Positive Psychology Exercise - Emoclear Self-Helpapedia Emoclear Positve Psychology Exercise I: Doing Pleasurable, Important, and Meaningful Activities Every day for two weeks do the following: 1. Choose a pleasurable activity to do alone and do it to completion. Example: Gardening or writing.2. Choose a pleasurable activity to do with others and do it until completion. Emoclear Positive Psychology Exercise II: Building Character. Based on Character Strengths (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). For two weeks pick two activities per day from the list below. The Activity List: 1. Here's a reflection exercise for accessing appreciation and gratitude: This exercise is to be done daily for two weeks. 1. Have fun, Steve 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.
Someday, This Robot Will Run Faster Than Us All MSNBC - How to Think About the Mind How to Think About the MindNeuroscience shows that the 'soul' is the activity of the brain Sept. 27 issue - Every evening our eyes tell us that the sun sets, while we know that, in fact, the Earth is turning us away from it. Astronomy taught us centuries ago that common sense is not a reliable guide to reality. Today it is neuroscience that is forcing us to readjust our intuitions. People naturally believe in the Ghost in the Machine: that we have bodies made of matter and spirits made of an ethereal something. Modern neuroscience has shown that there is no user. This resistance is not surprising. The disconnect between our common sense and our best science is not an academic curiosity. Prozac shouldn't be dispensed like mints, of course, but the reason is not that it undermines the will. To many, the scariest prospect is medication that can make us better than well by enhancing mood, memory and attention. © 2004 Newsweek, Inc.
The Benjamin Franklin Effect & You Are Not So Smart - StumbleUpon The Misconception: You do nice things for the people you like and bad things to the people you hate. The Truth: You grow to like people for whom you do nice things and hate people you harm. Benjamin Franklin knew how to deal with haters. Born in 1706 as the eighth of 17 children to a Massachusetts soap and candlestick maker, the chances Benjamin would go on to become a gentleman, scholar, scientist, statesman, musician, author, publisher and all-around general bad-ass were astronomically low, yet he did just that and more because he was a master of the game of personal politics. Like many people full of drive and intelligence born into a low station, Franklin developed strong people skills and social powers. Franklin’s prospects were dim. At 17, Franklin left Boston and started his own printing business In Philadelphia. As clerk, he could step into a waterfall of data coming out of the nascent government. What exactly happened here? Let’s start with your attitudes. By Fernando Botero
Top 10 Common Faults In Human Thought Humans The human mind is a wonderful thing. Cognition, the act or process of thinking, enables us to process vast amounts of information quickly. For example, every time your eyes are open, you brain is constantly being bombarded with stimuli. The Gambler’s fallacy is the tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality, they are not. Reactivity is the tendency of people to act or appear differently when they know that they are being observed. Pareidolia is when random images or sounds are perceived as significant. Interesting Fact: the Rorschach Inkblot test was developed to use pareidolia to tap into people’s mental states. Self-fulfilling Prophecy Self-fulfilling prophecy is engaging in behaviors that obtain results that confirm existing attitudes. Interesting Fact: Economic Recessions are self-fulfilling prophecies. Herd mentality is the tendency to adopt the opinions and follow the behaviors of the majority to feel safer and to avoid conflict.
From toxicity to life: arsenic proves to be a building block LLNL's Jennifer Pett-Ridge, right, runs the NanoSIMS and analyzes some arsenic-grown cells from Mono Lake as NASA/USGS's Felisa Wolfe-Simon observes. High Resolution Image LIVERMORE, Calif. - Arsenic -- an element that triggers death for most Earthly life forms -- is actually allowing for bacterium to thrive and reproduce. In a study that may prompt the rewriting of textbooks, a team of astrobiologists and chemists has found the first known living organism that can use arsenic in place of phosphorus in its major macromolecules. Oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorous are the six basic building blocks of life on Earth. The new study by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and led by NASA and the U.S. Mono Lake, located in eastern California, is an alkaline and hypersaline lake with high dissolved arsenic concentrations and is believed to have formed more than 760,000 years ago from neighboring volcanic eruptions.
Our brains are wired so we can better hear ourselves speak, new study shows Like the mute button on the TV remote control, our brains filter out unwanted noise so we can focus on what we’re listening to. But when it comes to following our own speech, a new brain study from the University of California, Berkeley, shows that instead of one homogenous mute button, we have a network of volume settings that can selectively silence and amplify the sounds we make and hear. Activity in the auditory cortex when we speak and listen is amplified in some regions of the brain and muted in others. In this image, the black line represents muting activity when we speak. Neuroscientists from UC Berkeley, UCSF and Johns Hopkins University tracked the electrical signals emitted from the brains of hospitalized epilepsy patients. Their findings, published today (Dec. 8, 2010) in the Journal of Neuroscience, offer new clues about how we hear ourselves above the noise of our surroundings and monitor what we say.
The Battle for Your Mind: Brainwashing Techniques Being Used On The Public By Dick Sutphen - StumbleUpon Authoritarian followers Mind Control Subliminals By Dick Sutphen Summary of Contents The Birth of Conversion The Three Brain Phases How Revivalist Preachers Work Voice Roll Technique Six Conversion Techniques 1. keeping agreements 2.physical and mental fatigue 3. increase the tension 4. Summary of Contents The Birth of Conversion/Brainwashing in Christian Revivalism in 1735. I'm Dick Sutphen and this tape is a studio-recorded, expanded version of a talk I delivered at the World Congress of Professional Hypnotists Convention in Las Vegas, Nevada. Although I've been interviewed about the subject on many local and regional radio and TV talk shows, large-scale mass communication appears to be blocked, since it could result in suspicion or investigation of the very media presenting it or the sponsors that support the media. Everything I will relate only exposes the surface of the problem. In talking about this subject, I am talking about my own business. The Birth of Conversion Charles J.
"Junk DNA" Allowed Us to Survive as a Species Highly infectious viral diseases -including the Plague, yellow fever, measles, smallpox and he Spanish Flu, which killed 50 million people at the end of the First World War, moving from one cell to the next, transforming each new host into a factory that makes even more virus. In this way, one infected cell soon becomes billion -that die when the host dies. Endogenous retroviruses, however, once they infect the DNA of a species they become part of that species: they reside within each of us, carrying a record that goes back millions of years. These viral fragments are fossils that reside within each of us, carrying a record that goes back millions of years. That is until Thierry Heidmann who runs the laboratory at the Institut Gustave Roussy, on the southern edge of Paris, brought one to life. After resurrecting the virus, the team placed it in human cells and found that their creation did indeed insert itself into the DNA of those cells. Posted by Casey Kazan.
Electromagnetic theories of consciousness The electromagnetic theories of consciousness propose that consciousness can be understood as an electromagnetic phenomenon. Overview[edit] Theorists differ in how they relate consciousness to electromagnetism. Electromagnetic field theories (or "EM field theories") of consciousness propose that consciousness results when a brain produces an electromagnetic field with specific characteristics. Susan Pockett[1] [2]and Johnjoe McFadden[3][4][5] have proposed EM field theories; William Uttal[6] has criticized McFadden's and other field theories. Some electromagnetic theories are also quantum mind theories of consciousness; examples include quantum brain dynamics (QBD) approaches of Mari Jibu and Kunio Yasue[7] and of Giuseppe Vitiello.[8] In general, however, quantum mind theories other than these QBD approaches do not treat consciousness as an electromagnetic phenomenon. Also related are E. Cemi theory[edit] McFadden thinks that the EM field could influence the brain in a number of ways.
People Are Awesome: The Coffee Shop Where Everyone Pays for Everyone Else's Drinks - News The main conceit of the 2000 Kevin Spacey film Pay It Forward is that if one person does a kindness for three strangers, and those three people each do kindnesses for three strangers, and so on, one person can change the world. Rarely do we see this acted out in the real world the way it was cinematically—one scene finds a man giving away his brand-new Jaguar to a guy having car troubles—but on a smaller scale, these sorts of random niceties happen far more often than you might think. Today, it's selflessness at a small coffee house in Bluffton, South Carolina. It all started two years ago at Corner Perk, a small, locally owned coffee shop, when a customer paid her bill and left $100 extra, saying she wanted to pay for everyone who ordered after her until the money ran out. The staff fulfilled her request, and the woman, who wishes to remain anonymous, has returned to leave other large donations every two to three months. "People will come in and say, 'What do you mean?
The Spooky World Of Quantum Biology | h+ Magazine Michael Garfield The new science of quantum biology is teaching us about how the actual behavior of evolution is governed by disconcertingly spooky processes – time travel being one of them. Will quantum computation finally be realized by biomimicry, in organic systems? Evolution is the new (old) computation...and we're about to take the reins. One hundred and fifty years ago, paleontologist Thomas Henry Huxley (an autodidact and philosopher who coined the term “agnostic” and was known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his passionate defense of natural selection) asserted that humankind would eventually take the processes of evolution into our own hands. The premise is simple. Quantum computation, a science still in its infancy, promises swiftness and efficiency vastly superior to anything possible with conventional silicon chips. It’s a promising avenue for people with big plans for strong AI or virtual reality. What does this all mean?