The Happy-When Hoax

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It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. —Mark Twain

Back in 1994, the real beginnings of Supernoetics™, I came up with the concept of hoaxes; those “Everybody knows that’s true…” tidbits, which it turns out are not true at all. In fact the real truth is often 180-degrees in the other direction (So I invented my 180-degree rule at the same time!)

I’m going to walk you through one of the biggest killer hoaxes of all time. I call it the Happy-When Hoax. “I’ll be happy when… ,” I have achieved some cherished goal or other: getting rich, getting laid, becoming famous, discovering the comet that gets named after me, recover my health, whatever.

There is more than one problem with this position: Continue reading →

Blue Light Enhances Brain Performance

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A single 30 min. exposure to blue-wavelength light can increase subsequent activation in brain regions critical for successful working memory performance and improve response times, a new study suggests.

Previous studies have shown that exposure to blue light, which is similar to the type of light you get on a bright sunny day, leads to increases in alertness and better performance on reaction time tasks, while being exposed.

“Our study adds to this literature by showing that exposure to 30 minutes of blue light in comparison to 30 minutes of amber light led to subsequently better performance on a cognitive task 40 minutes after the blue-light exposure period had ended,” Dr Alkozei, PhD, postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Arizona in Tucson, told MedScape News.

The findings were presented at SLEEP 2016: the 30th Anniversary Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies. Continue reading →

Who Is Living The Perfect Life?

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Nobody, I’m sure, is living a perfect life. I’m not. But I’m working all the time on improving my life a lot and I think that’s something we should all be doing. It’s NEVER too late to improve things!

I read a marvelous story of a guy who graduated Oxford University at the age of 91! Bertie Gladwin left school aged 14 with no interest in academia. He’d been put in the duffers class by teachers and promptly lost interest in schooling (what does that tell you about teachers, eh?)

Today he has a total of three degrees and is even considering doing a PhD (what does that tell you about Bertie Gladwin?) I would argue he actually had far more ability than any of his teachers!

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2147643/Bertie-Gladwin-Britains-oldest-student-graduates-degree-military-intelligence-aged-91.html]

If you didn’t know it already, here are some remarkable people who were abject school failures: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Sir Winston Churchill. None of them graduated college and yet each left a considerable mark on the world.

What that tells me is that a typical school education—teachers—actually destroy ability, instead of nurturing it.

But I’m really talking about living to the max, rather than worldly success. Most of us, if shown a path to critical acclaim or power, would choose something closer to our heart anyway. It’s simply that, with those individuals in particular, what they were really passionate about was computers, records (Virgin Records) and the British Empire. Continue reading →

Separating Noise From Knowledge and Wisdom

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A picture is worth a thousands words, they say. Take a look at this graphic: it almost doesn’t need any comment.

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It makes the point that wisdom floats on top of understanding and understanding is built on knowledge.

It also clearly separates information and data. It’s been a saying of mine for decades that information implies consciousness. Information doesn’t mean anything much unless there is awareness present.

Shorn of interpretation and meaning, information is just data. A ton of data points mean little or nothing, unless there is intelligence viewing it, which can spot the patterns.

Below that is just noise.

It may be more important to understand noise than to understand wisdom (in a way). Noise appears random, arbitrary, unimportant, is not aligned and therefore not useful. It’s the opposite of coherence. Noise is a sort of psychic turbulence. It is best avoided. Continue reading →

Don’t Let The Future Kill The Now

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The Gap

The discipline we call “Solutions Focus” has a very fine point to make. We ask how things are on a scale of 1—10 and then, instead of asking, “Why isn’t it a ten?” we ask, “Why isn’t it a one?”

Say your life is a 3. Well, you must have some things going right… after all, it isn’t a 1 or a 0! So there must be some resources you can use. Look at what’s working in your life and start to build on that.

In other words, you look at solutions, instead of problems; what you have, instead of what you don’t have.

If you ask how to get to a 10, that will likely depress you. But ask how to get to a 4 and it will seem very doable.

A chunked down version of this life hack is attributed to Dan Sullivan; he calls it “The Gap”. He’s referring to the gap between where you are and where you’d like to be (the ideal, for you). Continue reading →