Emotions are how your emotional system reacts to your perception of your environment with motivation to behave. In every culture around the world, in every language, essentially all of us share the same emotions. This commonality is not an accident. Human behavior is driven by human emotions and our behavior is what made us so overwhelmingly successful in population and geographic spread. Our behavior and emotions didn’t come out of[…] Keep reading →
Every species has a few traits that give it advantages over any other. Cheetahs have their speed, for example. As far as I know they’re the fastest animals on land. We have our intelligence, among other things. As far as I know, we’re the most intelligent animal on land. Like other species with their traits, we have been using our intelligence to help us survive. We’ve been doing so for[…] Keep reading →
April 5 and 7, 6-10pm at the New York Academy of Sciences I will be giving my seminar on Leadership and Personal Success — the best seminar you’ll ever attend. It’s similar to the leadership seminar at Columbia Business School in December, but more science-y and less business-y. Here’s the background from the NYAS web page (where you can register): Leadership and personal success through self-awareness and emotional intelligence are[…] Keep reading →
Do you feel if you don’t deal with difficult things you’re denying or avoiding reality? Does that bring you down or make you feel irresponsible? Does that compel you to do things you don’t want to? Here’s how to make sure you don’t. After a conversation last night, my friend said she looked at enjoying life in a whole new way for the better. Let’s start with an analogy. On[…] Keep reading →
Want a liberating concept? Our brains and senses are limited. Our ancestors didn’t evolve minds to understand everything or senses to sense everything. They evolved them to navigate their environments enough to propagate their genes. That’s it. The ones that could had children eventually resulting in us. The ones that couldn’t didn’t. Limited senses mean we have limited access to the universe. The observable universe stretches for tens of billions[…] Keep reading →
An incredibly useful perspective in some half-baked notes to a friend. I’ll develop them more in future posts. Feedback and criticism appreciated. — You wrote about lying as an example of a “bad trait”. I’d like to suggest another perspective (generalizable from just lying to other aspects of apparent lack of empathy): that the reason people communicate is not to convey truths. Evaluating people according to truths and lies holds[…] Keep reading →