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Why are Buddhist monks and nuns learning about science? What do Westerners learn when teaching them?

Meditation, positive thinking, and ethics are just a few of the topics enriched for both the monastics and the scientists in these programs described in "Monastics Turn Their Minds Toward Science" (Monterey Herald).

Excerpt:

Tibetan monks and nuns spend their lives studying the inner world of the mind rather than the physical world of matter. Yet for one month this spring, a group of 91 monastics devoted themselves to the corporeal realm of science.

Instead of delving into Buddhist texts on karma and emptiness, they learned about Galileo's law of accelerated motion, chromosomes, neurons and the Big Bang, among other far-ranging topics.

...

To add to the challenge, some monastics have limited English and relied on Tibetan translators to absorb the four-week crash course in physics, biology, neuroscience and math and logic taught by teachers from Emory University in Atlanta.

But the monastics put morning-to-evening lectures into action. At a Buddhist college campus here in Dharamsala, the exile home of the Dalai Lama in northern India, red-robed monks and nuns

Report from recent LMA Rocky Mountain meeting: "Forget About Love and Hate: Strive for 'Professional' in Your Relationship with Reporters"

The program for the March, 2009, meeting of the Rocky Mountain Chapter of Legal Marketing Association featured a panel of reporters and editors giving advice on how best to work with them. Excerpt from the program summary:

Lawyers and law firms often maintain a love-hate relationship with reporters.  When they have good news to tell about themselves or their clients, they actively seek media attention.  When the news is not so good, they try to duck around the corner.

...

Before pitching a story idea to the press, carefully review the publication to see which kinds of articles it runs and to determine which reporter covers the appropriate “beat.”  All of the panelists said that they prefer to be contacted by email or by phone – not mail.  A “blanket” press release that has obviously been sent to many publications will get less attention than an email or phone call offering an exclusive.

The definition of “news” in the eyes of a reporter or editor can vary with how often a publication appears, although there is some overlap.  A daily publication wants to be the first to cover news as it happens (although all publications relish the opportunity to break important stories).  To appeal to a daily, you must be timely with your news and provide the name of a lawyer who is ready and able to talk.

“As a weekly, we have the luxury of having more time to interpret the news,” said [Cara] DeGette.  “Because of Law Week’s unique focus on the legal industry, we often can include stories that would not qualify as news for a reader of The Denver Post.  If a story has already run in the daily newspaper, we will be looking for a fresh angle on that story.”

...

A daily newspaper, for example, might run the news that a new law has been adopted at the state or federal level.  A weekly (or the Sunday section of a daily) would be more likely to consider and write about the impact of that law on local law firms (Law Week) and businesses (The Denver Business Journal).  A monthly might write about the lengthy lobbying effort that contributed to passage of the law.

Each reporter and editor indicated an interest in ideas that provide a local or regional perspective on a legal trend or a national or international business story.  Weeklies provide editorial calendars, and are particularly receptive to stories that fit within their calendared themes.  None wants to dedicate much time or energy to news that has appeared in a similar form in a competing publication.

Click to read the rest of "Forget About Love and Hate: Strive for 'Professional' in Your Relationship with Reporters."

Is your childhood home a clue to your best office space today?

After reading Does Your Childhood Home Dictate Your Design Choices? (Fast Company blog), I ordered Some Place Like Home: Using Design Psychology to Create Ideal Places, the book discussed in the post.

From that post:

Newsstands are crammed with shelter magazines that dictate how your home should look. Cantilevered credenzas, bamboo modern beach furniture, appliances in bold colors--these are furnishing of the moment.

Will they gratify you? Not unless you understand the emotional roots of your likes and dislikes, according to Toby Israel, an environmental psychologist and author of Some Place Like Home. Just as therapy helps a patient unravel family patterns and predilections, design psychology shows how we're unknowingly influenced by the design and décor we knew in our formative years, for good or ill. Israel helps clients "design from within" by plumbing what forms and objects from the past have positive associations. "We all have an environmental autobiography," she said. "Why not open this treasure chest and think consciously about what gave you pleasure?"

Environmental autobiography . . . writing one sounds both fun and useful.

Image credit: ImageAfter.

Blog Glob: "Stories we tell about national trauma reflect our psychological well-being"

Excerpt:

"Our findings suggest that different ways of writing about the events of 9/11 relate to different psychological outcomes," Poulin says, and that the different ways people describe traumatic national events -- even those they do not experience directly -- are linked to different levels of psychological adaptation.

"To sum up," he says, "we found that psychological well-being was associated with post-trauma stories that were high in closure, high in redemptive imagery and high in themes of national redemption. Psychological distress, on the other hand, was significantly related to accounts that were low in closure, high in contaminative imagery and high in themes of personal contamination."

The researchers looked at personal accounts about experiences of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 written by 395 adults from across the country, some of whom were more intimately connected to the events in question than were others. They then compared the narratives with various measures of their psychological well-being.

Click to read the rest of "Stories we tell about national trauma reflect our psychological well-being" (University of Rochester via EurekAlert).

How does our brain sense danger? Is the ability innate or can it be trained?

If you are interested in the answers to those questions, you will want to read "In Battle, Hunches Prove to Be Valuable" (New York Times). Excerpt:

Everyone has hunches — about friends’ motives, about the stock market, about when to fold a hand of poker and when to hold it. But United States troops are now at the center of a large effort to understand how it is that in a life-or-death situation, some people’s brains can sense danger and act on it well before others’ do.

Experience matters, of course: if you have seen something before, you are more likely to anticipate it the next time. And yet, recent research suggests that something else is at work, too.

Small differences in how the brain processes images, how well it reads emotions and how it manages surges in stress hormones help explain why some people sense imminent danger before most others do.

Studies of members of the Army Green Berets and Navy Seals, for example, have found that in threatening situations they experience about the same rush of the stress hormone cortisol as any other soldier does. But their levels typically drop off faster than less well-trained troops, much faster in some cases.

Is this ability to sense and handle danger naturally better in some individuals? Can one be trained to improve?

“The big question is whether these differences perceiving threat are natural, or due to training,” Dr. [Martin P.] Paulus said.

The question is still being studied. This article provides some pieces of the puzzle.

Note: Other articles in this series on Brain Power:

• "At the Bridge Table, Clues to a Lucid Old Age" A study of people 90 and over without a trace of dementia has begun to alter understandings of the aging brain.
• "Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory" An influx of money and talent into neuroscience has led to an experimental drug that could block certain memories.
• "H. M., an Unforgettable Amnesiac, Dies at 82" Henry Gustav Molaison, or H.M., was recognized as the most important patient in the history of brain science.

Image credit: Dave's Eye.

Blog Glob: A Millennial's Guide to Millennial Guides

Excerpt:

In recent years, a growing number of 30-, 40-, and 50-something authors have written books detailing how, exactly, my traits will transform your workplace. They've read the research, talked to some token teens, and branded their findings with sensational titles, such as The Trophy Kids Grow Up: How the Millennial Generation Is Shaking Up the Workplace, and Generation Me: Why Today's Young American's Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled--and More Miserable Than Ever Before. By and large, these books are long, boring and peppered with irritating half-truths. In Trophy Kids, for example, there's a whole page dedicated to deciphering text-message lingo, replete with acronyms like "CRBT" (crying really big tears) and "FOMC" (falling off my chair)--none of which I have ever sent, received, or heard anyone say. And in Generation Me, Jean M. Twenge, Ph.D., posits that the 1994 movie Clerks is "a pretty accurate illustration of how young people talk, with about two swear words in every line." Gimme a f***ing break.

At my editor's request, however, I set aside my preconditions--which, according to Twenge, is a very un-millennial-like thing to do--and prodded through four of these so-called "youth culture" guides, hoping to discover something new about my peers (and maybe even myself). Here's what I learned:

Click to read the rest of A Millennial's Guide to Millennial Guides (Fast Company blog)

Toyota plant in Kentucky has a 5-person outreach team for employees' life events

A list of some of the ways the team at the Georgetown plant serves fellow employees was included in an article "Toyota's outreach is model program" (Lexington Herald-Leader):

• Attending the funeral and visitation of any plant employee or their children or spouse that are within a three-hour drive of Georgetown. They also attend either the funeral or visitation of parents, siblings and in-laws who pass away.
• Ordering flowers for funerals and for employees who are hospitalized for three days or longer.
• Ordering food for families during funerals. The group once made an order for a family in St. Lucia, in the Caribbean.
• Delivering meal vouchers to the families of those hospitalized.
• Ordering gifts for weddings (crystal dishes) and births (photo albums).

The team is very busy.

During Toyota's last fiscal year, which runs from April to March, the team handled 1,086 deaths; 369 hospitalizations; seven home destructions, in which they helped with finding lodging and new uniforms; 108 births; and 78 weddings.

In the near future, this program may expand beyond Kentucky.

The program originated in 1999 at the Georgetown plant and might soon be expanded to all of Toyota's North American manufacturing plants.

The team's role is valued by the Toyota plant.

And even as the recession slammed the automotive industry in the past year, Toyota has stuck by the program.

"Back when this really hit," said spokesman Rick Hesterberg, "the company looked at every program we have and put everything on the table to see where we could do some cost containment. And the decision was this is a program that needed to stay.

"You just can't take for granted what it means to people."

Read more about the program.

Image credit: Lexington Herald-Leader.

Blogger happiness has increased over the last 4 years according to this study

I have questions about this research; you may too, if you read it. Happiness is not just a matter of word choice or responses to words but the study, although reductionist, is at least a fun read. The abstract of "Measuring the Happiness of Large-Scale Written Expression: Songs, Blogs, and Presidents" [pdf] (Journal of Happiness Studies):

The importance of quantifying the nature and intensity of emotional states at the level of populations is evident: we would like to know how, when, and why individuals feel as they do if we wish, for example, to better construct public policy, build more successful organizations, and, from a scientific perspective, more fully understand economic and social phenomena. Here, by incorporating direct human assessment of words, we quantify happiness levels on a continuous scale for a diverse set of large-scale texts: song titles and lyrics, weblogs, and State of the Union addresses. Our method is transparent, improvable, capable of rapidly processing Web-scale texts, and moves beyond approaches based on coarse categorization. Among a number of observations, we find that the happiness of song lyrics trends downward from the 1960s to the mid 1990s while remaining stable within genres, and that the happiness of blogs has steadily increased from 2005 to 2009, exhibiting a striking rise and fall with blogger age and distance from the Earth’s equator.

Note: Article about the study: "Scientists develop 'sensor' to measure happiness" (Hindu News Update Service).

Image credit: Tomorrow Bystander.

Are you happy in the practice of law? Is it because you are complying with the "rule of two"?

After working with a group of lawyers, psychologist and lawyer G. Andrew H. Benjamin noticed that typically the most psychologically healthy shared at least two of these three characteristics:

• Had clients that fit well with their own personality,
• Worked with legal issues that were stimulating to them,
• Either started cases with a sufficient retainer or took them on a pro bono basis.

In his article "Reclaim your practice, reclaim your life" (TRIAL), Benjamin says hundreds of solo practitioners have since used his "rule of two" to assist them in getting "back on track with their values." He further states, "Almost without exception, lawyers who suffer from depression or alcohol abuse have developed habits that violate the rule of two."

Some questions for you:

• In your experience, do you think the "rule of two" is a good assessment of lawyer satisfaction?
• If so, do you think it would apply to lawyers other than solos?
• And, if so, do you think efforts should/could be made in law schools to make students aware of the "rule of two" early on?
• How do you measure up on the "rule of two"?

Image credit: SBA73.

Two new books on "methods and motivations at the base of evil and human cruelty"

Two books on evil behavior are reviewed today in the Seattle Times. I have read neither but plan to order the book by Dr. Stone. Have any of you read one or both? If so, let's hear what you thought, please.

"Divining the source of evil and human cruelty" begins:

When news breaks of a psychopathic crime (usually murder), people use a particular set of adjectives that reflect their horror, writes psychiatrist Michael H. Stone, M.D., in his new book "The Anatomy of Evil" — "words like 'fiendish,' 'revolting,' 'heinous,' and (pretty regularly) 'inhuman.' This is how we distance ourselves from the acts in question, as if to say: 'no human could do these things.' We don't like to be reminded that only humans do these kinds of things, that evil is an exclusively human phenomenon."

University of Oxford neuroscientist Kathleen Taylor concurs. Her new book, "Cruelty: Human Evil and the Human Brain," coincidentally appearing on the shelves at the same time as Stone's, examines the roots and forms of human cruelty.

Taylor writes, "Cruelty is as old as humankind, if not older. At its core lies unjustified voluntary behaviour which causes foreseeable suffering to an undeserving victim or victims ... [I]ts aim is to make its targets suffer physically or psychologically."

But why does cruelty exist? It is comforting to consider brutality an aberration and decency the norm. ...

Click to read the rest of the "Divining the source of evil and human cruelty."

Note: The Wikipedia entry for Dr. Stone's Most Evil. Excerpt:

Most Evil is an American forensics television program on Investigation Discovery starring forensic psychiatrist Michael Stone from Columbia University. On the show, Stone rates murderers on a scale of evil that he has developed in order to help science understand and thus prevent this type of behavior.