Why Jokes Make News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

change people’s beliefs, it seems to make no moral difference anyway.Illustration by Triff / Shutterstock Belief is a special kind of human power. Agustin Fuentes, an anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame, eloquently claims as much in his recent book Why We Believe: Evolution and the Human Way of Being. It’s the “most prominent, promising, and dangerous capacity humanity has evolved,” he writes, the power to “see and feel and know something—an idea, a vision, a necessity, a possibility, a truth—that is not immediately present to the senses, and then to invest, wholly a...

It’s encouraging to know that merely paying attention to the details of your environment can make you a little more rational.Illustration by yulianas / Shutterstock Would you like to be more rational? Of course you would. Who doesn’t want to behave and think more reasonably? Good news: New research, from Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer, suggests mindfulness, or at least an aspect of it, can help. By “mindfulness”—a feature of Buddhism for thousands of years, and a subject of scientific investigation for a few decades—most people mean a mental state you can be in. Let’s try.