Cav > Books: mindset‎ (216)

"...These elements indeed include things like moral values and the economic value of an option, but they also include the consequences of your past choices, your mood, the opinions of the people around you, and so much more. A reward can be money, but it can also be friendship. It can be seeing something good happen in the world for others, achieving a small goal, or having enough energy and strength to finally run a marathon. There are many things that our brains value, many ways our brains can find reward—but as we find ourselves making the same choices again and again, it doesn’t always feel that way. Getting takeout trumps saving for retirement; hitting deadlines trumps professional development; the Internet vortex trumps spending time with the people we love. In this way, the choices the brain hands down don’t always align with what we might explicitly think of as the thing we value most."

"We found that if parts of a person’s value system, like a region known as the medial prefrontal cortex, ramped up their activity when they saw a message about sunscreen or smoking or exercise, they were more likely to change their behavior to conform to the message—regardless of whether
they said they consciously thought the message was effective. This offered our first glimpse of how the value system was linked to relatively highstakes, real-life choices outside the lab. A plethora of other studies, by my team and others, have shown similar findings when people are deciding what to eat, what to buy, how much to save for retirement, and more.
At first we were only looking to see if activity in the brain correlated with the choices people made outside the lab. Once we saw that it did, we asked: How can we use this to help facilitate change? I believed that the answer was to somehow ramp up activity in the system, but it would take more than a decade of research to understand how.
During that time, in experiments ranging from giving people feedback about their peers’ experiences, to helping them connect with their core values as a way of becoming more open to change, to comparing how the value system responds to immediate rewards versus those that lie in the more distant future, my team and others saw how simple interventions could dial value system activity up or down, which could ultimately help someone change their behavior. We discovered how changing where people put their attention—on different past experiences, current needs, or dreams for the future—changes the value calculation. This research also made it clear that activity in the value system captures something that goes beyond people’s initial instincts about what they’ll do next and can sometimes help explain the discrepancy we observed between what people say they will do and what they actually do."

"In this book, we will shed light on seven key barriers to social connection —each corresponding to a different chapter—and offer research-based strategies for removing them. Some of these strategies might seem obvious (although we suspect that they are often easier to understand than they are to execute), but others might surprise you. (For example, did you know that meditating can help you feel more socially connected, even when you’re doing it alone?) The strategies in the book can help you live a more connected life, and they might also help you live a longer life. As we’ll see, research shows that your feelings of connection are a significant predictor of how long you’ll live!"

"...That wasn’t an isolated incident. I often had moments like these, in which I snatched dissatisfaction from the jaws of happiness.
My life, after all, is and was objectively excellent: I have a solid relationship, an interesting job, and a stable place to live. But neuroticism kept me from enjoying this bounty, and it meant that when some calamity—unemployment, a health scare—did inevitably strike, I crumbled more quickly than most. My personality blinded me to the ways I could expand my life and make it even better, or even just appreciate my good fortune.
In addition to neuroticism, personality consists of four other “factors,” or traits: extroversion (which is basically sociability); agreeableness (or niceness); openness to experience (vaguely, creativity); and conscientiousness (or orderliness). Together, your levels of these five traits predict how you’ll respond to various situations—like, say, if you’ll relish your special photo shoot in a tropical paradise or have a cosmic breakdown.
I had always felt unusually neurotic, introverted, and disagreeable. Over time, I stuck those labels to myself proudly, and I mostly lived by them, even when doing so made me miserable. I avoided anything that didn’t suit my personality perfectly..."

"...I was searching for the tools to develop an inner life—an inner fortitude that would serve me until the end. This wisdom would guide my intuition, how I treated people, how I navigated the world and how I coped with it all: disappointment and loss, joy and abundance. But it would work inwards too—creating meaning and a map, orienting a moral compass, and creating the ability to be calm and courageous during times of global chaos and in a chaotic personal life.
By happenstance (more of that later) I found the wisdom I’d been searching for, deep in the past, in the ancient Greco-Roman philosophy of Stoicism.
The Stoics, always useful, seemed even more necessary in March 2020. They whispered from the past: ‘We’re here, we’re here . . . we’ve always been here.’
And so into the past I went. I found a time not unlike our own— full of chaos, war, plagues, pestilence, treachery, corruption, anxiety, overindulgence and fear of a climate apocalypse. Those times were populated by people questing for the answers that we crave today. In ancient Stoicism I found people, just like us, longing to find meaning and connection, to feel whole and tranquil, to love and be loved, to have a harmonious family life, fulfilling and meaningful work, intimate and nourishing friendships, a sense of contributing to your community, belonging to something greater than yourself, a wonder at the natural world, flashes of deep awe, a head full of questions
about how it all came to be, and, finally, coming to terms with letting it all go—at some point, not of your choosing."

"...‘Memento mori,’ the slave whispered into the general’s ear: ‘Remember you will die.’
The idea is to habituate yourself to thoughts of your own mortality. You can’t begin to properly contemplate death if you live in constant terror of it. By reminding ourselves regularly that we will die, we sharply bring into focus the one thing that really matters: the present moment—the time that we have. When we realise that our moments are slipping away with unceasing constancy, we come to realise how short life actually is."

"...These causes are located in three places: your world, your body, and your mind.
When you combine the causes and the places, there are nine ways to make your life better.
All of these are important, but growing resources in the mind has a unique power. It offers the greatest opportunity, since you usually have more influence over your mind than over your body or world. It also offers the greatest impact, since you take your mind with you wherever you go.
You can’t always count on the world, other people, or even your own body. But you can count on durable inner strengths hardwired into your nervous system—and this book is about growing them."

"Relevance, robustness and range are three strong reasons for applying behavioural science in your business. However, knowing you should apply behavioural science and actually applying behavioural science are different things.
When there is such a variety of biases, it can be hard to know where to start. This book aims to address that hurdle. Rather than race through a bewildering range of biases, I’ve selected the most pertinent: 16½ ideas that can both be applied easily and have the potential to make a large impact on marketing."

"...I mean it. Consider precognitive phenomena. I have long thought of these as the most well-documented and philosophically important of all impossible events. As such, they carry immense potential for influencing everything intellectuals and scientists do. If taken as real (by which I simply mean, “they happen”), such experiences and events (and they are both) would transform the entire order of knowledge upon which our present culture depends, the sciences included. For a start, they could tell us something stunning about the practice of history (time goes both ways), the history of religions (divination is globally distributed because it is based on an actual, if unreliable, human ability), the philosophy of mind (consciousness and cognition are not stuck in the present skull cavity or in this temporal slice of a body), and even something as abstract as causality itself (agency can act from the future). If we want to begin to learn how to think impossibly, precognitive phenomena are going to be a key to any such new order of knowledge."

"Impossible things certainly happen in numerous cultural zones and through specific ritual practices on a fairly routine basis. This is why a comparative practice is so necessary, so liberating and healing, but also so devastating to our local assumptions. Trained intellectuals who experience the impossible are commonly shocked and often see and say more or less the same thing: “It is not what we thought.”13
That is the very first lesson of thinking impossibly: recognizing that the impossible is a function not of reality but of our own present social constructions and subsequent perceptions and cognitions. That is also the humanist’s secret taken to its furthest point until it bends back on itself and consumes its own historical perspective. That is the deconstruction of deconstruction. That is the snake biting its own tail."

"WHILE IT WAS Gary Webb who pulled the trigger, the bullet that ended his life was a mere afterthought to the tragic unraveling of one of the most controversial and misunderstood journalists in recent American history. A college dropout with twenty years of reporting experience and a Pulitzer Prize on his resume, Webb broke the biggest story of his career in August 1996, when he published “Dark Alliance,” a three-part series for the San Jose Mercury News that linked the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to America’s crack-cocaine explosion.
Webb spent more than a year uncovering the shady connection between the CIA and drug trafficking through the agency’s relationship with the Nicaraguan contras, a right-wing army that aimed to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government during the 1980s. The Sandinistas were Marxist rebels who came to power in 1979 after the collapse of decades of U.S.- backed dictatorship at the hands of the Somoza family. President Reagan called the contras “freedom fighters” and compared them to America’s founding fathers. Even as Reagan uttered those words, the CIA was aware that the many of the contras’ supporters were deeply involved in cocaine smuggling, and were using the money to fund their army, or, as more often proved the case, to line their own pockets."

"...As this book will show, the controversy over “Dark Alliance” was the central event in Webb’s life, and the critical element in his eventual depression and suicide. His big story, despite major flaws of hyperbole abetted and even encouraged by his editors, remains one of the most important works of investigative journalism in recent American history. The connection Webb uncovered between the CIA, the contras and L.A.’s crack trade was real—and radioactive. Webb was hardly the first American journalist to lose his job after taking on the country’s most secretive government agency in print. Every serious reporter or politician that tried to unravel the connection between the CIA, the Nicaraguan contras and cocaine, had lived to regret it."

"Webb’s original draft highlighted the CIA’s involvement in the drug ring, but didn’t assert that the agency had conspired with Blandon or Meneses, but rather that it knew about their activities. In his 1998 book, Webb wrote that he “never believed, and never wrote, that there was a grand CIA conspiracy behind the crack plague. Indeed the more I learned about the agency, the more certain of that I became. The CIA couldn’t even mine a harbor without getting its trench coat stuck in its fly.”
Rather than a CIA conspiracy to flood the streets of South Central Los Angeles with crack, Webb stated in his book Dark Alliance that what transpired was “a horrible accident of history” abetted by bad timing. “The contras just happened to pick the worst possible time ever to begin peddling cheap cocaine in black neighborhoods—unbridled criminal stupidity, cloaked in a blanket of national security,” he wrote."

"...A time when much of the world has access to rigorously produced, independent, and carefully curated information on everything from our health to details about the black hole at the centre of our galaxy. There are more highly trained researchers than at any time in human history. There are more diverse voices and perspectives in the knowledge- creation mix. There is more research happening on more things. And there are more ways to access and share the knowledge produced by that research and analysis.
This is all good. And it should continue to excite and amaze us. It should give us hope that we can find rational and evidence-informed answers to our problems, both big and small. Both personal and societal."

"The present reality: our information environment—that space where we seek, contribute to, and interact with the world’s knowledge—is completely and truly f*cked. It is a tangle of lies, distortions, and rage- filled rants. This has created a massive paradox: we have more access to more knowledge than ever before and, at the same time, less and less certainty about the issues that matter to us.
Everybody knows this. It is a truism of our time. But it gets worse. The tools we use to navigate through the noise and to find some semblance of certainty—science and academic analysis, expert opinions, representations of consensus, and evidence- informed recommendations—are also being corrupted and twisted, often rendering them near useless. There are, for example, fewer transformative scientific discoveries happening now than in past decades, but research is hyped now more than ever. There are an increasing number of fake and poor- quality scientific journals that pollute both the academic literature and public discourse. It has become the norm to use bad science—and science-y language—to sell us bogus products, procedures, and policy agendas. Fake consumer reviews and ratings exploit our desire for authentic opinion. And even our search for clarity is manipulated by marketers using a manufactured and illusory certainty about what is healthy, needed, and good. We are adrift in a storm of information chaos, and we are tearing down the lighthouses."

"...The researchers paid hundreds of hardcore Fox News watchers fifteen dollars an hour to watch seven hours of CNN for an entire month. Despite the fact that many of the participants were likely suspicious of the goals of the research (“you’re trying to brainwash us with Anderson Cooper propaganda!”), the results were both surprising and encouraging. Watching CNN caused the Fox News fans to alter their perspectives, even on highly contentious and politically polarized issues..."

"While this is just one study with obvious limitations (paying people to be exposed to different perspectives isn’t a sustainable solution!), it is clear we need to consider ways to penetrate the citadels of certainty created by information echo chambers."

"...Although the killing was lowtech—performed largely by machete—it was carried out at dazzling speed: of an original population of about seven and a half million, at least eight hundred thousand people were killed in just a hundred days. Rwandans often speak of a million deaths, and they may be right. The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. It was the most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

"Considering the enormity of the task, it is tempting to play with theories of collective madness, mob mania, a fever of hatred erupted into a mass crime of passion, and to imagine the blind orgy of the mob, with each member killing one or two people. But at Nyarubuye, and at thousands of other sites in this tiny country, on the same days of a few months in 1994, hundreds of thousands of Hutus had worked as killers in regular shifts. There was always the next victim, and the next. What sustained them, beyond the frenzy of the first attack, through the plain physical exhaustion and mess of it?"

"The killers killed all day at Nyarubuye. At night they cut the Achilles tendons of survivors and went off to feast behind the church, roasting cattle looted from their victims in big fires, and drinking beer. (Bottled beer, banana beer—Rwandans may not drink more beer than other Africans, but they drink prodigious quantities of it around the clock.) And, in the morning, still drunk after whatever sleep they could find beneath the cries of their prey, the killers at Nyarubuye went back and killed again. Day after day, minute to minute, Tutsi by Tutsi: all across Rwanda, they worked like that. “It was a process,” Sergeant Francis said. I can see that it happened, I can be told how, and after nearly three years of looking around Rwanda and listening to Rwandans, I can tell you how, and I will. But the horror of it—the idiocy, the waste, the sheer wrongness—remains uncircumscribable."

"While convention holds that Hutus are a Bantu people who settled Rwanda first, coming from the south and west, and that Tutsis are a Nilotic people who migrated from the north and east, these theories draw more on legend than on documentable fact. With time, Hutus and Tutsis spoke the same language, followed the same religion, intermarried, and lived intermingled, without territorial distinctions, on the same hills, sharing the same social and political culture in small chiefdoms. The chiefs were called Mwamis, and some of them were Hutus, some Tutsis; Hutus and Tutsis fought together in the Mwamis’ armies; through marriage and clientage, Hutus could become hereditary Tutsis, and Tutsis could become hereditary Hutus. Because of all this mixing, ethnographers and historians have lately come to agree that Hutus and Tutsis cannot properly be called distinct ethnic groups."

"In discussions of us-against-them scenarios of popular violence, the fashion these days is to speak of mass hatred. But while hatred can be animating, it appeals to weakness. The “authors” of the genocide, as Rwandans call them, understood that in order to move a huge number of weak people to do wrong, it is necessary to appeal to their desire for strength—and the gray force that really drives people is power. Hatred and power are both, in their different ways, passions. The difference is that hatred is purely negative, while power is essentially positive: you surrender to hatred, but you aspire to power. In Rwanda, the orgy of misbegotten power that led to genocide was carried out in the name of Hutuness, and when Paul, a Hutu, set out to defy the killers, he did so by appealing to their passion for power: “they” were the ones who had chosen to take life away and he grasped that that meant they could also choose to extend the gift of retaining it."

"...At eighteen, he was diagnosed with osteosarcoma and learned that within days they would have to amputate his leg. He would then have to undergo harsh chemotherapy treatment for the next year and a half with only a thirty percent chance of surviving."

"The first experiences he shared were the ones he was having at the cancer clinic with his distress at what he was seeing. Not about himself — he rarely talked about his own reactions other than the loss of his hair — but he would talk about seeing people who were so sick. He’d see them the next time and they looked even worse, or he’d go the next time and they weren’t there at all. And that really, really upset him. That’s why his focus, I think, right from the beginning was “Why aren’t they making a difference? Why aren’t they researching this?” Because he could see that what people were doing was fundraising for comfort, fundraising for the equipment you might need, or fundraising for the services that you’re receiving in these specialized units, but they’re not going to prevent you from getting sick. And that became his real interest: research and getting rid of this in the first place, instead of having to deal with it afterwards."

"We all have defining moments in our lives—meaningful experiences that stand out in our memory. Many of them owe a great deal to chance: A lucky encounter with someone who becomes the love of your life. A new teacher who spots a talent you didn’t know you had. A sudden loss that upends the certainties of your life. A realization that you don’t want to spend one more day in your job. These moments seem to be the product of fate or luck or maybe a higher power’s interventions. We can’t control them.
But is that true? Must our defining moments just happen to us?"

"In this book, we have two goals: First, we want to examine defining moments and identify the traits they have in common. What, specifically, makes a particular experience memorable and meaningful? Our research shows that defining moments share a set of common elements.
Second, we want to show you how you can create defining moments by making use of those elements. Why would you want to create them? To enrich your life. To connect with others. To make memories. To improve the experience of customers or patients or employees.
Our lives are measured in moments, and defining moments are the ones that endure in our memories. In the pages ahead, we’ll show you how to make more of them."

"...Suggestion can make cheap wine taste like Château Margaux, warp our perception of time, and alter our memories. We know that psychedelic substances, illusions, and other dramatic effects can also alter our levels of suggestibility. But, paradoxically, being susceptible to suggestions hardly means we’re feeble-minded or gullible."

"Here, I share some of my best stories about the science of suggestion, the bread and butter of my professional life. Throughout my academic career, I have focused specifically on the role that suggestion plays in the effectiveness of psychiatric medications, alongside how attention, selfregulation, placebo phenomena, and expectations affect human consciousness. For example, sometimes placebos work even when people know that they are taking them. The fields of developmental psychopathology and transcultural psychiatry teach us how much our communities and social standards can shape our thoughts, emotions, and cognitive processing. And using imaging of the living human brain and other state-of-the-art techniques, my research has helped unravel the mental experiences of hypnosis and meditation."

"...by repeatedly showing participants photographs of famous and respected Black people, such as Martin Luther King Jr., and photographs of infamous and disapproved white people, such as criminal and cult leader Charles Manson, negative attitudes waned by more than 50 percent.57 Similarly, videos of Black people during positive activities such as going to church or enjoying a family barbecue also reduced implicit bias.58 These early efforts to change the social context and, through it, reduce automatic prejudice and preference have paved the road to diversity education."

"...In this way, and others, we can apply the science of suggestion—in a way that transcends lip service and performative activism—to result in real social impact, health outcomes, and political change."

"...No surprise, then, that the nocebo effect has been called “the placebo effect’s evil twin.” In our view, the nocebo effect can be summarized as “the occurrence of a harmful event that stems from consciously or subconsciously expecting it.” The core of the nocebo effect is that adverse health effects occur as a result of negative expectations. Expectations come up in everyday conversation, like when you tell a friend that you’re stuck in traffic but expect to meet them for dinner in twenty minutes. But it’s also an important technical term that academics use (sometimes interchangeably with expectancy), and it was popularized by Dr. Irving Kirsch at Harvard University. Expectancies can teach us a lot about our behavior and actions. They are critical to our health and well-being. The nocebo effect, then, can be thought of as the scientific term for saying that when you expect to feel sick, you are more likely to feel sick."

"Dopamine, like all neurotransmitters, contains the basic building blocks of life: oxygen, hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen. It exists not only in humans, but in all animals. Primitive lizards and reptiles living tens of millions of years ago had dopamine as part of their neurochemistry. What’s more, dopamine serves a similar role in animals as it does in humans: it modifies behaviours by playing a crucial function in learning and reinforcement from rewards."

"In this book, we are going to discuss the common triggers of anger, using some new research on the brain’s rage circuits. Then we are going to look at what happens in our body when we have an anger response. After the science-y part of what anger is, we’re gonna do the unfuckening part.
We’re gonna go through all those light-shining activities that help us understand our unique and personal anger responses, and discuss how to channel our anger into better relationships or barnstorming social action. And I’m gonna share all the work I’ve done in my life around learning how important forgiveness is for my own-damn-self. We are going to discuss ways of living with our very real and valid anger responses without losing our shit or swallowing our rage like so much poison. Because if feeling anger is OK, you can be angry and still be OK."

"By shifting from irritation and defensiveness, he validated the experiences of the individuals who have been victimized, which lent support to social change.
2) Own our privilege and power: We are not the sum of our disenfranchisement, we are the sum of our assets. And our assets are not just our fundamental agents of change, our recognition of them informs our compassion for others and our intersectionality. My friend Naomi Brown, who is a minister and social worker, calls this conscious using of privilege to help those who do not have it sneaking in the front door. Power and privilege lets us get into spaces others could not. This doesn’t mean speaking for them, but providing support and amplification of their experiences..."

"...Most of this usage presents mindfulness as a condition solely of the mind and often related to the practice of meditation. But mindfulness—as my students and I have shown—is instead the simple process of actively noticing things, no meditation required. When mindful, we notice things we didn’t notice before, and we come to see that we didn’t know the things we thought we knew as well as we thought we knew them. Everything becomes interesting and potentially useful in a new way..."

"But my use of the word “mindfulness” also, importantly, refers to a condition of the body. Indeed, I believe our psychology may be the most important determinant of our health. I’m not just speaking of harmony between mind and body. I believe the mind and body comprise a single system, and every change in the human being is essentially simultaneously a change at the level of the mind (that is, a cognitive change) as well as the body (a hormonal, neural, and/or behavioral change). When we open our minds to this idea of mind-body unity, new possibilities for controlling our health become real. Making use of the power of a mindful body is well within our grasp."

"Schopenhauer is presumed to have said, “All research passes through three phases: First it is ridiculed; then it is violently opposed; and third it is accepted as self-evident.”

"...People seeking enlightenment or relief from stress, anxiety, and pain have been the primary audience.
Therefore, most mindfulness teachers have continued to discuss mindfulness within that frame. That frame has been so narrow for so long it might seem that mindfulness is only for the spiritually inclined, or for people with challenging medical issues, such as panic attacks, paralyzing anxiety, and deep depression, or people who just want some stress relief.
That couldn't be further from the truth..."

"I don't know why you picked up this book, but given the title it might be that you've had the thought, “What the hell is all the hype about mindfulness?” You may be one of the millions of people who have been curious about mindfulness but don't want to be associated with the spiritual crowd that so often drowns out its core meaning. Perhaps you recoil at the thought of listening to someone breathlessly guide meditations in a sickly sweet voice. Maybe you thought you'd need to join a yoga studio and get a subscription for monthly deliveries of incense. If any of those have been keeping you from trying out mindfulness, this book is for you. In these pages, I peel back the layers of hype and hyperbole about mindfulness and provide a practical and demystified approach to reaping the real benefits from a consistent mindfulness practice over just an 8-week period.
The concept of "Mindfulness" is not new, despite the many new Western practitioners who have emerged in the last few decades. Although mindful practices are just hitting an upswing here, they have been a component of Eastern philosophy, namely Hinduism and Buddhism, for a few thousand years."

"Mindfulness is an ability to keep attention on one's present moment experience without getting too caught up in automatic thoughts and judgments."

"Attending my first mindfulness teacher training course was quite a shock. In the morning on the first day, the teachers came into the room holding small bells, wearing Buddhist beads, and carrying special cushions on which they meditated. This struck me as odd, because I had signed up for the “secular” mindfulness teacher training. It did not take long to gather that this “secular” training was going to be deeply intertwined with overtly spiritual and new-age thoughts, positions, and perspectives. There were–I kid you not–even Tarot card readings at an evening event and scores of participant comments during the training were met with the response, “That's so beautiful.” If you want to turn off a corporate audience and never be invited back beyond what your original contract stipulated, just do what's in this paragraph."

"As you progress through the book and do the exercises, you can gain a greater ability to respond thoughtfully and calmly in the midst of high-pressure and complex situations, become more agile in the face of change, and pay more attention to the things you deem most important. You will learn practices that are known to lead to enhanced mental focus, empathy, and resilience. Through consistent practice, you can become aware of some of your self-created challenges and learn ways to avoid automatically falling into the same patterns so you can get out of your own way. You will learn ways to be less affected by unhelpful internal dialogue, limiting beliefs, and irrational feelings of fear (failure, embarrassment, and criticism), allowing you to see and seize opportunities to grow beyond what you previously thought possible and unlock your latent potential. Finally, you'll also begin to be able to connect with people around you more fully and effectively. These benefits cascade and compound, resulting in improvements in performance, leadership, and well-being."

"This is a book to help you change things. We consider change at every level—individual, organizational, and societal. Maybe you want to help your brother beat his gambling addiction. Maybe you need your team at work to act more frugally because of market conditions. Maybe you wish more of your neighbors would bike to work.
Usually these topics are treated separately—there is “change management” advice for executives and “self-help” advice for individuals and “change the world” advice for activists. That’s a shame, because all change efforts have something in common: For anything to change, someone has to start acting differently. Your brother has got to stay out of the casino; your employees have got to start booking coach fares. Ultimately, all change efforts boil down to the same mission: Can you get people to start behaving in a new way?..."