This time I won't tell you which articles are the absolute best, you decide what's closer to you and more interesting. I guess, if you were to read just one, you should read the last one.
1. How to Fake Being More Confident When You’re Just Not Feeling It
About self-confidence and how to achieve it.
It gives well-known, but still useful advice. Proper body language, eye contact, how to be charismatic, how to pronounce phrases (hint: slowly and confidently, without filler words and interjections).
It's relevant to me, I can rarely figure out where I can show more confidence because I know better, and where I should back down.
2. Boredom is not a problem to be solved. It's the last privilege of a free mind
An occasionally encountered theme about how boredom isn't just something that sucks. The brain needs boredom for digestion and a subsequent burst of creative activity. How can you invent something of your own if you're consuming other people's content all the time?
There are other aspects too.
When you’re bored, time moves slowly. The German word for “boredom” expresses this: langeweile, a compound made of “lange,” which means “long,” and “weile” meaning “a while”. And slow-moving time can feel torturous for people who can’t feel peaceful alone with their minds. Learning to do so is why learning to be bored is so crucial. It is a great privilege if you can do this without going to the psychiatrist.
3. The two faces of Airbnb
A detailed discussion of the problems with the popular real estate rental service.
It will be interesting primarily to those who are into startups, or use the service.
The problems are varied, and pretty substantial:
- There's no screening of guests or hosts, it's unclear who you'll run into. Generally, there's very little control over the level of service compared to hotels.
So to test Airbnb's system, I signed up as a host. I took a few photos of my house, inside and out and uploaded them to the Airbnb website, and within 15 minutes my place was "live" as an Airbnb rental. No background check, no verifying my ID, no confirming my personal details, no questions asked. Not even any contact with a real human from their trust and safety team. Nothing.
- Entire neighborhoods of popular cities are turning not into places to live, but into places to rent out, noise, din, hustle and bustle, blah blah blah. And the locals just want to live in peace and quiet! As a result, in San Francisco residents actually wanted to ban AirBnB in their area – but they don't have the money, unlike a corporation that's worth 22 billion.
Protesters
4. Why Virtual Classes Can Be Better Than Real Ones
Why remote learning can be better than the real deal is told to us by a technical disciplines prof who runs the super popular online course: "Learning How to Learn". (Almost messed up and assumed by default it was a dude)
Based on the achievements of neurocognitive science (which has been trending in recent years) they will tell us the better and proper way.
Human brains have evolved with a flitting, fleeting ability to maintain focus on any one thing.
One of the tricks used by many of the past greats in science has been to imagine themselves transported into what they’re trying understand.
5. This Is Your Brain on Heartbreak
The consequences of romantic relationship breakups for the brain. I'm always interested in the neuroscience topic, so a portion of such articles is always familiar to me, but this article is detailed, and it's on a solid university website, so let's give it a chance.
The caudate nucleus is associated with what psychologists call “motivation and goal-oriented behavior,” or “the rewards system.” To many of these experts, the fact that love fires there suggests that love isn’t so much an emotion in its own right—although aspects of it are obviously highly emotional—as it is a “goal-oriented motivational state.”
The state of being in love is not an emotion in itself, there is no point in studying it in isolation from the dopamine system of motivation and reward.
But romance isn’t the only thing that stimulates increases in dopamine and its rocketlike path through your reward system. Nicotine and cocaine follow exactly the same pattern: Try it, dopamine is released, it feels good, and you want more—you are in a “goal-oriented motivational state.” Take this to its logical conclusion and, as far as brain wiring is concerned, when you’re in love, it’s not as ifyou’re an addict. You are an addict.
From the perspective of the brain's state, the state of being in love is no different from addictions akin to cocaine or nicotine.
More interesting bits
As far as the midbrain reward system is concerned, they were still “in love.”
The brain still thinks you're in love, it doesn't give a damn about the reality of the breakup (for a while)
There’s a point, however, where this trend in fMRI research starts to enter a prickly realm: Because physical pain and emotional pain—like heartbreak—travel along the same pathways in the brain, as covered earlier, this means that theoretically they can be medically treated in the same way. In fact, researchers recently showed that acetaminophen—yep, regular old Tylenol—reduces the experience of social pain. “We have shown for the first time that acetaminophen, an over-the-counter medication commonly used to reduce physical pain, also reduces the pain of social rejection, at both neural and behavioral levels,” they write in their paper in the journal Psychological Science.
However, simple over-the-counter paracetamol like this helps with the pangs of love. How about that!