Life is filled with a lot of difficult and unanswered question. In many ways, these uncertainties add to the mystery and amazement of life. A short question, like “Who am I?” can lead to hours of introspecting and debating among friends and family. And by the end of it, we probably still won’t be able to agree on an answer.
In my experience, contemplating the answers to these questions sharpens our thinking and can give us a deeper understanding of ourselves and life in general.
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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How does our spiritual identity affect our actions and how we shape our world?
Modus Operandi
When I think of the “spirit” of something I think of its modus operandi; what is its “method of operating?” What makes it function? What drives it to work?
When I think of the spirit of a human being, I ask myself, “What does that being live for?” What makes him or her get up every morning? What makes his or her life worth living? What source of energy does that person draw upon to do what they do?
Unspoken Values
Evolution and biology can describe the reasons behind a lot of basic instincts and behavior, but they don’t answer a whole lot about the values we hold implicitly through our traditions, customs, culture, and art.
We all go through rituals that define our existence. It could be watching TV, going to church, reading books, meditating, playing sports, doing your job, eating, videogames, working out at the gym, writing, taking care of your kids… you get the point – if you do it periodically then it is a ritual – and these habits implicitly tell us what we value out of life.
But how often do you ask yourself, “Why do I do the things I do?”
It can seem like a stupid question because we take these things for granted. Maybe you do them because you have always done them and that is just who you are. I hear people give me that response a lot, but that is circular reasoning; saying those things only reinforces who we are, even if that modus operandi isn’t doing ourselves much justice.
Backbone = Identity
I wouldn’t say that our actions define ourselves (although that might be a behaviorist approach to identity), but I do think how we define ourselves plays a significant role in our actions.
Buddism and many Eastern philosophies put a strong emphasis on the “nature of self” as a spiritual guide. They also recognize that how we think of our self determines certain values we hold about our world. For example, many schools of Buddhism recognize a non-dualistic nature between self/other (that we are all interconnected and no one is separate), thus compassion and loving-kindness become logical moral values to hold in our relationships with friends, family, neighbors, coworkers other acquaintances, and nature itself.
Some of the big questions regarding anybody’s life are,
- “How do I fit into the world at large?”
- “What purpose do I serve in life?”
- “How can I improve conditions for myself and others?”
Only you can answer these questions with your own reason and experience, but let it be known that your answers have a profound impact on how you live your life. Thus, I would argue these questions are worth contemplating through daily introspection, meditation, or prayer.
Getting Off The Soapbox For A Moment
Before I conclude this post let me just clear up a few things that often get misunderstood when I write about spirituality. I do not intend to change anyone’s values or how they live their life. What I am suggesting is that we take the time to question why we live the way we do. It is a deep question, directed towards you, but not one that I can provide the answers for.
I think when we try to make a change or improvement in our lives we often take the most basic questions for granted. But often those fundamental questions are the catalysts for the biggest improvements one can make in their life.
I write in order to get people thinking and re-evaluating that world which we take for granted. I want to bring into light implicit assumptions and beliefs, and get individuals to think critically about these ideas they have grown up with all their life. Through doing this individuals can grow a stronger backbone, become more dedicated to what they actually love to do, and drop actions which have become “no good” habits of familiarity that we have wrongly identified to.
But – because we are all diverse individuals with separate interests and talents – it is up to each from their own individual perspective to decide what is right and wrong for them. There is no objective good for everyone; our traditions, culture, art, and tastes (our “pursuit of happiness”) should be particular to our personality. We should not take anything as given just because we have grown up with it or some higher authority has “bestowed” it upon us. Even the values I hold implicitly in my writings should be doubted and questioned.
A Healthy Backbone Builds New Elements, Gets Rid Of Old
A spiritual backbone gives you a center to stand on but it is not necessarily fixed in one place. Just like your spine is built of various bone elements, your spiritual spine too is mobile and multi-faceted. The only thing different is your spiritual spine never stops growing and evolving in new ways (whether you are conscious of it or not).
Your relationship with the world is never fixed, it is always changing; new aspects are constantly arising and fading into the ever-expanding shape of time. From a day-to-day basis things may seem to be moving slow, but when you reflect on months or years they can seem like eternities apart. The world is actually a really exciting and dynamic place if we keep our eyes open to it. Not many things remain the same over extended periods of time. Isn’t that what evolution is all about?
The only thing worse than not having a spiritual backbone at all is having a concrete one, which refuses to change in the face of new evidence and experience. Extreme fundamentalists from all religions share this illness, like when biblical literalism takes precedence over scientifically-gathered facts.
Man is not omniscient nor infallible, that is why God forgives and, most importantly, why we should forgive ourselves. All actions and creations of men, including the Bible, are not perfect. This is why spirituality in all of its form is a never-ending process and not a goal-seeking one.
Living In Congruence
When our unspoken values become spoken we are more conscious of the driving forces in our world. Now we know why we get up every morning and we are proud to live out our lives in congruences with those values.
This requires a higher level of consciousness. No longer is our modus operandi like a puppet on strings, but now we are the puppet masters. We understand the reason behind our rituals; we don’t just live them out obediently but with a sense of joy, flow, and engagement. There is purpose behind every action. We embody what we believe and we act in accordance. As Gandhi once said, we “Become the change we wish to see in the world.” Within that cycle, within every action, we are constantly being born and re-born into a different world.
So don’t stay static, never be afraid to re-align your spiritual backbone, and keep living the life you want to live (as you see fit). The world depends on your moral courage and aptitude.
Whether it is an advertisement in Time Square, the opinion of a TV personality, or the rhetoric of a politician, we should always be mindful not to confuse the face with the idea. Often we get too caught up in the appearance of an idea and neglect how it relates to our world in the realm of logic, reason, and metaphysics.
Some like to blame corporations and mass advertising for our consumer culture, but I also believe it is partly our fault for accepting the lies that are constantly fed to us. Society, as a whole, seems like a very gullible bunch. Like savaged wolves we still like to travel in packs, always voting Republican or Democrat, always turning on our favorite TV shows, and constantly investing our time and effort into the same old patterns of thought.
Especially in this age of information, our minds are always being filled – like a sponge – yet at the end of the day we rarely if ever take the time to reflect, contemplate, and introspect on what ideas we should keep and what ideas we should throw away. We have become programmed by a culture filled with deception. It is not about who holds the truth, but who is the best persuader.
Be A Healthy Skeptic
Looking through our list of cognitive biases, it is hard not to be alarmed at all the different ways one can be duped. A big part of critical thinking is to be aware of these biases, another part is to always be what I call a healthy skeptic. By this I mean we should always leave room for doubt and always have the flexibility to change our views in the face of new information.
No kind of dogma, whether through religious authority or political consensus, should be held blindly as a truth – unless it stands to our own reason. People can certainly suggest ideas to us, but it is only through each individual’s critical thinking (or lack of) which determines if we accept an idea or not.
But even our own faculty of reason can be faulty. No individual is perfect or has all the information in the world; as the philosopher and scientist Alfred Korzybski points out, the map is never the territory, if it were it would have to be the same as the ground it covers. Since we are beings that can acknowledge our own ignorance, we must also include a healthy dose of skepticism in whatever it is we choose to believe regarding life. If we choose not to, we will surely find ourselves in the same cycles of behaviors and outcomes, and therefore never progress.
The Function Of Beliefs
A belief is confidence in the truth or existence of something without proof. For example, one can believe that “everyone is a good person at heart despite their actions,” but that is not a claim that can be properly falsified or proven (and therefore it is not a matter of science according to the philosopher Karl Popper). A belief is true only so far as it permeates each individual’s perspective. It is high-chunked information based on our everyday experience.
So despite beliefs inherit non-truthfulness in the face of scientific rigor, the human perspective necessitates that we hold beliefs about our existence in order to function effectively in our world.
Knowing that we all hold beliefs, we can begin understand why being a healthy skeptic is so important. A belief is only as important as it is a positive influence to our actions. And even our belief in what is a “positive influence” is a subject we should always debate (both in our heads and amongst friends).
So while I preach a philosophy of consistent skepticism, I also want to acknowledge that having beliefs, opinions, and presuppositions are important and necessary. They are information about how we view the world. The key is to be flexible with those views (and always willing to change in the face of new experience and evidence).
Reflection And Introspection
One important aspect to critical thinking is to contemplate why we believe the things we do. Why? is always the big question, and the more we ask it and attempt to answer it, the more we are aware of our patterns of thinking and our false assumptions.
The deeper we dig into our inquiries the closer we come to answers of “I just don’t know.” Acknowledging this ignorance can become an amazing insight, because to know what you know and know what you don’t know – that is true knowledge.
Introspection is such a great tool because it allows us to re-track the steps of our experiences and take notice of things we may have took for granted the first time around.
As far as we know, humans have the greatest ability to reflect on their experiences, but they aren’t the only animals to exhibit these characteristics. Studies have shown that when lab rats are given a chance to experience downtime after going through a maze, they are likely to learn the maze quicker than other rats who are simply put through trial-after-trial.
Researchers theorize through brain scans (although they can’t know the mind of a rat for certain) that this downtime is spent replaying memories. They paid particular attention to the hippocampus, an important structure of the brain responsible for learning. Researchers think this act of replaying memories may be a general mechanism of learning, and perhaps it explains the memory-formation theories behind dreams (which too can be seen as another kind of introspection).
What This All Boils Down To
The message I want my readers to walk away with is that our minds are incredibly powerful tools, and it is important that we actively and consciously use it to our advantage. I believe that sometimes we take our ability to think for granted and in the process we forget how to separate a lot of bullshit from the truth.
No scientist, politician, relative, or movie star can use our brains for us. And when it comes down to how we think of our world we need to distinguish between what we are told from what we believe to be true through our own experience and reason.
This doesn’t mean the scientist, politician, relative – or even movie star – can’t offer us information or insight into a particular perspective; I am only saying we must remain forever vigilant not to accept these ideas on any kind of dogma. Instead, we must look through our own mind’s eye to make the best and most cohesive sense of our world.
Earlier this morning I was watching a lecture on positive psychology by former Harvard professor Tal Ben-Sahar. During each day of the class Sahar allocated two or so minutes of complete silence. This is all done in the name of embracing stillness and introspection, a practice that Sahar finds extraordinarily important in improving one’s health and well-being.
Within the lecture he cites a study done by MIT Professors David Foster and Matthew Wilson, one which Sahar found rather convincing regarding the importance of reflection in our everyday lives and specifically its effects on our cognitive abilities.
In this study researchers looked inside the brains of rats. They paid particular attention to the hippocampus, a brain structure that has shown to be responsible for learning and memory in rodents, primates, and humans. They performed brain scans on rats as they went through a maze, and then also after the experience, during times of reflection.
- “What the results suggest is that while there certainly is some record of your experience as it is occurring (in other words when the rats were running the maze), the actual learning – when you try to figure out: ‘What was important? What should I keep and throw away?’ – that happens after the fact, during periods of quiet wakeful introspection.”
Rats who were given a chance to relax and reflect showed better signs of learning than rats who were not given a chance to relax and reflect. Scientists have implied that it could be that “replaying a sequence of behavioral events in our mind” is an important mechanism in effective learning and memory retention.
Further Implications
If we can reinforce learning by actively replaying memories then certainly there is good reason to practice wakeful introspection. Like Sahar, we should set aside a time and place for it. Even by reflecting on negative events, we can extract lessons from our old ways and thus learn to gain something positive from them. The implications of this study are more than just getting rats to run through mazes faster, it can also have a significant effect on building new habits and improving the quality of life.
On this site I often write about the importance of relaxation on our health and happiness. To know that these exercises can also improve our cognition and learning is just another good incentive to continue practicing these everyday.
Most of us have grown up in a culture surrounded by noise, clutter, and busy-ness. There is sometimes even a disdain for silence; we find it awkward, unproductive, or boring. But maybe we are just not very good at it? Perhaps this modern culture also explains how we have left society with so many children with ADHD and other learning disabilities.
Is it really so hard to find the time for a little peaceful reflection? Even just 5 or 10 minutes a day is enough to start seeing the difference. We could easily accomplish this during a lunch hour or after dinner. It is a good way to soak in everything that has happened to us throughout the day and at the same time relax all the tensions from family, relationships, and work. It gives us time to ask, “Am I staying on course? Am I doing the right things? Am I improving myself?” These are just some of the questions we can ask to better ourselves.
Information And Transformation
All knowledge is processed knowledge. We don’t know things in the form of their raw sensory experience, but the form in which we conceptualize them. We then integrate these concepts into our representation of the world, just like the rat does when it makes a mental map of a maze.
As Sahar describes in his lecture, information is the sensory data of what we experience and transformation is the map we create from that data. When we reflect we are re-initiating this process of transformation by deriving new meaning from our memories.
During transformation we decide what parts of the experience were most important and worth paying attention to. When our mental schema doesn’t work, we can always reflect back, re-focus, and adjust our understanding of that experience. Although this may seem like commonsense, very few people actively practice this technique.
Sahar believes that the road to improvement isn’t necessarily about getting more and more information, but transforming our understanding of the information we already have. This requires us to look inside at what we already know and to use that knowledge in a more effective manner. The educational tools and resources are all already there inside of us.
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