Peace isn't just a feeling - it's a currency

 If it costs your peace, it’s too expensive.

Choose to be Focused

If you want to make great strides and achieve a truly extraordinary life, you need to reinvest your free time into learning new skills, putting in the work, and being productive.

Hyper-focused mental efforts help to make fast progress. 

It won’t last forever, but you need to put in the time now, so later you can have the life you want.

Your body is a representation of your mindset

 

Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.

Fear and doubt are natural – embrace them. 

Idea doubt is healthy, 

Self-doubt is not.

#StayHomeSaveLives

Many of us fear boredom – even the faintest whiff of boredom sends us scurrying right back to the game.

Arthur Schopenhauer said that willing itself is never fulfilled - as soon as one wish is satisfied, another appears. Though there may be some very brief respite, some fleeting period of satiation, it is immediately transformed into boredom.

Every human life is tossed backward and forward between pain and boredom.

Yesterday's Ignorance

Personal reflections on the dating world: If you’re a gay man, body image and insecurities are hugely magnified, much more so than in comparison to heterosexuals. In the 21st century, social media platforms like Instagram exacerbate these insecurities and force feed you your daily fix of unrealistic pressures of what the ideal body or partner should look like. It's nothing new that it's becoming more and more infused in to society, especially in the lives of the LGBT world. However, once the bedroom lights go off it's the conversation and the mind that you're going to be ultimately attracted to. Whether you want to admit that or not, this is what will sustain any meaningful relationship you'll ever have. Social media is all about comparisons, where we spend a lot of time admiring other people’s lives instead of investing in our own. Ignore the status quo. You can’t judge a book by its cover, and the same goes for people. Those looks will surely fade, but that personality is in it for the long haul.  
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind ~ Shakespeare

We all have some kind of scar

The thing about an emotional injury is this sense of unfairness.
It's like a car crash, where everyone was in the car
but you're the only one who went through the windscreen.


"If you can sit with your pain, listen to your pain and respect your pain 
- in time you will move through your pain." ~ Bryant McGill

The Rest will Follow

Sometimes you don’t realize
the weight of something you've
been carrying until you feel
the weight of its release

Eureka!

The part of the brain where insight occurs is the anterior superior temporal gyrus. During a flash of insight the left side doesn't really react, but the right side does. High-energy brain waves called gamma-waves erupt from this one spot.

Intelligence and creativity are not isomorphic. There is overlap between the two, but they are very different. It's wrong to think that brain structure alone makes you creative, but there is a neurological basis to divergent thinking - to creativity itself.

 

The Divergent thinking test, as in diverging from known ideas to come up with something novel, is one of the most commonly used creativity tests. An example would be to give someone a common object, such as a brick, and then ask them to think of as many creative ways to use the item. It gets people thinking outside the box.

Mind wandering seems to facilitate the creativity process. If you want to come up with a solution to a problem - don't do anything, but instead do something undemanding. If your stumped, take a break and let the mind wander.

Alpha waves help cut off distractions, helping you to summon the idea. A transient dip in frontal lobe activity aids the creativity and insight process. So, insight (the Aha! moment) essentially comes from cutting yourself off from the distractions of the outside world.

With a dissertation in the offing (and not an iota of what to do it on) it's beginning to look as though I'll have to lock myself in a room until I retrieve this moment of clarity.                         

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original

~ BBC Horizons: How insight works

The McGurk effect

A phenomenon that occurs when a speech sound does not match the shape of the lips producing it, as when the sound corresponding to the usual pronunciation of the word gay is dubbed on to a video image of a person uttering the word bay, causing the listener to hear a word intermediate between the two (day).

The effect shows that the visual channel conveys important information not just to deaf people but also to listeners with normal hearing. For those with minor hearing loss, speech reading can be a very valuable way to maximize the hearing they still do have. Also, this reveals more about why watching the mouth is so important in intense language learning.

The phenomenon is named after the Scottish psychologist Harry McGurk (1936-98) who co-authored the first article on it, entitled 'Hearing Lips and Seeing Voices' in the journal Nature in 1976.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Warning Signs for Suicide

The best predictor of suicide attempts in both women and men is a verbal or behavioural threat to commit suicide, and such threats should always be taken seriously.

 

One of the most destructive myths about suicide is that people who talk openly about suicide are just seeking attention and do not actually intend to carry out the act. Yet research shows that a high proportion of suicide attempts - perhaps 80 percent - are preceded by some kind of warning (Bagley & Ramsay, 1997). Sometimes the warning is an explicit statement of intent, such as 'I don't want to go on living' or 'I won't be around for much longer'. Other times, the warnings are more subtle, as when a person expresses hopelessness about the future, withdraws from others or from favourite activities, gives away treasured possessions, or takes unusual risks.

 

Other important risk factors are a history of previous suicide attempts and a detailed plan that involves a lethal method (Chiles & Strossahl, 1995; Shneidman, 1998). Substance abuse also increases suicide risk (Yen et al., 2003; Passer & Smith, 2009).

 

There's an enormous amount of pain in the world. Not physical pain but psychological pain. It's an ache in the mind. It's an ache of the negative emotions. It's the ache of guilt and of shame, and of loneliness and rejection. It comes from thwarted, blocked, frustrated, trampled upon psychological needs. And if I were to commit suicide, it would be in terms of my frustrated needs. And if you were my therapist, I would be grateful if you understood me, not in terms of my biology or my parents or my psychodynamics, but in terms of what needs were bugging me.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
''The grief of the worshippers left behind, the awful famine in their hearts, these are too costly terms for the release''
                                                                                                                                                                     ~ Mark Twain

Samaritans                                     Pieta House                                 Turn2Me

Ireland: 1850 60 90 90                   Website: www.pieta.ie                 Website: www.turn2me.org

 

Chinese Room Argument

The Chinese room argument is a thought experiment. It was first proposed by the US philosopher John Searle (pictured) in the journal Behavioural and Brain Sciences in 1980 , in which many people feel he thoroughly disproved the notion that any computer program could acquire true intelligence. It is one of the best known and widely credited counters to claims of artificial intelligence (AI) - that is, to claims that computers do or at least can (someday might) think.

It was written to demonstrate a simple point - intelligent behaviour does not equate to intelligence. This doesn't mean AI design is impossible, but that a behavioural-based model for intelligence is flawed.

Imagine yourself a monolingual English speaker, ''locked in a room, and given a large batch of Chinese writing'' plus ''a second batch of Chinese script” and ''a set of rules'' in English ''for correlating the second batch with the first batch.'' As Searle explains how it works: ''Suppose that unknown to you the symbols passed into the room are called 'questions' by the people outside the room, and the symbols you pass back out of the room are called 'answers to the questions' ''. Just by looking at your answers, nobody can tell you ''don't speak a word of Chinese.''

The point he makes is that you may hand out the appropriate and even accurate answers and that those responses may serve to connect with the expectations of those asking the questions.  However, it does not indicate that any real understanding has taken place or that any sort of meaning is actually attached to the question and answer process that is taking place.

 

It should be conceded that Searle's argument is effective in showing that certain kinds of machines - even machines that pass the Turing Test - are not necessarily intelligent and do not necessarily "understand" the words that they speak. This is because a computer sitting on a desk with no sensory apparatus and no means of causally interacting with objects in the world will be incapable of understanding a language. Such a machine might be capable of manipulating linguistic symbols, even to the point of producing output that will fool human speakers and thus pass the Turing Test. However, the words produced by such a machine would lack one crucial ingredient: The words would fail to express any meaningful content and thus would fail to be "about" anything.

What's the point?

It doesn't matter how perfectly a computer is designed to simulate the intelligence of a human being - because its behaviour is a result of aimlessly executing instructions, not understanding. In this case, the means defines the end. You're reading this sentence, and understanding it without demonstrating behaviour of any kind. A system's behaviour doesn’t indicate intelligence or understanding, and a system that behaves intelligently is not necessarily ''intelligent.''
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Before we work on artificial intelligence why don't we do something about natural stupidity