People rarely miss a chance to record the highlights of their lives.
Phones, albums and social media sites are full to bursting with holiday snaps, wedding videos, baby photos, and all the rest.
But even the more mundane, everyday experiences can provide unexpected joy down the line, new psychological research finds.
While Einstein was not a neuroscientist, he sure knew what he was talking about in regards to the human capacity to achieve. He knew intuitively what we can now show with data—what it takes to function at your cognitive best. In essence: What doesn't kill you makes you smarter.
Not so many years ago, I was told by a professor of mine that you didn't have much control over your intelligence. It was genetic—determined at birth. He explained that efforts made to raise the intelligence of children (through programs like Head Start, for example) had limited success while they were in practice, and furthermore, once the "training" stopped, they went right back to their previously low cognitive levels. Indeed, the data did show that [pdf], and he (along with many other intelligence researchers) concluded that intelligence could not be improved—at least not to create a lasting change.
Click to readIt's one of the irritations of having a mind that sometimes bad thoughts get stuck going around in it.
It could be a mistake at work, money worries or perhaps a nameless fear. Whatever the anxiety, fear or worry, it can prove very difficult to control.
The most intuitive method for dealing with it is using thought suppression: we try to push it out of our minds.
Most people would rather be doing something than sitting alone thinking, a new study finds, even if it involves self-administering a painful electric shock.
Across 11 studies, psychologists at the University of Virginia and Harvard University had people sitting on their own in a featureless room for between 6 and 15 minutes (Wilson et al., 2014).
Professor Timothy Wilson, who led the study, which is published in the journal Science, said:
At a family holiday dinner last week, it finally dawned on me that certain people I consider smart and beautiful consider themselves stupid and hideous.
Granted, I spent most of my life considering myself occasionally stupid and more or less hideous, but no one has ever considered me beautiful, so that's different. Well, almost no one. But those few who did were clearly out of their minds.
It wasn't my family's holiday event. The family in question was a loved one's family, with whom I have spent countless holidays over many years. Not that I always wanted to.
Lately, we've been discovering addiction to wealth. Or, I should say, rediscovering.
It began with Sam Polk's op-ed in the New York Times, "For the Love of Money."
In my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million — and I was angry because it wasn't big enough. I was 30 years old, had no children to raise, no debts to pay, no philanthropic goal in mind. I wanted more money for exactly the same reason an alcoholic needs another drink: I was addicted.
Polk, as they say, knew of what he spoke: he was "a daily drinker (hey!) and pot smoker and a regular user of cocaine, Ritalin and ecstasy," and had been suspended from Columbia for burglary and arrested twice. The only thing important to him was his girlfriend. "But even though I was in love with her, when I got drunk I'd sometimes end up with other women."
In her 1993 book Cognitive Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder, Linehan notes the essence of validation:
The therapist communicates to the client that her responses make sense and are understandable within her current life context or situation. The therapist actively accepts the client and communicates this acceptance to the client. The therapist takes the client's responses seriously and does not discount or trivialize them.
Validation is also a powerful parenting tool.
In fact, it's one of the most important things you can do for your child, according to authors Karyn D. Hall, Ph.D, and Melissa H. Cook, LPC, in their book The Power of Validation.
I hope you do surprise yourself from time to time. Why? Because that's a sign that you're attuned to the complexity of your own psyche. You acknowledge (and forgive yourself) for not being a single, unitary, consolidated person. Instead, you are a person who is diverse, divided, growing and learning. Good for you – even though it may not always feel so good.
It's one of the members of my holy trinity of good mental health (along with a good diet and regular exercise).
Over the ages, sleep and depression have proved to have a dysfunctional, angry relationship.
Video gaming causes increases in the brain regions responsible for spatial orientation, memory formation and strategic planning as well as fine motor skills. This has been shown in a new study conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Charite University Medicine St. Hedwig-Krankenhaus. The positive effects of video gaming may also prove relevant in therapeutic interventions targeting psychiatric disorders.
In order to investigate how video games affect the brain, scientists in Berlin have asked adults to play the video game "Super Mario 64" over a period of two months for 30 minutes a day. A control group did not play video games. Brain volume was quantified using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In comparison to the control group the video gaming group showed increases of grey matter, in which the cell bodies of the nerve cells of the brain are situated.