Word: behaviors
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...really believe—and heck, my column is premised on it—that there is such a thing as a national sensibility. This singular, essential taste guides our behavior not just where art and entertainment are concerned, but also in government, politics, law—in everything...
Take these two specimens. Hannah Holmes is a tall, blond, personally assertive science journalist. Temple Grandin is an eminent scholar of animal behavior who also happens to be autistic. These humans have written two books that look very different but are, in their warm-blooded, four-chambered hearts, very similar. In The Well-Dressed Ape (Random House; 351 pages), Holmes attempts to produce a thorough description of Homo sapiens using the kind of language we ordinarily reserve for animals. In Animals Make Us Human (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 342 pages), Grandin does the opposite: she describes animals in terms we usually...
...actual scientist and an influential designer of humane cattle-handling systems. Grandin is also famous for being one of the world's most professionally eminent autistic people, which gives her work an ineffably distinctive perspective. In Animals Make Us Human, she's particularly interested in a kind of behavior called a stereotypy: an abnormal action that someone can't stop repeating. Autistic people often have stereotypies. So, it turns out, do unhappy animals...
...seriously, I have to keep reminding myself to stay positive and look for opportunities even in the difficult economic climate of Harvard today.” Stephen Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology: “Resolutions and commitments of one’s own future behavior are a bit like one person coercing another, except that in this case the present self is trying to coerce the future self. Since Ulysses had his sailors tie him to the mast so he could hear the sirens’ song without steering the ship onto the rocks, people...
...other myth that you see in this is the myth of panic. People assume, in an airplane crash, that there's pandemonium and people panic. But in fact, according to research done after earthquakes and natural disasters and airplane crashes, panic behavior rarely happens. In fact, as passengers are describing right now, people were scared, but they got very quiet, silent; they awaited instructions; a few people took command, got everybody in line and got everybody off the plane. So there are people crying and people that are afraid and people giving voice to their concerns...