Mary Martin

The study found that mindfulness helped the nurses experience fewer negative emotions and less rumination — repetitive negative thinking.

Thinking about curiosity as going beyond the need for quick answers also highlights the power of what happens when we engage with un­­cert­ain­ty: having to ponder and anticipate answers can improve learning and memory, and curiosity can facilitate brain states that help us encode new information. Learning new things can be tough, but harnessing... See more

Economy

You can do this practice not only thinking of people you care about, but also visualizing people you don’t like. It’s important to have an unbiased, compassionate attitude toward whatever is arising.

we’d argue that if you produce something iconic, you can create a cultural moment that ripples through people’s crowded psyches and impacts them deeply. And if you’re culturally and commercially successful, it paves the way for future experiments: it becomes easier to both sell tickets and sell ideas to potential clients.

“I think in 50 or 100 years time we will have discovered the entity that is consciousness,” he told me. “It will be taken for granted that it wasn’t produced by the brain, and it doesn’t die when you die.”

Ritualization is a potent stabilizing agent, a simple salve for a stressful time if only we are mindful of how we use its powers.