Psychology

[close] What if your psychotherapist could really see into your soul? Picture all those secrets lying hidden, perhaps squirming a bit, just out of view. Would you invite your analyst to take a peek behind that gossamer curtain? Read your aura? Scry your future…?

Classically trained at the Jung Institute in Zurich, Doctor Lara McInnis has a special gift that helps her with her patients. Born with “the sight” she can read auras, while flirting with a somewhat elusive ability to foretell the future. Lara becomes alarmed when several of her patients—and a student or two—tell her about the same cataclysmic dream. Reaching out to the Institute for answers, Lara’s paranormal ability sounds a sharp warning and she runs up hard against a dead end. Her search for assistance leads her to a Sidhe and ancient Celtic rituals blaze their way into her life. Complicating the picture is a deranged patient who’s been hell bent on destroying Lara ever since she tried to help his abused wife, a boyfriend with a long-buried secret and a society that’s crumbling to dust as shortages of everything from electricity to food escalate.
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[close] So keen is the interest in the newly discovered “risk intelligence” that when professor Dylan Evans posted an innovative test online that allows people to assess their Risk Quotient (RQ), it was taken by tens of thousands of people and was featured in Psychology Today and across the blogosphere. Should we have that surgery? Should we trust the advice of financial advisors? How worried should we be about terrorist attacks? Evans, who has pioneered the study of risk intelligence, shows how essential it is in our lives to make good decisions when we are facing uncertainty but that the vast majority of us are actually quite bad at doing so—we have low RQs. Some people do, though, have very high risk intelligence. What makes the difference?

Introducing a wealth of fascinating research findings and using a wide range of real-life examples—from the brilliant risk assessment skills of horse race handicappers to the tragically flawed evaluations of risk that caused the financial crisis—Evans reveals the common errors in our thinking that undermine our risk intelligence, such as “ambiquity aversion,” overconfidence in our knowledge, and the fallacy of worst-case scenarios, as well as the many ways we are duped by how information is provided to us. He then introduces a host of simple techniques we can use to boost our RQ, offering a brief test for assessing our risk intelligence and reporting on the powerful results he’s seen in experiments he’s conducted in training people to develop their RQs. Both highly engaging and truly mind-changing, Risk Intelligence will fascinate all of those who are interested in how we can improve our thinking in order to enhance our lives. [close]

[close] We are all Born Believers, explains Oxford University’s Professor Justin L. Barrett in this enlightening and provocative book on how human beings, across every culture, instinctively develop a belief in a divine power.

It all begins in the brain. Infants, under the sway of powerful internal and external forces, make sense of their environments by imagining a creative and intelligent agent, a grand controller who makes the sun shine and the night fall. In the chaos of childhood, where so much is out of the child’s control, this belief in a morally good creator can bring tremendous comfort and calm. A child’s world is then filled with beings who intentionally act upon the environment, maintaining order. Summarizing scientific experiments conducted with children across the globe, Professor Barrett illustrates the ways human beings have come to develop complex belief systems about God’s omniscience, the afterlife, and the immortality of deities. He shows how the science of childhood religiosity reveals, across humanity, a “Natural Religion,” the organization of those beliefs that humans gravitate to organically, and how it underlies all of the major world religions, uniting them under one common source.

For believers and non-believers alike, Barrett offers a compelling argument for the human instinct for religion, as he guides parents on how to effectively encourage children in developing a healthy constellation of beliefs about the world around them. [close]