According to a recent study published in Emotion, students who evaluated their performance on an exam as higher than it actually was – a form of undeserved self-praise – later felt dejected and depressed.
According to Chi-Yue Chiu, of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore:
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“Distress following excessive self-praise is likely to occur when a person’s inadequacy is exposed, and because inaccurate self-assessments can prevent self-improvement.”
Researchers discovered this effect in students from both the U.S. and Hong Kong, suggesting that it may be cross-cultural. However, they found that students from Hong Kong tended to be more humble in their self evaluations overall, which was consistent with previous research supporting the trend of Asian cultures being more modest than Western cultures.
This finding shouldn’t be that shocking to readers of The Emotion Machine. I have long advocated that we take an honest and reasonable approach to how we view ourselves.
I like positive psychology and I think it offers many useful theories and practices for how we can benefit our lives. But this shouldn’t be confused with the “positive thinking movement.” The former is a scientific discipline, while the latter is a heavily commercialized and distorted industry with little scientific backing.
I’ve experienced the heartache of believing things like The Law of Attraction and The Secret first hand, and I’ve later warned about these dangerous trends in personal development – which often emphasize the importance of excessive self-praise and over-confidence, even when it is irrational and potentially very harmful.
When the self-help “guru” James Arthur Ray had participants go on a physically demanding “Spiritual Warrior” retreat that consisted of several days of fasting, and then spending hours locked in a sweat lodge, several people needed to be hospitalized after – and some even died. Ray believed that through excessive confidence and self-belief, they could overcome any physical limitations. His excessive confidence was wrong, and it had dire consequences for those who fell prey to it.
Of course, some level of self-praise and confidence is essential to our evolution. Because without any confidence, we can never be motivated to take the risks required to successfully adapt to our environment.
If a fish gets thrown into a new pond, but it is too fearful and avoiding of it’s surroundings, it will have greater difficulty finding food to survive. But if it has the confidence to explore its new territory and take calculated risks, it will often have a greater probability of discovering new means of survival, without being crippled by fear.
Self-praise is one of the biggest ways humans can build a more confident demeanor and be more motivated to take action, but it needs to be balanced.
Sports psychologists have demonstrated how athletes can use positive self-talk to improve their performance. But clearly overestimating our abilities can at times lead to some destructive outcomes.
Another study showed how overly optimistic people are susceptible to underestimating the risks that bad things will happen to them, such as getting cancer or getting into a bad car accident. This optimistic attitude can motivate people toward more reckless behaviors because they mis-attribute the risks of their actions.
Again, it’s about balance. Self-praise and confidence are good, but only when they are deserved and when they are grounded in reality. Trying to fool ourselves into thinking we are more than we are can only backfire in the end.
Vengeance is a form of justice where we seek another person or group’s misfortune after that person or group has caused pain to us. There is an allure to vengeance that can captivate the human soul, and while vengeful we often think and act willfully to hurt and destroy, with the expectation that once we succeed we will feel righteous and victorious.
Revenge in the Movies
One of my favorite depictions of revenge is in the movie V for Vendetta, where a masked revolutionary seeks revenge from a government that has oppressed him and left him disfigured. By the end of the movie he succeeds and blows up Parliament in a fit of honor and integrity.
While watching the movie, it’s hard not to feel good when V (the main character) finally succeeds in his destructive endeavors, but is this really how revenge often plays out in the real world?
My guess is no. Having the intentions to cause suffering in another person is physically and psychologically destructive to the intention-holder. Even in the romanticized depiction of vengeance in V for Vendetta, it is clear that some of V’s actions ultimately lead to self-destruction (watch the movie if you haven’t already).
I think the same can be said for most thoughts and acts regarding vengeful behavior. Intentions to hurt rarely lead to positive outcomes for others or ourselves.
Let’s look at another depiction of revenge, this time in the movie Old Boy. In this movie both the protagonist and antagonist seek retributive justice against each other. Dae-su told a rumor about Woo-jin when they were just teenagers, this lead to certain consequences. Woo-jin responded by kidnapping Dae-su for 15 years, tortured him, and ruined his life. As Dae-su was locked up he grew strong feelings of hatred for his kidnapper (can you blame him?) and spent years training in solitude with thoughts of revenge. By the end of the movie both cause immense suffering to each other, but neither find true happiness or closure in their ways.
This seems to be a more accurate depiction of vengeance. Both character’s stories turn into a vicious cycle where one negative deed leads to another. Because they never moved on to a more clear and positive set of intentions (which isn’t always easy), both ended up destroying themselves and their dignity.
In both of these movies the protagonist has violent and destructive intentions, yet I find myself rooting them on and hoping they succeed. Sure, it’s just a movie and it’s all fiction, but I think this allure can be captivating to a certain degree in the real world as well. I know I can identify times in my life where I have at least shown wishful thinking that something goes wrong in another person’s life, mostly because that person treated me poorly at one point and I never fully forgave them.
Is Forgiveness the Answer?
As our society grows increasingly secular, I think “forgiveness” is developing a bad reputation as an outdated Judeo-Christian value. We imagine it in the sense of “turn the other cheek,” and we see forgiveness as catalyst to invite others to keep hurting us.
However, I think forgiveness is still an important value. Holding grudges is psychologically and emotionally draining. Just being able to let go of them can be like a weight being lifted off of our shoulders.
Plus we can forgive someone without ever telling them or inviting them back into our lives. There is no need to welcome further abuse, we only need to make the mental shift to hope that person sees the err in their ways and improves themselves for future well-being. While our good will alone won’t change or fix the other person, it will free us from the false desire for adequate justice (which is often skewed in the heat of revenge, or simply out of our control).
Can You Forgive Hitler?
Hitler didn’t just commit crimes against Jews, he committed crimes against humanity as a whole. This has made him out to be one of the most hated men in history. The quintessence of evil. Our society and culture has no problem depicting Hitler being tortured or burning in hell for all of eternity.
This led me to a question I frequently ask people: Can you forgive Hitler for what he did? I think many people may answer no. They will add that what Hitler did made him an evil person through-and-through, and this has ruined all chances of him ever being forgiven. In fact, he rightly deserves any negative thing that happens to him if there is an after-life.
While I understand this viewpoint, I think it is a product of frustration, anger, and revenge, and not a particularly enlightening view of humanity as a whole. Buddhists would argue that Hitler had a Buddha-nature like everyone else. What led him to his bad deeds were accumulations of negative karma: his upbringing, his environment, his genes, his relationships, as well as the negative karma he reaped through his own ill intentions and poor judgment. One shouldn’t excuse Hitler for his actions, but one can be led to believe that under certain conditions it takes a tremendous amount of will-power to not turn into a monster. If any of us were born in Hitler’s shoes and lived his life, would we have ended up in a similar way?
I don’t expect to persuade you in less than 250 words why you should forgive Hitler, but I do hope that my question gives you an estimate on your capacity to forgive in general.
Empathy’s Role in Forgiveness
I mentioned stepping into Hitler’s shoes to give you a better understanding of Hitler’s actions. What I am describing here is nothing more than empathy, our ability to think and feel about the world from another person’s perspective.
Psychologist Frederic Luskin from the Stanford Forgiveness Project has been training people to forgive for almost a decade now. He considers it a very important skill to both mental and physical well-being (especially reducing stress), and he considers empathy one of the central components of this skill. When we step outside of our narrow view of the world, we either better understand the faulty ways of our victimizers or we find that they never had intentions to hurt us in the first place. Having this kind of knowledge can make it much easier to forgive.
If you feel hurt or betrayed, imagining yourself in the other person’s shoes and trying to understand why they did what they did can sometimes help you alleviate your ill-feelings toward that person. This doesn’t mean that what they did was acceptable, but it is important to know that we all have the capacity to make mistakes in a given situation under certain conditions. I’m sure you too can think of times when you have made poor decisions and hurt another person. You can just as well use empathy to sympathize with these past misdeeds you’ve committed.
Forgiveness Is About Control
Another aspect of forgiveness Luskin emphasizes in his training is the fact that we don’t always have control over the bad actions and character of another person. Seeking to change or “get back” at someone who is not willing to change, or who is no longer in our lives, can be a great source of stress and discomfort. Often we can minimize this stress by re-focusing on what is in our control. Forgiveness provides the tools we need to let go of this resentment and thus concentrate on more important things in our life. When we sincerely forgive someone they no longer possess our minds or distract us from living mindfully in the present.
A Strength in Not Forgiving
Psychotherapist Jeanne Safer, in her book Forgiving and Not Forgiving: Why Sometimes It’s Better Not to Forgive, offers an alternative perspective to forgiveness. She feels that when we feel obligated to forgive it can often make our forgiveness insincere or make our feelings of anger feel unjustified. She finds that it is healthy to experience anger and grief when someone has betrayed us, and that it is not necessary to forgive someone, just not to hate them.
According to Safer, many of her clients feel there is too much emphasis on forgiveness in society, and that if they don’t do it there is something wrong with them. She says, “It’s a double-whammy. First something terrible happens to them, and then they feel bad that they can’t fix it through forgiving and loving.”
In addition, we hate being told to “get over it.” People make it sound so easy because they don’t seem to relate to how angry we feel in a given moment. Sometimes when we hear this advice we will do just the opposite in spite of the other person because how dare they tell us how to feel. Safer feels that if forgiveness is to come, it has to come naturally. And if it doesn’t ever come, that is okay too. However, there is one kind of forgiveness Safer believes is unavoidable to mental health – forgiving yourself.
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“Forgiving yourself is the only essential kind of forgiveness, because you are the only person you can’t cut out of your life.”
What do you think?
Is forgiveness something that can be extended to everyone or should we only reserve forgiveness for those who deserve it? Can apathy or indifference be enough to curb our desire for vengeance or ill-will? Please share your thoughts in the comment section.
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The Biopsychosocial Model
Psychology is the study of the mind. In modern academia, it prides itself in its scientific progress and growing ability to objectively study human behavior and cognition. With the help of genetics, and the emergence of neuroscience, we now have great insight into the biological underpinnings of the human mind, and some of the biological causes of mental illnesses like autism, schizophrenia, and chronic depression. These advancements have provided tremendous improvements to psychology since Freud’s psychoanalysis in the late 19th century, but not without some caveats.
The biological-basis of psychology is widely prevalent in our mainstream culture. We often see news articles on the “Altruism Gene” or “Gay Gene” or “Hunger Gene.” To some it may seem as though our whole existence can be reduced to the genes we have inherited. Thus we either have these genes or we don’t, and we tend to view ourselves as more fixed in place than we really are. This is emphasized whenever we say things like “this is just how I was made.” Don’t get me wrong, I definitely believe that genes play a big role in who we become, but I want to emphasize that not everything about ourselves is strictly dependent on genes.
One effect of this emerging scientific viewpoint is that many are under the impression that the more we can reduce the mind to a biological level, the better our understanding of mental health. This is the viewpoint modern psychotherapy has adopted over the past half century, which has led to a tremendous growth in psycho-pharmaceuticals (although I will mention other forms of modern psychotherapy, like Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, later in this post)
This biological bias in modern psychology has already seeped into our collective unconscious. We often find everyday people describing the mentally ill as having “chemical imbalances,” and rarely questioning how past history, culture, and habits of living affect our mental well-being and sanity.
The problem with studying the mind on a biological level is not that it is wrong, but that it only takes into account a fraction of the picture. A strictly biological viewpoint ignores how our environment and culture affect the expression of those genes. A recent post at Mind Hacks gives a wonderful example of how this phenomena can come into play:
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“Neuron Culture has a fantastic piece on how a long touted ‘depression gene’ turned out to reduce the risk of mood problems in people in East Asia and why we can’t always understand genetic effects on behaviour without understanding culture.
The piece riffs on the long-established finding that the short variant of the serotonin transporter or 5-HTTLPR gene is more common in people with depression, until psychologist Joan Chiao found that East Asians are more than twice as likely to have the gene but only have half the rate of mood problems.”
While biology and neuroscience are great fields of study, we cannot mistaken them for a “more scientific” or “more accurate” view of the human mind. They will always be but one piece of the puzzle.
Psychology (and psychotherapy especially) should instead take heed to the biopsychosocial model of mental health. This is the view that mental health encompasses not just biological factors, but also psychological factors (thoughts, emotions, and behaviors) and social factors (family, traditions, culture).
The biopsychosocial model isn’t anything new. It has been talked about since the late 70s and has also been criticized several times for being overly broad and vague. The problem seems to be that we have many different subfields of psychology: Cognitive, Behavioral, Social, and Biological, but science has yet to integrate them all into a coherent whole.
American psychiatrist Steven Sharfstein pointed out in 2005 that “We have let the biopsychosocial model become the bio-bio-bio model.” He warned about modern psychology’s over-emphasis on pharmaceuticals as solutions, and our lack of focus on other factors that influence mental health.
However, other forms of psychotherapy have been developed over the past few decades that aren’t pharmaceutical-based. One such system is Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) which focuses on building new skills in patients, like mindfulness, to help patients become more aware of their thoughts and emotions and how they influence their actions. CBT has shown to be effective for a wide-range of different mental disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder, OCD, and clinical depression. It has also shown to be a worthy complementary medicine for disorders like schizophrenia. CBT has since been adopted into other forms of psychotherapy including Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), which have shown moderate success with some mental disorders.
Often times these kinds of psychotherapies are more effective in combination with pharmaceuticals. This at least shows one step in the right direction when trying to form a more comprehensive view of mental health. One that is not only biology-based but also takes into account cognitive factors.
On the other hand, the social aspect of the biopsychosocial model is a more difficult aspect to turn into a treatment. Most psychologists today only use social factors to assess the risk in certain mental disorders. For example, those who are raised in the city are more inclined toward schizophrenia.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) too is an illness specifically caused by a person’s history. It could be caused by experiences of war, rape, a terrorist attack, or the experience of a natural disaster. These all fit under the “social” or environmental aspect of mental health. Other common factors to look at in social psychology include relationships, socio-economic status, culture, tradition, and geography.
One example related to geography affecting mental health is that many people who live where there are polar nights (24 hours of darkness) are prone to depression. To a lesser extent, this can be seen in those who experience seasonal affective disorder (SAD), otherwise known as winter depression. These are disorders triggered by changes in light, and they can sometimes be treated using light therapy. If you have ever seen the movie Insomnia with Al Pacino than you are familiar with some of the psychological effects darkness can have.
The takeaway message here is that humans are variables of multi-variables. They are never static, and always changing over time depending on new conditions, new relationships, and new habits. Everything seems to have some effect on our mental well-being, and a comprehensive science of the mind must look at the whole picture.
1. Video Games Lead to Faster Decisions That Are No Less Accurate
- “Cognitive scientists from the University of Rochester have discovered that playing action video games trains people to make the right decisions faster. The researchers found that video game players develop a heightened sensitivity to what is going on around them, and this benefit doesn’t just make them better at playing video games, but improves a wide variety of general skills that can help with everyday activities like multitasking, driving, reading small print, keeping track of friends in a crowd, and navigating around town.”
2. Contagious yawn ’caused by empathy’
- “Researchers from the University of Connecticut observed 120 well developing children between the ages of one and six. The study showed that although babies yawn even before they leave the womb, the majority of children show no signs of succumbing to contagious yawning until they reach four years old.
In a second study they looked at 28 children between the ages of six and 15 with some form of autism. Autism is a developmental disorder which affects children’s social interaction causing them to be unable to form normal emotional ties with people around them. Scientists discovered that autistic children were less likely than typically developing children of the same age to yawn when someone else yawns.
The more severe a child’s autism the less likely he or she would yawn contagiously, the report published in the latest edition of the respected Child Development journal concluded.”
3. How culture can invert genetic risk
- “Neuron Culture has a fantastic piece on how a long touted ‘depression gene’ turned out to reduce the risk of mood problems in people in East Asians and why we can’t always understand genetic effects on behaviour without understanding culture.
The piece riffs on the long-established finding that the short variant of the serotonin transporter or 5-HTTLPR gene is more common in people with depression, until psychologist Joan Chiao found that East Asians are more than twice as likely to have the gene but only have half the rate of mood problems.”
4. Do You Know When You’re Wrong? Gray Matter Shows Introspective Ability
- “Introspection—or metacognition, self-awareness about one’s thinking—is a high-level mental process. ‘Accurate introspection requires discriminating correct decisions from incorrect ones, a capacity that varies substantially across individuals,’ researchers behind the new findings explained in their study.
For the study, researchers used simple visual stimuli to test 32 healthy subjects’ perception—and how confident they felt about their assessment of a geometric image. The tests were customized to each individual’s level of perceptual skill, in order to keep each subject’s accuracy score at 71 percent, so that the test was consistently difficult for all subjects…
Test subjects’ accuracy in assessing their own performance ‘was significantly correlated with gray-matter volume’ in the right anterior prefrontal cortex, the team wrote in their study report, published online September 16 in Science. Subjects with more accurate introspective assessments also tended to have denser connections between that area of gray matter and the axon-filled white matter that connected it.”
- “As new cases of autism have exploded in recent years—some form of the condition affects about one in 110 children today—efforts have multiplied to understand and accommodate the condition in childhood. But children with autism will become adults with autism, some 500,000 of them in this decade alone. What then? Meet Donald Gray Triplett, 77, of Forest, Mississippi. He was the first person ever diagnosed with autism. And his long, happy, surprising life may hold some answers.”
6. Placebo Effect Significantly Improves Women’s Sexual Satisfaction
- “Many women with low sex drives reported greater sexual satisfaction after taking a placebo, according to new psychology research from The University of Texas at Austin and Baylor College of Medicine. The study was conducted by Cindy Meston, a clinical psychology professor at The University of Texas at Austin, and Andrea Bradford, a 2009 University of Texas at Austin graduate and postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. They found that opening a new line of communication about sex can have a positive effect in many women with low libidos.
The researchers examined data from a previous clinical trial that followed 200 women over a 12-week period. Fifty of those women, ages 35-55, were randomly chosen to receive a placebo instead of a drug treatment for low sexual arousal. None of the participants knew which treatment they were given. To measure the effect of the treatment, women were asked to rate symptoms of sexual dysfunction such as low sexual desire, low sexual arousal and problems with orgasm.
The findings, available online in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, show that on average, one in three of the women who took a placebo showed an overall improvement. Most of that improvement seemed to happen during the first four weeks.”
- “Olfactory marketing has been used for years, and usually the objective is to use appealing scents and create a positive branding message. Not always, though – one politician is conducting a campaign that, well, stinks. Carl Paladino, the Republican nominee for governor of New York State, has sent out a mailing that smells like garbage.
The mailer shows pictures of seven Democratic office holders from the Empire State, six of whom have been investigated. Two of the Democrats have already resigned. The theme of the mailer is, ‘Something STINKS in Albany!’”
8. Measuring Preference for Multitasking
- “A new study led by Elizabeth Poposki, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology in the School of Science at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, may help employers identify employees who enjoy multitasking and are less inclined to quit jobs involving multitasking. The study presents a new tool developed to measure preference for multitasking, information which may be of interest to bosses who tire of repeatedly hiring and training new employees.
A growing number of individuals must multitask at work and positions requiring a significant amount of multitasking typically have high turnover. Even positions which in the past did not require multitasking may now do so as staff reductions require remaining workers to pick up additional assignments. Technological innovations (e.g., e-mail) also create frequent interruptions. How workers feel about multitasking may influence their job satisfaction and the likelihood that they will quit, important factors in hiring and placement decisions.”
10. Dog with symptoms of unilateral neglect
For those who don’t know: unilateral neglect is a “neuropsychological condition in which, after damage to one hemisphere of the brain, a deficit in attention to and awareness of one side of space is observed.” As you can see in the video, the dog only eats half of its bowl and then walks away thinking it is finished.
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1. The Labyrinthe of Inception
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“It’s easy to why the movie [Inception] has attracted neuroscience fans, including a brain-based review in this week’s Nature. It’s a science fiction film, the dream entry device presumably alters the brain, and director Christopher Nolan’s previous film Memento was carefully drawn from a detailed reading of the science of brain injury and memory loss.
Inception itself, however, contains so little direct reference to the brain (I counted about three lines) that you have to do some pretty flexible interpretation to draw firm parallels with brain science. Perhaps, most tellingly, for a film supposedly about neuroscience, the dream entry devices don’t even connect to the brain and nothing is made of how they achieve their interface.
But for those familiar with the theories of Carl Jung, the psychoanalyst and dissenter from Freud’s circle, the film is rich with both implicit and explicit references to his work.”
- “Mark Beeman is one of the eminent neuroscientists studying the ‘aha’ moment. As he said in a paper in the first NeuroLeadership Journal, “…variables that improve the ability to detect weak associations may improve insight solving.” In short, insights tend to involve connections between small numbers of neurons. An insight is often a long forgotten memory or a combination of memories. These memories don’t have a lot of neurons involved in holding them together. The trouble is, we only notice signals above whatever our base line of noise is. Everyday thought, like wondering what to have for lunch, might involve millions of neurons speaking to each other. An insight might involve only a few tens of thousands of neurons speaking to each other. Just as it’s hard to hear a quiet cell phone at a loud party, it’s hard to notice signals that have less energy than the general energy level already present in the brain. Hence, we tend to notice insights when our overall activity level in the brain is low. This happens when we’re not putting in a lot of mental effort, when we’re focusing on something repetitive, or just generally more relaxed like as we wake up. Insights require a quiet mind, because they themselves are quiet.”
3. You Must Remember This: What Makes Something Memorable? by Christof Koch, California Institute of Technology
- “Nerve cells do not generally operate in lockstep. They typically send out pulses irregularly, whenever their excitation levels exceed a threshold. What the Caltech team found, however, is that neuronal rhythms can be highly orchestrated at times—and that this synchrony helps people form lasting memories. Think about a freestyle swimmer. She regularly turns her head to the side to breathe within the triangle formed by her upper and lower arm and the waterline. If she takes a breath during a different phase of the crawl, she most likely will swallow water and lose her rhythm. And so it seems to be for these memory-forming neurons.
During the learning phase, the team found, if a picture flashed on the screen at a moment when neuronal spikes in the hippocampus and the amygdala lined up with the local theta clock, patients were more likely to remember the image and feel confident that their recollection was accurate. When people were viewing images that they would later fail to recognize, this coordination between individual memory-encoding neurons and overall brain activity was much reduced.
This research reveals an extra factor besides attention, novelty and emotional impact in determining what makes something memorable: timing. Neurons always spike in response to new images and experiences. But when the spikes happen to coincide with the theta rhythm, this coordinated electrical activity alters the brain’s synapses, those specialized molecular machines between neurons, enabling memories to form.”
4. Hallucinogen Can Safely Ease Anxiety in Advanced-Stage Cancer Patients, Study Suggests
- “In the first human study of its kind to be published in more than 35 years, researchers found psilocybin, an hallucinogen which occurs naturally in ‘magic mushrooms,’ can safely improve the moods of patients with advanced-stage cancer and anxiety, according to an article published online September 6 in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
Patients enrolled in the study at the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center (LA BioMed) demonstrated improvement of mood and reduction of anxiety up to six months after undergoing treatment, with significance reached at the six-month point on the ‘Beck Depression Inventory’ and at one and three months on the ‘State-Trait Anxiety Inventory.’ A third screening tool, the ‘Profile of Mood States,’ identified mood improvement after treatment that approached but did not reach significance.”
5. A Stranger In Half Your Body
- “An amazing study has just been published online in Consciousness and Cognition about a patient with epilepsy who felt the left half of his body was being “invaded by a stranger” when he had a seizure. As a result, he felt he existed in one side of his body only.
The research is from the same Swiss team who made headlines with their study that used virtual reality to make participants feel they were in someone else’s body, and one where brain stimulation triggered the sensation of having an offset ‘shadow body’ in patients undergoing neurosurgery.
The researchers suggest that having an integrated sense of our own bodies involves three types of perception: self-location – the area where we experience the self to be located; first-person perspective – the perceived centre of the conscious experience; and self-identification – the degree to which we identify sensations with our own bodies.”
6. What Calms Distress And Causes Growth?
- “What causes personal growth? Memories and memories alone (I’ll explain later). Start the process by remembering something horrible. Feel your pot stirring? A slight frown? A faster heart beat? What happens next?
That fresh experience is a command to calm the distress we now feel. With this memory, we have started a process, however unconscious, designed to accommodate, resolve and integrate the upsetting memory.
How do we calm our stirred pot and resolve the painful memory? To find the answer, it’s helpful to have separation and perspective from the distress, which is hard when it’s our own. We get too emotionally involved.
We can find separation and perspective when we follow someone else’s horrible thing. For the example below, I use a section from Isabel Gillies’ book Happens Every Day: An All Too True Story. We can track our experience of her story.”
7. Designing your own workspace improves health, happiness, and productivity.
- “Employees who have control over the design and layout of their workspace are not only happier and healthier — they’re also up to 32% more productive, according to new research from the University of Exeter in the UK.
Studies by the University’s School of Psychology have revealed the potential for remarkable improvements in workers’ attitudes to their jobs by allowing them to personalise their offices.
The findings challenge the conventional approach taken by most companies, where managers often create a ‘lean’ working environment that reflects a standardized corporate identity.”
8. Consumers pay more for goods they can touch.
- “Investigations into how subjects assign value to consumer goods — and how those values depend on the way in which those goods are presented — are being published in the September issue of the American Economic Review.
The question they address is at the heart of economics and marketing: Does the form in which an item is presented to consumers affect their willingness to pay for it?
Put more simply, says Antonio Rangel, professor of neuroscience and economics at Caltech, ‘At a restaurant, does it matter whether they simply list the name of the dessert, show a picture of the dessert, or bring the dessert cart around?’”
9. Meditation And “Drugs” by Jay Michaelson
- “[One] point of similarity between drug use and meditation is that both lead to states of consciousness that are different from the ordinary. Enjoying these seems to be a matter of taste. A lot of people like to take vacations in foreign countries. Some like exotic foods. And many others like vacations from their ordinary modes of consciousness into a different ‘mind-space’ where new insights can occur and even ordinary stimuli (and even without the sensual enhancement above) can be experienced in a whole new way.
Many people deeply fear altered states of consciousness, I think because they are overly afraid of their own non-rational minds. Subscribing to a worldview in which ‘rational’ rules of decency, propriety, etc., govern every aspect of life means relying on our capacities of rational judgment for every important decision. And so, mind-states which relegate such faculties to a subordinate or even invisible role is scary. Now, of course, I’m all for rational judgment making most decisions in the world, and certainly all of those which seriously affect other people. But is it a rational judgment to dance? To let go of the self in orgasm? To fall in love? Some of our most transcendent moments come when the rational mind is quieted and something else takes its place. In some aspects of life, being in touch with the nonrational is essential to being human.”
10. Derek Silver: Keep Your Goals To Yourself
- “Solitude, quite literally, allows introverts to hear themselves think. In a classic series of studies, researchers mapped brain electrical activity in introverts and extraverts. The introverts all had higher levels of electrical activity—indicating greater cortical arousal—whether in a resting state or engaged in challenging cognitive tasks. The researchers proposed that given their higher level of brain activity and reactivity, introverts limit input from the environment in order to maintain an optimal level of arousal. Extraverts, on the other hand, seek out external stimulation to get their brain juices flowing.
Neuroimaging studies measuring cerebral blood flow reveal that among introverts, the activation is centered in the frontal cortex, responsible for remembering, planning, decision making, and problem solving—the kinds of activities that require inward focus and attention. Introverts’ brains also show increased blood flow in Broca’s area, a region associated with speech production—likely reflecting the capacity for self-talk.”
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