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To decrease stress for students Set clear classroom rules with predetermined consequences. Keep students' sensitive information, such as grades and personal issues, confidential. Speak respectfully to students, address them by name, get to know them as individuals, and make each person feel special. Use rubrics for…
News misleads. News leads us to walk around with the completely wrong risk map in our heads. So terrorism is over-rated. Chronic stress is under-rated. The collapse of Lehman Brothers is overrated. Fiscal irresponsibility is under-rated. Astronauts are over-rated. Nurses are under-rated. News is irrelevant. Out of the…
Now these numbers can be appreciated in many different ways. From the standpoint of calculation, they're as easy to understand as one plus one, which is two. Then one plus two is three, two plus three is five, three plus five is eight, and so on. Indeed, the person we call Fibonacci was actually named Leonardo of…
Your heart might be pounding, you might be breathing faster, maybe breaking out into a sweat. And normally, we interpret these physical changes as anxiety or signs that we aren't coping very well with the pressure. But what if you viewed them instead as signs that your body was energized, was preparing you to meet…
What are observations? Some philosophers have taken them to be sensory events: the occurrence of smells, feels, noises, color patches. This way lies frustration. What we ordinarily notice and testify to are rather the objects and events out in the world. It is to these that our very language is geared, because…
Maybe the coolest technology could get very good and cheap, while at the same time crucial fundamentals for survival could become expensive. The calculi of digital utopias and man-made disasters don’t contradict each other. They can coexist. This is the heading of the darkest and funniest science fiction, such as the…
People who don't have a cohesive sense of self will feel the need to conform and will easily succumb to peer pressure
Anyone who expresses a more definitive response to the question is claiming access to knowledge not based on empirical foundations. This remarkably persistent way of thinking, common to most religions and some branches of philosophy, has failed badly in past efforts to understand, and thereby predict the operations of…
Aristotle repeatedly pointed out that his predecessors' work and conclusions were often marred by insufficient observation. He himself, after a remarkable analysis of the reproduction of bees, states that he cannot arrive at certain conclusions because "the facts have not yet been sufficiently ascertained. And if at…
Taken globally, the set of traces that we leave in the world does without doubt add up to something. It is through operations on sets of traces that I understand an event that I take part in. Tolstoy wrote about the foot soldier in the Napoleonic wars. The soldier he describes cannot have the experience of the war he…
It is perhaps premature to attempt an exact definition of happiness. However, despite the fact that formal diagnostic criteria have yet to be agreed, it seems likely that happiness has affective, cognitive and behavioural components. Thus, happiness is usually characterised by a positive mood, sometimes described as…
Brainprint scans are considered the definitive method for identifying egos. Contrary to popular misconceptions, the term “brainwave scan” is a misnomer, as this form of identifier is not based on simple electroencephalography (EEG: a reading of the electrical activity created by neurons firing within the brain). The…
Science and religion are often taken to offer competing explanations of the world (Preston & Epley, 2009). That science can be a source of meaning, similar to religion, is not a completely new idea; it has been raised by philosophers (Ziman, 1978/1991) and scientists (Dawkins, 2006) alike. While many have attempted to…
Human-induced rapid environmental change (HIREC; e.g., climate change or exotic species) has caused global species declines. Although behavioral plasticity has buffered some species against HIREC, maladaptive behavioral scenarios called ‘evolutionary traps’ are increasingly common, threatening the persistence of…
evolution conserves things that work. We have a conserved brain, with different ages for its different parts—in effect lizard at back and bottom, mammal in the middle, human at the front and top. Lizard brain to breathe and sleep, mammal brain to form packs, human brain to think it over
Currently, diagnosis in mental disorders is based on clinical observation and patients’ phenomenological symptom reports. This system, implemented with the innovative Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-III (DSM-III) in 1980 and refined in the current DSM-IV-TR (Text Revision), has served well to improve diagnostic…
The RDoC research framework can be considered as a matrix whose rows correspond to specified dimensions of function; these are explicitly termed “Constructs,” i.e., a concept summarizing data about a specified functional dimension of behavior (and implementing genes and circuits) that is subject to continual…
I think the more you know, the more you realize just how much you don't know. So paradoxically, the deeper down the rabbit hole you go, the more you might tend to fixate on the growing collection of unlearned peripheral concepts that you become conscious of along the way. That can manifest itself as feelings of…
When we encourage the evolution of insight, we attack the root cause of opposition. The more we develop our cognitive capacity to manage greater complexity, the more we prevail over the compulsion to oversimplify our problems. Schwartz put it this way: "The findings suggest that at a moment of insight, a complex set…
When faced with complexity, our first response is to retreat to the familiar, even if the familiar means failing. But in addition to reverting to what is familiar, we also have another reaction: fear. We are hardwired to perceive real change as threatening, so we instinctively reject it. Sure, a few of us have the…