The Art Of Giving Up

There is a wonderful article over at dyske.com that discusses the art of giving up… not in the sense of quitting but of learning and knowing when to let go. The article goes on to explore why we develop attachments in the first place.

This hit home for me on a personal level as I thought back on my love of photography and my passion to pursue it as a career. I was a professional photographer for a period in time, but realized mixing the business of photography with the creative side, did not make for an enjoyable career.

… choices are either to quit altogether or to depend on it for life. Either way, it is not enjoyable. It is also common to see aspiring artists, musicians, and actors entirely drop their activities once they come to a conclusion that they are not going to make it. At that point, it becomes clear that the driving force behind their creative pursuits was not their enthusiasm or passion, but their attachment to the idea of becoming someone. Or, it is also possible that whatever enthusiasm they had was overwhelmed by their fear of failure. Ironically, I believe that, if you can give up the idea of “making it,” you would have a better chance of actually making it….

You can read more at dyske.com

How Your Mind Impacts Your Happiness

Great article over at pathwaytohappiness.com. As humans we live in two worlds. There is the external physical world of work, family and friends that we travel in. Then there is the world of our mind and imagination. It is a virtual reality that can appear and feel just as real. When it comes to your emotions the virtual world of your mind can be more real.

If you are seeking to create greater fulfillment and happiness in your life most sources will point to making changes in your external world. However it is changes in the virtual reality of your mind that will make a lasting impact on your happiness and fulfillment.

Read more at pathwaytohappiness.com

7 Questions Science Can’t Answer

Put yourself in the shoes of our ancestors, 3,000 years ago, and look around you. Raise your eyes towards that big, bright disc in the sky which goes up and down, once a day.

What is it, what causes it to shine? No idea. No idea what goes on inside the body, either.

Our forebears’ ignorance was profound. Today, of course, we know what the sun is, and exactly how our bodies work. Science seems to have answered all the big questions.

And yet, maybe we shouldn’t be so cocky. For just as we have solved a hundred riddles about the natural world, so a thousand more have come to take their place.

Here are some of the most intriguing questions science has not yet answered or, in some cases, even really addressed.

1. Do Dogs Have A Sense Of Humor?

I have always championed the cause of those brave men and women who risk injury and even death at the hands of animal rights terrorists by performing vivisection experiments that could save thousands of lives (including the lives of animals).

And yet, the more that scientists discover about the workings of the animal mind, the more they are forced to conclude that our fellow beasts are not mindless auto meta driven purely by instinct, but conscious, thinking entities capable of suffering and anticipation - and even humor - just like us.

Researchers have discovered, for instance, that elephants can recognize themselves in a mirror (something that very young children cannot do). Apes (and perhaps some birds) can learn the rudiments of English and make complicated tools. If crows can fashion hooks out of wire to help them fish food out of a jar, is it really right to conduct painful experiments upon them?

Some people say this is woolly thinking; that there cannot be animal rights without responsibilities. But this ignores the fact that we are happy to give many humans rights with no responsibilities.

The very young, the senile, the mad are given a legal status denied to any animal yet are also exempt from criminal and other sanctions.

2. How Did Life Really Begin?

If you want to discomfit a biologist, ask him how life began.

Darwin, 150 years ago, speculated about the primordial soup from which all life sprang but that is, to date, all we have: speculation.

We don’t know how life started, where it started, when it started, whether it began just once or restarted many times. Maybe Darwin was right - life began as the result of some complex chemical reactions on our planet’s early, warm seas.

Other scientists believe life began deep underground, or maybe around volcanic vents. Maybe life arrived, ready-formed, on meteorites or comets from space.

Some believe that one single microbe was the ancestor of all life on Earth, having arrived here on pieces of rock blasted off the planet Mars more than three billion years ago, when Mars may have been warm and wet, and Earth a hellish desert. In which case, we are all Martians.

None of these theories has been proved, and none has been discounted.

Life, its genesis and true nature, may turn out to the Universe’s most profound secret.

3. Am I The Same Person I Was A Minute Ago?

What a strange question! Yet this goes to the heart of one of the most vexed questions in the whole of science and philosophy - that of identity. On the face of it, the answer is obvious: of course I am. But think again.

Ten minutes ago, every cell in your brain was doing something different to what it is doing now. Every few years, your body is mostly replaced. If it is possible to rebuild the burned Cutty Sark, using new timbers, and many other new parts, is it really the same ship that plied the seas 150 years ago?

Purists say “No”. But if that is the case, then you are certainly not the same person you were when you were a child or a baby.

This question shows that the way we think about ourselves runs contrary to what is actually happening. And it has practical implications: Should people be held responsible for crimes they committed decades previously? How do we establish someone’s identity? Is it DNA or something more nebulous?

For what it is worth, I conclude that our identity is largely a fiction. We are the same person through time only in the same way that a river is the same river as it flows down the same course. But of course the water, the ripples and eddies, change every second.

4. Is The Paranormal For Real?

Most scientists dismiss the paranormal because it flies in the face of the rational and testable. For the most part, I agree with this. But can we be sure things like crystal healing (using crystals to allegedly bring the body’s “bio-magnetic field” back into “balance and harmony”) and telepathy are bunkum?

By “paranormal”, I mean the whole litany which encompasses religion, “psychic” powers, the mumbo-jumbo of the New Age, astrology, tarot and homeopathy.

There are very good reasons to dismiss the paranormal as gobbledygook. For a start, scientists ask us to look at the people involved and compare them with those working in science.

Many of these crystal therapists, healers, astrologers and even diet gurus wear silly clothes, spout gibberish and seek fame and money above all else. Scientists, on the other hand, are reasonable people who submit their findings to respected journals so as to be rigorously judged by their peers.

But while crystal healing and astrology are certainly entertainment rather than science, what about telepathy, acupuncture and hypnotism? These deserve scientific study. Yes, telepathy will probably turn out to be bunkum but, who knows? It would be a shame not to try to find out for sure.

5. Exactly What Is Time?

If you want to annoy a physicist ask him this question. Because the answer is, we simply do not know.

Time, goes the joke, is Nature’s way of stopping everything happening at once. Time defines our lives, it is how we measure our very being. Yet as to what it is, we are as in the dark as the ancients.

That is not to say that we do not understand what time does. Physicists such as Albert Einstein have come up with some great insights as to the properties of time. We give it a symbol and plug it into various equations and it works very well.

But that, again, does not tell us what time actually is. Is it a “river”, which flows from past to future? If so, a river of what? What causes it to flow, and what sets the rate at which it flows?

Would it be possible to swim, as it were, upstream, and travel through time? Could we stop the river flowing altogether?

Science fiction writers say all this is possible, as, surprisingly, do most physicists. But before we build a time machine, we will need to get a grip on what this most elusive and slippery thing actually is.

Ultimately, all these mysteries will be solved. But you can guarantee that they will be replaced by many more.

The only consolation is perhaps, that the day after we finally solve the last mystery - if that day ever comes - will be a very dull day indeed.

6. Why Are We Getting So Fat?

The obesity crisis is unprecedented in human medical history. Almost no one was obese 100 years ago. In 100 years’ time, if current trends continue, we will all be grossly overweight.

The reason is clear: too much food, too little exercise. But it may not be as simple as that.

For a start, few realise that in the West, in the most “obese” countries like the U.S., people actually consume fewer calories now than they did 50 years ago.

And while we certainly walk less and drive more than we did in the 1950s, we don’t do much less exercise than we did in 1980 - which is when the obesity epidemic started to take off.

Many scientists believe that there may be a deep mystery behind the obesity epidemic. Some have suggested that a virus is responsible. Or genetics. It may not be as simple, in fact, as calories in, calories out.

7. Can I live forever?

Possibly, but not yet. Ageing - and particularly ways of stopping the process - is one of those issues that many scientists would rather not talk about because it raises disturbing moral and ethical questions.

For a start, on a practical level, we do not know what aging really is. We take it for granted that our bodies wear out as we grow older, yet this is not really the case.

For the first 20 years of our lives, our bodies grow stronger, more efficient, more resistant to disease. It is only later that things start going wrong. Why?

According to the evolutionary theory of ageing, our bodies start to fail us because in the “wild” we would expect to die anyway, at the age of 30-50, from cold, starvation, an attack by sabre-toothed tigers and so on. There was no point in our having evolved to cope with the diseases of old age, if we were never going to live that long anyway.

But that doesn’t really tell us what is going on when we age, what drives the genetic “clock” that makes skin dry, our hair go grey and our bones brittle. Only when we understand what truly drives these processes will we stand a chance of combating them.

And then, of course, we will be faced with a huge moral problem: do we really want to live in a world where some people will never grow old? Or in a world where (inevitably) only a lucky elite will be able to afford the treatments to allow this to happen?

Based on the book: 10 Questions Science Can’t Answer (Yet) by Michael Hanlon

This Is Your Awakening…

A time comes in your life when you finally get it… When in the midst of all your fears and insanity you stop dead in your tracks and somewhere, the voice inside your head cries out - ENOUGH!

Enough fighting and crying, or struggling to hold on. And, like a child quieting down after a blind tantrum, your sobs begin to subside, you shudder once or twice, you blink back your tears and through a mantle of wet lashes, you begin to look at the world through new eyes.

This is your awakening…

You realize that it’s time to stop hoping and waiting for something to change, or for happiness, safety and security to come galloping over the next horizon. You come to terms with the fact that he is not Prince Charming and you are not Cinderella and that in the real world, there aren’t always fairy tale endings (or beginnings for that matter) and that any guarantee of “happily ever after” must begin with you and in the process, a sense of serenity is born of acceptance.

You awaken to the fact that you are not perfect and that not everyone will always love, appreciate or approve of who or what you are … and that’s OK. (They are entitled to their own views and opinions.) And you learn the importance of loving and championing yourself and in the process, a sense of new found confidence is born of self-approval.

You stop complaining and blaming other people for the things they did to you (or didn’t do for you) and you learn that the only thing you can really count on is the unexpected. You learn that people don’t always say what they mean or mean what they say and that not everyone will always be there for you and that it’s not always about you. So, you learn to stand on your own and to take care of yourself and in the process, a sense of safety & security is born of self-reliance.

You stop judging and pointing fingers and you begin to accept people as they are and to overlook their shortcomings and human frailties and in the process, a sense of peace & contentment is born of forgiveness.

You realize that much of the way you view yourself and the world around you, is a result of all the messages and opinions that have been ingrained into your psyche. You begin to sift through all the junk you’ve been fed about how you should behave, how you should look and how much you should weigh, what you should wear and where you should shop and what you should drive, how and where you should live and what you should do for a living, who you should marry and what you should expect of a marriage, the importance of having and raising children or what you owe your parents. You learn to open up to new worlds and different points of view. You begin reassessing and redefining who you are and what you really stand for.

You learn the difference between wanting and needing and you begin to discard the doctrines and values you’ve outgrown, or should never have bought into to begin with and in the process, you learn to go with your instincts.

You learn that it is truly in giving that we receive and that there is power and glory in creating and contributing and you stop maneuvering through life merely as a “consumer” looking for your next fix.

You learn that principles such as honesty and integrity are not the outdated ideals of a by gone era, but the mortar that holds together the foundation upon which you must build a life.

You learn that you don’t know everything; it’s not your job to save the world and that you can’t teach a pig to sing. You learn to distinguish between guilt and responsibility and the importance of setting boundaries and learning to say NO. You learn that the only cross to bear is the one you choose to carry and that martyrs get burned at the stake.

Then you learn about love. Romantic love and familial love. How to love, how much to give in love, when to stop giving and when to walk away. You learn not to project your needs or your feelings onto a relationship. You learn that you will not be more beautiful, more intelligent, more lovable or important because of the man on your arm or the child that bears your name.

You learn to look at relationships as they really are and not as you would have them be. You stop trying to control people, situations and outcomes.

You learn that just as people grow and change, so it is with love; and you learn that you don’t have the right to demand love on your terms, just to make you happy.

You learn that alone does not mean lonely. You look in the mirror and come to terms with the fact that you will never be a size 5 or a perfect 10 and you stop trying to compete with the image inside your head and agonizing over how you “stack up.”

You also stop working so hard at putting your feelings aside, smoothing things over and ignoring your needs. You learn that feelings of entitlement are perfectly OK and that it is your right, to want things and to ask for the things that you want and that sometimes it is necessary to make demands.

You come to the realization that you deserve to be treated with love, kindness, sensitivity and respect and you won’t settle for less. You allow only the hands of a lover who cherishes you, to glorify you with his touch and in the process, you internalize the meaning of self-respect.

And you learn that your body really is your temple. And you begin to care for it and treat it with respect. You begin eating a balanced diet, drinking more water and taking more time to exercise. You learn that fatigue diminishes the spirit and can create doubt and fear. So you take more time to rest. Just as food fuels the body, laughter fuels our soul; so you take more time to laugh and to play.

You learn that for the most part in life, you get what you believe you deserve and that much of life truly is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

You learn that anything worth achieving is worth working for and that wishing for something to happen, is different from working toward making it happen.

More importantly, you learn that in order to achieve success you need direction, discipline and perseverance. You also learn that no one can do it all alone and that it’s OK to risk asking for help.

You learn that the only thing you must truly fear is the great robber baron of all time; FEAR itself. You learn to step right into and through your fears, because you know that whatever happens you can handle it and to give in to fear, is to give away the right to live life on your terms.

You learn to fight for your life and not to squander it living under a cloud of impending doom. You learn that life isn’t always fair, you don’t always get what you think you deserve and that sometimes bad things happen to unsuspecting, good people. On these occasions, you learn not to personalize things. You learn that God isn’t punishing you or failing to answer your prayers; it’s just life happening.

You learn to deal with evil in its most primal state; the ego. You learn that negative feelings such as anger, envy and resentment must be understood and redirected or they will suffocate the life out of you and poison the universe that surrounds you. You learn to admit when you are wrong and to build bridges instead of walls.

You learn to be thankful and to take comfort in many of the simple things we take for granted; things that millions of people upon the earth can only dream about; a full refrigerator, clean running water, a soft warm bed, a long hot shower. Slowly, you begin to take responsibility for yourself, by yourself and you make yourself a promise to never betray yourself and to never ever settle for less than your heart’s desire. You hang a wind chime outside your window so you can listen to the wind, and you make it a point to keep smiling, to keep trusting and to stay open to every wonderful possibility.

Finally, with courage in your heart, you take a deep breath and you begin to design the life you want to live as best as you can.

by Sonny Carroll

P.S - Sonny wrote this piece in 1996 shortly after coming out of a long drawn out and painful break-up… “I was a total mess. My life was in shambles and as I tried to make some sense of what had happened, and why, I began to write The Awakening. This piece is a compilation of all the lessons I learned and the observations I made about myself, about other people and their relationships, and of the wisdom that my most dear friend, Drane Uljaj, has shared with me over countless cups of tea.”

Her website, Wake To Life (www waketolife com) is now no longer in existence and attempts to contact her recently have been unsuccessful.

How To Experience Total Freedom

Eckhart Tolle asks the questions: Are you stressed? Are you so busy getting to the future that the present is reduced to a means of getting there? Stress is caused by being “here” but wanting to be “there,” or being in the present but wanting to be in the future. It’s a split that tears you apart inside.

Are your thought processes creating guilt, pride, resentment, anger, regret, or self-pity? Then you are not only reinforcing a false sense of self but also helping to accelerate your body’s aging process by creating an accumulation of past in your psyche. Verify this for yourself by observing those around you who have a strong tendency to hold on to the past.

Does the past take up a great deal of your attention? Do you frequently talk and think about it, either positively or negatively? The great things that you have achieved, your adventures or experiences, or your victim story and the dreadful things that were done to you, or maybe what you did to someone else?

Die To The Past Every Moment

You don’t need it. Only refer to it when it is absolutely relevant to the present. Feel the power of this moment and the fullness of Being. Feel your presence.

Are you worried? Do you have many “what if” thoughts? You are identified with your mind, which is projecting itself into an imaginary future situation and creating fear. There is no way that you can cope with such a situation, because it doesn’t exist. It’s a mental phantom.

You can stop this health- and life-corroding insanity simply by acknowledging the present moment.

Give Up Waiting As A State Of Mind

When you catch yourself slipping into waiting… snap out of it. Come into the present moment. Just be, and enjoy being. If you are present, there is never any need for you to wait for anything.

So next time somebody says, “Sorry to have kept you waiting,” you can reply, “That’s all right, I wasn’t waiting. I was just standing here enjoying myself — in joy in my self.”

These are just a few of the habitual mind strategies for denying the present moment that are part of ordinary unconsciousness. They are easy to overlook because they are so much a part of normal living: the background static of perpetual discontent. But the more you practice monitoring your inner mental-emotional state, the easier it will be to know when you have been trapped in past or future, which is to say unconscious, and to awaken out of the dream of time into the present. But beware: The false, unhappy self, based on mind identification, lives on time. It knows that the present moment is its own death and so feels very threatened by it. It will do all it can to take you out of it. It will try to keep you trapped in time.

In a sense, the state of presence could be compared to waiting. It is a qualitatively different kind of waiting, one that requires your total alertness. Something could happen at any moment, and if you are not absolutely awake, absolutely still, you will miss it. In that state, all your attention is in the Now. There is none left for daydreaming, thinking, remembering, anticipating. There is no tension in it, no fear, just alert presence. You are present with your whole Being, with every cell of your body.

In that state, the “you” that has a past and a future, the personality if you like, is hardly there anymore. And yet nothing of value is lost. You are still essentially yourself. In fact, you are more fully yourself than you ever were before, or rather it is only now that you are truly yourself.

The past cannot survive in your presence. Whatever you need to know about the unconscious past in you, the challenges of the present will bring it out. If you delve into the past, it will become a bottomless pit: There is always more. You may think that you need more time to understand the past or become free of it, in other words, that the future will eventually free you of the past. This is a delusion. Only the present can free you of the past. More time cannot free you of time.

Access the power of Now. That is the key. The power of Now is none other than the power of your presence, your consciousness liberated from thought forms. So deal with the past on the level of the present. The more attention you give to the past, the more you energize it, and the more likely you are to make a “self” out of it.

Don’t misunderstand: Attention is essential, but not to the past as past. Give attention to the present; give attention to your behavior, to your reactions, moods, thoughts, emotions, fears, and desires as they occur in the present. There’s the past in you. If you can be present enough to watch all those things, not critically or analytically but non judgmentally, then you are dealing with the past and dissolving it through the power of your presence.

Become Aware Of Your Breathing

Feel the air flowing in and out of your body. Feel your inner energy field. All that you ever have to deal with, cope with, in real life — as opposed to imaginary mind projections — is this moment. Ask yourself what “problem” you have right now, not next year, tomorrow, or five minutes from nöw. What is wrong with this moment?

You can always cope with the Now, but you can never cope with the future — nor do you have to. The answer, the strength, the right action, or the resource will be there when you need it, not before, not after.

Are you a habitual “waiter”? How much of your life do you spend waiting? What I call “small-scale waiting” is waiting in line at the post office, in a traffïc jam, at the airport, or waiting for someone to arrive, to finish work, and so on. “Large-scale waiting” is waiting for the next vacation, for a better job, for the children to grow up, for a truly meaningful relationship, for success, to make money, to be important, to become enlightened. It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living.

Waiting is a state of mind. Basically, it means that you want the future; you don’t want the present. You don’t want what you’ve got, and you want what you haven’t got. With every kind of waiting, you unconsciously create inner conflict between your here and now, where you don’t want to be, and the projected future, where you want to be. This greatly reduces the quality of your life by making you losë the present.

For example, many people are waiting for prosperity. It cannot come in the future. When you honor, acknowledge, and fully accept your present reality — where you are, who you are, what you are doing right now — when you fully accept what you have got, you are grateful for what you have got, grateful for what is, grateful for Being. Gratitude for the present moment and the fullness of life now is true prosperity. It cannot come in the future. Then, in time, that prosperity manifests for you in various ways.

If you are dissatisfied with what you have got, or even frustrated or angry about your present lack, that may motivate you to become rich, but even if you do make millions, you will continue to experience the inner condition of lack, and deep down you will continue to feel unfulfilled. You may have many exciting experiences that monëy can buy, but they will come and go and always leave you with an empty feeling and the need for further physical or psychological gratification. You won’t abide in Being and so feel the fullness of life now that alone is true prosperity.

You cannot find yourself by going into the past. You find yourself by coming into the present.

Eckhart Tolle is the author of the internationally-acclaimed The Power of Now and Stillness Speaks.

“…My Sensuous And Godlike Trombone Playing…”

This guy should get some kind of an award for creativity. This could be one of those urban myth things, but I’m told this is an actual essay written by a college applicant…. one of the best examples I’ve seen of thinking outside the box. He has since gone on to attend NYU.

3A. ESSAY: IN ORDER FOR THE ADMISSIONS STAFF OF OUR COLLEGE TO GET TO KNOW YOU, THE APPLICANT, BETTER, WE ASK THAT YOU ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTION: ARE THERE ANY SIGNIFICANT EXPERIENCES YOU HAVE HAD, OR ACCOMPLISHMENTS YOU HAVE REALIZED, THAT HAVE HELPED TO DEFINE YOU AS A PERSON?

I am a dynamic figure, often seen scaling walls and crushing ice. I have been known to remodel train stations on my lunch breaks, making them more efficient in the area of heat retention. I translate ethnic slurs for Cuban refugees, I write award-winning operas, I manage time efficiently. Occasionally, I tread water for three days in a row.

I woo women with my sensuous and godlike trombone playing, I can pilot bicycles up severe inclines with unflagging speed, and I cook Thirty-Minute Brownies in twenty minutes. I am an expert in stucco, a veteran in love, and an outlaw in Peru.

Using only a hoe and a large glass of water, I once single-handedly defended a small village in the Amazon Basin from a horde of ferocious
army ants. I play bluegrass cello, I was scouted by the Mets, I am the subject of numerous documentaries. When I’m bored, I build large
suspension bridges in my yard. I enjoy urban hang gliding. On Wednesdays, after school, I repair electrical appliances free of charge.

I am an abstract artist, a concrete analyst, and a ruthless bookie. Critics worldwide swoon over my original line of corduroy evening wear.
I don’t perspire. I am a private citizen, yet I receive fan mail. I have been caller number nine and have won the weekend passes. Last
summer I toured New Jersey with a traveling centrifugal-force demonstration. I bat .400. My deft floral arrangements have earned me
fame in international botany circles. Children trust me.

I can hurl tennis rackets at small moving objects with deadly accuracy. I once read Paradise Lost, Moby Dick, and David Copperfield in one day
and still had time to refurbish an entire dining room that evening. I know the exact location of every food item in the supermarket. I have
performed several covert operations for the CIA. I sleep once a week; when I do sleep, I sleep in a chair. While on vacation in Canada, I
successfully negotiated with a group of terrorists who had seized a small bakery. The laws of physics do not apply to me.

I balance, I weave, I dodge, I frolic, and my bills are all paid. On weekends, to let off steam, I participate in full-contact origami. Years ago I discovered the meaning of life but forgot to write it down. I have made extraordinary four course meals using only a mouli and a toaster oven. I breed prizewinning clams. I have won bullfights in San Juan, cliff-diving competitions in Sri Lanka, and spelling bees at the Kremlin. I have played Hamlet, I have performed open-heart surgery, and I have spoken with Elvis.

But I have not yet gone to college.

How Your Brain Interprets Perception, Not Reality

When we experience an illusion, we usually have the impression we have been fooled, or that our minds are playing tricks on us. New research published in the journal Science indicates our perceptions of these illusions are no hoax, but the result of how the brain is organized to process the information it receives from our senses.

Vanderbilt University psychology department researchers Anna Wang Roe, Li Min Chen and Robert Friedman have identified responses in the brain to a touch illusion that shed new light on how the brain processes sensory information and call into question long-held theories about the nature of the “map” of the body in the brain.

Walter Penfield is credited with first establishing in 1957 that a map of the human body exists in the brain, with specific areas of the cortex processing information from different body areas. Researchers have long hypothesized this map is a topographic map of the physical body.

“What is surprising about this paper is we found the cortical map reflects our perceptions, not the physical body,” Roe said. “The brain is reflecting what we are feeling, even if that’s not what really happened.” The team completed the research at Yale University before moving to Vanderbilt this fall.

Roe’s research used a well-documented illusion called the tactile funneling illusion to explore how the brain processes touch. With this illusion, an individual perceives simultaneous touches to multiple locations on an area of skin as a single touch at the center of that area. Although the perception of this illusion has been studied for decades, researchers did not know how it was processed by the brain.

Roe’s team first tested the funneling illusion in humans by stimulating adjacent fingers. The human subjects confirmed that they experienced a sensation between the two fingers when both were touched simultaneously. The team then used a technique called intrinsic signal optical imaging to study the reaction to the same illusion in the brains of squirrel monkeys. Intrinsic signal optical imaging uses a specially designed video camera to detect changes in light reflectance viewed through a “window on the brain.” These cortical reflectance changes are related to changes in blood flow that occur when neurons respond to specific sensory stimuli.

When the monkeys were touched on one digit alone, the researchers observed a response in Area 3b of the somatosensory cortex, the area previously determined to process information from that digit. When an adjacent digit was stimulated on its own, a response was seen in the cortical map for that digit. However, when the monkey was touched simultaneously on both digits, a single cortical location between the maps of the two individual digits responded, explaining the perceived location of the illusion. In addition, the perceived intensity of this illusion is caused by the integration of activity across all three locations (two actual, one illusory).

“The merger of signals from adjacent fingers demonstrated in this elegant study may serve an important function in hand use,” Esther Gardner, professor of physiology and neuroscience at NYU School of Medicine, said. “It allows the fingers to be controlled as a single functional group centered opposite the thumb when grasping large objects, rather than as distinct individuals.” In addition to establishing that the cortical map reflects perception rather than physical location, the researchers found the brain processes touch perceptions at an unexpectedly early stage.

“The cortical area we studied, 3b, is an early entry level in the cortex for information from the skin,” said Friedman. “We did not expect to see perception being reflected that early. This gives us a much better understanding of how much work the brain is doing, even at this early level of processing.”

“How we perceive the world is an enduring question in neuroscience,” Mriganka Sur, head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, said. “This is a fascinating study that cleverly uses a tactile illusion to demonstrate that the brain’s representations of the world, and of sensory stimuli that impinge on us, are shaped by the brain’s circuitry. In short, our perceptions have a great deal to do with the way our brains are wired.”

Roe’s team will continue to study how the brain processes sensory input and illusions, though Roe cautions against misinterpretation of that term. “Illusions are not unusual or strange–they are how we interpret the world,” Roe said. “We think we know what’s out there in the physical world, but it’s all interpreted by our brains. Everything we sense is an illusion to a degree.”

Source: Science Daily

A Good Kind Of Mad

A Little Anger Can Sharpen The Human Mind, Researchers Say. Many say that anger always clouds our judgment. Or as Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, anger “blows out the light of reason.”

Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, have found in some cases, a little anger can sharpen your ability to analyze data carefully and make the right decisions.

We’re not talking road rage here. We’re talking about anger more on the level of miffed, or irked, or mad enough to think about telling the boss off. That’s the level of anger that should help you to think twice about the boss and possibly figure out a better way to let him know he’s acting like a jerk.

“The results of our study seem counterintuitive to people,” said psychologist Wesley G. Moons, lead author of the study, published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Moons and a colleague, Diane M. Mackie, put a bunch of students through a series of experiments to see if they could “think straight while seeing red,” as they put it.

In some cases the students were provoked, or insulted, causing them to describe themselves as angry. In other cases the students were asked to recall something that made them angry. Then they were asked to solve a problem, or analyze some data, to see how anger impacted their judgment.

Among the findings: People who normally think carefully before making a decision were unaffected by their personal anger. And people who don’t always think through a situation were actually helped by anger. They were, for example, more likely to rely on data that was furnished by someone in the know than someone who is irrelevant and probably uninformed.

Under the influence of anger, Moons said, the participants “were not stupidly relying on anything that’s available” to help them make a decision. “They were selectively using relative, useful information,” he said.

How can that be true, since we’ve been told so often to hold off on making a decision until we cool down? The research suggests that anger, and possibly many other emotions, actually sharpens analytical thinking, helping us throw out irrelevant information, and figuring out a better way to deal with an issue.

“Anger motivates people to think more carefully,” Moons said.

The researchers offer a couple of theories as to why that might be the case. Any “negative emotional state will signal to an organism that there’s something wrong in the environment,” Moons said. “If you’re not feeling good then there has to be a reason, and you’re better off to think carefully about what’s happening, what’s wrong, and how best to resolve it.

“The negative emotion triggers you into thinking carefully about what’s happening, almost as a survival mechanism.”

Another theory is you’ll feel better about yourself if you figure your own way out of your mess, so a negative emotion, including anger, compels you to think more clearly.

The findings may be counterintuitive to lay persons, and they contradict a number of earlier studies that suggested that anger does, indeed, clobber our ability to think clearly. But those conflicts may be partly the result of differing ideas of what constitutes anger.

The Santa Barbara researchers define two types of anger. Road rage, for example, is a very intense form of anger, leading to physiological arousal. That’s not likely to lead to clear thinking.

“Physiological arousal (sweaty palms, racing heart, etc.) has its own independent effect on cognitive functioning,” Moons said. “It can inhibit cognitive functioning in and of itself.”

But there’s also a “cold form of anger,” he adds. That’s anger in the absence of physiological arousal, like when some jerk tells you that you look goofy. You should be able to think through that clearly, aided by cold anger that helps your decision making machinery look at the relative benefits between laughing it off or punching him in the nose.

That’s the kind of anger that Moons and Mackie are studying. So if this column bugs you, at least it ought to help you think straight.

Lee Dye is a former science writer for the Los Angeles Times. He now lives in Juneau, Alaska.

10 Mysteries Of The Mind

Jeanna Bryner at Live Science writes:

Much of what we don’t understand about being human is simply in our heads. The brain is a befuddling organ, as are the very questions of life and death, consciousness, sleep, and much more. Here’s a heads-up on what’s known and what’s not understood about your noggin.

Dreams
If you were to ask 10 people what dreams are made of, you’d probably get 10 different answers. That’s because scientists are still unraveling this mystery. One possibility: Dreaming exercises brain by stimulating the trafficking of synapses between brain cells. Another theory is that people dream about tasks and emotions that they didn’t take care of during the day, and that the process can help solidify thoughts and memories. In general, scientists agree that dreaming happens during your deepest sleep, called Rapid Eye Movement (REM).

Slumber Sleuth
Fruit flies do it. Tigers do it. And humans can’t seem to get enough of it. No, not that. We’re talking about shut-eye, so crucial we spend more than a quarter of our lives at it. Yet the underlying reasons for sleep remain as puzzling as a rambling dream. One thing scientists do know: Sleep is crucial for survival in mammals. Extended sleeplessness can lead to mood swings, hallucination, and in extreme cases, death. There are two states of sleep—non-rapid eye movement (NREM), during which the brain exhibits low metabolic activity, and rapid eye movement (REM), during which the brain is very active. Some scientists think NREM sleep gives your body a break, and in turn conserves energy, similar to hibernation. REM sleep could help to organize memories. However, this idea isn’t proven, and dreams during REM sleep don’t always correlate with memories.

Phantom Feelings
It’s estimated that about 80 percent of amputees experience sensations, including warmth, itching, pressure and pain, coming from the missing limb. People who experience this phenomenon, known as “phantom limb,” feel sensations as if the missing limb were part of their bodies. One explanation says that the nerves area where the limb severed create new connections to the spinal cord and continue to send signals to the brain as if the missing limb was still there. Another possibility is that the brain is “hard-wired” to operate as if the body were fully intact—meaning the brain holds a blueprint of the body with all parts attached.

Mission Control
Residing in the hypothalamus of the brain, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or biological clock, programs the body to follow a 24-hour rhythm. The most evident effect of circadian rhythm is the sleep-wake cycle, but the biological clock also impacts digestion, body temperature, blood pressure, and hormone production. Researchers have found that light intensity can adjust the clock forward or backward by regulating the hormone melatonin. The latest debate is whether or not melatonin supplements could help prevent jet lag—the drowsy, achy feeling you get when “jetting” across time zones.

Memory Lane
Some experiences are hard to forget, like perhaps your first kiss. But how does a person hold onto these personal movies? Using brain-imaging techniques, scientists are unraveling the mechanism responsible for creating and storing memories. They are finding that the hippocampus, within the brain’s gray matter, could act as a memory box. But this storage area isn’t so discriminatory. It turns out that both true and false memories activate similar brain regions. To pull out the real memory, some researchers ask a subject to recall the memory in context, something that’s much more difficult when the event didn’t actually occur.

Brain Teaser
Laughter is one of the least understood of human behaviors. Scientists have found that during a good laugh three parts of the brain light up: a thinking part that helps you get the joke, a movement area that tells your muscles to move, and an emotional region that elicits the “giddy” feeling. But it remains unknown why one person laughs at your brother’s foolish jokes while another chuckles while watching a horror movie. John Morreall, who is a pioneer of humor research at the College of William and Mary, has found that laughter is a playful response to incongruities—stories that disobey conventional expectations. Others in the humor field point to laughter as a way of signaling to another person that this action is meant “in fun.” One thing is clear: Laughter makes us feel better.

Nature vs. Nurture
In the long-running battle of whether our thoughts and personalities are controlled by genes or environment, scientists are building a convincing body of evidence that it could be either or both! The ability to study individual genes points to many human traits that we have little control over, yet in many realms, peer pressure or upbringing has been shown heavily influence who we are and what we do.

Mortal Mystery
Living forever is just for Hollywood. But why do humans age? You are born with a robust toolbox full of mechanisms to fight disease and injury, which you might think should arm you against stiff joints and other ailments. But as we age, the body’s repair mechanisms get out of shape. In effect, your resilience to physical injury and stress declines. Theories for why people age can be divided into two categories: 1) Like other human characteristics, aging could just be a part of human genetics and is somehow beneficial. 2) In the less optimistic view, aging has no purpose and results from cellular damage that occurs over a person’s lifetime. A handful of researchers, however, think science will ultimately delay aging at least long enough to double life spans.

Deep Freeze
Living forever may not be a reality. But a pioneering field called cryonics could give some people two lives. Cryonics centers like Alcor Life Extension Foundation, in Arizona, store posthumous bodies in vats filled with liquid nitrogen at bone-chilling temperatures of minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit (78 Kelvin). The idea is that a person who dies from a presently incurable disease could be thawed and revived in the future when a cure has been found. The body of the late baseball legend Ted Williams is stored in one of Alcor’s freezers. Like the other human popsicles, Williams is positioned head down. That way, if there were ever a leak in the tank, the brain would stay submerged in the cold liquid. Not one of the cryopreserved bodies has been revived, because that technology doesn’t exist. For one, if the body isn’t thawed at exactly the right temperature, the person’s cells could turn to ice and blast into pieces.

Consciousness
When you wake up in the morning, you might perceive that the Sun is just rising, hear a few birds chirping, and maybe even feel a flash of happiness as the fresh morning air hits your face. In other words, you are conscious. This complex topic has plagued the scientific community since antiquity. Only recently have neuroscientists considered consciousness a realistic research topic. The greatest brainteaser in this field has been to explain how processes in the brain give rise to subjective experiences. So far, scientists have managed to develop a great list of questions.

Source: Live Science

Six Key Principles That Will Change Your Life

The belief that you can change is the key to change.

This is not the powerlessness message of the 12 steps but rather the message of self-efficacy. Addictions are really no different from other behaviors—believing you can change encourages commitment to the process and enhances the likelihood of success.

The type of treatment is less critical than the individual’s commitment to change.

People can select how they want to pursue change in line with their own values and preferences. They don’t need to be told how to change.

Brief treatments can change longstanding habits.

It is not the duration of the treatment that allows people to change but rather its ability to inspire continued efforts in that direction.

Life skills can be the key to licking addiction.

All addictions may not be equal; the community-reinforcement approach, with its emphasis on developing life skills, might be needed for those more severely debilitated by drugs and alcohol.

Repeated efforts are critical to changing.

People do not often get better instantly—it usually takes multiple efforts. Providing follow-up care allows people to maintain focus on their change goals. Eventually, they stand a good chance of achieving them.

Improvement, without abstinence, counts.

People do not usually succeed all at once. But they can show significant improvements; and all improvement should be accepted and rewarded. It is counterproductive to kick people out of therapy for failing to abstain. The therapeutic approach of recognizing improvement in the absence of abstinence is called harm reduction.

By:Stanton Peele
psychologytoday.com

How to Land Your Dream Job When You Lack The Skills

Jeremy Atkins doesn’t have a shred of artistic talent, but he still enjoys many of the benefits he would get as a successful comic-book illustrator.

Mr. Atkins, 30 years old and a collector of comics since childhood, gets free passes to trade shows, discounts on his favorite toys and the chance to hobnob with such industry luminaries as Frank Miller, creator of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. The perks come with his job as director of publicity for Dark Horse Comics Inc.

If you are passionate about a certain industry but lack the skills commonly associated with its most visible leaders, you can try to pursue a career working on the sidelines. Being behind the scenes may offer more than just the opportunity to score freebies and gain exposure to your dream industry’s superstars. The career choice also may help you enjoy what you do for a living as well as pay your bills.

Eric Doyne says he originally abandoned his goal of working in sports after his attempts to become a professional athlete failed. “I really gave the [bicycle] racing thing a go in college,” he said. “I won some races, but I realized I wasn’t a Lance Armstrong.” Mr. Doyne studied journalism in school, and after graduating in 1999, he landed an entry-level public-relations job at a large agency. In his fourth year there, a colleague enlisted his help on an account for a bike company, and “a light bulb turned on,” he said. “My job went from being just any job to one that I felt incredibly passionate about.”

Now, as the owner of a small public-relations firm called Dispatch, 31-year-old Mr. Doyne handles publicity for companies that sell biking and other sports products. He said he takes client meetings on ski lifts, helps run pro sporting events and often receives free gear. “I always have the latest and greatest stuff,” he said.

If you are trying to get a job in a highly coveted industry, think broadly about the types of employers to target. For example, if you want to work in high fashion, look beyond the runway or design studio to jobs at clothing warehouses, licensing agencies and consulting firms, said Dan Lagani, president of the Fairchild Fashion Group in New York.

Start by joining trade groups and attending the conferences, seminars and other events they host, said Alexandra Levit, author of “How to Score THAT Gig,” to be published next year. By citing your membership in these organizations on your résumé, you also will boost your credibility, she said.

Networking is especially critical if you are pursuing a job at a high-profile company — no matter what department it is in, Ms. Levit said. “Everybody wants to work for them, so they don’t need to try as hard to get qualified applicants,” she said.

Volunteer opportunities also are a way to make connections and learn the ropes, said Cynthia Shapiro, a career coach in Los Angeles. “You’ll show that you are willing to give extra of yourself for the industry,” she said.

Upon landing a job interview, be sure to express your knowledge of the industry, but don’t go overboard. A candidate for a midlevel sales job at McFarlane Toys didn’t get an offer after gushing about the manufacturer’s founder, Todd McFarlane, creator of the comic book Spawn. “He knew everything about Todd — every public appearance he’s made, every comic he’s had a hand in,” said Melanie Simmons, executive director of human resources. “It was almost stalker-like.”

If you do land a job in your dream industry, remember to keep your cool. On his first day of work at McFarlane, a retail sales associate showed up with a stack of comics for Mr. McFarlane to sign, said Ms. Simmons. “He didn’t last very long,” she said.

Also keep in mind that working in your favorite area may sour you on it outside the office. Stanley Tang said he couldn’t stand watching baseball on TV after coming home from his former marketing-production job at MLB.com, the online home of Major League Baseball. “I got totally burnt out,” said the 34-year-old. “I was surrounded by television screens that were showing 10 to 15 games a day.” A longtime Yankees fan, Mr. Tang said he is happier now working for ESPN as a technical producer because he is assigned projects related to a wide range of sports. “I deal with ones I’ve never even heard of, like competitive eating,” he said.

Copyrighted, Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Do Women Dream About Sex As Much As Men?

Men may spend a lot of their waking time thinking about sex, but both genders dream about sex in equal measure, according to a new study.

That finding is a little surprising given the fact that previous research suggested otherwise, that women have far fewer erotic dreams.

But the similarities end there. For the most part, male and female sex fantasies, even in the land of sleep, tend to conform to gender stereotypes, say psychologists from the University of Montreal in Canada.

In your dreams

The Montreal study was based on interviews with 109 women and 64 men who kept diaries of their dreams over a period of two to four weeks. The volunteers racked up some 3,500 dreams, but just eight per cent were sex-related.

The findings were reported in June at Sleep 2007 a conference for sleep scientists and researchers held in Minneapolis, USA.

While women tend to fantasize about film stars, politicians, rock stars or lovers past and present, men tend to visualize themselves making love to multiple partners in public or unknown settings.

The women who took part in the study were twice as likely to have dream scenarios featuring celebrities, than men. The celebrities that the women dreamed about included actors such as Brad Pitt or George Clooney and Irish rocker Bono,

The men, on the other hand, reported dreams featuring multiple sex partners twice as often as the women. Flesh and blood lovers, past and present, turned up in 20 per cent of the women’s dreams but only 14 per cent of the men’s dream sequences.

In their fantasy worlds, the men almost never had to put their ego on the line and come on to a woman. In about 90 per cent of the erotic dreams they logged and reported to investigators, the women made the first move.

Sexual revolution

“The men had women coming on to them – at least in their dreams,” said study author Antonio Zadra, an associate professor of psychology.

The pattern may reflect a certain amount of wishful thinking given the usual social norms that apply in the dating and courtship world, he said.

And finally, when it came to erotic dreams that dealt with sexual disappointments, the genders had very different tales to tell. The women recounted scenarios where they were turned off by something that happened or the pace of proceedings. For the men, it was more often a case of their virtual partners refusing to engage in certain activities, or their sexcapade plans falling through for some reason.

“Maybe their demands were unrealistic even for their dream characters,” Zadra said.

As noted above, women seemed to have as many erotic dreams as men. This reflects an increase from what was reported in the 1960s, but that may reflect an increased willingness of women to talk about the subject or the fact that women are having more such dreams since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, or both, according to Zadra.

Leadership By Example

Great Article by By Jim Citrin, Senior Director of Spencer Stuart, one of the world’s preeminent executive search firms, where he founded the global Technology, Communications, and Media Practice….

In addition to my 25 years in business, I’ve been an athlete my entire life. As such, I’m interested in the champions who have taken their success in sports and gone on to do great things with their lives.

I’m just as interested in the many great business leaders who learned how to compete, win, lose, and excel on a team or individually through sports when they were growing up.

Studying the Champions

I’ve always wanted to find out what separates the enduring champions — those who stay on a positive life trajectory, growing as people and contributing to the greater good — from the other sports stars who fade out or crash and burn. What in all of this could be applied to help achieve one’s greatest aspirations and potential?

So, for over three years, I’ve been working on a study to distill the most important lessons about leadership and business success from the world’s most inspiring athletes. The culmination of this work is my brand-new book, “The Dynamic Path,” which I’ll provide an overview for in this column.

A Framework for Life

The Dynamic Path is a powerful framework that can help you live your life to reach your greatest potential. It allows you to set goals and move from stage to stage in your life, continually growing and developing from individual to champion, and from leader to legacy-builder.

You don’t need to be Colin Powell, Bono, or Magic Johnson to inspire people and build a legacy. Anyone who has the motivation, energy, and a little bit of creativity can have a positive and enduring impact on those around them — and even the world at large.

Through natural talent, dedication, hard work, and mental toughness, you can grow to achieve excellence in your chosen field. To become a top performer in any discipline, you need to sharpen your skills through highly directed practice over an extended period of time. And to progress from strong performer to champion in sports or business, you need to develop mental toughness.

Learning Mental Toughness

The ability to come through and deliver in the moment of truth is the single characteristic that distinguishes the greatest champions from everyone else. I’d always thought that they were endowed with a “mental toughness gene” at birth. However, to my great surprise and delight, I discovered from my research that mental toughness is in fact a learnable skill.

It turns out that the ability to achieve a personal best in the seminal time trial, to make the last shot at the buzzer, or to hit the RBI with two outs in the bottom of the ninth is something that can be practiced and developed. With knowledge of how your mind and emotions work, and with deliberate practice in training and competitive situations, you can develop this ability. Moreover, mental toughness is an important skill that applies far beyond the realm of sports into your most important career, community, and personal situations.

Mental toughness allows you to thrive when it counts most, remaining cool, calm, and collected during the ups and downs of a game, race, match, or business situation. It’s this skill that allows you to act in an instinctive and automatic way at the most important turning points of a competition or other high-stakes circumstance.

Practice Makes Perfect

Expert performers are distinguished not by the characteristics they inherited, then, but rather by their ability to continue improving for years, even decades, until they become great. Expert performance is the end result of prolonged effort to improve through a regimen of deliberate, targeted activities specifically designed to optimize improvement in carefully selected areas.

Differences among performers, even the most elite, are a function of the amount and duration of deliberate practice they undertake. The top performers in the world not only work harder than everyone else in their field, they’ve invested many more hours of highly focused practice over the years.

Deliberate practice helps improve a specific skill or performance to enable you to reach for goals just beyond your level of proficiency, to provide you feedback on results, and to build a program that allows for high levels of repetition. Think about a few concrete things that are at the core of your role and focus on how to do them significantly better. And continue to focus day in and day out.

From Individual Contributor to Leader

At some point for people in sports, physical ability will ebb and athletic talents will fade. This is a critical turning point. Some ignore the telltale signals and try to hang on to what they have, relying on the skills that got them to their peak. That’s a recipe for disaster, because inevitably you have to change in order to grow.

This is the exact parallel for a star individual performer in business — the rainmaking sales leader, the hot designer, the brilliant trader — who risks topping out as a solo act. The champion who breaks through to become a leader decides to confront the moment and stop focusing on himself and concentrate instead on the success of others.

When you’re dedicated to making those around you successful, success will accrue to you as a natural end result. It’s one thing to be a star individual contributor in sports, business, or life and quite another (ultimately more satisfying and sustaining) to extend beyond oneself to work with and through others. This is how a champion continues to grow as a person and transforms into a leader.

Leaving Behind a Legacy

Whether on a historic scale like battling to cure cancer, a large scale like helping inner-city youths find a way out of poverty, or on a small scale like becoming a mentor, the more you isolate something genuinely meaningful to you that’s worth fighting for, the more that your leadership will propel you toward building an enduring legacy.

People everywhere have a deep-seated urge to be meaningful contributors in the world. When you decide to focus your attention on a particular calling that will make a discernable positive impact, you’ve moved into the realm of building a legacy. If your cause is worthy and if there’s a credible reason for selecting it, then you’ll be able to inspire others to follow along and make a sustaining and positive impact.

Becoming a true champion in sports or business requires sacrifices. This can only be sustained by a burning desire that needs to be fueled every day. Not everyone wants to assume the responsibilities of leadership or to focus on the success of others around them. And while many people want something that will outlive them and provide evidence of a life meaningfully lived, not everyone has the drive or passion to create a bequest of significance.

But for those who aspire to do all these things, The Dynamic Path is the way.

By James “Jim” Citrin is a Senior Director of Spencer Stuart, one of the world’s preeminent executive search firms, where he founded the global Technology, Communications, and Media Practice.

Women Go For The Rich Guys, Men For The Looks

The face of dating may have changed down the years, but the laws of attraction have not changed since the days of the Neanderthals, a new study says.

It seems that men still seek out the most attractive women and women are drawn to the men that make the best providers - leveraging their looks to snag the best mate they can.

Or at least that’s what a group of researchers found when they observed some modern singles at work - in a speed-dating session in Munich, Germany.

In questionnaires filled out before they went into the session, the participants said they were looking for mirror-images of themselves - someone who matched them in terms of status, commitment and looks.

But when the 21 women and 25 men sat down for “mini-dates” with members of the opposite sex and later chose which ones they would like to go on a proper date with, the investigators saw a completely different dynamic at work.

“There’s this disparity between what people say they want in a mate and what they end up choosing,” said Peter Todd, a cognitive scientist at Indiana University in Bloomington who worked on the paper.

The men homed in on the most attractive women, while the women were drawn to material wealth and security. The females were also much more calculating and picky in their choices of prospective mates than their male counterparts.

While the men opted on average to see every second woman, the women expressed an interest in seeing only a third of the men again, and they appeared to calibrate their choices based on how attractive they thought they were and who they could realistically expect to bag.

“The women were self-censoring. The men weren’t,” said Mr Todd.

The results suggest that modern-day singles, like generations of their ancestors, are driven by biology with men seeking the best specimens to procreate with, and women seeking the best long-term partners.

“Evolutionary theories in psychology suggest that men and women should trade off different traits in each other, and when we look at the actual mate choices people make, this is what we find evidence for,” said Mr Todd.

“Ancestral individuals who made their mate choices in this way - women trading off their attractiveness for higher quality men and men looking for any attractive women who will accept them - would have had an evolutionary advantage in greater numbers of successful offspring.”

Published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Wit & Wisdom of Oxymoronica

This is a great little book. A collection of self-contradictory terms, phrases, or quotations; examples of oxymoronica appear illogical or nonsensical at first, but upon reflection, make a good deal of sense and are often profoundly true. As simple as some of them sound, they can really push the brain. The collection is divided into 14 chapters ranging in subject and author from wit and wisdom through love and sex and insults. Two thumbs up. Some examples I enjoyed:

Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded
Yogi Berra

Marriage is lonelier than solitude.
Adrienne Rich

The superfluous is the most necessary.
Voltaire

Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.
Margaret Mead

I shut my eyes in order to see.
Paul Gauguin

We learn from history that we do not learn from history.
Georg Hegel

We are never prepared for what we expect.
James Michener

To be believed, make the truth unbelievable.
Napoleon Bonaparte

The final delusion is the belief that one has lost all delusions.
Maurice Chapelain

What we really want is for things to remain the same but get better.
Sydney J. Harris

When a dog runs at you, whistle for him.
Henry David Thoreau

Always be sincere, even if you don’t mean it.
Harry S. Truman

Man can believe the impossible, but can never believe the improbable.
Oscar Wilde

War is a series of catastrophes which result in a victory.
Georges Clemenceau

First I dream my painting, then I paint my dream.
Vincent van Gogh

We are confronted by insurmountable opportunities.
Walt Kelly, From Pogo

A man chases a woman until she catches him.
Anonymous

I want peace and I’m willing to fight for it.
Harry S. Truman

Study the past, if you would divine the future.
Confucius, in Analects

Love is a kind of warfare.
Ovid

All works of art should begin…at the end.
Edgar Allan Poe

Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Hatreds are the cinders of affection.
Sir Walter Raleigh

I must follow the people. Am I not their leader?
Benjamin Disraeli

What you get free costs too much.
Jean Anouilh

Good fiction is that which is real.
Ralph Ellison

Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.
Samuel Beckett (in Endgame)

Oxymoronica: Paradoxical Wit & Wisdom From History’s Greatest Wordsmiths
Marty Grothe
$10
Amazon