bodhi tree swaying

Saddhamala wrote the other day about how we “catch” emotions from others. As she points out, this happens when you’re hanging around someone who is negative, and it brings you down, and that it even happens when we watch a movie! So this is definitely a part of our experience. You may not have realized, [...]

I’ve been meaning for a while to write about a fascinating study that touches on Terror Management Theory — something I mention in my book, Living as a River.

A Canadian study showed that when faced with thoughts about their own mortality, a sample of people in the US

expressed relatively more positive reactions to intelligent design theory and its proponent, Michael Behe, and “significantly greater negativity” toward evolutionary theory and its proponent, Richard Dawkins.

People, in other words, would rather believe fairy stories than believe that their lives and deaths were meaningless. But…

In one of their experiments, featuring 269 psychology students, half of the participants read a passage by cosmologist and science writer Carl Sagan.

In it, he argued that “humans can attain meaning and purpose by seeking to understand the natural origins of life.” Even if we are “merely matter,” he

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I’ve long advocated the usefulness of “creative daydreaming.” In fact I wrote a piece on Wildmind several years ago that touched on the subject, which I suspects is a bit taboo with some meditation teachers who are stuck with the idea that we should let go of all thinking.

Anyway, there was an interesting article recently in the New York Times, called Discovering the Virtues of a Wandering Mind, confirming the notion that daydreaming can be a creative act. Fortunately research is being done on the topic, and there are some interesting results:

During waking hours, people’s minds seem to wander about 30 percent of the time, according to estimates by psychologists who have interrupted people throughout the day to ask what they’re thinking. If you’re driving down a straight, empty highway, your mind might be wandering three-quarters of the time…

From one third to three quarters of our time being …

From David Brooks:

In 1950, thousands of teenagers were asked if they considered themselves an “important person.” Twelve percent said yes. In the late 1980s, another few thousand were asked. This time, 80 percent of girls and 77 percent of boys said yes.

Read the full article…

It’s ironic that just as science is beginning to discover how creativity works, it is (in the US at least) in the midst of a marked decline. A Newsweek article reports that while IQ has been steadily rising, generation by generation, creativity began to decline steeply after 1990.

It’s a fascinating article (that I’m only half-way through), but in case one day you ever need to remind yourself what creativity was, here’s how it used to work:

When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available

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Feelings and emotions are funny things. Emotional pain doesn’t involve any physical damage to the body, but it hurts just as much as a physical pain does. And it seems that some of the mechanisms of emotional pain may be similar to physical pain, given that recent research demonstrates that analgesics (painkillers) actually blunt feelings of being emotionally hurt.

Everyone has experienced pain and sickness at some point in their lives. For such physical ailments, one of the first things we do–or are instructed to do by medical providers–is take a pain reliever, like acetaminophen (a.k.a., Tylenol). But physical pain isn’t the only kind of pain. Our feelings can also be hurt. So researchers wondered whether acetaminophen, which acts on the central nervous system, could blunt social pain, too. In one experiment, healthy college students were randomly assigned to take acetaminophen or a placebo twice a day for three weeks. Those

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A key Buddhist teaching is a list of five reflections that the Buddha said everyone should contemplate daily. The reflections are:

1. I am subject to old age.
2. I am subject to sickness
3. I am subject to death.
4. I will be separated from all that is dear to me.
5 I am responsible for my own actions and destiny.

Basically it’s saying: life is short, make the most of it, take responsibility for yourself.

And I just came across a nice piece of research showing that your attitude to time affects your ability to fully appreciate the present moment.

This is from an article in Science Daily, last year:

Psychologist Jaime L. Kurtz from Pomona College investigated how our behavior and attitude towards an activity change when there is a limited amount of time remaining to engage in it. A group of college

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Sanghapala, a fellow member of the Triratna Buddhist Order (formerly the FWBO) brought this video to my attention. It’s a really fascinating insight by Dan Pink into what really motivates people to excel.

We learn:

For mechanical skills, the higher the reward, the better the performance. But, for even moderately demanding cognitive skills, a larger reward leads to poorer performance.

The way money works as a motivator is that if you don’t pay people enough, they won’t be motivated. Once people are comfortable with the amount they’re being paid, money isn’t an issue and they can concentrate on their work. Once the money issue is dealt with, there are three factors that lead to better performance:

1. Autonomy: if you want engaged workers, they have to be self-directed.
2. Mastery: people like to develop excellence. It’s satisfying to do something …

A long term study of students at the university of Michigan suggests that empathy has been declining since the 1980s and 1990s, with a particularly steep drop after 2000:

“We found the biggest drop in empathy after the year 2000,” said Sara Konrath, a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research. “College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago, as measured by standard tests of this personality trait.”

Konrath conducted the meta-analysis, combining the results of 72 different studies of American college students conducted between 1979 and 2009, with U-M graduate student Edward O’Brien and undergraduate student Courtney Hsing.

Compared to college students of the late 1970s, the study found, college students today are less likely to agree with statements such as “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective” and “I

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Eric Weiner writes about a recent report saying that the Danes are the happiest nation, and puts it down to their attitude of not having unrealistic expectations — something that he (rightly, I think) equates with Buddhism. It’s a post that’s worth reading in full, especially for his analysis of the "hedonic treadmill," but here’s an extract:

About once a year, some new study confirms Denmark’s status as a happiness superpower. Danes receive this news warily, with newspaper headlines that invariably read: "We’re the happiest lige nu." Lige nu is a Danish phrase that means literally "just now" but strongly connotes a sense of "for the time being but probably not for long." Danes, in other words, harbor low expectations about everything, including their own happiness. Though not an especially religious people, Danes would make good Buddhists. They live their lives as the Buddha advised: in

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From the BBC:

Canadian researchers found those with low self-esteem actually felt worse after repeating positive statements about themselves.They said phrases such as "I am a lovable person" only helped people with high self-esteem.

This doesn’t surprise me. Telling yourself things you fundamentally don’t believe is likely in many cases to remind you of what you do believe, which may be along the lines of "Who am I kidding, lots of people don’t like me."

I think some affirmations would be less likely to have this effect. Things that are true would be affirmations of the possibility of change and growth, and although they may stir up some reactivity at first they are fundamentally true and it’s therefore possible for our entire being to organize itself around them. Untrue affirmations ("everybody loves me") can only be believed by people who suppress an awareness of the truth

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• I managed to get a lot of writing done yesterday. I’ve been going back over a chapter I wrote on the Water Element (for a book on the Six Elements). I think I’m going to have to fork some of the material into a new chapter either at the start or end of the book, but that’s ultimately a good thing. I find sometimes I have to print stuff to be able to get some perspective on it — otherwise it’s hard to keep track of where I am in the document. Since I have a quiet morning I’m hoping to be able to get some more work done before heading off for a 4th July family gathering.
• Watched the final episode of Frasier last night What a great show! I’m going go miss those characters and the wit of the script. Even

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• I’m excited to hear there’s a possibility that outgoing Doctor, David Tennant, might be making a Doctor Who movie.
• The LRO has started sending Hi-Res images of the Moon’s surface.
• In honor of the United States of America’s most important day, Wired magazine publishes the same 4th July article that they published last year.
• I like to call it "Colonial Rebellion Day."
• Wired also has an interesting interview with Daniel Wegner about his paper on "How to Think, Say, or Do Precisely the Worst Thing for Any Occasion." Just don’t mention the war:

Very interesting article from Discover about distractedness…

I am going to do my best to hold your attention until the very last word of this column. Actually, I know it’s futile. Along the way, your mind will wander off, then return, then drift away again. But I can console myself with some recent research on the subject of mind wandering. Mind wandering is not necessarily the sign of a boring column. It’s just one of the things that make us human.

Everybody knows what it is like for our minds to wander, and yet, for a long time psychologists shied away from examining the experience. It seemed too elusive and subjective to study scientifically. Only in the past decade have they even measured just how common mind wandering is. The answer is very.

Some of the most striking evidence comes from Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara

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Jonathan Haidt, who I mentioned yesterday, gets a mention in a column today by David Brooks. It’s a quote that’s also a rather neat restatement of Davd Hume’s dictum that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.”

The emotions are, in fact, in charge of the temple of morality, and … moral reasoning is really just a servant masquerading as a high priest.

MSNBC.com’s science section has an interesting although brief report on some thinking by Jonathan Haidt, whose work I’ve mentioned before:

Dark moralityUniversity of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt blows my mind with his theory of dark morality – which is a social-science parallel to dark energy and dark matter. When it comes to morals, everyone agrees that we should whenever possible avoid harming people and provide care for the needy. The same goes for issues of fairness and reciprocity (“Do unto others…”) Haidt calls these “visible morals,” analogous to the 4 percent of the universe that we can see.

But those represent just the tip of the iceberg: Most of the mechanics of morality have to do with three “dark morals”: in-group loyalty, respect for authority, and issues of purity and sanctity. This is what accounts for qualities such as patriotism, conformism and taboos about food and sex. (Haidt drew

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From today’s Boston Globe comes this interesting snippet about an experiment or experiments (it’s not clear) showing that thinking about one’s own death reinforces faith in the notion of progress. And denying the idea of progress prompts people to think more about their own death. As I mentioned in a comment to Bob the other day, “when people are reminded of their mortality they become emotionally invested in institutions, like religion or nation, that could be thought of as providing a kind of immortality.” The idea of progress would seem to provide a similar function, in that the individual can see his or her life as being part of a larger pattern involving an onward march to a better world.

For many people, faith in a higher power gets them through dark times. But for those

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From today’s New York Times:

…experts who are trotted out on television can move public opinion by more than 3 percentage points, because they seem to be reliable or impartial authorities.

But do experts actually get it right themselves?

The expert on experts is Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His 2005 book, “Expert Political Judgment,” is based on two decades of tracking some 82,000 predictions by 284 experts. The experts’ forecasts were tracked both on the subjects of their specialties and on subjects that they knew little about.

The result? The predictions of experts were, on average, only a tiny bit better than random guesses — the equivalent of a chimpanzee throwing darts at a board.

“It made virtually no difference whether participants had doctorates, whether they were economists, political scientists, journalists or historians, whether they had policy experience or access to classified information, or whether they had logged

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Jesse Bering, who has been mentioned in this blog before, has an interesting column in Scientific American outlining a couple of experiments investigating mortality salience (the effect that an awareness of death has on us).

These rather elegant experiments show that when presented with reminders of death, people are more likely to make patriotic statements and to overestimate how many people share their opinions. In general it seems people cling to group membership as a protection against the idea of their own mortality.

Another such study found that judges presented with cues reminding them of death would set bond almost 10 times higher than they otherwise would.

In a 2005 study published in the Journal of Economic Psychology, German psychologist Eva Jonas from Ludwig-Maximilians University and Immo Fritsche from Otto-von-Guericke University teamed up with terror management theory co-founder, social psychologist

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Several weeks back I spotted this interesting article by Jesse Bering, director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland. In it he details experimental evidence that despite assumptions to the contrary, exacting revenge upon someone who has cheated you makes you less happy, not more.

In our minds we may imagine that revenge will feel sweet (this is known as “affective forecasting,” in which we make assumptions about how we will feel under a given circumstance) but actually it’s forgiveness that’s sweet.

…as a “punisher,” you would have been given the opportunity to levy a punitive fine against the cheater at the end of the game, thus “teaching her a lesson.” Or, as a “witness,” you would simply observe as one of the other players imposed the fine. Alternatively, you could have found yourself in the control condition in

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