Our languages are replete with phrases that unite words evoking a sense of cold with concepts of loneliness, social exclusion or misanthropy. When we speak of icy stares, frosty receptions and cold shoulders, we invoke feelings of isolation and unfriendliness. But cold and solitude are more than just metaphorical bedfellows; a new study shows that social exclusion can literally make people feel cold.

Chen-Bo Zhong and Geoffrey Leonardelli from the University of Toronto recruited 65 students and were asked to recall a situation where they either felt included within a group or left out of it. Afterwards, they asked the students to estimate the temperature in the room under the ruse of providing information for the maintenance staff. The estimates varied wildly but volunteers who had social exclusion on their minds gave an average estimate of 21C, while those who remembered fitting in guessed an average of 24C.

So far, so interesting. But Zhong and Leonardelli were not content with simply bringing social memories to the surface; for their next trick, they created real feelings of exclusion. They recruited 52 more students who were led to a computer cubicle and told that they were taking part in an online game with three anonymous players. The object was simply to throw a virtual ball between the group but unbeknownst to the volunteers, their “partners” were computer-controlled programmes. These avatars either intermittently passed the ball to the real player throughout the game, or left them out after a few cursory passes.

Afterwards, the students completed an apparently unrelated marketing survey where they had to rate their preference for five different foods or drinks. Zhong and Leonardelli found that the behaviour of their virtual peers affected their preferences for foods, depending on their temperature! The “unpopular” students who had been left out of the ball-throwing game showed significantly stronger preferences for hot coffee or hot soup than those who had been allowed to play. On the other hand, both groups showed the same degree of preference for control foods such as Coke, apple or crackers.



So being ostracised, or even the memory of being ostracised, drums up both a literal chill and a desire for warmth. It can work the other way round too; invoking the concept of temperature can alter your opinions of another person. In an as yet unpublished study, graduate students Lawrence Williams and John Bargh asked other students to hold a cup of hot or iced coffee, before talking to another researcher. Afterwards, those who held the hot drink rated the stranger as being warmer and friendlier and were more likely to recommend them for a job.

So to speak

To Zhong and Leonardelli, studies like these are a testament to the power of metaphors. When we first learn to wield them in English lessons, we are taught that they are not meant to be taken literally, and yet psychological experiments show that many metaphors reflect fundamental ties between our social lives and our physical sensations.

Zhong and Leonardelli suggest that this close link between temperature and social closeness may be rooted in our earliest interactions with other people. When our parents held us close to them, we felt the warmth of their bodies and when they kept their distance, they deprived us of that warmth. So from an early age, temperature and distance from another person go hand-in-hand.

Indeed, people seem to have a tendency to describe complex abstract concepts using familiar physical experiences. Positive traits like generosity, friendliness or compassion are associated with warmth, while greed and desire are associated with hunger. So it is with cold and solitude. This link between the physical and the abstract isn’t just a one-way street – the two domains are so closely linked that the abstract can also invoke the physical.

I’ve previously written about another example of this, where psychologists demonstrated the bond between physical and moral cleanliness – the so-called “Lady Macbeth effect“. In that study, people who were asked to recall past misdeeds felt the physical need to clean themselves, gravitating towards cleaning-related words and preferring hygiene products over other items. Once again, clean consciences, dirty traitors and washing away your sins are more than just figurative turns of phrase. Zhong and Leonardelli’s results open a door to a large flurry of follow-up questions. Could experiencing physical warmth help to lessen the hurt of social exclusion? Could a cup of warm chicken soup be more than a metaphorical remedy “for the soul”? Could ambient temperate affect the quality of social relationships, and could manipulating one influence the other? Does social cohesion have its own thermostat? Could the depressive experience of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) stem just as much from the chill of winter as it does from a dearth of sunlight? Are fans of Vanilla Ice destined to a life of loneliness and despair?

Weight affects our perceptions of importance

We often use weight as a metaphor for importance, describing something as a ‘weighty issue’ or dismissing an argument as ‘not holding much weight’ but a new study suggests that this is not just a figure of speech.

A research team found that they could alter people’s judgement of importance just by getting them to answer questions using a heavier clipboard.

In a series of short elegant experiments, a research team led by psychologist Nils Jostmann found that people holding a heavy clipboard would, for example, value foreign currencies more highly than those using a lighter clipboard.

Of course, this might be because of the simple association that larger amounts of money weigh more, so they looked at whether more abstract judgements about value could be affected by weight.

Subsequent studies showed that heavier clipboards led to participants placing more importance on the university listening to student opinions, and that participants were more likely to link their opinion of whether Amsterdam was a great city to the competence of the mayor.

A final study found that visitors who were stopped in the street and asked their opinion on a controversial subway were more confident in their opinion and were more likely to agree with strong arguments for the plan.

The researchers link these findings with the growing field of embodied cognition that suggests that much of our experience of the world is actually mediated through how we interact with it.

Much of this research shows that altering the physical condition of the body affects how we perceive and understand, even for concepts that we think are nothing but metaphors.

A cross-cultural look at our spatial understanding of numbers.
by Steven B. Jackson in Culture Conscious

In a recent post, we discussed how the cognitive processing of numbers may be rooted in the human body. It should come as no surprise then, that the way we think about numbers is deeply spatial. This phenomenon has a snappy title: The Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes, or SNARC, effect.

In the seminal 1993 study that uncovered the SNARC effect, cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene and colleagues conducted a series of experiments on number processing. They were interested in the way we discern and distinguish even and odd numbers. In one experiment, subjects were shown numbers between 0 and 9 on a computer screen. They were asked to determine whether each number was odd or even by pressing one of two response keys, one with the left hand and one with the right.

Subjects reacted faster to small numbers like 1 and 2 when they pushed the button with their left hand. Larger numbers like 8 and 9 elicited faster responses when the right hand was doing the clicking. The researchers hypothesized that this difference has to do with spatial associations we have with numbers. We—in America, at least—orient numbers in space, with smaller integers associated with the left side of space, and larger numbers to the right. As a result, processing speed is faster when numbers are located where they “should” be. That’s the SNARC effect in a nutshell.

So where does the SNARC effect come from? Is it hardwired in all humans? Are numbers inherently spatial? Most experts agree that this is not the case.

A recent study suggests that our cognitive architecture for processing numbers is influenced by language. In 2009, Israeli researcher Samuel Shaki studied the SNARC effect across language groups. Using methodology similar to Dehaene’s 1993 study, Shaki tested the SNARC effect in subjects from three different countries. One group of subjects was Canadian, who read English words and Arabic numbers from left to right. Another group was Palestinian, who read Arabic words right to left, as well as the numbers of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system. The third group was composed of Israelis, who read Hebrew from right to left, but Arabic numbers from left to right.

Canadians showed a typical SNARC effect, with fast left side responses for smaller integers. Palestinians had a reversed SNARC effect, associating smaller numbers with the right side of space and larger numbers with the left side. Israelis, with their conflicting reading directions for letters and numbers, showed the weakest SNARC effect. These results strongly suggest that spatial-numerical associations are influenced by culturally specific reading and writing systems for both letters and numbers.

The SNARC effect may be culturally acquired, but it is also highly flexible. Just one year before Shaki’s cross-cultural study was published, Scottish research Martin Fischer examined the malleability of the SNARC effect. Experimenters asked participants to read cookbook recipes on a computer screen. In one group, the recipes were SNARC-congruent, with smaller numbers on the left side of the line of text and larger numbers on the right. For example: “Take 2 potatoes and fry them for 9 minutes.” In the SNARC-incongruent group, the recipe would instead read, “Take 9 potatoes and fry them for 2 minutes,” with the larger number oriented on the left side of the screen and the smaller number on the right.

After about 40 minutes of exposure to the SNARC-incongruent recipes, subjects showed a significantly diluted SNARC effect. This suggests that our spatial-numerical associations are not fixed, but are sensitive to experiences in the here and now.

To sum up: We tend to conceptualize numbers spatially. Experiments across language groups have shown that the spatial associations we make with numbers are not innate, but appear to be shaped by language. On top of that, these associations can also be influenced by stimuli in the present.

We still have a lot to learn about the SNARC effect. A particularly interesting question is how the effect manifests itself (or doesn’t) in speakers and writers of vertically written languages like Japanese and Chinese. Another question for further research is how fluency in multiple languages may moderate the potency and direction of the SNARC effect. With researchers exploring these and other questions, we may one day have a fuller understanding of our curiously spatial approach to numbers.

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Sources:

Fischer M.H., Mills R.A., & Shaki S. (2010). How to cook a SNARC: number placement in text rapidly changes spatial-numerical associations. Brain and Cognition, 72, 333-336

Shaki S., Fischer M. H., & Petrusic W. M. (2009). Reading habits for both words and numbers contribute to the SNARC effect. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 16, 328–331.

Dehaene, S., Bossini, S., & Giraux, P. (1993). The mental representation of parity and numerical magnitude. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 122, 371–396.

What's the single most valuable lesson you've learned in your professional life?

The fundamental difference between smart people and wise people. Smart people reach answers fast without much consideration of alternatives, and who have amazing ability to justify anything, using their big brains.  Wise people who know they are often wrong, and so can admit and learn from their mistakes, take more time to make decisions when it is not an emergency, and generally come to better solutions if they are not working. Think of the difference between oh so smart Henry Kissinger and Cho En Lai who ran rings around him when Nixon went to China for example, or in business between the ever self justifying Alan Greenspan and Alan Mullaly who actually turned round Boeing and Ford. It is better to be wise than smart. Of course the wise people also have learned the sort of lessons Edmond Lau has posted, who sounds wise and I would only add admit and learn from mistakes as a specific tool to combine with his list.

Edmond Lau, Quora Engineer

 

Focus on high-leverage activities.  Leverage is defined as the amount of output or impact produced per unit of time spent.

This lesson applies regardless of whether you love to spend many waking hours working or whether you're a subscriber of Tim Ferris's 4-Hour Work Week philosophy [1]. At some point, you'll realize that there's more work to be done than you have time available, and you'll need to prioritize what to get done. Leverage should be the central, guiding metric that helps you determine where to focus your time.

Another rule of thumb for thinking about leverage is to consider the commonly mentioned Pareto principle [2] or the 80-20 rule -- the idea that 80% of the contributions or impact come from 20% of the effort.  That 20% of work consists of the highest leverage activities.  The 4-Hour Work Week philosophy requires taking this to the extreme -- assuming a normal 40-hour work week, what's the 10% of effort (4 hours) that you can do to achieve most of the gains?

By definition, your leverage, and hence productivity, can be increased in three ways [3]:

• By reducing the time it takes to complete a certain activity.
• By increasing the impact of a particular activity.
• By shifting to higher leverage activities.

Some examples of professional activities that I engage in to increase leverage include:

• Mentoring new hires.  Mentoring (and really managing) is an extremely high-leverage activity.  Over the course of a year, an employee will spend somewhere between 1880 to 2820 hours working (assuming 47 work-weeks and somewhere between 40-60 hours per week working).  Spending 1 hour every day for a month (20 hours) mentoring or training a new hire may seem like a lot of time, but it represents only about 1% of the total time the new hire will spend working his/her first year and yet can have a significant influence over the productivity and effectiveness on the other 99% of those hours.
  
• Building tools and automating repetitive work.  Coming from a software engineering background, one high-leverage activity that I tend to do is to build tools that reduce manual, repetitive work. I'm a little biased, but I'm a firm believer that everyone would benefit knowing a little bit about coding (see Computer Programming: Should most young people learn to code?), primarily because there are many fields not traditionally associated with computer science where a mindset of automation would have huge efficiency gains.  Don't do what a machine can do for you.
  
• Invest in learning and in continuously improving.  This falls in the bucket of "important and not urgent" tasks that Steven Covey describes in his time management matrix in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People [4, 5].  Learning never seems like an urgent task, and it's easy -- if you don't budget time for it -- to allow unimportant interruptions to dictate your schedule.  However, learning is what lets you improve your work productivity and increase the opportunities available, so it's a big high-leverage activity.
  
• Actively prioritizing tasks based on estimated impact.  I'm currently working on user growth at Quora, and there are probably hundreds of things that I could consider working on at any given time that might move our metrics up and to the right. Deciding what I should work on next that would be the highest impact requires regularly reviewing (I try to do this at least weekly) what needs to get done and having the data to guide the decision-making.
  
• Holding tech talks and writing guides to bring new hires on board.  At Quora, we've recently started having each new hire go through a series of tech talks and also assembled a set of codelabs.  Inspired by Google's training regimen, codelabs are documents that explain core software abstractions and concepts that we use, discuss the rationale for why we designed and used them, walk through the relevant code in the codebase, and provide a set of exercises to solidify understanding.  These took many people on the team many hours to write, but they provide a scalable and reusable resource that allow new hires to start on a consistent foundation and cut down the amount of time that each individual mentor needs to spend teaching the same concepts.
  
• Pushing back on meetings without an agenda or meetings that you don't really need to be a part of.  Poorly run meetings are negative leverage because they waste people's time.  Avoid those.  A corollary to this is defining and setting agendas for meetings that you hold so that you don't waste other people's time.
  
• Spending time on interviews and improving interview processes.  Conducting interviews is a huge amount of work.  Interviews interrupt your workday, and the hours spent talking with candidates, writing up feedback, and debriefing all add up to considerable amounts.  However, making sure that we're hiring the right people, that we have a good process in place,  and that people we hire are people that I would be excited to work with is essential to building a strong team and a strong product.  There have been many weeks where I've interviewed 4 candidates per week, and I think my personal record during the height of the recruiting season was doing 20 interviews in 20 consecutive workdays.
  
• Using open-source tools when they meet your needs.  There's no sense in re-inventing the wheel if someone else has already built what you need.

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[1] http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Par...
[3] http://www.amazon.com/High-Outpu...
[4] https://www.stephencovey.com/7ha...
[5] Tips & Hacks for Everyday Life: What are the top three effectiveness strategies you use?

What The Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast

BY Laura Vanderkam

Mornings are a great time for getting things done. You’re less likely to be interrupted than you are later in the day. Your supply of willpower is fresh after a good night’s sleep. That makes it possible to turn personal priorities like exercise or strategic thinking into reality.

But if you’ve got big goals--and a chaotic a.m. schedule--how can you make over your mornings to make these goals happen?

Because I write about time management frequently, I’ve gotten to see hundreds of calendars and schedules over the years. From studying people’s morning habits, I’ve learned that getting the most out of this time is a five-part process. Follow these steps, though, and you’re on your way to building morning habits that stick.

1. Track Your Time

Part of spending your time better is knowing how you’re spending it now. If you’ve ever tried to lose weight, you know that nutritionists tell you to keep a food journal because it keeps you from eating mindlessly. It’s the same with time. Write down what you’re doing as often as you can. Use my spreadsheet, a Word document, or a pad and pen.

While measuring your mornings, try tracking your whole week. The reason? The solution to morning dilemmas often lies at other times of the day. You may be too tired because you’re staying up late. But if you look at how you’re spending your nights, you’ll notice that you’re not doing anything urgent. The Daily Show can be recorded and watched earlier--possibly while you’re on the treadmill at 6:30 a.m.

As for the mornings themselves, you can be organized but still not be spending them well. Question your assumptions. You may believe that “a man who wants to keep his job gets into the office before his boss” because that’s what your father did, but your boss may be disappointed that he doesn’t get the place to himself for an hour first! If you decide that something is a top priority, do it, but understand that we have to do few things in life.

2. Picture the Perfect Morning

After you know how you’re spending your time, ask yourself what a great morning would look like. For me, it would start with a run, followed by a hearty family breakfast. After getting people out the door, I’d focus on long-term projects like my books. Here are some other ideas for morning enrichment:

For personal growth:
Read through a religious text: Sacred texts can teach us about human nature and history, even if they’re not from a religion you subscribe to. If they are, pray or meditate and get to know your beliefs in a deeper way.
Train for something big: Aiming to complete a half-marathon, a triathlon, or a long bike ride will keep you inspired as you take your fitness to the next level.
Do art projects with your kids:. Mornings don’t have to be a death march out the door. Enjoy your time with your little ones at a time of day when you all have more patience.

For professional growth:
Strategize: In an age of constant connectivity, people complain of having no time to think. Use your mornings to picture what you want your career and organization to look like in the future.
Read articles in professional journals: Benefit from other people’s research and strategic thinking, and gain new insights into your field.
Take an online class: If a job or career change is in your future, a self-paced class can keep your skills sharp.

3. Think Through the Logistics

How could this vision mesh with the life you have? Don’t assume you have to add it on top of the hours you already spend getting ready or that you’ll have to get to work earlier. If you fill the morning hours with important activities you’ll crowd out things that are more time intensive than they need to be. Map out a morning schedule. What time would you have to get up and what time do you need to go to bed to get enough sleep? As for the mornings themselves, what would make your ritual easier? Do you need to set your easel next to your bed? Can you find a more cheerful alarm clock or one you can’t turn off so easily?

It’s easy to believe our own excuses, particularly if they’re good ones. Come up with a plan and assemble what you need, but whatever you do, don’t label this vision as impossible

4. Build the Habit

This is the most important step. Turning a desire into a ritual requires willpower. Use these fives steps to optimize your routine:
Start slowly: Go to bed and wake up fifteen minutes earlier for a few days until this new schedule seems doable.
Monitor your energy: Building a new habit takes effort, so take care of yourself while you’re trying. Eat right, eat enough, and surround yourself with supportive people who want to see you succeed.
Choose one new habit at a time to introduce: If you want to run, pray, and write in a journal, choose one of these and make it a habit before adding another.
Chart your progress: Habits take weeks to establish, so keep track of how you’re doing for at least thirty days. Once skipping a session feels like you forgot something--like forgetting to brush your teeth--you can take your ritual up a notch.
Feel free to use bribery: Eventually habits produce their own motivation, but until then, external motivations like promising yourself concert tickets can keep you moving forward. And keep in mind that your morning rituals shouldn’t be of the self-flagellation variety. Choose things you enjoy: your before-breakfast ritual has the potential to become your favorite part of the day.

5. Tune Up as Necessary

Life changes. Sometimes we have to regroup, but the goal is to replace any rituals that no longer work with new ones that make you feel like every day is full of possibility.

That is ultimately the amazing thing about mornings--they always feel like a new chance to do things right. A win scored then creates a cascade of success. The hopeful hours before most people eat breakfast are too precious to be blown on semiconscious activities. You can do a lot with those hours. Whenever I’m tempted to say I don’t have time for something, I remind myself that if I wanted to get up early, I could. These hours are available to all of us if we choose to use them.

So how would you like to use your mornings? This important question requires careful thinking. But once you decide, small rituals can accomplish great things. When you make over your mornings, you can make over your life. That is what the most successful people know.

How to Develop 5 Critical Thinking Types

Great leaders think strategically.

They can understand and appreciate the current state as well as see possibilities. When dealing with today’s issues, they operate from a broad, long-term perspective rather than focusing only on short-term implications. And they can gather information and make decisions in a timely manner.

Most of all, strategic leaders know how to strike a balance between visualizing what might or could be and an effective day-to-day approach to implementation. They can look into the future to see where the company needs to go and what it will look like once they get there. And they can do this while making sure the right things get done on a daily basis.

This type of strategic leadership requires five different types of thinking. Knowing when and how much to utilize each one is the hallmark of great leaders.

1. Critical thinking is the mental process of objectively analyzing a situation by gathering information from all possible sources, and then evaluating both the tangible and intangible aspects, as well as the implications of any course of action.
2. Implementation thinking is the ability to organize ideas and plans in a way that they will be effectively carried out.
3. Conceptual thinking consists of the ability to find connections or patterns between abstract ideas and then piece them together to form a complete picture.
4. Innovative thinking involves generating new ideas or new ways of approaching things to create possibilities and opportunities.
5. Intuitive thinking is the ability to take what you may sense or perceive to be true and, without knowledge or evidence, appropriately factor it in to the final decision.

Until recently, most leaders could get by with critical and implementation thinking. But in today’s hyper-fast world, conceptual, innovative and intuitive thinking have becoming increasingly important, especially in industries where frenetic change represents the rule rather than the exception.

Business leaders still need to gather and analyze data, make decisions, and implement them well. But now they have to take in vast amounts of data from a more diverse array of sources. They have to make decisions much more quickly. And they have to do it knowing that everything could change overnight.

In such an environment, the ability to ponder possibilities, see patterns and connections that others don’t see, and look at the same data in new and different ways represents a formidable competitive advantage.

Some leaders seem to be born with these intuitive types of thinking skills. But since most of us are not so naturally gifted, here are some suggestions for developing these essential leadership skills.

• Take time to look around. Browse business websites and read related publications to learn how other organizations have implemented various strategies in order to increase their competitive advantage.
• Be willing to change directions and/or pursue new goals when strategic opportunities arise. Think about what is keeping you on the same path and force yourself to ponder whether or not you should shift plans. Consider worst-case scenarios.
• When problems arise, don’t settle for a quick fix. Instead, carefully look at the problem and take the time to analyze all possible solutions. Create a checklist for yourself to trigger thoughts on long-term consequences and possibilities.
• Help others in the organization feel that they are part of the overall mission and strategies by discussing it with them frequently and involving them as much as possible.
• Pause and view your situation from another perspective – that of an employee, customer, supplier, etc.
• Research and analyze your company’s major competitors. Create a detailed profile of each one and share it with your team. Constantly look for first-hand data rather than relying on anecdotal information.
• Engage in “what-if” thinking. For example, “If we do this, how will our competitors respond? What will our customers think? What impact will this have on our suppliers and distributors? What if there is something we have not considered?”
• Expand your data sources to include areas totally outside your business or industry. Analyze other industries to see what they’re doing well and how that could be adapted to your business.

Most of all, get in the habit of stimulating your mind by not thinking about your business. From time to time, go outside your office and take a walk. Turn off your processing and just soak in the sights, sounds, and scents of the environment. Let your mind wander, and allow yourself the luxury of daydreaming. You’ll be amazed at what you can come up with simply by shifting out of the critical/implementation thinking modes from time to time.

The human brain is a powerful leadership tool. It works even better when you use all five thinking types!

No Religion? 7 Types of Non-Believers

Religious labels help shore up identity. So what are some of the things non-believers can call themselves?

Catholic, Born-Again, Reformed, Jew, Muslim, Shiite, Sunni, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist . . . . Religions give people labels. The downside can be tribalism, an assumption that insiders are better than outsiders, that they merit more compassion, integrity and generosity or even that violence toward “infidels” is acceptable. But the upside is that religious or spiritual labels offer a way of defining who we are. They remind adherents that our moral sense and quest for meaning are core parts of what it means to be human. They make it easier to convey a subset of our deepest values to other people, and even to ourselves.

For those who have lost their religion or never had one, finding a label can feel important. It can be part of a healing process or, alternately, a way of declaring resistance to a dominant and oppressive paradigm. Finding the right combination of words can be a challenge though. For a label to fit it needs to resonate personally and also communicate what you want to say to the world. Words have definitions, connotations and history, and how people respond to your label will be affected by all three. What does it mean? What emotions does it evoke? Who are you identifying as your intellectual and spiritual forebears and your community? The differences may be subtle but they are important.

If, one way or another, you’ve left religion behind, and if you’ve been unsure what to call yourself, you might try on one of these:

1. Atheist. The term atheist can be defined literally as lacking a humanoid god concept, but historically it means one of two things. Positive atheism asserts that a personal supreme being does not exist. Negative atheism simply asserts a lack of belief in such a deity. It is possible be a positive atheist about the Christian God, for example, while maintaining a stance of negative atheism or even uncertainty on the question of a more abstract deity like a “prime mover.” In the United States, it is important to know that atheist may be the most reviled label for a godless person. Devout believers use it as a slur and many assume an atheist has no moral core. Until recently calling oneself an atheist was an act of defiance. That appears to be changing. With the rise of the “New Atheists” and the recent atheist visibility movement, the term is losing its edge.

2. Anti-theist. When atheist consistently evoked images of Madeline Murray O’Hare, hostility toward religion was assumed. Now that it may evoke a white-haired grandmother at the Unitarian church or the gay kid on Glee, some people want a term that more clearly conveys their opposition to the whole religious enterprise. The term anti-theist says, “I think religion is harmful.” It also implies some form of activism that goes beyond merely advocating church-state separation or science education. Anti-theism challenges the legitimacy of faith as a moral authority or way of knowing. Anti-theists often work to expose harms caused in the name of God like stonings, gay bating, religious child maltreatment, genital mutilation, unwanted childbearing or black-collar crime. The New Atheist writers including Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins might better be described as anti-theists.

3. Agnostic. Some atheists think of agnostic as a weenie term, because it gets used by people who lack a god-concept but don’t want to offend family members or colleagues. Agnostic doesn’t convey the same sense of confrontation or defiance that atheist can, and so it gets used as a bridge. But in reality, the term agnostic represents a range of intellectual positions that have important substance in their own right and can be independent of atheism. Strong agnosticism views God’s existence as unknowable, permanently and to all people. Weak agnosticism can mean simply “I don’t know if there is a God,” or “We collectively don’t know if there is a God but we might find out in the future.” Alternately, the term agnosticism can be used to describe an approach to knowledge, somewhat like skepticism (which comes next in this list). Philosopher Thomas Huxley illustrates this position:

Agnosticism is not a creed but a method, the essence of which lies in the vigorous application of a single principle... Positively the principle may be expressed as ‘in matters of intellect, do not pretend conclusions are certain that are not demonstrated or demonstrable.’

These three definitions of agnosticism, though different, all focus on what we do or can know, rather than on whether God exists. This means it is possible to be both atheist and agnostic. Author Phillip Pullman has described himself as both.

The question of what term to use is a difficult one, in strict terms I suppose I'm an agnostic because of course the circle of the things I do know is vastly smaller than the things I don't know about out there in the darkness somewhere maybe there is a God. But among all the things I do know in this world I see no evidence of a God whatsoever and everybody who claims to know there is a God seems to use that as an excuse for exercising power over other people, and historically as we know from looking at the history in Europe alone that's involved persecution, massacre, slaughter on an industrial scale, it's a shocking prospect.

4. Skeptic. Traditionally, skeptic has been used to describe a person who doubts received religious dogmas. However, while agnostic focuses on God questions in particular, the term skeptic expresses a broader life approach. Someone who calls him- or herself a skeptic has put critical thinking at the heart of the matter. Well known skeptics, like Michael Shermer, Penn and Teller, or James Randi devote a majority of their effort to debunking pseudoscience, alternative medicine, astrology and so forth. They broadly challenge the human tendency to believe things on insufficient evidence. Australian comic Tim Minchen is an outspoken atheist who earns a living in part by poking fun at religion. But his most beloved and hilarious beat poem, Storm, smacks down homeopathy and hippy woo.

5. Freethinker. Free-thinker is a term that dates to the end of the 17th Century, when it was first used in England to describe those who opposed the Church and literal belief in the Bible. Freethought is an intellectual stance that says that opinions should be based on logic and evidence rather than authorities and traditions. Well known philosophers including John Locke and Voltaire were called freethinkers in their own time, and a magazine, The Freethinker, has been published in Britain continuously from 1881 to the present. The term has gotten popular recently in part because it is affirmative. Unlike atheism, which defines itself in contrast to religion, freethought identifies with a proactive process for deciding what is real and important.

6. Humanist. While terms like atheist or anti-theist focus on a lack of god-belief and agnostic, skeptic and freethinker all focus on ways of knowing—humanist centers in on a set of ethical values. Humanism seeks to promote broad wellbeing by advancing compassion, equality, self-determination, and other values that allow individuals to flourish and to live in community with each other. These values drive not from revelation, but from human experience. As can be seen in two manifestos published in 1933 and 1973 respectively, humanist leaders don’t shy away from concepts like joy and inner peace that have spiritual connotations. In fact, some think that religion itself should be reclaimed by those who have moved beyond supernaturalism but recognize the benefits of spiritual community and ritual. Harvard Chaplain Greg Epstein dreams of incubating a thriving network of secular congregations.

7. Pantheist. As self-described humanists seek to reclaim the ethical and communitarian aspects of religion, pantheistscenter in on the spiritual heart of faith--the experience of humility, wonder, and transcendence. They see human beings as one small part of a vast natural order, with the Cosmos itself made conscious in us. Pantheists reject the idea of a person- god, but believe that the holy is made manifest in all that exists. Consequently, they often have a strong commitment to protecting the sacred web of life in which and from which we have our existence. The writings of Carl Sagan reflect this sentiment and often are quoted by pantheists, for example in a “Symphony of Science” video series which mixes evocative natural world images, atonal music, and the voices of leading scientists, and has received 30 million views.

If none of these fit . . . . Keep looking. Many of the American founding fathers were deists who didn’t believe in miracles or special revelation through sacred texts but thought that the natural world itself revealed a designer who could be discovered through reason and inquiry. Naturalists assume a philosophical position that the laws operating within the natural realm are the only laws governing the universe and no supernatural realm lies beyond. Secularists argue that moral standards and laws should be based on whether they do good or harm in this world and that religion should be kept out of government. Pastafarians playfully claim to worship the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and their religion is a good-humored spoof on Abrahamic beliefs and rituals.

Recently there has been steep uptick in people who identify as godless and a parallel uptick in atheist and humanist visibility efforts. Many godless people are newly out of religion (or newly out of the closet). Despite the best efforts of, say, the Humanist Community Project or Foundation Beyond Belief, stable communities organized around shared secular values and spiritual practices have yet to emerge. That means our labels are largely individual and sometimes experimental. We may try one on for size, live with it for a while, then try on something else.

As a movement, sexual and gender minorities have faced a similar challenge. LGB started replacing the term “gay community” in the 1980s. It then became LGBT, and then LGBTQ (to acknowledge those who were questioning) or LGBTI (to include intersex people). In India, an H got added to the end for the Hijra subculture. For urban teens, the catch-all termqueer has now replaced the cumbersome acronym. Queer embraces the idea that sexual and gender identity is biologically and psychologically multifaceted. It includes everyone who doesn’t think of themselves as straight. Secular rights activists may eventually evolve a similar catch all, but in the meantime, organizations that want to be inclusive end up with long lists on their ‘About’ pages: atheist, agnostic, humanist, freethinker, pantheist, skeptic and more. So, join the experiment that picking one that fits and wearing it for a while. Or make up your own. I often call myself a “spiritual nontheist.” It’s a mouthful, but it forces people to ask, what is that? and then, rather than having them make assumptions I get to tell them where I’m at: I don’t have any kind of humanoid god concept, and I think that issues of morality and meaning are at the very heart of what it means to be human. Maybe next year I’ll find something that fits even better.

15 Scientific Facts About Creativity

Although creativity keeps human society flourishing, science honestly offers few answers to how the intricate, infinitely complex concept actually works. No matter how much research pours into measuring and grasping the essential phenomenon, it seems as if more questions pop up than receive tangible answers. Theories and findings sometimes conflict with one another as well, meaning every "fact" presented here might very well end up discarded in due time. But that’s par for the course when exploring what seems almost entirely inexplicable.

Stress kills creativity

Just like it kills mental health, the heart, and pretty much everything else. Stress negatively impacts creative expression, particularly when it involves rigid timeframes and criteria. According to psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein, no gene or any other factor predisposes some individuals toward creativity and others not (this perspective is, obviously, disputed). External factors such as stress play a much heavier role in determining innovation than anything intrinsic.

Those considered geniuses describe their creative processes as trancelike

Dr. Nancy Andreasen, who wrote The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius, may not be able to scientifically explain how creativity and genius emerge, but she does know how they inspire and impact the great thinkers. All people experience moments of "ordinary creativity," which permeates daily tasks. But the artist, composers, scientists, writers, and others qualifying as geniuses typically talk of oneiric "flashes" setting off their most notable, iconic works.

A connection between dopamine production and creativity might exist

Because dopamine increases along with positive reinforcement and other rewards, some neurobiologists (like Dr. David Sweatt) believe it easily correlates with creativity, too. Either receiving money or the simple satisfaction of a job well done might stimulate levels of innovation, and dopamine in kind. Such a link still exists as a theory, albeit one that does go a long way in explaining the sometimes inexplicable.

Perception is the first step to nurturing the creative spark

All creative pursuits start when the thinker perceives an external stimulus and processes it in his and/or her mind. More complex than merely seeing, the "engines of our ingenuity" hook up imagery with imagination. Personal differences in this inevitable linkage lead to creative output and adroitly explain why some people end up with the particular results they do and keep society pushing forward.

Creativity might correlate with brain chemistry and structure

Theories regarding creativity’s true origins abound, and some think one’s aptitude may be determined by his or her brain chemistry and structure. University of New Mexico’s Rex Jung believes that if you have less of certain neurological phenomena, you’re better off when it comes to creative pursuits. Specific chemicals froth about in smaller dosages, while white matter sits weaker and the frontal lobe’s cortical regions are thinner. Interestingly enough, brains testing higher on intelligence tests feature the exact opposite composition. Generally speaking, of course.

Creative thinkers have slower nerves

During creative moments, the left frontal cortex experiences comparatively more sluggish activity, which also correlates with the aforementioned decreased white matter and connecting axons. Unlike intelligence, creativity tends to thrive when thinking slows down, although "flashes" of inspiration and insight occur with the speed of flashes. Emotions and some cognitive processes happen in this particular region as well, which scientists such as Dr. Jung believe encourage abstract and novelty thought processes.

"Psychological distance" facilitates creativity

When hitting a creative snag, the best thing thinkers can do for themselves is step away and try to look at everything from a completely different point of view. Studies have shown that the most consistently creative individuals display a willingness to approach their challenges from a wide variety of angles beyond their initial inklings. Putting some space between original perspectives and newer ones encourages abstract thinking, a crucial component in the inventive process.

Early research into creativity divided it up into three separate subsections

Mel Rhodes’ inquiries into the creative mind — which required him to research around 50 takes on the subject — eventually led him to break everything down into the person, process, and environment components. The person element, as you can probably guess, involves one’s unique set of characteristics needed to think and perceive things in an innovative, abstract fashion. Actually understanding and formulating ideas and results is known as process, and environment means the internal and external milieu in which the creative individual works.

Aerobic exercise increases one’s creative potential

When brain fog starts rolling in, try a moderate amount of aerobic exercise to try and clear it up. Rhode Island College scientists noted that the two hours after engaging in such rigorous physical activity proved some of the most mentally fertile in a 2005 study. They used the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking to measure how well the participating thinkers performed with and without exercise.

Creativity might plummet if it becomes a means to a rewarding end

Although from 1987, this study’s findings showcase just how largely unknowable creativity’s true face is these days, as it conflicts with some more contemporary theories despite making just as much sense. Tests conducted on Brandeis University creative writing students noted a dive in their motivation and thoughts regarding their work when receiving rewards for their efforts. They approached poetry with a lessened sense of intrinsic interest, a finding which ended up applying to situations beyond the creative.

Improvisation stimulates the brain’s language centers

fMRIs and improvised jazz form the crux of surgeon Charles Limb’s pioneering maps of the creative process. His TEDxMidAtlantic lecture discussed his fascinating findings regarding the physiology behind musical improvisation, specifically, how it makes the Broca’s Area light up like the Fourth of July. Brain scientists think this part is responsible for language development and cognition, implying that one of the body’s most essential organs might recognize music (and maybe even other expressive pursuits) as akin to speech.

Bilingualism and multilingualism might improve one’s creative skills

Researchers "may not have had [their] EUREKA moment" when it comes to proving a link between bi- and multilingualism, but compelling evidence certainly exists. Individuals capable of speaking more than one language generally display more competent multitasking skills and improved cognition, both usually labeled key ingredients to creative thinking. Most telling, however, is that they seem better able to analyze situations and stimuli from multiple angles, which nearly everyone attempting to define creativity considers essential.

Creative people are more likely to be dishonest

That doesn’t mean all creative folks ought not be trusted, nor that their opposites are always the most honest sorts, of course. But individuals capable of more novel and abstract thoughts — and possessing more flexible moral fibers — "enjoy" a higher risk of less-than-trustworthy behaviors. Multiple studies show that the ability to concoct more solid, viable stories and view scenarios and stimuli from many angles dull the chances of getting caught.

High IQ and creativity might correlate with one another

Harvard, like many other institutions of higher learning, hopes to try and unlock creativity’s beautiful and bizarre secrets. Dr. Shelley Carson, notable for developing a new standard to measure the mysterious phenomenon, wants to try and find a definitive relationship between intelligence and creative thinking. Some of her earlier studies note that both increase together at the 120, 130, and 150 IQ levels, but more research is needed to prove any sort of solid correlation.

So yeah. Creativity and mental illness might very well coincide

Painting all creative types as insane — particularly the influential and genius — always has been and probably always will be a rather tired cliché, albeit a cliché that might actually hold some cachet. Their brains have been proven to open up more to external sources and possess greater memory capacity than others, but such a perk does come burdened with some unfortunate side effects. Overstimulation might very well result, which can pique (or worsen) anxiety and depressive disorders.

How to Procrastinate and Still Get Things Done

I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, a grant proposal to review, drafts of dissertations to read.

I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time.

All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, such as gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they find the time. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because accomplishing these tasks is a way of not doing something more important.

If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him to do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely, and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

To make structured procrastination work for you, begin by establishing a hierarchy of the tasks you have to do, in order of importance from the most urgent to the least important. Even though the most-important tasks are on top, you have worthwhile tasks to perform lower on the list. Doing those tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher on the list. With this sort of appropriate task structure, you can become a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.

The most perfect situation for structured procrastination that I have encountered occurred when my wife and I served as resident fellows in Soto House, a Stanford University dormitory. In the evening, faced with papers to grade, lectures to prepare, and committee work to do, I would leave our cottage next to the dorm and go over to the lounge and play Ping-Pong with the residents or talk things over with them in their rooms -- or even just sit in the lounge and read the paper. I got a reputation for being a terrific resident fellow, one of the rare profs on campus who spent time with undergraduates and got to know them. What a setup: Play Ping-Pong as a way of not doing more important things, and get a reputation as Mr. Chips.

Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack. They try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this approach ignores the basic nature of the procrastinator and destroys his most important source of motivation. The few tasks on his list will be, by definition, the most important. And the only way to avoid doing them will be to do nothing. This is the way to become a couch potato, not an effective human being.

At this point you may be asking, "How about the important tasks at the top of the list?" Admittedly, they pose a potential problem.

The second step in the art of structured procrastination is to pick the right sorts of projects for the top of the list. The ideal projects have two characteristics -- they seem to have clear deadlines (but really don't), and they seem awfully important (but really aren't). Luckily, life abounds with such tasks. At universities, the vast majority of tasks fall into those two categories, and I'm sure the same is true for most other institutions.

Take, for example, the item at the top of my list right now -- finishing an essay for a volume on the philosophy of language. It was supposed to be done 11 months ago. I have accomplished an enormous number of important things as a way of not working on it. A couple of months ago, nagged by guilt, I wrote a letter to the editor saying how sorry I was to be so late and expressing my good intentions to get to work. Writing the letter was, of course, a way of not working on the article. It turned out that I really wasn't much further behind schedule than anyone else. And how important is this article, anyway? Not so important that at some point something that I view as more important won't come along. Then I'll get to work on it.

Let me describe how I handled a familiar situation last summer. The book-order forms for a class scheduled for fall were overdue by early June. By July, it was easy to consider this an important task with a pressing deadline. (For procrastinators, deadlines start to press a week or two after they pass.) I got almost daily reminders from the department secretary; students sometimes asked me what we would be reading; and the unfilled order form sat right in the middle of my desk for weeks. This task was near the top of my list; it bothered me -- and motivated me to do other useful, but superficially less important, things. In fact, I knew that the bookstore was already plenty busy with forms filed by non-procrastinators. I knew that I could submit mine in midsummer and things would be fine. I just needed to order popular books from efficient publishers. I accepted another, apparently more important, task in early August, and my psyche finally felt comfortable about filling out the order form as a way of not doing this new task.

At this point, the observant reader may feel that structured procrastination requires a certain amount of self-deception, since one is, in effect, constantly perpetrating a pyramid scheme on oneself. Exactly. One needs to be able to recognize and commit oneself to tasks with inflated importance and unreal deadlines, while making oneself feel that they are important and urgent. This clears the way to accomplish several apparently less urgent, but eminently achievable, tasks. And virtually all procrastinators also have excellent skills at self-deception -- so what could be more noble than using one character flaw to offset the effects of another?