Jung's Red Book

This came from my real world/day job persona. Jung was a major influence in my decision to become a psychology major in college. What are the chances that anybody will ever do with the Jung's Red Book what Elif Ayiter did with with Freud's ideas and her Entre Loup Et Chien?

From SmartBrief on Leadership:

Psychology's most famous suppressed work sees daylight Carl Jung's "Red Book" is finally being published, after being kept under wraps by his descendants since his death in 1961. The book details what Jung called his "confrontation with the unconscious" through 205 pages of elaborate illuminated text and illustrations of mythological figures. Jung worried that publishing the book during his life would undermine his credibility as as a scientist. previously on Yahoo!/The Associated Press (10/3)

Exploring Pathways of Vision, Sight and Insight

This blog started off as a personal trek to explore new paradigms. It has succeeded in doing that for myself and hopefully some few others along the way. These paradigm pathways have a tendency to cross over one another and create opportunities for serendipity. Even though the rule in blogging is too focus on one idea in short narratives, my habit is to ignore that advice and attempt to link different ideas. Two important sources for new ideas are TED and MIT for seeking pragmatic solutions and personal wisdom in redefining one's self as its says in the header.

Recently, I came across four videos from both sources that had a common set of themes, brain, cognition, vision, but also led to other pathways of compassion and social change. All involved understanding, but used different applications of that word.

In this episode of TEDTalks (video) on Tom Wujec on 3 ways the brain creates meaning - Tom Wujec (2009) -

Information designer Tom Wujec talks through three areas of the brain that help us understand words, images, feelings, connections. In this short talk from TEDU, he asks: How can we best engage our brains to help us better understand big ideas?

Cognitive psychologists now tell us that the brain doesn't actually see the world as it is, but instead, creates a series of mental models through a collection of "Ah-ha moments," or moments of discovery, through various processes.

So making images meaningful has three components. The first again, is making ideas clear by visualizing them. Secondly, making them interactive. And then thirdly, making them persistent. And I believe that these three principles can be applied to solving some of the very tough problems that we face in the world today. Thanks so much.

The next two videos from MITWorld, though longer in length, are well worth watching.

The first continues with the exploration of cognition and vision through - Computers with Commonsense: Artificial Intelligence at the MIT Round Table

Patrick Henry Winston ponders what makes humans different from our primate cousins. His field of artificial intelligence extends that question to thinking about how humans differ from computers, with a goal to "develop a computational theory of intelligence."

"We think with our eyes…vision is the locus of every profound kind of problem solving."

Patrick Henry Winston

The next MITWorld video takes us back to the human and to the humane -

Opening the Mind’s Eye-Learning to See

"Whenever we're asked how the brain does X or Y, the impulse is to work with this beloved creature, the human infant, to see how it acquires different capabilities... But there are challenges: Babies are not interested in being experimental subjects. They'd rather sleep than give us good data."

Pawan Sinha

The reason the Pawan Sinha video goes beyond interesting to inspiring is because

Sinha found these subjects in his native India, which has the world’s highest number of blind children -- more than one million. They are victims of Vitamin A deficiency, congenital cataracts, and absent or atrocious medical care. But salient to Sinha’s research, many of these blind children could be treated. He glimpsed a humanitarian and scientific opportunity, and Project Prakash (Sanskrit for light) was born .

It’s rare to find research that simultaneously advances basic science and brings immediate good into people’s lives, but Pawan Sinha’s Project Prakash does precisely that. An investigator of human visual processing, Sinha is interested in how these brain mechanisms develop, and in treating India's vast population of blind children.

The final video is another short one from TED and deals again with vision, but vision both from the idea of seeing and the idea of envisioning a new world. Both aspects of our understanding are necessary to bring about this new world, the understanding of our world and nature and the understanding we must show to each other.

Atomic physicist Joshua Silver invented liquid-filled optical lenses to produce low-cost, adjustable glasses, giving sight to millions without access to an optometrist. At TEDGlobal 2009, he demos his affordable eyeglasses and reveals his global plan to distribute them to a billion people in need by 2020.

12 Hacks 6 Myths And Other Ways On Amping Your Brainpower

As the title and tags of this weblog would indicate, there is a strong interest in endeavoring to ensure that the personal paradigm shifts that life has in store be positive

Modern science continues to provide increasing hope that life will continue to be interesting and inspiring.

Alexis Madrigal told us back in April that we could Forget Brain Age: Researchers Develop Software That Makes You Smarter via Wired Top Stories.

Brain researchers for the first time claim to have found a method for improving the general problem-solving ability scientists call fluid intelligence, otherwise known as "smarts."

Fluid intelligence was previously thought to be genetically hard-wired, but the finding suggests that with about 25 minutes of rigorous mental training a day, healthy adults could improve their mental capacities.

"The most important point of our work is that we can show that it is possible to improve fluid intelligence," said Martin Buschkuehl, a psychology researcher based at the University of Bern, Switzerland. "It was assumed that fluid intelligence was immutable."

And that's where Buschkuehl's research, which appears today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, claims to be groundbreaking.

A very simplified DIY version of the n-back described here also leads to an interesting article on looking at the brain with an MRI.

Wired Magazine also provided other ways to Get Smarter: 12 Hacks That Will Amp Up Your Brainpower via Wired Top Stories back in April 08.

If your IQ is hardwired, how can you get smarter? Lots of ways, and our guide to better brain power shows you how. Think of it as a software upgrade to maximize your "functional intelligence."

It also helps with exposing 6 Intelligence Myths via Wired Top Stories

We've all used the arguments to get away with playing Brain Age or doing crosswords. But how many of these "exercises" really sharpen your wits or fend off senility?

Right now I am testing out the hypothesis that keeping a weblog is a good way to exercise your brain.

Intentions Words Actions Of the Brain By The Brain For The Brain

This weblog started with a bias towards behavioral economics when it began its philosophical inquiry into the dismal science because of my undergraduate degree in Research Psychology and well established inclinations. Psychology has a tendency though to focus on the individual as in the question asked by Gary Marcus.

Does your brain have a mind of its own? by Gary Marcus on May 4, 2008 at latimes.com

Why can't we stick to our goals? Blame the sloppy engineering of evolution.

How many times has this happened to you? You leave work, decide that you need to get groceries on the way home, take a cellphone call and forget all about your plan. Next thing you know, you've driven home and forgotten all about the groceries.

This obviously takes a evolutionary/biological approach, but using the prevalent analogy of brain as computer there is also the programing needed to make it interact with other brains. That programing would seem to be language, though to what degree it is hardwired/genetic or software/environmental learning is still something to be far better understood.

Study finds some thoughts really do require language Posted on: February 14, 2008 3:17 PM, by Dave Munger Category: Language • Reasoning • Research

I don't need words to think about the shape of a car, or how to throw a football, or the taste of a chocolate chip cookie. In fact, things like that are probably easier to think about without using language. That's why the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis -- that language is necessary for conscious thought -- doesn't hold up. But even if language isn't required for some domains, it's still possible that it is required for certain types of mental processes. It may even be required for some thoughts that aren't obviously related to language.Some research suggests that understanding the thoughts of others -- having a theory of mind -- is one such process. Many children who are late in learning language are also late in developing a theory of mind. This story illustrates the classic theory of mind test:

• Mouse nibbles cheese.
• Mouse puts cheese under box A
• Mouse leaves room
• Cat enters room, moves cheese from box A to box B, and leaves.
• Mouse returns.
  

• Where does Mouse think the cheese is?

Raising the question, does understanding false beliefs of others require language? The "answer" is at the original post

David Munger goes on to write about Ashley Newton and Jill de Villiers who developed a very clever experiment to test this question.

Newton and de Villiers say there are a number of aspects of language processing that could be responsible for interfering with the false-belief test, but it's quite clear that some sort of language processing is necessary in order to reason about false beliefs. So while language isn't a requirement for all thought, it most definitely appears to be a requirement for some thought.

So how does this apply when we move outside the psychological laboratories and experiments? This weblog has been contemplating the many-to-many interactions of sociology and social-grouping that the web helps to make more apparent. With Web 2.0, it is possible to draw the lines. With economics, the lines would seem to be harder to specifically determine until after the fact, though models can be created for useful and often practical approximations.

Andreessen on The Psychology of Human Misjudgment via Marginal Revolution by Alex Tabarrok on 3/28/08

Professor Tabarrok provides access to the, "Great insights from two legendary entrepreneurs" - Marc Andreessen and Charlie Munger author of The Psychology of Human Misjudgment.

Mr. Anderson: Mr. Munger's magnum opus speech, included in the book, is The Psychology of Human Misjudgment -- an exposition of 25 key forms of human behavior that lead to misjudgment and error, derived from Mr. Munger's 60 years of business experience. Think of it as a practitioner's summary of human psychology and behavioral economics as observed in the real world.

Mr. Munger: ...almost everyone thinks he fully recognizes how important incentives and disincentives are in changing cognition and behavior. But this is not often so. For instance, I think I've been in the top five percent of my age cohort almost all my adult life in understanding the power of incentives, and yet I've always underestimated that power. Never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes a little further my appreciation of incentive superpower.

What the Marginal Revolution post does, to my mind, is put the individual question raised by Gary Marcus to a human species level of inquiry, not as individuals within the species but as a biological organism whose survival depends not only upon its interaction with the environment but its interaction with itself.

Our Understanding Of Ourselves Advancing Or Retreating

Two adherents of the dismal science took a look at the other social sciences and their progress in recent times.

Tyler Cowen on 4/1/08 discussed Gordon Tullock's The Organization of Inquiry and provided the full Tullock symposium here), in a Marginal Revolution Why are the social sciences backward?

This post is a summation of the original Marginal Revolution post which was itself an entry point to further reading or study. The topic is far too complex to fit into a few computer screen's worth of text . Unfortunately, the source materials are not available without cost. What this post can provide is some additional links and consider how this fits with what has been learned before.

Tullock next turns to what he considers to be the real reasons behind the backwardness of the social sciences:

• Differences in the social organization of natural versus social science.
• The relative absence of applied research:
• One example given is that there is no way to patent new sales technique?
• Many fewer checks from the applied side on pure social science research unlike the natural sciences
• The second motive for research, curiosity, is in the social sciences "likely to get distracted to essentially non-scientific ends."

According to Tullock, this is because in the social sciences: there is a strong possibility of artistic distraction. Literature of all kinds is quite frequently based on careful observation of human beings. A large number of brilliant men led by their curiosity to study their fellow men have produced great literature instead of science (p. 151).

Professor Cowen also brings into the discussion Mises and Hayek, to whom in Tullock is responding , who thought that the social sciences were different because matters of human affairs are more complex and because of the subjective dimension of human choice and expectation.

More can be found at the original post with an interesting link at complexity by Bruce Edmonds of the Centre for Policy Modelling, Manchester Metropolitan University Business School,

Professor Cowen goes on to argue that "that while economics lags behind physics, we understand the economy better than we understand the human brain or for that matter the deep ocean. "

I see complexity of the topic and accessibility to information as determining the progress of a science; I am not so far from Hayek's view, although he underestimated how much progress quantitative and experimental economics could make.

It seems there were even ancient computers, not to mention advanced philosophy. So the point remains: the absence of a developed economics until the mid-18th century remains a startling anomaly in the history of ideas. Why was that?

An Addendum to the original Marginal Revolution post provides EconLog's Arnold Kling's perspective.

Stephen J. Dubner via Freakonomics back on 4/8/08 questioned, "How Much Progress Have Psychology and Psychiatry Really Made?" in a Freakonomics Quorum

The debate about the effectiveness and safety of psychiatric drugs rambles on while new (if not conclusive) psychological studies come out with the frequency of fad diets. We invited some people who think a lot about such issues -- David B. Baker, John Medina, Dan Ariely, Satoshi Kanazawa, Peter D. Kramer, and Laurie Schwartz

Again, as with the Tyler Cowen post above, this is far too complicated a topic to do the original post justice without simply repeating the entire article, so this is not a substitute. It does bring up though the same argument emphasizing the differences between social and natural sciences, but this time within the same arena. There isn't a lack of progress but an ever increasing complexity within the fields as different disciplines cross over one and other.

for John Medina:

My personal hero in the exodus away from mental superstition is a large bolus of ego named Emil Kraepelin (1856 to 1926). He had the audacity to assume everything that was psychological was simultaneously biological.

Dan Ariely, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management, principal investigator of the MIT Media Lab’s eRationality group, and author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions takes the view"

“This, in my mind, is another important lesson that psychologists have learned — that our intuitions about what drives our behavior are not always correct.”

It seems to me that Professor Cowen's claim that our knowledge of economics is less than that of physics but far greater than the human brain pays too little attention to point that economics is able to smooth out the variables it studies to arrive at general principals, while modern neurosciences such as neurochemistry cannot. Economics is also arguably the consequence of the decision process by biological creatures. While we can make generalized predictions with economics, do we really understand the process if we don't understand the organisms that make those decisions?

This post has dealt with complexity, irrationality and mentioned the concept of artistic distraction, all in the course of studying economics, definitely food for further thought.

Embrace The Zen Of Presentation And Science Of Powerpoint

The web version 2.0 has a distinctive visual component, as does PowerPoint. One area this weblog has delved into is design. Another area of interest is psychology and brain-science, especially as it relates to communication using web 2.0 technology. Design and psychology can be combined in both web 2.0 and PowerPoint.

I have been interested in finding better ways to communicate using the web 2.0 tools I have been learning. The TEDBlog advised us on 2/19/08 to Embrace the zen of presentation.

Garr Reynolds uses some favorite TED speakers to help others refine, simplify and focus their own presentations and talks in his new book, Presentation Zen.

What makes a great TED speaker?
Passion, connection, a story to tell.

The TEDBlog also told us that on 2/16/08 told us that Brain science makes better PowerPoint, via the io9 blog -- Matthew Trost, using rules might remind you of some of the innovative TEDTalks presentations.

Stephen M. Kosslyn, professor and researcher in mental imagery at Harvard shared some quirkily titled guidelines at AAAS.

1. The Goldilocks Rule refers to presenting the "just right" amount of data. Never include more information than your audience needs in a visual image.
   
2. The Rudolph Rule refers to simple ways you can make information stand out and guide your audience to important details
3. The Rule of Four is a simple but powerful tool that grows out of the fact that the brain can generally hold only four pieces of visual information simultaneously.
4. The Birds of a Feather Rule how to organize information when you want to show things in groups.
   

"Kosslyn's co-panelist, Stanford psychologist Barbara Tversky, explained that one of the fundamental principles of data visualization is, ironically, misrepresentation in order to get at the truth.
Good to know: The human brain likes to spot differences and oddities -- and it doesn't like to see more than four things at once.

So we use visual designs to tell a story. There have been a number of other articles passing by my computer screen that touch upon how we our brains effect how we communicate, both visually and cognitively.

Embrace The Zen Of Presentation And Science Of Powerpoint pt. 2

Cognitive Daily on 2/19/08 taught us more about the visual system through the anatomy of an illusion.

Take a look at this amazing illusion created by Arthur Shapiro (you'll need the latest version of Flash Player to see it):

You're looking at two donut-shaped figures whose "holes" are gradually changing color from black to white and back again. It appears that the holes are changing in an opposite pattern -- when one is light, the other is dark, and so on. But if you click to remove the surrounding donuts, you'll see that the two holes are actually changing together.

Shapiro calls this the Contrast Asynchrony illusion, and he argues that it can tell us a lot about how the visual system works.

Definitely worthwhile to read the rest of the original post...

Finally, I found a recent study shows that the human brain reacts differently to people that seem like us than to those who don't through jason@kottke.org via kottke.org by on 2/7/08

The experimenters used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of Harvard and other Boston-area students while showing them pictures of other college-age people whom the researchers randomly described as either liberal northeastern students or conservative Midwest fundamentalist Christian students.

The study concludes that the secret to getting along with someone that you perceive as an outsider is to find some common ground so that your brain will accept them as someone with similar circumstances.

David Galbraith expands upon what this means for society at large:
In other words, a civilized society depends not on the people who are currently the most civilized, but those who are most willing to accept change, as social or cultural groupings change, split or coalesce. Inevitably this means reasonable people rather than faithful people.

As Garr Reynolds says, "If your idea is worth spreading, then presentation matters." It would seem we need to do our best to combine both the visual and the cognitive with PowerPoint and Web 2.0.

Learning To Be A More Social Conversationalist (And Blog-Tagger)

I have to figure it can't hurt to try to become more socially rounded (though spending time blogging could argue against how good are my intentions) in today's world and since Penelope Trunk seems to be a voice of today in 21st century networking it makes sense to take heed of her advice.

This also allows me to test out the diigo blogging tool with which I have been experimenting. I can't completely put aside this weblog's geek-factor. This post includes summaries of a couple of her posts on this subject (the social one).

How to be more interesting to other people » Brazen Careerist by Penelope Trunk Diigo Annotated

But I did learn some lessons from my visual art mentors, and one really cool thing someone taught me is that the color I choose is most interesting where it intersects with another color. Just knowing the right color to use is not the clever, interesting thing. Rather, interesting is when I am unsure what the two colors will do when they interact. (Here’s a great set of paintings that illustrate this idea.)

The same is true for writing. The interesting part of writing is not the part of the piece where you know exactly where it’s going. The interesting part is when you get to an unplanned moment in a paragraph and you surprise yourself by what you write next. It’s the moment of uncertainty, when you have to look inside yourself to keep going, and pull out something you didn’t know you had before.

A while back I wrote about Moira Gunn, and how she is good at interviewing people because she can find what’s interesting about them. She interviews scientists, and she is a pro at finding the quirky, unexpected moment within the topic of their science.

How to start a quality conversation with someone you don’t know » Brazen Careerist by Penelope Trunk Diigo Annotated tags: career, psychology

The way that Gunn gets such fun and interesting interviews out of her subjects is by not having a preconception of what they’ll be talking about. She wants to find that spot where they are engaged and knowledgeable, because anyone on any topic will be interesting if they have that. She says the key is to be open to where the other person wants to go, and to listen.

It’s Gunn’s job to figure out a way to connect with these scientists and part of the fun of the interviews is hearing her do that, because it’s what we have to do all the time when we make small talk. Yes, the scientists are extremely smart, but Gunn says the hard part is to get them to the point where they are talking about something comprehensible.

Stumbling on Sadness? Searching For Meaning?

TEDBlog had a post on Stumbling on sadness?

Many TEDTalks explore themes of happiness -- Stumbling on Happiness' Daniel Gilbert, Mattheiu Ricard (who's been called the Happiest Man on Earth), happy designer Stefan Sagmeister, and many more ...

Now a recent story in Newsweek rounds up the latest on happiness' opposite: sadness. It's an interesting gloss on the growing happiness industry -- and what the story calls "the backlash against the happiness rat race."

Stumbling on sadness is perhaps the TED Blog's stab at a minor alliteration, but having recently started using Stumble Upon, the social tagging system, I decided to see what they offered regarding happiness and sadness.

My own Stumbling sites on happiness are limited though this is more a matter of not tagging properly. Here are other Stumbling sites on happiness. I don't have any of my own, but here are some Stumbling sites on sadness.

This weblog has had a number of posts in the past dealing with the question of happiness.

Collaboration Moving Masses Through Compassion

Previously, I quoted Seth Godin as saying.

One more reason not to obsess about the A list in any media category. Worry instead about people with passion and people with lots of friends. You need both for ideas to spread. That was Malcolm's point all along.

I agree, but it's actually the concept of passion and people that I agree with, not what is Malcolm's Gladwell's point. I am even more sure that it is not Duncan Watt's point. Also raised a point regarding what had been said about the quality of feedback to and from a subsystem within a larger (information) system when dealing with unintended consequences.

What was missing from these discussions was the concept of collaboration. Both the posting on Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point and the posting on Unintended Consequences raised by the Freakonomics involved basically unilateral communications or at least the appearance of it.

If there was two-way communication, it was not conscious, purposeful nor intentional. The example of inter-ethnic violence cited by the British Psychological Society Research Digest blog, featured in past posts best illustrated the disruptive capacity of this, while the most illustrative example of decentralized crowd wisdom collaboration was undoubtedly Cosmic Variance's starlings used in a previous post to discuss greed and the human condition.

I realize that statistically we can see trends moving in certain directions and ignore the actions of the individual. But I am also reminded of the words of Krishinamurti.

Challenging The "Popular" Theory Of Group and Individual Interaction

Kottke.org by jason@kottke.org puts his two cents in on the Fast Company article By: Clive Thompson regarding Duncan Watts' research.

Duncan Watts' research is challenging the theory that a small group of influential people are responsible for triggering trends as explained in Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point.

"If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one--and if it isn't, then almost no one can," Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it's less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public's mood. Sure, there'll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts's terminology, an "accidental Influential."

Perhaps the problem with viral marketing is that the disease metaphor is misleading. Watts thinks trends are more like forest fires:

"And nobody," Watts says wryly, "will go around talking about the exceptional properties of the spark that started the fire."

Jason has more here of what he has previously covered about the topic of the article.(link)

Seth's Blog by Seth Godin has its own perspective on Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point plus that of some other Web 2.0 elite via The Hyping Point.

As I understand it, people are influenced by the people around them. That we act, like buffalo, in a herd. The idea that a single influential individual (even a blogger like Guy or a talk show host like Oprah) can individually change the herd is crazy, and I don't think anyone has argued that.

What should be really clear, though, is that people with big audiences certainly count as one of the people around you. If the guy down the row at work buys a Mac Air, it counts. If Guy buys a Mac Air, it counts just as much (or possibly a bit more).

Since people with big audiences have more 'friends' and have more 'people down the hall', they have more influence. Not because they count for more, just because they 'know' more people.

Cory Doctorow's take on it is here. Steve Pyke provides a guest perspective at Guy Kawasaki's blog. Steve agrees with Seth that this is One more reason not to obsess about the A list in any media category. Worry instead about people with passion and people with lots of friends. You need both for ideas to spread. That was Malcolm's point all along. I can agree with that

Seth uses his own Unleashing the Ideavirus as an example which he says, didn't spread because 'important' people endorsed and promoted it. It spread because passionate people did.

I can't fully buy Seth Godin's thinking on this one. He seems to be trying too hard to keep everybody happy. One issue is that we are looking at this from a very slanted and narrow perspective - marketing. At least narrow when compared to the larger fields of human psychology and sociology. We could even go one step further and talk about organic and inorganic information systems and how they interrelate. This weblog has posted previously to the ability of birds to communicate individual data that is transformed into group decisions in flight, basically bird-brains can effectively work in unison. While humans afflicted with ancient hate have the same deterministic predictability as inorganic chemicals. Seth is right in that it is a matter of balance, but as has also been argued in a previous post Nature Is Better At Balancing Complex Systems Than We Are. The problem is that this seemingly goes against what was said about feedback to and from a subsystem within a larger (information) system when dealing with unintended consequences. This is going to take a bit more thought.

Looking Again To Happiness

All of this philosophical musings is all to the good but I am not enough of a martyr or a proselyte to give up on the goal of Happiness.

Cognitive Daily asks the question: Is it possible to be too happy?

• A team led by Shigehiro Oishi conducted what they claim is the first study of the idea that there may be an optimal happiness level. There is a wealth of data available that includes some measure of happiness along with other possible measures of well-being, so rather than conducting a new survey, the researchers re-analyzed several different data sets with an eye to learning if the optimal level of happiness might be something less than "perfectly content."
  

Cognitive Daily: If short-term happiness isn't always best, what about long-term?

• Earlier this week we discussed the relationship between life satisfaction and other measures of well-being, finding that for measures such as relative income, the happiest people weren't always the best-off. For relationships, however, the happiest individuals also seem to do better.

  But these measures were only taken at an instant in time. What about over longer periods? The College and Beyond study questioned incoming college freshmen in 1976, and included a self-rating of "cheerfulness," among many other measures. Then those same individuals were surveyed in 1995. How did cheerfulness affect income nearly two decades later? Here are the results:

  
  

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Passion Alone Is Not Enough For You Or Anybody Else

Love Your Job? That Doesn't Mean Youre Better at It - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog

Love Your Job? That Doesn’t Mean You’re Better at It according to a recent article by Melissa Lafsky via the Freakonomics Blog.

"So is it really a fact that happiness breeds a better worker?

"Not necessarily, according to Wright State University psychologist Nathan Bowling. In a new paper called “Is the job satisfaction–job performance relationship spurious? A meta-analytic examination,” he re-assesses conclusions from five previous meta-analyses of the Big Five personality traits. He also conducts his own meta-analysis of the issue, focusing on studies that used data from thousands of employees and controlled for work-related self-esteem (how valuable employees think they are) and locus of control (how much they think they’ll be rewarded for a job well done)."

"His conclusion is right out of a Freakonomics lesson in causation vs. correlation:"

"My study shows that a cause and effect relationship does not exist between job satisfaction and performance. Instead, the two are related because both satisfaction and performance are the result of employee personality characteristics, such as self-esteem, emotional stability, extroversion and conscientiousness."

So the fact we have passion alone is not only not enough to sustain us through the ordeals we are likely to find ahead, its not enough to get anybody to want to keep us around. It seems to be more a matter of who you are in terms of values and character than what you want. Then again who your are dictates to a great extent what it is that you want out of life. People who are passionate are not necessarily good at what they do, but so often I find that people who are good at what they do are passionate.

Digging Your Way In and Out Of A Hole 2

Continuing with the concepts from the last post, TEDblog also had something to say about How toddlers (and monkeys) make choices. They focused though more directly on the question of human happiness citing the same study as the New York Times article in the previous post. However, they or their links to the Proper Study of the Mankind provide the actual recent study published in Psychological Science, by Louisa Egan, Laurie Santos and Paul Bloom, as well as better sources for in-depth inquiry and other voices that took part in the discussion. This includes Barry Schwartz, who spoke on the paradox of choice at TED. Other speakers on What Makes Us Happy have also spoken in the past at TED on this subject.

This led to other sources of insight. Dr Christian Jarrett, BSc MSc PhD, is according to his writeup, a writer/editor specialising in psychology and the neurosciences. He works full-time for the British Psychological Society as inaugural editor/writer of their Research Digest. His blog had two articles of interest to this line of inquiry - How ignorance can lead to the right answer and Inter-ethnic violence predicted by same rules that govern chemicals. This reminded me of a past post that linked to a Cosmic Variance article Birds of a Feather. The fascinating premise of the article is that the movement of the flock was created by the decisions of the individual birds.

So where does this leave us? We enter the world in ignorance. We become very good in justifying our selves and our ignorance. As Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson point out in their book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me), "we create fictions that absolve us of responsibility, restoring our belief that we are smart, moral, and right—a belief that often keeps us on a course that is dumb, immoral, and wrong". I do believe though that we can make decisions that transcend cognitive dissonance, where we don't create a false belief to justify ourselves, but we must also be willing to not continue to attach to that which we chose not to pick.

"The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." F. Scott Fitzgerald

Thinking Your Way Into and Out Of A Hole

So now I have something to write about even more foundational to the concept of self-generated paradigm shifts than those concepts touched upon in my last few posts, the workings of our mind. Also reaffirmed again the idea that the combination of identifying viable sources of information with a bit of serendipitous web-wandering can result in a number of interesting results. Nobody can complain about not finding enough interesting and knowledgeable information on the Web to write about.

The New York Times defines it as, "...self-delusion, the result of what’s called cognitive dissonance..." "...Psychologists have suggested we hone our skills of rationalization in order to impress others, reaffirm our “moral integrity” and protect our “self-concept” and feeling of “global self-worth.” In other words, it would seem to be ego-focused. The question then is at what level does this take place?

“If little children and primates show pretty much the same pattern you see in adults, it calls into question just how deliberate these rationalization processes are,” he says. “We tend to think people have an explicit agenda to rewrite history to make themselves look right, but that’s an outsider’s perspective. This experiment shows that there isn’t always much conscious thought going on.”

The article goes on to provide a rational for this approach that could have evolutionary consequences. "Once a decision has been made, second-guessing may just interfere with more important business. A fox who pines for abandoned grapes or a monkey who keeps agonizing over food choices could be wasting energy better expended obtaining the next meal."

There are, however, other explanations for this psychological occurrence. From John Tierney's TierneyLab Blog for the New York Times.

Other experts suggested that the monkeys’ behavior tended to support “self-perception” theory — which (bear with me) is not the same as “self-concept” theory. It’s the theory that once you perceive yourself making a choice — say, an electric sandwich press over a toaster, as in the classic experiment I described in my column — then you conclude that the toaster must be unappealing to you simply because you rejected it, not because you’re trying to banish the dissonant thought that you made a mistake.

Social psychologist Daniel Gilbert, the author of “Stumbling On Happiness” has the following take on the study.

"The data in the monkey study are extremely interesting. They could be interpreted in terms of cognitive dissonance theory, but there are other interpretations as well. For example, monkeys may be wired not to waste time making the same evaluation twice. So once they reject something, they remember that they rejected it and reject it again in the future. The fact that monkeys derogate unchosen items is novel and important, but the “Why?” question is still unanswered."

John Tierney sums it up nicely,

"Are you sensing some dissonance among researchers here? Well, they’ve only been debating this topic for half a century now."

If Money Doesn't Buy Happiness But Happiness Gets Money What Do You Use The Money For?

Mind Hacks looks at the relationship between money and happiness "The relationship between money and happiness:Newsweek has a brief article on what research has told us about the link between money and happiness. Essentially, more money makes you happier until you're comfortable, and then, it really doesn't do much good. "

Another blog post from Fast Company puts the optimal point of money with happiness at, $1.5 million. Googling "'money and happiness' on the FC website. According to this 2003 article, $1.5 million net worth is the magic figure where people's feelings of happiness go from nowhere to nirvana in nanoseconds."

Even more helpful, since getting $1.5 million any time soon is unlikely, is some good advice as to what to avoid being:

Uncomfortably challenged = stress and an untimely death.
Comfortably unchallenged = numb and stagnant; has a strange habit of morphing into uncomfortably unchallenged over time.

The post goes on to discuss finding happiness by following the different drummer in your career. This according to another Fast Company article means happiness comes from figuring out "How to Get the Job of Your Dreams"

"There's heaps of research out there that shows that the quality of your work affects your well-being and mental health. This has spillover effects for your life outside of work," says Professor Sharon Parker, Director of the Institute of Work Psychology at the University of Sheffield. She emphasizes that money is not usually the sole motivating factor behind why people choose to stay in a particular job; more important is whether it's challenging, exciting and stimulating."

Dan Gilbert provides insights into why we are happy and why we are not happy.

It is however Matthieu Ricard: Monk, author, photographer who provides us the habits of happiness.

Emotionally, the best may be yet to come - Los Angeles Times

According to the Los Angeles Times - Emotionally, the best may be yet to come - :

"The paradox of aging is that there is this decline in physical well-being and cognitive status and yet an increase in psychological well-being," Carstensen says. "We [colleagues in her laboratory] don't think of that as a paradox, of course, because it's the decline that reminds people that life will not go on forever."

With an eye on the clock, older people are more selective about their activities and relationships, Wood says. The happiest find ways to feel useful, giving them a sense of purpose and making their time feel meaningful. The happiest tend to say they enjoy serving others in some capacity.

"I think of old age as the richest form of emotional satisfaction that is possible," Carstensen says. "There are still positive emotions, but there is also an understanding and appreciation that there is an ending around the corner."

An appreciation of remaining time leads older people to be more grateful for what they have, Carstensen and other researchers say. And being thankful is great for mental health. Studies by Robert A. Emmons, a psychology professor at UC Davis, show that people who focus on what they are grateful for have better emotional well-being, especially a positive mood, compared with people who focus on the negative or neutral information.

"When you focus on gratefulness, you see that other people are providing you with support and value you," says Emmons, author of the book "Thanks! How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier." "You see that good stuff doesn't just happen randomly. It helps you make sense out of life. Grateful people see their lives as gifts."

Being able to forgive is the flip side, he adds. "It helps reduce negative emotions like anger and resentment."

The previous post on Baby Boomers and Millennial Entrepreneurs also seemed to indicate that this is what is needed from leadership in the future. Working in as a change agent in a non-profit or social entrepreneurship organization would seem to benefit myself as well as others.

More information, news and research on happiness and aging can be found at these sites:

• Stanford Center on Longevity
  
• University of Pennsylvania Positive Psychology Center
  
• University of Michigan Center for Behavioral and Decision Sciences in Medicine
  
• American Psychological Assn.

A Question of Greed and the Human Condition

My last post involved a exchange with an anthropologist. There have been a number of other posts on the Internet involving behavior and social interaction. One was pointed to by Marginal Revolution blogger Alex Tabarrok, Chimps More "Rational" than Humans . The original United International Press article is here.

My contribution to the Marginal discussion was a recent link from Scientific American Mind, Is Greed Good?

Economists are finding that social concerns often trump selfishness in financial decision making, a view that helps to explain why tens of millions of people send money to strangers they find on the Internet By Christoph Uhlhaas.

Contributions from others in the same Marginal post included Patience, Fairness and the Human Condition from the Economist.

Other articles passing by my computer screen also brought up a variety of ideas. The Business Pundit pointed to an article on Contagious Negativity and Social Media from the Journal of Consumer Research concluding that negativity is contagious. A recent Washington Post article says that the persistence of social myths such as Iraq was behind the 9/11 bombing could affect the implementation of public policy. All this would seem to put a dent in the notion of Homo economicus and indicate that we are in truth far more complicated.

However, there are other articles that would seem to indicate that there are forces in play beyond the solitary individual that creates new rules for the group, crowd or society as a whole. One example is from Cosmic Variance: Birds of a Feather which was found (8/11/09) to be recently updated with a video.

Excellence not equality key to happiness

Professor Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution wrote a post on Inequality and unhappiness. Being a novice to economics I should be able to get away with stating the seemingly obvious that using the dismal science to determine causality for happiness seems ironic. I am going to disagree slightly with Professor Cowen. It is not a perceived lack of economic opportunity that makes us unhappy but a sense of a lack of mastery over one's own fate. I fully agree that economic inequality is not at the root of unhappiness, not because of economic reasons but because people need to create and find their own purpose even on the assembly line or life becomes empty. The sense that my contribution makes a difference can make me want to contribute to society or it can make me want to compete in the market place. Economic equality makes me a lemming not only in economic terms but political terms as well.

I get the best sense of this key to happiness from Herbie Hancock's interview with Wired Blog Network

WN: I've just been listening to some of your latest tracks, and you're still running strong. So many musicians burn out, or can't keep going, and you've been through so many styles, so many incredible records; what do you attribute that longevity to? What's your secret?

HH: Well I have not shut myself off from learning, and the value and beauty of learning and expanding, exploring. That gets my adrenaline going. But I had the great advantage of working with Miles Davis back in the 60s, who, encouraged his young musicians (I was young then) to explore, to take chances, to go outside the box. And I've never forgotten those lessons. So I'm not dependant on staying in the same place. I like the idea of trying something new. I always try to find a way to challenge myself in some way that I feel is valuable to my development. But I have more to give. It's about giving, not getting. That's the bottom line. My feeling is that as long as you keep the flow of ideas going, which means not stopping them when they strike you in your life. Maybe the flow goes through you too, so that it's like a continuous flow, like a river. Then you continue to have ideas. Once you try and start hoarding them and stuff, then you stand in danger of it getting backed up (laughs).

There's only one you. And anyone else who tried to copy you is only a copy. And a copy is never as good as the original. It's not like digital copying. Human copying is not like digital copying, where you can get an exact duplicate of the original. We're not turned into 0s and 1s.