On the 8 Spot

Why can’t I seem to wean myself off these kinds of movies?

Why can’t I grow up? Because its Too fun being a kid at heart always!

thanks to j here:

from here:

Hope is oxygen to someone who is suffocating on despair.

I think that most people in developing nations such as my country this applies. I talk to a lot of people and what hits me is that extreme or even mild but prolonged poverty causes a great change in all but the best people.  Before we can even try to help someone we must first try to convince that person that he can be helped, that he can be “saved”.

There are a lot of foundations who like to help in our country but a key ingredient a lot of these foundations seem to be missing is that people who suffer from poverty are broken in a way. They are not normal or ordinary and a more mindful and involved program is needed. I’ve seen a few organizations that seem to know this. Hope they all do.

I don’t know, he was saying this about how he survived a drug addiction, but I think that this is great advice for life in general.

The article was a great read, please read it if you haven’t yet. Its about a drug addict who was able to overcome his addiction.

read the article here:

I lustily chanted some of those slogans and lived by others. There is nothing romantic about being a crackhead and a drunk — low-bottom addiction is its own burlesque that needs no snarky annotation. Unless a person is willing to be terminally, frantically earnest, all hope is lost.

TakeAways:

We are given brains and the larger the brain or the better formed the brain was the less energy it consumed in solving a problem and the better it was in processing information.

from here a scientific american article on intelligence and the brain:

Perfection from Practice
Whatever the neurological roots of genius, being brilliant only increases the probability of success; it does not ensure accomplishment in any endeavor. Even for academic achievement, IQ is not as important as self-discipline and a willingness to work hard.

The takeaway is that if you are not going to be mindful of what you are doing 24/7 why don’t you make helping people a default reaction. Remember maybe helping one people directly may mean really helping 2-3 people.

from here:

Consider the following experiment conducted by Monica Bartlett and myself. We brought people into the lab and set up 2 situations: One in which they confronted a problem which would require them to complete an onerous task and one where they didn’t face any problem. In the first case, a confederate, at some cost to herself in terms of time and effort, helped the participant solve the problem, which led to measurable feelings of gratitude. In the second, the confederate was just another person in the session.

After leaving the lab, all participants just happened to encounter someone asking for help on a different onerous task. This person was either the known confederate (labeled benefactor in the figure) or someone who was a complete stranger.

Looking at the first two bars, you can see that grateful participants helped the known confederate much more than neutral participants.

Ok, I know what you’re thinking. This doesn’t prove anything! They may just be following a reciprocity norm. Fair enough. But look at the second set of bars. If it were really reciprocity, then no increased helping should occur when a stranger requests help, as participants don’t owe this stranger anything. Yet, those who were feeling grateful still helped more. Simply put, gratitude functioned to push people to acquiesce to requests for help — even onerous ones from unknown others.

Importantly, another study showed that if we reminded the participants before they left that they were helped by the confederate, they didn’t help the stranger any more than control participants. By binding the emotional state so saliently to one person, it couldn’t be misattributed as a cue to help another, thereby indicating that the increased helping isn’t just adherence to a “pay-it-forward” norm. Yet participants still were paying-it-forward.