69 Awesome Brain Hacks That Give You Mind-Blowing Powers Remember when Neo got to choose between the red pill and the blue pill? The blue pill would have put him back to sleep in the fake world of cubicles and steaks in the Matrix, where the red pill would wake him up to the real world and its industrial womb factory. You probably just chalked that scene up to another case of Hollywood turning a complicated situation into a simplistic metaphor, but what you probably didn't realize is that you're living out your own little Matrix scenario every time you go to the pharmacy. "I really hope being swallowed by a mirror is covered by my insurance." What? How? Did you notice how the red pill would let Neo "wake up" to the real world, but the blue pill would let him stay "asleep" in the dream world? Blue, blue and blue -- if not the package, then the pill itself. What the hell? So, in a different experiment, subjects were told they were going to get a sedative or a stimulant, when in fact they were getting neither -- all of the pills were placebos.
The 4 Most Common Relationship Problems -- And How To Fix Them Relationship problems. Everybody has them. And sometimes you have them over and over and over. Most of the people giving advice don’t know the research. I decided to call an expert: Dr. You might remember him as the researcher in Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink who, after just a few minutes, could predict whether a couple would end up divorced. John is a professor emeritus at the University of Washington and co-founder of the Gottman Institute. He’s also a really cool guy. So what are you going to learn here? The four things that doom relationships.The three things that prevent those four things.The most important part of any relationship conversation.The single best predictor of whether a relationship is working. Want to be a Master and not a Disaster? 1) The Four Horsemen Of The Relationship Apocalypse John has studied thousands of couples over his 40-year career. #1: Criticism This is when someone points to their partner and says their personality or character is the problem. #2: Defensiveness
20-Year-Old Hunter S. Thompson’s Superb Advice on How to Find Your Purpose and Live a Meaningful Life As a hopeless lover of both letters and famous advice, I was delighted to discover a letter 20-year-old Hunter S. Thompson — gonzo journalism godfather, pundit of media politics, dark philosopher — penned to his friend Hume Logan in 1958. Found in Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience (public library | IndieBound) — the aptly titled, superb collection based on Shaun Usher’s indispensable website of the same name — the letter is an exquisite addition to luminaries’ reflections on the meaning of life, speaking to what it really means to find your purpose. Cautious that “all advice can only be a product of the man who gives it” — a caveat other literary legends have stressed with varying degrees of irreverence — Thompson begins with a necessary disclaimer about the very notion of advice-giving: To give advice to a man who asks what to do with his life implies something very close to egomania. Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience.
Ten Popular Mind Control Techniques Used Today The more one researches mind control, the more one will come to the conclusion that there is a coordinated script that has been in place for a very long time with the goal to turn the human race into non-thinking automatons. For as long as man has pursued power over the masses, mind control has been orchestrated by those who study human behavior in order to bend large populations to the will of a small “elite” group. Today, we have entered a perilous phase where mind control has taken on a physical, scientific dimension that threatens to become a permanent state if we do not become aware of the tools at the disposal of the technocratic dictatorship unfolding on a worldwide scale. Modern mind control is both technological and psychological. Tests show that simply by exposing the methods of mind control, the effects can be reduced or eliminated, at least for mind control advertising and propaganda. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
How to Find Your Bliss: Joseph Campbell on What It Takes to Have a Fulfilling Life by Maria Popova “You have to learn to recognize your own depth.” In 1985, mythologist and writer Joseph Campbell (March 26, 1904–October 30, 1987) sat down with legendary interviewer and idea-monger Bill Moyers for a lengthy conversation at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch in California, which continued the following year at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The resulting 24 hours of raw footage were edited down to six one-hour episodes and broadcast on PBS in 1988, shortly after Campbell’s death, in what became one of the most popular series in the history of public television. But Moyers and the team at PBS felt that the unedited conversation, three quarters of which didn’t make it into the television production, was so rich in substance that it merited preservation and public attention. As Moyers notes in the introduction, Campbell saw as the greatest human transgression “the sin of inadvertence, of not being alert, not quite awake.” Donating = Loving Share on Tumblr
How To Read People Like Sherlock Holmes: 4 Insights From Research Wouldn’t it be great to be able to just look at someone and tell what they’re really like? Sherlock Holmes does this all the time and it’s incredibly cool. Check out this clip from the BBC show Sherlock. Of course, Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character and nobody can read people quite that well. We can all get better at it, though. But where do you learn a skill like that? So I called a guy who has the answers: Sam Gosling. Sam is a personality psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin and author of the book Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You. What really works (and doesn’t) when reading people.How to get more accurate first impressions.What someone’s home or office can tell you about them.What someone’s Facebook profile really says about their personality.How to tell when someone is faking and putting up a false front. Okay, put on your deerstalker cap and let’s get to work. What Sherlock Gets Wrong — And How You Can Get It Right It’s really about detecting patterns. Why?
The Shortness of Life: Seneca on Busyness and the Art of Living Wide Rather Than Living Long “How we spend our days,” Annie Dillard memorably wrote in her soul-stretching meditation on the life of presence, “is, of course, how we spend our lives.” And yet most of us spend our days in what Kierkegaard believed to be our greatest source of unhappiness — a refusal to recognize that “busy is a decision” and that presence is infinitely more rewarding than productivity. I frequently worry that being productive is the surest way to lull ourselves into a trance of passivity and busyness the greatest distraction from living, as we coast through our lives day after day, showing up for our obligations but being absent from our selves, mistaking the doing for the being. Despite a steadily swelling human life expectancy, these concerns seem more urgent than ever — and yet they are hardly unique to our age. In fact, they go as far back as the record of human experience and endeavor. Seneca writes: It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Thanks, Liz
Virginia Woolf on Why the Best Mind Is the Androgynous Mind by Maria Popova “In each of us two powers preside, one male, one female… The androgynous mind is resonant and porous… naturally creative, incandescent and undivided.” In addition to being one of the greatest writers and most expansive minds humanity ever produced, Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) was also a woman of exceptional wisdom on such complexities of living as consciousness and creativity, the consolations of aging, how one should read a book, and the artist’s eternal dance with self-doubt. So incisive was her insight into the human experience that, many decades before scientists demonstrated why “psychological androgyny” is essential to creativity, Woolf articulated this idea in a beautiful passage from her classic 1929 book-length essay A Room of One’s Own (public library). A year after she subverted censorship and revolutionized the politics of gender identity with her novel Orlando, Woolf writes: Illustration from 'I’m Glad I’m a Boy! Donating = Loving
Can These Questions Make You Fall In Love? How to Live: Lessons from Montaigne, Godfather of Blogging by Maria Popova Don’t worry about death, pay attention, read a lot, give up control, embrace imperfection. “Living has yet to be generally recognized as one of the arts,” Karl De Schweinitz wrote in his 1924 guide to the art of living. In How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (public library), British biographer and philosophy scholar Sarah Bakewell traces “how Montaigne has flowed through time via a sort of canal system of minds” and argues that some of the most prevalent hallmarks of our era — our compulsive immersion in various forms of lifestreaming, our incessant social sharing, our constant oscillation between introspection and extraversion as we observe our private experiences more closely than ever so we can record and frame them more perfectly in public — can be traced down to this one proto-blogger, the godfather of the essay as a genre: Portrait of Michel de Montaigne by Salvador Dalí, 1947. 'Upon Some Verses of Virgil'
10 Differences Between Successful and Unsuccessful People Everyone strives to be successful, but it doesn’t always come easily. The people who do end up reaching their highest potential always possess certain qualities and habits that allowed them to get there which separate them from those who don’t. Here are 10 differences between successful and unsuccessful people! 1. Embrace change vs. 2. Complimenting someone is always a great way to show someone you care. Moments of gratitude, each and every one, transform my life each day- and unquestionably have made me more successful and more happy. How to remove self-importance from self-promotion and still be your badass self — She Negotiates I was working with a client, “Sally,” a very talented art director and designer with many credits, awards and years behind her name. Working through a career transition, I asked her to give me the unapologetic list of the things she’s really good at, and she demurred. She stuttered a little and said, “Really, I have to answer that? Isn’t it all in my résumé?” Haha. No. It’s always bowls me over that no matter how seasoned and accomplished we are, we all seem to share the same cultural DNA of doubt, and distaste for self-promotion. Sally twisted her mouth into a gobsmacked shape, and before she could deny I continued playing her role. Sally then says, “Stop. When we are called upon to talk about ourselves, it’s as if we’re all Peter Pan before sewing on the shadow. Let’s agree that those are all fabricated thoughts. What we are really after is removing self-importance from self-promotion. Honestly, we know what we’re good at. Tell me about me Here are the questions: Go.