— Leave a Comment

Meditating at Work: A New Approach to Managing Overload

Posted on February 2, 2012 

Today’s employees and managers are deluged with an unprecedented amount of information and distraction. If it’s not emails, texts, and instant messaging, then it’s phone calls, coworkers, and constantly changing demands and deadlines. Basex research found that 50 percent of a knowledge worker’s day is spent “managing information” and that an excess of information results in “a loss of ability to make decisions, process information, and prioritize tasks.” In fact, research shows that constant information overload sends the brain into the fight-or-flight stress response, originally designed to protect us from man-eating tigers and other threats.

According to Dr. Edward Hallowell, the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain responsible for executive functions such as decision making, problem solving, and planning) cannot execute properly when it is in stress mode. Instead, the “lower part” of the brain, which is responsible for dealing with survival, takes over. The prefrontal cortex then waits for a signal from the lower brain that the stressor has disappeared. Until then, the prefrontal cortex still functions, but poorly. Intelligence declines, and flexibility is minimal.1The result of this information and distraction overload is wreaking havoc with both employees’ and managers’ mental and physical health, as well as with productivity. As Jonathan Spira notes in Overload! How Too Much Information Is Hazardous to Your Organization, this problem has been estimated to cost the U.S. economy $900 billion per year in “lowered employee productivity and reduced innovation.”2 This figure also includes recovery time, which can be ten to twenty times greater than the time lost from the interruption itself.

While organizations have addressed these challenges with a variety of stress-management solutions, until recently meditation was not among them. It still had a reputation for being flaky and unfit for corporate consumption. However, scientific studies that have proven the value of meditation in changing the brain point to meditation’s practical application in the workplace. Meditation is now gaining acceptance and being used in established American companies such as General Mills, Google, and Prentice Hall.

Click to read

General Blog
— Leave a Comment

The Neuroscience Of Music


Posted on January 5, 2012 

Why does music make us feel? On the one hand, music is a purely abstract art form, devoid of language or explicit ideas. The stories it tells are all subtlety and subtext. And yet, even though music says little, it still manages to touch us deep, to tickle some universal nerves. When listening to our favorite songs, our body betrays all the symptoms of emotional arousal. The pupils in our eyes dilate, our pulse and blood pressure rise, the electrical conductance of our skin is lowered, and the cerebellum, a brain region associated with bodily movement, becomes strangely active. Blood is even re-directed to the muscles in our legs. (Some speculate that this is why we begin tapping our feet.) In other words, sound stirs us at our biological roots. As Schopenhauer wrote, “It is we ourselves who are tortured by the strings.”

We can now begin to understand where these feelings come from, why a mass of vibrating air hurtling through space can trigger such intense states of excitement. A brand newpaper in Nature Neuroscienceby a team of Montreal researchers marks an important step in revealing the precise underpinnings of “the potent pleasurable stimulus” that is music. Although the study involves plenty of fancy technology, including fMRI and ligand-based positron emission tomography (PET) scanning, the experiment itself was rather straightforward. After screening 217 individuals who responded to advertisements requesting people that experience “chills to instrumental music,” the scientists narrowed down the subject pool to ten. (These were the lucky few who most reliably got chills.) The scientists then asked the subjects to bring in their playlist of favorite songs – virtually every genre was represented, from techno to tango – and played them the music while their brain activity was monitored.

Click to read

General Blog
— Leave a Comment

Can Passion and Security Coexist? Reflections on Cronenberg’s “A Dangerous Method”


Posted on December 26, 2011 

In the new David Cronenberg film, A Dangerous Method, a tortured Carl Jung struggles with these very questions. He has met Sabina Spielrein, a fiercely writhing, twitching, hysterical patient who seems literally possessed by violence, her body stretched so taut that at times you half expect her to pounce. It’s Jung’s job to unearth the forces roiling within her that have her wound so tight, and that he does, with the help of a miraculous new “talking cure,” fashioned by one Sigmund Freud, his elder mentor, who aims to shake the medical community (and the world) out of their complacent view that the human race has evolved as far beyond animal instincts as they’d like to believe.

With Freud’s help, Jung uncovers the source of Sabina’s troubles–traumatic, sexual memories, of course (no spoiler there)–and on she goes, almost completely cured, to become a doctor, herself. But the bond between her and Dr. Jung begins to grow during his visits to her at the University. And Jung’s fascination with Spielrein’s erotic energy–she still loves a good, humiliating spanking–brings the two together in sometimes frightening ways.

Click to read

pixel.png?p=chrome&v=2.7.2.0&t=1314082099321&u=446362ef0c4ca423


 

General Blog
— Leave a Comment

Why do some people never get depressed?

Confronted with some of life’s upsetting experiences – marriage breakdown, unemployment, bereavement, failure of any kind – many people become depressed. But others don’t. Why is this?

A person who goes through experiences like that and does not get depressed has a measure of what in the psychiatric trade is known as “resilience”.

According to Manchester University psychologist Dr Rebecca Elliott, we are all situated somewhere on a slidling scale.

“At one end you have people who are very vulnerable. In the face of quite low stress, or none at all, they’ll develop a mental health problem,” she says.

“At the other end, you have people who life has dealt a quite appalling hand with all sorts of stressful experiences, and yet they remain positive and optimistic.” Most of us, she thinks, are somewhere in the middle….

Click to read

General Blog Neuroscience & Psychology
— Leave a Comment

No Matter What the Problem, There Are Only Four Things You Can Do

When faced with a difficult problem, you might find yourself paralyzed over deciding what to do. Emotionally sensitive people often have difficulty making decisions, tend to ruminate about issues and can become increasing upset as a result of thinking about the issue over and over.

Searching and searching for the right solution, perhaps one that won’t upset others or cause pain or loss, adds to anxiety and upset. How can someone find just the right solution and know what the right solution is?

Marsha Linehan, the creator of Dialectical Behavior Therapy, outlined strategies for any problem that you face. Remembering these options can help decrease the struggle of not knowing what to do. The four options are Solve the Problem, Change Your Perception of the Problem, Radically Accept the Situation, or Stay Miserable.

Choice 1: Solve the Problem.

There are many problem solving strategies but most use the same steps. First, define the problem. Be as specific as possible. Use numbers whenever possible. For example “I’ve been overspending my budget every other month by $315.”

Click to read

General Blog
— Leave a Comment

The Neuroscience Of Music

Why does music make us feel? On the one hand, music is a purely abstract art form, devoid of language or explicit ideas. The stories it tells are all subtlety and subtext. And yet, even though music says little, it still manages to touch us deep, to tickle some universal nerves. When listening to our favorite songs, our body betrays all the symptoms of emotional arousal. The pupils in our eyes dilate, our pulse and blood pressure rise, the electrical conductance of our skin is lowered, and the cerebellum, a brain region associated with bodily movement, becomes strangely active. Blood is even re-directed to the muscles in our legs. (Some speculate that this is why we begin tapping our feet.) In other words, sound stirs us at our biological roots. As Schopenhauer wrote, “It is we ourselves who are tortured by the strings.”

We can now begin to understand where these feelings come from, why a mass of vibrating air hurtling through space can trigger such intense states of excitement. A brand new paper in Nature Neuroscienceby a team of Montreal researchers marks an important step in revealing the precise underpinnings of “the potent pleasurable stimulus” that is music. Although the study involves plenty of fancy technology, including fMRI and ligand-based positron emission tomography (PET) scanning, the experiment itself was rather straightforward. After screening 217 individuals who responded to advertisements requesting people that experience “chills to instrumental music,” the scientists narrowed down the subject pool to ten. (These were the lucky few who most reliably got chills.) The scientists then asked the subjects to bring in their playlist of favorite songs – virtually every genre was represented, from techno to tango – and played them the music while their brain activity was monitored.

Click to read

General Blog Neuroscience & Psychology
— Leave a Comment

Can Passion and Security Coexist? Reflections on Cronenberg’s “A Dangerous Method”

 

In the new David Cronenberg film, A Dangerous Method, a tortured Carl Jung struggles with these very questions. He has met Sabina Spielrein, a fiercely writhing, twitching, hysterical patient who seems literally possessed by violence, her body stretched so taut that at times you half expect her to pounce. It’s Jung’s job to unearth the forces roiling within her that have her wound so tight, and that he does, with the help of a miraculous new “talking cure,” fashioned by one Sigmund Freud, his elder mentor, who aims to shake the medical community (and the world) out of their complacent view that the human race has evolved as far beyond animal instincts as they’d like to believe.

With Freud’s help, Jung uncovers the source of Sabina’s troubles–traumatic, sexual memories, of course (no spoiler there)–and on she goes, almost completely cured, to become a doctor, herself. But the bond between her and Dr. Jung begins to grow during his visits to her at the University. And Jung’s fascination with Spielrein’s erotic energy–she still loves a good, humiliating spanking–brings the two together in sometimes frightening ways.

Click to read

pixel.png?p=chrome&v=2.7.2.0&t=1314082099321&u=446362ef0c4ca423

General Blog
— Leave a Comment

Self-Compassion: The Key to Psychological Well-Being

 

Basically, self-compassion involves treating yourself with kindness, caring, nurturance, and concern, rather than being harshly judgmental or indifferent to your suffering. What distinguishes self-compassion from self-love or self-acceptance is that you frame your failures, your inadequacies, or the suffering in your life that’s not your fault in light of common humanity. Instead of feeling Oh, poor me, which is like self-pity, we understand that the human condition is tough. Humans aren’t perfect, and things go wrong. That’s the way it is for all of us. Also, people feel isolated, separated, and cutoff when they notice things about themselves that they don’t like or when something goes wrong. Another aspect of self-compassion is mindfulness. To have self-compassion, you have to be able to notice and become aware of your pain. A lot of people say, “Of course I’m aware of my pain,” but actually, in our culture’s stiff-upper-lip tradition, we’re often so busy solving the problem we don’t notice that the situation is really hard, especially when our pain comes from criticizing ourselves or seeing something about ourselves we don’t like. So we need to be mindful of the fact that we’re suffering; at the same time, we don’t want to get carried away in a personal drama that exaggerates the extent of our suffering. Self-compassion is seeing things as they are—no more, no less. That’s kind of a long-winded answer, but it’s necessary to think about all these facets of self-compassion to understand it in a more rich way..

Click to read

General Blog Neuroscience & Psychology
— Leave a Comment

Applications of Positive Psychology

Positive psychology studies happiness and how that relates to love and gratitude. What faith offers, such as community, gratitude, forgiveness, purpose, acceptance, altruism, and eternity, increases well-being. Marriage is the hope for happiness. We choose a career, or fly believing, hoping, or having faith. The chance for error in faith makes humans humble and open to hope that feeds love and joy.

Positive psychology also studies meaning and motivation and how these relate to happiness. Life purpose is the meaning and direction of one’s reality or experience and goal creation and pursuit. Quality relations and quality life are achieved through negotiation of adversities. To understand whether a political action is good or bad, it is possible to look at motivation or the motive, such as the general group/public good purposive and committed principle, versus a personal self- need.

Click to read

 

General Blog Neuroscience & Psychology
— Leave a Comment

Developing Creativity With Visual Thinking

“I may think in pictures, but first I write everything out in words.” Brian Selznick

Brian Selznick’s 2007 novel “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” is the basis for the new Martin Scorsese movie “Hugo” – the story of an orphan, living in a Paris train station at the dawn of the 1930s.

An article quotes the author:

“When I first presented ‘Hugo’ to [publisher] Scholastic, it was going to have one drawing per chapter and be about 100 pages. But the more I thought about the book, the more I thought it might be interesting to try to tell the story like a movie.” ///

Linda Kreger Silverman, Ph.D. of the Gifted Development Center explains, “Visual-spatial learners are individuals who think in pictures rather than in words. They have a different brain organization than auditory-sequential learners.”

Click to read

General Blog Neuroscience & Psychology
— Leave a Comment

52 Ways to Tame Rude, Crude and Attitude for a Polite Society

Sara Hacala has written a pathbreaking book that presents 52 ideas and practices to spur us on to a revival of a more civil society. Here is an excerpt on nurturing civility on the Internet.

“The Internet, which has become a nearly indispensable global communications tool in only a few short years, has afforded many positive benefits, far outweighing its drawbacks. Whatever your personal view, it is fair to say that the Internet, in all its forms, has altered the way that most of us communicate interpersonally.

“In July 2010, the Pew Research Center issued a report, ‘The Internet and the Future of Social Relations,’ based on 895 respondents, 371 of whom were technology experts. Asked to project, in 2020, whether the Internet will have produced a mostly positive or negative effect on the larger picture of their social relationships, 85 percent foresaw the Internet as a positive influence.

Click to read

General Blog
— Leave a Comment

Glorious Gaffes

From athletes who “choke” to concert violinists who flub well-rehearsed passages, to presidential candidates who space out, all of us are susceptible to performing poorly under pressure. Your motor memory might have a routine down pat, but as soon as the conscious, anxious part of your brain takes over, those normally smooth and automatic processes go awry.

Click to read

General Blog
— Leave a Comment

How Positive Psychology Can Boost Your Business

In tough times, entrepreneurs try the so-called science of happiness to build thriving companies

To understand how positive psychology—the so-called science of happiness—is being used by entrepreneurs, it helps to look at a company under siege. After all, it’s one thing to talk about the connections between a positive mental state and a healthy company when a business is running well, turning a profit, and grabbing new customers. But tougher times really test entrepreneurs, separating those who hunker down and hope the worst will pass from those who use their strengths to find opportunity amid rubble.

Robert Aliota is determined to be, when necessary, one of the latter. In 2004, Aliota, the owner of Carolina Seal, an 11-employee Charlotte (N.C.) company that makes custom-engineered parts for DuPont (DD) and John Deere (DE), among others, learned that a competitor had pounced on one of his key segments. Worse, the rival had hooked ExxonMobil (XOM), a customer that had eluded Aliota.

Click to read

General Blog Neuroscience & Psychology
— Leave a Comment

Positive Psychology, Positive Prevention, and Positive Therapy

Psychology after World War II became a science largely devoted to healing. It concentrated on repairing damage using a disease model of human functioning. This almost exclusive attention to pathology neglected the idea of a fulfilled individual and a thriving community, and it neglected the possibility that building strength is the most potent weapon in the arsenal of therapy. The aim of Positive Psychology is to catalyze a change in psychology from a preoccupation only with repairing the worst things in life to also building the best qualities in life. To redress the previous imbalance, we must bring the building of strength to the forefront in the treatment and prevention of mental illness.

The field of Positive Psychology at the subjective level is about positive subjective experience: well being and satisfaction (past), and flow, joy, the sensual pleasures, and happiness (present), and constructive cognitions about the future-optimism, hope, and faith. At the individual level it is about positive individual traits — the capacity for love and vocation, courage, interpersonal skill, aesthetic sensibility, perseverance, forgiveness, originality, future-mindedness, high talent, and wisdom. At the group level it is about the civic virtues and the institutions that move individuals toward better citizenship: responsibility, nurturance, altruism, civility, moderation, tolerance, and work ethic (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi, 2000; Gillham and Seligman, 1999).

Click to read

General Blog Neuroscience & Psychology
— Leave a Comment

Certain yogis have remarkable—and proven—abilities. Why does mainstream science remain skeptical?

Ancient yogic lore discusses special abilities, called siddhis, which may be attained through the disciplined practice of meditation. From a modern perspective, tales about siddhis are usually dismissed as superstitious nonsense. But when systematic science is applied, abilities once regarded as impossible, ranging from conscious control of the autonomic nervous system to perception through time, are found to be possible after all. This doesn’t mean that all yogic lore is true, but if we’ve overlooked even a tiny proportion of our remarkable capacities, what does this imply about the full range of human potential? And what does it imply about the way that mainstream science has marginalized or ignored such abilities?

What do you think? Join the discussion at Noetic:

General Blog