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How Do You Deal with Obstacles and Setbacks?
If there’s one sure bet we can all make, it’s that things won’t always go according to plan. Sometimes we drop the ball and other times external circumstances keep us from following through with our...
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U Is for Unconscious
Three things we don’t like, all beginning with u: uncertainty, unsolved problems, and urgency. Combine the three and we’re likely to encounter another u word: uncomfortable. Actually, uncomfortable is...
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What’s the Condition of Your Metacognition?
Metacognition is the awareness of our own thought process and the ability to make judgments about our thoughts. Another way to describe it is “thinking about thinking.” Although this is an abstract...
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How Free Is Your Will?
Here are links to a few articles and videos by some of my favorite scientists, researchers, and writers who focus on the brain—specifically on the part of the brain we’re not aware of but which so...
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A Case for Lucid Waking
You have to hand it to humans. As a species, we are seriously and committedly wrong-headed about so very many things. And we have a high level of confidence about our beliefs and convictions regardless...
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Why All the News Is Bad: Our Negativity Bias
Our brain’s own hardwiring for survival makes us vulnerable to stress and anxiety. It evolved to quickly detect threats in the environment and sound the alarm: time to fight or flee now! When we were...
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Got Free Will? Yes and No.
Do we have free will? To some, the answer is yes, obviously we have free will. Many others say not so fast. It’s a thorny question that has only grown thornier over the past 30 years. That’s because...
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Searching for Clarity? Try Writing.
Writing is a great tool to use when you want to gain clarity about an issue you’re dealing with or are troubled by. This is not news. The catch is that in order to get the best results you need to be...
View ArticleOde to the Brain!
Oh, the amazing brain. This Symphony of Science video is included in the playlist in an edutopia article (Five-Minute Film Festival: Learning and the Brain). It’s under four minutes. So just go for it...
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Intuition: Knowing without Knowing How We Know
Intuition goes by many names: hunch, gut feeling, instinct, inkling, inner voice. Malcolm Gladwell refers to it as “rapid cognition.” Cognitive psychologist John Bargh calls it “automatic processing.”...
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Is There a Real You?
The answer may seem obvious; of course there’s a real you. But journalist and philosopher Julian Baggini, who studies the complexities of personal identity, offers a counterintuitive answer to the...
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How Many of these Myths Do You Believe?
These six beliefs are so pervasive they seem to be embedded in our culture. Most of them are meant to be motivational, but because they aren’t true, belief in these myths can have unintended...
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The Space-Mind Continuum
We all have a limited amount of System 2 (conscious) attention to dispose of each day, and when we’ve exhausted it we can’t quickly or easily replenish it. Every waking moment, you are making judgments...
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Why Right-Brain Left-Brain Is Wrong-Headed
Conventional wisdom has it that some people are right-brained, meaning they tend to be creative, intuitive, and emotional, while others are left-brained, meaning they tend to be logical, analytical,...
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Count your Yesses
As Rick Hanson famously says, “Your brain is like Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive ones.” That’s because your brain’s primary concern is your survival, so it’s primed to pay more...
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2 Prerequisites for Change
The Farther to Go! program is all about change-making. Change is what we want and what we struggle with because many of the things we’ve tried simply don’t work. On the way to creating and developing...
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Buddhism, the Enneagram, and Neuroscience
I got up so tight I couldn’t unwind I saw so much I broke my mind I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in —words by Mickey Newbury, vocals by Kenny Rogers The “human condition,”...
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Are You Thinking Outside the Box Yet?
If you’ve ever felt stymied by the prospect of thinking outside the box, you may be relieved to find out that you can’t actually do that. The box is the mental model through which you view and...
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Giving the Unconscious a Makeover
Humans have been aware for quite some time that the unconscious—a powerful yet mysterious force that exerts some degree of control over us—must exist. But what exactly is it? It can’t be accessed...
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Brain Dead: Is Your Mind Temporarily Offline?
Your brain has two systems for processing the stimuli and experiences of your life and determining how you act upon them. Conscious: The processing system you’re aware of is called System 2. It is...
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