimaginable social change happen in a world of strangers? Kwame Anthony Appiah is a philosopher who studies ethics and his parents' marriage helped inspire the movie Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. In a tense moment in American life, he has refreshing advice on simply living with difference.


Jacob Needleman — The Inward Work of Democracy
Krista Tippett speaks with philosopher Jacob Needleman. As new democracies are struggling around the world, it’s easy to forget that U.S. democracy was shaped by trial and error. A conversation about the “inward work” of democracy — the conscience that shaped the American experiment.

Pertinent Posts from the On Being Blog

Stepping Outside the Moral Matrix
In this TED talk, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt breaks down human moral values into five basic elements, then shows how an individual's placement on the liberal-conservative spectrum is determined by how much emphasis that person puts on each of these values.


Are Babies Moral?
A fascinating, in-depth article and video discussing new research indicating that babies may have a "rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life."


Barbara Ehrenreich on "Living With a 'Wild' God"
In Barbara Ehrenreich's latest book — and first memoir — she asks the age-old questions at the center of human life. A self-described atheist, she leans into the word "mystical" and encourages more cosmic wandering.


What Stories Do We Tell?
There are stories within stories that are desperate to be heard, and when they’re heard, they bring us to the place of encounter and empathy, which is the essence of hope and humanity.


David Eagleman's Secular Sermon on Knowing One's Selves
How and why did we choose this "secular sermon" for our podcast. A bit of behind-the-scenes insight that answers these questions — and a chance to watch the full sermon from The School of Life.

Ellen Langer — Science of Mindlessness and Mindfulness (NPR's On Being)

Ellen Langer was one of the trailblazers in seeing and researching the potential of mindfulness practice as an adjunct to psychotherapy and education. In this week's On Being podcast from NPR, host Krista Tippett speaks with Langer about her work, and about practicing mindfulness with meditation and without yoga.

Langer is the author of several influential books, especially Mindfulness and Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility. 

Ellen Langer — Science of Mindlessness and Mindfulness

On Being | May 29, 2014

Social psychologist Ellen Langer's unconventional studies have long suggested what brain science is now revealing: our experiences are formed by the words and ideas we attach to them. Naming something "play" rather than "work" can mean the difference between delight and drudgery. She is one of the early pioneers — along with figures like Jon Kabat-Zinn and Herbert Benson — in drawing a connection between mindlessness and unhappiness, between mindfulness and health. Dr. Langer describes mindfulness as achievable without meditation or yoga — as “the simple act of actively noticing things.”

Photo by Kris Krug - Dr. Ellen Langer presents at PopTech's annual conference at Camden, Maine, where she discussed the illusion of control, perceived control, successful aging, and decision-making.

Listen

• Radio Show/Podcast  - (mp3, 51:00)
• Unedited Interview - Ellen Langer  (mp3, 88:19)

Transcript

Voices on the Radio


Ellen Langer is a social psychologist and a professor in the Psychology Department at Harvard University. Her books include Mindfulness and Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility.

Production Credits

• Host/Executive Producer: Krista Tippett
• Executive Editor: Trent Gilliss
• Senior Producer: Lily Percy
• Technical Director: Chris Heagle
• Associate Producer: Mariah Helgeson

Like-Minded Conversations

Jon Kabat-Zinn — Opening to Our Lives - Jon Kabat-Zinn has learned, through science and experience, about mindfulness as a way of life. This is wisdom with immediate relevance to the ordinary and extreme stresses of our time — from economic peril, to parenting, to life in a digital age.




Esther Sternberg — Stress and the Balance Within - The American experience of stress has spawned a multi-billion dollar self-help industry. Wary of this, Esther Sternberg says that, until recently, modern science did not have the tools or the inclination to take emotional stress seriously. She shares fascinating new scientific insight into the molecular level of the mind-body connection.




Richard Davidson — Investigating Healthy Minds - Neuroscientist Richard Davidson is revealing that the choices we make can actually “rewire” our brains. He’s studied the brains of meditating Buddhist monks, and now he’s using his research with children and adolescents to look at things like ADHD, autism, and kindness.

Pertinent Posts from the On Being Blog

A Little Bit of Mindfulness Meditation Can Reduce a Lot of Pain - Even novice meditators are able to curb their pain after a few training sessions in mindfulness meditation.



Meditation and Mindfulness for All of Us: Six Questions with Sharon Salzberg - One of the pioneering teachers of Buddhist thought and meditation in the U.S. answers our in-house "wannabe" mindfulness practitioner's questions on techniques and focus, and the balance of new technologies with human connection.



Sharing Gratitude and Releasing Mindfulness - A week of gratitude for our many gifts: from Walter Rauschenbusch's gorgeous prayer to Thich Nhat Hanh's guiding dharma talk.



Danish Filmmaker Spends Year in Wisconsin Documenting Contemplative Neuroscience Research with Children and Vets in "Free the Mind" - A Q+A with Phie Ambo on meditation, contemplative neuroscience, and what she learned while making the documentary Free the Mind on neuroscientist Richard Davidson.



An Aural Hike Through the Hoh Valley Rain Forest: A Soundscape Meditation - Take this mystical aural hike into the Hoh Rain Forest in Olympic National Park to One Square Inch of Silence — and experience the chirping twitter of the Western wren and the haunting call of the Roosevelt elk.



Questioning the Science of Happiness (Infographic) - Happiness. A word that gets bandied about quite a bit lately, and for good reason. An infographic that jogs a host of questions and insights.



Mastering the Hong and the Sau - A joyous monk at a meditation center in India teaches a young journalist how to breathe, one breath at a time.

Leonard Mlodinow — Randomness and Choice (On Being)

Leonard Mlodinow is the author of Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior (2012), among other books. Some of the material in this episode is from Mlodinow's earlier book, The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives (2008).

Leonard Mlodinow — Randomness and Choice

May 1, 2014

Fundamental forces of physics somehow determine everything that happens, as physicist Leonard Mlodinow has written, “from the birth of a child to the birth of a galaxy.” Yet he has intriguing perspective on the gap between theory and reality — and the fascinating interplay between a life in science and life in the world. As the child of two Holocaust survivors, he asks questions about our capacity to create our lives, while reflecting on extreme human cruelty — and courage.

Listen

• Radio Show/Podcast - (mp3, 51:00)
• Unedited Interview- Leonard Mlodinow - (mp3, 1:14:33)
• Transcript

Voices on the Radio

Leonard Mlodinow is a physicist, and the author of several books including The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives and Feynman’s Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life. He's also written for television, including "Star Trek: The Next Generation."

Production Credits

Host/Executive Producer: Krista Tippett
Executive Editor: Trent Gilliss
Senior Producer: Lily Percy
Technical Director: Chris Heagle
Associate Producer: Mariah Helgeson

Brian McLaren — The Equation of Change (On Being)

An interesting discussion from Krista Tippett's On Being (NPR) on how we can regain our faith in a postmodern, post-traditional world. Brain McLaren is a progressive voice in the new(ish) "Emerging Christianity" movement.

Brian McLaren — The Equation of Change

March 13, 2014

How can people rediscover faith as a series of stories and encounters rather than being reduced to a system of abstractions and beliefs? An influential voice in the worlds of progressive Evangelicalism and “emerging” Christianity, Brian McLaren envisions a community where diversity no longer means division. A provocative conversation on the meaning and future of Church in a 21st-century world.

Listen

Radio Show/Podcast - (mp3, 51:00)
Unedited Interview, Brian McLaren - (mp3, 1:19:02)

Learn

• Transcript

Voices on the Radio

Brian McLaren is a leading Evangelical pastor and author of several books including A Generous Orthodoxy, Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road?, and the forthcoming We Make the Road by Walking.

Production Credits

Host/Executive Producer: Krista Tippett

Head of Content: Trent Gilliss

Technical Director: Chris Heagle

Senior Producer: Lily Percy

Associate Producer: Mariah Helgeson

Pertinent Posts from the On Being Blog

Nadia Bolz-Weber Talks Tattoos, Resurrection, and God's Disruption (video)
Every so often, Krista's interviews should be seen as much as heard. Her conversation with Nadia Bolz-Weber is one of these essential moments.



Bluegrass Unites: A Musical Collaboration Between an Orthodox Jew and Evangelical Christian
A joyful story on how bluegrass music brought together a country music star and klezmer virtuoso to record the classic 18th-century hymn, "The Lord Will Provide."



Millennials, DJs of Their Own Spiritualities
Krista sits down with The Takeaway to explain the impulses behind the Pew polls on the religiously unaffiliated Millennials. She believes that this growing number of unaffiliated young people are a source of renewal of religion in the U.S.



Rooting the Poetry of Resurrection in the Garden of Eden
In the beginning was poetry. The book of Genesis starts with a liturgical poem.

The creation of the cosmos can only be communicated, the ancients knew, through language that speaks to the imagination — that unity of intellect and emotion, which was for the biblical writers the restless human heart. Images and metaphors are primary speech, conveyers of truth — durable yet pliable, precise yet ever expansive in the vision of the world (and ourselves) they set before us.



Transforming the "Other" to "Us": A Call for Faith Communities to Practice Mutuality
How do we fulfill the dream that was bequeathed to us? By practicing the joyful art of doing life together across racial categories without fear.

Ann Hamilton — Making, and the Spaces We Share (On Being)

From NPR's On Being, this episode features Ann Hamilton, who is a visual artist and self-described "maker." She is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Art at Ohio State University.

From her website:

Ann Hamilton is a visual artist internationally recognized for the sensory surrounds of her large-scale multi-media installations. Using time as process and material, her methods of making serve as an invocation of place, of collective voice, of communities past and of labor present. Noted for a dense accumulation of materials, her ephemeral environments create immersive experiences that poetically respond to the architectural presence and social history of their sites. Whether inhabiting a building four stories high or confined to the surface of a thimble, the genesis of Hamilton's art extends outwards from the primary projections of the hand and mouth. Her attention to the uttering of a sound or the shaping of a word with the hand places language and text at the tactile and metaphoric center of her installations. To enter their liminality is to be drawn equally into the sensory and linguistic capacities of comprehension that construct our faculties of memory, reason and imagination.

Cool stuff - enjoy the conversation.

Ann Hamilton — Making, and the Spaces We Share

February 13, 2014

The philosopher Simone Weil defined prayer as “absolutely unmixed attention.” The artist and self-described maker Ann Hamilton embodies this notion in her sweeping works of art that bring all the senses together. She uses her hands to create installations that are both visually astounding and surprisingly intimate, and meet a longing many of us share, as she puts it, to be alone together.

Listen

• Radio Show/Podcast  (mp3, 51:00)
• Unedited Interview » Ann Hamilton  (mp3, 87:05)
• Transcript

Voices on the Radio

Ann Hamilton is a visual artist and self-described maker. She is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Art at Ohio State University.

Production Credits

• Host/Executive Producer: Krista Tippett
• Head of Content: Trent Gilliss
• Technical Director: Chris Heagle
• Senior Producer: Lily Percy
• Associate Producer: Mariah Helgeson

Pertinent Posts from the On Being Blog

A World Through the Hands
Simply a wonderful, four-minute film about the value of handwork and experiencing the world.



Ann Hamilton: A Twitterscript
Don't tweet. No problem. A compilation of our tweets of a wandering conversation with a maker on language, time, and life as a maker.



Completely Free to Be Vulnerable: Martha Depp on Art and Cancer
We received this remarkable video from a brother to his sister. A tribute on art, cancer, and vulnerability that touched us deeply.



Meredith Monk and Ann Hamilton Ascend at the Walker
Our consulting editor experiences Monk's "spiritual propulsion" at her live performance.



Art from Detroit's Ashes
A massive art installation made with repurposed materials breathes new life into a deteriorating Detroit neighborhood.



Recognizing an Obscure Photographer's Hidden Gifts
We all have gifts. But sometimes those gifts remain invisible to the people around us. This was true for honed her craft as street photographer for over four decades.



The Embodied Art of Ann Hamilton (video)
There's something magical about the way Ann Hamilton inhabits space. This video will transport you to an extraordinary world of ordinary life observed by a maker.



Ann Marsden and the Spiritual Craft of Photography
"I picked up a camera in journalism class, and it was truly spiritual." We've had the honor of working with Ann Marsden many times over the years. Her passion for her craft inspired all of us at On Being, and we’ll miss her deeply.



Art Can Stir More than Just the Soul
Viewing and experiencing art in a museum can actually affect you physically.



'Those People' Can Make Art: Poems from New Immigrants in Response to Seth Godin's Story
A community college professor responds to Seth Godin's story with his student's poetry.

Brian Greene — Reimagining the Cosmos (On Being)

Dr. Brian Greene is a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University. He is also co-founder of the World Science Festival. His books include The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality, and The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos.

He is one of the most entertaining science writers and television hosts (he has done several programs on physics and cosmology). This week he was the guest on NPR's On Being with Krista Tippett.

Brian Greene — Reimagining the Cosmos

January 30, 2014| On Being
Hosted by Krista Tippett


The discoveries which the physicist Brian Greene spends his life pondering lead to a thrilling, mind-bending view of the cosmos, and of the human adventure of modern science. Think of the certainties many of us grew up learning in school - now overtaken by the constant reimagining of the cosmos that is modern physics. The word “space” to describe what we now understand as a sphere teeming with mysterious energy and matter. In our lifetime the science fiction scenario of parallel universes has become a compelling mathematical possibility. Brian Greene works on this frontier, and he increasingly believes that the deepest realities are hidden from human senses and defy our best intuition.

A thrilling, mind-bending view of the cosmos and of the human adventure of modern science. In a conversation ranging from free will to the meaning of the Higgs boson particle, physicist Brian Greene suggests the deepest scientific realities are hidden from human senses and often defy our best intuition.

Listen

Radio Show/Podcast - (mp3, 51:00)
Unedited Interview - Brian Greene - (mp3, 84:55)
Transcript

Voices on the Radio

Dr. Brian Greene is a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University. He is also co-founder of the World Science Festival. His books include The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality, and The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos.

Pertinent Posts from the On Being Blog

Nobel Prize for ‘God Particle’ Discovery Prompts Deeper Questions

Would the Higgs boson exist without our thinking it existed in the first place. Is it possible that by thinking differently – about ourselves, about others, about our universe – we might begin to see things differently?

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The Higgs Boson (The "God Particle") Explained in Comics

With the important news about the the Higgs boson particle, this excellent video explainer with comic sketches may even help us understand it one day!

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Superstring Theory as a Unifier for the Laws of Physics

Writing script explaining string theory isn't so easy. Thankfully, Brian Greene's TED talk provided just the right language. A revelatory video that will excite your imagination.

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Quarks and Creation: On the Complementary Nature of Science and Religion

Krista Tippett reflects on her conversation with John Polkinghorne on quarks, creation, and God.

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Quantum Biology and the Hidden Nature of Nature (live video)

Put an astrobiologist and a mechanical engineer on the same stage and what do you get? One heck of an exciting conversation about how quantum physics realm holds sway and plays a pivotal role in our everyday experiences — in everything from bird navigation to our sense of smell.

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Mathematics, Purpose, and Truth: The World Feels More Spacious

Of all the ideas Janna Levin presents, the most provocative and disturbing, perhaps, is her doubt that there is free will in human existence at all. She cannot be sure that we are not utterly determined by brilliant principles of physics and biology. Yet she cleaves more fiercely in the face of this belief to the reality of her love of her children and her hopes and dreams for them.

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Black Holes and the Sonic Song of the Universe (video)

Listen to these sounds of black holes merging and falling into one another and the "white noise" of the Big Bang. A TED Talk with Janna Levin that stirs the mind.

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Symbols of Power: Adinkras and the Nature of Reality

Physicists have long sought to describe the universe in terms of equations. Now, James Gates explains how research on a class of geometric symbols known as adinkras could lead to fresh insights into the theory of supersymmetry — and perhaps even the very nature of reality.