Gaming Produces a Meditative State

Your brain, in other words, may not consent to be trained. But t will improve a few of these key skills if you let it enjoy a few hours of the first-person shooter BioShock. Recent research, the 2012 re noted, has revealed action games' positive effects, not just on attentional control and emotional regulation, but also on decision making, "mental rotation" (the ability to create a mental image of m object and manipulate it in three dimensions), and the ability to switch rapidly between compe...

 Wargaming Allows a Safe Space to Learn and Experiment

Such is the power of wargames: They create a virtual world players can experience, learn from, and integrate into their tactical and strategic decision making. Let's repeat what we said at the outset. If you had the opportunity to probe the future, make strategic choices, and view the consequences of those choices in a risk-free environment before making expensive and irrevocable decisions. wouldn't you take advantage of it?

 The Thermian Argument

So there's a bad habit people have gotten into. It's nothing new, but it's become more and more common. It goes like this: Critic: Hello. This is Folding Ideas. I recently watched the anime Women Getting Ripped Apart by Orcs and was, you know, disturbed by the seeming perverse glee the way the show takes the frequent and excessive dismemberment of its female cast members. In fact, the entire purpose of the show seems to be little more than showing women being brutally violated by orcs. Mino...

 How Utopian Stories Can Encourage Work in Reality

"I do a lot of public speaking, often debating public figures on television or other high profile settings, or giving speeches to large audiences," one Fellow, an immigration rights lobbyist, wrote in her query response. "I am constantly, almost involuntarily, honing my skills by debating adversaries or giving speeches when I'm alone (in the car or walking to the metro). They're not exactly imaginary worlds, but rather imagined versions of real-life settings in which I find myself" Equally ...

 Negative Attention is Better Than No Attention at All

To give and receive attention is a fundamental human need. In the 13th century, King Frederick II of Sicily wanted to find out what language children would naturally grow up to speak if they were never spoken to. He took babies from their mothers at birth and placed them in the care of nurses who were strictly forbidden to either speak to or touch them. The babies, as it turned out, didn’t grow up to speak any language, as they all died of attention deprivation within a fortnight of the sta...

 Our Life is What We Pay Attention To

When our attention is lured, herded, and commandeered in such a way, our full human potential is profoundly subverted. “Our life experience,” William James once said, “will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default.” We become what we attend to — nothing more, nothing less. A steady and exclusive stream of reality TV, entertainment gossip, social media chatter, and “breaking news” about the latest celebrity scandal or Trump’s most recent tweets — all...

 Review Your Social Media Timeline to Improve Your Sense o...

In an experiment at Cornell, stressed college students randomly assigned to scroll through their own Facebook profiles for five minutes experienced boosts in self-affirmation compared to students who looked at a stranger’s Facebook profile. The researchers believe self-affirmation comes from reminiscing on past meaningful interactions — seeing photos they had been tagged in and comments their friends had left — as well as reflecting on one’s own past posts, where a person chooses how ...

 The Personal Equation

Sounds like a "fuzzy set." Which comes into play when you try to categorize things that vary continuously into discrete groups. Can't be done without ambiguruity and bias. As a geneficist by the name of Pearl demonstrated when he had 15 scienfists sort the same 532 com kernels into yellow-starchy, yellow-sweet, white-starchy or whitesweet groupings. Each scientist came up with a different count. Instead of objectivity. Pearl discovered "personal equation," the slight nuance in perception each...

 Considering Art Creative but Engineering Not as a Questio...

In retrospect, Cohen and MacKeith made a number of questionable assumptions that undermine that conclusion. To be fair, these assumptions were quite common among psychologists at the time and still persist to a significant degree among the public. One of these assumptions is that some activities, such as the arts, are inherently creative, whereas others, such as science or engineering, are not. Another assumption is that creativity is a function of one's ability to fantasize, which is to say,...

 The Coal Standard

Here's a thought: maybe we could buy off the simplistic goldbug-minded "money is a commodity" thinkers by proposing a coal standard? That is: treat burnable fossil carbon as money? Like BTC, there's a finite amount of it remaining to be mined. Like BTC, mining the last reserves gets incrementally harder over time. Unlike BTC, if you burn it, it's gone for good, so there's an incentive to stockpile it and not burn it (ideally by stockpiling it in the ground, where it comes from, by buying lan...