We’re all familiar with cases where one attributes certain psychological states or capacities to creatures and systems that are not human persons....

The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision required desegregation of America’s schools, but it also set in motion an agonizing multi-decade debate over race, class, and IQ. In The Mismeasure of Minds: Debating Race and Intelligence Between Brown and...

Steven Shaviro’s book Discognition (Repeater Books, 2016) opens with a series of questions: What is consciousness? How does subjective experience occur? Which entities are conscious? What is it like to be a bat, or a dog, a robot, a tree,

Listeners familiar with our recent podcasts exploring the remarkable legacy of William T. Powers revolutionary Perceptual Control Theory of human behaviour, including its contribution to cognitive behavioural therapy through the development of the Meth...

What can a researcher do to promote social justice? A conventional image of a researcher describes her staying in the ivory tower for most of the time, producing papers filled with academic jargons periodically,

Social cognition includes the ways we explain, predict, interpret, and influence other people. The dominant philosophical theories of social cognition–the theory-theory and the simulation theory–have provided focused accounts of mindreading,

Human beings have long seen themselves as the center of the universe, as specially-created creatures who are anointed as above and beyond the natural world. Professor and noted scientist David P. Barash calls this viewpoint a persistent paradigm of our...

Humans are the only animals that can use language processes to create abstract, symbolic thoughts. This is both a blessing and a curse. Although symbolic processes have many benefits to humans, they can also lead us to great suffering.

Sometimes, a couch is a only a couch, but not in Dr. Nathan Kravis’s new book, On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud (MIT Press, 2017). In a live interview conducted in connection with the Manhattan Institute for P...

In this episode, cross-posted from the podcast Psychologists Off The Clock, Dr. Yael Schonbrun discusses common struggles in adult romantic relationships with Dr. Avigail Lev, co-author (with Matthew McKay) of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Coup...

Magical thinking lies at the heart of J. Eric Oliver and Thomas J. Wood’s new book, Enchanted America: How Intuition and Reason Divide Our Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Oliver is professor of political science at the University of Chica...

Pamela Woolner, senior lecturer in education at Newcastle University, joins us in this episode to discuss her edited volume, School Design Together (Routledge, 2014). Pam is an expert in understanding and developing learning environments,

To many, the title, A Transdiagnostic Approach to CBT using Method of Levels Therapy: Distinctive Features (Routledge, 2012) , may seem incongruous with a podcast channel called “New Books in Systems and Cybernetics.”  However,

Balancing work and a personal life can be a challenge for many of us, and we often make things worse by buying into myths that interfere with our effectiveness and happiness but are unsupported by social science. In this episode,

In Genetics in the Madhouse: The Unknown History of Human Heredity (Princeton University Press, 2018), Theodore Porter uncovers the unfamiliar origins of human genetics in the asylums of Europe and North America.

Schizophrènes au XXe siècle: des effets secondaires de l’histoire [Schizophrenics in the Twentieth Century: The Side Effects of History] is a strong argument in support of the history of psychiatry “from below.

Evolution science and behavioral science both have strong theories that can help us understand humans in context, and yet, until now, the two fields have been mostly separate. In this episode, cross-posted from the podcast Psychologists Off The Clock,

In this inspirational episode, cross-posted from the podcast Psychologists Off The Clock, Dr. Diana Hill interviews Dr. Steven Hayes, co-developer of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), about the future of evidence-based therapy. Dr.

In this episode, cross-posted from the podcast Psychologists Off The Clock, Dr. Diana Hill interviews Dr. Dan Siegel about his new book, Aware: The Science and Practice of Presence (TarcherPerigree, 2018). Dr.

In her new book, State of Madness: Psychiatry, Literature and Dissent After Stalin (Northern Illinois University Press, 2018), Rebecca Reich argues that Soviet dissident writers used literary narratives to counter state-sanctioned psychiatric diagnoses...

In this this interview, cross-posted from the podcast Psychologists Off The Clock, Deirdre Fay, LICSW discusses how she integrates yoga, meditation and attachment theory into healing trauma. Ms. Fay discusses the intersection between yoga philosophy an...

Ever since the first clinical account of autism was published by Dr. Leo Kanner in 1943, Western culture has tended to mythologise the disorder as impenetrable, non-verbal and characterised by silence. As such,

While most children experience some fear and anxiety, some develop more extreme forms of anxiety that can impair their daily functioning. In this episode, cross-posted from the podcast Psychologists Off The Clock, Dr. Veronica Raggi,