Mindful December 2016

Is generosity overrated? Compared to others, how generous are you? 52% SAY THEY’RE AVERAGE, while 45% consider themselves more generous than others and just 4% report being less generous than others. We’re not mathematicians here at Mindful, but something about this doesn’t quite add up. What time of year are you most likely to be generous? 88% TRY TO GIVE THROUGHOUT the year, while 8% tend to be more giving around the holidays, and less than 1% are most generous around tax season. Honorable mentions: ● “On my birthday.”● “Not often enough.” Who is it most difficult to be generous with? ● “My mother-in-law.”● “Colleagues who blame children for their problems.”● “My psychologist.”● “People who don’t like me.”● “Telemarketers.”● “The NRA.”● “Myself!!!!” If you won the lottery, how would it…

Editor-in-Chief barry@mindful.org Our must-read story this issue: “A Deep Dive into Mindfulness” explores what happens when you bring together a bunch of teens, take away their phones, and teach them to meditate. On page 62. Giving is hard. According to many evolutionary psychologists, including Dacher Keltner, of the Greater Good Science Center, we are born to be good. Altruism and sharing are part of our makeup. Nonetheless, giving to others is not a cinch. We struggle with it. Just look at all the angst that surrounds our annual “season of giving.” To be truly generous requires us to step beyond the self-protected bubble we create for ourselves. Just think about it. So many decisions we make during the day—what to eat, what to wear, when to do this, that, and…

This is the map that never ends... Ever looked at a map, and the street you’re standing on isn’t there? Time for an update! Until recently, neuroscientists relied on a 100-year-old brain map. Now researchers at Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, have published a much more detailed map of the cerebral cortex, the outermost layer responsible for sense perception, attention, language, tool use, and abstract thinking. The new map emerged from the Human Connectome Project, a five-year effort to map the brains of 1,200 young adults using MRIs. While the previous map showed 50 regions, the new map presents 180, based on physical differences, functional differences (e.g., differing responses to a stimulus), and connectivity to other regions. On the surface, regions look identical, so the brain map “is…

mindful mindless…

MIND A Journey to the Heart of Being Human Daniel J. Siegel, MD • W.W. Norton For 25 years and in over a dozen books, Dan Siegel has explored his deep curiosity with the workings of mind and brain. His early work with psychotherapy patients inspired him to develop the field of interpersonal neurobiology. The hallmark of his approach has been compassion. While his medical training, he says, taught him to always think in terms of the physical, the material, it was only after he rejected that notion that he was able to see our biology in a new, more dynamic light. In his way of looking at things, our body is a collection of systems that intimately connect us to the world, to living things, to each other. Well-being,…

You’ll become obese and possibly addicted to illegal drugs or painkillers, you’ll run out of money during retirement, you’ll become a compulsive gambler and an alcoholic. And all because you just couldn’t resist devouring the marshmallow right now, could you? For decades psychologists have dangled that grim future in front of people who choose immediate gratification rather than the postponement of same. The marshmallow reference is to the classic experiment in which researchers told 4-year-olds they could eat the tempting marshmallow in front of them now or, if they waited a bit, have two. The best postponers turned out to achieve greater academic success, higher emotional intelligence, and other accomplishments than the eat-it-now children. That result has been generalized into psychological dogma: that how much of an “immediacy bias” you…