• Science Shows There's Only One Real Way to Listen to Music.  Steve Jobs, the man who invented the iPod and ignited the digital music revolution, never listened to MP3s. 
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• How People’s Political Passions Distort Their Sense of Reality.  Though people might disagree on how to solve a problem, they can at least agree that the problem exists. Or can they? A new study finds that deeply held beliefs can undermine rationality: When confronted with solutions that challenge deeply held values, people may be inclined to disbelieve the problem.
  
  
• How to Study the Brain.  The human brain contains roughly 86 billion neurons and trillions, perhaps hundreds of trillions, of intricate interconnections among those neurons. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of different kinds of cells within the brain. And—after nearly two centuries of research—exactly zero convincing theories of how it all works.
  
  
• Healthy lifestyle triggers genetic changes: study.  In the study 30 men with low level prostrate cancer were tracked over 3 months where they changed their diets, exercised for 1/2 hour every day and engaged in stress management practices such as meditation.  As expected, the men all improved their health with lower blood pressure and weight loss. The surprising thing was they also changed the expression of around 500 genes.  Disease prevention genes were turned on and genes known to be linked to disease were turned off.
  
  
• Physicists say there may be a way to prove that we live in a computer simulation.  Back in 2003, Oxford professor Nick Bostrom suggested that we may be living in a computer simulation.  Now, a team of physicists say proof might be possible, and that it's a matter of finding a cosmological signature that would serve as the proverbial Red Pill from the Matrix. And they think they know what it is.
  
  
• Why Germans Work Fewer Hours But Produce More: A Study In Culture
  
  
• Better All the Time.  James Surowiecki in the New Yorker, concludes that the essence of high performance is the capacity for “getting better at getting better.”
  
  
• Do Politicians Love Kids?  If American politicians are looking for a genuinely bipartisan issue to work together on, here’s a suggestion: invest in early childhood education.
  
  
• Improved perceptions of aging can lead to increases in physical strength, an unusual study finds.
  
  
• I have long known that Single Malt Scotch is a beautiful thing.  But I didn’t know the full extent of its beauty till I saw these photographs taken by a Princeton engineering professor.  
  
  
• You’re powered by quantum mechanics. No, really…
  For years biologists have been wary of applying the strange world of quantum mechanics, where particles can be in two places at once or connected over huge distances, to their own field. But it can help to explain some amazing natural phenomena we take for granted.
  
  
• How the Information Age Makes It Harder to Make Informed Choices About Risk (or Anything Else).  Here’s the problem. The human brain is lazy. It takes effort to “pay” attention, to concentrate and stay focused, to thoroughly think things through, to keep an open mind about ideas or issues about which we’ve already formed an opinion. The brain prefers to not work any harder than it has to. This lazy brain is why most of you probably won’t read to the end of this essay.
  
  
• Zen teacher Norman Fischer’s address to the 2014 graduating class of Stanford University.  Graduation speeches can often deliver the most profound summaries of life’s meaning and this one delivers the goods. It’s right up there with novelist George Saunders speech a couple of years ago to the new graduates of Syracuse University.   
  
  
• How ‘Deprogramming’ Kids From How to ‘Do School’ Could Improve Learning.  MindShift.com
  
  
• If we can direct our thoughts toward the well-being of others, says Daniel Goleman, it will help promote a more enduring, genuine kind of happiness.​​

Those of us living in the North East of the U.S. know first hand that the gray-cast skies and reduced sun light during the winter months just doesn’t feel good.  For some of us, either through our unique physiology or our inability to make it outside enough during winter, the effects can be severe enough to cause depression or depression like systems.  In Light: Medicine of the Future: How We Can Use It to Heal Ourselves NOW (1991), Dr. Jacob Lieberman explains that his research and clinical practice indicates that Light’s effects on our health and well being goes well beyond just affecting our mood.  Light, coming through our eyes, in fact is the key regulator of all our key biological systems.

"The body is a living photocell, stimulated and regulated by light entering the eyes, the ‘windows of the soul’.  The eyes are the entry points through which light has its profound effects on the regulation of human physiological functioning and development of our consciousness....the pineal gland is the body’s light meter and assists us in becoming synchronized with nature and thus one with the universe...we use color to heal, and use light as food - the nutrient that catalyzes biological combustion in humans, just as it catalyzes photosynthesis in plants.  Modern technological advances such as most fluorescent lighting, sunglasses, tanning lotions, and our general indoor life styles, may in fact be harming us more than helping us.  Light and color contain the essence of what humans attempt to gain by eating food and taking vitamins, and, in fact, act as catalysts for the absorption and use of these nutrients within our bodies.  Light’s most powerful role may lie in its ability to unlock and unclog the mind with great expediency. "

• Former Apple CEO John Sculley: The Most Valuable Lesson I Learned From Steve Jobs
  

• Is Death Final?  NPR Intelligence Squared Debates podcast.
  
  
• The Art of Noticing and Creating.  Seth Godin on the On Being podcast.
  

• “Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom." - Marcel Proust​​
  
  
• Writing about “technology and the moral dimension,” tech writer and Gigaom founder, Om Malik made the following observation:  “I can safely say that we in tech don’t understand the emotional aspect of our work, just as we don’t understand the moral imperative of what we do. It is not that all players are bad; it is just not part of the thinking process the way, say, ‘minimum viable product’ or ‘growth hacking’ are.”
  
  
• “There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.” – Marshall McLuhan
  
  
• “Gratitude is the sweet fragrance of an opening heart.” – Aine Belton
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• “The beautiful souls are they that are universal, open, and ready for all things." - Michel de Montaigne

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