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Dan Ariely on the Truth About Dishonesty, Animated

Dan Ariely on the Truth About Dishonesty, Animated

The Psychology of Trust in Life, Learning, 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.

MOOCs – The Opium of the Masses “MOOCs are the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. They are the opium of the people. The abolition of MOOCs as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.” (Modification of Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right) Replacing "Religion" with MOOC in the quote above should give a pretty clear indication of where this post is heading. There is a confluence of circumstances at play in the United States right now, culminating with the President’s recent State of the Union call to reduce the cost of higher education, that is sending one of our most important and progressive social institutions on a crash course directly back to the Industrial Age, mass-production model that we have struggled to escape for so long. (Storming of the Bastille and arrest of the Governor M. de Launay, July 14, 1789. Massive is Not Better Masses, massive, mass-production.

Trying Not to Try: How to Cultivate the Paradoxical Art of Spontaneity Through the Chinese Concept of Wu-Wei by Maria Popova “Our modern conception of human excellence is too often impoverished, cold, and bloodless. Success does not always come from thinking more rigorously or striving harder.” “The best way to get approval is not to need it,” Hugh MacLeod memorably counseled. We now know that perfectionism kills creativity and excessive goal-setting limits our success rather than begetting it — all different manifestations of the same deeper paradox of the human condition, at once disconcerting and comforting, which Edward Slingerland, professor of Asian Studies and Embodied Cognition at the University of British Columbia and a renowned scholar of Chinese thought, explores in Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity (public library | IndieBound). Our lives, Slingerland argues, are often like “a massive game of Mindball,” when we find ourselves continually caught in this loop of trying so hard that we stymie our own efforts. Art by Austin Kleon from 'Show Your Work.' Share on Tumblr

Q&A: What the Brain Reveals About the Self — And Self Control With the Obama administration planning a major initiative to map the brain, there’s more attention focused on what all of that new information will mean for how we see ourselves and how we take moral and legal responsibility for our actions. David Eagleman, a neuroscientist who directs Baylor College of Medicine’s Initiative on Neuroscience and Law and the bestselling author of Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, provided some insights into what neuroscience can do for us. Do you think there is a ‘real you’? If somebody makes a racist or anti-Semitic remark, is that what he really thinks, but hides most of the time because it’s not socially acceptable? I think when we talk about a person and we use some sort of name or an identity, what we’re really talking about is something like the running average. Let’s take a different case. What’s the difference? Presumably, though, most of us would prefer not to have racist words or ideas in our heads… That’s a good example. Quite right.

Isaac Asimov on Optimism vs. Cynicism about the Human Spirit by Maria Popova Why cynicism is, above all, a disservice to our own happiness. “As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman,” E.B. White wrote in a letter to a man who had lost faith in humanity, “the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate.” A beautiful and soul-expanding counterpart to the power of optimism in the human spirit that White advocates comes from science-fiction icon Isaac Asimov, found in his posthumously published It’s Been a Good Life (public library) — a rich selection of the author’s letters, diary entries, and his three prior autobiographies, edited by his spouse, Janet Jeppson Asimov, which also gave us Asimov’s wisdom on humanism and science vs. spirituality. The book itself is titled after some of Asimov’s last words to his wife, but the most magnificent embodiment of his faith in life’s goodness comes from a letter to one of his friends. Donating = Loving Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. Share on Tumblr

Do i know you? Memory patterns help us recall the social webs we weave With a dizzying number of ties in our social networks -- that your Aunt Alice is a neighbor of Muhammad who is married to Natasha who is your wife's boss -- it's a wonder we remember any of it. How do we keep track of the complexity? We cheat, says a Cornell University sociologist in Scientific Reports (March 21), a publication of Nature. Humans keep track of social information not by rote memorization but with simplifying rules, as you might remember a number sequence that always increases by two, according to author Matthew Brashears, assistant professor of sociology. People recall social ties that both involve at least three people who know each other and kinship labels such as "aunt" twice as well as they remember ties that do not, even though triad kinship networks are far more complex, he said. "Humans are able to manage big, sprawling, complicated social networks essentially because we don't remember big, sprawling, complicated social networks.

Build Trust with Others Using the Johari Window Model Human Humans began to practice sedentary agriculture about 12,000 years ago, domesticating plants and animals which allowed for the growth of civilization. Humans subsequently established various forms of government, religion, and culture around the world, unifying people within a region and leading to the development of states and empires. The rapid advancement of scientific and medical understanding in the 19th and 20th centuries led to the development of fuel-driven technologies and improved health, causing the human population to rise exponentially. Etymology and definition In common usage, the word "human" generally refers to the only extant species of the genus Homo — anatomically and behaviorally modern Homo sapiens. In scientific terms, the definition of "human" has changed with the discovery and study of the fossil ancestors of modern humans. History Evolution and range Evidence from molecular biology Evidence from the fossil record Anatomical adaptations

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