Our Screwed Up Brains - Video

Al Seckel, a cognitive neuroscientist, explores the perceptual illusions that fool our brains. Loads of eye tricks help him prove that not only are we easily fooled, we kind of like it.

The Two-Minute Self-Hypnosis Technique

By Colin G. Smith

Psychologists and Doctors used to send their ‘impossible’ clients to him and in many instances he helped them to turn their lives around. Milton H. Erickson was one of the most successful hypnotherapists in the world and is often referred to as ‘the father of modern hypnosis.’

One of the factors that set him apart from other change workers was his strong faith in the vast potential of human beings. He knew that when a person stopped stumbling around with their conscious mind and tapped into the limitless ocean of unconscious resources, people could make wonderful changes.

He used to look at a client and say something like, ‘You’ve tried to solve this problem with your conscious mind and failed utterly. Now is the time to access your unconscious resources in a way that resolves this problem effectively.’

Now you may be wondering just how can you really induce self hypnosis in two minutes!?

Well, one of the common misconceptions about hypnosis is that you have to be able to concentrate and go into a profoundly altered state. This could be done, however what we are really interested in is accessing other areas of our mind (i.e. unconscious resources) so that we can make certain changes giving rise to our chosen outcome.

The good news is you can do this very easily and you can give it a go now with the following techniques. No need for deep trance!

Three Magic Doors

This is a classic hypnotherapy technique. I think you’ll be surprised and intrigued at what your unconscious mind conjures up.

Think of a small problem you want to change. For example perhaps there is someone you would like to get along with better

Imagine there are three closed doors in front of you: Door one is labeled, ‘usual way’, door two is labeled, ‘another person’s way’ and door three is labeled, ‘wacky way!’

In a moment you are going to imagine walking through one of those door ways and your unconscious will then present you with a solution or new creative insights.

So as you look at those doors notice which one you are drawn to. Would you prefer to solve the problem in a, ‘usual way’, ‘another person’s way’ or a ‘wacky way!’

And then just allow your unconscious to create an experience behind that door that will give rise to what is known as a ‘ah ah’ eureka moment when you walk through to the other side.

When you feel ready imagine opening the door and walking through, becoming aware of what you are presented with. What do you see, hear, smell and feel? And as you look around what is it that you haven’t noticed yet?

You may or may not know at the conscious level how this experience is going to help you, but you can if you wish ask yourself, ‘how does this experience help me?’ or ‘what new ideas, insights and perspectives does this give me?’

Whenever we are stuck it’s as if our mind is locked into a groove. We can snap out of it and gain creative solutions by accessing the unconscious regions of our mind.

There are many techniques and methods that enable us to achieve this goal such as the ‘three magic doors.’

The Wall

What is it that you’d like some help with?

Imagine a big wall in front of you.

Just allow your unconscious or the creative problem solving parts of your mind to manifest some useful insights on the other side of the wall.

When you feel ready imagine jumping up and looking over the wall. You may have to jump up a few times to gather all the new information!

Playing around with these kinds of rapid self hypnosis techniques will cause you to learn to access more areas of your mind. And as you continue to do so you will find yourself becoming more capable of solving problems creatively.

Colin G Smith is a licensed Master Practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and creator of The NLP Toolbox

The Universe is Really, Really Big

I guess this kind of puts things in perspective. When your troubles are weighing you down, or you feel a tad overwhelmed… then take a look at this to put your life in perspective. At the end, we have a narrator that tells it like it is.

This Article Doesn’t Exist

What are you worried about right now?

Well, it’s an almost guarantee that you are worried about nothing, for the very reason that you don’t exist!

You have no worries because you have no mind or body or life to worry with — it’s all an illusion. No worries, but more significantly, no worrier.

If you think this sounds like utter nonsense, some of the most brilliant scientists, philosophers and theological thinkers of our century would disagree with you.

Science and math suggest that we humans don’t exist, (even though there is really no math or science — more illusions!)

The advent of quantum mechanics and modern physics increasingly imply that our existence as human beings is a kind of persistent illusion. We are under the false assumption that we’re people, we only imagine we have bodies and brains, and minds functioning inside those brains. Illusions, all of it.

Listen to what one of the greatest physicists of the century, Authur Eddington said of quantum theories:

“In the world of physics…the shadow of my elbow rests on the shadow table as the shadow ink flows over the shadow paper…the frank realization that physical science is concerned with a world of shadow is one of the most significant of recent advances.”

By “shadow” Eddington meant illusion. More than any other science, it is particle physics that is confronting the fundamentals of reality, and more and more, the evidence point to the fact there is no reality!

For the past 300-some years, the world has been under the impression that everything is made up of atoms, “the building blocks of the universe.” It was the great Isaac Newton who solidified our impression that atoms were like billiard balls. Pile enough of them on top of each other, set them in motion and you get rocks, trees, animals and people.

But in 1900 Albert Einstein’s hero, the brilliant Max Planck, revealed some incredibly disturbing discoveries he made while trying to solve problems concerning the radiation of energy.

To make a long story short, Planck was forced to conclude that matter at its most fundamental level is not continuous, not solid. There are no tiny billiard balls. When you break down an atom, you get an electron, a proton and maybe a neutron. But it turns out these are not the smallest units either. You can break things down further to bosons, quarks, W particles, tachyons and a lot of other shadowy “things” that just sort of wink in and out of existence.

Where do things go when they “wink out?” Nowhere! They cease to exist! Then they come back again.

So what? you might ask. Well, as you know, the human body is made up from the fundamental elements of nature. We are mostly water, but we also have iron in our blood, calcium in our bones, and such. But each of those substances are made up of individual atoms, which in turn are made up of ghostly bits of nothing that just sort of come and go, in and out of reality.

Scientists call this blinking process “quantum fluctuation.”

So when the elements of your body fluctuate, so does your body, and so do you! So does you brain and the chemicals in your brain! In fact, you may be in a state of nothingness more often than you are in a state of somethingness (even though there really is no somethingness!)

As the currently popular medical guru Depack Chopra points out, all of us our dead (nonexistent) for much of the time, yet we are all constantly afraid of dying, not realizing we are dead much of the time! (Oh by the way, there’s no such thing as time either. Einstein proved it was an illusion, but we won’t get into that right now).

Even at its most solid state, the atom turns out to be not very solid at all. Atoms are 99.999999 empty space. If the nucleus of an atom were the size of a ping-pong ball, and if you were to place it in the center of a large football stadium, the electrons that orbit around the nucleus would be at the outer walls of the stadium.

What is between the nucleus and the electron? Nothing! And what are the nucleus and electron made from? Smaller and smaller bits of energy which are not solid, but actually whirling fragments of light.

Even a block of solid lead is nothing and light, acting as “something.” So is your car. So are the chemicals in your brain. So are you.

Once during a long, boring drive from Grand Forks to southern Missouri with one of my graduate school professors, we became embroiled in a lengthy debate about the deep issues of the universe. I argued that all was illusion, and he argued for solid reality. When I mentioned the unreal nature of fundamental particles, he said:

“That makes no difference! All this means is that these flucuating bits of energy are what we are made out of — but we are still us, still the same, still real solid people. Are your saying is that we are more fundamental than atoms.”

He also said: “If I whacked you with a baseball bat, I bet your pain wouldn’t feel like an illusion!”

At the time, I was stumped to answer because that was before I understood the nature — or more accurately — the mechanics of illusion. I didn’t realize that even our argument was an illusion!

The fact is, my professor and I could have argued for years on end and neither of us would have convinced the other because BOTH of our aurguments were false! Why? Because neither of our arguments exist!

The fact is, language is one of the primary ways in which we become deceived into believing in solid reality. Once a creature reaches the stage where it can manipulate symbolic language, you can bet that creature is deeply buried under many layers of illusion.

I also should have quoted the Uncertainty Principle and the Incompleteness Theorm to my professor.

You see, the idea that language is all illusion is not a simple belief, but a fact which has been proved mathematically. Back in the 1920s, a German math genius by the name of Kurt Godel produced a rigorous mathematical demonstration which showed that all logic was ultimately self contradictory.

Godel’s proof is known as Godel’s Theorm, but also as the Incompleteness Theorm. It states this:

“It is impossible to to establish the logical consistency of any complex deductive system except by assuming principles of reasoning whose own internal consistency is an open question as that of the system itself.”

Whew! That’s just a fancy way of saying that, no matter what your viewpoint — it’s wrong! You will never be able to convince someone of what you believe because all rhetoric is, by nature, fundamentally inconsistent.

That’s why arguing politics and religion is so frustrating — no one is ever right, literally! All arguments are rigged from the start!
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But there’s even more bad news for reality. It’s called the Heisenbreg Uncertainty principle, suggested and later proved by one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, the great Werner Heisenberg. His principle states:

“The position and the velocity of an object cannot both be measured exactly, at the same time, not even in theory. The very concepts of exact position and exact velocity together, in fact, have no meaning in nature.”

What this means is that physical objects cannot be pinned down to absolutely exist in any one place at any given time. Like Godel’s Theorm, this principle comes with a rigorous mathemetical proof.

So not only are all verbal arugments fundamentally inconsistent, and therefore false, but physical matter ultimately cannot be measured.

As one physicist put it:

“Our conception of substance is only vivid so long as we do not face it. It begins to fade when we analyze it … the solid substance of things is another illusion … we have chased the solid substance from the continuous liquid to the atom, from the atom to the electron, and there we have lost it.”

It’s amazing how complimentary Godel’s Theorm and the Uncertainty Principle are — they both devastate the idea of a solid physcial world filled with ultimate “truths.” There are no objects, no people and no truth. We’ve only been tricked into thinking so, as weird as this sounds.

Who have we been tricked by? Ourselves! And we don’t exist! Odd!

You might ask: How does knowing that you don’t exist help you with your daily troubles? Well, in fact, it helps a lot. Indeed, this knowledge can lead you to an extreme state of happiness, even bliss. How?

By getting to work at realizing that you are buried under many layers of very tricky, persistent illusions, which because of their mathematical inconsistency, are driving you nuts! It seems like you can never find ultimate truth, true peace and the purest of love becaue you are trying to get these things under the false assumption that they exist in some real way. They don’t. And neither does pain, suffering and worry.

The greater degree to which you become aware that you and your world is all sticky illusion, the greater your feeling of being happy, loving and truthful will become. Why this is so becomes plain when we give a more conventional example of how illusions cause pain.

We all know someone who has mistaken money for what money represents, or mistaken money for happiness. Money itself is just paper, a symbol which rerpresents material goods. Some people fall under the illusion that money is an end it itself, so they mindlessly persue more and more of the green stuff until they have a heart attack and die.

All would agree it’s good to be free of the illusion of money and materialism.

Well, as it turns out, the more illusions we get rid of, the better off we are. Getting rid of illusions like money, drugs and sex addictions is easy compared to getting rid of major illusions like death, time, language, and physical existence, but it’s far from impossible.

I should warn you also, that the more you try to achieve happiness, the worse off you’re likely to get because happiness is an illusory concept which does not exist. You’ll get very frustrated, although frustration does not exist either. Sorry.

So it’s better to work on getting rid of illusions themselves and let the rest take care of itself.

The brilliant psychologist-philospher-author Ken Wilber describes seven layers of illusion in his groundbreaking book, The Spectrum of Consciousness. In this book, Wilber takes you step by step through the kind of illusions human are trapped within, from Nothing to the deepest layer of illusion, which he calls “dualisms.”

The more you understand the nature of illusions, the various kinds of illusions, (especially language, time, the separation of objects in space) the more likely you are to find your way out.

This is what Zen and other forms of meditation are about — to get you to stop thinking so that the ultimate silence of the greater reality of Nothing can be realized.

But as any Zen master would warn you, the minute you start thinking that Zen meditation is going to help you, or that the Zen philosophy is going to help you, or any philosophy or any religion — in that assumption you get lost again!

What’s truly weird about illusion is that you have to use illusions to get rid of them, and it’s hard describe how this gets done. Remember Godel’s Theorm: all arugments based in language are fundamentally inconsistent, and therefore, just more traps.

Even what you are reading here right now is a trap, though this article strives to point out the fact that you are trapped by illusions! But I think it’s at least better to know you’re in jail, than being in jail and thinking this prison we call “life” is our true home.

Some might say: “Okay, but it’s better to exist as an illusion that suffers than to be nothing at all!”

So let me throw you this bone: The big Nothing scientists and philosophers speak of is not so much the complete lack of anything, as it is a singularity of pure Virtual Potential. It does not exist, but has the potential to exist if it wants to. It’s Nothing, but a kind of dynamic Nothing. Whatever. Words and labels are tricky.

But the reason you have the illusion of being, along with its joy and suffering — you want it. At the same time, you can have the bliss of realizing Infinite Potential without the suffering of the illusion of objective existence. In fact, this is your condition right now. You just don’t know it. It’s weird.

A lot of people who read this article are going to say: “Jeez! What a load of utter nonsense!”

And guess what? They’re right!

Article Source: Ken Korczak http://ironghost.wordpress.com

Why Change Can Be A Challenge?

Great article over at Scientific American… Millions of us dream of transforming our lives, but few of us are able to make major changes after our 20s. Here’s why….

“The shortest path to oneself leads around the world.” So wrote German philosopher Count Hermann Keyserling, who believed that travel was the best way to discover who you are.

That was how 22-year-old Christopher McCandless was thinking in the summer of 1990, when he decided to leave everything behind—including his family, friends and career plans. He gave his bank balance of $24,000 to the charity Oxfam International and hitchhiked around the country, ending up in Alaska. There he survived for about four months in the wilderness before dying of starvation in August 1992. His life became the subject of writer Jon Krakauer’s 1996 book Into the Wild, which inspired the 2007 film of the same name.

Read more…

How To Be A Renaissance Man (or Woman)

Based from the book “How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci” by Michael J. Gelb. Leonardo da Vinci was the ultimate multi-tasker: an accomplished scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, botanist, musician and writer. If you want to be a Renaissance Man, you can learn a lot from how Leonardo da Vinci lived and thought. Based on studying his life and work, anyone can emulate da Vinci with the following steps.

Curiosità

Curiosità is an “insatiably curious approach to life and unrelenting quest for continuous learning”. Great minds have one characteristic in common: they continuously ask questions throughout their lives. Leonardo’s endless quest for truth and beauty clearly demonstrates this. What makes great minds different is the quality of their questions. You can increase your ability to solve problems by increasing your ability to ask good questions. Like da Vinci, you should cultivate an open mind that allows you to broaden your universe and increase your ability to explore it. Here are some ways to apply Curiosità:

* Keep a journal. Bring a journal wherever you go and use it often. Write your ideas and thoughts there. Try to write several statements a day that start with “I wonder why/how…”
* Observe according to a theme. Choose a theme and observe things according to the theme for a day. For example, let’s say you choose “communication”. For the entire day, observe every type and instance of communication you come across. You can then record your observations in your journal.
* Stream of consciousness exercise. Pick a question and write the thoughts and associations that occur to you as they are. Don’t edit them. The important thing is to keep writing. This is also referred to as freewriting.

Dimostrazione

Dimostrazione is “a commitment to test knowledge through experience, persistence, and a willingness to learn from mistake”. Wisdom comes from experience and the principle of Dimostrazione helps you get the most out of your experience. Here are some ways to apply Dimostrazione:

* Check your beliefs. Do you hold any beliefs that you haven’t verified through experience?
* Three points of view. First, make a strong argument against your belief. Next, take a distant view of your belief (for example, as if you live in a different culture) and review it. Finally, find friends who can give you different perspectives.
* Analyze the advertisements that affect you. Look at the advertisements in your favorite magazine and analyze the strategy and tactics they use. Find the advertisements that affect you most and find out why.
* Find “anti-role models” to learn from. List the names of some people whose mistakes you want to avoid. Learn from them so that you won’t encounter the same pitfalls.

Sensazione

Sensazione is “the continual refinement of the senses, especially sight, as the means to enliven experience”. According to da Vinci, we can best practice Dimostrazione through our senses, particularly sight. That’s why one of Leonardo’s mottoes is saper vedere (knowing how to see) upon which he built his work in arts and science. Here are some ways to apply Sensazione:

* Write detailed description of an experience. For instance, describe your experience of watching a sunrise in your journal.
* Learn how to describe a smell.
* Learn to draw.
* Listen to different sounds around you. Learn to listen to different intensity of sounds from the softest (e.g. your breathing) to the loudest (e.g. traffic).
* Live in the moment. Practice mindfulness.

Sfumato

Sfumato is “a willingness to embrace ambiguity, paradox, and uncertainty”. An essential characteristic of da Vinci’s genius is his ability to handle a sense of mystery. Here are two ways to apply Sfumato:

* Befriend ambiguity. Find some situations in your past where you faced ambiguity (e.g. waiting to hear if your application for a job you wanted was successful). Describe how you felt.
* Ask yourself questions that relate two opposites. For example, ask yourself how your happiest and saddest moments are related.
* Practice the Socratic method. The goal with the Socratic method is to examine possibilities, and that is done by asking questions, not by giving answers. Socrates was known (and criticized) for asking questions to which he didn’t have answers.[2] The key to using the Socratic method is to be humble. Don’t assume that you or anyone knows anything for sure. Question every premise.

Arte/scienza

Arte/scienza is “the development of the balance between science and art, logic and imagination”. This is thinking with the “whole brain”. Mind mapping is a powerful method that can help you combine logic and imagination in your work and life. The end result of mapping should be a web-like structure of words and ideas that are somehow related in the writer’s mind.

Corporalità

Corporalità is “the cultivation of grace, ambidexterity, fitness, and poise”. Leonardo had amazing physical ability that complemented his genius in science and arts. Here are some ways to apply Corporalità:

* Develop a program for physical fitness. Your program should include three things: flexibility exercises, strength training, and aerobic conditioning.
* Develop body awareness. Study anatomy. Try yoga. Dance. Do some contact juggling. Whatever strengthens the connection between body and mind, go for it.
* Cultivate ambidexterity. Leonardo could work with both his right and left hand and regularly switched between them. You can cultivate ambidexterity by using your nondominant hand for relatively simple tasks like brushing your teeth or eating your breakfast. Later you can use your nondominant hand for writing.

Connessione

Connessione is “a recognition of and appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things and phenomena”. This, in other words, is systems thinking. One main source of Leonardo’s creativity is his ability to form new patterns through connections and combinations of different elements. Here are some ways to apply Connessione:

* Find ways to link things that seem unrelated. For example, you can try to find connections between a bear and the World Wide Web, or geology and the Mona Lisa (real name “La Joconde”).
* Imagine dialogues. Imagine talking with a role model to gain new perspective and insight. Or you can imagine how some role models would discuss your problem.
* Think about how things originate. Take an object and think about what elements are involved in its creation and how.

Source: wikiHow

The Overview Effect

In February, 1971, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell experienced the little understood phenomenon sometimes called the “Overview Effect”.

He describes being completely engulfed by a profound sense of universal connectedness. Without warning, he says, a feeling of bliss, timelessness, and connectedness began to overwhelm him.

He describes becoming instantly and profoundly aware that each of his constituent atoms were connected to the fragile planet he saw in the window and to every other atom in the Universe. He described experiencing an intense awareness that Earth, with its humans, other animal species, and systems were all one synergistic whole.

He says the feeling that rushed over him was a sense of interconnected euphoria. He was not the first—nor the last—to experience this strange “cosmic connection”.

Rusty Schweikart experienced it on March 6th 1969 during a spacewalk outside his Apollo 9 vehicle: “When you go around the Earth in an hour and a half, you begin to recognize that your identity is with that whole thing. That makes a change…it comes through to you so powerfully that you’re the sensing element for Man.” Schweikart, similar to what Mitchell experienced, describes intuitively sensing that everything is profoundly connected.

Their experiences, along with dozens of other similar experiences described by other astronauts, intrigue scientists who study the brain. This “Overview Effect”, or acute awareness of all matter as synergistically connected, sounds somewhat similar to certain religious experiences described by Buddhist monks, for example.

Where does it come from and why?

Andy Newberg, a neuroscientist/physician with a background in space medicine, is learning how to identify the markers of someone who has had the experience. “You can often tell when you’re with someone who has flown in space,” he says, “It’s palpable.” Andy scans brains for a living: praying nuns, transcendental mediators, and others in the act of focused states.

Newberg can pinpoint regions in subjects’ gray matter that correlate to these circumstances. Newberg is seriously looking at how to fly equipment that could study—in action—the brain functions of space travelers. If this Overview Effect is a real, physiological phenomenon—he wants to watch it happen.

Newberg’s first test subject will not be a paid astronaut, but rather a paying space tourist: Reda Andersen slated to fly with Rocketplane Kistler says, “It would be criminal NOT to study the first of us (space adventure travelers).”

After decades of study and contemplation about his experience, Ed Mitchell believes that the feeling of “oneness” with the Universe that he and others have experienced is a consequence of little understood quantum physics.

In a recent interview with writer Diana deRegnier of American Chronicle, Mitchell explains how the event changed his life and his entire perspective on the world and how each of us fits into the grand scale of the cosmos.

“Four hundred years ago. the philosopher Rene Descartes came to the conclusion that physicality, spirituality, mind and body belonged to different realms of reality that didn’t interact. Now, that served the purpose to get the Inquisition off the backs of the intellectuals so they could disagree on material things with the church and without the fear of being burned at the stake. So that ended that, but it did cause, for four hundred years, science to consider consciousness and mind a subject for philosophy and religion and not a subject for science.

Now, one of the things that happened, in the 1940s, was the mathematician, physicist, Norbert Wiener (MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) for the first time really defined information as the negative of entropy, and entropy as the idea of the universe is running down and wastes energy. But, Wiener defined information as the negative of entropy, and that’s wonderful but it didn’t go far enough.”

Mitchell says that in an attempt to fill in some of the missing gap, the 2008 revised edition of his book The Way of the Explorer explores the largely ignored science of human consciousness. Using what he calls the “dyadic model” he outlines the “two faces” of energy. “Instead of being two separate things, it’s the energy as the basis of our existence in matter. And, it’s the basis of our knowing and information,” Mitchell explains.

“We had not had, in science, a definition of consciousness. The only definition of consciousness from the dictionary is that at its basic level it is awareness. Consciousness means to be aware, and then we have different levels of consciousness depending upon how complex the substance is. It has been demonstrated many times over in laboratories that basic awareness is demonstrable at the level of plants, at simple bacteria, at simple life forms.

This is done with Faraday cages. It’s shown that this information at this deep level, at the quantum level, can transcend electromagnetic theory. And, now we’re getting into quantum physics and we don´t want to go there at this point. But it’s a very fundamental notion that awareness is at the very basis of things.”

Mitchell believes that perhaps both the theologians and scientists have missed the mark.

“All I can suggest to the mystic and the theologian is that our gods have been too small; they fill the universe. And to the scientist all I can say is that the gods do exist; they are the eternal, connected, and aware Self experienced by all intelligent beings.’

In response to DeRegnier questioning whether or not Mitchell believes in the idea of God, he responds that while he does not believe in the traditional “grandfather figure” version of God, “we do have great mystery about what is the origin of the universe, how it came to be. There’s a great deal of question as to whether the big bang is the correct answer to the way the universe arose, and under what auspices and conditions. I don’t think we have the full answers to that yet. Hopefully in due course we’ll be able to find a much better way to describe all this.”

But while Mitchell does not claim to know how to perfectly interpret his experience, he is certain that it was a glimpse into a largely ignored reality: People, places and things are all more closely connected than they sometimes appear. He also mentions the need for better stewardship of our precious planet.

“The great thinker Buckminster Fuller, philosopher, now deceased but for a goodly portion of the twentieth century, pointed out at the beginning of our space exploration that we are the crew of ‘space ship earth’. But we ‘re a crew of mutiny and how can you run a space ship with a mutinous crew?”

By Rebecca Sato
Source: Daily Galaxy

10 Common Dreams And What They Mean

Everyone dreams (even if we don’t always remember them after the fact) and researchers have found that the majority of us have dreams with similar themes.

For years people have tried to interpret the fleeting images that we see when we go to sleep - some interpretations are outright bizarre, while others are pretty understandable. This is a list of the interpretations that the Association for the Study of Dreams has given to the most recurring and common types of dream.

10. Car Troubles

In these types of dreams you are usually in or near a car or some other type of vehicle which is out of control or has other problems that seem insurmountable. For example, the brakes may have failed, you may have lost control of the steering, or be heading over a cliff or crashing. You can either be the driver or the passenger. This is a very common type of nightmare and it occurs in all people - not just those who can drive. This dream usually means that you are feeling powerless over something in your life - or that you are heading for a crash (metaphorically speaking).

9. Faulty Machinery

In the faulty machinery dream you are trying to operate mechanical equipment which either fails to work, or fails to work in the way that you expect it to. The vast majority of these dreams involve a telephone - either trouble dialing, losing a connection, or dialing a wrong number. It can involve a lost Internet connection, or something manual like a jammed or broken machine. This dream often means that you feel you are losing touch with reality, or that a part of your body or mind is not functioning as it should. It can also occur when you are feeling anxious about making a connection with another person in real life.

8. Lost or Trapped

Dreaming about being lost is very common and will usually occur when you are having conflict in deciding how to react in a situation in real life. In the dream you are trying to find your way out of an area - such as a forest, city streets, a large building, or other maze-like structure. Another way this dream plays out involves you being trapped, buried alive, caught in a web, or unable to move for some other reason. This is often accompanied by a feeling of terror. This dream usually means that you are trapped in real life - unable to make the right choice.

7. Missed a Boat or Plane

In this type of dream you are rushing to catch a bus, train, plane, or other type of public transport - but you miss it - usually by a fraction of a second. Rather than feeling fear in this dream, you usually feel frustration. This dream can also occur in a different form, in which you arrive late for an important performance or sporting event that you are supposed to participate in, only to find that the event has already begun. This dream usually means that you feel that you have missed out on an important opportunity in your real life. It will often occur when you are struggling over an important decision.

6. Failing a Test

This dream usually manifests itself in people who have been out of school for a long time. In the dream you are prevented from passing a test in a variety of different possible scenarios. In one scenario you find that you are unable to make it to the test on time, often through being unable to find the test room. In other versions you are unprepared (either through lack of study) or you are missing equipment. This dream usually means that you are feeling tested in some way in your real life. You may feel that you are unprepared for something or playing the wrong part in life.

5. Ill or Dying

In this dream, you (or a loved one) are ill, injured, or dying. It is a moderately common dream and, not surprisingly, occurs often at the onset of an illness. Aside from becoming ill, this dream can mean that you are emotionally hurt or are afraid of becoming hurt. The dream may also be warning you of an upcoming physical risk to yourself or a loved one. When it is someone else in the dream that dies, it can mean that you feel that part of yourself (that you see represented by that person) is dead. It may also mean that you wish the person would go away, or that you fear losing them.

4. Being Chased

Dreaming of being chased can be a truly horrifying experience. Most often the chaser is a monster or some person that is frightening, and occasionally it may be an animal. You may be surprised to know that this is the most commonly experienced nightmare theme. The meaning of these dreams is that someone, something (possibly something as obscure as an emotion) is making you feel threatened. One way to determine the root of the threat is to ask yourself who or what in your real life most closely resembles the “creature” or circumstance in your dream. It is also worth noting that sometimes this dream is a replay of an actual event in your life.

3. Bad or Missing Teeth

Teeth dreams are fairly common and they usually involve the discovery of extremely decayed or missing teeth in your own mouth. Sometimes you will dream that you open your mouth and your teeth begin to fall out. The fact that the majority of people today have reasonable teeth (perhaps with the exception of the British), it is not surprising that we feel so emotionally disturbed by these dreams. So, what does it mean when we dream about missing teeth? At the most basic level it means that we are afraid of being found unattractive. At a deeper level, it can signify a fear of embarrassment or a loss of power in real life. Oh - I was just kidding about the “British” thing!

2. Dream Nudity

In this type of dream you are in a state of undress, partial undress, or inappropriate dress (for example wearing pajamas to work). Occasionally you are the witness of another person who is naked while you are clothed. This is often accompanied by feelings of embarrassment and shame, but occasionally with the feeling of pride or freedom. The meaning of this dream is that you are feeling exposed, awkward, or vulnerable, or you are afraid that you have revealed too much of yourself (such as a secret or a very personal feeling) in a real life situation. An interesting fact about this type of dream is that it occurs much more frequently in people who are involved in a wedding ceremony in their real life.

1. Falling or Sinking

We have all had falling dreams - it is such a common dream, in fact, that myths have arisen over them; the most common myth is, of course, that you will die if you hit the ground in the dream. I can assure you, having hit the ground in more than one falling dream, that this is not true at all. In the falling dream we are usually falling through the air and frightened. Occasionally we may be sinking in water (and in danger of drowning). Typically a person having this dream is feeling insecure or lacking in support in their waking life. These dreams often occur when you are overwhelmed in life and feel ready to give up. If you have this dream you should evaluate your current situation and try to locate the problem that is overwhelming you. Deal with it and this dream should go away.

Source: The List Universe

How To Kill A House Fly

Using high-speed video footage, bioengineers have discovered the key to the evasive manoeuvrability of flies – and found the best strategy for swatting them successfully.

Michael Dickinson has been interviewed hundreds of times about his research on the biomechanics of insect flight. One question has always dogged him: Why are flies so hard to swat?

“Now I can finally answer,” said Dickinson, a bioengineer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Tiny brain, big escape plan

Using high-speed, digital imaging of fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) faced with a looming swatter, Dickinson and graduate student Gwyneth Card determined the secret to a fly’s crafty behaviour.

Long before the fly leaps, its tiny ‘brain’ calculates the location of the impending threat, comes up with an escape plan, and places its legs in an optimal position to hop out of the way in the opposite direction. All of this action takes place within about 100 milliseconds after the fly first spots the swatter.

“This illustrates how rapidly the fly’s brain can process sensory information into an appropriate motor response,” said Dickinson who this week publishes a paper detailing the research in the U.S. journal Current Biology.

In this study, the swatter was actually a 14-centimetre-diameter black disk, dropping at a 50º angle toward a fly standing at the centre of a small platform.

The researcher’s videos show that if the descending swatter comes from in front of the fly, the fly moves its middle legs forward and leans back, then raises and extends its legs to push off backward.

Rear attack

When the threat comes from behind, however, the fly (which has a nearly 360º field of view) moves its middle legs a tiny bit backwards. With a threat from the side, the fly keeps its middle legs stationary, but leans its whole body in the opposite direction before it jumps.

“We also found that when the fly makes planning movements prior to take-off, it takes into account its body position at the time it first sees the threat,” Dickinson said.

“When it first notices an approaching threat, a fly’s body might be in any sort of posture depending on what it was doing at the time, like grooming, feeding, walking, or courting,” he said.

Perfecting pre-flight posture

Yet, the experiments hinted that the fly somehow ‘knows’ whether it needs to make large or small postural changes to reach the correct pre-flight posture. This means that it must integrate visual information from its eyes with sensory information from its legs, to tell it how to move to get in the optimal pose for take-off.

The results offer new insight into the nervous system of insects, and suggest that within the fly brain there is a map in which the position of the looming threat “is transformed into an appropriate pattern of leg and body motion prior to take off,” Dickinson said. “This is a rather sophisticated sensory-to-motor transformation and the search is on to find the place in the brain where this happens.”

Handily, the research suggests an optimal method for successfully swatting a fly.

“It is best not to swat at the fly’s starting position, but rather to aim a bit forward of that to anticipate where the fly is going to jump when it first sees your swatter,” suggested Dickinson.

~ California Institute of Technology and Cosmos Online

The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon

You may have heard about Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon before. In fact, you probably learned about it for the first time very recently. If not, then you just might hear about it again very soon. Baader-Meinhof is the phenomenon where one happens upon some obscure piece of information– often an unfamiliar word or name– and soon afterwards encounters the same subject again, often repeatedly. Anytime the phrase “That’s so weird, I just heard about that the other day” would be appropriate, the utterer is hip-deep in Baader-Meinhof.

Most people seem to have experienced the phenomenon at least a few times in their lives, and many people encounter it with such regularity that they anticipate it upon the introduction of new information. But what is the underlying cause? Is there some hidden meaning behind Baader-Meinhof events?

The phenomenon bears some similarity to synchronicity, which is the experience of having a highly meaningful coincidence… such as having someone telephone you while you are thinking about them. Both phenomena invoke a feeling of mild surprise, and cause one to ponder the odds of such an intersection. Both smack of destiny, as though the events were supposed to occur in just that arrangement… as though we’re witnessing yet another domino tip over in a chain of dominoes beyond our reckoning.

Despite science’s cries that a world as complex as ours invites frequent coincidences, observation tells us that such an explanation is inadequate. Observation shows us that Baader-Meinhof strikes with blurring accuracy, and too frequently to be explained away so easily. But over the centuries, observation has also shown us that observation itself is highly flawed, and not to be trusted.

The reason for this is our brains’ prejudice towards patterns. Our brains are fantastic pattern recognition engines, a characteristic which is highly useful for learning, but it does cause the brain to lend excessive importance to unremarkable events. Considering how many words, names, and ideas a person is exposed to in any given day, it is unsurprising that we sometimes encounter the same information again within a short time. When that occasional intersection occurs, the brain promotes the information because the two instances make up the beginnings of a sequence. What we fail to notice is the hundreds or thousands of pieces of information which aren’t repeated, because they do not conform to an interesting pattern. This tendency to ignore the “uninteresting” data is an example of selective attention.

In point of fact, coincidences themselves are usually just an artifact of perception. We humans tend to underestimate the probability of coinciding events, so our expectations are at odds with reality. And non-coincidental events do not grab our attention with anywhere near the same intensity, because coincidences are patterns, and the brain actually stimulates us for successfully detecting patterns… hence their inflated value. In short, patterns are habit-forming.

But when we hear a word or name which we just learned the previous day, it often feels like more than a mere coincidence. This is because Baader-Meinhof is amplified by the recency effect, a cognitive bias that inflates the importance of recent stimuli or observations. This increases the chances of being more aware of the subject when we encounter it again in the near future.

How the phenomenon came to be known as “Baader-Meinhof” is uncertain. It seems likely that some individual learned of the existence of the historic German urban guerrilla group which went by that name, and then heard the name again soon afterwards. This plucky wordsmith may then have named the phenomenon after the very subject which triggered it. But it is certainly a mouthful; a shorter name might have more hope of penetrating the lexicon.

However it came to be known by such a name, it is clear that Baader-Meinhof is yet another charming fantasy whose magic is diluted by stick-in-the-mud science and its sinister cohort: facts. But if you’ve never heard of the phenomenon before, be sure to watch for it in the next few days… brain stimulation is nice.

Written by Alan Bellows From DamnInteresting.com

Louise Hay - You Can Heal Your Life: The Movie

This entertaining and inspirational movie based on the best-selling book of the same name is hosted by author and teacher Louise L. Hay. This film gives penetrating insights into Louise’s fascinating personal story; and shows how her views on self-esteem, abundance, and the metaphysical causes behind physical ailments were developed. It also reveals how she applied these concepts to her own emotional, spiritual, and professional life.

A number of luminaries in the fields of self-help, philosophy, health, spirituality, and New Thought join Louise, giving their take on success, happiness, and the myriad ways in which people can heal their own lives. And there are also gripping firsthand accounts from others who have been positively affected by Louise’s work.

[youtube qYCamVx4fSQ]

Illusions Of The Brain (Video)

This is the “Way Cool Scientist” section of Bill Nye The Science Guy: The Brain episode. Pretty neat.

The Lost Art Of Dream Incubation

Dreams can provide us with a direct link to the unconscious, allowing a much larger perspective than our physical senses. They provide an ideal means for honing intuition, for bringing about profound feelings and states of being, for self-exploration, and ultimately, for discovering our own true nature. We can even follow in the footsteps of Tibetan monks who master dream skills as a stepping stone on the path to enlightenment, as the following experience suggests:

“Falling asleep, I remember wondering what truly ‘knowing myself’ would be like. Dreaming, I become aware of this incredible, indescribably powerful ‘Love Light.’ The thought comes that there is no power in the universe like it — it’s absolutely non-judgmental, and dwarfs every worry or desire I’ve ever had. It is peace and simplicity and well-being. It includes sexuality but encompasses far more. Basking in what feels like ‘an ocean of grace’, I begin to realize that I’m not looking at it, but rather that I AM it, recognizing myself.” (C.W., Palo Alto, CA)

1. Choose Your Goal

You can incubate a dream on any topic you choose, but you will have the greatest success with those goals in which you have some emotional investment. Pick a problem or question that concerns you, one which you would be willing to explore. Or, choose an interesting or intriguing goal, one that excites you and with which you can have some fun.

2. Immerse Yourself in the Goal

Engage in activities relevant to the goal. Read books or notes on your chosen subject. Utilize photos, movies, or objects to form associations. Rehearse the situation in the waking state, using role-playing or discussion. Pray or meditate to the goal; fantasize about it. Visualize writing the dream in your journal.

3. Feather Your Nest

Create an atmosphere that will most encourage the dream. Provide a peaceful place to sleep. Choose a time when you are not fatigued, in which you have not indulged in stimulants or heavy food. Have your notebook, pen and light available for recording the dream, or use a tape recorder. Do not give yourself a short length of tape or piece of scrap paper to record–this defeats your confidence in the dreaming process. Retire at a reasonable time if night sleeping, or awake yourself in the early morning hours to return to lighter sleep. You might also try day sleeping.

4. Narrow Your Focus

Write down your request. Outline all aspects of the topic on paper. Get in touch with how you feel about the situation, especially all those reasons for not wanting to resolve or experience the goal. Give yourself permission to discover and explore. The point is to be specific about your goal, but open-ended about the results. Finally, write down the phrase that most clearly speaks to your deepest desires. Use the first person–after all, this is your dream! Date the dream and write “Dream I” if you wish, to indicate to your dreaming mind that you are ready to record.

5. Open Your Expectations

Relax and put yourself in the mood or emotion of your goal. Concentrate on the energy and feeling of the topic. Repeat your goal phrase to yourself. You may, depending upon the topic, choose to adopt one of the following approaches: mantra, affirmation, prayer, or command. If your mind wanders, gently bring it back to the topic. Avoid thinking of alternatives. Think about the topic firmly, but don’t force it. Then let yourself drift into sleep.

6. Sleep and Dream

Trust your dream maker to respond to your request.

7. Recall Your Dream

Try to awake before your usual time to rise: use a music alarm, a partner, or give yourself the suggestion prior to sleep. You might try drinking several glasses of water before sleeping. Don’t move; remain prone and try to recall the images of the dream. Hold on to the feeling tones: these can sometimes conjure up the related dream visuals. When you have the first fragment, turn over in bed to another position–this may stimulate additional dream portions. Try still other positions until you have the fullest recall. Reexperience the dream several times, noting a key word from each segment to help reconstruct the whole dream.

8. Record Your Dream

Record all dreams as soon as possible upon waking. Include the feelings associated with the dream. Title and date the dream, and use the present tense. If, while recording, you have any immediate associations with waking life, note them. If you have no dream recall, simply record the feelings upon waking, or the first thoughts that pop into mind.

9. Reinforce Your Dream

Record each dream! The seemingly trivial can often contain a profound message. Treat all “failures” kindly; encourage yourself to try again. Sometimes the incubated dream will appear on a succeeding night. Share your dream with a partner or group. By yourself, you can try various methods of interpretation. But do something with the dream; actualize it!

First published as Magallón, Linda Lane. “Dream Trek: Incubation Techniques: How To Dream To The Target,” Dream Network Bulletin, 5/3 (1986), 15.

The Fringe Benefits Of Failure

J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivered her Commencement Address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association. Below are notable excerpts and a link to the original video.

“I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.

However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown academically.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.

Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.”

“… One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.”

“So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.
I wish you all very good lives.

Thank you very much.”

-JK Rowling
http://harvardmagazine.com/go/jkrowling.html

Does Your Brain Have A Mind Of Its Own?

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.

Or this. You decide, perhaps circa Jan. 1, that it’s time to lose weight; you need to eat less, eat better and exercise more. But by the first of May, your New Year’s resolutions are a distant memory.

Human beings are, to put it gently, in a unique position in the animal world. We’re the only species smart enough to plan systematically for the future — yet we remain dumb enough to ditch even our most carefully made plans in favor of short-term gratification. (”Did I say I was on a diet? Mmm, but three-layer chocolate mousse is my favorite. Maybe I’ll start my diet tomorrow.”)

In a wonderful study conducted at Stanford University in the late 1960s, psychologist Walter Mischel offered preschoolers a choice: a marshmallow now, or two marshmallows if they could wait until he returned. And then, cruelly, he left them alone with nothing more than themselves, the single marshmallow, a hidden camera and no indication of when he would return.

A few of the kids ate the oh-so-tempting marshmallow the minute he left the room. But most kids wanted the bigger bonus and endeavored to wait. So they tried. Hard. But with nothing else to do in the room, the torture was visible. The kids did just about anything they could to distract themselves from the tempting marshmallow that stood before them. They talked to themselves, bounced up and down, covered their eyes, sat on their hands — strategies that more than a few adults might on occasion profitably adopt. Even so, for about half the kids, the 15 to 20 minutes until Mischel returned was just too long to wait.

Toddlers, of course, aren’t the only humans who melt in the face of temptation. Teenagers often drive at speeds that would be unsafe even on an autobahn, and people of all ages have been known to engage in unprotected sex with strangers, even when they are perfectly aware of the risks. (To say nothing of the daily uncontrollable choices of alcoholics, drug addicts and compulsive gamblers.)

What gives? Why are we as a species so often so desperately poor at achieving our goals? If we are, as the selfish-gene theory would have it, organisms that exist only to serve the interests of our genes, why do we waste so much of our time doing things that are not, in any obvious way, remotely in the interest of our genes? How can one explain, for example, why a busy undergraduate would spend four weeks playing “Halo 3″ rather than studying for his exams?

The selfish-gene theory doesn’t, in itself, answer these questions, but there is another facet of evolution that can: The fact that evolution is entirely blind, unable to look forward, backward or to the side. As Charles Darwin observed, evolution invariably proceeds through a process called “descent with modification.” In lay language, this means that Mother Nature never starts from scratch, no matter how useful an overhaul might be. Everything that evolves necessarily builds on that which came before. Our arms, to take one simple example, are adaptations of the front legs of our primate ancestors.

In practical terms, that means that evolution’s products aren’t always particularly sound. Truly dismal solutions are quickly weeded out; if someone has a genetic condition that brings them into the world without a functioning heart, they don’t live long enough to reproduce. But merely adequate solutions (what engineers call “kluges”) — like the awkward, injury-prone human spine, good enough but far from perfect — can stick around indefinitely if better solutions are too far away on the evolutionary landscape.

In the mental machinery that governs our everyday decisions, kluges abound. Take, for example, the scenario described in the beginning of the essay — the fellow who forgets his errand on the way home. His problem is clearly not in finding his way to the grocery store — it’s in remembering to go in the first place.

The problem is that evolution failed to realize that remembering goals is not like recognizing objects. When your brain sees a lion, the thing to do is to decide, lickety-split, to get out of the way. Run first; ask questions later. We’re programmed for just that kind of split-second decision; just about every creature on the planet is built such that it can identify things like predators and prey very rapidly. We’re not programmed to remember precise episodes from the past. Why not? Because remembering the exact date on which you last saw a lion is not particularly helpful when you’re trying to get out of the way.

Alas, evolution didn’t have the foresight to realize that different kinds of tasks require different kinds of memory, and it used the same basic sort of memory for everything, not just for remembering what lions and tigers look like (in which general tendencies suffice) but also for cases — like tracking our goals — where a bit more precision would have been helpful. As a result, trying to remember what to do next can be a little like trying to remember what you had for breakfast yesterday: There are too many breakfasts and too many yesterdays for our biological memories to keep track of.

The same thing can happen with our goals. When you sit in your car late in the day and ask yourself, “What am I supposed to do next?” and all of a sudden the cellphone rings, your brain can easily lose track of which “next step” is the right one. Instead of zeroing in on the specific memory it needs, it may well settle for remembering whatever you’ve done in the car most often — and that’s drive home. Voila, autopilot.

Our attempts to pursue our goals are often thwarted by the fact that evolution has built our most sophisticated technologies on top of older technologies — without working out how to integrate the two. We can plan in advance, using our modern deliberative reasoning systems, but our ancestral reflexive mechanisms, which evolved first, still basically control the steering wheel. When the chips are down, it’s those mechanisms that our brains turn to, and that means that our brains frequently wind up relying on machinery that is all about acting first and asking questions later, squandering some of the efforts of our deliberative system.

No sensible engineer would have designed things this way. Why design fancy machinery for making long-term goals if you’re not going to use it? Yet the brain is structured such that the more tired, stressed or distracted we are, the less likely we are to use our forebrains and the more likely to lean back on the time-tested but shortsighted machinery we’ve inherited from our ancestors.

Still, all is not lost. Even though our short-term desires are pretty good at grabbing the steering wheel of our consciousness, our more recently evolved deliberate minds are powerful enough to regain at least some measure of control.

Consider, for example, the difficulty that most people having in sticking to abstract goals like “I intend to lose weight” or “I plan to finish this article before the deadline.” Nice thoughts, but not formulated in terms that your ancestral, reflexive brain might understand. The work-around? Translate those abstract goals into a form your ancestral systems — which traffic largely in dumb reflexes — can understand: if-then. If you find yourself in a particular situation, then take a specific action: “If I see French fries, then I will avoid them.” As Peter Gollwitzer, my colleague in New York University’s department of psychology, has shown, even simple changes like these can markedly increase the chances of success.

Our conscious, deliberate systems will never have total control, and our memories will never be perfect, but as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, recognition is the first step. If we come to recognize our limitations, and how they evolved, we just might be able to outwit our inner kluge.

Gary Marcus, a professor of psychology at New York University, is the author, most recently, of “Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind.”

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