One morning, a blood vessel in Jill Bolte Taylor’s brain exploded. As a brain scientist, she realized she had a ringside seat to her own stroke. She watched as her brain functions shut down one by one.. Amazed to find herself alive, Taylor spent eight years recovering her ability to think, walk and talk.. Her [...]
The image is from the book Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge, by B. Alan Wallace, founder and president of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies. The book notes “There are certainly kinds of neuronal activity that causally contribute to the emergence of specific states of consciousness and mental activity.” Bill Harris, Director [...]
In her article The Need for Others, Anne Paris, PhD quotes Loren Long, an accomplished artist who has illustrated many books: “I want [my wife and publisher] to like what I’ve done. I guess that, in general, I always need someone to like my work. If they don’t, my self-doubts come to the surface. Anne [...]
Excerpts from article Art and Happiness, by painter Robert Genn : In the recently published “Against Happiness,” popular writer Eric Wilson disparages our current love affair with putting on a happy face. With our “feel good” culture and the widespread use of happy drugs, everybody’s trying to be cheerful and there are no decent dollops [...]
Can intuition be a useful extension or complement to rational thought? Many think so. Others caution it can be uncertain and misleading. Tama J. Kieves notes we may block intuitive understanding because “It’s hard to let insights in, if we’ve dead bolted the doors. Sometimes we are begging for clarity, just as long as it’s [...]
In his book Life on Purpose: Six Passages to an Inspired Life, Brad Swift quotes Indian philosopher Patanjali: “When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all of your thoughts break their bonds: your mind transcends limitations.. faculties and talents become alive and you discover yourself to be a greater person than [...]
Excerpts from article by James Ray: Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 6 months, you’ve most likely heard the buzz around A New Earth. I applaud Eckhart Tolle for putting forth the time and energy to make such a positive impact on the world. The things he’s teaching are powerful… and [...]
Writer Michael Chabon comments on the value of not defining creative work – and ourselves as creators – too narrowly: Entertainment has come to mean junk. But its definition also should include everything pleasurable that arises from an encounter with literature. Entertainment has a bad name. Serious people learn to mistrust and even to revile [...]
Laura Silva Quesada is President of Silva International and the daughter of Jose Silva, founder of the original Silva Mind Control Method. She recalls coming across a Bible phrase that has relevance to personal growth and consciousness: “Do not conform yourself to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you [...]
The author of The Highly Sensitive Person, Elaine N. Aron, Ph.D. notes that about 15 to 20 percent of the population have this trait. “It means you are aware of subtleties in your surroundings, a great advantage in many situations,” she says. “It also means you are more easily overwhelmed when you have been out [...]
Excerpts from article Memory Training Shown to Turn Up Brainpower: A new study has found that it may be possible to train people to be more intelligent, increasing the brainpower they had at birth. Until now, it had been widely assumed that the kind of mental ability that allows us to solve new problems without [...]
“I have never been a fan of learning in a classroom. Inside a laboratory or a garage, I always wanted to know more, but never inside a classroom.” That quote is from Caltech physicist Caolionn O’Connell, PhD, from the site for PBS program Einstein’s Big Idea. Speaking of Einstein: he was expelled from school (in [...]
As she noted at the start of her blog (in 2005), writer Liz Spikol “struggles with mental illness, specifically bipolar disorder and OCD. I was also diagnosed with dissociative disorder N.O.S. — which means I suffer from intermittent depersonalization and derealization.” Here is part of a New York Times article that includes Spikol and others [...]
Heather Thomas based her new novel “Trophies” on Hollywood trophy wives – women who, she says “get a bad rap, and there’s a lot of misconceptions about them. But really, there isn’t a hospital wing or a library in this city that wasn’t the result of some trophy wife’s efforts.” Continued on Women and Talent
Sonja Lyubomirsky, Ph.D., an experimental social psychologist, notes each of us is born with a particular “happiness set point” – “a baseline or potential for happiness.” She has conducted “the first controlled experimental intervention studies to increase and maintain a person’s happiness level over and above” this set point. In her book The How of [...]
“As a child, I was very shy. Painfully, excruciatingly shy. I hid a lot in my room. I was so terrified to read out loud in school that I had to have my mother ask my reading teacher not to call on me in class.” – Kim Basinger Many of us were shy as children, [...]
Google+
Site author: Douglas Eby, M.A./Psychology, is a writer and researcher on the psychology of creative expression and personal growth, especially for high ability adults. He is publisher of the Talent Development Resources series of sites.
