James Olson may refer to:
James Olson (born October 8, 1930) is an American actor.
Olson was born in Evanston, Illinois, and graduated from Northwestern University. He performed stage work in and around Chicago before his 1956 film debut in The Sharkfighters. He starred alongside Joanne Woodward in Academy Award-nominated best picture Rachel, Rachel in 1966. Olson made numerous stage, feature film and TV appearances from the mid-1950s until the early 1990s.
Olson's television appearances include guest roles on scores of shows, including episodes of Kraft Television Theatre, Murder, She Wrote, Little House on the Prairie, Hawaii Five-O, Battlestar Galactica, Lou Grant, The Bionic Woman, Wonder Woman, Mannix, Bonanza, Have Gun-Will Travel, Marcus Welby, M.D., Police Woman, Barnaby Jones, The New Land, and Maude.
James Olson (born Chet Myles Olson; June 27, 1943) is an American philosopher and author. A generalist, his primary focus is on the effects of functional lateralization on consciousness and human behavior. Olson is the author of The Whole-Brain Path to Peace (Origin Press, 2011), a book that seeks to explain human behavior by focusing on mental perspective, the initial stage of perception, rather than on the whole of perception—the latter being the more common approach to understanding the roots of behavior.
As shared in Olson’s speaking engagements and radio interviews, his passion is to help bring a greater measure of peace to this planet by reducing the level of conflict through greater self-understanding. Olson believes that mental conflict is initiated in the brain/mind complex, the result of profound differences in the polar left hemisphere and the non-polar right hemisphere as expressed though the unique perspectives and ideas that they generate. According to Olson, the perceptual and ideological conflicts that arise can often be consciously eliminated by understanding the two hemispheres as a complementary whole rather than as parts.