Alone But Not Lonely
An emerging body of research is suggesting that spending time alone can be good for us. Just as regular exercise and healthy eating make our minds and bodies work better, solitude, experts say, so can being alone. Sherry Turkle, director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, makes the case for people to mindfully set aside time everyday when they are not engaged in so-called "social snacki... posted on Aug 05 2011, 5,427 reads

7 Practices to Cultivate Compassion
Scientific studies suggest that there are physical benefits to practicing compassion -- people who practice it produce 100 percent more DHEA, which is a hormone that counteracts the aging process, and 23 percent less cortisol -- the "stress hormone." According to this guide, the key to developing compassion is to make it a daily practice, and it offers 7 different ways to incorporate it into ever... posted on Aug 02 2011, 50,102 reads

A Low Electron Diet
Author Shannon Hayes turns her computer off every morning around 9 am, once her workday is complete. Then she tunes out the rest of the world and tunes into her family, home, and farm. Very often the telephone gets turned off, too. So does the radio. "I shut out the wide world to tend to my immediate world." Hayes continues: "Radical homemakers are not one-person wonders, single-handedly capable o... posted on Jul 26 2011, 10,619 reads

Why Patience Pays Off
"Consider this powerful quote by Lao Tzu: 'Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles, and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving until the right action arises by itself?' We might think of "waiting" as taking time, but it's actually less about clock time and more about inner space. Of course, there are moments when our immediate gut-level response to a situation is a flash of in... posted on Jul 25 2011, 40,871 reads

You Can't Buy Empathy
"It's not what you know but who you know," the saying goes, suggesting that social connections breed success. But it seems there's at least one way that the well educated are less socially connected: New research finds that those with an economic advantage have more trouble reading others' emotions. In a series of studies, researchers examined how well participants could judge the emotions that ot... posted on Jul 24 2011, 11,875 reads

Reading, Writing and Revelation
Whenever the stabbing pain in her knee becomes unbearable, 17-year-old Mackenzie Bearup picks up a book and starts to read. While previous treatments -- painkillers, physiotherapy, acupuncture, hyperbaric oxygen therapy -- have failed, a self-prescribed reading cure works. "So far, books have been my only medicine," Bearup says. Reading and healing have an age-old association. In ancient Egypt, li... posted on Jul 14 2011, 7,304 reads

9 Interviews with Creative Visionaries
"I love a good interview. To me, there's nothing so useful for demystifying the creative process as hearing an artist or entrepreneur speak from a very personal perspective about how, and why, they do what they do. This weekend, I combed through my archive of epic and inspiring interviews and came up with this shortlist. Straight talk from Ernest Hemingway, Dieter Rams, Patti Smith, Steve Jobs, An... posted on Jul 13 2011, 14,958 reads

Impossible: Breaking the Four-Minute Mile
In 1954, England's Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile. Today, of course, the it is routine among the top runners, but until Sir Roger (knighted in 1975) accomplished it, it was considered beyond the realm of human possibility -- like climbing Mount Everest or walking on the moon. Bannister though, being a medical student at Oxford at the time, recognized it more of a global, psycho... posted on Jul 11 2011, 3,479 reads

The Science of Self-Control
In the classic Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, researchers gave children a choice between one marshmallow right away, or two later. Most struggled to resist the treat and held out for less than three minutes. "A few kids ate the marshmallow right away," Walter Mischel, the Stanford professor in charge of the experiment, remembers. "They didn't even bother ringing the bell. Other kids would stare ... posted on Jul 10 2011, 12,001 reads

Why Invisible Gorillas Matter
Daniel Simons has become one of the most influential young cognitive scientists in the last decade, co-authoring smash-hit studies in two different fields. He's best-known for his "Gorillas in our Midst" study, co-authored with Christopher Chabris, where viewers are shown a 45-second video of six students tossing around basketballs. Viewers are instructed to carefully count only the passes between... posted on Jun 29 2011, 4,964 reads