All Posts

In 1987, a graduate student named Francine Shapiro was walking through a park in Los Gatos, California, turning over something distressing in her mind, when she noticed something unexpected: her eyes were moving rapidly from side to side — and the distress was diminishing. Curious, she began to experiment deliberately. When she intentionally moved her eyes back and forth while holding distressing thoughts, the thoughts lost their emotional charge. When she stopped, the charge

Keith Richards famously woke up in the middle of the night, grabbed the cassette recorder he kept by his bed, and recorded what would become the opening riff of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" — before falling immediately back asleep. When he listened to the tape the next morning, the riff was there, followed by forty minutes of him snoring. The unconscious, it turns out, writes pretty good songs. This is the territory depth psychology inhabits — the dimension of psyche t

Watch a wildebeest in the moments after escaping a lion. It will shake — violently, trembling from nose to tail — before returning, more or less immediately, to grazing. The shaking isn't a malfunction. It's the completion of a defensive response: the nervous system discharging the enormous biological energy mobilized for survival. The wildebeest doesn't develop PTSD. It shakes it off. Literally. Humans, blessed and cursed with a cortex sophisticated enough to override inst