Dim Lighting Sparks Creativity - New German research finds a darkened room encourages freedom of thought and inspires innovation. There are certain times when you want the lights turned way down low. One such time, according to recent research, is when you need to think creatively. “Darkness increases freedom from constraints, which in turn promotes creativity,” report Anna Steidle of the University of Stuttgart and Lioba Werth of the University of Hohenheim. Steidle and Werth describe six experiments which provide evidence for their thesis. Merely priming the idea of darkness—taking five minutes to describe an experience of literally being in the dark, and recalling how it felt—is sufficient to boost creativity. The room was lit by a fixture hanging from the ceiling directly above the desk. After acclimating themselves for approximately 15 minutes, participants went to work on what the researchers describe as “four creative insight problems typically used in creativity research. Don’t have a dimmer switch at your desk?
Hurst Lecture Series: A Conversation with Eric Schmidt 7 Limiting Beliefs of Unhappy People Your beliefs shape your life. Trust me, I know that life can be hard. Really, really hard. But how you see the world is ultimately responsible for whether you are overall a happy person, or whether you end up feeling bitter and unhappy most days. Negative beliefs act like a filter. The good news is, once you recognize negative beliefs in yourself, they begin to lose their power over you. And like a ray of sunlight peeking through dark clouds, your inner capacity for joy will begin peeking through, brightening up your life once again. Here are the most common negative beliefs that can limit your potential for happiness: 1. If you tend to see the world as either black or white, you are setting yourself up for disappointment. No one is always good (or bad). Inside every person, including you and me, are good thoughts and bad thoughts, things we are proud of having done and things we wish we could change. Another person may act out of love at home but feel bitter when she is at work. 2. 3. Why? 4.
Einstein [History Channel] Headspace (on-the-go) Learn the life-changing skills of meditation in just a few minutes a day with Headspace. Find hundreds of sessions on physical health, personal growth, stress management, and anxiety relief. They are all designed to help you stress less, focus more, and feel better. Download Headspace to meditate anywhere, anytime and start living a healthier, happier life. About HeadspaceHeadspace is your personal guide to health and happiness. What this meditation and sleep app doesThe Headspace meditation app teaches you how to breathe, meditate, and live mindfully. In the Sleep by Headspace experience, you’ll find sleep meditations, relaxing sleep music, and sleepcasts to guide you to a place of rest. What themes the meditations coverCourses: Each course has a series of guided meditations designed to help you skillfully manage various topics and form healthy habits. Sleep by Headspace: Create the best possible conditions for restful nights.
The Course in Mastery Day 6 Fluoridation: Stealing our Precious Bodily Fluids | SkeptEco Fluoridation- a sensible and effective public health measure- or a commie (or Big Government) plot to steal your bodily fluids? Fluoridation of public drinking water has been an environmental hot-topic for decades. I remember going to a talk about it nearly 20 years ago. More recently the odd phenomenon of the anti-fluoride movement has come to my attention through a report by Cork-based environmental scientist Declan Waugh. In Waugh’s lengthy report Human Toxicity, Environmental Impact and Legal Implications of Water Fluoridation which does not appear to have been published in a peer-reviewed journal and does not have the status of a scientific paper- he makes the following claim: While the practice of fluoridation of drinking water was intended to have a beneficial effect on caries prevention and to reduce social inequalities in dental health, there is now unequivocal evidence to show that the practice is now contributing to adverse public health risks and environmental impacts. Why?
Behavioral Laboratory Cracks the DNA Code of Happiness Chicago, IL (PRWEB) April 13, 2010 The Human Thriving Foundation is a nonprofit organization whose Mission Statement is: To scientifically increase the level of happiness of a minimum of 10 Million Americans by 2013. The Behavioral Laboratory announces today that it appears that they have Cracked the DNA Code of happiness. Happiness360, the foundation’s parent company, was launched in 2005 as a behavioral, quantitative, research laboratory to seek the scientific predictors of happiness. This was a ground-breaking concept versus the conventional Subjective Well-Being and Positive Psychology efforts. The main short-coming of the previous research has been that it is subjective versus objective. The time was well past-due to discover how to scientifically increase the level of the happiness of humankind. Why is happiness important to humankind? Anthropologically speaking, Buddha and Confucius were the earliest to seriously speak of the importance of happiness.
Ultimeyes Vision - See Farther When a major league baseball pitcher throws a 95-mph fastball, only about 400 milliseconds—the duration of a blink—pass before the ball rockets over the plate. And a batter gets less than half that time to decide whether to swing, and where. Baseball players, then, could reap huge benefits from being able to probe a baseball farther from their eyes. "We were using standard, on-the-wall eye charts," Seitz says. Although Seitz's app seems quite implausible, its effects are indeed real, says Peggy Series, a neuroscientist at the University of Edinburgh, who was not involved in the study or the development of UltimEyes. The Brain—Not the Eyes Despite its name, UltimEyes has little to do with improving the physical eye or eye muscles. "Within the last decade or so we've started to learn that brain fitness is a bit akin to physical fitness," Seitz says. UltimEyes exercises the visual cortex, the part of our brain that controls vision. Open Questions
What Music Does to Your Brain While You Work Damn. I forgot my headphones. Nothing has a more negative impact on my day than showing up to our office without them. Like most people, music is a huge part of my life and my tastes are constantly changing based on how I feel or what I’m doing. I listen to the most music while I work, sifting through playlists, from jazz, to indie pop, to electronica, on what seems to be a never-ending search for the perfect tunes to keep me in the zone. When I looked back at all my favorite playlists, I wondered what effect music has had on my work and more specifically, which types of music have had the most impact. I thought it’d be interesting to take a dive into the science behind the deep power of music to find out if it actually helps you work better. Why you love music Whether you’re listening to the driving beat of a Daft Punk song or the opening chords of a mellow Jack Johnson track, both have an effect on your brain that is not seen in any other animal. ‘Two cheeseburgers equals one orgasm.’ – PBS
The myth of the eight-hour sleep Image copyright Other We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night - but it could be good for you. A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural. In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month. It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week the subjects had settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. Though sleep scientists were impressed by the study, among the general public the idea that we must sleep for eight consecutive hours persists. In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks. Image copyright bbc "It's not just the number of references - it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge," Ekirch says.
Decoding the Science of Sleep Zlatko Glusica was the captain of an Air India Express plane carrying 166 passengers from Dubai to Mangalore, a bustling port city on India's southern coast. As his Boeing 737 approached the city, Mr. Glusica woke up from a nap in the cockpit and took over the controls. His co-pilot warned him repeatedly that he was coming in at the wrong angle and that he should pull up and try again. It isn't just the airline industry. Sleep wasn't something we were supposed to worry about in the early years of the 21st century. Americans, however, are starting to wake up about sleep.
6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person #3. You Hate Yourself Because You Don't Do Anything Getty "So, what, you're saying that I should pick up a book on how to get girls?" Only if step one in the book is "Start making yourself into the type of person girls want to be around." Getty"Come ooooon. Because that's the step that gets skipped -- it's always "How can I get a job?" "But why can't I find someone who just likes me for me?" Here's another video (NSFW): Everyone who watched that video instantly became a little happier, although not all for the same reasons. "But I'm not good at anything!" Don't like the prospect of pouring all of that time into a skill? The bad news is that you have no other choice. Because in my non-expert opinion, you don't hate yourself because you have low self-esteem, or because other people were mean to you. GettyStep One: Get up. Do the math: How much of your time is spent consuming things other people made (TV, music, video games, websites) versus making your own? #2. But really, does that matter?