A slashdot comment on Emotion

Today I read a comment on slashdot about emotion. The orginal subject is about a php developer quits. The comment I read talks about the role of emotion in our life. Almost exactly my own thoughts except for the wordings. Here I cites below:

"Re:Looks like a stomp and a doorslam.
(Score:5, Insightful)
by hey! (33014) on Friday July 28, @07:38AM (#15797781)
(http://kamthaka.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday March 30, @03:18PM)
It's not that different from what adults do though.

Recently, I read an interesting book by a psychologist named Paul Eckman. OK it wasn't an interesting book, it was a tedious book on a fascinating subject.

A couple of the takeways from the book: emotions are persistant mental states that are triggered by situations that bear on your future well being, and in turn trigger certain stereotyped survival related behaviors. In an emotional state, people do not process new information that would contradict the survival behavior. In other words, once you get to fighting, or to running away, you aren't going to listen to reason until you've fought it out or have run far, far away. The psychologists therefore call emotional states refractory, which is a word I learned from EE "Doc" Smith which when applied to metal means hard to work and when applied to a state of mind means hard to work with.

I've sometimes seen job listings looking for people who are passionate about their work. I'm not so sure this the right thing to look for unless you are looking for a short term employee. All jobs involve having your desires frustrated from time to time. As your emotions build up, your ability to process new information and ideas that could help you overcome your frustrations is diminished, because atavistic survival behaviors related to conflict and survival begin to strangle your productiivty.

In that case, the best thing is to take yourself out of the situation, which in all liklihood your own behavior contributes to.

You can take two people who are miserable and underperforming in their jobs, have them swap jobs, and suddenly they'll feel a great relief and surge of productivity, as they work flexibly around the exact same kinds of problems that had them stymied in their original job.

Unless you're some kind of Zen master you're going to run into this sooner or later. When you reach the point where you can't perform up to your potential, even your potential as defined by the less than perfect work situation you're in, it's time to move on. This is probably why academia, infamous for its harsh and pointless politics, evolved the institution of the sabbatical. But for the rest of us, this means quitting and getting a new job.

The emotions expressed in the email are probably universal. They do not in themselves indicate immaturity However, one thing that you do learn as you get older is when you feel strong negative emotions towards other people, hiding them is the best first reaction. In most cases you cannot change other people, especially if you are terminating your relationship to them. So the best you might hope for from negativity in the way you do this is some kind of catharsis, or perhaps some kind of public vindication. However experience teaches you don't often get those, and when you do they aren't as satisfying as you imagined them being.

Above the simple futilty of showing your anger and disappointment, expressions of strong negative emotion evoke an equal, if not stronger reaction from their targets. Often this ignites a round of petty retribution that comes back to haunt you.

So when it becomes impossible to deal with the emotional climate of work, leave. But always leave with a kind and magnanimous word. In the end that serves you best.

--
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure."

Einstein and Game Addicts

It is very easy to understand people who engage in efforful process of gaining experience and heading for the direction of becoming experts when they are at the beginning of the road. It is easy to pick up a hobby and devote countless hours in it; it is easy to spend day-and-night learning programing; it is easy to to practice tennis without breaks from time to time. Because, at the start of the road, it is easy to make progresses and we are making subconscious comparisons to majority of other people that haven't been on the road yet. Say I started to learn playing tennis, it is easy to play much better with some practice, and I am comparing to other people that havn't practiced at all. I am picking those people for my subconscious to compare because they are equivalent to me (before my practicing). Thus the practice makes great fun. We see us getting better and better, which subconsciously means we are getting better and better than other people.

Then after a while, practicing will lose its luster and become not so joyful anymore. For one, it is because now it needs much more significant effort to make an apparent progress as now our experience base is bigger. And for two, we are no longer comparing ourselves to novice, but to seasoned players that plays around or even better than our current level.

So it is very natural to see most majority stays at not far from the beginning of the road.

Then what plays key here is the size of your goal and your perseverance. The goal size is the projection size of the goal in your mind. In common word, it is "how strong" do you desire that goal. Of course how this projection works worth another day's thoughts of exploring, so lets leave it that the same goal can have very different projection size on different mind and those who find it easy to persever no doubt has a much bigger image of their goals.

Then it comes to perseverance. Can I say that the one who persevers reaches farther along the road? But is perseverance a fibre that is intrinsicly born with us? The more I think about it, the more I find it may be just a result of balance between the joy of imagining your goal versus pain the marching on the road causes.

The bigger of your goal, the more joy it gives by just thinking about it. The better you can spot the progress you made along the road helps reducing the pain it causes. The smaller of your goal, the more easily you can spot the small progress you made along the road. ... I know, above statement can not stand on their own, but do they reflect some truth? If they do, to make it easy to travel on the road, one needs both a big goal projection and a small practical goal. Without either of which, the road is quite tough. I salute to those who travels throught the path with only one element.

Einstein's big goal is finding out a unified theory of God, super grand! however, I am not sure he had enough progress along the path. He did had quite some progress at early middle part of his path -- discovering the theory of relativity. I guess that success makes his early life quite joyful (thus easy), but watch his next half life is pretty amazing, that he persevers. So a super grand goal does help! On the other hand, Newton, had almost similar grand goal as Einstein, but he gives that up at his mid-life -- very understandable. As to the overall life, Newton probably is more joyful than Einstein unless Einstein had another big progress that compensates his pain (if that happened, it will over compensates all the pain for sure). Of course, I could be totally off about the pain in Einstein due to some aspect of his life I am not aware of or neglected.

Addict gamers have a very similar strength of perseverance as Einstein. At the start of game it is easy and joyful because the character keeps leveling. At certain stage, they will reach a level that to gain another level, they need play countless more hours; and for the next level they need play even more. In this case, the size of goal is much smaller than Einstein's, but it is relatively easy to recognise the progress along the path as well. Most players after reaching certain level, the size of the goal projection in their mind are not sufficient to overcome the progress they made, so will stop. But for addict gamers, they persevers. They must have a way of project a not so big goal really big into their minds. Nevertheless, I salutes them.

How much interest was born with you?

When we read many life guide out there, most of them all point to some intrinsic quality of you -- what you really interested in and what you really love to do.

The question is trickily asked. The word "really" in the question assumes that there is such quality (interest and love) lives in you, born with you, and you need to find it out. But what if the quality is not inside you? Then how hard would it be to find something intrinsic but not intrinsically there.

I start to have doubt in it. There must be some part of our interest born with us. Watching kids play, some kid like to play quietly and some like to play loud, some like to draw and some like to run around. But looking back at much of my experience and connect them together, I can't help to see that large part of my interest is just determined by how easily I can get appreciation.

Say I love maths, is the fact that I got a lot of praises from my big brother and the fact I got a amazing math book show me all the tricks of math computation and later I can show off before other kids and teacher? Say I love play chess, does the fact that I started chess earlier of my age and at school I can beat all the kids in my class? I lost much of my intestest in chess, does it to do with the fact that school I hardly find a competition, and in college that I hardly can beat anyone?

It is more complex that just current appreciations. I still think I love chess. Does it to do with my old memory of winning all those games? I work very hard on getting my phD degree, does that has anything to do with the image in my mind of appreciation of a PhD degree?

It goes on and on, and I hardly can find any of my interest has nothing to do with environment, society, experience, ... etc.

Sometime, it resolve into a chicken-egg question. I have strong interest in physics because I do better in physics than other same-ages. I doing better in physics give me the appreciation or satisfaction of self-esteem, and it drives me futher hard work in gaining more experience in physics. And it goes on. What it starts I learn physics better and faster than many others has much to do with the fact that I like math and good at math. Then logic goes again with math. So all my life to now I believe I have intrinsic talent in math, until my son born. He can't count to 10 yet but I have met other kids even younger than him can count to even 100. Maybe I don't have that math talent intrinsically.

Well, finding out chicken first or egg first sure is exhausting. Let me just rest on the conclusion that large portion of my interest is purely obtained after born.

Comment on "Find What You Love To Do"

Nice Article!

However, I see from comments that many readers are young about to choose a career or even a major, and would like to point out: be flexible. What you love to do often change.

From my cursory reading, skill+interest+value -> what you love to do (and should do to make a living).

Skills are just a proportion to experience. For young people, don’t bother too much about your current skills and do place more emphasis on your interest. The efficiency of building skill set or experience is proportional to your interest. With strong interest and time and baseline energy, you will have that skill by time you call it a career.

Interest does not need to be specific. Actually our interest is largely determined by the education we received and the people we live, socialize, and work with. If you doing something and can get sufficient appreciation with relative ease, you are bound to have interest in that particular thing. So it is not that much single cut word to write it down. Say you play football pretty well, and are very interested in it, will you still be interested in it once you are competing in a national league and spend 5 years without achieving your goals? (that also depends on what your dream is). I like science, physics to be specific. But when it comes to academic and stuck to costant writing proposals and doing research based on trend, I am not so sure about my interest any more. So be flexible.

Finding what you love for life is not an easy task and we should not expect any easy solution out of it. Life is complex. Choose your future is difficult. But enjoy whatever life throws at you and be happy is not that difficult.

But I find the formula given in the article most useful when you hate what you are doing right now and thinking about a change. Use this formula to find a choice that is better than what your current job, and go for it. The usefulness of this formula comes in convincing yourself about the rightness of your choice and having a peace of mind.

My 2 grain of salt.

Israel, how to live happily ever after

Israel is fighting a war that he cannot win. It is like John McClain living in middle of Harlem. Yes, Israel is strong and able, he can pound any neighbor and win any fight that he got involved, but all his neighbors hate him, the fights will never stop.

Why the arab neighbors hates israel?

1.Jews are different than Arabians. We naturally don't trust, don't respect people that is different from us.

2.Jews are rich, richer than his neighbors. We naturally don't like others doing better than us. If we can't have effective ways bring ourselves better, we wish the others doing worse. It is the comparison matters.

3.There is long history behind it. They have been fighting since the beginning.

Of all the reasons, I think the most fundmental root of the non-ending conflicts is the better economic status of Jews.

Rich people generally don't hate poor people. They disrepect them because they believe they are smarter than those poor people -- if the poor is as smart as I am, they should be rich. But they don't hate poor people.

Poor people hates rich people. Being poor rips off their capability to play equally with the rich, and it is all rich people's fault. If there is no rich people, we won't be so poor, at least won't feel so poor.

From a westerner's point of view, Israel has all the legitmate reasons to fight back. Is playing fair and getting richer a sin?

Looking at human nature, yes, the better Jews plays, the more conflicts it raises.

There is all kinds of reasons for middle east confilicts, but I think they are all offsprings from economic unequilibrium.

US is super rich, so it will always think along the line of Israel, and it will not working toward equilibrium, which is to embedding more conflicts. US is seeding the middle east crisis.

Europe is not as rich as US, but rich nevertheless. Europe won't fundmentally help the middle east crisis either.

Arabians cannot stop the hatred, it is against human nature.

So for Israel, if he wants to sleep peacefully at night, the only choices are -- 1. move out of the bad neighborhood, location, location, location; 2. help improve the neighborhood. Spend all the money on military to help neighbors build their houses and build business for them. Only reducing the equilibrium can reduce the violent reactions. It is simple chemistry.

Interest and Talent

If all of us are equally smart, then why some become high achiever while others spend whole life envying? The key is at the path of building experience. Some are interested in the experience they were building and motivated along the path, while most of us seems don't have such strong interest and somehow unlucky in getting all those motivations. There are certainly environmental issues. Some learning environment is very motivating, such as close competitions. We will experience most rewarding learning when we are actively participating in some formal or informal competitions. If it appears no body in the world would care what you were learning, we would hardly have any persistent energy to learn at all.

Then there is this mysterious element called interest. It is apparent that we are not born equal. Even infants would show different characters from very active to very quiet. So is it true that we each have our own natural interest, is it true that this teeny bit of difference in our born interest determines the fate of our life?

Middle East Violence

There are many points of views on the recent crisis of middle east violence. Well I am not so hot on caring for things that were out my reach, but here is my trace of thoughts when watching news and reading other's blog.

I think the source of violence at any level is disrespect. At street level, one bully thinks the other guys is just an asshole that doesn't respect him and want to show him why he should respect, so he beats him up. Of course, the other guy doesn't respect him and want to show that he should respect him. So the fight and street violence. At country level, there is little respect of people toward people in the other country, then the people in one country likes to show proof that other other country should respect them and vice versa, then they went to war.

Of course there is always economy reasons. But typically violence doesn't do good to economy. They cost huge in economy. So today's violence in middle east is mostly a war about respect.

I wouldn't say those country in war or terrorism is out of conscious control. When you think rightfully that you are gods non-equal son (the better one), then you would naturally think the other son should respect you and you would feel rightful to prove that you deserve the respect. And after conscious, logical, and reasonable postulation, beating the other son up is a logical choice.

It all starts with one's own disrespect to the others. And even you realize it, the disrespect of others under your subconscious is most difficult to conquer.

Back to middle east, how can we stop the violence in middle east when they are being disrespected?

Am I smarter than you?

I always think I am a smart guy since I was very young. Then I realized a lot of others think the same (not that I am smart, but they themselves are smart). Now, should I venture to say that almost any one on earth is thinking he/she is smarter than average, much smarter than average?

I think that bit of feeling of smartness is the source of our motivation. It is that feeling of smarter give us joy, and keep us on continuous developing or improving, to strenghen the proof that we, are in fact smarter than average, or most of the rest of the world.

Of course the equation won't add up. not more than half should be smarter than average, and certainly only a portion should be fit into the small portion of smart elites. So are we just all contantly fooling ourselves?

Not really. I have blogged on a recent article from Scientific American about the difference between experts and non-experts. The thinking power of experts, masters, and grandmasters are really, not much different than ordinary minds. If our thinking power is measure in numbers, think about the range from 998000 to 1002000. Of course there could be a lot of variance inside that range, but noone would be any better than the others. Our thinking powers are about the same. We are equally smart. Of course there would be exceptional that suffer from accidents or down syndroms that having a number of 200000 or something, but the chance of some one have a thinking power of 1500000 is 0. The evolution path is slow, it is absolutly impossible to have an exception that is way ahead of our current human species, unless, he is a result of cosmic ray exposure inside a spaceship.

When our thinking power is equal, what determines one would play better than others is really just experience (which is the point of that Scientific American article). To attain the experience of experts is hard work, 10 years as the article cites. And since there are so many fields, it is certain that any one is better than any others at many fields.

With that understanding in mind, paying respect to others is suddenly, no longer a difficult object. We disrepect others because our subconcious thinks we are smarter than the others; but really, that isn't true. The reason we knows more than the others, we are richer than others, we have better family than others, we can beat others in a game, ..., is because we had different experience than others. Given the same amount of experience, the others probably would achieve the same.

Under our thinking power, we often randomly hit a spark, and have a genious moment. Those genious moment is very joyful, albeit there is nothing to do with ourselves being smarter. Genious moments are wonderful, they propels our civilization, we should be very proud of those genious moments and enjoy the happiness it brings. Meanwhile, it happens as often in you as any others. I guess if we keep our eye open, we can spot much more genious moments in others, and enjoy them as well, and we would be much happier. After all, no one is really smarter than anyone, and those genious moments are really the sparks our mankind and deservs enjoyment for every one. -- Am I wandering my thoughts too far?

Death

Browsing through Peter Kua's blog, among many insightful articles, there is one series of How not to fear death, invoked some thinking, blogging down before I forget.

I admit I fear death, a lot, ever since I was very young. There are many claims that one can stop fearing death, but no matter how the claim sounds, I doubt it. Deep down, do you not fear death?

Fear is a natural builtin mechanism of life. Without fear, one probably will commit much more dangerous actions and by statistics, life probably will be much shorter and the entire life may have gone extinct by now. After all, every mechanism in life is to survive. Every bit inside a life works to avoid death, so how can any life not fear death?

On death, I don't have an answer yet. I think we are meant to fear death. Death is one thing that hardly have any positive aspects of it and we have to accept.

So the trick to death is not to think about it. Logically there is nothing to think about: death is certain, no way avoid it; death is meaningless, and death is always in the far future. In reality, few people seems ever worry about death. In deed, we all have this natural tendency of avoid un-joyful thoughts. Thinking about death is the ultimate unhappy and boring thought, so I believe as long as we just relax, we will not worry about it.

In deed, on reflection, I worry about death most often when I was very young, when I hardly started life. Nowadays, I have so many things to think about, there is hardly spare time for death thoughts anymore. Do you notice time flies by faster as we grow older. I guess when we get even older, and as our experience even grows, we would have so many thoughts going around our mind all the time, there would not be one bit of space for death thought, even the death is tomorrow. Well, may be when death gets closer, we would more worry about other things that we wants to do and time would get even squeezed and simply there will be no space death worrying thoughts.

So if you find yourself worrying about death, you need dig in your mind on what you really like to do and do it. Anything in life will surely beats death.

How do we think

What separates us from the animal kingdom and from computers? Is your answer that we have conscious and we can think? "I think, so I am." But really, how do we think?

There are two component that makes up our thinking process: memory recollection and memory manipulation. The latter part includes imagination and logic derivation, which is probably what we commonly recognized as active thinking. Why I call imagination and logic derivation "memory manipulation"? Well, imagination is just putting our memory pieces together and making a new result that doesn't exist in our memory before. And logic derivation is merely connecting existing memory pieces and reaching an imagination result that makes sense. Does that makes sense?

For the convenience, let me refer to memory recollection process "passive thinking" and the other part "active thinking". Which part do you think contributes to the most of our smartness? It got to be the ability of active thinking, is it?

In the recent issue of "Scientific American" there is an article "Secrets of the Expert Mind". For those haven't read the magazine, from the research mainly on chess masters, experts don't "think" more than ordinary non-experts. What separates an chess grandmaster from mediocre player is their memory or experience. In the research, there is not evidence that those grandmasters have extraordinary ability in other realm, say image recognition or logic conclusion. In other word, our ability to active think is about the same. Actually, I think our ability to do passive thinking is about the same too.

Think it this way, if our mind is a computer, then all the discs and ram makes up our memory. Pulling stuff out of the memory or discs makes up passive thinking. Is running the code active thinking? No, that is still passive thinking, because how to run a certain opcode is predefined, so it is a piece of passive thinking as well. A computer does not have any active thinking process (which is after all, separates them from us). The "smartness" of computer is then, determined by its ability to recollect memories and the speed of running opcodes. Some computer is much faster, or "smarter" than other computers, but I don't think any human mind is any smarter than or faster than other minds. Why? Because computers are "slow", thus it is relatively easy to develop from 1 GHz processor to 2 GHz processor in a short period, thus having a much "smarter" computer coexist with a much "dumber" computer. Human mind is much faster (talking about our ability in recollecting most RELEVANT memory before we realize it). Certainly there will be some mind can work slightly faster than the other (lets say due to nutrition or blood pressure difference), but for a mind at such advanced level, it is very difficult to have two mind with noticeable difference. It is similar with two computers, one at 100Ghz and the other at 101Ghz.

But certainly there are smart people and there are dumb people. People are smart merely because they accumerlated more organized and thorough experience. We are accumerlating experience every living second, so I don't think the absolute amount of experience can be much a factor in smartness. Rather, it is the thoroughness wittin a field and the organization level that matters. Use the chess grandmaster example, they are smarter in playing chess because they have most thorough experience in chess games. They simply remember more game patterns then others. Also their memory of chess games are more organized. The have more connections between different game patterns. They have more connections between the moves with the game. Well, after all, these connections between memory pieces, are part of their memory as well. With such a massive, organized chess playing memory, grandmasters can re-call a whole game by just glancing at a game board, and they can foresee the result in the end.

Computers are much dumber than us not only because they lack active thinking, they lack the ability to organize memory and lack the ability to fast recall relevant memory as well. They are just dumb. (but they are just tools, we don't expect tools to be smart to be useful.)

How do we get smarter? By accumerlating experience, make it more thorough and more organized. There is simply no way around it. The research claims it requires 10 years of hard experience to become a chess grandmaster, or expert in any field.

10 years! How many times you can try that! No wonder experts are so scarce. Note that merely "in" the field for 10 years doesn't give you that expert experience. It is 10 years of effortful, top-open, motivated learning and training experience. Use the example of driving, we typically only effortful seeks that experience during the month before driving test, and most time in my driving after driving school is absent-minded. No wonder I am such a poor driver.

How can we go through 10 years of effortful hard training? Isn't that just crazy? Not, if you are strongly interested in the field, periodically rewarded and motivated by little successes and praises, and finds the goal of expert ultimately fascinating. When you have that, that 10 years of life is the most joyful life one can get. Not every expert had that 10 years of joy though, but many do.

Why some people are smarter than others? Because some are more interested in stuffs and more motivated.

How to Stay Conscious?

We often reget from time to time, at which time, we often wish we can stay "conscious" when that situation happened. As it often happens, we will do it again when under a similar situation, and afterwards, we will once again regret.

Staying conscious is very hard, especially when we didn't realize why we lose our "conscious" in the first place.

By conscious, I assume we are referring to our ability to study all available information, including past experience, current events, and logical conclusions of all consequences, and the ability to do logical judgments on actions. It is important to realize, the key part of conscious is to do a "full" recollection and logical conclusion to the best of our ability. For example, your kid is making a lot of noise in the other room, and you gets angry instantly because you have a critical job currently needs concentration. Assuming you knows what "Super Nanny" knows, staying conscious means to realize the problem of your kid is boredom and require attention and your kid should come before your job and you should either play with your kid or find nanny support. However, collecting all these informations or logics takes time and it is not that easy as it seems. As a matter of fact, at the time you were disturbed from the work you are trying to concentrate on by the kid's noise, the informations your mind collects immediately is -- 1. You need concentrate on the job you are doing, 2. There is this noise keep you from concentrating and, 3. Your kid makes that noise, and ... you would see your logic conclusion based on these overwhelming informations.

So why we lose our conscious? The answer is we never really lose our conscious. It is simply we have naturally built precedences among huge amount of information we constantly receives and sometime, it takes too long before we recollect certain information that necessary to prevent regrets. Consciousness is actually a relative term. When we regret for certain things, we say to ourselves: "why we didn't think of this or that". But a further question is: "why we would particularly think of this or that -- among millions of informations available to us, including the temperature, wind, light, your wife's talking, ..., last episode of "super nanny", Steve Pavlina's last month's blog, ..., your wish of staying conscious yesterday, ...
Why particularly this or that?

We would never be able to process all the information through our best logic at any single time. "Full consciousness" is an idealism. Theoretically, and often we believe, we can achieve full conscious, but in reality and practically, that is not possible. Even it is possible, the process would take forever, and we would not be able to take actions fast enough to survive.

So with our amazing mechanism, we have developed *precedence* among all informations that we receive and possess. And for information with extremely high precedence, we will process it almost instantly and take actions before we "realize" it. For example, if your finger touches the hot coffee, it retracts. Well you say, that is extreme, it is almost a reflex. Then how about some one hit you, and you naturally hit back. And some one bad mouthing you and you naturally want to talk back. What happened here is we have built a very high precedence on information that concerns personal safety and when we perceive an information that our personal safety gets threatened, we process that information immediately before collecting other information. When some one maliciously hits you, you don't have time to recollect your past experience of the hitter and the information that he is hitting you is overwhelming.

Back to the example of parenting. When we trying to concentrate on some short term tasks, often informations that prevent you from completing the tasks takes precedence over other long term information such as your kid needs your attention and proper education. Therefore, especially for parents that are busy and strong in personal development, parenting is often a problem.

How to stay at better conscious? Without changing our mindset, trying to stay conscious as we often struggled at regretting time, is very difficult. Essentially, we are asking our mind to give up our ability to do quick responses to high-precedence-information which has developed through the long course of evolution. It is almost impossible.

What we should ask ourselves is not "staying conscious", but adjusting our precedence to the informations we receive and possess. Back to the example of parenting, we regret yelling at the kid. Wishing next time staying conscious is futile, rather we should raise the precedence of the well being of the kid, our long term goal and our essential happiness, and the feelings and emotions of the kid above the disturbance to a short term hobby project. Well, to raise long term information such as our life's well being above short term information such as completing certain short term project, is very difficult. Our ability to survive naturally placed short term information much higher than long term information. However, raising certain long term information's precedence height enough so that the information can come to our logic soon enough, hopefully before our reckless action take place, is not impossible.

How do we raise the precedence of certain information? Well, that actually we all already knows -- by thinking on it, by our desire for it, and by our focus. If you think about your kid all day, you would hear your kid's cry before you realize you have cut your finger (Do you have similar experience, maybe on stuff other than kid?) If you desire certain achievement, you would notice anything related to your success before anything else.

So when you regret again next time, don't just blame your self "losing conscious", think about your precedences.

More on "Training your spouse"

There is something not right about "taining your spouse like shamu".

I am sure it works. After all we are not all that different than shamu as the meaning of life goes. I can't find there is anything wrong with the approaches the author of the article uses to change her husbands' behavior. However, what is not right is the under-tone of the article. It steals the concept that her husband is her equal. Even though the author may not have that meaning when she writes it, it mines into the subconcious that self is at a much higher level than the other.

This disrespect, even when we are often unaware of, is most easy to be picked up, since the other have the tendency to think the same. And when this disrepect is sensed, the relationship tend to go south.

"Training Your Spouse"

Run over this article on Training Spouse. Basically, it says if you want your spouse develop into certain habit your like, you need train him/her like training a dolphin -- Reward every step toward the goal, and Ignore every bit that you don't want or desire.

Remarkable!

In practice, the "ignore" part is the most difficult part. The essence of "ignore" is not to express your anger, annoyance, worry, dislike when you actually feels them, many time, strongly feels it. How can a mortal possibly do that?

Master Our Emotions

Emotion is not a bad thing. Emotion is the exact element that fulfills our life. However, sometime, we do regret having certain emotions. Most often, we will do something regretful under the control of angry emotion; and some time, we will regret not doing somthing under the control of fear or shy. Therefore, we often wish we can control our emotions.

Emotions, in my opinion, are our reflexes on the infomation we perceive. Given certain amount of infomation, if is futile to change the emotion we experience. It is like you want to change the sight of your nemesis when he is in front of you. The only possible way to remove that sight is to physically remove that physcial object. Similarly, the only way to change certain emotion is to change the infomation that emotion is based on. More accurately, we need include more infomation into our perception. We only regret having a emotion when we have neglected certain information when that emotion invokes. If we didn't miss any infomation, we will not regret. You will not regret hit somebody when you were angry; but you will regret when you later realize you misunderstood that guy or that guy beats you up or you beats that guy badly. You regret because you had more infomation later that would change your emotions. So to master our emotion, we need train our ability to discover as much infomation as it matters or as many aspects of the same object as we can.

Our emotion is not only based on current events. It also based on our experience, and on infomation we deduced throught our logic mind. So the art of mastering our emotion is not much different than learning in school. First we accumerlate knowledge into experiences; Second we delvelop our ability to do logic deduction. If we have strong experience of regretful concequences of certain emotions, that emotion will not come easily to us. If we have strong ability to deduce more hidden infomations, we are more able to change our biased emotion quick enough to prevent later regreting.

To accumerlate that experience, we need remember the regrets we had and more importantly, remember the hidden infomations that we failed to realize early enough. Only after the memory become permant and can be withdrawn quick enough, it can become an experience prevent us having regretful emotions next time.

To develop our ability to do logical deduce, we need practice doing that on all things we perceive every day. We need practice looking at two sides of the coin and six sides of the cube. When we can quickly see the other side of the meaning, we can change our one-side fed emotion quick enough to avoid regretful actions.

Can we control our emotions?

The very reason that we feel our aliveness is the way we can control our thoughts, and concequently, we can make our decisions on our actions and to a long extent, control our own fates. Our emotions are very similar to our thoughts; they are all generated by our mind, aren't they? So not suprisingly, the ansewers from many is "yes", we can control our emotions.

I held this belief too. However, I am start to question it. It seems very few people are able to really control their emotions, and certainly I have failed in countless occasions. There are some commonly acknowledged bad emotions, the notorious one being angry. I thought I can control my emotion so completely avoid angry, but I think I never managed so. I was able to constrain the actions when I felt angry, but even that is extremely difficult.

What is emotion?

I think, emotion is not really thoughts that we are so confident of being able to control, rather, emotion is our second tier senses. Our first tier senses include our famous five-senses -- sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Not so often mentioned, but our first-tier senses also include our sense of imbalance, hunger, pain, as well as all the strange things we felt when we ingest too much chemicals such as alcohol. And to our mind, I believe all the infomation we received forms our first-tier senses. Besides the physical infomation we received from our physical senses, we also sense abstract information, such as "You are about to get a promotion", or "your boss thinks you are very lazy", or "our soldiers got killed in Iraq".

Most of the time, our mind does not directly operate on the information we received from our first-tier senses. We do not really think about square and red, but rather, we are thinking on buildings and cars; we do not really think about high pitch and low pitch, but rather we are thinking on the source of sound and meaning of the speech. In fact, our body has many reflexes developed, a common being the famous knee-jerk reflex. Those reflexes doesn't really goes through our mind and thus are more of sort-or second tier senses than our concious decision. And emotions are just one of these reflexes, a sort or second tier senses. We can't really control our senses, so I don't think we are able to really control our emotions.

However, since they are second-tier, I guess those reflexes are not entirely uncontrollable if we really put our efforts in and force our mind to intercept them, but it is really, really difficult. It either requires geniouses or long period of dedicated training. There are certain religion put strong emphasis on "endurance", I guess trying to control their second-tier senses are one of their goals.

Emotion, however, somehow is slightly different than other physical second-tier senses. Emotion is a reflex on abstract infomations, and those information is not limited to information from first-tier senses. Emotion reacts on any informations, even those result from our non-sensical thoughts. For example, if we imagine some foes bad mouthing our egos, we can feel angry (the extent of course, depend on the vividness of our imagination).

Therefore, can we control our emotion? Not really. But we do have some level of control over the information that our emotion feeds on. If we are feeling angry, I don't think it is feasible to just tell our mind to "not angry". It doesn't work, or does it? However, we can let our mind think about some images that make us calm and happy, or more directly, we can counter-think the infomation that evoked our emotion in the firstplace. Say you heard your archenemy is badmouthing you, of course you would and should feel angry; but if your mind can think that the gossip may not be true, and in one more step, think about that your archenemy is not bad-mouthing you at all, dependent on how vivid you mind can work, it probably can reduce or change your emotion to certain extent.

Also, rather than counter-think the information we already received -- which is sort of stupid to do so -- we can add more information to it. It works just like we adding suger to coffee, more information in the different direction often can alter our emotion. So if something set you angry, getting more information about the reasons and facts and feelings of the other end that cause you angry, in addition, the consequeces your angriness may bring, often will change your mood a little. However, if after all the infomation we can get, we still feel angry, probably, we should be angry. After, the reflexes built into our body is there for a reason. An emotion that we will not regret is not much a problem. The difficult part is how do we make sure that we have received all the necessary information.