30 Habits that Will Change your Life. Developing good habits is the basic of personal development and growth. Everything we do is the result of a habit that was previously taught to us. Unfortunately, not all the habits that we have are good, that’s why we are constantly trying to improve. The following is a list of 30 practical habits that can make a huge difference in your life. You should treat this list as a reference, and implement just one habit per month. This way you will have the time to fully absorb each of them, while still seeing significant improvements each month. Health habits Exercise 30 minutes every day. Productivity habits Use an inbox system. Personal Development habits Read 1 book per week. Career habits Start a blog. What do you think? Update: A reader put together a downloadable copy of all these habits. 10 Simple Postures That Boost Performance.
Psychological research suggests simple actions can project power, persuade others, increase empathy, boost cognitive performance and more… We tend to think of body language as something that expresses our internal states to the outside world. But it also works the other way around: the position of our body also influences our mind. As the following psychological research shows, how we move can drive both thoughts and feelings and this can boost performance. 1. If you want to feel more powerful then adopt a powerful posture. 2. Tensing up your muscles can help increase your willpower. 3. If you’re stuck on a problem which needs persistence then try crossing your arms. 4. If crossing your arms doesn’t work then try lying down. 5. While you’re lying down, why not have a nap? Brooks & Lack (2005) compared 5, 10, 20 and 30 minute naps to find the best length. 6. The way people’s hands cut through the air while they talk is fascinating. 7. 8. 9. 10. Embodied cognition Image credit: Hector.
8 Things Everybody Ought to Know About Concentrating. “Music helps me concentrate,” Mike said to me glancing briefly over his shoulder. Mike was in his room writing a paper for his U.S. History class. On his desk next to his computer sat crunched Red Bulls, empty Gatorade bottles, some extra pocket change and scattered pieces of paper. In the pocket of his sweat pants rested a blaring iPod with a chord that dangled near the floor, almost touching against his Adidas sandals.
Mike made a shift about every thirty seconds between all of the above. Do you know a person like this? The Science Behind Concentration In the above account, Mike’s obviously stuck in a routine that many of us may have found ourselves in, yet in the moment we feel it’s almost an impossible routine to get out of. When we constantly multitask to get things done, we’re not multitasking, we’re rapidly shifting our attention. Phase 1: Blood Rush Alert When Mike decides to start writing his History essay, blood rushes to his anterior prefrontal cortex. Phase 2: Find and Execute. 10 Simple Postures That Boost Performance. Woman With Perfect Memory Baffles Scientists. James McGaugh is one of the world's leading experts on how the human memory system works. But these days, he admits he's stumped.
McGaugh's journey through an intellectual purgatory began six years ago when a woman now known only as AJ wrote him a letter detailing her astonishing ability to remember with remarkable clarity even trivial events that happened decades ago. Give her any date, she said, and she could recall the day of the week, usually what the weather was like on that day, personal details of her life at that time, and major news events that occurred on that date. Like any good scientist, McGaugh was initially skeptical. But not anymore. "This is real," he says. Soon after AJ took over his life, McGaugh teamed with two fellow researchers at the University of California at Irvine. "We are trying to find out, but we haven't hit 'bingo' yet," says McGaugh. His initial hypothesis, like several others, has turned out to be wrong -- or at least incomplete. But she did. "I said what? Self help: try positive action, not positive thinking | Science | The Observer.
For years self-help gurus have preached the same simple mantra: if you want to improve your life then you need to change how you think. Force yourself to have positive thoughts and you will become happier. Visualise your dream self and you will enjoy increased success. Think like a millionaire and you will magically grow rich. In principle, this idea sounds perfectly reasonable. However, in practice it often proves ineffective. Take visualisation. In one study led by Lien Pham at the University of California, students were asked to spend a few moments each day visualising themselves getting a high grade in an upcoming exam. Why should this be so? However, when it comes to change, the message is not all gloom and doom. Towards the end of the 1880s, James turned his attention to the relationship between emotion and behaviour. James hypothesised that the relationship between emotion and behaviour was a two-way street, and that behaviour can cause emotion.
Take, for example, willpower. Exceptional Memory Explained: How Some People Remember What They Had for Lunch 20 Years Ago. Researchers from the University of California, Irvine reported in 2006 on a woman named Jill Price who could remember in great detail what she did on a particular day decades earlier. James McGaugh, Larry Cahill and Elizabeth Parker put the woman through a battery of tests and ascertained that she was not using any of the memory tricks that have been known to mnemonists for millennia. Word got out, the media descended and the lab now receives calls every day from people who say they have the same ability as Price. Of the hundreds of people interviewed, 22 appear to exhibit what the researchers call highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM), the detailed recollection of events that occurred in the distant past.
A question that has persisted about this line of research is whether the brains of these people are distinct from the organs of others who can’t remember yesterday’s lunch, let alone trivial events from 20 years back. Source: University of California, Irvine. No one has a photographic memory. Kaavya Viswanathan has an excuse. In this morning's New York Times, the author of How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life explained how she "unintentionally and unconsciously" plagiarized upward of 29 passages from the books of another young-adult novelist, Megan McCafferty.
Viswanathan said she has a photographic memory. "I never take notes. " This seems like as good an opportunity as any to clear up the greatest enduring myth about human memory. Lots of people claim to have a photographic memory, but nobody actually does. Nobody. In 1970, a Harvard vision scientist named Charles Stromeyer III published a landmark paper in Nature about a Harvard student named Elizabeth, who could perform an astonishing feat. In 1979, a researcher named John Merritt published the results of a photographic memory test he had placed in magazines and newspapers around the country.
That's not to say there aren't people with extraordinarily good memories—there are. Lucid dreaming: Rise of a nocturnal hobby. The Brain May Disassemble Itself in Sleep. Compared with the hustle and bustle of waking life, sleep looks dull and unworkmanlike. Except for in its dreams, a sleeping brain doesn’t misbehave or find a job. It also doesn’t love, scheme, aspire or really do much we would be proud to take credit for. Yet during those quiet hours when our mind is on hold, our brain does the essential labor at the heart of all creative acts. It edits itself. And it may throw out a lot. In a provocative new theory about the purpose of sleep, neuroscientist Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin–Madison has proposed that slumber, to cement what we have learned, must also spur the brain’s undoing.
Select an option below: Customer Sign In *You must have purchased this issue or have a qualifying subscription to access this content. The Benefits of Daydreaming. A new study suggests that a daydreaming is an indicator of a well-equipped brain Does your mind wander? During a class or meeting, do you find yourself staring out the window and thinking about what you’ll do tomorrow or next week? As a child, were you constantly reminded by teachers to stop daydreaming? Well, psychological research is beginning to reveal that daydreaming is a strong indicator of an active and well-equipped brain. Tell that to your third-grade teacher. A new study, published in Psychological Science by researchers from the University of Wisconsin and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science, suggests that a wandering mind correlates with higher degrees of what is referred to as working memory. For example, imagine that, when leaving a friend ‘s house, you promise to call when you get home safely.
In the study, the researchers sought to examine the relationship between people’s working memory capacity and their tendency to daydream. The Mind's Hidden Switches: Scientific American Podcast. Podcast Transcription Meet Dr. Bechard Nor, pioneer transplant surgeon and one of the many achievers helping to unlock human potential at Cutter Foundation. Steve: Okay, how do you do this again?
You press this button, no wait. Nestler: The ability of this chronic social stress to produce maladaptive changes in brain and behavior are mediated through epigenetic modifications of gene expression in particular emotional centers of the brain. Steve: That's Eric Nestler. Steve: The old nature versus nurture thing is very simplistic. Nestler: Yes, I think that's true. Steve: You come at this from a particular vantage point, because you're an addiction researcher.
Nestler: Yes. Steve: But the findings that your lab generated would apply to great many biological phenomena. Nestler: That's right. Steve: So, let's talk about the nuts and bolts of the research. Nestler: Right. Steve: Right and development is the clearest example. Nestler: It's the best established by far. Steve: Right. Nestler: Exactly. The Brain: A Body Fit for a Freaky-Big Brain | Mind & Brain.
Aiello and Wheeler noted that this dramatic increase in brain size would seem to have required a dramatic increase in metabolism—the same way that adding an air-conditioning system to a house would increase the electricity bill. Yet humans burn the same number of calories, scaled to size, as other primates. Somehow, Aiello and Wheeler argued, our ancestors found a way to balance their energy budget. As they expanded their brains, perhaps they slimmed down other organs. The scientists compared the sizes of organs in humans and other primates. Relatively speaking, our liver is about the same size as a baboon’s.
Our heart is on par with a gorilla’s. But our guts have shriveled. Aiello and Wheeler christened their idea “the expensive tissue hypothesis.” Then William Leonard, a biological anthropologist at Northwestern University, put the expensive tissue hypothesis to a new test. Wray and his colleagues compared SLC2A1 in humans and other animals. Your Brain Knows a Lot More Than You Realize | Memory, Emotions, & Decisions. Meanwhile, a similar story was unfolding oceans away. During World War II, under constant threat of bombings, the British had a great need to distinguish incoming aircraft quickly and accurately. Which aircraft were British planes coming home and which were German planes coming to bomb? Several airplane enthusiasts had proved to be excellent “spotters,” so the military eagerly employed their services.
These spotters were so valuable that the government quickly tried to enlist more spotters—but they turned out to be rare and difficult to find. The government therefore tasked the spotters with training others. It was a grim attempt. With a little ingenuity, the British finally figured out how to successfully train new spotters: by trial-and-error feedback.
The Knowledge GapThere can be a large gap between knowledge and awareness. Consider patients with anterograde amnesia, who cannot consciously recall new experiences in their lives. What Douglas experienced is called anosognosia. Thinking in a Foreign Language Makes Decisions More Rational | Wired Science. To judge a risk more clearly, it may help to consider it in a foreign language. A series of experiments on more than 300 people from the U.S. and Korea found that thinking in a second language reduced deep-seated, misleading biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived. “Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue?” Asked psychologists led by Boaz Keysar of the University of Chicago in an April 18 Psychological Science study. “It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less systematic.
We discovered, however, that the opposite is true: Using a foreign language reduces decision-making biases,” wrote Keysar’s team. 'Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language? ' The first experiment involved 121 American students who learned Japanese as a second language. Click to Open Overlay Gallery. Scientists Manipulate and Erase Memories. Tracking the tell-tale signs of pure genius. The Science of Sarcasm? Yeah, Right. প্রকাশনা | Quantum Method | The Science of Living. Why Is Memory So Good and So Bad? What did you eat for dinner one week ago today? Chances are, you can’t quite recall. But for at least a short while after your meal, you knew exactly what you ate, and could easily remember what was on your plate in great detail. What happened to your memory between then and now? Did it slowly fade away? Or did it vanish, all at once? Memories of visual images (e.g., dinner plates) are stored in what is called visual memory.
For many reasons, then, it would be very useful to understand how visual memory facilitates these mental operations, as well as constrains our ability to perform them. Memories like what you had for dinner are stored in visual short-term memory—particularly, in a kind of short-term memory often called “visual working memory.” The question is: when are these memories wiped away? UC Davis psychologists Weiwei Zhang and Steven Luck have shed some light on this problem. But this, it turns out, is not true of all memories. Eureka! When a Blow to the Head Creates a Sudden Genius - Brian Fung - Health. Brain injuries can sometimes reveal extraordinary talents in people. Now, savant syndrome is helping to create whole new fields of scientific discovery.
Wikimedia Commons For a long time, it was a mystery as to how horses galloped. Did all four hooves at some point leave the ground? Or was one hoof always planted? It wasn't until the 1880s when a British photographer named Eadweard Muybridge settled the debate with a series of photographs of a horse in midstride. Muybridge could be obsessive -- and eccentric, too. Muybridge may have been what psychiatrists call an acquired savant, somebody with extraordinary talent but who wasn't born with it and who didn't learn the skills from someplace else later.
It sounds crazy. Wisconsin psychiatrist Darold Treffert keeps a registry of known savants as part of his research on the subject. It wasn't until recently that scientists began figuring out what actually causes savant syndrome. "What happens is that there is injury," said Treffert. Or do we? The Learning Brain Gets Bigger--Then Smaller.
Thou Can’t Not Covet. Why you probably won’t experience your own traumatic death. What's Wrong With the Teenage Mind?