Anyone who has ever slowed their driving speed down around a police car or watched their favorite sports team choke in a high-pressure situation knows that people watching you can affect your behavior. You may also be familiar with some of the basics of how people influence each other psychologically, from peer pressure to self-fulfilling...
Read MoreThe number of sales that a GTA (Grand Theft Auto) game gets might be alarming to responsible adults who wonder why players take glee in shooting people and taking money from their corpses. Similarly, playing a game where you continuously camp the enemy respawning area, kill spawning players, and then teabag their dead bodies might seem like a bad...
Read MoreOne of the hardest parts of life is letting go of your past. They call it “baggage” for a reason: it weighs you down and holds you back. Yes, there are things that definitely do legitimately restrict your behavior: owning a home, holding a job, having a spouse, having children, and similar responsibilities and obligations. But that’s not what...
Read MoreLife is full of cycles, opposites, complements, and balance. The Earth revolves around the Sun, the Moon revolves around the Earth, and the Earth rotates to create a day-and-night cycle that many animals have evolved to set their periods of activity and rest to. There are also complements in nature such as men and women, sunshine and rain, effort...
Read MoreThere are two approaches to maximizing your abilities: These differences occur in two ways: you can do the same activity consistently to master it vs. doing it in a different way to be able to perform under a variety of conditions, or you can do one activity to improve in one area or various activities to improve in multiple
Read MoreEvery organism is biologically wired to behave in ways that have a good probability of survival. Whether by design (i.e., a higher power) or simple, random chance (i.e., “the ones that were not wired that way are dead”), organisms have certain instinctual behaviors that they perform to survive, grow, and reproduce. From beavers building dams to...
Read MoreDrama is an interesting (pun intended) concept: the idea of eventful experiences in life that are worth talking about. “Bob went to the store and bought a gallon of milk,” is not interesting. It’s a statement of fact to convey information. Now, one way to spice it up is through plot: “Bob went to the store and bought a gallon of milk only to find...
Read MoreYou will often hear people spout the virtues of critical thinking. Ironically, they can often be the people who are least likely to exhibit it themselves in certain situations. The reason is the Primacy Effect, or when you become biased toward the first explanation you hear about a topic and only then display critical thinking of information...
Read MoreThey call it “The Hard Problem” of consciousness; it is commonly described as, “What is it like to be a bat?” Effectively, how can you break down consciousness into a definable set of components so that you can both understand consciousness and identify life forms that have it. They test the problem with various thought experiments, such as if...
Read MoreEveryone thinks they just want to live the easy life: being waited on hand and foot, eating junk food and playing video games all day, or living a life without work. People say they want that—no matter how much evidence you provide to the contrary: people who hit the lottery are often miserable or lose it all; animals sit around all day and eat...
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