When I was 12 I was talking with my mom at the dining table. Suddenly she looked up, stood up and said, “Mother?” She asked me, “Did you hear that?” I’d heard nothing. “I hear my mother calling my name!” she said. She walked around the house, upstairs, out front. My maternal grandparents lived about 300 miles away in Ohio. We didn’t think they were coming to see us. Mom called Ohio. There was no answer. A couple hours later we got a call: My grandmother had been in a car accident, knocked out but okay. When the ambulance came for her, she was whispering my mother’s name, over and over. Years later, I was studying martial arts, and we got a visit from a slender, slightly stooped Chinese man. He was 35 years old, but was introduced to us as a master. He was asked to demonstrate his skills and did three things. First, he asked a sword-wielding student to attack him, which the student did in a great leap. To me, it looked like the master just raised one hand; the student went flying straig...
For some 50 years or so, generations of college students participated in psychological testing. It was easy money for goofy tasks: sort silverware, look at images with your left eye, then your right. But then all that science, because that’s what it was, started to yield results. Here’s one of the experiments that stayed with me. First, you go to the park by yourself and have an ice cream. Second, you get a visit from someone who drops off a sandwich and stays to chat for a while. Third, you make a bunch of sandwiches, drop them off at a senior center, and stick around to chat with the folks there. After each of these, you are asked how you feel a half hour later, a day later, a week later, a month later. Here’s the surprising finding. All of these things make you feel a little happier. But the third task, where you do something for someone else, had enduring results, up to six months later. Science has confirmed that it is literally better to give than to receive. In a world where we ...