One of the biggest challenges as you expand your online influence is how to manage your attention. If you follow people back on Twitter, for example, pretty soon you’re trying to drink from a firehose.

ifttt to the rescue!

In this post I show how to auto-curate Twitter lists of a) people who engage with you publicly via @ messages or retweets, and b) people who participate in a particular hashtag chat.

It’s a great way to help focus your attention and support on like-minded people who are willing to support and interact with you.

Noise to Signal Cartoon

This simple distinction between anxiety and fear is an important one in the task of defining and treating of anxiety disorders, which affect many millions of people and account for more visits to mental health professionals each year than any of the other broad categories of psychiatric disorders.
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Fear and anxiety are in the brain because they helped our ancestors and theirs cope with life’s challenges. But when these states interfere with our ability to survive and thrive, one has an anxiety disorder. These include phobias, panic disorder, post-traumatic stress syndrome, generalized anxiety disorder, among other conditions. While fear plays a key role in some anxiety disorders (phobia, post-traumatic stress), it takes a back seat in others (generalized anxiety).

Read more…

Simply stated, clinical trial data on antidepressants, similar to that for many other classes of drugs, including most cancer and anti-inflammatory drugs, have never shown that more than 60 to 70 percent of patients in any given study improve.  And, in many studies, improvement on a placebo (so-called sugar pill with no active drug) is observed in 30 to 50 percent of patients during the average six week trial period.  This could be taken to mean that only about 20 percent of depressed patients truly benefit from their antidepressant medication (i.e. beyond those patients who would benefit from just a placebo), with 30 to 40 percent of patients failing to improve on either drug or placebo.

Why, then are drugs with such limitations widely used as antidepressants by the medical profession?

Great question. Especially when studies have shown that the single most effective treatment for depression is…

Wait for it…

Whichever one the patient, not the doctor, believes is going to be most effective. A 2005 study found that “after three months of treatment, the…patients matched with their preferred treatment were significantly less depressed than those not matched. Patients who got their preferred treatment also tended to be less depressed after nine months.”

So the placebo effect seems to take place even when you’re not receiving a placebo — simply the belief and expectation that the treatment you’re receiving significantly improves its effectiveness.

Does this have implications for treatments for other health issues, both mental and physical? Not a huge leap…

No accurate thinker will judge another person by that which the other person’s enemies say about him.

Napoleon Hill

Google should post that as a disclaimer on searches on people’s names! Some of the nicest, brightest, most spiritual people I know have been the brunt of someone’s negative rants online, and unfortunately, if they shout loud enough and often enough, they can easily created a distorted perception of someone who has years or even decades of fans and satisfied customers.

Want to make the world a more positive place?

Tell about your positive experiences online. Write a review on Yelp or CitySearch. Give a recommendation on LinkedIn. Share about it on Twitter and Facebook. Rate it on Amazon or Google.

Don’t make stuff up. Don’t whitewash the truth. Just be every bit as willing — eager, even — to tell about good experiences as bad.

Suppose you wrote a program that translated written words into vibrations. Perhaps the specific vibration would depend on the length of words, number of syllables, tone of the sentence, punctuation, and other factors. Presumably, Hemingway’s text would create different pattern of vibrations from Shakespeare’s sonnets, and so on. My hypothesis is that we humans are so wired for language that the patterns of the vibrations that originate from the written word would register to us as both human-made and – here’s the best part – unpredictable. That’s the Holy Grail.

More at Dilbert.com

All the breaks you need in life wait within your imagination.

Napoleon Hill

It turns out that your social network doesn’t just affect how you think — it literally rewires your brain in ways you can’t even imagine. Yet another reason to pick your friends wisely!

Not long ago, scientists thought that social factors were relatively unimportant to the basic structure and function of the brain and biology because of their relatively recent emergence in species. The social brain hypothesis, however, posits that the social complexities of primate species contributed to the rapid increase in neocortical connectivity and intelligence.