On Habit

The Power of Habit and How to Rewire Our “Habit Loops”

by Maria Popova on (the great website) Brain Pickings

What Iraqi kebob vendors have to do with your New Year’s resolutions.

Extract:

“As a young man, Benjamin Franklin set out to improve himself by devising a chart-based log for tracking his progress against the virtues he identified as essential to good personhood. Each week, he would pick a virtue to cultivate, then put a black pencil mark in his calendar chart on any day he failed to uphold the virtue. This visual feedback on his progress encouraged him, and allowed him to move to a different virtue the following week, hoping that each week would leave him with a “habitude” for that particular virtue.”

On Personal Change

Courage: a product of practice rather than faith

The question of moral courage – and whether you can get better at it – has stayed with me ever since I was shot at by Israelis

By Giles Fraser (23/01/12), The Guardian, Comment is Free

Extracts:

“At least since Aristotle there has been an important strain of moral thought that has recognised human virtue not as some innate given, but rather as something that one can prepare for, and indeed get better at. (…)

‘Fake it till you make it.’ If you want to become a different sort of person, first act like you are, and the acting will eventually transform you. Pretend to be the person you want to be and you will end up becoming more like that person. This cuts right against the grain of familiar assumptions that moral change comes from within, that the most important thing is expressing who you really are – "To thine own self be true", as Polonius puts it in Hamlet. From this perspective, an honest confession of our own weakness – our lack of courage, for instance – becomes the only real expression of virtue. In other words, an emphasis on authenticity can easily become an alibi for a refusal of character development. (…)

The issue of being true to oneself offers so little to the task of becoming the person we would want to be. Change requires practice."

How Barbara Arrowsmith-Young rebuilt her own brain

She realised that part of her brain was not functioning properly so she devised a series of cognitive exercises to develop it. The results changed her life – and now she has helped thousands of children with learning disabilities

By Jon Henley (12/06/12), The Guardian

Extract:

“She read about the work of Mark Rosenzweig, an American researcher who found that laboratory rats given a rich and stimulating environment, with play wheels and toys, developed larger brains than those kept in a bare cage. Rosenzweig concluded that the brain continues developing, reshaping itself based on life experiences, rather than being fixed at birth: a concept known as neuroplasticity. Arrowsmith-Young decided that if rats could grow bigger and better brains, so could she.”

Self help: forget positive thinking, try positive action

The self-help industry is mired in ideas about positive thinking that are at best ineffective and at worst destructive. If you want to be more confident or successful, says Richard Wiseman, the best thing to do is act the part

The Guardian, 30/06/2012

Extract:

“For years self-help gurus have preached the same simple mantra: if you want to improve your life then you need to change how you think. Force yourself to have positive thoughts and you will become happier. Visualise your dream self and you will enjoy increased success. Think like a millionaire and you will magically grow rich. In principle, this idea sounds perfectly reasonable. However, in practice it often proves ineffective.”

On Ignorance

Humans share 55% of their DNA with bananas.

"If ignorance is bliss, there should be more happy people." (Victor Cousin)

Is America Becoming an “Idiocracy?” by Michael Michalko

Extract:

"We are mentally lazy. Our education has conditioned our brains to circumvent deliberative and creative thinking wherever possible through rote memorization and robotic learning of formulas and principles. We have not been taught how to think for ourselves, we have been taught what to think based on what past thinkers thought. We are taught to think reproductively, not productively. We have been trained to seek out the neural path of least resistance, searching out responses that have worked in the past, rather than approach a problem on its own terms. This kind of thinking is dehumanizing and naturalizes intellectual laziness which promotes an impulse toward doing whatever is easiest or doing nothing at all.

Here is a general law of nature: When organisms no longer use something they have—no matter what it is, eyes, brilliant colors, wings, or even brains—that something rapidly evolves  and becomes  lost. Consider flight in birds. Birds typically live longer than mammals of the same size, in part because they can escape from predators more easily. However, flight can take a lot of energy, and it keeps you small. Thus, if there aren't any predators—as on remote islands—the birds become lazy and flightlessness quickly evolves."

Incompetent people Too Ignorant to Know It by Natalie Wolchover on Life's Little Misteries

Extract:

“A growing body of psychology research shows that incompetence deprives people of the ability to recognize their own incompetence. To put it bluntly, dumb people are too dumb to know it. Similarly, unfunny people don't have a good enough sense of humor to tell. This disconnect may be responsible for many of society's problems.

With more than a decade's worth of research, David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, has demonstrated that humans find it "intrinsically difficult to get a sense of what we don't know." 

On Power

Power and Poor Decision-Making

Extracts:

“Power leads to over-precision, which is the tendency to overestimate the accuracy of personal knowledge. (...)

The most effective leaders bring people around them who critique them. As a power holder, the smartest thing you might ever do is bring people together who will inspect your thinking and who aren't afraid to challenge your ideas." But, ironically, the study shows that the more powerful they become, the less help leaders think they need.”

UNESCO is better at naming enemies than finding friends

Jul 14th 2012 – The Economist

Extract:

“UNESCO, like most other UN agencies, suffers from a house culture which prefers to deal with governments, and lives happily with the fiction that governments genuinely care about citizens and their heritage. If that were true, then the problem of protecting patrimony could simply be solved by telling governments to pass good laws and enforce them. But in many places where sites are at risk, government either does not operate at all, or functions only in the interest of a kleptocratic elite. In some such places, so-called non-state players (from warlords to private firms to religious leaders) are about the only things that really function at all.”

Betrand Russel's Ten Commandments

1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.

2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.

3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.

4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.

5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.

6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.

7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.

9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.

10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool’s paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.

On Work

"The Lord created the universe in seven days but the Lord had the wonderful advantage of being able to work alone." 

Kofi Annan

“Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don't think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn't stop you from doing anything at all.”

Richard Feynman