It was a very difficult little league baseball game.  The favored team was losing right from the early innings.  The young players walked with their heads hung low, and even their parents’ anguished faces confirmed the grief.

But surprisingly, the team slowly began battling back.  As the game got closer and closer to the end, the club clawed their way into contention.  And it all came down to the last inning and the final at-bat.

The youth stepped to the plate.  With nerves rattling and stomach churning, he eyed the incoming pitch – and then swung.  Continue reading →

A young couple was enjoying a lovely stroll through a beautiful garden.  They happened upon a fruit tree of which they were warned not to eat.  A sly, conniving stranger convinces the couple that it really is OK to eat the fruit from that particular tree.  So they do.  And all hell breaks loose.  Literally.

We’ve all heard the story – forms of which exist in nearly all cultures, all religions.

God becomes angry.  And not just a mild twinge of annoyance, but full-on rage.  He punishes the couple making their lives difficult, forces childbirth to be painful, and extends His curses to all future children the couple and their descendants will sire.  He further projects his disappointment by castigating the devious stranger as well all his offspring.   Continue reading →

I once worked for a boss who could best be described as a bully.  He yelled at the slightest hint of bad news and believed that threatening people was the best way to inspire them.  He had a very “successful” professional career in that his teams accomplished extraordinary results and he scaled to the penultimate position in his industry.  But most of his employees were terrified of him – until the morning he died of a heart attack in his office, right next to mine.

How do you feel when you are stuck in an environment with a difficult person?  Perhaps you’ve had the experience of working with (or for) someone who was extremely challenging to your psyche.  An awful boss who created a very challenging workplace.  A difficult co-worker with intentionally opposing views or ineffectual skills.  A family member that represented everything contradictory to your views.

Whether those encounters induce mild frustration or stressful, cortisol-pulsing rage – they aren’t fun, and few people look forward to such incidents.  But that need not be the case. Continue reading →

What would you say if I told you that I can make you clearly hear something that was never spoken? Prepare to have your senses blown.

The phenomenon I’m about to describe was first detailed by two cognitive psychologists at the University of Surrey in England – when they accidentally stumbled on it in 1976 while studying how infants perceive language.

It’s called the McGurk Effect (named after the lead researcher) and it works like this. A video shows a person’s face and you hear the person uttering the sounds ba ba ba. Like the sound of a sheep – bah – repeated three times, over and over. There is no confusion about what the sound is – it is perfectly clear. Ba ba ba, ba ba ba, ba ba ba. Continue reading →

Ms.  Zawistowska is going to die.  It will be by suicide.  While many will argue her boyfriend was responsible, her devastating past haunted her relentlessly.  It’s a tragic story of stark contrasts and choices.

Most of us would agree that making difficult choices is emotionally taxing, and our general preference is not to make them.  Research demonstrates that people have much stronger emotional reactions (including regret) to an outcome that follows from some action we took versus the same outcome resulting from inaction.

Blackjack gamblers were studied to see how much regret they felt when they lost.  But the clever part of the study was as follows: some players were asked “Do you want to hit?” while others were asked “Do you want to stand?”  And regardless of which question was posed, answering “yes” produced much greater regret than saying no if the outcome was a loss! Continue reading →