June 2013
29 posts
“As Western society gained the ability to limit the suffering caused by harsh living conditions, it seems to have lost the ability to cope with the suffering that remains. Studies by social scientists have emphasized that most people in modern Western society tend to go through life believing that the world is basically a nice place in which to live, that life is mostly fair, and that they are good people who deserve to have good things happen to them. These beliefs can play an important role in leading a happier and healthier life. But the inevitable arising of suffering undermines these beliefs and can make it difficult to go on living happily and effectively. In this context, a relatively minor trauma can have a massive psychological impact as one loses faith in one’s basic beliefs about the world as fair and benevolent. As a result, suffering is intensified.”
—Excerpt From: Lama, Dalai. “The Art of Happiness, 10th Anniversary Edition.”
“In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates tells the story of the myth of Aristophanes, concerning the origin of sexual love. According to this myth, the original inhabitants of Earth were round creatures with four hands and four feet and with their back and sides forming a circle. These self-sufficient sexless beings were very arrogant and repeatedly attacked the gods. To punish them, Zeus hurled thunderbolts at them and split them apart. Each creature was now two, each half longing to merge with its other half.”
—Excerpt From: Lama, Dalai. “The Art of Happiness, 10th Anniversary Edition.”
I Suck At Getting Hit On * Sherilynn Macale (HeyCheri) →
bit.ly
Getting hit on via Internet is not the same as being hit on in real life.
Derp. New blog post.
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Neuroscientists have documented the fact that the brain can design new patterns, new combinations of nerve cells and neurotransmitters (chemicals that transmit messages between nerve cells) in response to new input. In fact, our brains are malleable, ever changing, reconfiguring their wiring according to new thoughts and experiences. And as a result of learning, the function of individual neurons themselves change, allowing electrical signals to travel along them more readily. Scientists call the brain’s inherent capacity to change “plasticity.”
This ability to change the brain’s wiring, to grow new neural connections, has been demonstrated in experiments such as one conducted by Doctors Avi Karni and Leslie Underleider at the National Institutes of Mental Health. In that experiment, the researchers had subjects perform a simple motor task, a finger-tapping exercise, and identified the parts of the brain involved in the task by taking a MRI brain scan. The subjects then practiced the finger exercise daily for four weeks, gradually becoming more efficient and quicker at it. At the end of the four-week period, the brain scan was repeated and showed that the area of the brain involved in the task had expanded; this indicated that the regular practice “and repetition of the task had recruited new nerve cells and changed the neural connections that had originally been involved in the task.
This remarkable feature of the brain appears to be the physiological basis for the possibility of transforming our minds. By mobilizing our thoughts and practicing new ways of thinking, we can reshape our nerve cells and change the way our brains work. It is also the basis for the idea that inner transformation begins with learning (new input) and involves the discipline of gradually replacing our “negative conditioning” (corresponding with our present characteristic nerve cell activation patterns) with “positive conditioning” (forming new neural circuits). Thus, the idea of training the mind for happiness becomes a very real possibility.
” —Excerpt From: Lama, Dalai. “The Art of Happiness, 10th Anniversary Edition.”
“[Women] are tourists in sexual perversion. [Men] are imprisoned there.”
—Louis C.K.: Live at the Beacon Theater
“You should act in a way that if everybody acted that way, things would work out.”
—Louis C.K.: Live at the Beacon Theater
“Lying in bed and smoking my sixth or seventh cigarette of the morning, I’m wondering what the hell I’m going to do today. Oh yeah, I gotta write this thing. But that’s not work, really, is it? It feels somehow shifty and … dishonest, making a buck writing. Writing anything is a treason of sorts. Even the cold recitation of facts — which is hardly what I’ve been up to — is never the thing itself. And the events described are somehow diminished in the telling.”
—Excerpt From: Bourdain, Anthony. “Kitchen Confidential.” Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009-01-03. iBooks.
We're all going to die.
“Identifying an asteroid doesn’t make it safe. Even if every asteroid in the solar system had a name and known orbit, no one could say what perturbations might send any of them hurtling toward us. We can’t forecast rock disturbances on our own surface. Put them adrift in space and what they might do is beyond guessing. Any asteroid out there that has our name on it is very likely to have no other…
…The first one wasn’t spotted until 1991, and that was after it had already gone by. Named 1991 BA, it was noticed as it sailed past us at a distance of 106,000 miles—in cosmic terms the equivalent of a bullet passing through one’s sleeve without touching the arm. Two years later, another, somewhat larger asteroid missed us by just 90,000 miles—the closest pass yet recorded. It, too, was not seen until it had passed and would have arrived without warning. According to Timothy Ferris, writing in the New Yorker, such near misses probably happen two or three times a week and go unnoticed.
An object a hundred yards across couldn’t be picked up by any Earth-based telescope until it was within just a few days of us, and that is only if a telescope happened to be trained on it, which is unlikely because even now the number of people searching for such objects is modest. The arresting analogy that is always made is that the number of people in the world who are actively searching for asteroids is fewer than the staff of a typical McDonald’s restaurant. (It is actually somewhat higher now. But not much.)”
Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything”
“All organisms are in some sense slaves to their genes. That’s why salmon and spiders and other types of creatures more or less beyond counting are prepared to die in the process of mating. The desire to breed, to disperse one’s genes, is the most powerful impulse in nature. As Sherwin B. Nuland has put it: “Empires fall, ids explode, great symphonies are written, and behind all of it is a single instinct that demands satisfaction.” From an evolutionary point of view, sex is really just a reward mechanism to encourage us to pass on our genetic material.”
—Bill Bryson, “A Short History of Nearly Everything”
