Kids aren’t born knowing how to tell stories, least of all stories about themselves. Most of us remember having to tell someone, recounting a sequence of events, or a disjointed set of dream images, “but that’s not a story.” Stories are about someone trying to do something, and what they have to go through to do it, whether overcoming obstacles or being defeated by them. Mostly kids learn how to tell stories about themselves by being told stories about themselves by other peo

Standing before a Mayan temple near Mahahuan, on the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico, I’m taken back to the Mayan heart sacrifice ritual, and the image of a bloody heart held in a priest’s hand, still beating. The ritual may have been done to appease the gods, feeding them with the blood of high status prisoners of war, their bodies painted blue for the ritual (and perhaps to provide better contrast with blood). One thinks of Mayan civilization as having come and gone fairly quic

I couldn’t exactly say this in my grad school essay, but the real reason I started studying psychology wasn’t a great teacher or a fascinating textbook. It was a little pill called “barrel of sunshine.” Popping 1000 mg of LSD at a Jefferson Airplane concert probably wasn’t the smartest thing I did when I was 15 but it turned my interest in science turned into an interest both in the psychology of consciousness, and in the search for God largely from the “mind-expanding” effec