© Thomas Pullin
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The World for People who Think
Science of the SpiritS
This applies directly to the on-going awakening and how to put our best foot forward in times like these. How best can we be used to effect change? What is the most productive and effective course of action in our personal lives?
With everything at stake at this crucial juncture in history these questions become profoundly important. And the answers just may surprise each of us.
What did it look like? How did it feel? Do your thoughts drift to the good times, or do they dwell on the bad times?
Our mothers were pivotal players in our development as children and they formed the very foundation of our emotional and psychological growth. To this very day our mothers continue to influence us both through our deeply ingrained perceptions of life and through our feelings towards ourselves and other people.
But although our mothers may have tried their very best to nurture us, our relationships with them may have been laced with undercurrents of shame, guilt and obligation. In fact, we may continue to carry unresolved grief, fear, disappointment and resentment towards our mothers long into our adult lives. This deep pain is usually the result of unhealed core wounds that are passed on from generation to generation.
Comment:
- Dr. Gabor Maté: "When the Body Says No: Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection"
- When the Body Says No: How Emotions Can Cause or Prevent Deadly Disease
- When the Body Says No: Caring for ourselves while caring for others - Dr. Gabor Maté
- How traumatic unconscious memories are stored in the brain and how to access them
- Journaling Benefits Trauma
- Writing to Heal
The basic concept of an "average" implies that 50% of people will be below average, and 50% of people will be above average. However, when you ask people if they're below or above average when it comes to any particular skill (e.g., driving or singing in tune), far more people will rate themselves as above average than the 50% that would be expected.
Likewise, even when we know about certain cognitive biases, we often think of ourselves as being immune to those biases. We think "Other people might fall into that cognitive trap, but I'm too smart for that."
If you're looking to optimize your thinking, it can be worthwhile to look at which cognitive biases you see yourself as being immune to.
Comment: While we like to think we're rational human beings, we are actually prone to hundreds of proven biases that cause us to think and act irrationally:
- 58 Cognitive biases that screw up everything we do
- Understanding the cognitive biases that make us irrational
- Confirmation bias or why being wrong feels so right
- You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself
© Daily Record
"Yeah!" Another girl yells. "Back away!"
I look over in the far corner of the woods to see a small group of girls holding hands and forming what looks to be a wall in front of a teepee they just created. A little boy stands in front of them with a face that is beet red. He is shaking from head to toe.
"I will NOT!" he yells back. "You have to let me play! That is the rules!" He gets dangerously close to them.
"People's feelings about getting older influence their sensory and cognitive functions," said Alison Chasteen, professor in U of T's Department of Psychology and lead author of the study published in Psychology and Aging. "Those feelings are often rooted in stereotypes about getting older and comments made by those around them that their hearing and memory are failing. So, we need to take a deeper and broader approach to understanding the factors that influence their daily lives."
In the study, the researchers examined three variables -- views on aging, self-perceptions of one's abilities to hear and remember, and one's actual performance of both functions -- to uncover connections between them. It marks the first time all three factors were studied together using the same group of subjects.
© Unknown
Mind experts say various scientific studies conducted in the fields of psychology and neuroscience could explain why psychopaths have a tendency to be attracted and convinced by ISIS' propaganda and ultimately recruited by the terrorist group.
First, what is a psychopath? This is an individual suffering from a personality disorder that makes them antisocial, unstable and aggressive, causing the person to exhibit violent social behaviour, the experts say.
Comment: Understanding psychopathy is essential for understanding why the world is the way it is. See also: Masters of Manipulation: Psychopaths rule the world:
As anyone can readily see from the preceding prototype description of the psychopath, the high powered arena of politics, the dog-eat-dog corporate world and the strong arm tactics of the military domain are all ideal and ripe fields of endeavor for those imbued with psychopathic traits.
A study out of Great Britain last year using a psychopathic survey to assess the presence of psychopathic traits within the national workforce showed that CEO's, politicians, media honchos, lawyers, surgeons, military generals, police officers and the clergy all scored highest. Generally any line of work characterized by a hierarchical infrastructure that places those in positions of power ruling over others with relative impunity proves to be the most fertile ground attracting those with a psychopathic personality.
Such punishment may seem cruel, but it is not all that unusual. It's an extreme example of the classic "time-out" — one of the more prevalent, and pernicious, notions advocated by parenting experts.
Not long ago, the mother of a young girl with attention-deficit disorder wrote to me saying that, when her daughter was 3, psychologists advised a similar time-out to discourage her temper tantrums. Lock her in a closet, they suggested, "where she couldn't hurt herself."
Ask the average school leaver who they are at the core of their being and they'll likely say they haven't the faintest clue. Heck, ask me eight years ago when I was in my final year of high school and I'd have shrugged my shoulders too. I, like many others I've spoken to, didn't find myself until after I'd run the school gauntlet. Why is it that so many kids go through over a decade of 'education', yet come out the other end without a sense of who they truly are? Surely, the education system hasn't done its job. Or, perhaps, the education system was never geared at helping children learn who they are. If that is the case, as I daresay it is, what a tragedy...
But it doesn't have to be this way.
Comment: Education and the death of creativity
In short, we've been educated to become good workers, rather than creative thinkers. We teach children to be part of the system governing our society- uniformed, respectful of authority, scared of making mistakes. "If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original," Robinson points out. "Kids aren't afraid to make mistakes. If they don't know, they'll take a chance. But by the time they become adults most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. We run our companies this way. And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make."
Both impulsiveness and compulsiveness are often just two sides of the same coin. Compulsivity differs from impulsivity in that a particular action is repeated over and over. Psychologist Ainslie argues that rigid (or compulsive) behaviors arise as side effects of successful attempts to alleviate the weakness of the will.
Compulsive people are apt to get just as little long-range pleasure as impulsive ones. Here is how:
1. A defense mechanism
Rigid behavior is a defense mechanism in the effort to maintain a strong, consistent, positively valued sense of self. People who are strongly preoccupied with being in control may be struggling against more powerful temptations toward self-indulgence than most of us face.
Comment: Writing by hand benefits the brain: The lowdown on longhand