From the Blog
Writings on Well-Being Dr. Rick Hanson
Meditation + Talk: Coming Home: Resting in Peace and Stillness
In this weekly live meditation and talk from Stephen Doetsu Snyder, the focus was on Coming Home: Resting in Peace and Stillness.
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Part II of a talk and guided mediation given at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in March, 2011.
Your brain evolved a negativity bias that makes it like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones. Therefore, a foundation for happiness is to deliberately weave positive experiences into the fabric of your brain and your self.
Your brain evolved a negativity bias that makes it like Velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones. Therefore, a foundation for happiness is to deliberately weave positive experiences into the fabric of your brain and your self.
Keep Hope Not Fear Alive
This recent series of posts has used the example of Stephen Colbert's satirical "March to Keep Fear Alive" as a timely illustration of a larger point: humans evolved to be fearful – a major feature of the brain's negativity bias that helped our ancestors pass on their...
Confronting the Negativity Bias
My previous post used the example of Stephen Colbert's satirical "March to Keep Fear Alive" as a timely illustration of a larger point: humans evolved to be fearful – since that helped keep our ancestors alive – so we are very vulnerable to being frightened and even...
Stephen Colbert: We Don’t Need To ‘Keep Fear Alive’
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have dueling rallies in DC coming soon. Stewart's is the "Rally to Restore Sanity" and Colbert's is the "March to Keep Fear Alive!" Obviously, Colbert is a great satirist who is poking fun here, since we sure don't need a rally to keep...
Balancing Joining and Separating
There is a natural balance within us all between the desire for joining and the desire for separation, between the desire for closeness and the desire for distance. These two great themes – joining and separation – are central to human life. Almost everyone wants both...
21 Ways To Turn Ill Will to Good Will
My recent posts have highlighted two very powerful, yet opposing forces in the human heart: in a traditional metaphor, we each have a wolf of love and a wolf of hate inside us, and it all depends on which one we feed every day. On the one hand, as the most social and...
How Did Humans Become Empathic?
Empathy is unusual in the animal kingdom. So empathy must have had some major survival benefits for it to have evolved. What might those benefits have been? Empathy seems to have evolved in three major steps. First, among vertebrates, birds and mammals developed ways...
The Wolf of Hate
I once heard a teaching story in which an elder, a grandmother, was asked how she had become so wise, so happy, and so respected. She answered: “In my heart, there are two wolves: a wolf of love and a wolf of hate. It all depends on which one I feed each day.” This...
The Evolution of Love
How did we evolve the most loving brain on the planet? Humans are the most sociable species on earth – for better and for worse. On the one hand, we have the greatest capacities for empathy, communication, friendship, romance, complex social structures, and altruism....
5000 Synapses in the Width of a Hair
How much change in the brain makes a difference in the mind? That's the issue raised by a very interesting comment regarding my previous blog, "The Brain in a Bucket." So I've taken the liberty of posting the comment here (hoping that's OK in blog etiquette; still...
The Brain in a Bucket
Have you ever seen a real brain? I remember the first time I saw one, in a neuropsych class: the instructor put on rubber gloves to protect against the formaldehyde preservative, popped the lid off of a lab bucket, and then pulled out a brain. It didn’t look like...