"What this research suggests, however, is that we need to make time to escape from everyone else, to explore those parts of the world that weren't designed for us. It's when we are lost in the wild that the mind is finally at home."

"...clicking the like button 1 billion times will never give you an orgasm or a hug or a high five....Get on, make the most meaningful information and connections, and then get offline. Then, live purposefully towards happiness."

"The visual information a person gets from seeing a person speak changes the way they hear the sound." from Wikipedia.

"Nevertheless, this research helps to explain the importance of indifference in a partisan age. ...It's the people who don't know very much who make democracy possible."

"On what’s wrong with the way we teach." Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley.

"Neuroscience is beginning to touch on questions that were once only in the domain of philosophers and psychologists, questions about how people make decisions and the degree to which those decisions are truly “free.” These are not idle questions. Ultimately, they will shape the future of legal theory and create a more biologically informed jurisprudence."

"I've got no larger point here, other than that this yet another reminder (at least for me) that we should be suspicious of large points, especially when it comes to the web. Like everything else, the internet remains a flurry of contradictions. It makes us stupider and smarter."

"And yet, while the Web has enabled new forms of collective action, it has also enabled new kinds of collective stupidity. Groupthink is now more widespread, as we cope with the excess of available information by outsourcing our beliefs to celebrities, pundits and Facebook friends. Instead of thinking for ourselves, we simply cite what's already been cited."

"Today, it turns out, the real cutting edge of architecture has to do with the psychology of buildings, not just their appearance."

David Eagleman and Mysteries of the Brain. "Time is a dimension like any other, fixed and defined down to its tiniest increments: millennia to microseconds, aeons to quartz oscillations. Yet the data rarely matches our reality." from The New Yorker.

"Action for Happiness is a movement of people committed to building a happier society. We want to see a fundamentally different way of life where people care less about what they can get for themselves and more about the happiness of others."

"While learning from a teacher may help children get to a specific answer more quickly, it also makes them less likely to discover new information about a problem and to create a new and unexpected solution."

"...unstructured play turns out to be one of the most important aspects of Pre-K education."

Resistentialism is a jocular theory to describe "seemingly spiteful behavior manifested by inanimate objects." from Wikipedia.

"Their hypothesis is that my wasted deliberation...is a metacognitive mistake....I confuse the array of options and excess of information with importance."

"The basic premise of construal level theory is that things that feel close get contemplated in concrete, literal terms while things that feel far away allow us to think in more abstract ways." from Wired.

"That voice in your head...only cares about finding reasons that sound good, even if the reasons are actually irrelevant or false." from Wired.

“I think this boils down to a philosophical question, rather than a psychological one,” says Gilovich. “Should you value moment-to-moment happiness more than retrospective evaluations of your life?” from New York Magazine.

"'The daily activity most injurious to happiness is commuting.'" from The Frontal Cortex.

"So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind’s phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success." from The Atlantic.

"Wilson speculates that dreams are also an attempt to search for associations between seemingly unrelated experiences, which is why it’s so important for the controlling conscious self to disappear." from NYT Opinionator blog.

The results of a new survey on satisfaction—at home and at work—may surprise you.

Spontaneous, fluid, even riotous creativity is a natural part of the design of the mind.

psychological distance and creativity. from scientific american.

AEA slide deck. 5 principles.

the powerful role of aesthetics. from a list apart.

experiences must be immersive and sensorial. the more it talks to human senses, the better it will be.

a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. from boxes and arrows.

the simultaneous simplicity and complexity of mirrors. from nyt.

the emphasis on social learning stands in sharp contrast to the traditional cartesian view.

parceling the brain into cognitive and affective regions is inherently problematic.

4 rules to help.

the stability of nature and our psychic well-being.

four rules based on csikszentmihalyi’s flow.

nature's grand experiment with moral animals.

good summary.

V.S. Ramachandran talks neuroscience.