Justifiably Paranoid

Sometimes, the most important mental activity is not what you think, but what you think about what you think. Let's unpack that contention. Suppose you are walking along the avenue, and a friend drives past.  You wave and your friend does not acknowledge you.  Your automatic thought is "What's wrong with him?" You then proceed to thinking: "The last time we talked, he asked me to come over to his house to help him, and I declined. I bet he's still irritated about that” You then might think about something else while retaining the belief in your friend's irritation. You also could ruminate about your friend not-waving-to-you problem for minutes, hours, or days. When you see your friend again, you mention that you waved and he did not respond, and he answers, "Oh, I don't remember seeing you."  At that point you could accept his explanation, be satisfied, and banish the not-waving-incident from your mind. However, it also is possible that you ...

  It's early morning, you are in bed with your partner, and you both have just awakened.  What do you immediately do?  That depends on the state of your heart and mind.  One partner might reach out for, hold, and embrace the other, savoring some precious moments together. To do so provides more than mutual warmth and comfort.  The activity communicates powerful messages—you are top of my mind, my day begins with you, you have my undivided attention and time.  If instead, you awaken, reach for, and become engrossed in your mobile device, you also are communicating clearly to your partner. Attention and time.  No matter how rich or poor you are, these are life’s most precious, unreplenishable resources.  In the 21st century, our limited attention and time are stolen.  Contemporary attention and time bandits, many of whom are multi-millionaires and billionaires are organized into a variety of cartels.  A f...

For purposes of this posting, let’s presume that most people prefer to be liked, accepted, or, at least, tolerated. That begs the question, “By whom?”   Who is the person or persons who determine your worth?: family? friends? neighbors? co-workers?   Do you believe that all the valued ones want to see the same attitudes and behaviors from you?   When their expectations conflict, which, if any, members of the multitude exert the greatest influence? Where are you, yourself, in the “how to be” equation?   When you realize that someone or some group expects you to exhibit a particular attitude or behavior, do you start with them or start with you?   What parameters do you apply when attempting to reach your conclusion?     Equally important, what parameters do you ultimately apply when acting upon your decision?   If your decision and/ or action is contrary to expectations of valued others, do you explicitly address the discrepancy or not? Of...

 Most evolution scientists assert that human language began 200,000 to 300,000 years ago and they use speech development as a defining feature, if not  the  defining feature of homo sapiens. People, of course, could communicate via body language and physical signaling of various kinds at some undefined period, as well.  And pictorial communication, such as by cave paintings, are conventionally dated to about 30,000 years ago.  Before 1844, real time talk required real time physical, in-person interaction.  That meant that people were consciously or unconsciously perceiving not only the literal content of their verbalizations but also their body language and prosody (vocal pitch, length of sounds, loudness, and timber [quality of the voice]).  Ancient wisdom acknowledges the importance of body language and prosody as expressed in the advice, “It’s not what you say but how you say it.” Not until the invention of the telegraph approximately...

Please pause before reading this blogpost and answer the title's implied questions for yourself. Okay, let's try a concrete metaphor to begin our discussion.  Imagine you live immediately adjacent to a field pock-marked with many bare and grassy areas.  You do not have a garage or driveway, so you park on the street and your car occasionally is dusty.  How often do you wash it?  That depends on your personality and on external factors as sifted through your personality. If you are a "car person," you might wash the car often.  If you are a "it's just transportation" person, you might wash it rarely or never.  But even in the second case, if the car is new, you might be strongly inclined to keep it clean.  My example is so simplistic and obvious that you could consider it worthless.  Almost anyone would realize that both internal and external factors would affect car-washing. However, I believe that literally everything you think and feel ...

Let’s begin with a short retrospective time travel.  Picture yourself as an early elementary school child, pencil in hand and paper before you. You are just learning to regroup in addition and subtraction—what then, respectively, were called carrying and borrowing.  At the time, no one labeled these as “algorithms,” but the lessons probably were your introduction to them.  You need not have known anything about rationales behind the processes; if you followed them faithfully, you invariably arrived at the “correct” answers and were happy to have done so.  However, in contrast to algorithms, you already had learned some fundamental heuristics long before you entered your first classroom.  And much of that learning was acquired independently and automatically.  For instance, you could have come to believe that grandparents were more likely to buy you a new toy than were mom and dad.  You, of course, were not aware of the term “heuristics,” and they ...

  According to the United States Centers for Disease Control, inadequate sleep is associated with a host of physical and mental ailments, including type 2 diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, and depression.  Perhaps for that reason, WebMD.com distributed a posting entitled, “What Your Sleep Position Says About You.”  The post reported the following "research" relating body position to personality: ·         Five percent of the population prefer to sleep on their backs with arms close to their heads.   They frequently are good listeners and attention-seeking. ·         Eight percent of the population prefer to sleep with arms down and close to the body.   They tend to be quiet, keep to themselves, and expect a lot from themselves and others. ·         Fifteen percent of the population prefer to sleep on their side with arms down.   There...