Eighty years ago, Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank theorized that when we are born, we experience a “birth trauma” that affects us for the rest of our lives.  More recently, psychiatrist Stanislav Grof has created a model for understanding in greater depth the kinds of effects that birth can have upon our later lives.  He writes that...Read More

Thomas Edison was one of the greatest inventors who ever lived.  He patented the incandescent light bulb, the carbon microphone, the phonograph, the motion picture projector, and a thousand other inventions.  But few people know that Edison also was working on a machine that would be able to communicate with the dead. In an article...Read More

“Babies haven’t any hair. Old men’s heads are just as bare Between the cradle and the grave Lies a haircut and a shave.” ——- Samuel Hoffenstein “The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.” ——- Mark Twain “It is...Read More

When Albert Einstein was four, his father gave him a simple magnetic compass for his birthday.  Later on, in adulthood, Einstein wrote that this simple toy served to unlock his feelings of curiosity and wonder about the world   He said that from that time on he was filled with a desire to ferret out the...Read More

A report in the journal Neuropsychology suggests that hypertension (high blood pressure) contributes to age-related declines in the brain and cognition.  They looked at two groups of adults:  one group remained healthy for 5 years; the other group either had hypertension at the start of the study, or developed it sometime during the 5 year...Read More