It starts with a glance. Not the quick, casual kind, but the one that lingers—measuring, scanning, assessing. For most women, it’s a familiar experience.

A new study in the Asian Journal of Social Psychology confirms that this gaze is more than harmless attention: it sparks measurable anxiety about personal safety.

Yet the findings also reveal a paradox.

That spike in safety anxiety doesn’t always dampen women’s choices to self-sexualize, especially when the man is described as attractive or high in status. In short: risk and reward collide in the space of a single look.

Itzhak Bentov thought the heart and brain were tuning forks for the cosmos. Nikola Tesla insisted everything could be explained through vibration. John C. Lilly floated in darkness until he was convinced the universe was being run by “cosmic programmers.”

Edgar Cayce shut his eyes, went into a trance, and spoke about health and Atlantis in the same sitting. Jacques Vallée looked at UFOs and decided they were less about aliens and more about the human imagination.

Put them all together and you don’t really get a coherent school of thought, do you?

You get a strange constellation of characters — brilliant, reckless, often wrong, but unwilling to accept the idea that consciousness was nothing more than neurons firing in the dark.

Most UFO researchers chase hardware: saucers, propulsion systems, and the occasional green alien with big eyes. Jacques Vallée went after something stranger — the way these sightings reflect the human mind.

Born in France in 1939, Vallée trained as an astronomer and computer scientist. He worked on the technology that would eventually become the internet, which should have earned him a safe life as a respectable scientist.

Instead, he took a sharp turn into the murky business of UFOs. But Vallée wasn’t interested in proving that we’re being visited by extraterrestrials.

His heresy was more subtle: UFOs might be real enough as experiences, but they were also psychological, symbolic events — mirrors more than machines.

While Tesla fried eggs on coils and John Lilly floated with dolphins, Edgar Cayce just took a nap. That was his whole method in a nutshell.

He lay down, went into a trance, and started talking. And for reasons that baffled his family and most of the scientific community, people listened.

Born in 1877 in rural Kentucky, Cayce became famous as the “Sleeping Prophet” — a man who could, while unconscious, diagnose illnesses, prescribe cures, and occasionally wander off into Atlantis.

He wasn’t a trained doctor, he wasn’t a laboratory scientist, and he wasn’t much of a showman either.

He was a soft-spoken, church-going man who looked more like your kindly uncle than a psychic celebrity.

Which made it all the stranger when thousands of people wrote him letters begging him to bestow attention upon them and heal them from afar.

Some scientists spend their careers tidying up data.

John C. Lilly spent his tearing holes in the curtain of reality. A physician and neuroscientist by training, Lilly began as a careful brain researcher.

But somewhere between mapping monkey neurons and building the first sensory isolation tank, he decided science wasn’t asking nearly big enough questions.

What happens to the mind when all stimulation is removed? Could dolphins be taught human language? Could psychedelics unlock a cosmic operating system?

Lilly chased each of these questions with the same intensity — and not always with the same caution.

His life was a mix of genuine discovery, hubris, and a kind of reckless mysticism that makes him one of the strangest figures in the history of consciousness studies.

When most people hear the name Nikola Tesla, they picture lightning bolts, coils sparking like something out of Frankenstein, or maybe a shiny electric car.

But Tesla’s true obsession wasn’t electricity — it was vibration.

He believed the entire universe was built on frequency, resonance, and energy.

That conviction put him somewhere between a genius and a mystic.

And while he never offered couples therapy, he left us metaphors — resonance, harmony, tuning — that describe relationships and consciousness surprisingly well. He was an engineer of machines, yes, but also of metaphors that still hum with relevance.

Itzhak Bentov and the Mechanics of Consciousness: From Pacemakers to the CIA’s Gateway Process

What if your heart wasn’t just pumping blood, but also helping tune your brain into the frequencies of the universe?

That was the audacious claim of Itzhak Bentov, an Israeli-American inventor who straddled the worlds of biomedical engineering and mystical speculation.

He designed medical devices that saved lives, yet he’s best remembered for arguing that consciousness itself is a kind of vibration — one that can stretch beyond the body and even into the cosmos.

It’s 2:17 a.m. in Boston. A college sophomore, already waitlisted for campus counseling, opens her laptop. She doesn’t write in her journal. She opens ChatGPT.

“Why do I hate myself so much?” she types.

The machine—tireless, polite, available—answers.

This is not science fiction. It’s American culture in 2025. Therapy is expensive, therapists are scarce, loneliness is epidemic, and the machines are always awake.

The question isn’t whether people are using ChatGPT as a therapist.

They are. The question is how, how often, how well—and what happens when they do.

Is ChatGPT Being Used as Therapy in America?

Why Texting After a Fight Feels Harder

Long-distance relationship fights land harder. There’s no softening hug, no shared silence to dissipate tension. All you have are words—digits on a screen that come without tone or presence.

That’s why your first message after a fight carries weight. It doesn’t need to resolve everything. It just needs to reopen the door.

Long-Distance Love Requires Extra Care

LDRs ask for more trust, more effort, and more emotional craftsmanship. According to research, long-distance couples often feel more anxiety around communication gaps—but those who succeed develop stronger connection habits (Jiang & Hancock, 2013).

In therapy, I've seen couples transform conflict into deeper intimacy by treating communication like a practiced skill, not a given.

After fights, that craft becomes everything.

The modern wellness industry promises a fix for everything—powders for your cortisol, books to “hack” your brain, apps to engineer happiness.

Neuroscience offers a humbler message: your brain is not a machine to be optimized, but a living system to be understood.

Treat it less like a gadget and more like a pet: it thrives on consistency, kindness, and patience.

When we ignore this, three forces often take hold—loneliness, chronic stress, and self-doubt. They do more than make us miserable; they change the brain itself.

But neuroscience also shows us how to push back—without buying miracle cures.

Social rejection neuroscience has revealed something many already suspect: exclusion doesn’t just bruise the ego, it activates the same brain regions as physical pain.

Research shows that being left out triggers cortisol, the body’s stress hormone, while also lowering a sense of belonging and sometimes sparking aggression (Blackhart et al., 2009).

Chronic rejection is even linked to long-term mental health struggles, including depression and anxiety, as well as physical health risks (Slavich et al., 2010).

Evolution offers an explanation.

For early humans, being excluded from the group meant danger. Without social bonds, survival chances plummeted. Today, the brain’s warning system still interprets rejection as a threat to well-being.

Functional MRI studies show that the anterior cingulate cortex—the same region active in physical pain—lights up when people are excluded from something as trivial as a virtual ball-tossing game (Eisenberger et al., 2003).

But newer findings complicate this picture. Follow-up research suggests the anterior cingulate also responds to surprise or expectation violation, not just social pain (Somerville et al., 2006).

In other words, rejection may hurt partly because it confounds predictions: you thought you belonged, but you were wrong.

Scene One: The Dinner Party

It happens in an instant. You’re sipping wine at a friend’s house when your partner leans over and says, almost casually, “Oh—my ex is here tonight.”

You nod, trying to appear calm.

But inside, your organs fall through the floor.

Every time your partner laughs, you notice who they’re laughing with. The food tastes like nothing. The room feels like it’s shrinking.

That’s jealousy. It barges in, uninvited, pulling a chair up at the table.