Seven Good Things About Feeling Bad.
Beating Boredom. The One Social Skill that Can Change Your Life. Everyone would like to be able to remember the names of people we meet, especially people we meet in new social situations. Some of these situations are purely for enjoyment, and others have higher stakes. You’re being interviewed for a new job, for example, and as soon as you’re introduced to your potential supervisor, the name has flown completely out of your consciousness. Unfortunately, you’ll lose the job prospect as quickly as you’ve lost that name. When it comes to meeting people at parties, or even in casual conversation when introduced by a mutual friend, you also will appear to be a social klutz when you see that person again and must flounder (or fake) knowing the new people’s names.
We know it’s bad to forget names of new people, but looking at the flip side, we also know how much it means when we are able to call people by name the next time we see them. Some people seem to be born with this ability to associate a face and a name. Rationality in Action: Look at a Problem as an Outsider. Sheena Iyengar: How to make choosing easier. Risk Intelligence: How to live with uncertainty. How to Be Prepared When Worry Attacks.
Ever notice how aggravated you get when you go to check out at the grocery store, and... there's a line? And what about how even more aggravated you feel when you realize that you're standing in the line, especially after you've done the exhaustive -- customers x coupons x cashier energy -- calculation of which line is most likely to move fastest? No matter how insignificant the activity is that you have to do next, you are incensed (and frustrated by your poor calculation skills) that you've had to waste even a moment of your time unnecessarily. And yet. Look what happens, two minutes later when in the parking lot of the very same grocery store, your iPhone buzzes with a message from a frustrated client. Whoa there. Not so fast. No, none of these disasters are actually happening, though the knot in your stomach and the throbbing in your head suggest otherwise.
Oh, and not to keep score, but do we complain about the time we're clocking in when we're worrying? We do. What Underlies Physician Compassion? Every day I work with physicians. I interview them, write with them and edit for them. I’m a freelancer; consequently, in order to make a living, I’m constantly taking on new clients—new physicians. I enjoy my job. It keeps me in touch with medicine, and I meet interesting people all the time. One day I started thinking about physician empathy and compassion. And then I remembered Terror Management Theory. I realize that Terror Management Theory has been used to explain nearly every human behavior, and I almost feel guilty chalking up physician compassion—a sanctimonious bond between a health care provider and a patient—in terms of theory. In a nutshell, Terror Management Theory states that when people are reminded of their own mortality (death), they are more likely to act in accordance with their cultural worldview or cultural point-of-view and perspective.
Physicians are constantly reminded of death. Here comes the disclaimer. How Memory Works: an Infographic. For our blog’s sections on ‘Your Brain‘ and ‘Test Prep‘, we’re always on the lookout for great articles, videos and charts on memory and retention. By helping you understand how our brains work, we want to allow you to try different approaches to studying that will hopefully help you become better learners for life.
Over time, we’ve compiled articles on brain foods, how motivation and memory works, methods for better retention, … If we take a look at the sum of all articles and areas of interest, it seems obvious that there should be one chart that combines all of these elements that make up and influence our memory. Thanks to onlinecolleges.com, there now is. Dr. Bill, whom some of you may know as the “Memory Medic”, wrote a short mention of this infographic on this blog after one of its creators mentioned it to him. Think of Yourself in the Third Person. I remember reading somewhere that writer Anne Lamott thinks about herself in the third person, to take better care of herself: “I’m sorry, Anne Lamott can’t accept that invitation to speak; she’s finishing a book so needs to keep her schedule clear.”
I find that often, the same trick helps me to be realistic about myself. "Gretchen gets frantic when she's really hungry, so she can't wait too long for dinner. " "Gretchen needs some quiet time each day. " "Gretchen really feels the cold, so she can't be outside for too long. " Yes, I admit, this approach makes me sound a bit affected and self-important, but the thing is, it really works. For instance, for the last few weeks, I felt...depleted. As the long holiday weekend approached, I asked myself, "What's the best medicine for Gretchen when she feels drained? " That's what I needed. Self-knowledge! I’m working on my Happiness Project, and you could have one, too !
* The holidays are approaching! ¿Dios es real o sólo un amigo imaginario? Neurólogos daneses realizan controversial hallazgo. Si perteneces al amplio grupo de personas que se definen cristianas, la ciencia tiene una buena y una mala noticia para ti. La buena, es que un equipo de neurólogos de la universidad Aarhus en Dinamarca, pudo demostrar empíricamente cómo el cerebro se “ilumina” al momento de rezar.
Esto lo lograron midiendo la actividad cerebral de un grupo de cristianos, identificando 4 áreas comprometidas mientras se comunicaban con Dios. La mala sin embargo, es que el equipo también confirmó que las áreas del cerebro con mayor flujo sanguíneo durante la oración son exactamente las mismas utilizadas al hablar con otra persona. Es decir, para nuestros cuerpos rezar es una actividad tan mundana como conversar con el vecino o con un amigo, al menos desde el punto de vista médico, consigna CBC News.
Uffe Schjodt, líder de la investigación, interpretó estos resultados como la evidencia de que el ser humano ha ido evolucionando para adaptarse a los desafíos de su entorno natural. Researchers find thinking in a foreign language causes people to make more rational decisions. (Medical Xpress) -- While at first glance it might seem irrational, researchers from the University of Chicago have found that people who speak two languages tend to make more rational decisions when thinking in their non-native tongue. They came to this conclusion after conducting a series of experiments, the results of which they have published in a paper in the journal Psychological Science.
Intuitively, most people would assume that it shouldn’t matter which language a person is thinking in when making a decision, but the research team found just the opposite to be true, and they theorize that it’s because when people think in a language that takes more effort, they tend to be more analytical and less emotional when faced with making a choice. To find out if their idea was sound, they conducted several experiments. To make sure their results were sound, the team conducted several variations on this experiment and found nearly identical results.
The Foreign-Language Effect. Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases Abstract Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue? 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. Four experiments show that the framing effect disappears when choices are presented in a foreign tongue. Article Notes The authors declared that they had no conflicts of interest with respect to their authorship or the publication of this article. Nuevo estudio afirma que evitar que las personas piensen favorece las ideas políticas de derecha. Luego de que en febrero un exhaustivo estudio publicado en el “Journal of Psychological Science” encendiera la polémica al afirmar que las personas de derecha, con pensamiento conservador, están ligadas a una menor inteligencia incluso detectable durante la niñez, un nuevo trabajo académico atrae controversia sobre las motivaciones de los sectores políticos.
Esto porque según un estudio de la Universidad de Arkansas, el pensamiento conservador de derecha está vinculado al pensamiento del “mínimo esfuerzo”, ya sea por las características de la persona o bien por la necesidad de entregar respuestas sin mayor elaboración. “La gente tiende a apoyar las ideas conservadoras cuando tiene que entregar una primera respuesta o una respuesta rápida”, señaló en un comunicado el doctor Scott Eidelman, a cargo del estudio. Sin embargo esto no significa que las personas de derecha sean por naturaleza flojas al momento de razonar. ¿Cómo llegó el equipo de investigación a esta insólita conclusión? It’s a Fine Line between Narcissism and Egocentrism. We see the world from the inside out, a fact that leads everyone to be at least somewhat self-centered. The technical term for this is "egocentrism. " As a cognitive bias , egocentrism refers to the natural restriction on our perception caused by the simple fact that we can only see the world from our perspective.
It takes special effort to see the world from any perspective other than through our own eyes. The basic egocentrism built into our cognitive apparatus became an important part of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget’s theory about child development . In observing children describe the way a small table-sized model of a mountain might look to someone else, Piaget found that prior to the age of 8 or so, this seemingly easy task was surprisingly difficult.
Young children seem cognitively unable to take the perspective of another person. This fact, incidentally, makes them easy to beat at a two-person perspective game such as checkers. Recipe for Representativeness. When ordinary people make judgments or inferences, they do not operate like a logician or statistician might. They fail to use some of the relevant information, and they fail to ignore other information that they should not use. Kahneman and Tversky (1974) argued that these departures from rationality arise because people rely on rules of thumb, or . Heuristics are not strictly rational because they guarantee that systematic errors will occur, and systematic errors are - in contrast to random errors - predictable. Yet, heuristic judgments are better than doing nothing or guessing randomly. Random guessing is, it seems, just a lousy way of making judgments, but not as an irrational one because it does not produce systematic bias.
The big three heuristics (there are others) are: [1] Representativenesss , [2] Availability, and [3] Anchoring (with insufficient adjustment). [1] Representativeness is perceptual. If heuristics entail systematic error, what can be done about that? Manufacturing Someone Perfect. The eponymous hero—or antihero—of Miguel de Cervantes’s idealizes his ‘princess’ to such an extent that it becomes comical. To emulate the knights-errant of old who fought battles to earn the affections of their true love, Don Quixote identifies a simple peasant girl called Aldonza Lorenzo, changes her name to the much more romantic and aristocratic sounding ‘Dulcinea del Toboso,' and then paints her in the most flattering terms possible—even though he has only ever seen her fleetingly and never spoken to her.
Dulcinea barely exists, but the idea of her nonetheless keeps Don Quixote alive on his quest. Idealization involves overestimating the positive attributes of a person, object, or idea and underestimating the negative attributes; but more fundamentally, it involves the projection of our needs and desires onto that person, object, or idea. ‘Longing makes the heart grow deep.’ –St Augustine But even a god is not enough. The writer and thinker C.S. Adapted from my new book, 1. 2. 3. 4. Love Big, Think Small. If you're like most people, you rode into married life on powerful waves of affection and intimacy that crashed occasionally into self-doubt and apprehension, only to rise again, stronger than ever.
In other words, you believed that you married for love. That was the easy part. Lots of research shows that love is more effective at bringing us together than keeping us together. You may have heard the saying, "Love is easy; relationships are hard. " The truth is relationships are hard love is easy. Strong feelings and sensations of any kind carry an illusion of certainty . With the exception of resentment, no emotional experience has more illusion of certainty than love. Strong feelings and sensations of any kind also tend to block out those of other people. {*style:<b>Half the Story: Your Partner Changed into Someone You Like Less </b>*}When the intensity of love wanes, we stop projecting and begin to see some things in our lovers we don't like. "Why can't you be what I want?
" EP102934.pdf (objeto application/pdf) Can You Think Your Way Out of a Depression? Whether it's advanced language, ability to reflect upon the past and plan for the future, or our access to a rich shared culture, our unique human traits are usually a source of pride. But, in my last post, I explored the riddle of rising depression in humans . It seems that the same capabilities that enable our species to harness fire and put a man on the moon lead to self-defeating efforts to control low mood.
Do our special cognitive capabilities play into a uniquely human pathway into depression ? A main function of low mood is to draw attention to threats and obstacles in unfavorable environments. The consequences are a pause in behavior and a more careful analysis of the environment . In humans, this analysis is more explicit than in a tiger or a tree shrew. It's natural to expect, "If I understand why I feel bad, I will know how to fix it. " As a scientist who studies mood, I'm naturally all for the examined life.
. (1) . (2) . (5) This escalating-self-focus is far from benign. Mind42.com. Deep Rationality. {*style:<i> </i>*} Radical changes are in store when these two men are properly introduced to one another. Behavioral economics has become an increasingly popular topic over the last few years, as demonstrated by the success of a string of books like and . Challenging the classical model of rational man -- which depicts people as well-informed decision-makers - behavioral economists have incorporated the insights of cognitive and social psychology - fields where researchers have done a rich business demonstrating people's tendencies to use simplistic and irrational biases . A classic example is Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's demonstration of - the finding that people are more psychologically moved by a loss of $100 than by a gain of an identical amount.
To a rational economic mind, $100 is worth exactly $100. The implications of the evolutionary multiple-mind viewpoint for everyday economic decision-making are thus far largely unexplored.