Goethe on the Psychology of Color and Emotion Color is an essential part of how we experience the world, both biologically and culturally. One of the earliest formal explorations of color theory came from an unlikely source — the German poet, artist, and politician Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who in 1810 published Theory of Colors (public library; public domain), his treatise on the nature, function, and psychology of colors. Though the work was dismissed by a large portion of the scientific community, it remained of intense interest to a cohort of prominent philosophers and physicists, including Arthur Schopenhauer, Kurt Gödel, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. One of Goethe’s most radical points was a refutation of Newton’s ideas about the color spectrum, suggesting instead that darkness is an active ingredient rather than the mere passive absence of light. YELLOWThis is the color nearest the light. It appears on the slightest mitigation of light, whether by semi-transparent mediums or faint reflection from white surfaces.
Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Crucial Difference Between Success and Mastery by Maria Popova The lost art of learning to stand “where we would rather not and expand in ways we never knew we could.” “You gotta be willing to fail… if you’re afraid of failing, you won’t get very far,” Steve Jobs cautioned. Female archers, lantern slide, c. 1920. Lewis begins with a visit with the women of Columbia University’s varsity archery team, who spend countless hours practicing a sport that requires equal parts impeccable precision of one’s aim and a level of comfort with the uncontrollable — all the environmental interferences, everything that could happen between the time the arrow leaves the bow and the time it lands on the target, having followed its inevitably curved line. There is little that is vocational about [contemporary] culture anymore, so it is rare to see what doggedness looks like with this level of exactitude… To spend so many hours with a bow and arrow is a kind of marginality combined with a seriousness of purpose rarely seen. Mastery requires endurance.
Your Mind & Body Are Not Separate For more: This isn’t news to anyone, right? We talk about feeling things in “our guts.” We talk about a lump in our throat when we are upset. Our daily language illustrates this, but how often do we ignore what our bodies are telling us? This graphic is one depiction of some of the places in our bodies that emotions get stuck or stored. While I don’t believe that every disease and ailment is a result of emotional distress, it’s always worth taking a second look at what’s going on internally when you notice chronic pain patterns in your body. A Relephant Read:> “Enlightenment is Simple: the Synchronization of Body, Speech & Mind, Harnessed to the Present Moment.”> Or, What does your Body look like when it feels these 14 basic Emotions? Like elephant health & wellness on Facebook. About Kate Bartolotta Kate Bartolotta is a wellness cheerleader, yogini storyteller, and self-care maven.
How to Use Deep Work to Kill Distractions and Boost Productivity Deep work, as defined by author and professor Cal Newport in his best selling book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, is a concept born out of the difficulty many people have today in handling distractions caused by the boom in digital communications. These distractions prevent us from focusing on work that matters and contributes towards us feeling overwhelmed and overworked every day, yet at the same time, leaving us feeling we are not doing work that really matters. We are reacting rather than being proactive. Deep work prevents us from reacting by scheduling time for focused work where we turn off all our notifications and devices for an hour or two and sit down in a quiet place, undisturbed, to focus on work that matters. It works, and it is something I have been using for years when I need to get a book finished or I have an important project to complete. How Deep Work Helps You Refocus There are many benefits of deep work. Unimportant Distractions Are Gone
21 Things To Do When You're Feeling Blue Wisdom from a MacArthur Genius: Psychologist Angela Duckworth on Why Grit, Not IQ, Predicts Success by Maria Popova “Character is at least as important as intellect.” Creative history brims with embodied examples of why the secret of genius is doggedness rather than “god”-given talent, from the case of young Mozart’s upbringing to E. B. In this short video from the MacArthur Foundation, Duckworth traces her journey and explores the essence of her work: We need more than the intuitions of educators to work on this problem. In the exceedingly excellent How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character (public library) — a necessary addition to these fantastic reads on education — Paul Tough writes of Duckworth’s work: Duckworth had come to Penn in 2002, at the age of thirty-two, later in life than a typical graduate student. The problem, I think, is not only the schools but also the students themselves. Duckworth began her graduate work by studying self-discipline. This is where grit comes in — the X-factor that helps us attain more long-term, abstract goals.
15 Things Highly Confident People Don't Do Highly confident people believe in their ability to achieve. If you don’t believe in yourself, why should anyone else put their faith in you? To walk with swagger and improve your self-confidence, watch out for these fifteen things highly confident people don’t do. 1. Highly confident people take ownership of their thoughts and actions. 2. Highly confident people don’t let fear dominate their lives. 3. Highly confident people avoid the comfort zone, because they know this is a place where dreams die. 4. Highly confident people know that a good plan executed today is better than a great plan executed someday. 5. Highly confident people don’t get caught up in negative feedback. 6. Highly confident people have no tolerance for unnecessary, self-inflicted drama. 7. Highly confident people can make use of whatever resources they have, no matter how big or small. 8. Highly confident people know that they are not competing with any other person. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. Dig this article?
Clever Goal setting achieves I’m going to tell you the secrets on how to start taking action on your dreams. When you decide to turn thoughts into action, there are specific, actionable steps you can take to move forward. The first thing I want you to do is think back to when you were a child. Our childhood selves hold many of the secrets to realizing our real life dreams. By taking the following steps, you’ll do some playing and storytelling to reveal your dreams and start making them come true. 1. Your life story is unique and has brought you here today. Finding out what our future lives and dream lives might look like can be done effectively through the eyes of our childhood selves. Can you remember what you loved to do most as a child? You can use the instincts, passions, and skills you had as a child to fuel your progress toward your adult dreams. What we call getting into our flow state as an adult is what came naturally to us as children. 2. This step also involves building motivation for the steps to come. 3.
The worst scars are in the mind: psychological torture Torture often includes methods that entail severe psychological distress and profoundly disrupt the senses and personality. This article describes how psychological methods which do not amount to ill-treatment when considered in isolation can amount to torture through their accumulation over time and their integration into the whole torture process. Dr Hernán Reyes, MD, of the ICRC’s Assistance Division, is a specialist on medical aspects of detention and has visited numerous detention centres around the world. Abstract Torture during interrogation often includes methods that do not physically assault the body or cause actual physical pain – and yet entail severe psychological pain and suffering and profoundly disrupt the senses and personality.
Enlightenment’s Evil Twin Exploring the Shadow Side of Meditation In 1974 Hans Burgschmidt was sixteen years old, living in the Canadian Prairies, working in a photography studio darkroom, elbow-deep in chemicals all day long. “Is this what life is about?” “An infinite ocean of peace and love and happiness awaits you,” said the radiant Maharishi, with his flowing hair and his garland of flowers. Soon after he began his meditation practice, exactly as advertised, he found himself transported from his parent’s basement into a shimmering inner space of light and colour and bliss. Hans was hooked. But somewhere along the line Hans became disenchanted. Thus began Hans’ long career as an itinerant spiritual seeker. “I found it invigorating,” says Hans. Everything was fine, until three weeks after his first retreat, when, in Hans’ words, “something changed.” Hans was at home making his bed, when the room suddenly appeared “very far away.” “All of my thoughts, all my processing – none of it referred to me.
The Psychology of Language: Which Words Matter the Most When We Talk 8.4K Flares Filament.io Made with Flare More Info'> 8.4K Flares × Here is a secret right off the bat and I hope it isn’t too odd. One of the things I fuss about a lot (especially for Buffer copy, for example our welcome email if you sign up!) are words; very simple words in fact. Should it say “Hi” or “Hey.” There are many occasions when Joel and I sit over one line and change it multiple times, until we feel it really sits right. “How does this make you feel?” The question might sound very obvious. Recently we explored how much sleep do we really need to work productively. Our brain whilst listening to words Recently, a lot of the long standing paradigms in how our brain processes language were overthrown. “Words are then shunted over to the left temporal lobe [of our brain] for processing, while the melody is channelled to the right side of the brain, a region more stimulated by music.” So our brain uses two different areas to identify the mood and then the actual meaning of the words.
7 Most Important Cognitive Skills for Fast and Successful Learning One of the biggest problems with the traditional education model is it works on the premise that one size fits all. As we now know, a one-size-fits-all approach does not work well in a universal education system as we all possess different cognitive skills. At the basic level, there are 4 learning types: visual, auditory, reading/writing and kinesthetic, and each of us are dominant in one or more of these types. Visual learners learn better in an environment where there are a lot of visual stimuli. However, on top of these basic learning types, there are also cognitive skills related to the way our brains process information. Understanding where we are strong and where we lack skills helps us improve what and how we learn. One of the advantages we have over our ancestors is the almost limitless access we have to free education. However, with those almost limitless possibilities, you will not learn anything effectively unless you know and understand what kind of learner you are. 1. 2. 3.
Psychology of Trust in Work and Love by Maria Popova The science of why tit-for-tat isn’t the best strategy for cooperation and why you should hear out your hunches. “When you trust people to help you, they often do,” Amanda Palmer asserted in her beautiful meditation on the art of asking without shame. But what does it really mean to “trust,” and perhaps more importantly, how can we live with the potential heartbreak that lurks in the gap between “often” and “always”? That’s precisely what psychologist David DeSteno, director of Northeastern University’s Social Emotions Lab, explores in The Truth About Trust: How It Determines Success in Life, Love, Learning, and More (public library). DeSteno, who has previously studied the osmosis of good and evil in all of us and the psychology of compassion and resilience, argues that matters of trust occupy an enormous amount of our mental energies and influence, directly or indirectly, practically every aspect of our everyday lives. The short answer is that we have to.
The Psychology of Getting Unstuck: How to Overcome the “OK Plateau” of Performance & Personal Growth by Maria Popova “When you want to get good at something, how you spend your time practicing is far more important than the amount of time you spend.” “Any sequence of mental action which has been frequently repeated tends to perpetuate itself,” William James wrote in his influential meditation on habit, ”so that we find ourselves automatically prompted to think, feel, or do what we have been before accustomed to think, feel, or do, under like circumstances.” In the 1960s, psychologists identified three stages that we pass through in the acquisition of new skills. And so we get to the so-called “OK Plateau” — the point at which our autopilot of expertise confines us to a sort of comfort zone, where we perform the task in question in efficient enough a way that we cease caring for improvement. Color restoration of archival Einstein photograph by Mads Madsen The challenge, of course, is that we can’t get better on autopilot. The Mozart family on tour: Leopold, Wolfgang, and Nannerl.