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Jumping for joy on four paws: Neurological evidence of emotion in dogs
Bri’s dog Rainey Running with Rainey is simultaneously the best thing and the worst thing. As a joint new year’s resolution to get in better shape, we’ve been trying to run together several times a week. Yesterday, as we started out in the warm afternoon sunshine, my iPod jamming away to White Panda’s mashup of…
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Surrendering to Creativity: The Psychology of Remembering to Breathe (Part 3 of 3)
Up until graduate school, I often indulged the myth that good writing was a sacred thing to be done under the most precise conditions. Akin to knowing without a timer when the soufflee has finished (sorry, I have holidays sweets on the mind), the creativity dedicated to a well-written piece had to be carefully cultured…
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Surrendering to Creativity: The Psychology of Remembering To Breathe (Part 2 of 3)
“Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity.” – T.S. Eliot What does it mean, for anxiety to be the handmaiden to creativity? Reading this quote from T.S. Eliot, my mind wandered to think about Shae and Sansa. For those less obsessed with George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones than me, Shae is Sansa Stark’s handmaiden in the imaginary…
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Surrendering to Creativity; the Psychology of Remembering to Breathe (Part 1 of 3)
The author’s dad, Yogaman Bill, letting go of anxiety and creating beauty on the beach. “Work done with anxiety about results is far inferior to work done without such anxiety, in the calm of self-surrender…” ~ The Bhagavad-Gita, p. 41 I stumbled upon this quote earlier this week, as I…
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The Significance of Impression Formation: Reinterpreting Early Social Psychology Findings Using Modern Stats
Solomon Asch may be best known in social psychology for his 1951 Conformity Studies in which he brought participants into a room with seven confederates—actors pretending to be other participants—and had them recount the length of a line. Before demonstrating that normative pressure can lead people to lie, Asch was one of the foremost researchers…
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Memory in the Mountains: How Cognitive Psychology Can Improve Rock Climbing
“You can never climb the same mountain twice, not even in memory. Memory rebuilds the mountain, changes the weather, retells the jokes, remakes all the moves.” – Lito Tejada-Flores, Extreme Skiier, Climber and Author As Lito Tejada-Flores alludes, rock climbing and mountaineering depend as much on human memory as the physical environment in which…