psychology

Every second, millions of bits of information flood into our senses. Yet the human brain can only handle about 7 bits of information at once, and the shortest time it takes to discriminate one set of bits from another is one-eighteenth of a second.7 “By using these figures,” as Csikszentmihalyi explained in Flow, “one concludes that it is possible

Why do you feel angry? Is it because you failed to achieve some goal? Why do you feel lethargic and uninspired? Is it because you don’t think you’re good enough? This layer of questioning helps us understand the root cause of the emotions that overwhelm us. Once we understand that root cause, we can ideally do something to change it.

Although often involving greater development expense, such sustaining investments appeared far less risky than investments in the disruptive technology: The customers existed,

Subtlety #2: To not give a fuck about adversity, you must first give a fuck about something more important than adversity.

Talk to a different stranger, tell a few friends about your ideas, or join a meetup devoted to the subject. An online community. A book club. And if one doesn’t exist, start your own. Finally, it’s important to do these steps in order. You want to spend a bit of time playing around at the intersections of curiosities before taking this public.

So why aren’t you eating M&Ms right now? This is where my degree in mind reading psychology comes in handy. The reason you’re not is that you’re not sitting next to a giant bowl of M&M’s. How do I know? Because if you were, I can say with a high degree of certainty that you would be eating them. Physical availability is one of the key inhibiting

Consistent with the musical chairs analogy above, they report that “Over the last two decades, an average of 28 percent of workers had large [earnings] increases and 28 percent had large [earnings] declines each year”. “Large” in this case is defined as a 10 percent change from the previous year. It is very difficult to wrap our minds around such

A little knowledge of history stresses the variability of moral codes, and concludes that they are negligible because they differ in time and place, and sometimes contradict each other. A larger knowledge stresses the universality of moral codes, and concludes to their necessity. Moral codes differ because they adjust themselves to historical and

To Watson, the question at hand begins with the walking stick: “a fine, thick piece of wood, bulbous-headed, of the sort which is known as a ‘Penang lawyer,’ ” which is “just such a stick as the old-fashioned family practitioner used to carry—dignified, solid, and reassuring.” That first bit is just fine, a description of the stick’s outward