Why feeling like a fraud can be a good thing Image copyright iStock If you feel inadequate or that you are likely to be "found out" at work, you're probably not alone. It's part of a phenomenon called the "imposter syndrome" and it's very common, writes journalist Oliver Burkeman. "I have written 11 books but each time I think 'Uh-oh, they're going to find out now,'" the novelist Maya Angelou once said. "I've run a game on everybody, and they're going to find me out." Angelou was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and won five Grammys for her spoken recordings, plus a myriad other awards. But the "impostor phenomenon" - sometimes known as impostor syndrome - had her firmly in its grip. You've probably felt the same. So you may not find it reassuring to learn that Angelou felt it too. "Sure," you tell yourself, "she thought she was a fraud - but I really am one. Image copyright Getty Images But the truth is you're far from the only sufferer. "But you have to come across as being relatively competent and confident." Image copyright AFP
The McGurk Effect (Or, Brains are Weird) 12.6K 33Share57 The McGurk effect is mind-blowing. It involves showing a person's lips making the shape of one sound—like "bah"—while the audio is actually the person saying "fah." The effect is named for researcher Harry McGurk, who published a 1976 paper with John MacDonald entitled "Hearing lips and seeing voices." What's most interesting about the McGurk effect is that, even when the viewer knows what's happening, it still works. Why Can’t You Remember Your Future? Physicist Paul Davies on the Puzzlement of Why We Experience Time as Linear “If our heart were large enough to love life in all its detail,” French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote in his 1932 meditation on our paradoxical experience of time, “we would see that every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer.” Nowhere is this duality of time more disorienting than in the constant mental time travel we perform between what has been and what will be in order to anchor ourselves to what is. As our lives tick on, gradually robbing the future of potential and robbing the past of relevance, we trudge along the arrow of time dragging with us this elusive curiosity we call a self — an ever-shifting packet of personal identity, mystifying in how it links us to our childhood selves and misleading in how it maps out our future selves. Davies writes: With these buttons, gone would be the orderly procession of events that apparently constitutes my life. Complement it with T.S.
What is white noise? Commercially available white noise generators are a popular option for people who have trouble sleeping. Clinical and anecdotal evidence suggests the technology works. But how does it work? In this DNews report, Amy Shira Teitel explains how color is a useful metaphor for understanding white noise. If it's playing loud enough, white noise essentially masks other sounds by drowning them out. At night, that sound that wakes you up is typically a spike -- a sudden change in frequency relative to background noise. RELATED: This Genetic Condition Makes You Need Less Sleep White noise generators work by flooding the brain with "flat" ambient sound at all frequencies. Interestingly, recent studies suggest that a different shade of sound, as it were, may be even more effective than white noise. In other words, with pink noise the lower bass frequencies are louder. You can check out the video above to hear some audio samples of both white noise and pink noise. -- by Glenn McDonald Read More:
Luck Is a Bigger Contributor to Success Than People Give It Credit For I’m a lucky man. Perhaps the most extreme example of my considerable good fortune occurred one chilly Ithaca morning in November 2007, while I was playing tennis with my longtime friend and collaborator, the Cornell psychologist Tom Gilovich. He later told me that early in the second set, I complained of feeling nauseated. He yelled for someone to call 911, and then started pounding on my chest—something he’d seen many times in movies but had never been trained to do. Ithaca’s ambulances are dispatched from the other side of town, more than five miles away. Doctors later told me that I’d suffered an episode of sudden cardiac arrest. If that ambulance hadn’t happened to have been nearby, I would be dead. Not all random events lead to favorable outcomes, of course. Most people will concede that I’m fortunate to have survived and that Edwards was unfortunate to have perished. My having cheated death does not make me an authority on luck.
A Super Simple Hack for Falling Asleep Faster 2049 7ShareNew Next time you're counting sheep to no avail, try sticking one foot outside the covers. According to the above video from Science of Us, studies have shown that a higher internal body temperature makes people more alert and awake—and that the opposite is also true. Just before drifting off, our bodies automatically cool down. But if sleeping still isn't coming naturally to you, you can actively lower your body temperature by keeping one foot cover-free.
Surfing Uncertainty: Do our dynamic brains predict the world? Mehau Kulyk/Getty ON the 300th anniversary of Johannes Kepler’s death, Albert Einstein said: “It seems that the human mind has first to construct forms independently before we can find them in things.” He was referring to Kepler’s astounding deduction that the orbits of planets around the sun were not circular as scholars had believed, but elliptical – a feat that would set the stage for Newton’s laws of motion. Were Einstein alive today, he might be amazed at his own prescience. The clue is prediction. The traditional bottom-up view of visual perception, for example, holds that our brain analyses incoming signals, finds patterns of ever-increasing complexity, and makes sense of what’s out there by matching observed patterns against internal representations. In this paradigm, which has its roots in ideas developed by German physician Hermann von Helmholtz in 1860, our brains actually generate sensory data to match what’s coming in, using internal models of the world and of our bodies.
Watch This Selective Attention Test 3Share0 Just watch this video first, then read the words. Seriously. Follow the instructions and count how many times a player wearing white passes the ball: Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris study how the human mind works. First is their most famous video, involving basketball passing. How did you do? Perhaps more importantly, would you like to try out more videos like this? If you're into this stuff, check out the authors' website, and their book about what these tests reveal.
Future - The enormous power of the unconscious brain If you don’t think the act of stacking and shuffling a set of cups could boggle your mind, watch the video below. In it, neuroscientist David Eagleman introduces 10-year-old Austin Naber – a world record-holding, champion cup stacker. Naber moves the cups around at a blistering pace and when Eagleman has a go at keeping up with him, the difference in skill and speed becomes immediately apparent. “He smoked me,” Eagleman admits. Both Eagleman and Naber had their brain activity monitored via an electroencephalogram (EEG). “His brain was much more serene than mine because he had automised his behaviour,” explains Eagleman. The reason you practise sports over and over again is so you get really good at automising your action – David Eagleman It’s a question that Eagleman explored in a PBS television series that aired recently on BBC4 in the UK. You’re already aware of the fact that breathing and organ functions are things we do “automatically”, but there are lots of other examples.
Forecasting the Future: Can The Hive Mind Let Us Predict the Future? Polling The (Chat)Room If two minds are better than one, how much better are two thousand minds? A new hive mind project known as Metaculus is attempting to find out. Essentially the crowdsourcing of knowledge, the concept of “hive mind,” or collective intelligence, has been explored within the context of such fields as biology, robotics, and political science. Now, through their online community Metaculus, physicists Anthony Aguirre (University of California), Gregory Laughlin (Yale), and former postdoc Max Wainwright are testing the accuracy of hive mind in making predictions about the future of such fields as science, technology, and space. So, how can humans help predict the future? After signing up for a free account, Metaculus users answer yes-or-no questions such as “Will SpaceX launch for Mars in the 2018 window?” The hive mind works. Notably, these early Metaculus findings are in line with those of other hive-mind projects. A Strong Hive is Made of Quality Bees
Capital - Positive thinking can make you too lazy to meet your goals About fifteen years ago, when entrepreneur Michael Stausholm started a business with a friend, his partner painted a rosy picture of the future of the business and promised him a lot of success. Stausholm believed him and felt uplifted, as if saying it would will it to be so. Thinking positive, after all, is a common step to success, right? Just being positive and happy go lucky is not going to work “Positive thinking is something in the DNA of most entrepreneurs,” says Stausholm, who is based in Copenhagen and who previously worked for shipping company Maersk and then went on to consult for large companies on sustainability issues. But when the business fell apart, he learned an important lesson. The power of positive thinking has been a guiding principle for business leaders at least since 1936 when Napoleon Hill published Think and Grow Rich. According to these positive-thinking tomes, negative thoughts or doubts stand in the way of success. The seductive power of fantasy
Foresight as a measure of fluency, creativity, and "future thinking." | Johnson O'Connor Research Foundation Rex E. Jung, Ph.D. Are you more likely to come up with a creative idea if you produce many ideas? This question is at the core of the "equal-odds" rule, formulated by Dean Keith Simonton, who has observed that highly creative individuals tend to put out a lot of ideas. Pablo Picasso is, perhaps, best known for his masterpiece Guernica, which attempts to translate the horrors of war. The Foresight test is particularly well suited to such a study, as it asks subjects to look at a design (say a zig-zag) and "write down as many things as you can that the drawing makes you think of, looks like, reminds you of, or suggests to you." What we found was fascinating. Finally, we were interested in whether cortical thickness (this is the 2-4 millimeters of gray matter at the surface of the brain made of neuron cell bodies—the central processors of the neuron) was associated with either fluency or creativity measures of the Foresight task. Stawarczyk, D., and D'Argembeau, A. (2015).
What Negative Thinking Does to Your Brain Like ATTN: on facebook for more content like this. If you’ve ever found yourself trapped in a seemingly endless loop of negative thinking, or wondered why you fixate on a stray rude comment but easily forget compliments, you may have a culprit to blame: evolution. According to Rick Hanson, Ph.D., a neuropsychologist, founder of the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom, and New York Times best-selling author, humans are evolutionarily wired with a negativity bias. Our minds naturally focus on the bad and discard the good. It was much more important for our ancestors to avoid threats than to collect rewards: An individual who successfully avoided a threat would wake up the next morning and have another opportunity to collect a reward, but an individual who didn’t avoid the threat would have no such opportunity. Thus, the human brain evolved to focus on threats. Hanson describes the brain as like "Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones."