Welcome to Issue #73 of ThinkSpace Thursday
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📚 Light Reading
How some people get away with doing nothing at work
Strongly suspecting that a certain person isn’t doing much, or not nearly enough, to fill up what is ostensibly an eight-hour day seems to be a near-universal work experience.
How genetics determine our life choices
Research is revealing new connections between our genetic code and our life choices. For many scientists, it has begun to raise the question: to what extent is our behaviour the product of our own volition, and how much is simply pre-determined by our underlying biology?
Why does our confidence so often exceed our competence?
Overconfidence seems purely maladaptive. Imagine an athlete who thinks she will perform well no matter what, so she continually skips practice, or a person who views himself as invulnerable, so he engages in reckless behaviour. For overconfidence to evolve, it would have to be a better default than under-confidence.
🔎 Study of the Week
Is it real or imagined? How your brain tells the difference.
We rarely mistake the images running through our imaginations for perceptions of reality, although the same areas of the brain process both. New experiments show that the brain distinguishes between perceived and imagined mental images by checking whether they cross a “reality threshold.”
📺 Video of the Week
Who am I? It's a question that humans have grappled with since the dawn of time, and most of us are no closer to an answer.
What is the ‘self’? The 3 layers of your identity (11 mins.)
🎙 Podcast Episode
How should we live? This is the basic question for all of us. In this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast, Edith Hall, author of the book Aristotle's Way, gives a sympathetic answer to Aristotle's take on this question.
🗣 Quote of the Week
Arthur Schopenhauer on national pride:
“The cheapest sort of pride is national pride; for if a man is proud of his own nation, it argues that he has no qualities of his own of which he can be proud; otherwise he would not have recourse to those which he shares with so many millions of his fellowmen. The man who is endowed with important personal qualities will be only too ready to see clearly in what respects his own nation falls short, since their failings will be constantly before his eyes. But every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud adopts, as a last resource, pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and glad to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.”
👀 Perception Watch
That’s some hooter!
😲 WTF
An object that can be depicted in a perspective drawing but cannot exist as a solid object. It was devised and popularised in the 1950s by psychiatrist Lionel Penrose and his son, prominent Nobel Prize-winning mathematician Sir Roger Penrose, who described it as "impossibility in its purest form."
😁 In the Memetime
📖 Book Club
This book reminds us that the biggest goal of all is to live a life we are happy with, in which work is but one of the multitude of facets that make us who we are. An antidote to the toxic #hustle movement convincing us all we need to find fulfilment in the office, it denounces the dangers of burnout linked to those of us who cannot answer the question: beyond work, what's left?
🤔 Contemplation Corner
🎧 The Song of the Week
The Coral - Wild Bird
Listen to the ThinkSpace Thursday playlist on Spotify.
🧠 Go Deeper with ThinkSpace
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👍 Thanks for Reading
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Live well, and I’ll see you next week.
John