The psychology of happiness

My happy chappy

Parenting is very difficult. However children give us a sense of accomplishment which makes us feel happy. :)

The psychology of happiness
or positive psychologie

I always loved psychology. It gave me a little understanding of how the world works or better how people work. When I studied some psychology a  part was abnormal psychology which is how people shouldn't work and how to fix it when things go wrong. I thought wouldn't it be much better to know what makes people happy in the first place so you can prevent this stuff from happening.
I found out this has been happening over the last years and I completely missed it.  I learned about it through a magazine and some stuff on the Internet, I have to share it with you  I know it works. Because we are all different some things work better for one than for others but they all  contribute. here we go, what makes us happy:

• Relationships! We are social animals. We are connected, and the more you are able to connect to people the happier you are. What stops you from this : Looking up and looking down on people.
• Exercise! This is a well known one. When you exercise you produce endorphins which are happy chemicals. Don't over exercise though, which causes stress to you and the muscles. Walking and swimming will do just fine.
• Don't focus on the negative but on the positive. When you think about things that make you angry you won't feel happy. Logic hey but we still tend to do it often. At the end of the day just count your blessings.Make a list of what was fun today or what you are grateful for. Your happiness will go in the lift to the top floor.
• Caring and giving. When you contribute to other peoples happiness you feel better yourself. You don't have to be mother Theresa but just little things will do. Become a member of  Love Rally  A blog which gives you tips how to care and write letters to people who have a really hard time. Giving some money to the red cross etc. Your mental health will sky rocket.
• Flow. Losing your self consciousness and being deeply engaged in doing something makes you happy. This can be gardening, cooking, for me it is writing poetry or reading a book etc. Somethng which engages you so much that you loose yourself in it.
• Learning something Learning something new whether this is at work or at home, a new language, a new hobby etc keeps the brain stimulated and therefore makes you feel better.
• Living in the moment. Focus on what you are thinking and feeling an seeing now. When you are doing new things or going on holiday to new places you are focused because all is new and you are living in the now. This makes you feel more alive and happier.
• Achieving something .. If you feel you have accomplishment something you feel more happy. Even if you go through a traumatic experience you can feel good. In science this is called post-traumatic growth: After a traumatic experience some people realise that there relationships are improved, they realised that they could cope and survived and they realise the important things in life. So even if you lost your stuff in an earthquake you realise that it is more important that your friends and family are all fine.

How I understand the mind

Intelligence

What is intelligence. In the beginning of 1900 they started to measure intelligence to identify children with a learning problems. They tested children of different ages and looked how the average child scored. Over the year it changed a little bit but nowadays an IQ of 100 is still the score for how the average child performs. A score of 85 is better than 16% of the same age and a score of 115 is a score better than 84 % of the same age.

We have to take in mind however that these tests are test of a persons ability not of aptitude. Not every person's aptitude is developed because of for example their circumstances. Different opportunities can make a great difference.

First of all if you are born into a family were you have access to knowledge , books , computers and can join sports and clubs, this hugely affects your IQ. When you have access to excellent nutrition, love and encouragement it positively effects your IQ enormously. You are very likely to reach your potential.

Secondly about 20 % of the population have some form of learning disability. Even if their potential is above average they can perform extremely below that because they learn differently and process slowly. I think that intelligence is not fast processing as often is the general believe. These children get blocked and can't access the curriculum because they are slow in reading and writing and processing the language for example. But some children with learning disabilities understand their matter better than average.

Furthermore have you heard about the Pygmalion effect. This means that teachers influence the performance of students. Teacher tend to give more positive feedback, they relate more positively to high expectancy students. They relate better to the child they were once. they challenge them more and these students get more change to show their abilities as opposed to low expectancy students.

Luckily academic ability is not the only source of success later in life. Things as motivation, perseverance, emotional intelligence and even luck are sometimes even more important. A good start can however make an enormous difference.

I believe like Howard Gardner says that there are different form of intelligence which are
logical-mathematical
linguistic
spatial intelligence
Musical
Bodily-kinesthetic (sports)
Interpersonal intelligence (social skills)
Intrapersonal intelligence (understand yourself)
I think everybody has a strength in one of these areas

If you achieve in your area depends however on your opportunities, your background etc. My son was written of by the system but made an enormous progress and he will prove everybody wrong . He is in a fabulous school so he will get there. So many don't

How I understand the mind

Memory

The photo above is not a Christmas tree with lights. No the coloured balls are brain cells or neurons. We've got about 10 billion of them. The fibres between these neurons are called dendrites. So how does a memory in the brain looks like. A memory is not stored in one cell.

No a memory is a pathway or pattern between many cells which can be spread all over the brain (75 % of the memory are however stored in the outer layer of the brain).

The pattern first gets created in our short time memory. This gets quickly lost. Therefore it has to be consolidated in long term memory. You do that to change the physical structure of the pattern. When we concentrate a electrical charge goes through the pattern. The easier it is to

activate the pattern the stronger the memory is. When an electrical signal arrives at a cell it has to pass a gap before entering the cell. Neurotransmitters (brain chemicals) pass the gap. These neurotransmitters stimulate the process to build a bigger entrance to the cell and make it easier to stimulate the next dendrite (fiber between cells).

To make a strong pathway you use repetition of information. Other tricks are to connect the new information to other strong pathways. For example to remember a name for example Quin Washington., you could relate the name quin to the word quintet (five) and think of the city Washington. Picture in your head 5 cities of Washington. Success guaranteed. So imagination and association is very important. When reading new information make a mind map of it. Tony Buzan developed them and they completely relate to how the brain stores a memory.

To create memories you also have to sleep good. During the dream time at night most of our memories get consolidated. Than we are relaxed and the brainwaves are exactly right. Relaxation is also key when taking in new information. Stop every 10 minutes when you learn and relax. When you have an exam week don't go on a strict diet. When you don't get enough nutrients or brain food memory suffers. Fruit and vegetables but also proteins in white meat and milk and fatty fish are for example good brain food.

When we get older our memory doesn't get worse. But if you don't use it you loose it. Same as with muscles. So exercise your brain. The only thing what happens when you are old is that the process to store and retain memory is slower. This is because the circulation of the blood is getting slower which brings oxygen to the brain. Oxygen is very important for good brain functioning. So if we know the right tricks we all can get smarter. Intelligence isn't fixed. So even when you are old you still can raise your IQ. Blogging is a good way for brain exercise I think.

What do you think?

How I understand the mind

part 1. Conciousness and unconciousness

What is conciousness? There are several theories about it but I like to think of it as a snapshot of what we experience now. All the information we get from our senses gets combined in the brain at a certain time and place and gives us a snapshot from our environment.

So that's how we experience the world? No the concious part is only the tip of the iceberg. How we experience it and how we react to it is for the biggest part unconcious.

For example for a lot of actions and things we rely on our long term memory. We have our automatic pilot on when we are walking, writing, biking etc. We don't do these things conciously. Most of the time we are not aware that we are doing these things, otherwise our working memory would collapse from the amount of information.

We only put in our working memory things we attend to. Now put 10 people on the same spot and ask them what they see or experience. They each will give you probably a different story. They each take in different details.

What we attend to can be driven by our instinct. When we are hungry we see food everywhere.

What we attend to depends on past experiences which determine our preferences. If we are asked to focus on a crowd, KB will pick up the rugby player and I will spot the Dutch people.

What we attend to depends also on if we have seen it before. If we have seen a street lots of times, our brain says; seen that ,done that and pays no attention to it. So we remember the street the same as last time. Again we use our long time memory to fill in the details

If we are in a new situation or learn something new, we concentrate. The dopamine level in our brain goes up which is necessary for learning and we take in lots of details. We are very concious.

Emotion is also a factor as to how we experience the world. How? Say in the past we walked on a bridge and somebody scared us terribly. The brain takes in fear associated with bridge. Over the years the person forgets about the experience and it becomes unconcious. The emotion remains accessable though. So what can happens is that when the person walks on a bridge he can become highly anxious. The brain still associates fear with a bridge but the concious mind doesn't know why.

When we say we have a good fibe or a bad fibe about something or someone than the reason is probably somewhere in the unconcious.

The best start we can give our children therefore I think is giving them lots of positive ecxperiences or good fibes for later.

What do you think?