Like most swimmers, I try to get in some laps almost every day, but there is only one health club with a pool within decent driving distance from where I live. It doesn't call itself a Christian gym, but it plays primarily Christian music overhead, holds prayer meetings and Bible studies, and incidentally it also leaves most of its hi-def televisions parked on the same 24-hour news network all the time.

Even though I don't intentionally listen to Christian music, I find it difficult to escape it where I live. My regular readers have already heard me gripe about how it's not this way only at a local health club but also at local restaurants, skating rinks, doctor's offices, gas stations, and just about any other place you can go around here. That means I get a decent feel for what messages my Christian friends and family are exposed to on a regular basis. I already knew that fare pretty well, of course, since I was a devoted Christian myself for twenty years. But this way I guess you could say it keeps me current.

And the songs we listen to matter. They help shape the way we think. Andrew Fletcher famously said, "If a man were permitted to make all the ballads he need not care who should make the laws of a nation." I would modify that to say that Sunday morning sermons can go in one ear and out the other, but the songs Christians hear replay over and over again several times a week, impacting them in their daily lives in a way no eloquent speech ever could. Back when I was a leader in my church group, I put a good deal of time into writing songs for our group (we often stole popular tunes and wrote our own lyrics for the group to learn and sing—loads of fun, by the way!) because I understood the weight that songs carry.

Teachers and preachers like to think they shape the theology of a congregation but they can't hold a candle to the music. The most forward-thinking leaders of Evangelicalism have known for years that if you can influence the music in people's earbuds, you can steer an entire generation in the direction you feel is best. Of course, if you can also commandeer control over the hiring and firing of Christian seminaries and universities, that can powerfully reshape a culture as well. But that's a topic for another day, perhaps.

People with psychopathic traits are less affected by others' yawns, a new study finds.

Contagious yawning has been linked to empathy levels in several studies, though not all research supports the association. However, new research in the journal Personality and Individual Differences finds that people with psychopathic traits—especially a lack of empathy—are not as susceptible to catching a case of the yawns ... at least among college students, the only group tested.

Researchers from Baylor University in Texas tried to provoke 135 students to yawn in reaction to someone else's yawn. Each of the participants also completed a questionnaire regarding their personality traits, measuring psychopathic characteristics like selfishness, tendency to be manipulative, impulsivity, and a lack of empathy. Then they sat at a computer and watched 10-second video clips of facial movements, including yawning. Electrodes were attached to their faces just under the lower eyelids, on their foreheads, on the outer corners of their eyes, and on their fingertips to measure their movements in reaction to the videos.

We have this tragic misperception that humanity is predisposed to violence.

The truth is that humanity is predisposed to peace. The default position for humanity is that of conscientious objector to war and violence.

In our work at the Center on Conscience & War, this is proven to us daily, through our individual conscientious objectors. Science has proven it, too. This tendency for cooperation over competition is evident in daily life: on an average day, most people will witness countless acts of cooperation, kindness, and humanity towards one another, and not one act of violence or competition. And most of it is so commonplace, we barely even notice it. We take our nonviolence for granted.

And so does the news. What makes the news is violence, not cooperation. Particularly, on our local news programs, the top stories are the ones that depict street crimes and "home invasions." Seeing this interpersonal violence, I am convinced, leads us to believe that people are predisposed to acting violently toward one another. We all make decisions based on patterns we observe, and if the patterns we observe are highlighting violence, we are going to decide that humanity is violent.

How does this relate to war? If we believe that violence among humans is natural, we will believe that war is inevitable.

But violence is not natural. Our conscience tells us killing another human being is wrong. And it is the military that knows this better than anyone.

The military has taken notice that, over time, and through the history of war, the vast majority of individuals refuse to shoot to kill. That means, instead of firing directly at an "enemy," soldiers (used here to cover all members of the Armed Forces: soldiers, Marines, airmen and women, and sailors) would fire their weapons away from their "targets," or pretend to shoot. One investigation found -- and these studies have been replicated -- that in World War I only about 5% of people shot to kill; in World War II, about 15% of people shot to kill. By the US war in Vietnam, the rate at which soldiers were shooting to kill was found to be 90%. Today, that number could be even higher.

What happened? Training evolved to meet the military's goals.

There is a science of teaching soldiers to kill and it is called killology. It is the science of circumventing the conscience.

In order to get an otherwise psychologically healthy individual to kill, US military training has been developed to bypass the conscience and have the act of killing - the act of firing one's weapon with the intent to kill -- become reflexive.

Three years ago, I set out to come up with a single sentence that could guide both my career and personal decisions. It turned out to be:

Be generous and expert, trustworthy and clear, open-minded and adaptable, persistent and present.

Only after months of living by these words did I realize that all these elements came down to a single powerful habit, which is to start every interaction by thinking: help this person. Let me explain...

Generous means to start every personal interaction with three words in your head: help this person. When you answer the phone, when someone knocks on your door, when you get introduced to a new colleague, your first instinct should be to help that person. Two years ago, I was driving my 14-year-old son back from a school event and I made an observation about the event that wasn't entirely positive. His response was, "How is that helping this person?"

That quick exchange taught me two things. It's not enough to say you are generous, you actually have to work hard every day to live that way. I'm trying hard, but it is challenging, I admit. But more importantly, I learned that my son now has these words in the front of his mind, and that is a very good thing.

I'm a freelance writer. Often when I tell people about what I do, I hear the Greek chorus: "What a luxury! How nice it must be to work from home." Except I can't. Or rather, I could, but I would be fending off a very needy cat and the desire to eat last night's takeout at 11 AM.

At present, I am writing this article at a cafe surrounded by the furious typing of other cafe patrons who I assume have similar petty distractions awaiting them in the dysfunctional solitude of their apartments. And, according to a recent study by Belgian psychologist Kobe Desender, there's a reason for my sneaking suspicion: Mental effort is contagious. So contagious that, when Desender and his team tested the human hive mind with a simple computer game that required varying levels of partner participation and difficulty, participants naturally gravitated toward matching the perceived effort of their harder-working partners — not the difficulty level of the task.

Desender and his team determined that partners were not "mimicking" each other, but the reasons why aren't clear. "Swarm theory" has fascinated scientists for decades: Mainly, why do humans work harder, better, faster when we are tapped into the energy of a group? In fact, brain scans of control groups of children show more activity in regions that recognize facial expressions, faces, and social signals versus groups of autistic children who have trouble interpreting basic human social cues. Even monkeys who are popular have bigger brains.

So is understanding group behavior really the way to understanding how to improve human efficiency and motivation? Working together could be hardwired in our DNA. We are descended from fish, after all.

Steven Kotler explains the neurochemical changes during flow states that strengthen motivation, creativity, and learning.

We think of psychological disorders like anxiety and depression as uniquely human problems, but many other species could be suffering from them too

Flint was hit hard when his mother Flo passed away. He became withdrawn and stared into space. He also stopped eating and became weak. After a few days, Flint rested close to where his mother had lain, and died.

Flint was a chimpanzee living in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. His story was described by primatologist Jane Goodall in her 2010 book Through a Window. She contends that he was suffering from depression.

To our eyes, many animals seem to suffer from forms of mental illness. Whether they are pets, or animals kept in ill-managed zoos and circuses, they can become excessively sad, anxious, or even traumatised.

Are you addicted to high stress? Your health and longevity hang in the balance of your honest response. What I've noticed in my 20 years as a specialist in integrative medicine is that cortisol has become the new crack: highly addictive yet flying below the radar of awareness.

Chronic stress, and its hormonal indicator, cortisol, can make you fat, cranky, and inflamed, or at minimum, age faster than necessary. Mastering stress as a form of energy, rather than being bullied by it into addictive patterns, is the key to health prosperity, longer life, and happier days. My mission is to offer novel ways to rehab your rhythm with stress so that there's a playful, hip-hop vibe to it, not the grim march through your 20s, 30s, and 40s of racing from one task to the next.

Cortisol is the "fight or flight" hormone and it has a simple job: to get you out of a jam. If a tiger is about to charge you, cortisol raises your blood sugar, heart rate, blood pressure, sending fresh blood to your muscles so you can either pick up a club and fight the tiger or run like crazy up the nearest tree.

One in 50 of us is a victim, left feeling like a robot - and yet even doctors have to Google it. Now one sufferer is intent on helping millions out of their torment

Jane Charlton was not herself when she woke one day in April 2002, but it was more terrifying than any ordinary morning grogginess - and it did not shift for the best part of three years.

"It was a feeling of being fundamentally wrong in your own body," Charlton says, attempting to describe what has remained largely indescribable: the symptoms of depersonalisation disorder, the condition that swallowed a huge chunk of her life.

"It was a constant, continuous otherworldly experience," she says. "It's a feeling that, if you're feeling this way, you shouldn't be existing at the same time. The feeling was of having left myself completely, constantly trying to grasp on to reality, trying to claw back what I'd had a few days ago. Yesterday I had a life, and now I've got nothing."

Emotional intelligence is probably the most powerful yet undervalued trait in our society.

We believe in rooting our everyday functions in logic and reason, yet we come to the same conclusions after long periods of contemplation as we do in the blink of an eye. Our leaders sorely overlook the human element of our socio-political issues and I need not cite the divorce rate for you to believe that we're not choosing the right partners (nor do we have the capacity to sustain intimate relationships for long periods of time).

It seems people believe the most intelligent thing to do is not have emotions at all. To be effective is to be a machine, a product of the age. A well-oiled, consumerist-serving, digitally attuned, highly unaware but overtly operational robot. And so we suffer.

Too bad every liar isn't Pinocchio, with a tell-all nose. But do our faces give ourselves away in more subtle ways? The answer is often yes — though the science of exactly how is surprisingly complex.

For many people, lying is stressful — so you might think that that stress would reveal itself blatantly via body language. But supposedly obvious "giveaways" aren't reliable indicators of dishonesty, experts say. Unease could have many causes.

That's not to say having a strange feeling about the way someone is acting doesn't mean something. If someone's body language is making your gut shout "liar," investigate further. After all, research suggests that intuitions about lying may be more accurate than conscious judgment. In one study, participants watched videos of "suspects" in a mock-crime interview, some of whom were lying. They were able to pick out the liars only 43 percent of the time, less than by chance. In a separate test of unconscious associations, however, they were more likely to link the liars to words like "untruthful" and "dishonest."