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Born to Perform. The ability to keep cool depends on how your brain is wired by Joshua Gowin | Psychology Today on 2009-11-10
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The ability to keep cool depends on how your brain is wired
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As he waited to go onstage, a stage manager asked McCartney, "Are you nervous?
"No, not really."
"You should be, there are over 70 million people watching."
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some people seem to be naturals, born performers, so what makes them different? The ability to remain calm could be due to the structure of the
brain.
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The amygdala, a central brain structure highly active when we're afraid, is also connected to more rational brain regions such as the prefrontal cortex through white matter pathways.
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The brain can be divided into two functional categories, gray matter and white matter. Gray matter performs heavy-duty processing, like a computer, but it only functions on a local level. White matter helps distant brain regions communicate by carrying signals over long distances. You could imagine white matter as the telephone lines that transmit conversations between regions of gray matter. The quality and strength of the signal carried by white matter is determined by how thick the lines are and how well they're insulated, which can vary from person to person. For example, research has shown that long-term
cocaine abuse may disrupt brain function by deteriorating white matter pathways.
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The best predictor of anxiety was the strength of the connection between the two regions. Why might connection strength be more important than the amount of activation in either region alone?
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People with stronger and heartier white matter pathways may have lower levels of anxiety because they're able to calm down more effectively. This may be important for having the steely nerves it takes to go on stage in front of a live television audience or to speak up in class or in business meetings.
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Even if you are someone who gets nervous before making phone calls, there's hope in this finding that may give you pluck. It was formerly believed that the adult brain was static and that after the growth and pruning that takes place when we're children and adolescents, we're stuck with what we've got. What we're finding now is that the brain is constantly in a state of revision. Not only can we develop new neurons, but perhaps more importantly we can also develop new connections or strengthen preexisting connections between neurons.
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The more exposure you have to nerve-wracking situations, the more you can train your brain to relax, presumably by bolstering the pathway from the vmPFC back to the amygdala. Finally, having a bit of nervous energy may not be a bad thing. By activating the autonomic system, your brain and body will be alert, poised and prepared for action. That way, if all else fails, at least you'll be ready to duck when the tomatoes start flying.
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The New Science of Temptation. What happens when Harvard scientists use a brain scanner to look for the devil inside? | Scientific American on 2009-11-09
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A new
brain imaging study by Josh Greene and Joe Paxton at Harvard University published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that what separates the well-behaved from the poorly-behaved might not be the ability to control your temptations but rather what kind of temptations you have. For example, foregoing the opportunity for short-term gain and satisfaction, whether it is a delicious slice of tiramisu or that wallet stuffed with cash you stumbled across in the empty parking lot, will depend more on the nature of your automatic urges than your ability to control them.
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Is President Obama a model of transformative leadership? by Jim Taylor | Psychology Today on 2009-11-09
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Memory and forgetting in the digital age by Yadin Dudai | New Scientist 24 October 2009 on 2009-11-09
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JUST as Molière's bourgeois gentleman spoke in prose without being aware of it, most of those who fear forgetting do not realise that they have amnesiphobia. But perhaps this tiny lexical blind spot is not important any more. Amnesiphobics, unite and rejoice:
Gordon Bell and
Jim Gemmell (and Bill Gates, in his enthusiastic introduction) now inform us that we need never fear forgetting again. Total recall is around the corner. But alas, in such a world, even our phobia of forgetting cannot be forgotten.
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Total Recall is an extended corporate US manifesto, whose explicit slogan is: "I hate to lose my memories. I want total recall." The subtext is a bit more naive: I want total control over my life, I want immortality. If only I could record and store everything, I would become Homo eternicus. This is the same philosophy that feeds the US's mammoth pharmaceutical, food and health industries.
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The scheme seems ingeniously simple and technically feasible. To overcome oblivion, say the authors, all you need are sensitive miniature sensors and several terabytes of storage, which are already or soon-to-be affordable. You can then record every minute of your life using video, audio, location and physiological signals, culminating in the commitment of this endless stream of information to your personal
MyLifeBits account in your pocket and/or in cyberspace. Proper software will permit you to retrieve the information years later, and it will even pass by default to your progeny for eternity, with the hope that they will pay attention to it.
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Furthermore, when we perceive the world, we get not only objective input but also the context, including our complex internal physiological milieu and all of our emotional baggage. Again, it is unlikely that a computerised total recall system will be able to register this unique endogenous world and the way it interacts with the outside world to generate the subjective percept.
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Most importantly, though, the authors, consumed by their hunt for every last bit of information (and even offering practical advice on how to make an extra buck in the process), forget forgetting.
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For the human condition, forgetting is at least as important as remembering - sometimes more so. Without it, we are all bound to lead the miserable life of A. R. Luria's patient
Solomon Shereshevsky, who was crippled by his boundless, indelible memory, or his fictional counterpart,
Jorge Luis Borges's Funes. No forgetting implies no generalisation, no real present time, no amelioration of trauma, and no weaving of meaningful life narratives.
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Total recall may be beneficial for businesses and courts, clinics and insurance agencies, even possibly in settling occasional disputes with significant others, but rarely would it be deeply rewarding for the humble self.
As its title suggests, Delete is about forgetting, more specifically about the demise of forgetting and the resulting perils.
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He observes how advanced information technology can allow the traces of every experience to chase us forever. Yet evolution has created the brain in such a way that the traces of experience do fade over time, receding into oblivion. Presumably, this offers us some kind of survival advantage - as Shereshevsky and Funes would attest. Mayer-Schönberger presents a scholarly discussion throughout, unlike the PowerPoint style of some chapters in Total Recall.
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The Root of Thought: What Do Glial Cells Do? Nearly 90 percent of the brain is composed of glial cells, not neurons | Scientific American on 2009-11-09
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Nearly 90 percent of the brain is composed of glial cells, not neurons. Andrew Koob argues that these overlooked cells just might be the source of the imagination
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What do glial cells do? And why do we have so many inside our head?
KOOB: Originally, scientists didn't think they did anything. Until the last 20 years, brain scientists believed neurons communicated to each other, represented our thoughts, and that glia were kind of like stucco and mortar holding the house together. They were considered simple insulators for neuron communication. There are a few types of glial cells, but recently scientists have begun to focus on a particular type of glial cell called the 'astrocyte,' as they are abundant in the cortex. Interestingly, as you go up the evolutionary ladder, astrocytes in the cortex increase in size and number, with humans having the most astrocytes and also the biggest. Scientists have also discovered that astrocytes communicate to themselves in the cortex and are also capable of sending information to neurons. Finally, astrocytes are also the adult stem cell in the brain and control blood flow to regions of brain activity. Because of all these important properties, and since the cortex is believed responsible for higher thought, scientists have started to realize that astrocytes must contribute to thought.
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To understand this, you have to take a tour of the history of brain science. Glia were mainly a sidebar for 200 years in the struggle over the idea of the neuron.
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You suggest that glia and their calcium waves might play a role in creativity. Could you explain?
KOOB: This idea stems from dreams, sensory deprivation and day dreaming. Without input from our senses through neurons, how is it that we have such vivid thoughts? How is it that when we are deep in thought we seemingly shut off everything in the environment around us? In this theory, neurons are tied to our muscular action and external senses. We know astrocytes monitor neurons for this information. Similarly, they can induce neurons to fire. Therefore, astrocytes modulate neuron behavior. This could mean that calcium waves in astrocytes are our thinking mind. Neuronal activity without astrocyte processing is a simple reflex; anything more complicated might require astrocyte processing. The fact that humans have the most abundant and largest astrocytes of any animal and we are capable of creativity and imagination also lends credence to this speculation.
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How Eurocentric Is Your Day? by M. Shahid Alam | P U L S E on 2009-11-09
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I began my first lecture on Eurocentrism by asking my students, How Eurocentric is your day? I explained what I wanted to hear from them. Can they get through a typical day without running into ideas, institutions, values, technologies and products that originated outside the West – in China, India, the Islamicate or Africa?
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I proceeded to pepper them with questions about the things they do during a typical day, from the time they wake up.
Unbeknownst, my students discover that they wake up in ‘pajamas,’ trousers of Indian origin with an Urdu-Persian name. Out of bed, they shower with soap and shampoo, whose origins go back to the Middle East and India. Their tooth brush with bristles was invented in China in the fifteenth century. At some point after waking up, my students use toilet paper and tissue, also Chinese inventions of great antiquity.
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I walk my student through her breakfast. Most likely, this consists of cereals, coffee and orange juice, with sugar added to the bargain. None originated in Europe. Cereals were first cultivated in the Fertile Crescent some ten thousand years BCE. Coffee, orange and sugar still carry – in their etymology – telltale signs of their origins, going back to the Arabs, Ethiopians and Indians.
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How far could my students go without the alphabet, numbers and paper? Yet, the alphabet came to Europe courtesy of the ancient Phoenicians. As their name suggests, the Arabic numerals were brought to Europe by the Arabs, who, in turn, had obtained it from the Indians. Paper came from China, also brought to Europe by the Muslims.
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In her prayer, my Christian student turns to a God who – in his human form – walked the earth in Palestine and spoke Aramaic, a close cousin of Arabic. When her thoughts turn to afterlife, my student thinks of the Day of Judgment, paradise and hell, concepts borrowed from the ancient Egyptians and Persians. ‘Paradise’ entered into English, via Greek, from the ancient Avestan pairidaeza.
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Of medieval origin, the college was inspired and, most likely, modeled after the madrasa or Islamic college, first set up by a Seljuk vizier in eleventh century Baghdad. In a nod to this connection, professors at universities still hold a ‘chair,’ a practice that goes back to the madrasa, where the teacher alone sat in a chair while his students sat around him on rugs.
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When she finishes college and prepares to receive her baccalaureate at the graduation ceremony, our student might do well to acknowledge another forgotten connection to the madrasa. This diploma harks back to the ijaza – Arabic for license – given to students who graduated from madrasas in the Islamicate.
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Our student runs into fields of study – algebra, trigonometry, astronomy, chemistry, medicine and philosophy – that were introduced, via Latin, to Western Europe from the Islamicate. She also encounters a variety of scientific terms – algorithm, alkali, borax, amalgam, alembic, amber, calibrate, azimuth and nadir – which have Arabic roots.
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If my students play chess over the weekend and threaten the King with ‘check mate,’ that phrase is adapted from Farsi – Shah maat – for ‘the King is helpless, defeated.’
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When she uses coins, paper currency or writes a check, she is using forms of money first used outside Europe. Gold bars were first used as coins in Egypt in the fourth millennium BCE. With astonishment, Marco Polo records the use of paper currency in China, and describes how the paper used as currency was made from the bark of mulberry trees.
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Similarly, Islam, in the seventh century, made a more radical break from priesthood than the Reformation in Europe. In the eleventh century, an Arab scientist, Alhazen – his Latinized name – devised numerous experiments to test his theories in optics, but, more importantly, theorized cogently about the scientific method in his writings. Roger Bacon, the putative ‘founder’ of the scientific method, had read Alhazen in a Latin translation.
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When our student reads the sonnets of Shakespeare and Spenser, she is little aware that the tradition of courtly love they celebrate comes via Provencal and the troubadours (derived from taraba, Arabic for ‘to sing’) from Arab traditions of love, music and poetry. When our male student gets down on one knee while proposing to his fair lady, he might do well to remember this.
On a clear night, with a telescope on her dormitory rooftop, our student can watch stars, many of which still carry Arabic names. This might be a fitting closure to a day in the life of our student, who, more likely than not, remains Eurocentric in her understanding of world history, little aware of the multifarious bonds that connect her life to different parts of the ‘Orient.’
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In Eastern Europe, People Pine for Socialism | CommonDreams.org on 2009-11-09
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Twenty years after the fall of communism, Belene is largely forgotten -- only a small marble plaque tells its horrific story. And nostalgia for the past is growing in the small Balkan country and across the former Soviet bloc.
Capitalism's failure to lift living standards, impose the rule of law and tame flourishing corruption and nepotism have given way to fond memories of the times when the jobless rate was zero, food was cheap and social safety was high.
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"(The bad) things have been forgotten," said Rumen Petkov, 42, a former guard now clerk at the only prison still functioning on the Persin island.
"The nostalgia is palpable, particularly among the elderly," he said, in front of the crumbling buildings of another old jail opened on the site after the camp was shut in 1959. The communists imprisoned dozens of ethnic Turks here in the 1980s when they refused to change their names to Bulgarian.
Some young people in the impoverished town of Belene, linked to the island with a pontoon bridge, also reminisce: "We lived better in the past," said Anelia Beeva, 31.
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"We went on holidays to the coast and the mountains, there were plenty of clothes, shoes, food. And now the biggest chunk of our incomes is spent on food. People with university degrees are unemployed and many go abroad."
In Russia, several Soviet-themed restaurants have opened in Moscow in recent years: some hold nostalgia nights where young people dress up as pioneers -- the Soviet answer to the boy scouts and girl guides -- and dance to communist classics.
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Soviet Champagne and Red October Chocolates remain favorites for birthday celebrations. "USSR" T-shirts and baseball caps can be seen across the country in summer.
While there is scant real desire for old regimes to be restored, analysts say apathy is a vital outcome.
"The big damage of the nostalgia...is that it dries out the energy for meaningful change," wrote Bulgarian sociologist Vladimir Shopov in the online portal BG History.
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Across former communist eastern Europe, disenchantment with democracy is widespread and pollsters say mistrust of the elites who made people citizens of the European Union is staggering.
A September regional poll by U.S. Pew research center showed support for democracy and capitalism has seen the biggest fall in Ukraine, Bulgaria, Lithuania and Hungary.
The poll showed 30 percent of Ukrainians approved of the change to democracy in 2009, down from 72 percent in 1991. In Bulgaria and Lithuania the slide was to just over half the population from nearer three-quarters in 1991.
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Hopes of catching up with the wealthy Western neighbors have been replaced by a sense of injustice because of a widening gap between the rich and the poor.
In Hungary, one of the countries worst hit by economic downturn, 70 percent of those who were already adults in 1989 say they were disappointed with the results of the regime change, an October survey by pollster Szonda Ipsos showed.
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People in the former Yugoslav countries, scarred by the ethnic wars from the 1990s and still outside the EU, are nostalgic for the socialist era of Josip Broz Tito when, unlike now, they traveled across Europe without visa.
"Everything was better then. There was no street crime, jobs were safe and salaries were enough for decent living," said Belgrade pensioner Koviljka Markovic, 70. "Today I can hardly survive with my pension of 250 euros ($370 a month)."
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Over 60 percent say they lived better in the past, even though shopping queues were routine, social connections were the only way to obtain more valuable goods, jeans and Coca Cola were off-limits and it took up to 10 years' waiting to buy a car.
"For part of the Bulgarians (social) security turned out to be more precious than freedom," wrote historians Andrei Pantev and Bozhidar Gavrilov in a book on the 100 most influential people in the Balkan country's history.
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"Our parents' generation was much more satisfied with what they had. Everybody just wants more of everything these days," said Zsofia Kis, a 23-year old student in Budapest, referring to the way communist regimes artificially held down unemployment.
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Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent, described the fall of the Soviet Union as the "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century."
Kremlin critics have accused the authorities of a creeping rehabilitation of the Soviet Union to justify their clampdowns on the media and opposition parties.
"There is an idealization of the Soviet past," said Nikita Petrov, an historian from the Memorial human rights group. "It's a conscious policy. They are trying to show the Soviet authorities looking decent and attractive to today's generation."
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Some of the most popular words among ordinary Bulgarians are "dalavera," a Turkish word meaning fraud, "mutri," a nickname for ugly mafiosi and "mente," which means counterfeit products.
"People are losing faith that one can achieve success in an honest, decent way. Success is totally criminalized," said Boriana Dimitrova of Bulgarian polling agency Alpha Research.
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She said the sense of injustice was particularly strong in the Balkans, Europe's poorest corner, where untouchable parallel structures of power reign. "Some people say: 'yes, the old regime was repressive but at least there was law and order.'"
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"The level of mistrust in the political elite and institutions is so high that you cannot convince people to do anything under unpopular governments," said Ivan Krastev of Sofia's Liberal Strategies Institute.
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The election of Bulgarian Irina Bokova, 57, a former communist apparatchik and ambassador to Paris, as head of the U.N. culture and education body UNESCO in September was a stark example of the West's hypocrisy, critics say.
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n one front at least, some eastern Europeans say they have succeeded in catching up with and even outstripping capitalist standards -- the thirst for materialism.
A big chunk of the loans taken in the boom years was spent on fancy cars and yachts, flat TV screens, designer clothes, silicon surgeries and exotic trips abroad.
Copying foreign standards went as far as giving babies Western names and flooding TV screens with reality shows like "Big Brother."
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"Bulgaria is becoming Americanized," said renowned Bulgarian artist, Nikola Manev, who lives in Paris. "I pick up the phone and they talk to me in English, I go to a restaurant and it's called Miami. Don't we have our own names for God's sake?
"Looking on the surface, I see new buildings, shops, shiny cars. But people have become sadder, more aggressive and unhappy," he said, prescribing spiritual cures.
This autumn for the first time in many years, tickets at Sofia's theatres are selling out weeks in advance.
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Religion a figment of human imagination by Andy Coghlan | New Scientist 28 April 2008 on 2009-11-08
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Humans alone practice religion because they're the only creatures to have evolved imagination.
That's the argument of anthropologist Maurice Bloch of the London School of Economics. Bloch challenges the popular notion that religion evolved and spread because it promoted social bonding, as has been argued by some anthropologists.
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Instead, he argues that first, we had to evolve the necessary brain architecture to imagine things and beings that don't physically exist, and the possibility that people somehow
live on after they've died.
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Once we'd done that, we had access to a form of social interaction unavailable to any other creatures on the planet. Uniquely, humans could use what Bloch calls the "transcendental social" to unify with groups, such as nations and clans, or even with imaginary groups such as the dead. The transcendental social also allows humans to follow the idealised codes of conduct associated with religion.
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"What the transcendental social requires is the ability to live very largely in the imagination," Bloch writes.
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No animals, not even our nearest relatives the chimpanzees, can do this, argues Bloch. Instead, he says, they're restricted to the mundane and Machiavellian social interactions of everyday life, of sparring every day with contemporaries for status and resources.
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Bloch believes our ancestors developed the necessary neural architecture to imagine before or around 40-50,000 years ago, at a time called the Upper Palaeological Revolution, the final sub-division of the Stone Age.
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At around the same time, tools that had been monotonously primitive since the earliest examples appeared 100,000 years earlier suddenly exploded in sophistication, art began appearing on cave walls, and burials began to include artefacts, suggesting belief in an afterlife, and by implication the "transcendental social".
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Once humans had crossed this divide, there was no going back.
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"The transcendental network can, with no problem, include the dead, ancestors and gods, as well as living role holders and members of essentialised groups," writes Bloch. "Ancestors and gods are compatible with living elders or members of nations because all are equally mysterious invisible, in other words transcendental."
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But Bloch argues that religion is only one manifestation of this unique ability to form bonds with non-existent or distant people or value-systems.
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"Religious-like phenomena in general are an inseparable part of a key adaptation unique to modern humans, and this is the capacity to imagine other worlds, an adaptation that I argue is the very foundation of the sociality of modern human society."
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"Once we realise this omnipresence of the imaginary in the everyday, nothing special is left to explain concerning religion," he says.
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"theory of mind" - the ability to recognise that other people or creatures exist, and think for themselves - might be as important as evolution of imagination
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As soon as you have theory of mind, you have the possibility of deceiving others, or being deceived," he says. This, in turn, generates a sense of fairness and unfairness, which could lead to moral codes and the possibility of an unseen "enforcer" - God - who can see and punish all wrong-doers.
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Did Evolution of Human Imagination 50,000 Years Ago Trigger Belief in God? | The Daily Galaxy on 2009-11-08
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French-British anthropologist, Maurice Bloch, of the London School of Economics believes that humans alone practice religion because they're the only creatures to have evolved imagination. The development of imagination occurred at the time of the Upper Palaeolithic 'revolution' 40-50,000 years ago. Bloch challenges the popular notion that religion evolved and spread because it promoted social bonding, as has been argued by some anthropologists (Image is prehistoric rock painting from south of Spain).
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According to Bloch's theory, initially humans had to develop the essential brain architecture to imagine things and beings that don't exist physically, and the possibility that people somehow survive on after their death.
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Once this was acquired, we had access to a form of social interaction unavailable to any other creatures on the planet. Exclusively, humans could use what Bloch calls the "transcendental social" to unite with groups, such as nations and clans, or even with imaginary groups such as the dead. He explained that the transcendental social also permits humans to follow the idealized codes of conduct linked with religion.
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"What the transcendental social requires is the ability to live very largely in the imagination," New Scientist magazine quoted him, as saying.
"One can be a member of a transcendental group, or a nation, even though one never comes in contact with the other members of it. Moreover, the composition of such groups, whether they are clans or nations, may equally include the living and the dead," he added.
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Bloch believes our ancestors evolved the essential neural architecture to imagine before or around a time called the Upper Palaeological Revolution, the final sub-division of the Stone Age.
"The transcendental network can, with no problem, include the dead, ancestors and gods, as well as living role holders and members of essentialised groups," he said.
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"Ancestors and gods are compatible with living elders or members of nations because all are equally mysterious invisible, in other words transcendental," he added.But Bloch argues that religion is only one expression of this exceptional ability to form bonds with non-existent or distant people or value-systems.
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Religious-like phenomena in general are an inseparable part of a key adaptation unique to modern humans, and this is the capacity to imagine other worlds, an adaptation that I argue is the very foundation of the sociality of modern human society," he said.
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Once we realize this omnipresence of the imaginary in the everyday, nothing special is left to explain concerning religion," he added.
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Nie kontrola, lecz chęć szczera on 2009-11-07
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Pieniądze są ważnym motywatorem do pracy, ale wcale nie najważniejszym! Badania pokazują, że bardziej liczy się atmosfera w pracy. Jak się firma komunikuje z ludźmi, jaki wpływ oni mają na cele firmy, jakie są stosunki między współpracownikami. Finanse są dopiero na drugim miejscu.
Na czym polega to dobre komunikowanie się?
- Na szczerości po obu stronach. Precyzyjnym i jasnym formułowaniu oczekiwań. Jeśli komuś się nie podoba jakiś projekt, powinien to jasno komunikować, a nie powodować obstrukcję, czepiając się nieistotnych detali. I ważna jest informacja zwrotna. Powinno się ganić po cichu, a chwalić publicznie. Ale dla mnie to sztuczna sytuacja, raczej chwalę ludzi w cztery oczy.
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A dobra atmosfera?
- Pan pewnie ma na myśli miłe kolory na ścianach, firmowe przedszkola, zajęcia sportowe po godzinach, tworzenie firmowych portali społecznościowych albo fundacji, które mogą wspomóc pracownika w sytuacjach losowych. To tylko dodatki. Dobra atmosfera bierze się z jasnej komunikacji. Bo co z tego, że będzie kawiarnia, jeśli uzyskanie odpowiedzi zwrotnej z innego działu będzie trwało trzy miesiące.
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dlaczego mamy motywować leniwego pracownika? A może lepiej zastąpić go kimś pełnym zapału do pracy? Jeśli w organizacji będziemy skupiać się na motywacji "leniwych", i to drogimi metodami, jak wyjazdy, premie, to zdemotywujemy zmotywowanych.
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Ludzie dzielą się na dwie grupy - jedni pracują, żeby żyć, a drudzy żyją, żeby pracować. Ta druga grupa jest dla firm najcenniejsza, dla nich pracodawcy mają zestaw środków motywujących, tworzą dla nich ścieżki kariery. Bo najcenniejsi są ludzie, którzy pracują z pasją.
Coraz więcej szefów zastanawia się, jak czują się ich pracownicy. Rozumieją, że to się bardziej liczy niż wskaźniki finansowe. I ostatecznie przynosi lepszy efekt. Trzeba angażować ludzi w cele firmy, rozmawiać z nimi, bo ludzie lubią czuć się ważni. Nie mówić: "Masz to zrobić", tylko: "Zastanówmy się, jak to zrobić".
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