bodhi tree swaying

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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Natalie Angier is my favorite science writer. Often I’ll be a couple of paragraphs into a science story, notice how well written it is, and realize it must be one of hers.

Her latest is a preview of a new book by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, “Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding,” which will be published by Harvard University Press in April.

The thesis of the book is that we evolved cooperation and social intelligence through learning to love babies. As Angier puts it:

…human babies are so outrageously dependent on their elders for such a long time that humanity would never have made it without a break from the great ape model of child-rearing. Chimpanzee and gorilla mothers are capable of rearing their offspring pretty much through their own powers, but human mothers are not.

Unlike chimps, our closest relatives, we spend …

I’ve just started reading Susan Blackmore’s “Ten Zen Questions” so that I can review it on Wildmind.

I’ve only read the (long) introduction and the first chapter so far, but it’s a great read. If you’ve ever seen or heard Susan (I’ve heard her on Podcasts and seen her on TED videos) you’ll know she’s an unconventional character. She’s a psychologist who researches consciousness and she also practices Zen, although she stresses she’s not a Buddhist.

Her writing style is both perky and very, very thought-provoking. Or rather she’s “non-thought” provoking, in that she reminds you over and over again to pay attention to your present moment experience (in the first chapter at least) by asking the question “Am I conscious now?” (although I’d express the question as “Am I conscious of being conscious now?”).

The constant reiteration of the question …

There’s a nice article (or was) in Psychology Today on the topic of mindfulness. It contains a lot of useful tips for bringing your awareness back into your present-moment experience.

Here are some practical tips to help you get mindful now.

• Meditate. Meditating is nothing more than focusing on the present moment. The easiest way to meditate is to simply focus on your breath—not because your breath has some magical quality, but because it’s always there with you. The challenge is to keep your attention on your breathing. Inevitably, your mind will wander and thoughts will arise—and that’s fine. When it happens, just let go of the thought and bring your attention back to the present by focusing once again on your breath.

• Use a reminder of the string-around-your-finger variety. Wear your watch upside-down, put a quarter in your shoe, or put a smudge on one of the lenses of

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I found this interesting, and I found it here. We completely take it for granted that we live in “the present” and yet everything we perceive is a split second behind reality because of the transmission lag in our nerves. This means that for tasks like catching a ball the brain has to employ some interesting trickery so that our hand reaches the ball and not the place it was 1/30 of a second ago. I wonder if babies have to learn this? I rather suspect they do.

In this brief excerpt from The Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test, the novelist Wolfe describes the mind-set of writer and counter-cultural guru Ken Kesey. Kesey, who died in 2001, was the author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes A Great Notion, two novels that defined American life in the 1960’s. (“The Movie” mentioned in the excerpt was never finished.)

The

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Over on Wildmind I’ve written a longish post with some reflections on Joss Whedon’s new show, Dollhouse, starring Eliza Dushku, who played Faith on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

It’s the kind of thing that ordinarily I would post here, but I think that in future I’m going to be putting a bit more of my energy into Wildmind. That doesn’t mean I’ll be writing less or differently. I’ll keep using this blog as a way of letting people know what I’m up to, including passing on news of articles I’ve posted. I’ll probably also continue to post shorter pieces here.

Anyway, here’s the start of the article, with a link to the rest. The Buddhist stuff starts just after the jump to Wildmind…

So far there’s only been one episode of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse, so perhaps it’s a bit early to be talking about overarching themes, leitmotifs,

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I have to admire the way that Tibetan Buddhists respond to adverse circumstances. When Tibetan monks and nuns are brutally tortured by Chinese security forces, rather than get angry their response is to be compassionately concerned about the karma of their torturers. When a Tibetan gets sick this is often taken as the result of bad karma in the past, and so rather than wallow in self-pity they do even more spiritual practice than usual in order to purify their karma. And when the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition’s Istituto Lama Tzong Khapa, in Pomaia, Italy, burned down Lama Zopa Rinpoche wrote to the community

“I think what has happened at Lama Tzong Khapa Institute, with the blazing fire destroying the gompa, is an auspicious

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Scientific American has a very interesting and challenging article on how difficult it can be to bring about personal change. It’s worth reading the entire article, but here’s the handy digest (you know, just in case that resolution to stop skimming the surface of articles isn’t working out for ya).

• Studies of personality development often focus on traits such as extroversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism and openness to new experiences. In most people, these traits change more during young adulthood than any other period of life, including adolescence. Openness typically increases during a person’s 20s and goes into a gradual decline after that.
• This pattern of personality development seems to hold true across cultures. Although some see that as evidence that genes determine our personality, many researchers theorize that personality traits change during young adulthood because this is a time of life when people assume new roles: finding a partner, starting a

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There’s an excellent but rather long article in Psychology Today about the benefits of mindfulness, called, “Psychology Today: The Art of Now: Six Steps to Living in the Moment.” Here’s a digest of some of the main points, in case you don’t have time to wade through all seven pages of the piece.

1. To improve your performance, stop thinking about it (unselfconsciousness)
By reducing self-consciousness, mindfulness allows you to witness the passing drama of feelings, social pressures, even of being esteemed or disparaged by others without taking their evaluations personally, explain Richard Ryan and K. W. Brown of the University of Rochester. When you focus on your immediate experience without attaching it to your self-esteem, unpleasant events like social rejection—or your so-called friends making fun of your dancing—seem less threatening.

2. To avoid worrying about the future, focus on the present (savoring).
When subjects in a …

There’s a fascinating article in the New York Times about people’s relationship to their frozen embryos. Because IVF treatment is so expensive and success is so hit-or-miss, couples generally create more embryos than they need. Those remaining after conception are stored in deep freezes. But couples become attached to those embryos — blastocysts, really — and can have trouble letting go of them.

The article gives an overview of different relationships with these embryos. Some people are willing to let them be used for research. Some are willing to donate them to other couples. But others are unwilling to have them donated, even though it would help another family get through the painful situation they themselves have experienced, because they regard these as “their” embryos and are unsure of what kind of life they wold have with a new family.

Some people are simply so …