India currently punches below its weight on the world stage due to slow economic development: 30 years ago, its GDP per capita was similar to China’s, but is now 5x lower. However, if India were to enter a period of similarly high growth over the next 30 years as China has for the past 30, it would quickly become one of the most powerful countries in the world thanks to the scaling factor of its immense population. 

Many factors determine happiness, but one has stirred considerable controversy over the years: money.

While the old adage says that money can’t buy happiness, several studies have determined that the more your income increases, the happier you are, up until US$75,000 a year. After hitting that threshold, more income doesn’t make a difference.

But in a new analysis of more than 40,000 U.S. adults aged 30 and over, my colleague and I found an even deeper relationship between money and happiness.

‘If you look at what people actually do to be happier, it seems nearly everyone tries to change the external facts: we try to become richer, thinner, more successful, to find a better house in a nicer area, and so on. A few of us think about trying to spend less time working, and more time on hobbies or with friends and family. Almost no one thinks about actively retraining the way they think. In fact, I don’t think this last idea even crosses most of our minds.’

All of them will help you think better, and I hope they inspire curiosity. 

The benefits of being attractive are exorbitant. Beauty might be the single greatest physical advantage you can have in life. And yet compared to other other privileges that may arise from race, gender, or sexuality, we don’t talk much about it. There is plenty of evidence that attractive people have it easier.

Certainty itself is an emotional state, not an intellectual one. To create a feeling of certainty, the brain must filter out far more information than it processes, which, of course, greatly increases its already high error rate during emotional arousal. In other words, the more certain you feel, the more likely you are wrong in some respect.

Everyone has the same amount of time in a day, except for the day they are born and the day that they die. Those days are started late and ended early, respectively. Every other day is the same, 24 hours. Most of what happens within our days are the results of choices, concious or otherwise. 

Poker players like to brag they win with luck not skill. So do investment bankers. Scientists. And writers. Skill, we insist, is our ticket to success. Who can blame us? It’s a useful delusion to bank our identity on skill, says Maria Konnikova. We can’t stand trembling in the chaos. We need some way to convince ourselves we can cash in. That skill can ever be enough, though, is “the biggest bluff,” writes Konnikova in her new book by that name.

It spells out the idea that the brain works as an editor, constantly minimizing, “squashing” input from the outside world, and in the process balancing internal models of the world with sensations and perceptions. Life, in Friston’s view, is about minimizing free energy. But it’s not just a view of the brain. It’s more like a theory of everything. Friston’s free-energy theory practically sets your brain on fire when you read it, and it has become one of the most-cited papers in the world of neuroscience.

“It’s really important to understand we’re not seeing reality,” says neuroscientist Patrick Cavanagh. “We’re seeing a story that’s being created for us.” |

When disaster strikes, people come together. During the worst times of our lives, we can end up experiencing the best mental health and relationships with others. Here’s why that happens and how we can bring the lessons we learn with us once things get better.

It’s easier than ever to slip into a vortex of YouTube or meaningless email, but if you reflect on why you’re distracted, you might discover something deeper.

In difficult times, it’s easy to feel at the mercy of big forces, but we’re more resourceful than we thinkContinue reading…

Conspicuous consumption is still part of the contemporary capitalist landscape, and yet today, luxury goods are significantly more accessible t…. This deluge of accessible luxury is a function of the mass-production economy of the 20th century, the outsourcing of production to China, and the cultivation of emerging markets where labour and materials are cheap. At the same time, we’ve seen the arrival of a middle-class consumer market that demands more material goods at cheaper price points.