The science of love: How "positivity resonance" shapes the way we connect by Maria Popova The neurobiology of how the warmest emotion blurs the boundaries by you and not-you. We kick-started the year with some of history’s most beautiful definitions of love. She begins with a definition that parallels Dorion Sagan’s scientific meditation on sex: First and foremost, love is an emotion, a momentary state that arises to infuse your mind and body alike. Fredrickson zooms in on three key neurobiological players in the game of love — your brain, your levels of the hormone oxytocin, and your vagus nerve, which connects your brain to the rest of your body — and examines their interplay as the core mechanism of love, summing up: Love is a momentary upwelling of three tightly interwoven events: first, a sharing of one or more positive emotions between you and another; second, a synchrony between your and the other person’s biochemistry and behaviors; and third, a reflected motive to invest in each other’s well-being that brings mutual care. This is no ordinary moment.
The “I” of the Beholder: What Is the Self? by Maria Popova “The fate of the world depends on the Selves of human beings.” “I change every day, change my patterns, my concepts, my interpretations,” Anaïs Nin wrote to Harper’s Bazaar editor Leo Lerman in history’s most gracious turn-down of a major magazine profile, “I am a series of moods and sensations. I play a thousand roles.” And yet despite how much science may disprove it and philosophy may debunk it, most of us cling to the notion of the permanent self with unparalleled zest. In her seminal book The “I” of the Beholder: A Guided Journey to the Essence of a Child (public library), education pioneer and Roeper School co-founder Annemarie Roeper considers the origin and nature of identity and of the self as it relates to developmental psychology and our formative years. Roeper writes in the introduction: [We have] a sense of the mystery of life, the mystery of the universe that surrounds us, and the mystery that is within us. Stop judging me, evaluating me, categorizing me.
The Science of Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect by Maria Popova “The self is more of a superhighway for social influence than it is the impenetrable private fortress we believe it to be.” “Without the sense of fellowship with men of like mind,” Einstein wrote, “life would have seemed to me empty.” It is perhaps unsurprising that the iconic physicist, celebrated as “the quintessential modern genius,” intuited something fundamental about the inner workings of the human mind and soul long before science itself had attempted to concretize it with empirical evidence. Now, it has: In Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (public library), neuroscientist Matthew D. Lieberman, director of UCLA’s Social Cognitive Neuroscience lab, sets out to “get clear about ‘who we are’ as social creatures and to reveal how a more accurate understanding of our social nature can improve our lives and our society. Our sociality is woven into a series of bets that evolution has laid down again and again throughout mammalian history. Donating = Loving
Meanwhile: An Illustrated Love Letter to the Living Fabric of a City and Our Shared Human Longing to Be Understood by Maria Popova A tender reminder that however vast our differences, we are bonded by the yearning to feel seen for who we are. I’ve written before that every city needs a love letter. Like a modern-day Margaret Mead armed with ink and watercolor, not a critic or commentator but an observer and amplifier of voice, MacNaughton plunges into the living fabric of the city with equal parts curiosity and compassion, gentleness and generosity, wit and wisdom, and emerges with a dimensional portrait painted with honesty, humor, and humility. Beneath the individual stories — of the bus driver, of the hipsters, of the old men in Chinatown, of the librarian, of the street preacher — lies a glimpse of our shared humanity, those most vulnerable and earnest parts of the human soul that we often overlook and dismiss as we reduce people to their demographic and psychographic variables, be those race or gender or socioeconomic status or subcultural identification. Donating = Loving Share on Tumblr
Amanda Palmer on the Art of Asking and the Shared Dignity of Giving and Receiving by Maria Popova “When we really see each other, we want to help each other.” “It would be a terrible calamity,” Henry Miller wrote in his meditation on the beautiful osmosis between giving and receiving, “for the world if we eliminated the beggar. The beggar is just as important in the scheme of things as the giver. If begging were ever eliminated God help us if there should no longer be a need to appeal to some other human being, to make him give of his riches.” Last week, I had the pleasure of spending some time with the wonderful Amanda Palmer who, besides being an extraordinarily talented musician, is also a fellow champion of open culture and believer in making good work freely available, trusting that those who find value in it will support it accordingly. Through the very act of asking people, I connected with them. Photograph: James Duncan Davidson for TED Donating = Loving Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. Share on Tumblr
Einstein on Kindness, Our Shared Existence, and Life’s Highest Ideals by Maria Popova “Without the sense of fellowship with men of like mind… life would have seemed to me empty.” In times of turmoil, I often turn to one of my existential pillars of comfort: Albert Einstein’s Ideas and Opinions — the definitive collection of the great thinker’s essays on everything from science and religion to government to human nature, gathered under the supervision of Einstein himself. It’s been a challenging week, one that’s reminded me with merciless acuity the value of kindness and compassion, so I’ve once again turned to Einstein’s timeless “ideas and opinions” on this spectrum of subjects. On the ties of sympathy: How strange is the lot of us mortals! On public opinion, or what Paul Graham might call prestige: One becomes sharply aware, but without regret, of the limits of mutual understanding and consonance with other people. On our interconnectedness, interdependency, and shared existence: On good and evil, creative bravery, and human value: On life’s highest ideals:
3 Bad Habits That Can Derail Any Relationship As a marriage therapist, one of the questions I get asked most by family and friends is What should I do so we don’t end up in couples therapy? As a wife, I get it: you want to know what goes wrong in other relationships so you can avoid it in yours. Unfortunately, there’s no magic checklist that will guarantee marital bliss. But I’ve seen enough couples in my professional life that I can offer an insider’s look at the three bad habits that I see often in the unhappy couples who find themselves on my couch. 1. Culturally we've embraced this idea that happy couples don’t fight. No two human beings alive will agree on everything and always meet each other’s needs and expectations; and that’s part of the excitement of being together. Too often couples think that conflict is a sign that the relationship is falling apart. 2. If you disagree on a major issue, it's so much easier to turn to a friend or family member who shares your position rather than facing the conflict with your partner. 3.
Buddhadharma In Everyday Life. ~ via Linda Lewis Lojong 12, “Drive All Blames into One” Perhaps the most challenging and provocative of Atisha’s slogans is Drive All Blames into One. Why in the world would anyone want to do such a thing? Who wants to invite blame? Sometimes it is difficult enough to take the blame for something we actually did, like reaching for honey in the grocery store and accidentally knocking a glass jar of peanut butter off the shelf and onto the floor. When we see our own or others’ defense mechanism shun blame, we also see self-cherishing and ego-fixation. Obviously, it’s good to be responsible for our own mishaps. As a Bodhisattva in progress, why in the world would we want to lay emotional or aggressive blame on anyone else? Interestingly, this simplifies the situation. I remember many years ago, one of my best bosses called me into his office. “Linda, you’ve been doing a good job, working independently, and I am to blame for not giving you enough guidance.” Elephriends - Mindful Affiliates Recent Trackbacks
A Simple Tool That Will Improve Every One Of Your Relationships Whether you're a friend, a partner, an employee, a boss, a world leader, or a parent, you will inevitably encounter communication challenges at some point in your relationships. And there is one simple tool that will produce radical changes when you implement and practice it. It's psych 101. The tool is called active listening. I'll give you an example from my life as a parent: My kids are screaming at each other. "He won't stop scratching the back of my chair! "I DON'T WANT TO STOP!" We're on vacation, trying to enjoy a peaceful morning in the snowy mountains, but as anyone with more than one child knows, the best-laid plans come to a screeching halt when siblings begin their rivalry. My husband and I look at each quickly and then act. "I'M NOT ANGRY! "Oh, you're sad. My first impulse was to jump in and try to appeal to their logic. My next impulse was to try to offer solutions. There's a small miracle that occurs when you say less, listen more, and allow room for a quiet space to exist.
The Science and Philosophy of Friendship: Lessons from Aristotle on the Art of Connecting by Maria Popova “Friends hold a mirror up to each other; through that mirror they can see each other in ways that would not otherwise be accessible to them, and it is this mirroring that helps them improve themselves as persons.” “A principal fruit of friendship,” Francis Bacon wrote in his timeless meditation on the subject, “is the ease and discharge of the fulness and swellings of the heart, which passions of all kinds do cause and induce.” For Thoreau, friendship was one of life’s great rewards. But in today’s cultural landscape of muddled relationships scattered across various platforms for connecting, amidst constant debates about whether our Facebook “friendships” are making us more or less happy, it pays to consider what friendship actually is. Philosophers and cognitive scientists agree that friendship is an essential ingredient of human happiness. Maurice Sendak illustration from 'I'll Be You and You Be Me,' a vintage ode to friendship by Ruth Krauss. Donating = Loving
George Saunders on the Power of Kindness, Animated With his gentle wisdom and disarming warmth, Saunders manages to dissolve some of our most deeply engrained culturally conditioned cynicism into a soft and expansive awareness of the greatest gift one human being can give another — those sacred exchanges that take place in a moment of time, often mundane and fleeting, but echo across a lifetime with inextinguishable luminosity. In this immeasurably wonderful animated teaser for the book, narrated by Saunders himself, illustrator Tim Bierbaum brings to life the author’s words: I’d say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder.In seventh grade, this new kid joined our class. In the interest of confidentiality, her name will be “ELLEN.” ELLEN was small, shy. Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter.
How to Navigate the Murky Waters of Workplace Friendships: Wisdom from Adam Smith and Aristotle by Maria Popova “Is not mistaking relationships for what they are not — that is being blind to their ambiguity — arguably the greatest cause of disappointment and failure?” “A condition of friendship, is the abdication of power over another, indeed the abdication even of the wish for power over one another,” Andrew Sullivan wrote in his beautiful meditation on why friendship is a greater gift than romantic love. “As soon as a friend attempts to control a friend, the friendship ceases to exist.” This is why one of the greatest challenges to any friendship is the emergence of a power dynamic, especially when it is perceived by one or both parties as uneven or unfair. Is not mistaking relationships for what they are not — that is being blind to their ambiguity — arguably the greatest cause of disappointment and failure? Illustration by Maurice Sendak from 'I’ll Be You and You Be Me' by Ruth Krauss, 1954. Those 30% of people who report having a best friend at work gain in unexpected ways.
A “Dynamic Interaction”: Leo Buscaglia on Why Love Is a Learned Language by Maria Popova From developmental psychology to Timothy Leary, a reframing of love as deliberate mastery rather than magical thinking. Love might be one of the most quintessential capacities of the human condition. That disconnect is precisely what Leo Buscaglia considers in one of the most stimulating chapters in Love: What Life Is All About (public library) — that slim and potent volume based on his 1969 course at the University of Southern California, which also gave us Buscaglia on education, conformity, and how labels limit us. Citing famous cases, both folkloric and factual, of human children raised by animals outside civilization, Buscaglia notes that just like we “learn” to be human, we also learn to love. Most of us continue to behave as though love is not learned but lies dormant in each human being and simply awaits some mystical age of awareness to emerge in full bloom. He writes: Love is a learned, emotional reaction. One cannot give what he does not possess. Share on Tumblr
Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think | Page 2 of 2 | Wait But Why | Page 2 This is Part 2. Part 1 is here. Part 2: Taming the Mammoth Some people are born with a reasonably tame mammoth or raised with parenting that helps keep the mammoth in check. Whatever your situation, there are three steps to getting your mammoth under your control: Step 1: Examine Yourself The first step to improving things is a clear and honest assessment of what’s going on in your head, and there are three parts of this: 1) Get to know your Authentic Voice This doesn’t sound that hard, but it is. There are cliché phrases for this process—”soul-searching” or “finding yourself”—but that’s exactly what needs to happen. 2) Figure out where the mammoth is hiding Most of the time a mammoth is in control of a person, the person’s not really aware of it. The most obvious way to find the mammoth is to figure out where your fear is—where are you most susceptible to shame or embarrassment? 3) Decide where the mammoth needs to be ousted 1) The mammoth’s fears are totally irrational. No. A) You live here: