By Joel Bowman, on January 12th, 2011% A few days ago in Tucson, Arizona, a young man named Jared Lee Loughner shot and killed six people and wounded 19 others, including Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who seems to have been his principal target. Since the shooting, much of the media coverage has focused on the possible influence of “hate speech,” which demonizes those who have certain opinions or otherwise belong to identifiable groups.
The event and the media coverage of it reminded me of three of the books that have influenced my own thinking about language and its relationship to thought and action: Science and Sanity . . . → Read More: Hate Speech
By Joel Bowman, on January 1st, 2011% The three principal questions everyone has when encountering something or someone new are (a) What’s familiar or “like me,” (b) What’s not familiar or not “like me,” and (c) What’s important about…. When it comes to people, the cliché has been, “Birds of a feather flock together.” Whether we’re talking about cultures, philosophies, or people, the main question is, what constitutes being “of a feather.”
One of the metaprograms in NLP is usually referred to as “same/different” or “match/mismatch.” This metaprogram addresses whether someone’s first tendency is to look for things that match or are the same as what . . . → Read More: Understanding, Rapport, and a Better 2011
By Joel Bowman, on December 29th, 2010% No, no, no…. Not resolutions. Revolutions.
Back in the 1970s, when Dr. Herbert Benson of the Harvard Medical School coined the term, “Relaxation Response,” he ushered in several decades of resolutions based on the concept of relaxing for better health—both physical and mental. He also provided scientific support for the practice of meditation, which was entering “mainstream” consciousness at about the same time. His new book, Relaxation Revolution: Enhancing Your Personal Health Through the Science and Genetics of Mind Body Healing, written with William Proctor (New York, Scribner, 2010) details the accumulation of research since the publication of the . . . → Read More: New Year’s Revolutions
By Joel Bowman, on December 15th, 2010% NeuroCaps may sound like the most recent designer drug for altering perceptions of reality, but in reality they are devices for measuring brain activity. If A. K. Pradeep, author of The Buying Brain: Secrets for Selling to the Subconscious Mind, is to be believed, NeuroCaps can reveal more about why you do what you do than your conscious mind is aware of. What’s more is that I believe him.
We humans like to think that we are fully conscious, rational decision-makers in charge of our behaviors and, ultimately, our destiny. As a growing number of scientists have reported, however, . . . → Read More: NeuroCaps and Human Evolution
By Joel Bowman, on November 24th, 2010% In a recent column for the Washington Post, columnist George Will said the following about the new airport screening procedures:
What the TSA is doing is mostly security theater, a pageant to reassure passengers that flying is safe. Reassurance is necessary if commerce is going to flourish and if we are going to get to grandma’s house on Thursday to give thanks for the Pilgrims and for freedom. If grandma is coming to our house, she may be wanded while barefoot at the airport because democracy – or the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment; anyway, something – . . . → Read More: For Appearance’s Sake
By Joel Bowman, on November 20th, 2010% In his best-seller, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell discussed perhaps the best-known way of using intuition: building and using a large database of information in what is typically called “the unconscious mind.” When you know a lot about a subject, answers to questions about it “just” come into awareness—no conscious searching for the answer is required.
It is easy for most people to accept and understand that kind of intuition. It is, after all, logical that those who know a lot about a subject can dredge up information about it. This is basically the same . . . → Read More: Intuition: Not Just for Women
By Joel Bowman, on November 6th, 2010% If you live in the States, unless you spent the last 6 months living in a cave or under a rock, you’ve been inundated with information about the “midterm” elections. I suspect that anyone else from anywhere else who has sufficient Internet connectivity to be reading this blog is also aware that candidates have been at each others’ throats, if not “tooth and claw,” TV and radio ads and “robo-calls” day and night. With Tuesday’s election (2 November 2010), all of that has come to an end at least for a few weeks—when “they” will start gearing up for the . . . → Read More: Winning, Losing, Communicating
By Joel Bowman, on October 30th, 2010% Most books on Energy Psychology focus on one, two, or three forms of Energy-based interventions for psychological change. The most often mentioned are Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), and Thought Field Therapy (TFT).
EMDR, developed by Francine Shapiro as a way to reduce the impact of traumatic memories, has clients think about the problem while watching hand (or object) passes back and forth in front of their eyes. Both EFT and TFT, which was developed by Dr. Roger Callahan and seems to have been the precursor of EFT, use tapping on acupuncture meridians in . . . → Read More: Energy Psychology—The Missing Piece
By Joel Bowman, on October 25th, 2010% In his new book, Spiritual Partnership, Gary Zukav discusses the ways that conscious intent influences the long-term results of an action. The example he provides is a parent’s sending his or her child to college and the way different whys lead to different outcomes. Zukav ties the concept of the why beneath the why to the metaphor of the influence the flap of a butterfly’s wings can have on global weather systems:
The sensitive dependence on initial conditions has come to be called the butterfly effect because the large magnitude of the change in predicted weather in relation to the . . . → Read More: The Why of the What, The What of the Why
By Joel Bowman, on October 20th, 2010% Unless you follow educational news or technology news, you may have missed one of the most significant shifts in education since the advent of the chalkboard: the availability of online learning programs. The signs are, of course, everywhere. Blogs abound. E-readers (such as the Kindle, Nook, and iPad) have almost become “must have” technology. Most major universities have developed online educational programs, and a variety of online-only programs have earned accreditation by principal educational accrediting organizations.
It is easy to see why online education has been gaining ascendancy. It provides access to learning 24 hours a day, 7 days . . . → Read More: Are You Ready for Online Learning?
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