Mindlessness: A Talk by Pioneer Ellen Langer

She at least sounds like she knows what she's talking about! A video is included.

...Ellen Langer is the author of Mindfulness (1990), one of the first non-Buddhist books...on the subject, and Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility (2009)...

Mindfulness and Leadership

Speaking at the ADC Future Summit in Melbourne, psychologist Ellen Langer speaks about the theory of mindfulness and how uncertainty and awareness affect the quality of our decision-making. Ellen Jane Langer is professor of psychology at Harvard University who has studied the illusion of control, decision making, aging and mindfulness theory. She was the first woman ever to be tenured in psychology at Harvard University and is the author of over 200 research articles and six academic books, including Mindfulness and The Power of Mindful Learning. ADC Future Summit 2011, Melbourne, June 2011.

Integral Options Cafe: Ellen Langer on Mindfulness and Leadership

A Hungry Future?

...It is estimated that across the globe 44 million people have been added to the estimated 1.2 billion already living below the poverty level of $1.25 a day according to the World Bank. This can be directly traced to the increase in food prices since 2010.

An increase in the price of what can be obtained, when the difference between sustainable and catastrophic is this small, is not just an individual tragedy. When thousands or even millions face such a reality it holds the potential to create massive social disorder. It should have surprised no one—although it seems to have surprised nearly everyone—that when the tipping point through a small price rise moved ever so slightly this Spring toward catastrophe, riots and uprisings erupted around the world, particularly in the Middle East. Hunger in the rest of the world will touch even the well fed because it is going to change the world. The American media hardly noticed, but the Egyptian Spring began not as a drive for democracy but as a food riot.

The bipolar geopolitical reality most of us have known all our lives ended in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union, but it has taken 20 years for it to become obvious. We are moving into a multipolar geopolitical world and, for the first time in 500 years—since Henry the Navigator—Caucasian cultures will not run the world. A different set of values will obtain, and many of those emerging countries will be profoundly changed by what hunger and its social unrest does to them. Our markets, our livelihoods, our lives, will feel the effect.

As with much of the developed world America's affluence has buffered a critical mass of us from such extreme sensitivity to supply and cost. But, because we have such a paltry and perverse social safety net—a situation almost unique in the developed world—that does not mean we are unscathed. Feeding America, the largest food program in the country, reported in 2010: “that hunger is increasing at an alarming rate in the United States, and our network is expanding its reach in response.”5...

Trends That Will Affect Your Future … The Coming Food Crisis—The Social Tsunami Headed Our Way

Clarke & Dawe Do Quantitative Easing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2AvU2cfXRk&feature=BFa&list

The Pillaging 1%

Charles Monbiot's incisive analysis:

...If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a rich family, you're likely to go to business school.

This is not to suggest that all executives are psychopaths. It is to suggest that the economy has been rewarding the wrong skills. As the bosses have shaken off the trade unions and captured both regulators and tax authorities, the distinction between the productive and rentier upper classes has broken down. Chief executives now behave like dukes, extracting from their financial estates sums out of all proportion to the work they do or the value they generate, sums that sometimes exhaust the businesses they parasitise. They are no more deserving of the share of wealth they've captured than oil sheikhs.

The rest of us are invited, by governments and by fawning interviews in the press, to subscribe to their myth of election: the belief that they are possessed of superhuman talents. The very rich are often described as wealth creators. But they have preyed on the earth's natural wealth and their workers' labour and creativity, impoverishing both people and planet. Now they have almost bankrupted us. The wealth creators of neoliberal mythology are some of the most effective wealth destroyers the world has ever seen...

- The 1% are the very best destroyers of wealth the world has ever seen | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian

Telling it like it is! -

http://youtu.be/M1lJd2eLG0M

Meanwhile, poor women are being incarcarated wholesale for profit -
http://www.nationofchange.org/dispatches-field-women-prison-american-growth-industry-1321720274

And a possible solution, 'time banking'? -
http://www.truth-out.org/time-banking-idea-whose-time-has-come/1322059802

Steven Pinker Deduces All's Well

Intensive media coverage of horrific events such as the genocide in Rwanda and the massacre perpetrated by Anders Breivik in Norway has us convinced that we live in an increasingly violent world. But according to Harvard professor of psychology and bestselling author Steven Pinker, that's a misperception. In his new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, he argues that human society is more peaceful than ever before.

"It's only when you calculate the amount of violence as a proportion of the world's population that you know how prevalent violence is today and how it's changed compared to earlier periods," Pinker said in a recent interview on The Current.

The baseline for Pinker's statistical analysis was the rate of violence in traditional tribal societies. "There, at least 15 per cent of people on average die from violence. Even the worst statistic that you can squeeze out of the 20th century — say, you add up all of the genocides, all of the wars, all of the manmade famines — that gets you up to about three per cent. That's the highest you can go during the worst period you can imagine, and it's five times lower than a conservative estimate of the rate of death in tribal societies," he told host Anna Maria Tremonti.

In his historical survey, Pinker touches on the fact that violence is rampant in Western mythology and even in our religious foundations, in part because they are rooted in early civilizations. "All of the first empires and kingdoms engaged in human sacrifice, torture, execution for victimless crimes, slavery," he said.

Pinker has identified a number of factors that helped us become less violent. "Good government is one of them. If you outsource your deterrents and revenge to a disinterested third party, namely a court system and a police force, you're less likely to get endless cycles of vendetta and violence, the Corleone method of dispute resolution. As flawed as our police and courts are, they're probably better than taking justice into your own hands."

He also credits the growth of commerce and trade, the broader reach of education and literacy, and "technologies that encourage people to take the viewpoints of other people: fiction, media, journalism, history, memoir, that elevate you from your tribal, parochial vantage point."...

CBC Books - Steven Pinker on The Better Angels of Our Nature

The Royal Society Opens Its E-Doors, BPS follows suit

The Royal Society is allowing free and permanent access to articles over 70 years old in its mighty journal archive which boasts about 60,000 historical scientific papers going back to the 1660s!

Search

Also, to view retrospectives on particular themes in psychology from their origination, such as Little Albert and the rat, Phineas Gage's hole in the brain, experimentation with Coca Cola and much much more, the 'Look Back' collection is available at 'Looking back'

Reading the Brain and Face - Two Resources

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