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Sounds True Presents Compassionate Brain Feat. Dr. Kelly McGonigal
The Compassionate Brain Activating the Neural Circuits of Kindness, Caring, and Love – Practical Neuroscience for Transformation Dr. Rick Hanson presents a FREE seven-part video series—The Compassionate Brain—that explores effective ways to change your brain and heart and life. Each week Dr. Hanson will be joined by a world-class scholar/teacher, including…
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Reading Bodies, Touching Minds – How Eye Contact, Facial Expressions, and Body Language are the Key to Connection
Just by looking at someone, you experience them. Ever fallen in love at first sight or had a “gut feeling” about someone? You internally resonated with them. Ever seen someone trip and momentarily felt a twinge of pain for them? Observing them activates the “pain matrix” in your brain,research shows. Ever been…
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Taking Time
Time is money in the West. Workers are paid by the hour, lawyers charge by the minute, and advertising is sold by the second ($117,000 per second at this year’s Super Bowl). Think about this: The civilized mind has reduced time, the most obscure and amorphous of all intangibles, to…
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Compassion Behind Bars
A few weeks ago, an unprecedented letter arrived at our office at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University. Here is an excerpt: The purpose of the inmate’s letter was to request reading materials pertaining to research on meditation and the brain. His goal upon…
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Brooklynites, Bike Accidents and the Science of Compassion
About 11 years ago I was hit by a car while bicycling through Brooklyn, N.Y. When I returned to consciousness I was lying in an intersection, blood streaming from a damaged hand, head, and knee. A small group of people had materialized out of the seemingly-empty street. They must have…
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Feeling Under the Weather? Go Hang Out with Friends
During my first quarter at Stanford, I got sick a lot. This was very unusual for me and was a little mysterious, since I was practicing all my healthy behaviors — eating well, sleeping well, and exercising daily. I blamed my frequent illness on living with so many people in…
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5 Ways to Do Good and Feel Good — Fast, Free and From Your Desk
Science tells us compassion is good for our health, and we know that helping others makes us feel good, but sometimes it feels like there just aren’t enough hours in the day. There is so much to do, can I possibly find time to contribute? Yes! In minutes, at no…
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The Science of Compassion
It is imperative that each of us try to garner insight into our prejudices. Awareness is the first step toward more compassionate decisions.
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Compassion: Shifting the Balance From Bad to Good Stress
We generally think of stress as a big, bad, disease-causing, killer. Yet mother nature didn’t give us the stress response to kill us. She gave us the stress response to help us stay alive! For example, without this fight-or-flight response, a lion has no chance of catching its meal, and…
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10 (Science-Based) Reasons Why Compassion is Hot
Science suggests that compassion may well be the most important thing in your life. 1. It makes us happy (as happy as getting money)! A brain-imaging study headed by neuroscientist Jordan Grafman from the National Institute of Health showed that the “pleasures centers” in the brain, i.e. the parts of…