Language Patterns - Newsletter Archive. Changing minds and persuasion -- How we change what others think, believe, feel and do. A Little Weird? Prone to Depression? Blame Your Creative Brain. Whenever you want to do something extraordinary, risky, or scary in your life (something that you know in your heart that you need to do, but it would really be more convenient to ignore it and just not do it), it’s essential to surround yourself with inspiring, encouraging, like-minded people. If they’re leaders in their own right who to a certain degree have done what you long to do, even better. I first met Gwyneth Leech last summer at my nephew’s first birthday party in Brooklyn (she’s my sister’s husband’s cousin). We were chatting idly until the moment she mentioned that she, a lifelong artist, had “accidentally” started creating art on used coffee cups, drawing to pass time in PTA meetings. I get as excited about a great story as some women get about shoes, and my story sensors started shrieking immediately.
Gwyneth has become a close friend and a beacon of inspiration and encouragement in my life as I contemplate great leaps of faith and creation. Can you relate to this? Dr. Your Initial Choices Often Get Stronger. We’re gearing up toward yet another election cycle. In the presidential election, most voters already have a pretty clear preference. However, there are always at least 10 percent of voters (and sometimes even more) who classify themselves as “undecided.” Even people who are officially “undecided” may have some leaning toward one candidate or another. Quite a bit of research suggests that the way that someone is leaning influences the way they interpret new information. The idea behind this effect is that we like to keep our beliefs consistent. An interesting set of studies in the August, 2012 issue of by Evan Polman and Jay Russo examined some seemingly small factors that can have a big impact on this kind of spreading coherence.
In their studies, they had people express a preference for two restaurants. The first feature people saw favored one restaurant over the other. But, that isn’t the interesting part. Why would having to darken a box increase people’s commitment to an option? People are more likely to believe in magic spells that are repetitious and time-consuming. The "Interpreter" in Your Head Spins Stories to Make Sense of the World | Mind & Brain. The left hemisphere specializes in speech, language, and intelligent behavior, and a split-brain patient’s left hemisphere and language center has no access to sensory information if it is fed only to the right brain.
In the case of vision, the optic nerves leading from each eye meet inside the brain at what is called the optic chiasm. Here, each nerve splits in half; the medial half (the inside track) of each crosses the optic chiasm into the opposite side of the brain, and the lateral half (that on the outside) stays on the same side. The parts of both eyes that attend to the right visual field send information to the left hemisphere and information from the left visual field goes to and is processed by the right hemisphere.
More than a few years into our experiments, we were working with a group of split-brain patients on the East Coast. We wondered what they would do if we sneaked information into their right hemisphere and told the left hand to do something [pdf]. The Science Behind Our Self-Defeating Behavior. Ever set a goal only to abandon it a few days later? New Year’s resolutions are a good example. While 45% of us usually make one, only 8% of us are successful at keeping it, according to research from the University of Scranton. So why do we keep setting ourselves up for failure? Francesca Gino, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed, and How We Can Stick to the Plan, says it’s because we don’t anticipate the different sets of forces that constantly influence us and our decisions.
“To avoid getting sidetracked, you need to recognize the limitations of the human mind, and acknowledge the forces from within ourselves, the forces from our relationships and the forces from the outside,” says Gino. While each set can be quite powerful--influencing us to make choices that are different than what we had planned--Gino says there are things we can do to stay on track. The Forces from Within The Forces from Relationships.