Your brain contains more than 100 billion neurons that flawlessly work together to create consciousness and thought. It is an astonishing marvel of evolution and adaptation, and it is also a huge dick.What do we mean by that? Well, everyone wants to be happy, but the biggest obstacle to that is the mushy thing inside your skull that you think with. Evolution has left your brain with all sorts of mechanisms that are heavily biased toward misery. We can't guarantee that reading this article will help, for your brain is as crafty as it is sadistic. But at least you'll understand it better.

Bad habits can ruin your life. Whether you're gorging on Haagen-Dazs or dressing up like a Power Ranger and flaying hobos every night, you know on some level that things have to change, or disaster will follow. But no matter how badly you want your life to be different, things just keep plowing on the way they are. Why?
Because your brain has a long list of diabolical mechanisms intended to keep your habits exactly as they are.

Szasz's analysis is highly relevant to the story Mark and Stephanie covered Sunday about the prisoner receiving gender re-assignment surgery. To call this required medical care is to identify the person's condition as a disease. Is that really where we want to go? It wasn't that long ago that homosexuality was considered a disease. I think Szasz would say the prisoner in question was unhappy with his/her lot in life, which is a fairly common condition that should not be medicalized or politicized.

Little Words with Absolutely Huge Meaning - Use Them

As children many of us hyped the statement, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Clearly, it doesn’t take long to realize that words have far more weight than we want to realize. They influence thoughts, feelings, actions and states of mind. Even little words often have big meaning.

Think about it. Whether you want to land your dream job, improve your friendships, save your marriage or retain your employees; the words you choose can make all the difference.

A French TV documentary features people in a spoof game show administering what they are told are near lethal electric shocks to rival contestants. Those taking part are told to pull levers to inflict shocks - increasing in voltage - upon their opponents. Although unaware that the contestants were actors and there was no electrical current, 82% of participants in the Game of Death agreed to pull the lever.

In each of five experiments the method of inducing a powerful feeling, and the method of determining moral double standards was different, but in every one the results were the same. Powerful people judge others more harshly but cheat more themselves. But what’s especially interesting is his last experiment where distinguishing between legitimate power and illegitimate power garnered the opposite results.

There is a rule of thumb that says in any company, 20 percent of the employees will give you 80 percent of the top-notch work. Which means the other 80 percent of us are just a waste of company money and vending machine sandwiches.

So why do so few of us really excel at our jobs? Well, science says...

Where people are hungry, it is because of war (Somalia, Ethiopia) or government policies that, in the name of modernization and industrialization, penalize farmers by taxing them at prohibitive rates (e.g., Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya), not because population is exceeding the natural limits of what the world can support.

In every region investigated, researchers have found that as pornography has increased in availability, sex crimes have either decreased or not increased.

Scientists have identified areas of the brain that, when damaged, lead to greater spirituality. The findings hint at the roots of spiritual and religious attitudes, the researchers say. Self-transcendence "reflects a decreased sense of self and an ability to identify one's self as an integral part of the universe as a whole," the researchers explain.