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Educational psychologists recognize two main kinds of motivation, intrinsic and extrinsic.

Intrinsic motivation takes over when we have a deep and genuine interest in a task or topic and derive satisfaction from the work or learning itself.

Extrinsic motivation, on the other hand, gets us to work by putting the outcome — like a paycheck or a good grade — in mind.

Every day, it seems, some verifiably intelligent person tells us that we don’t know what consciousness is. The nature of consciousness, they say, is an awesome mystery. It’s the ultimate hard problem. The current Wikipedia entry is typical: Consciousness “is the most mysterious aspect of our lives”; philosophers “have struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness.”

I find this odd because we know exactly what consciousness is — where by “consciousness” I mean what most people mean in this debate: experience of any kind whatever. It’s the most familiar thing there is, whether it’s experience of emotion, pain, understanding what someone is saying, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting or feeling. It is in fact the only thing in the universe whose ultimate intrinsic nature we can claim to know. It is utterly unmysterious.

The nature of physical stuff, by contrast, is deeply mysterious, and physics grows stranger by the hour. (Richard Feynman’s remark about quantum theory — “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics” — seems as true as ever.) Or rather, more carefully: The nature of physical stuff is mysterious except insofar as consciousness is itself a form of physical stuff.

Fame, riches and pleasure beyond imagination. Sound great? He went on to write:“I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot: They amount to 14.”Abd al-Rahman’s problem wasn’t happiness, as he believed — it was unhappiness

Happiness and unhappiness are certainly related, but they are not actually opposites.

Circumstances are certainly important. No doubt Abd al-Rahman could point to a few in his life. But paradoxically, a better explanation for his unhappiness may have been his own search for well-being. And the same might go for you.Continue reading the main story

74 percent of graduates from four-year colleges say that their education was “very useful in helping them grow intellectually.”

When, as is often the case in business education and teacher training, practical skills far outweigh theoretical understanding, we are moving beyond the intellectual culture that defines higher education

This lack of academic engagement is real, even among schools with the best students and the best teachers, and it increases dramatically as the quality of the school decreases.  But it results from a basic misunderstanding — by both students and teachers — of what colleges are for.

It’s the default prescription for any tense situation: a blind date, a speech, a job interview, the first dinner with the potential in-laws. Relax. Act natural. Just be yourself. But when you’re nervous, how can you be yourself?

Edward Slingerland. He has developed, quite deliberately, a theory of spontaneity based on millenniums of Asian philosophy and decades of research by psychologists and neuroscientists.

He calls it the paradox of wu wei, the Chinese term for “effortless action.”

We continue to revisit the issue of motivation and specifically, the “carrot and stick” aspect.  New research seems to indicate that brain chemicals may control behavior and for people to learn and adapt in the world; therefore, both punishment and reward may be necessary. T

The real question is, which route would you choose—positive or negative? Most people are taught to refrain from engaging in a certain behavior by being given punishments that create negative feelings.

Different players use different strategies. It all depends on their genetic material. People's tendency to change their choice immediately after receiving a punishment depends on which serotonin gene variant they inherited from their parents. The dopamine gene variant, on the other hand, exerts influence on whether people can stop themselves making the choice that was previously rewarded, but no longer is

More 5inShare Email Print A defendant in the Atlanta Public Schools case turns herself in at the Fulton County Jail on April 2. (David Goldman/AP) Earlier this week at The Atlantic, Emily Richmond asked whether high-stakes testing caused the Atlanta schools cheating scandal. The answer, I would argue, is yes... just not in the way you might think. Tests don't cause unethical behavior. But they did cause the Atlanta cheating scandal, and they are doing damage to the teaching profession. The argument that tests do not cause unethical behavior is fairly straightforward, and has been articulated by a number of writers. Jonathan Chait quite correctly points out that unethical behavior occurs in virtually all professions -- and that it occurs particularly when there are clear incentives to succeed. Incentivizing any field increases the impetus to cheat. Suppose journalism worked the way teaching traditionally had. You get hired at a newspaper, and your advancement and pay are dictated almost entirely by your years on the job, with almost no chance of either becoming a star or of getting fired for incompetence. Then imagine journalists changed that and instituted the current system, where you can get really successful if your bosses like you or be fired if they don't. You could look around and see scandal after scandal -- phone hacking! Jayson Blair! NBC's exploding truck! Janet Cooke! Stephen Glass! -- that could plausibly be attributed to this frightening new world in which journalists had an incentive to cheat in order to get ahead. It holds true of any field. If Major League Baseball instituted tenure, and maybe used tee-ball rules where you can't keep score and everybody gets a chance to hit, it could stamp out steroid use. Students have been cheating on tests forever -- massive, systematic cheating, you could say. Why? Because they have an incentive to do well. Give teachers and administrators an incentive for their students to do well, and more of them will cheat. For Chait, then, teaching has just been made more like journalism or baseball; it has gone from an incentiveless occupation to one with incentives.

Chait refers to violations of journalistic ethics -- like the phone-hacking scandal -- and suggests they are analogous to Major-League steroid use, and that both are similar to teachers (or students) cheating on tests. But is phone hacking "cheating"

Phone hacking was, then, not an example of cheating. It was a violation of professional ethics. And those ethics are not arbitrarily imposed, but are intrinsic to the practice of journalism as a profession committed to public service and to truth.

Parents face great challenges raising kids in our increasingly complex, frightening and uncertain world. The CDC reports that anxiety is on the rise among children, affecting 7.1 percent of children 6 to 17 years of age, about 4.4 million U.S. kids. The majority are untreated.

Children face myriad challenges—bullying, developmental trauma, information overload, global political upheavals and conflict, climate change, high rates of family breakup, and so on.

Learning to ride out anxiety and negotiate firm-but-flexible boundaries is a language much harder to learn in adulthood.

Dworkin, too, believes there is no contradiction in the term “religious atheism,” and offers no less towering examples than Shelley, Einstein and William James to show that it’s possible to adopt what he calls a “religious attitude,” a worldview which “accepts the full, independent reality of value,” as distinct from scientific fact, and which holds that both individuals and the natural world they inhabit have intrinsic, transcendental value, without believing in a personal God

Dworkin’s goal is to emphasize “the importance of what is shared” by subscribers of both “godly and godless religion.” That, in a word, he thinks, is faith. And while believers may think their faith in God differs substantially from the “faith” of an atheist, Dworkin’s rather startling conclusion is that the faith of theists is necessarily identical to that of religious atheists.

the brain is a malleable organ. Every time you do an activity, or have a thought, you are changing a piece of yourself into something slightly different than it was before. Every hour you spend with others, you become more like the people around you.

Gradually, you become a different person. If there is a large gap between your daily conduct and your core commitment, you will become more like your daily activities and less attached to your original commitment. You will become more hedge fund, less malaria.

I would worry about turning yourself into a means rather than an end. If you go to Wall Street mostly to make money for charity, you may turn yourself into a machine for the redistribution of wealth. You may turn yourself into a fiscal policy.

Recreational readers tend to have higher academic achievement and greater economic success, and even display more civic-mindedness.

eading now competes for children’s time with many other alluring activities, including television, social media, and video games. Most leisure time is now spent in front of a screen.

n some cases, parents must also sign this log before their child turns it in to the teacher.

Who is the enemy and what is the enemy's 'Threat Doctrine?'"

"the mythical 'moderate' Muslims who embrace traditional Islam but want a peaceful coexistence with the West is effectively non-existent."

They Must Be Stopped: Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam and How We Can Do It, and Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns

The vast majority of philosophy departments in the United States offer courses only on philosophy derived from Europe and the English-speaking world. For example, of the 118 doctoral programs in philosophy in the United States and Canada, only 10 percent have a specialist in Chinese philosophy as part of their regular faculty. Most philosophy departments also offer no courses on Africana, Indian, Islamic, Jewish, Latin American, Native American or other non-European traditions. Indeed, of the top 50 philosophy doctoral programs in the English-speaking world, only 15 percent have any regular faculty members who teach any non-Western philosophy.

Given the importance of non-European traditions in both the history of world philosophy and in the contemporary world, and given the increasing numbers of students in our colleges and universities from non-European backgrounds, this is astonishing. No other humanities discipline demonstrates this systematic neglect of most of the civilizations in its domain. The present situation is hard to justify morally, politically, epistemically or as good educational and research training practice.

While a few philosophy departments have made their curriculums more diverse, and while the American Philosophical Association has slowly broadened the representation of the world’s philosophical traditions on its programs, progress has been minimal.

children are "intuitive sociologists" trying to make sense of the social world. We already know that very young children make up theories about everyday physics, psychology and biology. Dr. Rhodes thinks that they have theories about social groups, too.

children aren't just biased against other racial groups: They also assume that everybody else will be biased against other groups. And this extends beyond race, gender and religion to the arbitrary realm of Zazes and Flurps.

intuitive social theory may even influence how children develop moral distinctions

the evolutionary logic of relationships beyond rivalry

~98% of bacterial species don’t thrive outside mixed-species colonies.

Bacteria are not self-sufficient: They’ve co-evolved to depend on each other.

The number of young men and women majoring in English has dropped dramatically; the same is true of philosophy, foreign languages, art history, and kindred fields, including history. As someone who has taught in four university English departments over the last 40 years, I am dismayed by this shift, as are my colleagues here and there across the land. And because it is probably irreversible, it is important to attempt to sort out the reasons—the many reasons—for what has happened.

English: from 7.6 percent of the majors to 3.9 percent

In one generation, then, the numbers of those majoring in the humanities dropped from a total of 30 percent to a total of less than 16 percent; during that same generation, business majors climbed from 14 percent to 22 percent.

To facilitate a 50,000:1 teacher-student ratio, they rely on an instructional model requiring minimal instructor involvement, potentially to the detriment of learners.

The only real change in the year following “the year of the MOOC” is that these companies have now begun to strike deals with private organizations to funnel in high performing students. To me, this seems like a terrifically clever way to circumvent labor laws. Instead of paying new employees during an onboarding and training period, business can now require employees to take a “free course” before paying them a dime.

why not reach out to an audience ready and eager to learn just because they are intrinsically motivated to develop their skills? This is what has motivated me to look into producing an I/O Psychology MOOC

Every American sees that leaders in foreign countries sometimes behave immorally. Yet we often seem averse to believing that our own leaders can be just as malign.

That's certainly my bias: Judging the character of U.S. officials, my gut impulse is to give them the benefit of the doubt.

But I know that my gut is sometimes wrong, that our institutions rather than anything intrinsic to our compatriots explains the comparative lack of corruption and tyranny in the United States, and that it's important to stay open to the possibility of malign or corrupt leaders—because otherwise, it's impossible to adequately guard against them. The Founders understood this. So did generations of traditional conservatives.

Hamilton was no militant atheist. He was not contemptuous of faith or of the faithful—far from it; he was a longtime churchgoer—and he was therefore, I think, all the more a threat to unreflective Christianity. At heart, he was questioning whether the Christian tradition of encouraging a temporal moral life required belief in a divine order.

The questions with which he grappled were eternal, essential, and are with us still: how does a culture that tends to be religious continue to hold to a belief in an all-powerful, all-loving divinity beyond time and space given the evidence of science and of experience?

faith has become not a possession but a hope.”

Part of what adults need to learn about self-control is in those videos of 5-year-olds. The children who succeed turn their backs on the cookie, push it away, pretend it’s something nonedible like a piece of wood, or invent a song. Instead of staring down the cookie, they transform it into something with less of a throbbing pull on them.

Adults can use similar methods of distraction and distancing, he says. Don’t eye the basket of bread; just take it off the table. In moments of emotional distress, imagine that you’re viewing yourself from outside, or consider what someone else would do in your place. When a waiter offers chocolate mousse, imagine that a cockroach has just crawled across it

“If you change how you think about it, its impact on what you feel and do changes,”