Neighbors lingered a long time on the lawns and street, long after the emergency workers and police had left. There was nothing we could do to help, but nobody seemed quite ready to give up the sense of solidarity that emerges around such threatening experiences.

Well, think about just what it is that "Jeopardy!" really tests in people. It's nothing less than the natural human ability to negotiate a vast amount of general knowledge and all very rapidly.

We think of Spokane and Olympia as psychologically close because they're both in Washington, even though Olympia is actually much closer to Portland, Ore. The mapmaker in our neurons favors the category over actual proximity.

New research suggests that our moral judgments about property ownership may be an intuitive process--one more fundamental than society's laws and regulations.

My adventures in happiness research led me to the concept of heuristics. Heuristics are "rules of thumb," the quick, common sense principles people apply to solve a problem or make a decision.