Do you dream>

Having a dream is awesome. Here are a few quotes about the importance of dreaming;

“Nothing happens unless first a dream.” -Carl Sandburg

“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” -Eleanor Roosevelt

“Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul, the blueprints of your ultimate achievements.” -Napoleon Hill

“Reach high, for stars lie hidden in your soul. Dream deep, for every dream, proceeds the goal." -Pamela Vaull Star

“Without dreams, there can be no courage. And without courage, there can be no action.” -Wim Winders

“Dreams are renewable. No matter what our age or condition, there are still untapped possibilities within us and new beauty waiting to be born." -Dale Turner

According to a recent article in Medical News Today, there are several theories about why we dream. Possible explanations of dreams include:

·        representing unconscious desires and wishes

·        interpreting random signals from the brain and body during sleep

·        consolidating and processing information gathered during the day

·        working as a form of psychotherapy

·        From the evidence and new research methodologies, researchers have speculated that dreaming serves the following functions:

o   offline memory reprocessing, in which the brain consolidates learning and memory tasks and supports and records waking consciousness

o   preparing for possible future threats

o   cognitive simulation of real-life experiences, as dreaming is a subsystem of the waking default network, the part of the mind active during daydreaming

o   helping develop cognitive capabilities

o   reflecting unconscious mental function in a psychoanalytic way

·       a unique state of consciousness that incorporates the experience of the present, processing of the past, and preparation for the future

·        a psychological space where overwhelming, contradictory, or highly complex notions can be brought together by the dreaming ego, notions that would be unsettling while awake, serving the need for psychological balance and equilibrium

Much that remains unknown about dreams. They are by nature difficult to study, but technology and new research techniques may help improve our understanding of dreams.

No matter why we dream, having a dream and showing up every day, even when nothing seems to be happening, is priceless.

But having a dream and showing up every day, while sauntering, winking, and hugging everyone, is when the floodgates begin to tremble and, in that process, perhaps dreams do come true.

Do you have any biases? 2

 03 Authority bias

Airline pilots wear smart uniforms for a reason. Not because they belong to a military order. They don’t. But because they want to imply authority. This is great for controlling passengers. They obey. The problem is, so do co-pilots. The writer Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers suggest the Korean Air flight 801 crashed because the co-pilot was too reticent to challenge the pilot about his decisions. Post-crash, British investigators demanded the airline “promote a freer atmosphere between the captain and the first officer” to permit questioning. The air of authority can dupe the best of us. A flash of military insignia, or sharp suit, can short-circuit our normal capacity for analysis.

04 Conservatism bias

It’s a misconception that the right approach to risk is solely to minimize it. Risk is a vital and necessary part of life. Conservatism bias is what happens when this is not well-understood Conservatism bias is why Blockbuster video turned down the acquisition of Netflix for $50 million. The management found it easier to do nothing than embrace risk.

05 Triviality law

It’s exhausting to think about complex issues. Given half a chance, the human mind will make a break for a simpler, trivial issue to distract itself. Politics is dominated by this effect. Major issues, such as a politician’s view on the national debt, are rarely discussed or reported. Too hard. Instead, the focus is on trivial issues, such as whether they can eat a bacon sandwich with dignity. This is a serious issue in risk. It takes effort to get people to think about critical issues. Given the chance they’ll veer off and focus on something fluffy and trivial, to spare their grey cells.

06 Risk compensation

The British Medical Journal recently came out against bicycle helmets. It’s not that helmets don’t work. Fall off and you’ll be grateful your fragile skull is encased in protective plastic. Rather, the phenomenon of risk compensation negates the benefit. Data from multiple nations shows that when cyclists feel safer, they compensate, by taking extra risks, cutting in front of cars and not looking at junctions. Individuals with documented helmet use had 2.2 times the odds of non–helmet users of being involved in an injury-related accident. Furthermore, mandatory helmet wearing reduced cycling, adding to negative effects.

07 Social proof

There is a beguiling power of effects such as social proof. Do you remember some years ago when one oil company bought a fertilizer company, and every other major oil company practically ran out and bought a fertilizer company? And there was no more damned reason for all these oil companies to buy fertilizer companies, but they didn’t know exactly what to do and if Exxon was doing it, it was good enough for Mobil, and vice versa. If someone in authority is doing or saying it you have a social proof and will consider whatever it is acceptable.

08 Charm pricing

Human reaction to numbers is riddled with quirks. Discount stores use charm pricing, knocking a penny off to end in “99”. When I worked in retail many years ago, we knew the value of having a price ending in 99. In an informal survey 50% of consumers when asked saw prices ending in 99 cents as more value for money, while the remainder saw prices as higher. Charm prices were 9 percent more likely to be seen as good value than the rounded prices. A disproportionately large improvement for a 1 percent price drop.

09 Overconfidence bias

There is an idea that dim people overestimate their skills, while bright people doubt their abilities. But could it be that even experts are overconfident? Alas yes, especially when forecasting. Economist Philip Tetlock spent 20 years studying forecasts by experts about the economy, stock markets, wars and other issues. He found the average expert did as well as random guessing or as he put it “as a dart-throwing chimpanzee

If you have been taken aback when you observed that someone was “assuming the worst intentions of others and have struggled to understand how someone could create in their mind such a different narrative of past events, despite seeing the same evidence. that you had seen. Hopefully, this will explain some of why people do what they d

Do you have any biases? 1

Nine cognitive biases you should know because if you don’t you may make foolish decisions. In Dr. Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow he explains that we have a Two System way of thinking.

The first is the intuitive, “gut reaction” way of thinking and making decisions. The second way of thinking is the analytical, “critical thinking” way of making decisions.

In the first way of thinking, we form “first impressions” and when we use this type of thinking we often jump to conclusions. Our second method of thinking does reflection, problem-solving, and analysis. However, we spend most of our time in thinking fast while we identify with our second type of thinking. Most of us consider ourselves rational, analytical human beings. Thus, we think we spend most of our time engaged in logical analytical thinking.

Actually, we spend almost all of our daily lives engaged in emotional thinking. Only if we encounter something unexpected, or if we make a conscious effort, do we engage Logical thinking?

These biases have evolved over thousands of years, we are pattern-seeking primates, which is useful for hunting prey, but terrible for complex tasks. So, we are now regularly prone to hundreds of biases, too deeply ingrained to overcome without removing the human from the process. Reading the book is not enough.

One of the biggest problems with emotional thinking is that it seeks to quickly create a coherent, plausible story — an explanation for what is happening — by relying on associations and memories, pattern-matching, and assumptions. When we use this type of thinking we will default to that plausible, convenient story — even if that story is based on incorrect information.

This type of thinking is highly adept it automatically and effortlessly identifies causal connections between events, sometimes even when the connection is spurious.

This is the reason why people jump to conclusions, assume bad intentions, give in to prejudices or biases, and buy into conspiracy theories. They focus on limited available evidence and do not consider absent evidence. They invent a coherent story, causal relationships, or underlying intentions. And then we quickly form a judgment or impression, which in turn gets quickly endorsed by our logical thinking.

As a result, people may make wrong judgments and decisions due to biases. There are several potential errors in judgment that people may make when they over-rely on emotional thinking:

01 Law of large numbers

People don’t understand statistics very well. As a result, they may look at the results of a small sample — e.g. 100 people responding to a survey — and conclude that it’s representative of the population. This also explains why people jump to conclusions with just a few data points or limited evidence. If three people said something, then maybe it’s true? If you personally observe one incident, you are more likely to generalize this occurrence to the whole population. For example, imagine two maternity hospitals, one large, one small. In a week, 60 percent of births are female. Which hospital is more likely to be the venue? It takes time to figure out… the smaller one. Small sample sizes suffer more from deviation from the mean.

02 Gambler’s fallacy and the Illusion of understanding:

The original sin is the tendency to assume that bad luck will be compensated by good luck. Karma. Alas, we are frequently crippled by the belief that life will magically auto-correct to compensate us for previous losses. People often create flawed explanations for past events, a phenomenon known as a narrative fallacy. These “explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; they are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen. Good stories provide a simple and coherent account of people’s actions and intentions. You are always ready to interpret behaviour as a manifestation of general propensities and personality traits — causes that you can readily match to effects.”

What do you take for granted?

There are a number of things that people, I think, take for granted as we journey through life and we do so at our peril. In my imagination I see that people take the following for granted: 

1.                   How important they were to so many.

2.                   How easy life was when they stopped struggling.

3.                   That all of their prayers and thoughts made a difference.

4.                   That there really were no coincidences.

5.                   How far ripples of kindness actually spread.

6.                   What really was important: happiness, friends, love.

7.                   That any and all dreams can come true.

8.                   How good-looking and fun they always were.

9.                   How much guidance they received at all times.

What do you see and what would you add to the list of things that we take for granted that perhaps we should pay more attention to as we move into retirement?