Category: Body & Mind

Think Good Thoughts About Yesterday for Happiness Today

This is a very simple way to make sure that you are happy and positive in life: just think about a good thing that happened to you yesterday.

It showed a 7 per cent increase in overall cheerfulness after the experiment.
”The figure is statistically significant,” said Prof Wiseman. ”I thought with a representative sample you wouldn’t see a change, but we got a 7 per cent rise. There was no big improvement in the weather or anything in the news that could have accounted for it, and we looked for that. Who knows, but I like to think we might have cheered up the nation.”
Participants were asked to carry out the tasks every day for a week and report any changes in their happiness, as well as that of people around them.

Residential Fruit Picking Program in Toronto

One of the reason I love Toronto is that there are so many small programs that do great things. It seems as if every month I find another community group making the world a better place. Today I found out that in Toronto there’s a group of people who harvest all the fruit they can in the city. They pick fruit from residential trees (with permission of course) and from city trees (again, with permission) then the fruit is shared. They are called Not Far From the Tree and they are having a tree tour on Saturday which hopefully I’ll be able to attend.

nfftt logo

The core of our programming is our residential fruit-picking program, where we pick fruit from trees that would otherwise go to waste. We help fruit tree owners make use of the abundance of fruit that their trees offer by dispatching teams of volunteers to harvest it for them. One third goes to the fruit tree owners, another third goes to the volunteers for their labour, and the final third is distributed (by bicycle or cart) to community organizations in the neighbourhood who can make good use of the fresh fruit.

PublicVoice.tv: A Place to Examine Issues that Matter

PublicVoice.tv wants you to learn more about the world around you and share your voice. The site is a fantastic resource for some thought-provoking videos focused on public policy. I encourage you to watch at least one of their videos; it’s like TED but for public policy.

PublicVoice.tv has been created as an online source for leading edge thinking and ideas about critical public policy questions.

PublicVoice seeks to be a forum for those issues that affect us all – and will give you unfiltered access to some of the best minds of our time, providing their unique insight in areas of great policy challenge, including pro-growth economic development, food security, the future of energy, the dynamics of poverty and citizen engagement – to name only a few.

Here’s a video on public service and citizen engagement in the information age:

Your Brain Enjoys Learning

Information is something that your brain genuinely craves and when it learns something new it gives us a little reward. New research as looked into why information is its own reward.

This preference for knowledge about the future was intimately linked to the monkeys’ desire for water. The same neurons in the middle of their brains signalled their expectations of both rewards – the watery prizes and knowledge about them.

All the neurons in question release the signalling chemical dopamine. While the monkeys were making their choices, Bromberg-Martin and Hikosaka recorded the activity of 47 dopamine neurons in their midbrains. These neurons became very excited when the monkeys saw a symbol that predicted a large amount of water, while the symbol that cued a smaller drink inhibited the neurons. The same dopamine neurons were excited during trials where the monkey only saw the symbol that heralded forthcoming information, and they were inhibited if they monkey only saw the other non-informative symbol.

Let Your Mind Wander

I’ll keep this short so your mind doesn’t wander away: studies show it’s good to let your mind wander.

The regions of the brain that become active during mind wandering belong to two important networks. One is known as the executive control system. Located mainly in the front of the brain, these regions exert a top-down influence on our conscious and unconscious thought, directing the brain’s activity toward important goals. The other regions belong to another network called the default network. In 2001 a group led by neuroscientist Marcus Raichle at Washington University discovered that this network was more active when people were simply sitting idly in a brain scanner than when they were asked to perform a particular task. The default network also becomes active during certain kinds of self-referential thinking, such as reflecting on personal experiences or picturing yourself in the future.

The fact that both of these important brain networks become active together suggests that mind wandering is not useless mental static. Instead, Schooler proposes, mind wandering allows us to work through some important thinking. Our brains process information to reach goals, but some of those goals are immediate while others are distant. Somehow we have evolved a way to switch between handling the here and now and contemplating long-term objectives. It may be no coincidence that most of the thoughts that people have during mind wandering have to do with the future.

Via Boing