We don’t use the word “joy” a lot these days. The Google Ngram below shows that the words “joy” and “happiness” occur with about the same frequency, but if you add “happy” and “happiness” together, then they occur about 3 times as often as “joy”. They can mean the same thing, but I think of…
During last week a friend and I watched The Wallat the wonderful Avoca Beach Picture Theatre, not quite knowing what we were going to see. Was it going to be a remake of the original movie or a documentary reflecting on the album that was first released 37 years ago? It turns out to be…
I know those two lines are thesame length but the knowingmakes no dent in the illusionof their difference. In the Müller-Lyer illusion two lines of equal length are made to look unequal. One explanation of the trick is that our minds interpret the lines as the corners of buildings: the one on the left as…
Although life has been hard going the last few years – well actually, because life has been hard going the last few years – I’m no longer so black and white in the way I see many things. I used to think the alternative to black and white was an unattractive gradient of grey. But…
Recent research suggests that it is easier to blame someone than to praise them. Joshua Knobe shows this clearly in the following two thought experiments: Suppose that a vice-president goes to the chairman of the board and says OK, we’ve got this new policy. It’s going to make huge amounts of money for our company…
Here’s a simple thing really, but it struck me as a neat summary. I was gazing over the shoulder of a fellow passenger on the train home this evening and in her book I read … An unconscious choice is a reaction.A conscious choice is a response.
Someone recently said to me “Some people go to church for their religion, but I get my religious nourishment while canoeing”. She wasn’t a friend — in fact it was the first time we had met — so I couldn’t delve into what she meant, but it set me to wondering. All I could say…
Dan Pink spoke at TED about the disparity between what science knows about human motivation and what techniques business uses to motivate employees. There is overwhelming scientific evidence that higher rewards lead to lower performance, except in the most non-cognitive tasks. The carrot-and-stick approach only works for tasks where the solution is obvious — e.g….
On Hope 103.2’s Open House, Stanton Jones discusses the efficacy of the Exodus Foundation program for changing people’s sexual orientation. He presented research to the American Psychological Association recently that sought to demonstrate: That at least some people can change sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual. That conversion programs are not necessarily psychologically damaging. Jones…
Alain de Botton‘s presentation at TED 2009 has greatly inspired me. (And BTW, the podcasts that come from TED are by far the most informative and diverse thought-provokers I have come across.) Snobbery: “A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who…
