Why feeling like a fraud can be a good thing Image copyright iStock If you feel inadequate or that you are likely to be "found out" at work, you're probably not alone. It's part of a phenomenon called the "imposter syndrome" and it's very common, writes journalist Oliver Burkeman. "I have written 11 books but each time I think 'Uh-oh, they're going to find out now,'" the novelist Maya Angelou once said. "I've run a game on everybody, and they're going to find me out." Angelou was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and won five Grammys for her spoken recordings, plus a myriad other awards. But the "impostor phenomenon" - sometimes known as impostor syndrome - had her firmly in its grip. You've probably felt the same. So you may not find it reassuring to learn that Angelou felt it too. "Sure," you tell yourself, "she thought she was a fraud - but I really am one. Image copyright Getty Images But the truth is you're far from the only sufferer. "But you have to come across as being relatively competent and confident." Image copyright AFP
10 Psychological Studies That Will Change What You Think You Know About Yourself Why do we do the things we do? Despite our best attempts to "know thyself," the truth is that we often know astonishingly little about our own minds, and even less about the way others think. As Charles Dickens once put it, “A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.” Psychologists have long sought insights into how we perceive the world and what motivates our behavior, and they've made enormous strides in lifting that veil of mystery. Aside from providing fodder for stimulating cocktail-party conversations, some of the most famous psychological experiments of the past century reveal universal and often surprising truths about human nature. Here are 10 classic psychological studies that may change the way you understand yourself. We all have some capacity for evil. We don't notice what's right in front of us. Think you know what's going on around you? We can experience deeply conflicting moral impulses.
Why Can’t You Remember Your Future? Physicist Paul Davies on the Puzzlement of Why We Experience Time as Linear “If our heart were large enough to love life in all its detail,” French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote in his 1932 meditation on our paradoxical experience of time, “we would see that every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer.” Nowhere is this duality of time more disorienting than in the constant mental time travel we perform between what has been and what will be in order to anchor ourselves to what is. As our lives tick on, gradually robbing the future of potential and robbing the past of relevance, we trudge along the arrow of time dragging with us this elusive curiosity we call a self — an ever-shifting packet of personal identity, mystifying in how it links us to our childhood selves and misleading in how it maps out our future selves. Davies writes: With these buttons, gone would be the orderly procession of events that apparently constitutes my life. Complement it with T.S.
I thought I was damaged. Then I learned I’m introverted. Not long ago, I discovered Michael Schiller’s terrific Social Introverts Facebook Fan Page. We started corresponding, and I’d love to share the note he sent me about his passion for helping introverts appreciate their own quiet perfection. ~ Susan Click image to "Like" Michael Schiller's "Social Introverts" FB Fan Page Hello, Susan. I spent my entire life thinking that I was psychologically damaged, that my aversion to social gatherings and crowds was a disorder or a phobia. It wasn’t until the middle of last year that I discovered that I am completely normal, that my disposition was born in me, and that it was no mistake. I smile more than I ever have, and I seldom wait for an excuse. Now I’ve made it my mission to try to help bring that same relief to others like me, who may also be spending their lives hating themselves by mistake. 665share
Luck Is a Bigger Contributor to Success Than People Give It Credit For I’m a lucky man. Perhaps the most extreme example of my considerable good fortune occurred one chilly Ithaca morning in November 2007, while I was playing tennis with my longtime friend and collaborator, the Cornell psychologist Tom Gilovich. He later told me that early in the second set, I complained of feeling nauseated. He yelled for someone to call 911, and then started pounding on my chest—something he’d seen many times in movies but had never been trained to do. Ithaca’s ambulances are dispatched from the other side of town, more than five miles away. Doctors later told me that I’d suffered an episode of sudden cardiac arrest. If that ambulance hadn’t happened to have been nearby, I would be dead. Not all random events lead to favorable outcomes, of course. Most people will concede that I’m fortunate to have survived and that Edwards was unfortunate to have perished. My having cheated death does not make me an authority on luck.
Understanding Borderline Personality Disorder | Symptoms and Treatment | All Natural Therapy and Self Help Definition - Borderline Personality Disorder is a defined as a serious mental illness characterized by pervasive instability in moods, interpersonal relationships, self-image, and behavior. The instability of BPD often disrupts family and work life, long-term planning, and the individual's sense of self-identity. Originally thought to be at the "borderline" of psychosis, people with BPD suffer from a disorder of emotion regulation. While less well known than schizophrenia or bipolar disorder (manic-depressive illness), BPD is more common, affecting 2% of adults, mostly young women or by another estimate, 1-3% of the general population. Some suggest that the name itself, Borderline Personality Disorder, is an inappropriate term for this disorder, or "a misleading label". The disorder has nothing to do with neurosis or psychosis, but rather involves emotional volatility, what one reporter described as "a [very] thin emotional skin". 1. 2. Current Treatment Approaches: 1. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Surfing Uncertainty: Do our dynamic brains predict the world? Mehau Kulyk/Getty ON the 300th anniversary of Johannes Kepler’s death, Albert Einstein said: “It seems that the human mind has first to construct forms independently before we can find them in things.” He was referring to Kepler’s astounding deduction that the orbits of planets around the sun were not circular as scholars had believed, but elliptical – a feat that would set the stage for Newton’s laws of motion. Were Einstein alive today, he might be amazed at his own prescience. The clue is prediction. The traditional bottom-up view of visual perception, for example, holds that our brain analyses incoming signals, finds patterns of ever-increasing complexity, and makes sense of what’s out there by matching observed patterns against internal representations. In this paradigm, which has its roots in ideas developed by German physician Hermann von Helmholtz in 1860, our brains actually generate sensory data to match what’s coming in, using internal models of the world and of our bodies.
How to Deal with Borderline Personality Disorder Steps Method 1 of 4: Understand "Borderline Personality Disorder" (BPD) 1Expect some of these character traits in the person with "Borderline Personality Disorder" (BPD), such as:Poor, or lack of, control over emotions.Sudden changes in mood.Poor follow-through. Frequently changing opinions and plans.Inability to maintain normal emotional relationships, throwing temper tantrums, arguing over insignificant events, fits of rage, at times "for no clear reason".Or the opposite, called "flat affect", often unable to feel or express anger.Fear of loneliness and isolation: yet, often at the same time, showing a tendency to avoid people, keeping them away.Fear of abandonment. 2See some characteristics on the positive side:Can be highly creative.Have a quick wit and are sometimes considered the life of the party.Are often talented and particularly intelligent. Method 2 of 4: Causes of BPD 1Understand the causes of BPD. Method 3 of 4: Seek professional assistance Method 4 of 4: Dealing with it all Ad
Future - The enormous power of the unconscious brain If you don’t think the act of stacking and shuffling a set of cups could boggle your mind, watch the video below. In it, neuroscientist David Eagleman introduces 10-year-old Austin Naber – a world record-holding, champion cup stacker. Naber moves the cups around at a blistering pace and when Eagleman has a go at keeping up with him, the difference in skill and speed becomes immediately apparent. “He smoked me,” Eagleman admits. Both Eagleman and Naber had their brain activity monitored via an electroencephalogram (EEG). “His brain was much more serene than mine because he had automised his behaviour,” explains Eagleman. The reason you practise sports over and over again is so you get really good at automising your action – David Eagleman It’s a question that Eagleman explored in a PBS television series that aired recently on BBC4 in the UK. You’re already aware of the fact that breathing and organ functions are things we do “automatically”, but there are lots of other examples.
Borderline personality disorder Photo by: kentoh Definition Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a mental disorder characterized by disturbed and unstable interpersonal relationships and self-image, along with impulsive, reckless, and often self-destructive behavior. Description Individuals with BPD have a history of unstable interpersonal relationships. The term "borderline" was originally used by psychologist Adolf Stern in the 1930s to describe patients whose condition bordered somewhere between psychosis and neurosis . Causes and symptoms Causes Adults with borderline personalities often have a history of significant childhood traumas such as emotional, physical, and/or sexual abuse and parental neglect or loss. Symptoms The handbook used by mental health professionals to diagnose mental disorders is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Demographics Diagnosis Borderline personality disorder typically first appears in early adulthood. Treatment Prognosis Resources
Forecasting the Future: Can The Hive Mind Let Us Predict the Future? Polling The (Chat)Room If two minds are better than one, how much better are two thousand minds? A new hive mind project known as Metaculus is attempting to find out. Essentially the crowdsourcing of knowledge, the concept of “hive mind,” or collective intelligence, has been explored within the context of such fields as biology, robotics, and political science. Now, through their online community Metaculus, physicists Anthony Aguirre (University of California), Gregory Laughlin (Yale), and former postdoc Max Wainwright are testing the accuracy of hive mind in making predictions about the future of such fields as science, technology, and space. So, how can humans help predict the future? After signing up for a free account, Metaculus users answer yes-or-no questions such as “Will SpaceX launch for Mars in the 2018 window?” The hive mind works. Notably, these early Metaculus findings are in line with those of other hive-mind projects. A Strong Hive is Made of Quality Bees
Top 10 Thinking Traps Exposed Our minds set up many traps for us. Unless we’re aware of them, these traps can seriously hinder our ability to think rationally, leading us to bad reasoning and making stupid decisions. Features of our minds that are meant to help us may, eventually, get us into trouble. Here are the first 5 of the most harmful of these traps and how to avoid each one of them. 1. “Is the population of Turkey greater than 35 million? Lesson: Your starting point can heavily bias your thinking: initial impressions, ideas, estimates or data “anchor” subsequent thoughts. This trap is particularly dangerous as it’s deliberately used in many occasions, such as by experienced salesmen, who will show you a higher-priced item first, “anchoring” that price in your mind, for example. What can you do about it? Always view a problem from different perspectives. 2. In one experiment a group of people were randomly given one of two gifts — half received a decorated mug, the other half a large Swiss chocolate bar. 3. 4.
Capital - Positive thinking can make you too lazy to meet your goals About fifteen years ago, when entrepreneur Michael Stausholm started a business with a friend, his partner painted a rosy picture of the future of the business and promised him a lot of success. Stausholm believed him and felt uplifted, as if saying it would will it to be so. Thinking positive, after all, is a common step to success, right? Just being positive and happy go lucky is not going to work “Positive thinking is something in the DNA of most entrepreneurs,” says Stausholm, who is based in Copenhagen and who previously worked for shipping company Maersk and then went on to consult for large companies on sustainability issues. But when the business fell apart, he learned an important lesson. The power of positive thinking has been a guiding principle for business leaders at least since 1936 when Napoleon Hill published Think and Grow Rich. According to these positive-thinking tomes, negative thoughts or doubts stand in the way of success. The seductive power of fantasy