Since I suffered a pretty substantial knee injury playing football in High School I still cringe when I’m watching a sporting event and a player hurts their knee. If they show a replay of the injury I turn my head away. It’s too hard to watch. Head injuries are probably second on my list of cringe-worthy injuries and…
One of the most memorable Thanksgiving sermons that I have ever written was entitled, “I’m Thankful For the Things I Don’t Know.” In the sermon I talked about how sometimes not knowing is better than knowing. For example, I am pretty sure that I would actually feel sicker just knowing about all the germs and…
This week I am reporting on the results of some interesting sleep research funded by the Latin American and Iberian Institute at the University of New Mexico. I think most of us would assume that people who live in hunter-gatherer, pre-industrial societies would get more sleep on average than those of us who live in the fast-paced world. This research…
Last month I took an afternoon to go visit a group of shut-ins who live out of town. I started with a visit to a 101 year old woman, followed by a visit to a 94 year old man and his wife, then it was off to see a 99 year old man. And I…
An remarkable collection of forty samovars is on display at The Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis now through January 24, 2016. A samovar or “self-boiler” is a metal urn with a spigot used to boil water for making tea. The water is boiled by kindling a fire in a metal tube that fits inside the urn. Although…
One of the three guiding principles of The Research Project is finding research that brings new understanding to previously held beliefs. The research I’m sharing this week has brought me to a new understanding of one of my beliefs. For years I wondered why hundreds of people didn’t go to jail when the housing bubble burst,…
By now it is a familiar routine; get your car serviced, spend the night in a hotel, call customer service for help with a problem, and a few hours or days later you get an email asking you to complete a survey to evaluate your experience. But what if, after making a court appearance, you…
At just past the halfway point in The Research Project it’s time to do a little looking back at what we’ve blogged about so far, maybe pick some favorites. To be sure I have discovered that we have some really amazing colleges and universities in our country. And there is a phenomenal amount of fascinating…
After eight weeks of states whose names begin with the letter “M” we are moving on to the N’s as in Nebraska. This week we head to Creighton University, a Jesuit school in Omaha, where they are developing a promising new way to help those suffering from PTSD, also known as shell shock or battle fatigue syndrome. The…
Mirror Neurons 