Think Tank: The Neuro Blog
The Most Common New Year’s Resolutions and How to Stick to Them
As the new year begins, it is time to set your goals for the next year. For most people, the New Year is synonymous with new beginnings and starting fresh, so it’s no surprise that many of them decide to come up with New Year’s resolutions. According to a recent survey, more than 40 percent of American adults create New Year’s resolutions for themselves. However, only 46 percent of them manage to fulfill their goals. While this success rate is about ten times higher than for people who decide to make major changes in their lives at any other time during the year, the fact that more than half of all resolvers fail doesn’t sound very encouraging.
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How to Deal with Nosy Relatives Over the Holidays
With Thanksgiving well out of the way, we are knee-deep in the holiday season. This is a time of love, peace, and new beginnings. ‘Tis the season of delicious meals, creamy eggnog, and quirky gingerbread decorations. For many of us, it is also that time of the year when we travel home to have dinner with the family, reminisce about the past, and try our best to deflect intrusive questions from nosy relatives. If you’re in your early to mid-thirties and happen to be single, you can probably predict the torrent of awkward questions you are bound to face. From “Are you still single?” and the follow-up “Why?” to “When is the last time you were in a serious relationship?” and “Do you plan on having kids anytime soon?”, things can get deeply unpleasant at the dinner table. That’s not to mention a flurry of passive-aggressive remarks you’ll receive like “Did you gain some weight?” and “You’re not getting any younger”.
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How to Engage Your Office Colleagues to Build Better Relationships
There’s ample evidence that the relationships we build in our workspace directly affect how satisfied we feel about our job. Everyone has experienced some exceedingly awkward moments with their colleagues at some point. But if you’re a bit introverted, moments like these bring a weighty feeling with them. Feeling isolated while people are going up and down around you probably isn’t something you’d wish to prolong. Each of us is different and not all people mix. Moreover, it’s quite hard to pierce yourself into an already established community that might not know how to treat new employees. It isn’t necessarily your or anyone else’s fault Once you accept the fact that other colleagues might also be having a hard time socializing, you won’t feel alone anymore. You might even develop some true friendships through empathy and a more healthy approach. There are a lot of things you can do to become a better colleague and most of them involve being a better version of yourself.
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How to Learn Difficult Subjects Faster When It’s Hard to Focus on Them
Coming across a difficult subject that you have never even heard of can be profoundly confusing. It gets even worse when you’re expected to learn it in a short period of time. However, you needn’t spend hours and hours memorizing the subject. There are much better and more efficient ways to understand and learn complex subjects. Instead of approaching learning in such a stiff manner, find a more flexible and efficient approach. Here are a number of techniques that you can use for learning a difficult subject faster.
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Mental Blockades and What to Do About Them
Have you ever had that feeling of not being able to finish the project you’re working on? Or not being able to even start? If you do, don’t worry, as you’re not the only one. This is something that happens to virtually everyone, and there are many reasons for it. Here’s a scenario that’s probably familiar to you: You sit at your desk and you’re looking to study/work, when all of a sudden you realize that you need to wipe the table, drink some water, and check Instagram to see what’s new. After you do all that, you feel like going to the toilet, checking your phone again, and doing pretty much anything to avoid working. If this happens to you, you’re facing a mental blockade. There are many reasons why this can occur. To help you understand them, let’s go over the most common ones, followed by some solutions.
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How Google’s AI is Helping Neuroscience Evolve
Artificial intelligence is a concept that has been dreamt about for decades now. You’ve had the chance to see robots in books, movies, and other forms of science-fiction entertainment. Thanks to decades of research and the evolution of technology, AI is becoming more science than fiction. We’re getting closer to developing machines that can have human characteristics. Even though we won’t witness this for quite some time, there’s no doubt that technology is moving in that direction. The problem is, before we make robots with brains similar to those of humans, we need to understand how the human brain works. Even though we can see it, and understand some of it, there’s still a lot of things to be discovered about it. Being one of the world’s biggest tech companies, Google has always wanted to be the leader in AI, as the first company to bring this technology to fruition will likely dominate the tech sector, if not the world. Towards this end, Google’s research aims to understand more about the human brain so that the knowledge can be applied to AI. This is of course music to the ears of neuroscientists.
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How to Get into the Habit of Doing the Hard Things
Is your daily routine unproductive? It may be if you are in the habit of avoiding things that make you uncomfortable. Sure, you need to take the trash to the curb every Wednesday night. You know that. Your spouse knows that. Yet, you may avoid the task by putting it off until Thursday morning every single week. You still get it done so what does it matter? As it happens, it matters a lot because you are reinforcing the message that it is okay to avoid doing things that you don’t want to do. This goes beyond procrastination and turns into a habit. When you get into the habit of avoiding things you don’t feel comfortable doing, you set yourself up for giving up in the future.
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Tips and Tricks to Improve Concentration Power
While it’s one of the essential requirements for normal day-to-day functioning, concentration always seems to be in short supply. We get up in the morning and struggle through our assignments and projects, only to reach the evening and unable to wrap our minds around a movie’s plot. Problems of this sort plague everyone; some have it better, others have it worse. But the ability to change and improve the situation is common to us all. The good news is that mental endurance, like its physical counterpart, can be increased through dedicated practice and effort. There are many ways to go about, so make sure you choose the one that fits you best. Here are our favorite tips and tricks to boost concentration power.
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How to Stay Calm in Any Situation
When was the last time you felt like you were in the present moment? How did you recognize that feeling? In the words of Eckhart Tolle, being present means to ‘become conscious of being conscious’. This means that you can experience everything that is happening to the fullest extent. This is sometimes referred to as mindfulness, and its many benefits have been proven over and over again. It ensured that you can react properly in any given situation, without letting your mind create distracting scenarios. Aside from the feeling of contentment, presence of mind ensures that you’re able to solve problems easily and be quick on your feet. Here you’ll see some of the examples of true presence of mind. But let’s not get too serious about it, and just go over some interesting ones instead.
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