I had an unforgettable experience with learning an American phrase when I began teaching at Thomas Jefferson College not long after I arrived in this country in the seventies. I had only begun to learn how to speak American English. My class took place in a large, windowless lecture hall, and on the first day, I'd just started to explain my goals for the class when one of the students yelled at me, "Watch out!" I'd never heard the phrase before and therefore had no idea what the student meant. Instantly, my brain searched for some kind of definition. "Watch" meant "look." "Out" could mean "outside." Did the student want me to look outside? I couldn't, though, because there were no windows in the room. Of course, all of this happened in a fraction of a second — after which a part of the ceiling fell on my head and I was suddenly lying on the floor bleeding and waiting for paramedics to arrive.

The following elements—proximity to the owner, and attention-getting behavior—are by now familiar to us as characteristic of dogs, and go into their being such fine companions for humans. And they are also essential for the survival of the person whose life was at risk. So are such dogs truly heroes? They are. But did they know what they were doing? There is no evidence that they did. And they don't know they're acting heroically. Dogs certainly have the potential, with training, to be rescuers. Even the untrained dog may come to your aid — but without knowing exactly what to do. Their success is due instead to what they do know: that something has happened to you, which makes them anxious. If they express that anxiety in a way that attracts other people—people with an understanding of emergencies— to the scene, or allows you to get out of a hole in the ice, it is great.

Stephen Colbert, political satirist and host of The Colbert Report, commented during an interview on the importance of laughter in tense times. "You can't laugh and be afraid at the same time," he said. And he'd be right. Laughing actually releases endorphins. They are released to mask the pain we're causing to ourselves as our organs are being convulsed. We like laughing for the same reason runners like running — it feels good. But we've all had the experience of laughing so much we want it to stop because it starts to hurt. Like the runner, the hurt actually began earlier, but thanks to the endorphins, we didn't feel it until later. It is the high we get from endorphins, which continues after the laughing has ceased, that makes it hard to be, as Colbert says, afraid at the same time.

Parents are generally infants' most frequent and consistent social partners and as such their behaviors are those that most profoundly affect infants, emerging sense of self-efficacy. The responses that are most effective in facilitating infants' early self-knowledge are socially contingent and reflect the infants' own behavior. In naturally occurring interactions with young infants, parental responses are primarily imitations of infants' actions. These imitations are not exact but rather match the infants' actions in intensity, affect, and tempo. Infants' early perceptual capacities allow them to recognize these imitative behaviors as mirroring their own. From the beginning of life, infants are aware of the matching quality of their behavior and that of others. Infants may more easily recognize the external effect of their behavior when the actions of others mirror the behavior the infants produce. Some theorists propose that in mirroring infant behavior, which exposes infants to external perceptual manifestations of what they are internally experiencing, parents facilitate infants' early understanding of their own experience.

Most prodigies don't make a transition from a child who learns rapidly and effortlessly in an established domain to an adult who ultimately remakes a domain. They apply their extraordinary abilities in ordinary ways, mastering their jobs without questioning defaults and without making waves. In every domain they enter, they play it safe by following the conventional paths to success. They become doctors who heal their patients without fighting to fix the broken systems that prevent many patients from affording health care in the first place. They become lawyers who defend clients for violating outdated laws without trying to transform the laws themselves. They become teachers who plan engaging algebra lessons without questioning whether algebra is what their students need to learn. Although we rely on them to keep the world running smoothly, they keep us running on a treadmill. Most gifted children grow to be adults who perform their jobs successfully in existing ways, without attempting to reform the established systems.

As with all aspects of body language, developing your gestural ability starts with learning how to accurately read other people's signals. Confidence and natural gestures go hand in hand because insecurity and nervousness can lead to jerky movements. One of the best ways to quiet your own anxiety is to learn as much as possible about whatever situation you're about to enter. When you know how to read people's body language, you have a great source of inside information constantly available to you. The body is a much better indicator of true emotions and feelings, simply because most people don't try to mask their body's revealing signals — they don't even realize those signals are happening. This allows you to more easily understand people's true feelings and respond in a way that makes people feel really good, so they want to please you in return — which is another way of saying, you'll have some serious charisma.

My father was a pharmacist and, in Egypt in those days, many people used to go to the pharmacist for every illness, just like going to the doctor. My father was like a medicine man; he had a good reputation. He always carried a little box in his pocket containing a few vitamin tablets and when people came to see him seeking his help, he used to put his hand into his pocket, take out the little box and say, ‘These are very special tablets and cost £1 each,' which was equivalent to £30 or more each in today's money, but he only sold one or two at a time. The fascinating thing was that all of these people recovered very quickly. I asked my father why he was lying to people and he replied, ‘If people think that this is the best and most expensive medicine, they will recover all by themselves.'

Moskowitz set up shop in the seventies, and one of his first clients was Pepsi. The artificial sweetener aspartame had just become available, and Pepsi wanted Moskowitz to figure out the perfect amount of sweetener for a can of Diet Pepsi. Pepsi knew that anything below 8 percent sweetness was not sweet enough and anything over 12 percent was too sweet. So Moskowitz made up experimental samples of Diet Pepsi with every conceivable degree of sweetness — 8 percent, 8.25 percent, 8.5, and on and on up to 12. And then he gave them to hundreds of people, and looked for the concentration that people liked the most. But the data were a mess — there wasn't a pattern — and one day, sitting in a diner, Moskowitz realized why. They had been asking the wrong question. There was no such thing as the perfect Diet Pepsi. They should have looked for the perfect Diet Pepsis.

Fear is a good thing — if we were completely fearless, it wouldn't be long before we were eaten by a crocodile or fell off a tall building. It's very difficult to figure out what people are most afraid of, but among the most common phobias is a fear of spiders. Why we should be afraid of nonaggressive creatures hundreds of times smaller than we are is a mystery. Probably the most common fear, if you grouped several together, is the fear of other people. Most people get sweaty-palmed and dry-mouthed at the thought of public speaking, for example. And agoraphobia, which affects one person in twenty, can stop sufferers from leaving their homes for years in extreme cases. Perhaps it's pretty reasonable: after all, which other animal is as scheming, unpredictable, and dangerous as people are?

Surely nothing would count as having human-level intelligence unless it had language, and the chief use of human language is to talk about the world. In this sense, intelligence is bound up with what philosophers call intentionality. Moreover, language is a social phenomenon, and a primary use of language within a group of people is to talk about the things they can all perceive (such as this tool or that piece of wood), or have perceived (yesterday's piece of wood), or might perceive (tomorrow's piece of wood, maybe). In short, language is grounded in awareness of the world. In an embodied creature or a robot, such an awareness would be evident from its interactions with the environment (avoiding obstacles, picking things up, and so on). But we might widen the conception to include a distributed, disembodied artificial intelligence equipped with suitable sensors.

There are many talented executives with the ability to manage operations, but great leadership is not based solely on great operational ability. Leading is not the same as being the leader. Being the leader means you hold the highest rank, either by earning it, having good fortune or navigating internal politics. Leading, however, means that others willingly follow you — not because they have to, not because they are paid to, but because they want to. A great leader knows how to lead the company. Those who lead are able to do so because those who follow trust that the decisions made at the top have the best interest of the group at heart. In turn, those who trust work hard because they feel like they are working for something bigger than themselves.

Routines are different than habits and rituals. Habits are repetitive behaviors that individuals perform without conscious thought. Behavioral habits are done automatically and typically involve a restricted range of behaviors. For example, a child may have a habit of sucking on the end of her blanket when going to sleep. A routine, in contrast, involves a sequence of highly ordered steps. A child's bedtime routine might include taking a bath, brushing his or her teeth, reading a book, saying prayers, and then sucking on the end of a blanket before going to sleep. Rituals, on the other hand, tend to be more symbolic and linked to emotional bonds within the family. They often provide continuity across generations and are unique and meaningful to the family. A routine has the ability to become a ritual when it is repeated over time and takes on symbolic meaning.