A number of recent books have lauded the connection between walking - just for its own sake - and thinking. But are people losing their love of the purposeless walk?

Walking is a luxury in the West. Very few people, particularly in cities, are obliged to do much of it at all. Cars, bicycles, buses, trams, and trains all beckon.

Instead, walking for any distance is usually a planned leisure activity. Or a health aid. Something to help people lose weight. Or keep their fitness. But there's something else people get from choosing to walk. A place to think.

Wordsworth was a walker. His work is inextricably bound up with tramping in the Lake District. Drinking in the stark beauty. Getting lost in his thoughts.

Born in 1956, Paul Levy graduated with degrees in art and economics and has had a lifelong intense interest in the work of C. G. Jung. As a result of an intense personal trauma in 1981, he began a process of spiritual awakening that led him on a 'shamanic descent' and a quest to understand the fundamental nature of reality.

Paul is the author of: The Madness of George Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis and Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil

In his books Paul explores and explains that we 'disown' our innermost, drarkest thoughts and feelings and project them outwards onto others and the world, a process he compares to the Native American Indian concept of "wetiko". Paul has stated that "there is a contagious psychospiritual disease of the soul, a parasite of the mind, that is currently being acted out en masse on the world stage via a collective psychosis of titanic proportions. This mind-virus covertly operates through the unconscious blind spots in the human psyche, rendering people oblivious to their own madness and compelling them to act against their own best interests."

Running Time: 01:48:00

Download: MP3

You knew it was true. Now research proves it! The real motivation behind Rush, Sterling and defenses of awfulness

Let's start with what I said about Limbaugh simply being a good conservative when he rushed to Sterling's defense. That's not just a liberal canard. It's not just me trying to do to Limbaugh what Limbaugh does to liberals. It's what conservatives themselves have said repeatedly over the years. The defense of hierarchy is what conservatism is all about, as Corey Robin reminded us all with his recent book, The Reactionary Mind.

What's more, the differences between how liberals and conservatives think are reflected in a range of divergent cognitive processes, as summarized in a 2003 paper by John T. Jost and three co-authors, Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition that brought together findings drawn from 88 study samples in 12 countries:,

"The core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justification of inequality and is motivated by needs that vary situationally and dispositionally to manage uncertainty and threat," Jost and his co-authors wrote in the abstract. These are not merely American phenomena, nor is there any reason to think they're particularly modern.

While Jost's paper revealed a complicated array of different factors involved, two in particular have been shown to explain the lion's share of intergroup prejudice: right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO). John Dean's book Conservatives Without Conscience focused on the combined workings of these two factors. While there is some overlap between the two, RWA is more predominant among followers, who would probably make up the main bulk of Limbaugh's audience, while SDO is more prominent in folks like Sterling.

SDO represents a generalized tendency to support groups' dominance, whether the groups are defined biologically (men over women, the old over the young) or culturally (race, ethnicity, religion, etc.).

Merely observing another person in a stressful situation - even on television - can be enough to make our bodies release the stress hormone cortisol, causing us to be stressed ourselves, a team of German scientists has found.

The study was conducted by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig and Technische Universitat in Dresden, Germany.

Stressful situations were observed through a one-way mirror, but in some cases, even looking at a stressed stranger on a video was enough to put some people on edge. The research notes that in a society where stress is everywhere, emphatic stress is a phenomenon that cannot be ignored.

One fantastic reminder of the varieties of consciousness is the phenomena of synesthesia: the cross-wiring of the brain's senses in a small proportion of the population.
Until recently, when experts explained that around 4% of people have the involuntary experience of, say, certain numbers evoking particular colours, they were met by disbelief.

Surely 'synesthetes' were making it up to feel special or perhaps unconsciously responding to the demands of the tests?

Now, of course, we know better: this cross-wiring of the brain's senses is real and it's experienced in all kinds of different ways.

Estimates place the number of varieties of synesthesia at between 50 and 150 but here are some of the most intriguing (that we know about).

As you read these, whether you're a synesthete or not, marvel at how different our experience of the world is at a very basic level.

Everyone periodically feels uncomfortable about falling short of a standard, but some of us exaggerate the risk and anxiously avoid situations where we have no guarantee of success. Tragically, many who fail to deal with their fear of failure accomplish less, and regret the loss.

If you fall into this group, can you turn things around?

Fear of Failure Test

Try this test: Answer true to any items that generally describe you, and false to any items that generally do not.

1. I'm afraid to fail. True False
2. I play it too safe. True False
3. I'm afraid of choking before a group. True False
4. I worry about making mistakes. True False
5. I'm afraid of disapproval. True False
6. I worry about looking incompetent. True False
7. I dread I won't do well enough. True False
8. I lack confidence in my abilities. True False
9. I feel anxious when uncertain. True False
10. Others will evaluate me negatively. True False

Answer true to one or more of the items, and you have isolated an area, or areas, that you can profitably work to change.

New study finds procrastination is warded off by considering tasks in concrete terms.

Although procrastination is usually thought of as something to be avoided, this hasn't always been the case. Surveying the history of procrastination Dr Piers Steel finds that before the industrial revolution procrastination might have been seen in neutral terms (Steel, 2007; PDF).

Nowadays, though, for those living in technically advanced societies, procrastination has become a 'modern malady': everything must be done now or, even better, three weeks ago. For good or evil there are now endless to-do lists to work through, appointments that must be kept and commitments that have to be fulfilled. Such is modern life.

Whatever the cause many people certainly view their procrastination as a problem. Psychologists have found that college students consider themselves champion procrastinators with almost half considering it problematic. Adults are not far behind with some 15-20% self-identifying as 'chronic procrastinators'. Meanwhile the rest of us are guaranteed to procrastinate from time to time. So, perhaps psychology can offer some hope in the ongoing fight against procrastination.

ma·nip·u·la·tive

[muh-nip-yuh-ley-tiv, -yuh-luh-tiv] adjective

1. influencing or attempting to influence the behavior or emotions of others for one's own purposes: a manipulative boss

You're reading this because you have reached an "enough already" point in your life. Or someone really manipulated you into doing something you didn't want to do or into not doing something you wanted to do and you became so infuriated with them and yourself that you reached a "never again" moment. Isn't that true?

Instead of going into why do they do that, let's just leave that as, because they can get away doing it with you. This article is about why you have continued to let them do it, why you reached your last straw with them and more importantly how you can put an end to it and never be manipulated again.

How well a person recovers from traumatic events may depend on in part on their self-esteem, according to researchers who examined the effects of a major earthquake on the survivors' brains.

The researchers had conducted brain scans of university students for a study before the Great East Japan Earthquake struck in 2011. After the earthquake, they repeated the scans on 37 of the same people, and tracked stress-induced changes in their brains in the following months.

"Most importantly, what these findings show, is that the brain is dynamic - that it's responding to things that are going on in our environment, or things that are part of our personality," said Rajita Sinha, professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine, who wasn't involved in the study.

In the brain scans taken immediately after the incident, the researchers found a decrease in the volume of two brain regions, the hippocampus and orbitofrontal cortex, compared with the scans taken before the incident.

One year later, the researchers repeated the scans and found that the hippocampus continued to shrink, and people's levels of depression and anxiety had not improved.

However, other changes in the brain had reversed, the researchers found: The volume of the orbitofrontal cortex had increased. Moreover, this increase was correlated with survivors' self-esteem scores soon after the earthquake, according to the study published today (April 29) in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

In a study of 14,000 U.S. children, 40 percent lack strong emotional bonds - what psychologists call "secure attachment" - with their parents that are crucial to success later in life, according to a new report. The researchers found that these children are more likely to face educational and behavioral problems.

In a report published by Sutton Trust, a London-based institute that has published more than 140 research papers on education and social mobility, researchers from Princeton University, Columbia University, the London School of Economics and Political Science and the University of Bristol found that infants under the age of three who do not form strong bonds with their mothers or fathers are more likely to be aggressive, defiant and hyperactive as adults. These bonds, or secure attachments, are formed through early parental care, such as picking up a child when he or she cries or holding and reassuring a child.

"When parents tune in to and respond to their children's needs and are a dependable source of comfort, those children learn how to manage their own feeling and behaviors," said Sophie Moullin, a joint doctoral candidate studying at Princeton's Department of Sociology and the Office of Population Research, which is based at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. "These secure attachments to their mothers and fathers provide these children with a base from which they can thrive."

Written by Moullin, Jane Waldfogel from Columbia University and the London School of Economics and Political Science and Elizabeth Washbrook from the University of Bristol, the report uses data collected by the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, a nationally representative U.S. study of 14,000 children born in 2001. The researchers also reviewed more than 100 academic studies.

Their analysis shows that about 60 percent of children develop strong attachments to their parents, which are formed through simple actions, such as holding a baby lovingly and responding to the baby's needs. Such actions support children's social and emotional development, which, in turn, strengthens their cognitive development, the researchers write. These children are more likely to be resilient to poverty, family instability, parental stress and depression. Additionally, if boys growing up in poverty have strong parental attachments, they are two and a half times less likely to display behavior problems at school.