Some psychologists have developed brief talks relevant to the topics I’ve covered in the book. I’ve provided links to some of their talks below, organized chapter by chapter.
Chapter 3: The People Out There
One of the key ideas of Chapter 3 (and also Chapter 4) is that we form mental models of the people around us and those models can diverge from the reality of what’s around us. One of the most striking illusions we encounter is what’s called “change blindness”–in which we believe we are observing a situation carefully but in fact are missing a key point of what’s going on. A number of psychologists have uploaded examples of our proneness to miss key parts of our environment. Watch the next two videos to see what I mean.
Chapter 5: Making Choices
- A humorous entry here: sometimes our judgment leaves something to be desired. George, on Seinfeld, shows a remarkable turnaround in his judgment, and this youtube video examines the positive impact of his new approach to his life. As the well-known warning goes, though, “Don’t try this at home.”
Chapter 6: Developing Personal Intelligence
- Rebecca Saxe’s TED talk on “How We Read Each Others’ Minds.” This video includes an example of the false belief task (using pirate puppets), and an extension of it to moral reasoning, and finally, a rather mind-blowing demonstration of transcranial magnetic stimulation and how it can interfere with moral judgment. (This last part may not have much to do with personal intelligence per se, but it sure is worth seeing, and enhances our understanding of the brain-mind connection).
Chapter 7: Personal Intelligence in Adulthood
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on his theory of Flow in a TED talk. Managing our flow and aiming toward a flow state is a key part of using our personal knowledge well, I’d say (this isn’t part of the book, but could have been).
- Clayton Christensen on how we should measure our lives (TED talk).
- The eminent Stanford psychologist Phil Zimbardo discusses the importance of time perspective in life, drawing on his own personal experiences, in this TED talk. A longer form video is found here.
- Angela Duckworth talks at TED about Grit.
Also click through to “The Science of Personality,” a 48 minute video from Hogan Assessment Systems here at: www.thescienceofpersonality.com.