Science of the SpiritS


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Certain childhood behaviors can predict occupational success and earnings 50 years later

Jeremy Dean
PsyBlog
Tue, 06 Mar 2018 00:00 UTC
child intelligence, child behavior occupational success
Certain behaviors at crucial periods could have long-term consequences for a person’s life.
The behaviours were linked to adult occupational success and earning more 50 years later.

Being interested in school, being a responsible student and having good reading and writing skills all predict people's occupational success decades later, new research finds.

Even 50 years after someone had left high school, these factors still predicted if people had a more prestigious job or not.

Being a good student also predicted how much money people earned 50 years later.

Comment: According to Paul Trough who wrote, How Children Succeed, evidence has shown that character skills, such as persistence, curiosity conscientiousness, grit and optimism are at least as important as IQ as predictors of success:

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Family

You can never change your life through willpower - connection is what actually works

Benjamin P. Hardy
Medium
Tue, 06 Mar 2018 01:35 UTC
inspirational will power
© Justin Luebke/Unsplash
The opposite of addiction is connection.

Last week, I did one of the hardest workouts of my life with one of my friends. We were getting pushed by a very good trainer. And we were pushing each other.

I've never felt my legs burn like they did. I barely walked out of the gym. It was 30 minutes of pain followed by several hours of psychological ecstacy and insight.

While driving back to my friend's house, he said, "There's no way I could've done a workout like that by myself."

The Problem of Willpower

When you think of the word, "Willpower," do you think of "individual" or "together"?

Willpower is a solo-battle.

Willpower is all about the individual.

Willpower is trying to go it alone. Willpower is an attempt to win a silent battle. It's the opposite of vulnerability. It's the opposite of connection.
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Blackbox

You don't know yourself nearly as well as you think you do

Adam Grant
The Atlantic
Thu, 01 Mar 2018 00:01 UTC
2008 Republican National Convention
© Damir Sagolj / ReutersDelegates at the 2008 Republican National Convention are reflected in a decorative mirror.
When Donald Trump tweeted that he was a "very stable genius," he was accused of lacking self-awareness by journalists and comedians. But the truth is that no one has perfect self-awareness - you probably believe more than a few things about yourself that are false.

Whether it's in trying to land a job or impress a date, people spend a staggering amount of time making claims about themselves. It makes sense: You're the only person on Earth who has direct knowledge of every thought, feeling, and experience you've ever had. Who could possibly know you better than you? But your backstage access to your own mind sometimes makes you the last person on Earth others should trust about it. Think of it like owning a car: Just because you've driven it for years doesn't mean you can pinpoint when and why the engine broke down.

Sixteen rigorous studies of thousands of people at work have shown that people's coworkers are better than they are at recognizing how their personality will affect their job performance. As a social scientist, if I want to get a read on your personality, I could ask you to fill out a survey on how stable, dependable, friendly, outgoing, and curious you are. But I would be much better off asking your coworkers to rate you on those same traits: They're often more than twice as accurate. They can see things that you can't or won't - and these studies reveal that whatever you know about yourself that your coworkers don't is basically irrelevant to your job performance.

Comment: See also:

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Bulb

Liberty without responsibility is meaningless

Tyler Brandt
Foundation for Economic Freedom
Tue, 06 Mar 2018 12:06 UTC
Liberty and responsibility are inseparable.
man pushing boulder up a hill
What does a free society look like to you?

Is it an anarcho-capitalist utopia where individuals are free to shoot fully-automatic AK-47s at their 1040 EZs in their private marijuana fields? Is it a harmonious society free from bureaucratic central planning, where people freely trade and engage in commerce? Is it your own apartment, with nobody yelling at you to do the dishes?

What components are necessary to exist in a free society? Is it trust, independence, toleration, or peace? Is it the rule of law and the triumph of negative rights? Is it the absence of coercion?

It's a fun thought experiment, but I would ask you to add one thing to your vision. A free society is impossible without a healthy dose of responsibility.

I know I sound like your dad, but just hear me out, okay?
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Attention

Danger! Stressful situations puts you at greater risk of missing threats and warning signs

Terra Marquette
Study Finds
Mon, 05 Mar 2018 00:00 UTC
Stress
When people are under stress, they pick up on every danger, both real and imagined, right? Wrong.
When people are under stress, they pick up on every danger, both real and imagined, right? Wrong. According to research from New York University, people have less flexibility to adjust to changing threats when they are preoccupied with a stressful situation.

"Stress does not always increase perceptions of danger in the environment, as is often assumed," says Candace Raio, the study's lead author, in a release.

Researchers say that our ability to anticipate threats around us is necessary to survival, but it is just as vital to be able to adjust our responses when new threats come into our environment -whether that is an out-of-control cyclist or a stranger following us to our car.

The authors carried out Pavlovian-type experiments to test threat responses to changing threats. Participants were asked to view certain images on a computer screen. They felt a mild electric wrist-shock while viewing some of the images ("threat cue"), but no shock with other images ("safe cue").

Comment: See also: Everybody is exhausted and it's not getting better

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Bulb

Telling yourself the truth is doing the hard work up front

Lindsey Antin, MA, MFT
Good Therapy
Mon, 05 Mar 2018 12:32 UTC
Sad and lonely woman looking at her reflection in the mirror
I've never lied to my kids. Sure, I've omitted some details and spared them information they aren't able to understand at their young ages. And no, this doesn't make me a better parent than anyone else-in fact, I'm sure my kids could have benefited at times from some good, old-fashioned scare tactics. But telling the truth-to others, but most importantly to yourself-is the fastest way to the life you want, and a crucial step in successful therapy.

Parenting can be exhausting, and telling some lies can make life seem so much easier in the short term. But when you start telling the truth, you do the hard work up front and spare yourself even harder moments in the future. For example, when you tell an unwelcome truth to children, it might result in a screaming fit or (often worse) having to bear their crushed expressions. But it's way easier than all the little hedges and adjustments you will likely have to make later. Not only do you teach them the valuable lesson of coping with disappointment or anger, they learn to trust you, and they witness strength in the face of reality. The reality is life lets us down sometimes and kids scream and cry and sometimes parents are the bad guys. Try to get comfortable early on with the simple truth that one of the roles of a parent is to be the disappointer; you will save yourself the long-term problem of raising a child who looks to you to smooth everything out for them.
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Blue Planet

Pale Blue Dot in the Cosmos


Design Luck
Sun, 04 Mar 2018 00:00 UTC
When the Voyager 1 probe was 3.7 billion miles from Earth, Carl Sagan made a request.

He asked NASA to turn it around to snap a quick photograph. The result was a faint image of Earth surrounded by the vastness of space. The late astronomer would then use this picture to share his own reflections on what it meant and why it was important for us to capture.
Planet Earth from 3.7 billion miles
© Unknown
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Comment: Who isn't amazed by the beauty and vastness of the Cosmos? Here is another view of our planet's place in Cosmos.
Where are we in the universe? Most detailed map yet



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Bulb

Scientific shamans, mutant mystics and God as a probability engine with Dr. Bruce Damer

Red Pill Junkie
Daily Grail
Wed, 21 Feb 2018 00:01 UTC
Dr. Bruce Damer
If you asked people on the street "who do you think is going to help propel humanity out into outer space?" chances are many of them would say Elon Musk. Maybe someone would mention Jeff Bezos, or even Robert Bigelow; maybe one of them would even claim the true bringer of the new Space Age will be Tom DeLonge and his To The Stars team - in which case you should probably buy that dude a coffee, because chances are he's at least $200 poorer...

But if I were to say that perhaps the one name which will be recorded in History books as being heavily responsible for lifting humanity out of our Earthly cradle is Bruce Damer, most people would likely react the same way.

"...Bruce Who??"
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Music

Why the sound of a voice is multisensory

Pavlo Shopin
Aeon
Wed, 15 Nov 2017 17:37 UTC
Sarah Vaughan
© WikipediaSarah Vaughan by William P Gottlieb.
To make sense of human voices, we rely on senses beyond hearing. The songs of Taylor Swift can be sweet and soft. Lady Gaga's singing feels dark. Johnny Cash's voice was low and rough. That's because voice is not just sound: it can be seen and heard, but also tasted and touched. The sound we hear in voice creates 'multisensory images' - drawing in perceptions from many senses, not just one.

The phenomenon of multisensory perception can help us to understand why we assign metaphorical properties of softness, roughness or depth to voice. Think of a politician whose voice is flat. Flatness is a multisensory concept because it is both tactile and visual. We can recognise flat surfaces by either touching or seeing them. These sensory impressions inform us about the acoustic characteristics of voice, implying that it does not have variation in tone. Notably, flatness can also convey lack of sympathy and emotion on the part of the speaker.
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Nebula

Taoist master Mantak Chia explains how negative chi affects us

Dylan Charles
Waking Times
Wed, 21 Feb 2018 15:37 UTC
Chi energy
The chi is the primordial life force.
They say that energy goes where attention flows. And in today's insane media universe, our attention is everywhere. Which means our energy is everywhere, and if it's everywhere, it's not where we need it most, contributing to our personal health and wellness.

This is especially true in times of crisis, when tragic events flood society-at-large with intense fear, anxiety, and worry, causing extreme stress. When human beings are operating in these states, our spiritual energy is drained, and physical and psychological health rapidly deteriorate.

There is more to this than just a feeling, it's the science of Chi, your life force energy. Taoist master and author of numerous books on personal energy development, Mantak Chia explains, Conserving, protecting and strengthening your chi is challenging today with so many distractions and with so many negative emotions in motion around us. Remarking in an article on Taoist Cosmic healing, Chia explains how negative chi affects us.
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