Oct 1, 2011

Jun 19, 2011

This is a repository of facts about humans. Please come back to this page from time to time to see most recent facts.

• Our brains are designed to seek out novelty, but too much information can overwhelm them; we are generally better at assessing risk when listening to Bach than with the chatter of TV news.
• Men’s brains tend to shut down after they have proposed a deal, waiting for the response. Scans show that women brains continue to be active, analysing whether they have done the right thing.
• Humans are the only animals that can delay gratification, a function of the prefrontal cortex. However, the prefrontal cortex only matures after the age of 30, and later in men than women. Before that, we are more likely to seek immediate gratification.
• If groups of young men are shown pornographic pictures of women and then asked to choose between safe and risky investments, compared with men shown non-pornographic pictures they choose far riskier portfolios.
• Our brains reward social interaction with the release of a chemical called oxytocin. It makes us feel good when we follow the herd. Stock market bubbles are one likely result of this.
• Our brains are wired for human oxytocin-mediated empathy (or HOME). We are biologically stimulated to love (or hate) what is most familiar to us. We are built to form attachments, to value what we own more than what we do not own. This fact skews the rationality of all our investment decisions.
• If stomachs did not have a lining of mucus, your stomach would digest itself.
• There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body.
• It takes about 60 seconds for a human blood cell to make a complete circuit of the body.
• The average person will shed 40 pounds of skin in his/her lifetime.
• 1/15th of a pint of blood is pumped with every heartbeat.
• Humans share 98.4% of our DNA with chimps. In comparison, we share 70% of our DNA with a slug.
• The lightest baby to survive weighed a mere 283 grams.
• On average, women say 7,000 words per day while men manage just over 2,000 words.
• The human brain uses 20% of the body’s energy but is only 2% of the body’s weight.
• On average, humans lose 40-100 strands of hair per day.
• A sneeze can exceed the speed of 100mph.
• A cough can reach the speed of 60mph.
• The average person will drink about 16,000 gallons of water in his/her lifetime.
• It takes 17 muscles to smile while taking 43 muscles to frown.
• The human brain is composed of 75% water.
• Human thigh bones are stronger than concrete.
• More germs are transferred while shaking hands compared to kissing.
• There are approximately 550 hairs in a person’s eyebrow.
• The strongest muscle in the human body is the tongue.
• A person produces 10,000 gallons of saliva in an average lifetime.
• The hardest bone in the human body is the jawbone.
• The number of eye blinks varies greatly from about 29 blinks each minute if you are talking to someone to only 4 blinks each minute if you are reading.
• The average human blinks 25 times per minute.
• A nail takes around 6 months to grow from base to the tip.
• Each second 10,000,000 cells die and are replaced in your body.
• Your liver performs over 500 functions in your body.
• The average person spends 1/3 of their lifetime sleeping.
• More germs are transferred when shaking hands than kissing.
• The average person (from western culture) consumes 10 liters of alcohol per year.
• Roughly 75% of people who play the radio in their car sing along to it.
• Human thigh bones are stronger than concrete.
• Your right lung takes in more air than your left one does.
• The human brain is composed of 75% water.
• 70% of the composition of dust in your home is made up of shed human skin and hair.
• The tooth is the only part of the human body that can’t repair itself.
• One human hair can support 3kg.
• Humans are the only animals that cry tears and blush.
• It takes the interaction of 72 different muscles to produce human speech.
• If the normal one hundred thousand hairs on a head were woven into a rope, it could support a weight of more than twelve tons.
• The fingernail grows about 1.5 inches per year.
• The total amount of skin covering an adult human weighs 6 lbs.
• The average person flexes the joints in their fingers 24 million times during a lifetime.
• Each person inhales about seven quarts of air every minute.
• On average, we breathe between 12 and 18 times a minute.
• The average guy will grow about 27 feet of hair out of his face during his lifetime.
• Approximately 1 out of 25 people suffers from asthma.
• The average man sweats 2 1/2 quarts every day.
• One out of every hundred American citizens is color blind.
• An average person laughs about 15 times a day.
• A human heart beats 100,000 times a day.
• Many sailors used to wear gold earrings so that they could afford a proper burial when they died.
• Some very Orthodox Jew refuse to speak Hebrew, believing it to be a language reserved only for the Prophets.
• Because they had no proper rubbish disposal system, the streets of ancient Mesopotamia became literally knee-deep in rubbish.
• Sliced bread was patented by a jeweler, Otto Rohwedder, in 1928. He had been working on it for 16 years, having started in 1912.
• Ancient drinkers warded off the devil by clinking their cups
• The Nobel Prize resulted form a late change in the will of Alfred Nobel, who did not want to be remembered after his death as a propagator of violence – he invented dynamite.
• Coffee is the second largest item of international commerce in the world. The largest is petrol.
• Only 1 child in 20 are born on the day predicted by the doctor.
• Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, never phoned his wife or his mother, they were both deaf.
• There are over 200 religious denominations in the United States.
• Eau de Cologne was originally marketed as a way of protecting yourself against the plague.
• Theodor Herzi, the Zionist leader who was born on May 2 1860, once had the astonishing idea of converting Jews to Christianity as a way of combating anti-Semitism.
• The Great Pyramid of Giza consists of 2,300,000 blocks each weighing 2.5 tons.
• Urine was once used to wash clothes.
• The city of New York contains a district called ‘Hell’s Kitchen’.

Jun 9, 2011

By Steve Pavlina

Online social networking has forever changed the ways we connect with each other. Which of these changes are helping you create a positive and abundant social life? Which changes are leading you towards stagnation?

Do you consider interacting with web browsers and online profiles to be social behavior? There’s certainly a social aspect to it in the sense that you’re communicating with people via the Internet, but it’s a pretty limited channel for satisfying your true social needs.

Typing messages back and forth or reading status updates can’t compare to having a real face to face conversation.

Clicking through someone’s photos is a lifeless 2D experience compared to seeing a real body in its full 3D animated expressiveness.

Video-Skyping is a richer way to connect, but you can’t touch an online video. You can’t even share a handshake let alone a hug.

Where does this path really lead? As you make more online friends, it leads you to spend more time with your web browser or your cell phone. This means less time to spend on real face to face human interaction.

Social networking via the Internet is like eating junk food. It will fill your belly and give you some temporary satisfaction, but in the long run, it doesn’t do much for your health. It can also encourage you to over-consume because it doesn’t give your body the nutrition it needs.

The Need for Socialization

Human beings are innately social creatures. We’re born completely dependent on others for our survival, and as much as you might like to think otherwise, this doesn’t change much throughout our lives. Humans are not solo creatures. We band together to meet our needs, not just our survival needs but our emotional needs as well.

One of the worst punishments to inflict on a human being is solitary confinement. After some time completely alone, most people would gladly spend time in the company of convicted murderers than be subjected to further solitude. Simply put, we need each other. Any humans who may have been truly anti-social would have been bred out of existence long ago, since we have to connect with others to reproduce.

If you find yourself addicted to online socializing, don’t see it as an addiction. See it as a real human need. Whether you’re willing to admit it or not, you need to connect with other human beings. And you need to do this often, ideally spending a significant part of each day in the company of others.

The problem with trying to meet this need via the Internet is that it doesn’t fully satisfy the need for socialization. This leads to over-consuming, spending more time in online socializing that you’ve consciously decided.

In January I quit Facebook, shutting down my personal page as well as my fan page. I shared my reasons for doing so in my Leaving Facebook blog post. I also shared an update after 30 days in my 30-day Facebook Fast post.

I realized that being active on Facebook couldn’t compare to real face to face socializing, so I shifted my social time towards more offline connections. I made it a higher priority to connect with people in person. I still communicate online with people frequently, but I don’t invest as much time on it as I did last year.

I noticed some key differences as I made this shift. One difference is that I’m having a lot more fun. Doing a lot of online socializing tends to drain me, but face to face interactions usually energize me. Deep conversations about personal growth, the nature of reality, or other subjects that interest me are inspiring.

Another difference is that face to face conversations can create the kind of connection in an hour that it would take a month to achieve online. When you can hear someone’s tone of voice and see their body language, you’re going to understand them much better than if you simply read their words on a screen. This is one reason I started doing live workshops too — people can instantly grasp ideas in minutes that might otherwise take hours of reading to comprehend.

Faux Socialization

If you spend a lot of time alone, you’ll often feel the urge to do some type of faux socialization. You may want to flip on the TV so you can see other people. Or you may want to check your email or social networking sites impulsively. Or you may want to read a book, so you can feel you’re engaged with other characters. Reading my articles can fit the bill as well, giving you the sense that you’re connecting with me; yet the reality is that we may be many miles apart.

Yes, faux socialization is still a form of connecting, just as junk food is a form of food. But it’s probably not the best way to meet your needs.

The socializing part is a genuine human need, included in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as a sense of belongingness and love, but the faux part can constitute an unhealthy addiction. Just as junk food crowds out healthy food, faux socializing crowds out healthy socializing.

When you get more of the real thing, you’ll find that your taste for the fake version gradually drops off. If you eat a lot of fruits and vegetables every day, junk food cravings will tend to subside within 30-40 days. If you do a sufficient amount of in-person socializing (ideally every day), your interest in online socializing will tend to diminish.

To shift towards a healthier and more abundant social life, don’t worry about trying to quit Facebook or anything like that. Instead, focus on amping up your face to face socializing. Make a point of doing something social several times a week, every day if you can swing it. You’ll likely find that after about a month or so, socializing online will seem a lot less interesting, perhaps even boring.

If you work with people, you may enjoy a lot of socialization in the normal course of your workday, but if you work at home like I currently do, it’s especially important to allocate time for your social life — offline. This can make your workdays more productive in the long run since you won’t feel as much of an impulse to get your social needs met via the Internet during your workday.

Someday the Internet may be so advanced that it can meet our social needs in truly satisfying and fulfilling ways. But for now it’s still in the junk food stage, too artificial to compete with the real thing.

I’m not suggesting you need to give up online socializing. Treat it as a companion to face to face socializing, but not a substitute. Make your in-person social life a significantly higher priority than your online social life. This is very important to your path of personal growth. There are many aspects of human social development that get stunted by excessive online communication and which can only be fully developed with sufficient face time (no pun intended for the geeks who are capable of noticing the pun).

If you’re not sure where to begin, start by setting the intention to expand your offline social life. When offline social opportunities come up, say yes to them. When you get inspired by an idea to do something social, act on it. It will take time, perhaps a few months, but eventually you’ll have a rich and abundant social life, and you won’t feel such a desire to try to meet this need through faux socialization. Fill your belly with real food, and you won’t be so hungry.

May 30, 2011

By Steve Pavlina

It can be tricky to achieve a healthy balance between self-discipline and spontaneity. If you’re too disciplined, you can become overly rigid and miss some wonderful growth opportunities. But if you’re too spontaneous, then your life may become messy and unfocused, struggling to get ahead. Disciplined, focused efforts can create some wonderful long-term payoffs, such as multiple streams of passive income that render a time-sucking job completely unnecessary. It takes a careful balance between these two factors to create a life of freedom and fulfillment.

Self-discipline pays off with the opportunity to be more spontaneous. It’s much easier for me to be spontaneous when you have full control of your schedule and don’t need a job. So if you like spontaneity, you’d better fall in love with self-discipline, or you’ll probably end up stuck working hard to fulfill someone else’s desire for more spontaneity.

Being spontaneous also makes it easier to be disciplined. If all you see before you is work, work, and more work, that isn’t very motivating. But if you make an effort to have fun, take unplanned trips, and live by the seat of your pants on occasion, you’ll burn off a lot of stress, and your motivation will increase. Happiness is a lot more motivating than tension.

Steve Pavlina is widely recognized as one of the most successful personal development bloggers on the Internet, attracting more than two million monthly readers to his website, StevePavlina.com. He has written more than 1000 articles and recorded many audio programs on a broad range of self-help topics, including productivity, relationships, and spirituality. Steve has been quoted as an expert by the New York Times, USA Today, U.S. News & World Report, the Los Angeles Daily News, Self Magazine, and The Guardian. He is also a frequent guest on radio and Internet radio shows.

Jan 25, 2011

Robert Thurman contends that true happiness occurs when we’re least aware of it.

Jan 24, 2011

With the increase of toxic chemicals entering into our personal care products it is not surprising why people adopt alternatives. Product-free or “no-poo” hair washing involves using a boar bristle brush, water and plenty of scalp scrubbing to clean hair without chemicals. A few hundred years ago, the idea of washing your hair sans chemicals would have been commonplace. Today it seems strange or even unhygienic; yet some people are turning back to traditional methods of haircare. Whether stemming from a desire to reduce consumption, avoid chemicals, relieve conditions such as eczema or dermatitis, or simply experiment, shampoo-free washing (known affectionately as ‘no-pooing’ or ‘water-only washing’) can be very effective in maintaining clean and healthy hair.