Interactions with people are the major source of emotional stress, but it doesn't have to be that way. The problem is that we are continually judging people, wishing they were something that they are not. We want to change them. We want them to think and act a certain way, most often the way we think and act. And because this is not possible, because everyone is different, we are continually frustrated and upset. I, see other people as phenomena, as neutral as comets or plants. They simply exist. They come in all varieties, making life rich and interesting. Work with what they give you, i resisting and trying to change them. Make understanding people a fun game, the solving of puzzles. It is all part of the human comedy. Yes, people are irrational, but so are you. Make your acceptance of human nature as radical as possible. This will calm you down and help you observe people more dispassionately, understanding them on a deeper level.



The present moment feels special. It is real. H much you may remember the past or anticipate the future, you live in the present. Of course, the moment during which you read that sentence is no longer happening. This one is. I, it feels as though time flows, in the sense that the present is constantly updating itself. We have a deep intuition that the future is open until it becomes present and that the past is fixed. As time flows, this structure of fixed past, immediate present and open future gets carried forward in time. Y as natural as this way of thinking is, you will not find it reflected in science. The equations of physics do not tell us which events are occurring right now ― they are like a map without the "you are here" symbol. The present moment does not exist in them, and t neither does the flow of time.



The conscious preference for apparent simplicity in the early-twentieth-century modernist movement in prose and poetry was echoed in what is known as the International Style of architecture. The new literature avoided old-fashioned words, elaborate images, grammatical inversions, and sometimes even meter and rhyme. In the same way, one of the basic principles of early modernist architecture was that every part of a building must be functional, without any unnecessary or fancy additions. Most International Style architecture aggressively banned moldings and sometimes even window and door frames. Like the prose of Hemingway or Samuel Beckett, it proclaimed, and sometimes proved, that less was more. B some modern architects, unfortunately, designed buildings that looked simple and elegant but didn't i function very well:. Their flat roofs leaked in wet climates and their metal railings and window frames rusted. Absolute simplicity, in most cases, remained an ideal rather than a reality, and in the early twentieth century complex architectural decorations continued to be used in many private and public buildings.



One study showed that a certain word (e.g., boat) seemed more pleasant when presented after related words (e.g., sea, sail). That result occurred because of conceptual fluency, a type of processing fluency related to how easily information comes to our mind. Because "sea" primed the context, the heightened predictability caused the concept of "boat" to enter people's minds more easily, and that ease of processing produced a pleasant feeling that became misattributed to the word "boat." Marketers can take advantage of conceptual fluency and enhance the effectiveness of their advertisements by strategically positioning their ads in predictive contexts. F, an experiment showed that consumers found a ketchup ad more favorable when the ad was presented after an ad for mayonnaise. The mayonnaise ad primed consumers' schema for condiments, and when the ad for ketchup was presented afterward, the idea of ketchup came to their minds more easily. A of that heightened conceptual fluency, consumers developed a more positive attitude toward the ketchup advertisement.



Some of the things we profess to value in the abstract may not, i, characterize our actual everyday experiences. F, we say that "honesty" and "open communication" are the foundational values of any strong relationship. B think of how many times you've lied to a potential romantic partner in order to make the person feel better about himself or herself. Likewise, every parent knows that lying to their kids about everything from the arrival of Santa Claus to the horrible things that will happen if they don't eat their peas is a key component of raising a child. As one author put it, "If you want to have love in your life, you'd better be prepared to tell some lies and to believe some lies."



People absorb iron best when it comes together with something else we readily absorb ― f, vitamin_C. Vegetarians use this trick to boost their iron absorption. By combining sources of iron with sources of vitamin C, they can ensure that their bodies are better able to absorb both. A large dose of vitamin C can increase iron absorption sixfold. U, the opposite is also true. A diet poor in vitamin C makes iron absorption difficult, often leading to the double bad luck of scurvy and anemia. Just imagine that combination. It's bad enough that you are pale and exhausted, but you could also lose muscle tone and begin bleeding internally. Vegetarians in developed countries avoid these fatal symptoms because they have access to many foods that are high in both iron and vitamin C, such as broccoli and spinach. Poor people in the developing world are usually less fortunate, h, as those key foods are often precious and strictly seasonal.



A change in motivation can be effected by targeting the physical consequences of various actions. This method is not at all automatic for most people. In general, people accept and deal with the set consequences of their actions prescribed by their surroundings. It is, h, possible for a person to personally manipulate and create consequences for his actions. This will inevitably have an effect on his future motivation and behavior. Most often this is achieved through the imposition of monetary consequences. A bet is a typical example of this. A person striving to reach a difficult goal or complete a task ― building a rocking chair or losing weight, f ― will be wise to supplement his motivation to do so by making a bet on it with a friend. He would of course bet in favor of himself. In doing so, he will receive both a positive incentive to complete the task (his desire to collect the reward for winning the bet) and a negative disincentive to quit the task (his desire to avoid having to pay out if he loses).



Children are born theorizers. Their minds are never idle and, once they start talking, their mouths aren't, either. When their use of a word strikes us as odd, we correct them. They learn the meanings of words by trial and error, by hypothesizing a fit between word and object and using the feedback they get from others to refine the abstract category for which the word stands. B of course, those others were once children themselves, and they learned language in the same way. It is obvious then that there is no authority external to the community of language speakers against whose prescriptions all usage could be checked. Rather, words acquire objective meanings because of the "pull" exerted by social pressures to conform to publicly approved usage. T every category, every concept of ours is a work in progress. No two of us learn our language alike, and nobody finishes learning it while he lives.



It is widely believed that verbal rehearsal improves our memory. H, an experiment by Schooler and Engstler-Schooler suggests that is not the case. Participants in the study watched a film of a robbery where they saw a bank robber's face. The experimental group of participants then gave as detailed a description of the face as they could for 5 minutes while the control group did something unrelated. Each participant then had to identify the robber from a line up of eight similar looking people. The participants in the control group, who performed an unrelated task for 5 minutes, picked the correct person from the line up 64% of the time. B the participants who had been recalling all they could of the suspect's face picked the correct person just 38% of the time. Somehow, putting the details of the face into words interfered with the natural facial recognition at which we all usually excel. This effect is called verbal overshadowing.



At around 1.5kg, the human brain is thought to be around five to seven times larger than expected for a mammal of our body size. Why do humans have such big brains? Although they only account for 2 percent of typical body weight, they use up 20 percent of metabolic energy. What could justify such a biologically expensive organ? An obvious answer is that we need big brains to reason. After all, a big brain equals more intelligence. B evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar has been pushing another answer ― one that has to do with being sociable. He makes the point that big brains seem to be specialized for dealing with problems that must arise out of large groups in which an individual needs to interact with others. This is true for many species. F, birds of species that flock together have comparatively larger brains than those that are isolated. A change in brain size can even occur within the lifespan of an individual animal such as the locust. Locusts are normally solitary and avoid each other but become 'gregarious' when they enter the swarm phase. This swarm phase of the locust is triggered by the build up of locusts as their numbers multiply, threatening food supply, which is why they swarm to move to a new location all together. In the process, they rub against each other, and this stimulation sets off a trigger in their brain to start paying attention to each other. As they swarm and become more tuned in to other locusts around them, their brain size increases by some degrees.