Science of the SpiritS


Light Saber

It's time to develop a self-reliant mentality and stop being a self-entitled millennial

Brett & Kate McKay
The Art of Manliness
Mon, 28 May 2018 08:09 UTC
reliance 1
The first thing we're going to cover in this series on 31 bits of know-how you should learn before heading out on your own, is really more of a mind-set than a skill-set, but it's a crucial building block that will lay the foundation for the rest of the "harder," more practical skills we'll be covering throughout the month.

It's developing a self-reliant mentality.

Part of being a grown man is taking care of yourself and making your own decisions. It isn't until you're on your own that you realize how much you relied on adults to make your life run smoothly. From doing your laundry to calling the doctor when you're sick, your parents likely did a lot of things for you.

While you might not be completely self-sufficient right when you move out (many young people rely on their parents for varying degrees of financial support well into their twenties), you can certainly be self-reliant in a number of areas in your life. For example, you shouldn't need your mom to remind you about important appointments or your dad to bug you about taking your car in to get its routine maintenance. You should be able to remember to do those things yourself. A man with a self-reliant mentality doesn't wait around for someone else to take care of things that need to be taken care of. If he encounters a problem, he takes the initiative and tries to figure out how to resolve it himself.

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Binoculars

We live in uncertain times: How to navigate with poise

Dr. Travis Bradberry
LinkedIn
Tue, 14 Aug 2018 00:00 UTC
dealing with uncertainty
Our brains are hardwired to make much of modern life difficult. This is especially true when it comes to dealing with uncertainty. On the bright side, if you know the right tricks, you can override your brain's irrational tendencies and handle uncertainty with poise.

Our brains give us fits when facing uncertainty because they're wired to react to it with fear. In a recent study, a Caltech neuroeconomist imaged subjects' brains as they were forced to make increasingly uncertain bets-the same kind of bets we're forced to make on a regular basis in business.

The less information the subjects had to go on, the more irrational and erratic their decisions became. You might think the opposite would be true-the less information we have, the more careful and rational we are in evaluating the validity of that information. Not so. As the uncertainty of the scenarios increased, the subjects' brains shifted control over to the limbic system, the place where emotions, such as anxiety and fear, are generated.
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Heart - Black

The dark core of personality measured

Scott Barry Kaufman
Scientific American
Sat, 28 Jul 2018 15:42 UTC
evil eye psychopath
© Getty Images
What's your dark core score?

Over 100 years ago, Charles Spearman made two monumental discoveries about human intelligence. First, a general factor of intelligence (g) exists: people who score high on one test of intelligence also tend to score high on other tests of intelligence. Second, Spearman found that the g-factor conforms to the principle of the "indifference of the indicator": It doesn't matter what test of intelligence you administer; as long as the intelligence test is sufficiently cognitively complex and has enough items, you can reliably and validly measure a person's general cognitive ability.

Fast forward to 2018, and a hot-off-the-press paper suggests that the very same principle may not only apply to human cognitive abilities, but also to human malevolence. New research conducted by a team from Germany and Denmark suggest that a General Dark Factor of Personality (D-factor) exists among the human population, and that this factor conforms to the principle of indifference of the indicator. This is big news, so let's take a look.

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Red Pill

Society is made of narratives - Realizing this is one step to awakening from The Matrix

Caitlin Johnstone
Medium
Wed, 22 Aug 2018 01:46 UTC
matrix
In the movie The Matrix, humans are imprisoned in a virtual world by a powerful artificial intelligence system in a dystopian future. What they take to be reality is actually a computer program that has been jacked into their brains to keep them in a comatose state. They live their whole lives in that virtual simulation, without any way of knowing that what they appear to be experiencing with their senses is actually made of AI-generated code.

Life in our current society is very much the same. The difference is that instead of AI, it's psychopathic oligarchs who are keeping us asleep in the Matrix. And instead of code, it's narrative.
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Alarm Clock

Slowness rage: How to reset your internal timer and regain patience

Chelsea Wald
Prevent Disease
Tue, 21 Aug 2018 19:52 UTC
crowds manhattan
Slowness rage is not confined to the sidewalk, of course. Slow drivers, slow Internet, slow grocery lines--they all drive us crazy. You too can measure yourself on the "Pedestrian Aggressiveness Syndrome Scale," a tool developed by University of Hawaii psychologist Leon James. While walking in a crowd, do you find yourself "acting in a hostile manner (staring, presenting a mean face, moving closer or faster than expected)" and "enjoying thoughts of violence?"

Slow things drive us crazy because the fast pace of society has warped our sense of timing. Things that our great-great-grandparents would have found miraculously efficient now drive us around the bend. Patience is a virtue that's been vanquished in the Twitter age.

Once upon a time, cognitive scientists tell us, patience and impatience had an evolutionary purpose. They constituted a yin and yang balance, a finely tuned internal timer that tells when we've waited too long for something and should move on. When that timer went buzz, it was time to stop foraging at an unproductive patch or abandon a failing hunt.

"Why are we impatient? It's a heritage from our evolution," says Marc Wittmann, a psychologist at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany. Impatience made sure we didn't die from spending too long on a single unrewarding activity. It gave us the impulse to act.
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People 2

Top predictor of divorce: Arguing about money


PsyBlog
Sun, 19 Aug 2018 15:19 UTC
couple divorce argument angry
Arguments about money are the top predictor of divorce, research finds. While arguing about money, couples use the harshest language and the arguments are also more intense and last longer. Money arguments also take longer than any other to recover from. Naturally, then, the more arguments about money couples have, the lower their satisfaction with the relationship.

Dr Sonya Britt-Lutter, study co-author, said:
"Arguments about money is by far the top predictor of divorce. It's not children, in-laws or anything else. It's money - for both men and women."
The conclusions come from a nationally representative survey of over 4,500 couples.

Dr Britt-Lutter explained the results:
"In the study, we controlled for income, debt and net worth. Results revealed it didn't matter how much you made or how much you were worth. Arguments about money are the top predictor for divorce because it happens at all levels."
The researchers found that arguments from the very start of the relationship about money were a particularly bad sign.
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Cloud Grey

Mess to Meaning: From breakdown to breakthrough

Kelly Brogan, MD
kellybroganmd.com
Sun, 19 Aug 2018 12:02 UTC
meaning

The stumble from grace

You were feeling great! You decided to taper your antidepressant medication, did the Reset, reclaimed your body, took a red line marker to many of your former perspectives and beliefs on health, and you were loving all of the spiritual tropes parading across your Instagram feed, feeling super proud of the fact that you were at half your dose of Pristiq.

Then something shifted.

You binged on cookies, lost one, then two, then 8 days of meditation, and you had a potentially relationship-terminating "discussion" with your brother. Now you're what you used to call depressed. Again. You tell yourself you were an imposter to think you could ever break free. You question all of your gains. You question your ability to get off of meds. And you question who you are. I don't even know who I am or what I'm doing here! You sob. And you withdraw. You've had to let go of the rope, and now it's whipping around in front of you behind a boat that's getting smaller and smaller in the distance.
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Books

Simple math and the right tools: How to read 200 books a year and change your life

Charles Chu
The Polymath Project
Fri, 06 Jan 2017 00:00 UTC
Reading books
Somebody once asked Warren Buffett about his secret to success. Buffett pointed to a stack of books and said,
"Read 500 pages like this every day. That's how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will..."
When I first found this quote of Buffett's two years ago, something was wrong.

It was December 2014. I'd found my dream job. Some days, I would be there, sitting at my dream job, and I would think. My god what if I'm still here in 40 years? I don't want to die like this...

Something wasn't right. I'd followed the prescription. Good grades. Leadership. Recommendations. College. Dream Job. I was a winner. I'd finished the race. Here I was in the land of dreams. But something was terribly, terribly wrong.

Every day, from my dream job desk, I looked out into their eyes. Empty, empty eyes.

There were no answers.

In January of 2015, I found Buffett's quote. I decided to read. I was going to read and read and read and never stop until I got some damn answers.

I didn't quite make 500 pages a day, but, in these last 2 years, I've read over 400 books cover to cover. That decision to start reading was one of the most important decisions in my life.

Books gave me the courage to travel. Books gave me the conviction to quit my job. Books gave me role models and heroes and meaning in a world where I had none.

I want to say reading 200 books a year is an amazing thing. But the truth is, it's not. Anybody can do it.

All it takes is some simple math and the right tools

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Brain

Neuroplasticity: The good & the bad - what happens to someone's brain from complaining every day?


runwonder.com
Tue, 31 Jul 2018 13:38 UTC
brain
"Thought changes structure ... I saw people rewire their brains with their thoughts, to cure previously incurable obsessions and trauma." ~ Norman Doidge, Canadian-born psychiatrist and author of The Brain That Changes Itself

The human brain is remarkably malleable. It can be shaped very much like a ball of Play-Doh, albeit with a bit more time and effort.

Within the last 20 years, thanks to rapid development in the spheres of brain imaging and neuroscience, we can now say for certain that the brain is capable of re-engineering - and that we are the engineers.
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Light Saber

How to take a stand against manipulation

Caitlin Johnstone
Medium
Fri, 17 Aug 2018 07:18 UTC
I've been busy working through some of my own stuff lately, while marveling at how closely my personal journey has been mirrored in the larger world. I wrote out the following as a personal exercise while meditating on all the similarities between abusive personal relationships with manipulators and our relationship as a species with the sociopathic plutocrats who rule us. I got a lot out of writing it, and it came out relatively readable, so I figured I'd publish it as-is in case anyone else finds it useful too. Here ya go!

media manipulation disinformation propaganda
© Garzon
Humans are hackable. Ask any conman. Our desire to think we have control over our lives often hides this from ourselves, but most of us are highly suggestible and hypnotizable. If you think you're not, you're in more danger of being hacked than someone who has humbled themselves enough to see how this works in them.

There's no need to be ashamed of being conned. Realizing that you've been, or are being, conned will naturally bring up feelings of embarrassment, but it's never your fault that someone's taken you for a ride. Get clear: conning someone is the crime; being conned is being a victim of that crime. That's how the law sees it in fraud cases. Manipulators would love you to think that it's your fault for allowing yourself to be manipulated, but that's just another manipulation isn't it?

Manipulators use one of our most astounding, useful, and beautiful human characteristics when they con us - empathy. Our innately trusting nature is the reason why we've been able to collaborate on large scales to create and innovate in extraordinary ways unseen anywhere else in the animal kingdom. Because we learn by modeling, and we are shaped by the group we inhabit and our urge to create harmony will make life viscerally uncomfortable until we are back in alignment with our tribe. We are the peacemakers; we seek alignment, which is how we are paced by manipulators into aligning with their sick agendas. How gross is it then that our ability to empathize and relate to each other is one manipulators use to control us?

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