Our health depends in part on environmental impacts. As Bill Davenhall shared at TEDMED, there are trends of specific health risks associated with specific locations. We need to know more about where we live and what impact it may have on our health.
Mind-blowing advances in bio-engineering and medicine presented by Anthony Atala at TEDMED. Repairing, reconstructing, and growing functioning organs with your own cell. The future of solving organ damage and organ donor shortages is arriving.
TEDMED focuses on the intersection of medicine and healthcare. It was created by Marc Hodosh (President) in partnership with TED founder Richard Saul Wurman. “TEDMED celebrates conversations that demonstrate the intersection and connections between all things medical and healthcare related: from personal health to public health, devices to design and Hollywood to the hospital.” I’m very excited about a TED conference solely dedicated to health, medicine, and similar topics. TEDMED on the web: |
Stuff White People Like by Christian Lander is a caricature of how one dimensional white people really are can be. The book is a bundled collection of 150 “stuff” white people like. It is filled with humor, sarcasm, irony, and the “occasional” truthful sore points (for White people at least). Read the full story
Gratitude is one of the most powerful ways to improve your well-being and among other things, increasing your happiness. Within positive psychology inquiries, gratitude interventions have proven to be among the most effective, as world expert on gratitude Robert A. Emmons and other researchers have found. Among the wide ranging benefits, researchers have found that “gratitude is positively related to such critical outcomes as life satisfaction, vitality, happiness, self-esteem, optimism, hope, empathy, and the willingness to provide emotional and tangible support for other people, whereas being ungrateful is related to anxiety, depression, envy, materialism and loneliness.” (p. 186)
“A person with the disposition to feel grateful has established a worldview that says, in effect, that all of life is a gift, gratuitously given. Although we cannot in any direct way be grateful, we can cultivate gratefulness by structuring our lives, our minds, and our words in such a way as to facilitate awareness of gratitude-inducing experiences and labeling them as such.” (p. 187) In other words “gratitude is a way of life.” (p. 186)
(Gratitude is one of the 24 Character Strengths included in the VIA Survey of Character Strengths which is a scientifically validated measurement designed to identify what your top signature strengths are.)
The top 10 evidence-based prescriptions for becoming more grateful: Read the full story
Robert A. Emmons, PhD
Professor of Psychology
Department of Psychology (Social-Personality)
University of California, Davis
e-mail: raemmons[at]ucdavis.edu
RESEARCH INTERESTS: gratitude, positive psychology, Read the full story
Lifestyle changes, according to Dr. Dean Ornish, can turn on your good genes and help you live longer and better lives. All this without the high costs of new drugs and treatments that will usually cost you a fortune or expose you to countless side effects. (Ornish’s segment starts at 4:19)
“The average is indicative of a trend, not of a necessity or of a universal truth. Often, it is those outside the norm, the exceptional ones, who point to the truth of what is possible.” (Ben-Shahar, 2007, p. 138)
Ben-Shahar, T. (2007). Happier: Learn the secrets of daily joy and lasting fulfillment. New York: McGraw-Hill.
In a series of round table discussions, a panel of brain science experts are exploring the most profound questions and challenges pertaining to understanding the brain, mind, consciousness/awareness. Each month, since October 2009, Charlie Rose will continue the discussion with a new round of experts. Read the full story
In 2006 U.N. concluded that about 18% of climate change is due to livestock. Three years later (2009), scientists conclude that livestock accounts for a staggering 51% of climate change.
Counting your kind acts throughout the day will make you happier. This is what a team of Japanese and a U.S. researcher found in two studies they conducted.
Overall people who counted their kind acts each day for a week became happier for at least a month later. And the increase in happiness was greater for people who were already happy to begin with. This finding was the result of two studies in 2006 by researchers Keiko Otake, Satoshi Shimai, Junko Tanaka-Matsumi, Kanako Otsui, and Barbara Fredrickson.
“Be the change you want to see in the world.” – Mohandas Gandhi
There is a movie called Zeitgeist, the Movie floating around the internet (freely distributed) and I wanted to biefly comment on some parts of it after multiple people had recommended it to me. Overall I found that the movie is working with a very ignorant portrayal of religion. They want to be taken serious and the claims being made are at best suggestions of some underlying fabric while they do not substantiate their findings with a credible bases. It seems a little like numerology where someone is eventually bound to find someway of connecting the dots together.
A creative and inspirational social experiment idea to make walking the stairs fun again! A group of Swedes set out to re-kindle peoples fun and playfulness as a way to get people walking the stairs instead of taking the escalator. So “obvious” choice was to transform the staircase into a piano. Each step a represents a separate note and when you step onto one you’ll hear the sound. Brilliant! I find little things like these to be hope inspiring.
from The Fun Factory.com “This site is dedicated to the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better. Be it for yourself, for the environment, or for something entirely different, the only thing that matters is that it’s change for the better.”
The VIA Survey of Character Strengths is a scientifically validated measurement designed to identify what your top signature strengths are. It was developed from and is based on the multi-year work of Chris Peterson and Marty Seligman. They have identified, with a team of professionals, 24 Virtues and Character Strengths that are found across cultures.
If you are interested to learn more about how it came about, you can find the culmination of their work in their book called Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification, which is sometimes referred to as the un-dsm manual or more accurately it provides a counter balance to the DSM. Read the full story
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