Positive thinking

By Jaideep Prabhu, Cambridge Judge Business School  Inequality is the defining social, political and economic phenomenon of our time. Just 1% of the world’s population now holds over 35% of all private wealth, more than the bottom 95% combined. Bad as this may seem, trends suggest that the situation will only get worse. Addressing it will involve multiple strategies working together, but one which is less well understood is how simple, affordable solutions to people’s problems can make a genuine difference from the bottom up. One way of measuring inequality is known as the Gini coefficient. It gives us a useful and straightforward number between zero and one, where zero represents perfect equality where everyone has the same income, and one expresses the maximum of inequality. In the countries which make up the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) the Gini was at 0.28 in the mid-1980s, but increased by 10% to 0.31 by the late 2000s.  ...

1.   “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.” 2. “Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” 3. “In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art.” 4. “Wear gratitude like a cloak and it will feed every corner of your life.” 5.   “Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.”  6. “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” 7. “Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray." 8. “Come, seek, for search is the foundation of fortune: every success depends upon focusing the heart.” 9. “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing the...

By   Larry Hardesty | MIT News Office                         Ballyhooed artificial-intelligence technique known as “deep learning” revives 70-year-old idea. In the past 10 years, the best-performing artificial-intelligence systems — such as the speech recognizers on smartphones or Google’s latest automatic translator — have resulted from a technique called “deep learning.” Deep learning is in fact a new name for an approach to artificial intelligence called neural networks, which have been going in and out of fashion for more than 70 years. Neural networks were first proposed in 1944 by Warren McCullough and Walter Pitts, two University of Chicago researchers who moved to MIT in 1952 as founding members of what’s sometimes called the first cognitive science department. Neural nets were a major area of research in ...

University of Cambridge (UK) Misfolded proteins build up in the brain in several neurodegenerative diseases and are a major factor in dementias such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s as well as prion diseases. Previously, the team found that the accumulation of misfolded proteins in mice with prion disease over-activates a natural defence mechanism, ‘switching off’ the vital production of new proteins in brain cells. They then found switching protein production back on with an experimental drug halted neurodegeneration. However, the drug tested was toxic to the pancreas and not suitable for testing in humans. In the latest study, published today in Brain , the team tested 1,040 compounds from the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke, first in worms (C.elegans) which have a functioning nervous system and are a good experimental model for screening drugs to be used on the nervous system and then in mammalian cells. This revealed a number of suitable candidate...

By Jose M. Mestre, University of Cadiz and Kimberly A. Barchard, University of Nevada, Las Vegas.   Emotional intelligence can mean the difference between behaving in a socially acceptable way and being considered to be way out of line. While most people will have heard of emotional intelligence, not many people really know how to spot it – in themselves or in others. Emotional intelligence is essentially the way you perceive, understand, express, and manage emotions. And it’s important because the more you understand these aspects of yourself, the better your mental health and social behaviour will be. It might be these are things you do without even really thinking – which can be the case for a lot of people. Or it might be that these are skills you know you need to work on. Either way, improved emotional intelligence can be very useful in all sorts of circumstances – be it in work, at home, in school, or even when you’re just socialising with your fri...

Anne Trafton | MIT News Office                          Neuroscientists identify circuits that could play a role in mental illnesses, including depression. Some mental illnesses may stem, in part, from the brain’s inability to correctly assign emotional associations to events. For example, people who are depressed often do not feel happy even when experiencing something that they normally enjoy. A new study from MIT reveals how two populations of neurons in the brain contribute to this process. The researchers found that these neurons, located in an almond-sized region known as the amygdala, form parallel channels that carry information about pleasant or unpleasant events. Learning more about how this information is routed and misrouted could shed light on mental illnesses including depression, addiction, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder, says Kay Tye...

By Robert Enright       When another person hurts us, it can upend our lives. Sometimes the hurt is very deep, such as when a spouse or a parent betrays our trust, or when we are victims of crime, or when we’ve been harshly bullied. Anyone who has suffered a grievous hurt knows that when our inner world is badly disrupted, it’s difficult to concentrate on anything other than our turmoil or pain. When we hold on to hurt, we are emotionally and cognitively hobbled, and our relationships suffer. Forgiveness is strong medicine for this. When life hits us hard, there is nothing as effective as forgiveness for healing deep wounds. I would not have spent the last 30 years of my life studying forgiveness if I were not convinced of this. Many people have misconceptions about what forgiveness really means—and they may eschew it. Others may want to forgive, but wonder whether or not they truly can. Forgiveness does not necessarily come easily; but ...

By Tchiki Davis       Happiness is something nearly everyone wants more of. Perhaps we don’t feel it often enough or strongly enough, or it seems to slip through our fingers far too easily. Many happiness seekers have read dozens of articles, yet they don’t feel much closer to creating the happiness they desire in their lives. If this sounds like you, don’t worry. Reading about the practices that increase happiness is a great first step. But the key that you may not have heard yet is this: To increase your happiness, you need a strategic plan for action. Making a plan for optimizing happiness is more important than most people realize. But think about it: Would you bake a cake without a recipe? Would you fix your transmission without the car manual? Would you go on a journey into the wilderness without a map? We know, intuitively, that a plan or guide or map—some kind of tool—makes it much easier to effectively navigate new territory. If long...

By Fran G. (UK) What pops into your head if I suggested you buy an electric car? For most people, it conjures up a host of stereotypes. Electric cars are thought to be either unreasonably expensive, like Teslas; or they don’t travel far enough; or they’re just plain ugly. And up until recently a lot of that was based in some truth. But the landscape is changing at breakneck speed. With the air pollution problem growing worse in our cities and towns, we need alternatives beyond the diesel or petrol cars currently filling our roads. And now, finally, electric cars are becoming that clean, green alternative. What are we waiting for?! Here are seven reasons to go electric now! 1. Electric cars travel much farther than you think Most new electric cars have a range of around 100 miles (or more). Given that the average UK journey   is just 25 miles, this range should cover most needs. Of course, a long range is important to some drivers. As technology and i...

University of Cambridge (UK) The study, published in Lancet Psychiatry, found that 14-year-old adolescents who had contact with mental health services had a greater decrease in depressive symptoms than those with similar difficulties but without contact. By the age of 17, the odds of reporting clinical depression were more than seven times higher in individuals without contact than in service users who had been similarly depressed at baseline. Researchers from the Department of Psychiatry recruited 1,238 14-year-old adolescents and their primary caregivers from secondary schools in Cambridgeshire, and followed them up at the age of 17. Their mental state and behaviour was assessed by trained researchers, while the teenagers self-reported their depressive symptoms. Of the participants, 126 (11%) had a current mental illness at start of the study – and only 48 (38%) of these had had contact with mental health services in the year prior to recruitment. Contact with mental heal...

Anne Trafton | MIT News Office          New findings challenge standard model of memory consolidation. When we visit a friend or go to the beach, our brain stores a short-term memory of the experience in a part of the brain called the hippocampus. Those memories are later “consolidated” — that is, transferred to another part of the brain for longer-term storage. A new MIT study of the neural circuits that underlie this process reveals, for the first time, that memories are actually formed simultaneously in the hippocampus and the long-term storage location in the brain’s cortex. However, the long-term memories remain “silent” for about two weeks before reaching a mature state. “This and other findings in this paper provide a comprehensive circuit mechanism for consolidation of memory,” says Susumu Tonegawa, the Picower Professor of Biology and Neuroscience, the director of the RIKEN-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics at the Picow...