Google Earth Fractals

How to Trick Your Brain for Happiness This month, we feature videos of a Greater Good presentation by Rick Hanson, the best-selling author and trailblazing psychologist. In this excerpt from his talk, Dr. Hanson explains how we can take advantage of the brain’s natural “plasticity”—it’s ability to change shape over time. gobyg There’s this great line by Ani Tenzin Palmo, an English woman who spent 12 years in a cave in Tibet: “We do not know what a thought is, yet we’re thinking them all the time.” It’s true. In recent years, though, we have started to better understand the neural bases of states like happiness, gratitude, resilience, love, compassion, and so forth. Ultimately, what this can mean is that with proper practice, we can increasingly trick our neural machinery to cultivate positive states of mind. But in order to understand how, you need to understand three important facts about the brain. Fact one: As the brain changes, the mind changes, for better or worse. Fact two: As the mind changes, the brain changes. 1. 2. 3.

2002 January 14 - Sun Halo at Winter Solstice Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 January 14 Sun Halo at Winter Solstice Credit & Copyright: Philip Appleton (SIRTF Science Center), Caltech Tomorrow's picture: Fifth Most Powerful Explosion Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (USRA)NASA Technical Rep.: Jay Norris. Wonder and Skepticism Article Carl Sagan Volume 19.1, January / February 1995 I was a child in a time of hope. Even with an early bedtime in winter you could see the stars. Not only could nobody tell me, but nobody even had the sense that it was an interesting question. That seemed to me a fantastically clever idea. It was in there. I sensed awe. It seemed the most exciting thing to study. It’s been my enormous good luck—I was born at just the right time—to have had, to some extent, those childhood ambitions satisfied. Science is still one of my chief joys. There’s another reason I think popularizing science is important, why I try to do it. We have a civilization based on science and technology, and we’ve cleverly arranged things so that almost nobody understands science and technology. The predictive powers of some areas, at least, of science are phenomenal. So, imagine—there are so many areas we could think of—imagine you want to know the sex of your unborn child. Now how does it work? We are fallible.