Parasite tales

Behavior control, Nature's way ....

Consider this ...

We Are One - The Science of Interconnectedness

Awesome article!

We are one - the science of Interconnectedness

Males were once females too

A very interesting animation on a known scientific fact -

The science of how we are all female

15 ways to mindfuck yourself

Some interesting reading -

Go to 15 ways to mindfuck yourself page

Why our brains are large

In today's excerpt - Martin Seligman, the University of Pennsylvania professor whose research has led to the development of the field of positive psychology, comments on the purpose of our large brains and speaks to the importance of relationships with others as one of the keys to our well-being:

"Other people are the best antidote to the downs of life and the sin­gle most reliable up. ... My friend Stephen Post, professor of Medical Human­ities at Stony Brook, tells a story about his mother. When he was a young boy, and his mother saw that he was in a bad mood, she would say, 'Stephen, you are looking piqued. Why don't you go out and help someone?' Empirically, Ma Post's maxim has been put to rigorous test, and we scientists have found that doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested. ...  

  

"Is there someone in your life whom you would feel comfortable phoning at four in the morning to tell your troubles to? If your answer is yes, you will likely live longer than someone whose answer is no. For George Vaillant, the Harvard psychiatrist who discovered this fact, the master strength is the capacity to be loved. Conversely, as the social neuroscientist John Cacioppo has argued, loneliness is such a disabling condition that it compels the belief that the pursuit of relationships is a rock-bottom fundamental to human well-being. ...

  

"Two recent streams of argument about human evolution both point to the importance of positive relationships in their own right and for their own sake. What is the big human brain for? About five hundred thousand years ago, the cranial capacity of our hominid ancestors' skulls dou­bled in size from 600 cubic centimeters to its present 1,200 cubic centi­meters. The fashionable explanation for all this extra brain is to enable us to make tools and weapons; you have to be really smart to deal instrumentally with the physical world. The British theoretical psy­chologist Nick Humphrey has presented an alternative: the big brain is a social problem solver, not a physical problem solver. As I converse with my students, how do I solve the problem of saying something that Marge will think is funny, that won't offend Tom, and that will per­suade Derek that he is wrong without rubbing his nose in it? These are extremely complicated problems -- problems that computers, which can design weapons and tools in a trice, cannot solve. But humans can and do solve social problems, every hour of the day. The massive pre­frontal cortex that we have is continually using its billions of connec­tions to simulate social possibilities and then to choose the optimal course of action. So the big brain is a relationship simulation machine, and it has been selected by evolution for exactly the function of design­ing and carrying out harmonious but effective human relationships.

"The other evolutionary argument that meshes with the big brain as social simulator is group selection. The eminent British biologist and polemicist Richard Dawkins has popularized a selfish-gene the­ory which argues that the individual is the sole unit of natural selec­tion. Two of the world's most prominent biologists, unrelated but both named Wilson (Edmund O. and David Sloan), have recently amassed evidence that the group is a primary unit of natural selection. Their argument starts with the social insects: wasps, bees, termites, and ants, all of which have factories, fortresses, and systems of communication and dominate the insect world just as humans dominate the vertebrate world. Being social is the most successful form of higher adaptation known. I would guess that it is even more adaptive than having eyes, and the most plausible mathematization of social insect selection is that selection is done by groups and not by individuals.

"The intuition for group selection is simple. Consider two primate groups, each made up of genetically diverse individuals. Imagine that the 'social' group has the emotional brain structures that subserve love, compassion, kindness, teamwork, and self-sacrifice -- the 'hive emotions' -- and cognitive brain structures, such as mirror neurons, which reflect other minds. The 'nonsocial' group, equally intelligent about the physical world and equally strong, does not have these hive emotions. These two groups are now put into a deadly competition that can have only one winner, such as war or starvation. The social group will win, being able to cooperate, hunt in groups, and create agricul­ture."

Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being

by Martin E. P. Seligman by Free Press

 

------------- excerpt for the delanceyplace newsletter -----------------

 

 

Paraprosdokians

Paraprosdokians are figures of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected ~ frequently humorous.

1. Where there's a will, I want to be in it.

2. The last thing I want to do is hurt you. But it's still on my list.

3. Since light travels faster than sound, some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

4. If I agreed with you, we'd both be wrong.

5. We never really grow up, we only learn how to act in public.

6. War does not determine who is right - only who is left..

7. Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.

8. They begin the evening news with 'Good Evening,' then proceed to tell you why it isn't.

9. To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism. To steal from many is research.

10. Buses stop in bus stations. Trains stop in train stations. On my desk is a work station.

11. I thought I wanted a career. Turns out I just wanted paychecks.

12. In filling out an application, where it says, 'In case of emergency, notify:' I put 'DOCTOR.'

13. I didn't say it was your fault, I said I was blaming you.

14. Women will never be equal to men until they can walk down the street with a bald head and a beer gut, and still think they are sexy.

15. Behind every successful man is his woman. Behind the fall of a successful man is usually another woman.

16. A clear conscience is the sign of a fuzzy memory.

17. You do not need a parachute to skydive. You only need a parachute to skydive twice.

18. There's a fine line between cuddling and holding someone down so they can't get away.

19. I used to be indecisive. Now I'm not so sure.

20. You're never too old to learn something stupid.

21. To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target.

22. Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.

23. Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.

Source : Email forward :)

Perspective is everything

A fascinating TED talk about how our happiness depends on our perception or rather how perspective is really all there is to everything :)

View the talk here

Forget the Church, embrace Christ

A hard-hitting, thought-provoking article.

Read article here

Why we fear Chikni Chameli

Good post! But would have liked it to be more in-depth. But do agree that most Indians are quite unimaginably hypocritical :(

Read post here

F.U.C.G.

(Warning : Please read further only if you have a sense of humour and a high tolerance to irreverence. :P)

In the long distant past (possibly when the Ages were Dark and dismal to boot) in the empire where the sun allegedly never set (but has, luckily for its colonies, since set) it is rumoured that a consent had to be procured from the monarch in order to pursue the activity of making babies. Once said consent had been obtained, a sign had to then be put up on the front door proclaiming ‘F0rnication Under the Consent of the King’ (F.U.C.K.). It is hard to tell why this extreme amount of control by the state was imposed. Maybe the king was a control freak and got his kicks by looking at the ledgers and saying ‘Oh! 350 people want to f0rnicate, let me give consent to 50 and let the others stew in their juices. Ha Ha Ha!’ And then giving himself the royal consent, off he would go to tickle his fourth queen. Or maybe, it was a means to control the population, just in case they multiplied too much and thought about revolting against the revolting conditions they lived in, in which case, a revolting peasant would find the royal neck and give it a not-so-royal slit and the kick-desiring royal would be forced to kick the bucket. Quite smart they were, eh, the ‘mai-baap’ of yore.

Well, actually that got me thinking … what if such a policy could be put to work in India as an anti-proliferation measure. That train of thought got me quite excited, I mean, in the mental sense. And I started to think of its consequences. For starters, even if such a policy was formulated, since we have managed to kick out all our raja-log, both desi and videsi, and now have a apunich chunela sarkar firmly entrenched, it would have to be called ‘F0rnication Under the Consent of the Government’ or F.U.C.G. Ughhh! I must say, just introducing the word ‘government’ just made the hitherto highly pleasure-inciting activity suddenly lose all its desirability and become almost as dull and unexciting as a bureaucratic babu. Imagine you and your significant other lying in bed and saying, ‘let’s get this thingamajig from the government.’ ‘Hmmmm…?’ ‘Ummm, let’s get the latest plasma installed in the bedroom instead’. See, that would straight away put off a lot of people from even thinking of trying to make babies. Part of our pesky proliferation problem solved there itself.

Well, let’s say some people refuse to get sidetracked by trashy TV shows even if they are in HD and 3D and are still wanting to steam up a sweat between the sheets. The next step, then would be to register all the applications from these testosterone-junkies. Out of the total of 1.2 billion (and rising) people, let’s say, there are 20 million eagerly waiting couples, and as luck would have it, you are one of those in whose chart Shani was casting a malevolent eye at the house of kiddos, then your application would be lost in the corridors of babudom for the next 30 years by which time your baby-making hormones would have gone into retirement, packed its bags and left, last heard of holidaying in Hawaii, leaving you, shall we say, cold in the extremities and, errr, hot in the middle. Hmmm … halat kharab, upar se kismet bhi kharaab, magar kya karen, such is life, just belt up and bear it, man. And look at the bright side, you complaining fella. So what if you couldn’t save your lineage from dying out, you have just saved the world from the population bomb. Come here and line up for the Bharat Ratna behind all these other nice senior citizens. And wipe that grimace off your face and smile for the camera please …

But what about all those people who after making trips to various holy places, fasting on Saturdays and feasting the holy men, manage to chum up with Shani and get him to move their applications to the front of the line, you ask? Well, you really are having an anxiety-attack, aren’t you? Let me assure you that you can safely put your worries together with all the other ill-fated applications down there in the dungeons, for the Indian babu will always remain a fly-swatting, file-pushing, long lunch-taking, personal errand-running flag-bearer of absentee incompetence. And no amount of Shani-appeasement is going to change that. But what is beginning to worry me is the thought that they might be able to side-step the babu-road-block if they took the help of the lissome Laxmi and shared some of their bootlegged bounty with the babu. Some of the missus’ ill-gotten diamonds packed into a mithai dabba and pressed upon the drooling babu or a creaking peti full of crinkly crores left at the bureaucratic door and the babu might give them the consent even before you finish saying ‘take off your clothes’.

In which case Darwin will rise from the ashes and kick up a big ruckus because we will have changed his theory to ‘survival of the filthiest richest’ and Amnesty International are not going to be too tickled either with the ensuing demographic disaster of proliferating smugglers, extortionists and liquor kings. But Darwin does not need a F.U.C.G. and neither does AI. In their lands it is consent-free, or rather, it’s a free-for-all, so they should count themselves lucky and go and proliferate in their own countries and not try to be the ‘foreign hand’ who is always trying to halt India’s progress. These firangs, I tell you, always interfering.

I know, I know, it’s not fair to the aam janta, who cannot afford to part with mildewed millions. The milling middle class, who is forever trying to add zeros to their paltry savings, trying hard from being hazarpatis, to become lakhpatis to crorepatis. When have they ever allowed boiled and pasty babus get in the way of accomplishing their ends, let me ask? To them what are babus anyway? Mere law-makers! Cogs in the wheel of the great lumbering, slumbering bureaucracy. Who is going to enforce the law? Not these stuffed shirts, with their starched collars and starchier smiles. Bah! The MCs are street smart. Whenever the hormones hit them below the belt, all they will do is pass a few Gandhijis to the hawaldars, the low on salary but high on self-importance law-enforcers and all will be happy. The babu, happy that he is not disturbed in reducing the number of flies in the over-populated fly kingdom, the hawaldar who can now go and buy that silk sari to keep his wife happy in anticipation of you-know-what, and the MC who can now indulge in the most pleasurable exercise ever known. Such a wonderful invention it is - this happiness-circulation device called corruption. I wonder why Anna Hazare was making such a big fuss over it, even trying to kick the bucket in protest, maybe his hormones were on vacation. Or did a Wall Street on him, you know, took a high-dive into nothingness.

But I hate to think of all that matrimonial ads that will surface. Like - ‘Boy: 10th fail, but with F.U.C.G. degree. Of no known employment other than putting degree to good, far and wide use. Seeks beautiful, fair pativrata girl with light eyes, expert in cooking and house management, willing to bring in at least 100 tolas of gold and 10 crores in cash ’. Or ‘Girl : 5th fail, getting close to 40, has rudimentary cooking skills, and most importantly F.U.C.G. Please reply only if you are a doctor, Air Force pilot or CEO or earning a seven figure salary and willing to employ a cook and housemaid. All other applications will be rejected.’ This is not looking too good, is it? And the fellow who was quite happy printing fake 1000 rupee notes will now be able to move from lakhpati to crorepati in a jiffy just by changing the typeface on his printing machine. This is looking downright depressing.

Ok, ok, ok, I know when I’m beaten. I know this idea of mine has as much chance of surviving as a rain-drop in the Saharan desert doing the belly-dance and surviving. So, I guess I’ll have to give it a fair and fitting funeral right here. But I do and most unabashedly hope that it does NOT RIP. I hope its seething, unfulfilled ghost rises to haunt the Indian psyche until they buy enough ‘What an IDEA Sirji’s and indulge in their orgasmic adventures only in virtual 3D. In which case Abhishek Bachan will get all the credit for having stopped India’s monumental baby production activities.

What the @#$%^, a woman’s brain is grossly under-rated, I tell you ...

~~~

Awesome

A video that touches you to the core and makes you believe in miracles ...

Watch Carly's journey here

God bless Carly and her family.

The Joy of Quiet

By PICO IYER

Published: December 29, 2011 in the New York Times | Sunday Review

ABOUT a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began — I braced myself for mention of some next-generation stealth campaign — was stillness.

A few months later, I read an interview with the perennially cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? “I never read any magazines or watch TV,” he said, perhaps a little hyperbolically. “Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.” He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because “I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.”

Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with $2,285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in “black-hole resorts,” which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms.

Has it really come to this?

In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.

Internet rescue camps in South Korea and China try to save kids addicted to the screen.

Writer friends of mine pay good money to get the Freedom software that enables them to disable (for up to eight hours) the very Internet connections that seemed so emancipating not long ago. Even Intel (of all companies) experimented in 2007 with conferring four uninterrupted hours of quiet time every Tuesday morning on 300 engineers and managers. (The average office worker today, researchers have found, enjoys no more than three minutes at a time at his or her desk without interruption.) During this period the workers were not allowed to use the phone or send e-mail, but simply had the chance to clear their heads and to hear themselves think. A majority of Intel’s trial group recommended that the policy be extended to others.

THE average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen, Nicholas Carr notes in his eye-opening book “The Shallows,” in part because the number of hours American adults spent online doubled between 2005 and 2009 (and the number of hours spent in front of a TV screen, often simultaneously, is also steadily increasing).

The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month. Since luxury, as any economist will tell you, is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow, I heard myself tell the marketers in Singapore, will crave nothing more than freedom, if only for a short while, from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too full all at once.

The urgency of slowing down — to find the time and space to think — is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

When telegraphs and trains brought in the idea that convenience was more important than content — and speedier means could make up for unimproved ends — Henry David Thoreau reminded us that “the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.” Even half a century ago, Marshall McLuhan, who came closer than most to seeing what was coming, warned, “When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.” Thomas Merton struck a chord with millions, by not just noting that “Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest,” but by also acting on it, and stepping out of the rat race and into a Cistercian cloister.

Yet few of those voices can be heard these days, precisely because “breaking news” is coming through (perpetually) on CNN and Debbie is just posting images of her summer vacation and the phone is ringing. We barely have enough time to see how little time we have (most Web pages, researchers find, are visited for 10 seconds or less). And the more that floods in on us (the Kardashians, Obamacare, “Dancing with the Stars”), the less of ourselves we have to give to every snippet. All we notice is that the distinctions that used to guide and steady us — between Sunday and Monday, public and private, here and there — are gone.

We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating. And — as he might also have said — we’re rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines.

So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen.

MAYBE that’s why more and more people I know, even if they have no religious commitment, seem to be turning to yoga or meditation, or tai chi; these aren’t New Age fads so much as ways to connect with what could be called the wisdom of old age. Two journalist friends of mine observe an “Internet sabbath” every week, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning, so as to try to revive those ancient customs known as family meals and conversation. Finding myself at breakfast with a group of lawyers in Oxford four months ago, I noticed that all their talk was of sailing — or riding or bridge: anything that would allow them to get out of radio contact for a few hours.

Other friends try to go on long walks every Sunday, or to “forget” their cellphones at home. A series of tests in recent years has shown, Mr. Carr points out, that after spending time in quiet rural settings, subjects “exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.” More than that, empathy, as well as deep thought, depends (as neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have found) on neural processes that are “inherently slow.” The very ones our high-speed lives have little time for.

In my own case, I turn to eccentric and often extreme measures to try to keep my sanity and ensure that I have time to do nothing at all (which is the only time when I can see what I should be doing the rest of the time). I’ve yet to use a cellphone and I’ve never Tweeted or entered Facebook. I try not to go online till my day’s writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot, and every trip to the movies would be an event.

None of this is a matter of principle or asceticism; it’s just pure selfishness. Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: it’s joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”

It’s vital, of course, to stay in touch with the world, and to know what’s going on; I took pains this past year to make separate trips to Jerusalem and Hyderabad and Oman and St. Petersburg, to rural Arkansas and Thailand and the stricken nuclear plant in Fukushima and Dubai. But it’s only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it.

For more than 20 years, therefore, I’ve been going several times a year — often for no longer than three days — to a Benedictine hermitage, 40 minutes down the road, as it happens, from the Post Ranch Inn. I don’t attend services when I’m there, and I’ve never meditated, there or anywhere; I just take walks and read and lose myself in the stillness, recalling that it’s only by stepping briefly away from my wife and bosses and friends that I’ll have anything useful to bring to them. The last time I was in the hermitage, three months ago, I happened to pass, on the monastery road, a youngish-looking man with a 3-year-old around his shoulders.

“You’re Pico, aren’t you?” the man said, and introduced himself as Larry; we’d met, I gathered, 19 years before, when he’d been living in the cloister as an assistant to one of the monks.

“What are you doing now?” I asked.

“I work for MTV. Down in L.A.”

We smiled. No words were necessary.

“I try to bring my kids here as often as I can,” he went on, as he looked out at the great blue expanse of the Pacific on one side of us, the high, brown hills of the Central Coast on the other. “My oldest son” — he pointed at a 7-year-old running along the deserted, radiant mountain road in front of his mother — “this is his third time.”

The child of tomorrow, I realized, may actually be ahead of us, in terms of sensing not what’s new, but what’s essential.

~~~

Read the article here

The beauty of wabi-sabi

Wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic whereby greatness exists in the inconspicuous and overlooked details, and beauty can be coaxed out of ugliness. Wabi-sabi is central to the idea Japanese beauty and has the same importance to Japanese aesthetic values as the Greek ideals of beauty and perfection do in Western thought:

"Truth comes from the observation of nature. The Japanese have tried to control nature where they could, as best they could, within the limits of available technology. But there was little they could do about the weather - hot and humid summers, cold and dry winters, and rain on the average of one out of every three days throughout the year, except during the rainy season in early summer when every­thing is engulfed in a fine wet mist for six to eight weeks. And there was little they could do about the earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, typhoons, floods, fires, and tidal waves that periodically and unpredictably visited their land. The Japanese didn't particularly trust nature, but they learned from it. Three of the most obvious lessons gleaned from millennia of contact with nature (and leavened with Taoist thought) were incorporated into the wisdom of wabi-sabi.

1. All things are impermanent. The inclination toward nothingness is unrelenting and univer­sal. Even things that have all the earmarks of substance - things that are hard, inert, solid present noing more than the illusion of permanence. We may wear blinders, use ruses to forget, ignore, or pretend otherwise - but all comes to nothing in the end. Everything wears down. The planets and stars, and even intan­gible things like reputation, family heritage, historical memory, scientific theorems, mathematical proofs, great art and literature (even in digital form) - all eventually fade into oblivion and nonexistence.

2. All things are imperfect. Nothing that exists is without imperfections. When we look really closely at things we see the flaws. The sharp edge of a razor blade, when magnified, reveals microscopic pits, chips, and variegations. Every craftsman knows the limits of perfection: the imperfections glare back. And as things begin to break down and approach the primor­dial state, they become even less perfect, more irregular.

3. All things are incomplete. All things, includ­ing the universe itself, are in a constant, never-ending state of becoming or dissolving. Often we arbitrarily designate moments, points along the way, as 'finished' or 'complete.' But when does something's destiny finally come to fruition? Is the plant complete when it flowers? When it goes to seed? When the seeds sprout? When everything turns into compost? The notion of completion has no basis in wabi-sabi.

" 'Greatness' exists in the inconspicuous and overlooked details. Wabi-sabi represents the exact opposite of the Western ideal of great beauty as something monumental, spectacular, and enduring. Wabi-sabi is not found in nature at moments of bloom and lushness, but at moments of inception or subsiding. Wabi-sabi is not about gorgeous flowers, majestic trees, or bold landscapes. Wabi-sabi is about the minor and the hidden, the tentative and the ephemeral: things so subtle and evanescent they are invisible to vulgar eyes. ...

"The essence of wabi-sabi is apportioned in small doses. As the dose decreases, the effect becomes more potent, more profound. The closer things get to nonexistence, the more exquisite and evocative they become. Consequently to experience wabi-sabi means you have to slow way down, be patient, and look very closely.

"Beauty can be coaxed out of ugliness. Wabi-sabi is ambivalent about separating beauty from non-beauty or ugliness. The beauty of wabi-sabi is, in one respect, the condition of coming to terms with what you consider ugly. Wabi-sabi suggests that beauty is a dynamic event that occurs between you and something else. Beauty can spontaneously occur at any moment given the proper circumstances, context, or point of view. Beauty is thus an altered state of conscious­ness, an extraordinary moment of poetry and grace."

----- article as posted by delanceyplace ----------

Love :)

Love sometimes wants to do us a great favor: hold us upside down and shake all the nonsense out. 

- Hafiz of Persia

Myths about introverts

Some Myths about Introverts. Super Interesting ! and Super True !

Myth #1 – Introverts don’t like to talk.
This is not true. Introverts just don’t talk unless they have something to say. They hate small talk. Get an introvert talking about something they are interested in, and they won’t shut up for days.

Myth #2 – Introverts are shy.
Shyness has nothing to do with being an Introvert. Introverts are not necessarily afraid of people. What they need is a reason to interact. They don’t interact for the sake of interacting. If you want to talk to an Introvert, just start talking. Don’t worry about being polite.

Myth #3 – Introverts are rude.
Introverts often don’t see a reason for beating around the bush with social pleasantries. They want everyone to just be real and honest. Unfortunately, this is not acceptable in most settings, so Introverts can feel a lot of pressure to fit in, which they find exhausting.

Myth #4 – Introverts don’t like people.
On the contrary, Introverts intensely value the few friends they have. They can count their close friends on one hand. If you are lucky enough for an introvert to consider you a friend, you probably have a loyal ally for life. Once you have earned their respect as being a person of substance, you’re in.

Myth #5 – Introverts don’t like to go out in public.
Nonsense. Introverts just don’t like to go out in public FOR AS LONG. They also like to avoid the complications that are involved in public activities. They take in data and experiences very quickly, and as a result, don’t need to be there for long to “get it.” They’re ready to go home, recharge, and process it all. In fact, recharging is absolutely crucial for Introverts.

Myth #6 – Introverts always want to be alone.
Introverts are perfectly comfortable with their own thoughts. They think a lot. They daydream. They like to have problems to work on, puzzles to solve. But they can also get incredibly lonely if they don’t have anyone to share their discoveries with. They crave an authentic and sincere connection with ONE PERSON at a time.

Myth #7 – Introverts are weird.
Introverts are often individualists. They don’t follow the crowd. They’d prefer to be valued for their novel ways of living. They think for themselves and because of that, they often challenge the norm. They don’t make most decisions based on what is popular or trendy.

Myth #8 – Introverts are aloof nerds.
Introverts are people who primarily look inward, paying close attention to their thoughts and emotions. It’s not that they are incapable of paying attention to what is going on around them, it’s just that their inner world is much more stimulating and rewarding to them.

Myth #9 – Introverts don’t know how to relax and have fun.
Introverts typically relax at home or in nature, not in busy public places. Introverts are not thrill seekers and adrenaline junkies. If there is too much talking and noise going on, they shut down. Their brains are too sensitive to the neurotransmitter called Dopamine. Introverts and Extroverts have different dominant neuro-pathways. Just look it up.

Myth #10 – Introverts can fix themselves and become Extroverts.
A world without Introverts would be a world with few scientists, musicians, artists, poets, filmmakers, doctors, mathematicians, writers, and philosophers. That being said, there are still plenty of techniques an Extrovert can learn in order to interact with Introverts. (Yes, I reversed these two terms on purpose to show you how biased our society is.) Introverts cannot “fix themselves” and deserve respect for their natural temperament and contributions to the human race. In fact, one study (Silverman, 1986) showed that the percentage of Introverts increases with IQ.

Original article at http://www.carlkingdom.com/10-myths-about-introverts

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Am sharing this because I've been accused of all of the above :( but stopped being bothered about it long ago :) but it's nice that someone took the trouble to figure it all out :D

Our very first goal-post

I learned something new today, that there is something called the breast-crawl. It happens naturally in the animal world. Mammals in the wild, unlike humans, have unassisted births. So after the baby is born, it not only has to find its feet and stand up, it also has to find its way to the mother's nipple, all by itself. Else, it would just starve and die then and there. So, nature has hardwired into all mammal babies the know-how to crawl towards its food supply.

So this is how it happens in the human world. After the baby is born, the placenta severed and the baby cleaned of all adhering fluids, it is placed face down on the mother's tummy. And left there with a little support on its back by the mother to ensure that it does not fall off. The baby at this point is quiet and fully alert. The best state of mind for learning. It is fast and furiously picking up cues from the environment and before long it starts moving. It blinks, moves its head and hands and even starts kicking. This gentle kicking motion on the mother's tummy stimulates the uterus to contract and dispel the placenta. Once it has got the hang of the kicking motion, it starts to crawl upwards. It is said that the nipples emanate a scent that is close to that of the amniotic fluid, so that must be a strong attraction for the baby and maybe it crawls towards this smell. This smell perhaps also sets off some trigger in the baby's body because it starts to salivate. Slowly, inch by inch, it crawls on its mother's body until its mouth finds the nipple. Somehow it knows that the food supply has been reached because it then starts suckling. 

Amazing, isn't it, how nature has provided the baby with all the information to do this, like some pre-loaded software. :) This little crawl that the little one does also creates a bond between mother and baby, supports and comforts the newborn one and familiarises it with the mother's (and if present, the father's) voice. Sadly, medicated births where the mother has taken or has been injected with painkillers dulls the baby's senses and it fails to do the crawl and has to be directly led to the breast.

Babies are not always ready for feeding as soon as they are born. Sometimes, when it is taken directly to the nipple, if it is not ready, it does not feed. Then the latching-on at a later stage becomes difficult. On the other hand, if the baby is left to crawl, by the time it crawls and reaches the nipple, it is ready for feeding. This whole process is deeply instinctive. Unfortunately, modern practices are so invasive and anti-instinct, that this beautiful mechanism that has been provided by nature is largely overlooked.

So that was it, our first little sprint to the goal-post - in the shape of a sweet-smelling nipple, crawled over the softest, smoothest turf in the world, supported by loving hands, all done on our own, on infant hands and legs. And didn't we deserve the prize :)))

Watch the amazing event here

And do share this, so that more babies can crawl and bond and be healthy.

Do you have an 'I' infection?

Symptoms are similar to narcissism; obsessively talking about oneself, ignoring other people when they talk with you, thinking about what you are going to say next instead of actively hearing what the other person is saying, failing to ask meaningful questions, verbal vomiting on your friends, sending people emails asking them to join your business or like your fan page without asking them about their life or interests.

Treatment involves being Interested vs. Interesting. Try getting to know your friends and prospects first! Then if they ask about what you do - share a little...

We've all met them, some simply do not recognize them because they are so lost to themselves they have chosen to live vicariously through those others. Look for a dominance of "I" words and a lack of "we" or "you" words...

~ Jack Ricci

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross quotes

"It is very important that you only do what you love to do. you may be poor, you may go hungry, you may lose your car, you may have to move into a shabby place to live, but you will totally live. And at the end of your days you will bless your life because you have done what you came here to do. Otherwise, you will live your life as a prostitute, you will do things only for a reason, to please other people, and you will never have lived. and you will not have a pleasant death.”

“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.” 



“There is within each one of us a potential for goodness beyond our imagining; for giving which seeks no reward; for listening without judgment; for loving unconditionally.” 



“Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose.” 
“Everything in this life has a purpose, there are no mistakes, no coincidences.” 


― Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Freedom

"A superficial freedom to wander aimlessly here and there, to taste this or that, to take a choice of distractions (in Pascal's sense) is simply a sham. It claims to be a freedom of “choice” when it has evaded the basic task of discovering who it is that chooses. It is not free because it is unwilling to face the risk of self-discovery.

The free man is the one whose choices have given him the power to stand on his own feet and determine his own life according to the higher light and spirit that are in him. The slave, in the spiritual order, is the man whose choices have destroyed all spontaneity in him and have delivered him over, bound hand and foot, to his own compulsions, idiosyncrasies and illusions, so that he never does what he really wants to do, but only what he has to do."

~ Thomas Merton