There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and that goes for your brain, too. Every time you amass the willpower to do anything, it has mental costs. (…)
Starting an activity seems to take a larger of willpower and other resources than keeping going with it. Required activation energy can be adjusted over time – making something into a routine lowers the activation energy to do it. (…)
This is a major hurdle for a lot of people in a lot of disciplines – just getting started.
Negotiations trigger anxiety. Across four studies, we demonstrate that anxiety is harmful to negotiator performance.
Compared to negotiators experiencing neutral feelings, negotiators who feel anxious expect lower outcomes, make lower first offers, respond more quickly to offers, exit bargaining situations earlier, and ultimately obtain worse outcomes.
Let’s consider the butterfly. One of the most taxing movements in sports, the butterfly requires greater energy than bicycling at 14 miles per hour, running a 10-minute mile, playing competitive basketball or carrying furniture upstairs. It burns more calories, demands larger doses of oxygen and elicits more fatigue than those other activities, meaning that over time it should increase a swimmer’s endurance and contribute to weight control.
So is the butterfly the best single exercise that there is? Well, no. The butterfly “would probably get my vote for the worst” exercise, said Greg Whyte, a professor of sport and exercise science. (…)
Ask a dozen physiologists which exercise is best, and you’ll get a dozen wildly divergent replies. (…)
Sticking with an exercise is key, even if you don’t spend a lot of time working out. The majority of the mortality-related benefits from exercising are due to the first 30 minutes of exercise. A recent meta-analysis of studies about exercise and mortality showed that, in general, a sedentary person’s risk of dying prematurely from any cause plummeted by nearly 20 percent if he or she began brisk walking (or the equivalent) for 30 minutes five times a week. If he or she tripled that amount, for instance, to 90 minutes of exercise four or five times a week, his or her risk of premature death dropped by only another 4 percent. So the one indisputable aspect of the single best exercise is that it be sustainable. From there, though, the debate grows heated.
…study by Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire. Wiseman surveyed a number of people and, through a series of questionnaires and interviews, determined which of them considered themselves lucky—or unlucky. He then performed an intriguing experiment: He gave both the “lucky” and the “unlucky” people a newspaper and asked them to look through it and tell him how many photographs were inside. He found that on average the unlucky people took two minutes to count all the photographs, whereas the lucky ones determined the number in a few seconds.
How could the “lucky” people do this? Because they found a message on the second page that read, “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” So why didn’t the unlucky people see it? Because they were so intent on counting all the photographs that they missed the message.
Wiseman noted, “Unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner, and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through the newspaper determined to find certain job advertisements and, as a result, miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there, rather than just what they are looking for.”
People who pitch project ideas to venture capitalists often focus on convincing them of #1, idea quality, not realizing that if you convince them of that but not #2, your team quality, they will just steal your idea and give it to another better team.
Usually they hear from several teams pitching pretty similar concepts, so they are judging mainly on team quality.
Knowing this, sophisticated innovators tend to neglect idea quality, and focus on team quality.
A new exciting paper in the forthcoming Journal of Consumer Psychology makes the case that money should buy us happiness, but most people aren’t spending it right. On the edge of psychology and economics, Profs. Daniel Gilbert, Elizabeth Dunn and Timothy Wilson lay out eight principles of spending efficiently, including:
1) Buy more experiences and fewer objects.
2) Don’t worry about insurance.
3) The frequency of happy events matters more than their intensity.
By creating a distinctive username—and reusing it on multiple websites—you may be giving online marketers and scammers a simple way to track you. Four researchers from the French National Institute of Computer Science (INRIA) studied over 10 million usernames—collected from public Google profiles, eBay accounts, and several other sources. They found that about half of the usernames used on one site could be linked to another online profile, potentially allowing marketers and scammers to build a more complex picture of the users.
The principle of Feng shui - to arrange rooms and buildings in ways that are pleasing and health-giving - has popular appeal. Unfortunately, Feng shui’s scientific credentials are lacking, being based as it is on the ancient Chinese concept of Ch’i or life-force. The good news is that psychologically informed, evidence-based design is on the increase. Consider this new study by Sibel Dazhir and Marilyn Read, which has compared the effects of curvilinear (rounded) and rectilinear (straight-edged) furniture on people’s emotions. (…)
The two room versions full of curvilinear furniture provoked significantly higher pleasure and approach ratings from the students. (…) It’s worth considering whether rectilinear-themed rooms may have their own benefits for purposes other than relaxing and socializing.
If you’re looking for the latest in home exercise equipment, you may want to consider a dog.
Several studies now show that dogs can be powerful motivators to get people moving. Not only are dog owners more likely to take regular walks, but new research shows that dog walkers are more active over all than people who don’t have dogs.
One study even found that older people are more likely to take regular walks if the walking companion is canine rather than human.
“Worrying is always bad for your health.” Wrong. A study lasting for more than 80 years debunks conventional wisdom.
(…)
Philip was one of 1,500 bright children who were tracked for more than 80 years in a massive longitudinal study begun in 1921 by psychologist Lewis Terman. Terman and his successors—he died before many of the children—collected millions of details about these subjects, including whether they were breast-fed, how much they exercised, what their marriages were like, how satisfying their sex lives were, how satisfying their jobs were. (…)
Optimistic people have a tendency to ignore details, meaning they don’t follow doctor’s orders correctly or lead themselves into unhealthy situations or addictions. It was the conscientious people—careful, sometimes even neurotic, but not catastrophizing—who lived longer, write Friedman and Martin, researchers at the University of California, Riverside. And, their studies show, some of what we think will benefit our children may actually rob them of years later in life. In the Terman study, precocious, active children who were sent to school a year early, as Philip was, tended to have emotional problems that led to unhealthy behaviors and shortened life span.
Dazzle camouflage, also known as Razzle Dazzle or Dazzle painting, was a camouflage paint scheme used on ships, extensively during World War I and to a lesser extent in World War II. Credited to artist Norman Wilkinson, it consisted of a complex pattern of geometric shapes in contrasting colours, interrupting and intersecting each other.
Face-detection software is everywhere. Defeat it with some artfully-applied, avant-garde face makeup called CV Dazzle.
CV Dazzle is named after the ingenious warship-camouflage designs deployed during World War I. Rather than actually hiding military vessels, the bold, jagged paint jobs made it difficult for naval rangefinders to discern details about the ship’s size, heading, armament, and so forth. Or at least, that was the idea — unlike Harvey’s digital version, the original Dazzle’s effectiveness was never proven. Of course, CV Dazzle benefits from the fact that face-detection software is much stupider than WWI seamen: you only have to apply a few strokes of face-paint to confuse it, rather than coat your whole kisser.
What can waiters, the TV series ‘Lost’ and the novelist Charles Dickens teach us about avoiding procrastination?
One of the simplest methods for beating procrastination in almost any task was inspired by busy waiters.
It’s called the Zeigarnik effect after a Russian psychologist, Bluma Zeigarnik, who noticed an odd thing while sitting in a restaurant in Vienna. The waiters seemed only to remember orders which were in the process of being served. When completed, the orders evaporated from their memory.
Zeigarnik went back to the lab to test out a theory about what was going on. She asked participants to do twenty or so simple little tasks in the lab, like solving puzzles and stringing beads (Zeigarnik, 1927). Except some of the time they were interrupted half way through the task. Afterwards she asked them which activities they remembered doing. People were about twice as likely to remember the tasks during which they’d been interrupted than those they completed.
What does this have to do with procrastination? (…)
When people manage to start something they’re more inclined to finish it. Procrastination bites worst when we’re faced with a large task that we’re trying to avoid starting. It might be because we don’t know how to start or even where to start.
What the Zeigarnik effect teaches is that one weapon for beating procrastination is starting somewhere…anywhere.
Don’t start with the hardest bit, try something easy first.
We perceive our own bodies in many different ways. We can look at our bodies, feel touch on our bodies, and also feel our body from within, as when we experience our hearts racing or butterflies in our stomachs. One way to check how good people are at perceiving their body from within is to ask them to count their heartbeats over a few seconds, but without taking their own pulse. Neuroscientists believe that the more accurate people are at this task, the better their perception of internal bodily states is. Can our ability to detect our own heartbeat tell us something about our body-image, that is, the conscious and mainly visual representation of how our body looks like?
To answer this question, we, first, measured how good people are at feeling their body from within, using the heartbeat counting task. We then measured how good people are at perceiving their own body-image from the outside, by using a procedure that tricks them into feeling that a fake, rubber hand is their own hand.
The less accurate people were in monitoring their heartbeat, the more they were influenced by the illusion. (…)
It seems that a stable perception of the body from the outside, what is known as “body image”, is partly based on our ability to accurately perceive our body from within, such as our heartbeat.
{ Left: The over orientation. Right: The under orientation. | In surveys of American consumers and of bath and kitchen specialists, 60–70% of respondents prefer over. | Toilet paper orientation | Wikipedia }
Ecodefense is a historical artifact. It be argued that it is the most controversial environmental book ever published; more importantly, though, it is a key exhibit in the legal history of freedom of the press in the United States.
Several years ago when Australia banned the importation and sale of Ecodefense, it was not possible for the United States to follow suit-because of the First Amendment. Instead, the United States government spent several million dollars, employed a small army of FBI agents, and entrapped a number of citizens in 1987-89 in an effort to suppress publication and distribution of Ecodefense.
We at Abbzug Press believe that the Bill of Rights is like a set of muscles-if they aren’t exercised, they atrophy. Therefore, it is our patriotic duty to defend the First Amendment to the United States Constitution and publish a new Third Edition of Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching.
Ross utilized the wet-on-wet oil painting technique, in which the painter continues adding paint on top of still wet paint rather than waiting a lengthy amount of time to allow each layer of paint to dry. Combining this method with the use of two inch and other types of brushes as well as painting knives allowed Ross to paint trees, water, clouds and mountains in a matter of seconds. Each painting would start with simple strokes that appeared to be nothing more than colored smudges. As he added more and more strokes, the blotches transformed into intricate landscapes.
Many regions of the brain literally shrink in size as adults grow older. The hippocampus, which is associated with memory and spatial tasks, is known to lose about 1-2% of its volume per year. As a result, memory eventually begins to suffer. But hippocampus shrinkage isn’t necessarily inevitable. Adults with higher physical fitness levels have been found to have larger hippocampi than less fit adults of the same age. Translation: Exercise now can prevent brain loss later in life. (…)
Aerobic exercise is the elixir of youth for hippocampi.
Over the December holidays, my husband went on a 10-day silent meditation retreat. Not my idea of fun, but he came back rejuvenated and energetic.
He said the experience was so transformational that he has committed to meditating for two hours a day, once in the morning and once in the evening, until the end of March. He’s running an experiment to determine whether and how meditation actually improves the quality of his life.
I’ll admit I’m a skeptic.
But now, scientists say that meditators like my husband may be benefiting from changes in their brains. The researchers report that those who meditated for about 30 minutes a day for eight weeks had measurable changes in gray-matter density in parts of the brain associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress. (…)
“The main idea is to use different objects to focus one’s attention, and it could be a focus on sensations of breathing, or emotions or thoughts, or observing any type of body sensations,” she said. “But it’s about bringing the mind back to the here and now, as opposed to letting the mind drift.”
