The Evolutionary Mystery of Left-Handedness and What It Reveals About How the Brain Works - Brain Pickings - Pocket. “Sahara is too little price / to pay for thy Right hand,” Emily Dickinson wrote in a poem. “The right hand = the hand that is aggressive, the hand that masturbates,” Susan Sontag pondered in her diary in 1964. “Therefore, to prefer the left hand! … To romanticize it, to sentimentalize it!”
The human hand has long carried cultural baggage, and yet we still struggle to unclutch from it the myths and reveal the realities. The question of why some humans are left-handed — including such notable specimens as Plato, Charles Darwin, Carl Sagan, Debbie Millman, Stephen Jay Gould, Noam Chomsky, and Albert Einstein* — has perplexed scientists for centuries. For Southpaws themselves — the affectionate term for lefties — this biological peculiarity has been everything from a source of stigma to a point of pride.
In the Western world, left-handedness has long been associated with the worst of the worst: sin, devil worship, Satan himself, and just an all-around bad position with God. Why Paul Broca. How to declutter your mind. Alice Mollon This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community. To see all the posts, go here. Do you ever feel like your mind is one big, infinitely scrolling, incredibly cluttered to-do list? And are you always struggling to keep it updated, remember what’s on it, readjust its priorities, and delete what no longer serves you? Brooklyn-based product designer Ryder Carroll suggests his solution to this problem: keeping a journal.
Growing up, Carroll was easily distracted, tugged in every direction by anything and everything. Sound familiar? What ended up helping Carroll cope was writing in a paper journal. To start decluttering your mind of its endless to-do lists, Carroll recommends grabbing a notebook and pen and following these steps: 1. 2. 3. 4. For example, “If you want to learn to cook, don’t start by tackling an incredibly complicated meal for six people,” he says. 5.
3 tips to slowing down cognitive decline. Why You Should Work Less and Spend More Time on Hobbies. Executive Summary As professionals around the world feel increasingly pressed for time, they’re giving up on things that matter to them. A recent HBR article noted that in surveys, most people “could name several activities, such as pursuing a hobby, that they’d like to have time for.” This is more significant than it may sound, because it isn’t just individuals who are missing out. When people don’t have time for hobbies, businesses pay a price. Hobbies can make employees substantially better at their jobs for three reasons: they reawaken your creativity, give you a fresh perspective, and bolster your confidence. As professionals around the world feel increasingly pressed for time, they’re giving up on things that matter to them. This is more significant than it may sound, because it isn’t just individuals who are missing out.
When I crash, there’s always the temptation to do something sedentary and mindless. Creativity. A creative hobby pulls you out of all that. Perspective. The Other Side Of Paradise: How I Left A Buddhist Retreat In Handcuffs. The Brain Maps Out Ideas and Memories Like Spaces. We humans have always experienced an odd — and oddly deep — connection between the mental worlds and physical worlds we inhabit, especially when it comes to memory. We’re good at remembering landmarks and settings, and if we give our memories a location for context, hanging on to them becomes easier.
To remember long speeches, ancient Greek and Roman orators imagined wandering through “memory palaces” full of reminders. Modern memory contest champions still use that technique to “place” long lists of numbers, names and other pieces of information. As the philosopher Immanuel Kant put it, the concept of space serves as the organizing principle by which we perceive and interpret the world, even in abstract ways. In the past few decades, research has shown that for at least two of our faculties, memory and navigation, those metaphors may have a physical basis in the brain.
The Amnesiac and the Hexagons Unlike the place cells, grid cells do not represent particular locations. The 2 Mental Shifts Highly Successful People Make - Benjamin P. Hardy - Pocket. “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” — Max Planck, German quantum theorist and Nobel Prize winner There are two primary mental shifts that occur in the lives of all highly successful people.
Many make the first, but very few make the second. Both of these shifts require a great deal of mental stretching from conventional and societal ways of thinking. In many ways, these shifts require you to unlearn the negative and sabotaging programming from your youth, public education, and even adulthood. The foundation of the first shift is the sublime power of choice and individual responsibility. Unfortunately, the results of the first shift can be overly-satisfying on one hand or paralyzing on the other. For example, when a musician starts out, they write lots of music for the love of it.
Their focus shifts from why they’re writing music to what their music has brought them. In this article, I explain the process of experiencing the first and second shift. The Weird Power of the Placebo Effect, Explained - Vox - Pocket. Photo by: Javier Zarracina/Vox Over the last several years, doctors noticed a mystifying trend: Fewer and fewer new pain drugs were getting through double-blind placebo control trials, the gold standard for testing a drug’s effectiveness. In these trials, neither doctors nor patients know who is on the active drug and who is taking an inert pill. At the end of the trial, the two groups are compared.
If those who actually took the drug report significantly greater improvement than those on placebo, then it’s worth prescribing. When researchers started looking closely at pain-drug clinical trials, they found that an average of 27 percent of patients in 1996 reported pain reduction from a new drug compared to placebo. In 2013, it was 9 percent. What this showed was not that the drugs were getting worse, but that “the placebo response is growing bigger over time,” but only in the US, explains Jeffrey Mogil, the McGill University pain researcher who co-discovered the trend. 2) Confirmation bias. How To Stop Overthinking Everything, According To Therapists. The Busier You Are, the More You Need Quiet Time - Harvard Business Review - Pocket. In a 2016 interview with Vox’s Ezra Klein, journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates argued that serious thinkers and writers should get off Twitter. It wasn’t a critique of the 140-character medium or even the quality of the social media discourse in the age of fake news.
It was a call to get beyond the noise. For Coates, generating good ideas and quality work products requires something all too rare in modern life: quiet. He’s in good company. Author JK Rowling, biographer Walter Isaacson, and psychiatrist Carl Jung have all had disciplined practices for managing the information flow and cultivating periods of deep silence. Recent studies are showing that taking time for silence restores the nervous system, helps sustain energy, and conditions our minds to be more adaptive and responsive to the complex environments in which so many of us now live, work, and lead.
But cultivating silence isn’t just about getting respite from the distractions of office chatter or tweets. The Busier You Are, the More You Need Quiet Time - Harvard Business Review - Pocket. How To Tell If Someone Is Truly Smart Or Just Average - Michael Simmons - Pocket. Photo credit: Heisenberg Media Have you ever noticed how some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs and leaders see reality in a fundamentally different way? When they talk, it’s almost as if they’re speaking a different language. Just look at this interview where Elon Musk describes how he understands cause and effect: “I look at the future from the standpoint of probabilities.
It’s like a branching stream of probabilities, and there are actions that we can take that affect those probabilities or that accelerate one thing or slow down another thing. I may introduce something new to the probability stream.” Unusual, right? “Musk sees people as computers, and he sees his brain software as the most important product he owns — and since there aren’t companies out there designing brain software, he designed his own, beta tests it every day, and makes constant updates.”
Musk’s top priority is designing the software in his brain. Self-made billionaire Ray Dalio is no less “weird.” Tools. Intellectual humility: the importance of knowing you might be wrong. Julia Rohrer wants to create a radical new culture for social scientists. A personality psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Rohrer is trying to get her peers to publicly, willingly admit it when they are wrong.
To do this, she, along with some colleagues, started up something called the Loss of Confidence Project. It’s designed to be an academic safe space for researchers to declare for all to see that they no longer believe in the accuracy of one of their previous findings. The effort recently yielded a paper that includes six admissions of no confidence.
And it’s accepting submissions until January 31. “I do think it’s a cultural issue that people are not willing to admit mistakes,” Rohrer says. The project is timely because a large number of scientific findings have been disproven, or become more doubtful, in recent years. It’s been fascinating to watch scientists struggle to make their institutions more humble. Intellectual humility, explained. Perspective. The Most Important Thinking Habit Nobody Taught You. How To Get Rid Of The Thoughts That Are Clogging Your Brain - Darius Foroux - Pocket. I want to ask you a question. How many hours per day do you think? “I never thought about that.” So let me get this straight. You’re thinking all the time, and yet, you never think about how much time you spend thinking.
That sounds like an addiction to me. When I eat too much, I can say “I’m overeating. But when I think too much, I can’t just say “I’m overthinking.” But the problem is that we don’t consider overthinking as a problem. When someone says that overthinking is bad, we often assume that only negative thoughts are wrong. That’s the thinking error that I’ve made in the past. But first, let’s talk about the difference between positive thoughts and negative thoughts. Positive Thoughts vs. I think most of us agree that negative thoughts are related to: WorryingComplainingAngerFeeling sorry for yourselfBlaming others Similarly, we can agree that the following thoughts are considered positive: Trying to solve problemsStudyingUnderstanding knowledgePlanningVisualizationSetting goals.