Gandhi Quotes

A 'No' uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a 'Yes' merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.

Action expresses priorities.

An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world blind.

An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching.

Fear has its use but cowardice has none.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.

Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress.

I am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill.

I look only to the good qualities of men. Not being faultless myself, I won't presume to probe into the faults of others.

It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.

It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

My life is my message.

Nobody can hurt me without my permission.

Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by acts of love. Power based on love is a thousand times more effective and permanent then the one derived from fear of punishment.

Satisfaction lies in the effort, not in the attainment, full effort is full victory.

The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.

The main purpose of life is to live rightly, think rightly, act rightly. The soul must languish when we give all our thought to the body.

The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within.

The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.

There is a sufficiency in the world for man's need but not for man's greed.

Those who know how to think need no teachers.

To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest.

Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self-sustained.

Whatever you do may seem insignificant to you, but it is most important that you do it.

You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

Happiness in Altruistic Behavior

Here is an excerpt from the Not Exactly Rocket Science Blog:

Elizabeth Dunn from the University of British Columbia wanted to see if there were ways of channelling the inevitable pursuit of money towards actually making people happier. Together with Lara Aknin and Michael Norton, she asked a representative group of 632 Americans to disclose their average monthly expenditure and to rate how happy they were.

She found that personal spending, including bills, living expenses and treats for oneself, made up 90% of the average outgoings but had no bearing on satisfaction. On the other hand, people who spent more money on others by way of gifts or charitable donations, were much happier for it. That either suggests that selfless spending increases happiness, or just that happier people are more likely to plump up more money for friends or charities.

Dunn sought out firmer conclusions by watching what happened to people who received an unexpected windfall. She surveyed 16 employees at a Boston firm who were given a bonus that ranged from $3,000 to $8,000. About two months later, Dunn grilled them about how they had spent the money and again, regardless of the size of the bonus, those who devoted more of their windfalls to selfless ends ended up happier, while those who splashed out on themselves did not. To paraphrase a saying, it's not how much you have, it's what you do with it that counts.

Finally, Dunn tested this theory through an experiment. She gave 46 people either $5 of $20, and an afternoon to spend it. Half of the lucky volunteers were told to splurge on themselves, while the other half had to buy a gift for someone else or to give the money to charity. By the evening, the charitable individuals felt happier than they did in the morning while the self-spenders did not, regardless of which bill they were given, and despite the fact that they were acting on instructions.

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And in a deeply ironic twist, the types of behaviour that allow money to buy happiness are subverted by the presence of, you guessed it, more money! Higher incomes bring greater self-sufficiency and as people start to need less help themselves, they tend to provide less for others. In psychological experiments, just the mere thought of money made people less likely to donate to charity, help acquaintances or spend time with friends, exactly the types of behaviour that are linked to happiness.

An emerging viewpoint from the science of happiness is that a persons' circumstances in life - their income, jobs and so on - tend to have limited long-term effects on their happiness. People mentally adapt to stable situations unless they learn to actively engage with their circumstances - simply put, savour the moment or your goalposts will shift. This latest study is consistent with this idea, for it showed that the way in which money is spent has a greater bearing on contentment than how much is made.

There is a silver lining then. While Dunn's work implies that of selfless spending is the key to happiness, it also suggests that you don't need to pauperise yourself to do it. The experimental study suggested that paying as little $5 towards a selfless cause can result in a significant spike in happiness. Given that the volunteers in the first study only spent 10% of their earnings on other people, there is plenty of leeway for purchasing a bit of pleasure.

And if all of that seems obvious in hindsight, consider this: when Dunn asked a fresh group of 109 people about the things that would make them happiest, she found that they were, on average, doubly wrong. A majority of 63% predicted that personal spending would make them happier than selfless spending while 86% said that they would be happier with the $20 bill than the $5 one. Those are certainly the intuitive answers, but they are not the empirical ones.

Dunn, E.W., Aknin, L.B., Norton, M.I. (2008). Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness. Science, 319(5870), 1687-1688. DOI: 10.1126/science.1150952

Ignoring What Might Have Been

An excerpt from the BPS Blog:

we take into account what might have happened if we'd taken a different path, made a different decision. These so-called 'fictive' thoughts can lead us to change the way we behave in the future. But now Pearl Chiu and colleagues have shown this ability is lacking in smokers - a finding they say could have implications for treating addiction.

Thirty-one smokers and 31 non-smokers had their brains scanned as they played an investment game. They were given $100 with which to invest in stocks and shares and after each round they were told how much money they'd made, relative to how much money they could have made if they'd invested the maximum amount in their chosen shares.

Discovering how much money they could have made if they'd invested a larger amount affected the subsequent decision-making of the non-smokers but not the smokers. It's not that the brains of the smokers didn't register this information - they, like the non-smokers, showed increased activity in a part of the brain called the caudate when shown what they'd missed - it's just they didn't act on it. Pearl Chiu and co-workers say this cognitive anomaly helps explain why smokers carry on puffing away without regard for the positive outcomes that could have ensued had they have given up.

Chiu, P.H., Lohrenz, T.M., Montague, P.R. (2008). Smokers' brains compute, but ignore, a fictive error signal in a sequential investment task. Nature Neuroscience DOI: 10.1038/nn2067

Reputation Management in Autism

Below is an interesting excerpt summarizing research on how kids with autism lack the skill to manage their reputation.

The autistic subjects showed normal activity during the "other phase" (when they were learning how much their partner was going to repay them), but they did not show the activation in the mid-cingulate during the "self phase" (when they were deciding how much to invest).

Why was there only a difference during one phase of the game? Imagine yourself at the moment you make an investment. This instance is your only chance to influence the other player. You are trying to read and manipulate his or her mind. At the same time, you are trying to build a reputation as a person who can be trusted.

Our speculation is that this process of reputation management is impaired in autistic individuals, because it depends on the ability to read the minds of others. This hypothesis can be tested experimentally. If we are concerned with our reputation then our behavior will be strongly affected by whether or not an audience is present to observe our actions. Consider, for instance, another sharing game known as the dictator game. One player is given $100 and is allowed to share any amount he or she chooses with the other player. In this situation, the rational thing to do would be to give the other player no money at all, because the second player is powerless to respond. Even "dictators" will typically dole out a small proportion of the money, however. When there is an audience for the transaction, dictators give away even more money. Presumably, they do not want to have a reputation for meanness or for acting unfairly. If autistic people are not concerned with their own reputation, then their behaviour should not be affected by the presence of an audience.

Hoarding Documentary

Below is a link to a documentary following four hoarders:
http://www.vimeo.com/603058

POSSESSED from Martin Hampton on Vimeo.

How do you know when you are finished eating?

An excerpt from Brian Wasnick, author of Mindless Eating:

In a recent study, researchers from my Cornell Food Lab asked 133 participants from Paris and 145 from Chicago to complete a brief survey on their food habits, posing the question “How do you know when you are through eating dinner?”

The Parisians said they knew they were through when they no longer felt hungry or when the food no longer tasted good to them. Their answers suggested that they're influenced by internal cues — whether they liked the taste of the food or whether they wanted to leave room for a later dessert — to tell them dinner's over. In Chicago, it was a different ball game. The 145 Americans relied on external cues of satiety. They said they knew they were through eating when they cleaned their plate, when everyone else at the table was finished or when the TV show they were watching was over.

The Americans were more influenced by their environment than whether they were actually still hungry. Since most of the signals in our society, from TV commercials to our best friends, tell us to “eat, eat, eat,” it can be difficult to control intake if we're ignoring our own bodies.

The study, conducted by Collin Payne and Pierre Chandon and published recently in the journal Obesity, also found that, for both the American and French participants, the heaviest people tended to be the ones who relied on external cues to tell them when to stop eating.

Placebo Works Better if It Costs More

An excerpt about different costs of a placebo:

Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University in North Carolina, and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tested 82 volunteers.

All got a light electric shock and were offered what they were told was a painkiller.

Half were given a brochure describing the pill as a newly approved painkiller that cost $2.50 per dose and half were given a brochure describing it as marked down to 10 cents.

Writing in a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association, Ariely and colleagues said the effects were unexpectedly strong.

Eighty-five percent of volunteers who thought they were getting a $2.50 pill said they felt less pain after taking it, compared with 61 percent of those who thought they were getting a discounted drug.

The results fit with other studies that show charging more for something makes people value it more. But Ariely said the combination with the placebo effect was especially interesting.

Signs of Threat Change Decision Making

An excerpt from the BPS Blog:

Aspects of the environment that indicate danger - from flashing lights to a mere exclamation mark - lead us to make faster and more extreme judgements about fairness.

Kees van den Bos and colleagues say this happens because when we sense a threat, and what they call the 'human alarm system' is activated, we tend to form faster and more extreme reactions, with justice-related decisions being no exception.

In one experiment, university students stared either at an exclamation mark for one minute, or at a line with a dot above it - the latter serving as a control condition. Next the participants played a computer-based task with what they thought was another participant, but was really just a computer programme. Afterwards, some participants were asked how lottery tickets - a reward for taking part - should be shared between themselves and their playing 'partner', based on their performances. The remaining participants were told the lottery tickets would be distributed without seeking their opinion. Finally, the participants were asked to indicate how fair this system of ticket allocation was.

Amazingly, the mere act of staring at an exclamation mark significantly affected the participants' reactions. The difference in fairness judgments between those who'd been given a say and those who hadn't was greater among the participants who'd previously stared at an exclamation mark than among the control participants - in other words their judgments were more extreme (those who'd been given a say responded more positively, those who hadn't, responded more negatively, relative to the control participants who had and hadn't been given a say).

Another experiment asked dozens of shoppers on the streets of Amersfoot in the Netherlands to imagine a scenario in which their colleague had either received the same or a larger bonus than they had. Half the shoppers were asked near to a flashing road-work light - their subsequent judgements on the fairness of the bonus allocation were more extreme than those asked with the light switched off.

VANDENBOS, K., HAM, J., LIND, E., SIMONIS, M., VANESSEN, W., RIJPKEMA, M. (2008). Justice and the human alarm system: The impact of exclamation points and flashing lights on the justice judgment process. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44(2), 201-219. DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2007.03.001

Baseline Testing and Steroids

An excerpt from Psychology Today:

See, it comes down to math. All steroids are hormones and all hormones begin life as cholesterol. The body turns cholesterol into progesterone, estrogen, DHEA, testosterone and cortisol, but these aren’t the only possibilities. Chemists can turn cholesterol into a near-infinite number of possibilities. Unfortunately, the only tests we have are one-for-one matches and we only have around forty of those. So the race between the scientists who create new performance-enhancing substances and scientists who create new tests for new performance-enhancing substances is long over. There’s just no way to stay ahead of the numbers.

Nor is this new information. In 2001, Charles Francis, Ben Johnson’s track coach, wrote in Testosterone Magazine: “Another unmodified drug that had been widely used up to and during the 2000 Sidney Olympics was Genabol. By the time the test was developed, the word was out and athletes moved onto other products.”

...

Furthermore, while most know there’s currently no test for Human Growth Hormone (technically there’s no urine test and the Player’s Association prohibits needles), what is less known is that some of the other tests are dangerously inaccurate. “The test for Nandrolone (another widely used steroid) frequently produces false-positives,” says Dr. Mark Gordon, a Los Angeles doctor and steroid expert. “We can’t identify the drug directly, so we look for elevated levels of progesterone, one of the main substances present after the body breaks down Nandrolone. But progesterone occurs naturally and some people are born with levels higher than legally allowed by these tests. Even more alarming, many of these tests are administered right after exercise and exercise concentrates progesterone in the bloodstream. The tests read this concentration as elevation and innocent athletes lose medals.”

In fact, the only real way to establish any legitimate form of drug testing program is to begin taking baseline hormonal profiles of players the minute they turn pro. Which is exactly what notables like Don Caitlin have been advocating. Yes, this is expensive. Yes, this is invasive. But it’s also the only way forward if sports are serious about remaining drug free.