Check Out These Blog Posts From Steve McEllistrem

Many of the things we do, in the hopes of achieving a particular result, come back to surprise us with unintended consequences. Sometimes those consequences are negative, sometimes positive, and sometimes so strange we find it difficult to believe there’s even a connection. It’s great when those unexpected consequences are positive – like with the development of Viagra, which began in the lab as a treatment for high blood pressure – or with the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone, which ...

People have been telling stories for almost as long as there have been people. Sometimes those stories have been told through art, as in the cave paintings found in Asia and Europe. Sometimes music has served as the medium and, before written language appeared, music assisted in transferring knowledge from one generation to the next. Yet the most direct way of relating information remains through words, either written or spoken. But why are stories so important? There’s actually a scientific ...

The world is complicated – that’s hardly news. But it’s important to recognize that fact because our brains don’t like a complicated world. They want a world that makes sense, a world that follows patterns we’re capable of understanding. This is why we discriminate and stereotype and generalize all the time. We witness a new thing and immediately wonder if that thing is common or rare. If it’s common, we can sort of forget about it, tuck it away in ...

We all know that desire is the longing for a person, thing or state of mind – and most of us call it an emotion, although psychologists tend to differentiate it from emotion, asserting that it arises from bodily structures or functions. However, we don’t need to get into technicalities in definitional terms to understand desire and what it does. It is a driver, a prod to action. The philosopher Thomas Hobbes asserted that it was the fundamental motivator of ...