Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
We credit Socrates with the insight that 'the unexamined life is not worth living' and that to 'know thyself' is the path to true wisdom. But is there a right and a wrong way to go about such self-reflection?
Simple rumination – the process of churning your concerns around in your head – isn't the answer. It's likely to cause you to become stuck in the rut of your own thoughts and immersed in the emotions that might be leading you astray. Certainly, research has shown that people who are prone to rumination also often suffer from impaired decision making under pressure, and are at a substantially increased risk of depression.
Instead, the scientific research suggests that you should adopt an ancient rhetorical method favoured by the likes of Julius Caesar and known as 'illeism' – or speaking about yourself in the third person (the term was coined in 1809 by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge from the Latin ille meaning 'he, that'). If I was considering an argument that I'd had with a friend, for instance, I might start by silently thinking to myself: 'David felt frustrated that...' The idea is that this small change in perspective can clear your emotional fog, allowing you to see past your biases.
A bulk of research has already shown that this kind of third-person thinking can temporarily improve decision making. Now a preprint at PsyArxiv finds that it can also bring long-term benefits to thinking and emotional regulation. The researchers said this was 'the first evidence that wisdom-related cognitive and affective processes can be trained in daily life, and of how to do so'.
The findings are the brainchild of the psychologist Igor Grossmann at the University of Waterloo in Canada, whose work on the psychology of wisdom was one of the inspirations for my recent book on intelligence and how we can make wiser decisions.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 12 2019, @02:56PM (3 children)
You, sir, just won the prize of the most idiotic S/N comment of the day.
Western civilization? By civilization you mean something "apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health"?
'Cause guess what? All the above were brought to the western barbarians in Caesar's campaigns [wikipedia.org]. If not for him the "western civilization" would still drink the Koolaid their druids fed them [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Funny) by nitehawk214 on Monday August 12 2019, @03:54PM (1 child)
Yes, yes, the roads. But aside from that; what have the Romans done for us?
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 12 2019, @04:59PM
The Super Bowl would use Arabic Numerals?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 13 2019, @01:36AM
Most of that (as in everything but wine) was discontinued for centuries throughout the western half (and a good portion of the Eastern half) when the Dark Ages happened.