Happiness: Is Feeling Content More Important Than Purpose and Goals?
There is much written about finding one’s life purpose and reaching self actualisation, but do we really need to have one? My partner is happy pottering around the house with his family around him, watching TV, reading the news, working in his unskilled job without responsibility, supporting his football team. Meanwhile, I am frustratingly “growing and developing”, learning, wondering what it is all about – yet without much actually changing in my life. Are drifting and feeling contented in life more important than having a “life purpose” and goals?
—Brenda, Blackpool
Questions about happiness, purpose and goals remind me of Don Quixote, the dreaming knight in Cervantes’ novel of the same name, and Sancho Panza, his earthy page. Indeed, literature often contains characters and themes that reflect telling universal truths about human existence, experience – and psychology.
As the novel progresses, we realise that both characters are equally sophisticated intellectually. But while Don Quixote’s goals are utopian, romantic and clearly unobtainable, Sancho is satisfied with feeling safe and eating bread and cheese – accompanied by a little wine, of course – after each of their frustrated misadventures.
I’m a psychiatrist and research on personality shows that a more open and inquisitive personality will always want to seek new experiences and sensations. This is more exciting, but also less comfortable, than rejecting what feels strange or unfamiliar.
Don Quixote’s sensation-seeking and restless personality, as well as his lofty ideals, are the drivers of his misguided adventures. Unable to find excitement in the comfortable but mundane daily life of a landed country gentleman, he sets out to right all the wrongs in the world in the most chivalrous and valiant manner he can imagine. His ambitious goals are unobtainable, though, and so he remains chronically dissatisfied.
In contrast, Sancho’s goals (cheese and wine) are simple, and they are also reliable and immediately achievable. Sancho will inevitably have some difficult emotions, like every other human, that will prevent him from being consistently happy. But he will be less inclined to express his occasional periods of distress in complex existential terms – and they are unlikely to nag and torture him in the same way.
On one level, then, Sancho’s personality seems better suited than Don Quixote’s for achieving a satisfactory level of psychological wellbeing. But we need to consider the fact that Quixote’s tortured loftiness will also afford him occasional moments of ecstasy that Sancho will never experience. Quixote will sample all the many wondrous highs – and lows – of existence.
Choleric Quixote
Quixote has a type of personality that Galen, the Greek physician of classical times, would have labelled as “choleric”: passionate, charismatic, impulsive and sensation seeking. He also has an extremely rich, but equally unstable, inner life, which produces copious amounts of fantasy and emotion.
Soon after the second world war, a London-based psychologist called Hans Eysenck developed another personality theory that included the dimensions of extroversion and neuroticism. Quixote is high in extroversion (he engages constantly with the external world) and high in neuroticism (his emotional life is unstable and intense), a combination that would be the equivalent of Galen’s choleric personality.
Sancho is, of course, the exact opposite. He could be described as “phlegmatic” in Galen’s classification: he is generally introverted, and being perfectly steady in emotional terms, he would certainly score very low on neuroticism. He does not view the world through the filter of a rich but volatile inner life, and instead sees ordinary windmills where Quixote sees formidable giants.
Resistance to Immunity
Not far from the hospital in Edinburgh where I work there’s a graveyard; it can be a calm, if morbid, place to reflect after a tough shift. Passing it acts as a memento mori on days when I need to be reminded of the value of medical practice—which for all its modern complexity remains the art of postponing death. Benches are set out in the shade of trees, between red-shingle walkways and rows of Victorian tombstones. Many of the stones commemorate dead children, but there’s a memorial near the entrance that always stops me short. It’s dedicated to Mary West, a woman who died in 1865, at the age of thirty-two—two years before Joseph Lister published his groundbreaking work on antisepsis. The reason for her death is unrecorded. Beneath her own name are listed the names of her six children in their order of death—at ages two, eleven, four, twelve, and fourteen. Only one lived to adulthood.
The death of any child is a tragedy, but to lose so many is now almost unthinkable. In the Victorian period, when infectious diseases were rife, it was routine. I trained in medicine through the 1990s and never saw a case of one of the most virulent, measles, though my tutors told me to learn about it from textbooks. Yet working in the emergency room recently I saw a girl with a rash, fever, conjunctivitis, swollen lymph glands—all classic symptoms of the measles virus. “Do you know if she has had her MMR [measles, mumps, and rubella] vaccine?” I asked her father. He nodded, but something made me doubt his sincerity.
“Are you sure?” I asked again.
He nodded, then broke my gaze. “Maybe she skipped that one,” he said at last.
One in twenty children with measles develops pneumonia. Only about one in a thousand develops the most serious complication, encephalitis (a viral infection of brain cells). About two in a thousand will die. Having to second-guess parents about whether a patient has been vaccinated is new: physicians are accustomed to trusting the parents of the children they see—after all, we both want what’s best for the child. But when fears about vaccine safety cause a drop in vaccination rates, cases of serious infectious disease start rising. Parents who decline to vaccinate their children sense a growing opprobrium toward their choices. They have a consequent incentive to lie or, perhaps worse, stay away from the emergency room for fear of having their parenting challenged by medical professionals.
In 2014 Eula Biss examined this crisis of confidence in her book On Immunity: An Inoculation and proposed that we think of infection control as an ecology to be kept in balance rather than a war between opposing sides. Writing with the perspective of a new mother who ultimately chose vaccination for her own child, Biss explored the metaphors we use to think about disease and the body. The word “inoculate” has its origin in the care of gardens and orchards, and was originally used to describe the grafting of a bud onto a tree. It’s unfortunate that vaccination has come to be seen as an unnatural and dangerous intervention, when in truth it’s through “grafting” that the natural power of the recipient’s own immune system is harnessed. The testimony of our graveyards is that before public health, clean water, antisepsis, and vaccination, it was perfectly natural that most children died.
To Delay Death, Lift Weights
Trust me, I understand—in theory—that I should be stronger. Yes, I’m an aerobic beast (or an aerobic addict, if you prefer), but I’m not oblivious to the benefits of having a reasonable amount of muscle. When I play the “look, you’re touching the ceiling!” game with my 18-month-old, I’d prefer that she get bored before I have to admit that Daddy can’t military-press her anymore. And I’m hoping that 20 years from now I’ll still be able to push myself out of an armchair without help.
But there’s a gap between “should” and “do.” This gap is one of the most vexing riddles in public health, and even people like me, who spend their days telling other people what they should be doing, aren’t immune to it. For that reason, I’m always eager for reminders of what’s at stake—and two papers offer some eye-opening insights into the benefits of strength training, even for people who consistently blow the aerobic exercise guidelines out of the water.
The first is an analysis of the link between strength, muscle mass, and mortality, from a team at Indiana University using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. The design was pretty straightforward: They assessed 4,440 adults ages 50 or up who had their strength and muscle mass assessed between 1999 and 2002. The researchers checked back in 2011 to see who had died.
For muscle mass, they used a DEXA scanner to determine that 23 percent of the subjects met one definition of “low muscle mass,” with total muscle in the arms and legs adding up to less than 43.5 pounds in men or 33 pounds in women. For strength, they used a device that measures maximum force of the knee extensors (the muscles that allow you to straighten your knee) and found that 19 percent of the subjects had low muscle strength.
The results, published in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, found that those with low muscle strength were more than twice as likely to have died during the follow-up period than those with normal muscle strength. In contrast, having low muscle mass didn’t seem to matter as much.
The Mozart in the Machine
Beauty is in the biometric data of the beholder, and artificial intelligence can decode it.
Sometime in the coming decades, an external system that collects and analyzes endless streams of biometric data will probably be able to understand what’s going on in my body and in my brain much better than me. Such a system will transform politics and economics by allowing governments and corporations to predict and manipulate human desires. What will it do to art? Will art remain humanity’s last line of defense against the rise of the all-knowing algorithms?
In the modern world art is usually associated with human emotions. We tend to think that artists are channeling internal psychological forces, and that the whole purpose of art is to connect us with our emotions or to inspire in us some new feeling. Consequently, when we come to evaluate art, we tend to judge it by its emotional impact and to believe that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
This view of art developed during the Romantic period in the 19th century, and came to maturity exactly a century ago, when in 1917 Marcel Duchamp purchased an ordinary mass-produced urinal, declared it a work of art, named it "Fountain," signed it, and submitted it to an art exhibition. In countless classrooms across the world, first-year art students are shown an image of Duchamp’s "Fountain," and at a sign from the teacher all hell breaks loose. It is art! No it isn’t! Yes it is! No way!
After letting the students release some steam, the teacher focuses the discussion by asking "What exactly is art? And how do we determine whether something is a work of art or not?" After a few more minutes of back and forth the teacher steers the class in the right direction: "Art is anything people think is art, and beauty is in the eye of the beholder." If people think that a urinal is a beautiful work of art -- then it is. What higher authority is there to tell people they are wrong?
And if people are willing to pay millions of dollars for such a work of art -- then that’s what it is worth. After all, the customer is always right.
In 1952, the composer John Cage outdid Duchamp by creating "4’33”." This piece, originally composed for a piano but today also played by full symphonic orchestras, consists of 4 minutes and 33 seconds during which no instrument plays anything. The piece encourages the audience to observe their inner experiences in order to examine what music is, what we expect of it, and how music differs from the random noises of everyday life. The message is that it is our own expectations and emotions that define music and that separate art from noise.
If art defined by human emotions, what might happen once external algorithms are able to understand and manipulate human emotions better than Shakespeare, Picasso or Lennon? After all, emotions are not some mystical phenomenon -- they are a biochemical process. Hence, given enough biometric data and enough computing power, it might be possible to hack love, hate, boredom and joy.
In the not-too-distant future, a machine-learning algorithm could analyze the biometric data streaming from sensors on and inside your body, determine your personality type and your changing moods, and calculate the emotional impact that a particular song -- or even a particular musical key -- is likely to have on you.
Of all forms of art, music is probably the most susceptible to Big Data analysis, because both inputs and outputs lend themselves to mathematical depiction. The inputs are the mathematical patterns of soundwaves, and the outputs are the electrochemical patterns of neural storms. Allow a learning machine to go over millions of musical experiences, and it will learn how particular inputs result in particular outputs.
Supposed you just had a nasty fight with your boyfriend. The algorithm in charge of your sound system will immediately discern your inner emotional turmoil, and based on what it knows about you personally and about human psychology in general, it will play songs tailored to resonate with your gloom and echo your distress. These particular songs might not work well with other people, but are just perfect for your personality type. After helping you get in touch with the depths of your sadness, the algorithm would then play the one song in the world that is likely to cheer you up -- perhaps because your subconscious connects it with a happy childhood memory that even you are not aware of. No human DJ could ever hope to match the skills of such an AI.
You might object that such an AI would kill serendipity and lock us inside a narrow musical cocoon, woven by our previous likes and dislikes. What about exploring new musical tastes and styles? No problem. You could easily adjust the algorithm to make 5 percent of its recommendations completely at random, unexpectedly throwing at you a recording of an Indonesian Gamelan ensemble, a Rossini opera, or the latest Mexican narcocorrido. Over time, by monitoring your reactions, the AI could even determine the ideal level of randomness that will optimize exploration while avoiding annoyance, perhaps lowering its serendipity level to 3 percent or raising it to 8 percent.
Another possible objection is that it is unclear how the algorithm could establish its emotional goal. If you just fought with your boyfriend, should the algorithm aim to make you sad or joyful? Would it blindly follow a rigid scale of “good” emotions and “bad” emotions? Maybe there are times in life when it is good to feel sad? The same question, of course, could be directed at human musicians and DJs. Yet with an algorithm, there are many interesting solutions to this puzzle.
One option is to just leave it to the customer. You can evaluate your emotions whichever way you like, and the algorithm will follow your dictates. Whether you want to wallow in self-pity or jump from joy, the algorithm will slavishly follow your lead. Indeed, the algorithm may learn to recognize your wishes even without you being aware of them.
Alternatively, if you don’t trust yourself, you can instruct the algorithm to follow the recommendation of whichever eminent psychologist you trust. If your boyfriend eventually dumps you, the algorithm may walk you through the official five stages of grief, first helping you deny what happened by playing Bobby McFerrin’s "Don’t Worry Be Happy," then whipping up your anger with Alanis Morissette’s "You Oughta Know," encouraging you to bargain with Jacque Brel’s "Ne me quitte pas" and Paul Young’s "Come Back and Stay," dropping you into the pit of depression with Adele’s "Someone Like You" and "Hello," and finally aiding you to accept the situation with Gloria Gaynor’s "I Will Survive" and Bob Marley’s "Everything's Gonna Be Alright."
The next step is for the algorithm to start tinkering with the songs and melodies themselves, changing them ever so slightly to fit your quirks. Perhaps you dislike a particular bit in an otherwise excellent song. The algorithm knows it because your heart skips a beat and your oxytocin level drops slightly whenever you hear that bit. The algorithm could rewrite or edit out the offending part.
The idea of computers composing music is hardly new. David Cope, a musicology professor at the University of California in Santa Cruz, created a computer program called EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence), which specialized in imitating the style of Johann Sebastian Bach. In a public showdown at the University of Oregon, an audience of university students and professors listened to three pieces -- one a genuine Bach, another produced by EMI and a third composed by a local musicology professor, Steve Larson. The audience was then asked to vote on who composed which piece. The result? The audience thought that EMI’s piece was genuine Bach, that Bach’s piece was composed by Larson, and that Larson’s piece was produced by a computer.
Hence in the long run, algorithms may learn how to compose entire tunes, playing on human emotions as if they were a piano keyboard. Using your personal biometric data the algorithms could even produce personalized melodies, which you alone in the entire world would appreciate.
It is often said that people connect with art because they find themselves in it. This may lead to surprising and somewhat sinister results if and when, say, Facebook begins creating personalized art based on everything it knows about you. If your boyfriend dumps you, Facebook might treat you to a hit song about that all-too-familiar bastard rather than about the unknown person who broke the heart of Adele or Alanis Morissette. Talk about art as a narcissistic extravaganza.
Alternatively, by using massive biometric databases garnered from millions of people, the algorithm could produce a global hit, which would set everybody swinging like crazy on the dance floors. If art is really about inspiring (or manipulating) human emotions, few if any human musicians will have a chance of competing with such an algorithm, because they cannot match it in understanding the chief instrument they are playing on: the human biochemical system.
Will this result in great art? That depends on the definition of art. If beauty is indeed in the ears of the listener, and if the customer is always right, then biometric algorithms stand a chance of producing the best art in history. If art is about something deeper than human emotions, and should express a truth beyond our biochemical vibrations, biometric algorithms might not make very good artists. But nor would most humans. In order to enter the art market, algorithms won’t have to begin by straight away surpassing Beethoven. It is enough if they outperform Justin Bieber.
Barriers to effective communication
The major barriers to human communication at the individual and organisational levels include:
Limitation of the receiver capacity
There can be serious breakdown in communication if the receiver does not have enough background information on the issues being communicated or if his cognition level is low. I this depends on his state of background information
Noise
This includes any external force which interfere with the reception of messages
Misunderstanding
The symbols the sender is using may have the same meaning for both. There is bound to be misunderstanding
Purpose of communication
The view of communicative purposes is to persuade,to inform and to entertain
Communication to inform
This involves passing an information to the audience with the intent of educating or imparting knowledge
Communication to persuade
Persuation attempts to influence people's beliefs, attitudes, intentions, motivation or behaviour in relation to an event. Persuation is achieved through written or spoken communication that conveys information, thoughts, emotions, logic and augments
Persuasive communication achieves four things. Which are;
- Stimulation
- Call to action
- Increase consideration
- Tolerance for alternative perspectives
Noise in communication
Noise is a technical term for all forms of obstacles which conspire to reduce the amount of information that is sent between those who are communicating
Types of noise
Physical Noise
These are environmental noise which may include loud sounds from radio sets, markets in full session, traffic, or children playing
Psychological Noise
These are noise produced by the brain, that is irrelevant thinking
Linguistic Noise
This is caused by the sender. That is when the sender uses a tone or language that the receiver does not understand clearly
Linguistic noise can be phonological, syntactic or sematic
Physiological Noise
This includes effects of poor hearing, stammering or stuttering, effects of medication, eye defects or other mental or emotional disabilities
Communication in English 5
**FEEDBACK**
This is the reaction that the receiver gives to the message. The receiver may agree or disagree. The feedback may be verbal or non verbal. It can be written or oral
The importance of feedback is that it provides guidance for the next message that we send to the receiver
IMPORTANCE OF FEEDBACK
Feedback is crucial in communication because it enables the sender to ascertain if the message reached the intended recipient, if the message was properly interpreted and consequently helps the encoder to adjust the message accordingly. Below are some other importance;
1. Collection of information
2. Completion of the communication process
3. Measuring the effectiveness of communication
4. Improving the labour management relationship
5. Problem solving
6. Taking proper decisions
Process of feedback
The process or technique of feedback should include the following steps :
a. Listening and understanding the message properly
b. Asking questions if the message is not understood properly to get clarification
c. Understanding the message in the sense originally intended
THE DETERMINANTS OF COMMUNICATION EFFECTIVENESS
Effective communication is essential to the success of any organization as well as other human relationships
COMMUNICATIVE SKILL
There are five verbal communication skills. Two of this are encoding skills (writing and speaking). Two are decoding skills (reading and listening). The fifth is important to both encoding and deciding (thoughts or reasons)
ATTITUDE
The attitude of the communication source affects the way in which we communicate
Good morning everyone. Hope you all had a nice weekend
Well it's a new week
Just want to wish y'all a wonderful week
Be safe
Communication in English 4
Factors that affect the message
1. The message code
2. Message content
3. Message treatment
The message code
A code is any group of symbols that can be structured in a way that is meaningful to some people. Languages are codes. For effective communication to take place the source must choose a code that is mutually intelligible to both the source and the receiver. If the recipient does not understand the language used, communication will fail
Message content
This is the material on the message that was selected by the source to express his purpose. Message contents includes 5he assertions that the source makes, the information he presents, the inferences that he draws and the judgements he proposes
Message treatment
The way the message was treated by the source matters a lot. In this case we are talking about message delivering.
THE CHANNEL
To transmit a message the sender uses some kind of channel (medium). The channel is the means by which we transfer the message from one sender to the receiver and vice versa. The channel could be oral, written or non verbal
If the sender uses an inappropriate channel the message may not get to the receiver
THE DECODER (RECEIVER)
The decoder is the receiver of the message. After the channel is selected, the message enters the decoding stage in the communication
Please don't forget to like and comment
Thanks
Communication 3
**Process of communication**
1. Stimulus
2. Encoder
3. Message
4. Channel
5. Decoder
6. Feedback
The stimulus
The stimulus is a situation that sets the communication in motion. It means what makes the person to start communicating.
That is, the reason for the communication encounter between two or more people
The encoder
This is the individual, group or organization who initiated the communication. The source is initially responsible for the success of the message
The message
This is the intention, idea, feeling, knowledge, or need sent across to the receiver. The message in a communication situation is the sum total of all that the source encoder desires to pass across to the decoder
Well continue on my next article
Communication in English 2
On our last class we discussed about the meaning of communication
Today we're going to talk about processes of communication
A process is a connected series of actions, changed, etc. Process is any phenomenon which shows a continuous change in time
The process of communication is divided into three components
**1. Actions**
This refers to the initiative taken by someone (a sender) or an encoder to share information, observations or opinions with others
**2. Reaction**
This is a response to the action taken by the sender.
In other words, the person is addressed to as the receiver responds to the initiative of starting the communication
**3. Interaction**
This is primarily concerned with the exchange of messages between the sender and receiver.
****Models of communication****
Model simplifies reality and indicates relationships. Communication model is an idealized systematic representation of the communication
**Elements of communication**
Communication is a dynamic process involving the interplay of several essential elements
In the rhetoric, Aristotle postulated that in our study of our communication process, we have to look at three communication elements. Which are;
1. The person who speaks
2. The speech that he produces
3. The person who listens
He meant that each of these elements is necessary for communication and that we can organize our study of the process under the three headings
If the models of the communication are put together the elements of the communication process will be;
1. Stimulus
2. Encoder
3. Message
4. Channel
5. Decoder
6. Feedback
That's all for today........
Communication in English 1
Communication serves as an instrument of social interaction. Communication helps us to understand ourselves, to keep in touch with people, I to understand them and to predict their response to situations
It is also a means whereby power is acquired, exercised and sustained.
In business and industry, communication helps to orient workers to one another and to the goals of the organization. It is the means by which such goals will be pursued, attained, sustained and improved
Communication has been described as a **Chameleon** of a word changing colors of its own meaning with a change of speaker
In the military, communication is thought of in terms of the army's line of communication
The sociologist thinks in terms of newspaper and broadcasting
The civil engineer thinks of road and railways
The electrical engineer thinks of telephone and teleprinters
Communication it self is derived from the Latin word Communicate which means **to share or to make common**
This the other half of the meaning has to do with information and meaning
Communication can be defined as the process of transmitting information and common understanding from one person to another
Communication can be said as sharing information
Communication can be seen as giving and receiving messages
Communication can also be seen as the transfer of information from one or more people to one or more other people
Lastly we can also define communication as a goal oriented process by which messages are passed from sources to receivers through adequate channels
On our next article we would discuss about other sub topics under communication
Thanks for you time please don't forget to like and comment
Effects of pollution in Nigeria
As we all know Pollution is the unfavourable alternation of the environment due to the addition of impurities by man that causes danger to living things
Pollution is caused by pollutants. Pollutants are substances that is introduced to the environment and causes pollution
The pollution is Nigeria has become something that's unbearable and if not treated with care can lead to destruction of life's and properties
Some examples of causes of pollution in Nigeria is
**1. BURNING OF SUBSTANCES**
In Nigeria you find people burning things close to houses or in places that there are a lot of people which is very wrong
The smoke produced from burning materials is a product of carbon monoxide (CO).
Carbon monoxide is produced by burning carbon substances with fire and addition of air. And it is a very harmful smoke that causes suffocation and damages the lungs when breathe in by humans
A useful way to control this is by burning those substances in places where there are no humans present or recycling is another option
**2. SEWAGES** (I.e Human waste such as Faeces, urine, fluid discharge from houses or factories)
If sewage are not well disposed they pollute the atmosphere
They may contain harmful chemicals. Sewage washed from land to ponds or rivers causes harm to aquatic bodies
And the urine and faeces produces offensive smells which pollutes the atmosphere and makes it un-easy for humans to
This can be controlled by using deep pit latrines or septic tanks
Sewage should be properly treated before disposal or recycling
And also indiscriminate passing of excreta should be avoided
There are other causes of pollution in Nigeria but we would discuss just this two
The ways of controlling pollution can be exercised easily by participating in sanitation as organised by the government on every last Saturday of the month
Thanks for reading. Don't forget to like and comment your ideas
Available at Lady's Empire
Get all kinds of ladies clothes and foot wears at an affordable and fascinating price
We also sell snickers for both sex. Dm on WhatsApp via 08024140661 for serious business deals😉😉
@Jbankz
