Meditating appears to change how you learn.
Originally shared by Neuroscience News
Meditation Adapts the Brain to Respond to Better Feedback
Researchers found that participants who meditated were more successful in selecting high-probability pairings indicating a tendency to learn from positive outcomes.
The research is in Journal of Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience. (full open access)
I’m on a forum for neopro writers, and a little while back I posted a question about how I could level up my short story writing. I want to break into the top pro magazines.
There were a lot of excellent answers, but they boiled down to, “You level up by grinding.”
Originally shared by Writers Write
Practice Makes Perfect http://bit.ly/2LRpjQL
I listened to this very moving podcast on my way home yesterday.
It’s about a Somali main who becomes a political prisoner of the regime and is kept in solitary confinement. His only human contact is when his friend in the next cell teaches him how to tap out code, letter by letter, on their shared wall.
Then his friend gets a book. Anna Karenina. And he reads it to the guy. All 800 pages. By tapping it out, letter by letter, on the wall.
And it helps him in completely unexpected ways that are thought-provoking from a writer’s POV.
Via Ryan Toxopeus.
I don’t know about you, but if my first draft is vaguely coherent and resembles a novel in the way that, say, Swamp Thing resembles a human being, I take the win.
Originally shared by Nicola Smith
Sage advice from a Hugo-award-winning, million-dollar-book-deal author:
Basically, if you think you’re an expert you’ll continue to do things the way you know how to do them, and may even subtly resist any other way.
This applies to creativity in general.
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
Why Disruptive Innovation Requires Looking Beyond the Experts http://bit.ly/2qR9W4S
Everyone feels like this. Even the people who seem blind to their own faults feel like this; they just cover it with arrogance.
Originally shared by Winchell Chung
Neil Gaiman on Impostor Syndrome
Via Laura Gibbs. Sharing to read later
Originally shared by Larry Ferlazzo
I realised last night that writing is good for my mental health.
This is a statement that a lot of writers will find odd, so let me explain.
After a bad retail experience while doing my grocery shopping amid the chaos of Christmas Eve, I felt anxious, and was considering abandoning my plans for the evening. Lately, though, I’ve found that I hold myself to the standards of the characters in my books, and they would definitely have faced the fear and gone ahead; so I did too.
Which is funny, because I’m very aware that the characters in my books are drawn out of elements of myself. So I used a part of myself to motivate myself to be better than I am.
I write noblebright fantasy, which means that my leading characters exhibit courage, perseverance, and kindness to a greater degree than most real people (though certainly there are real people like that). In using them as my model, I’m strengthening the best aspects of myself.
But it doesn’t just work that way. I’ve heard that horror writers are generally extraordinarily nice people, and I suspect that it’s because they draw out the darker parts of themselves into the light, externalise them so that they’re no longer driven by them unawares – and perhaps so that they have a clear model to steer away from, as I have one to steer towards in my more noble characters.
So, in summary: pay attention to the voices in your head. It can improve your mental health.
John Ward speaks wisdom. And so do these comic strips.
Making is, indeed, better than complaining. My first semipro sale was of a story I wrote because I read one and thought it could have been done much better. One of my best books has the same backstory.
Originally shared by John Ward
If you do any type of creative work, please click this link. It will help you. It doesn’t matter if you’re an artist, a writer, a programmer, or a stay-at-home parent trying to figure out some innovative way to get your kids to eat broccoli, the comics posted on the linked webpage will help you flip your point of view and see things in a new light. It’s brilliant, brilliant stuff and deserves to be shared with anyone who struggles with these issues.
Here’s the link: