Thoughts are not all that doubt is capable of provoking. Doubt causes you to focus on physical evidence that reinforces your skepticism. For example, suppose you have what you think is a clever idea for an invention. As you think about the invention, your idea grows. As your idea grows, doubt might counteract it. You might feel skeptical. If at this point you do not shrug off the negative communication and take action on your goal, then your skepticism will increase and you will reject the idea. As you become more cynical, you will bring into focus evidence that reinforces the doubtful message. This process feeds the Bad wolf. You might actually see a similar invention on the market that would convince you that you are wasting your time (somebody already created my idea). You might also read an article in a magazine that indicates it is very difficult to market a new idea. Soon afterward, you release the notion of an invention. Doubt has won the tug-of-war.

No one had yet attempted to survey the consequences of the fifteenth-century communications shift from script to print. While recognizing that it would take more than one book to remedy this situation, I also felt that a preliminary effort, however inadequate, was better than none, and began a decade of study ― devoted primarily to becoming acquainted with the special literature on early printing and the history of the book. Between 1968 and 1971 some preliminary articles were published to draw reactions from scholars and to take advantage of informed criticism. My full-scale work, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, appeared in 1979. It has been abridged for the general reader in the present version. Illustrations have been added, but footnotes have been dropped from this abridgment. The unabridged version should be consulted by any reader seeking full identification of all citations and references.

The battle against single-use plastic bags may not be won, but it's definitely under way. Restrictions on their use are in place in almost a dozen US states and in many other countries around the world. And in many cases, these efforts have been successful at eliminating new sales of thin plastic bags that float up into trees, block waterways, leech microplastics into soil and water, and harm marine life. But this environmental success story of sorts masks another problem. Many of us are drowning in reusable bags that retailers sell cheaply or give away to customers as an apparently greener alternative to single-use plastic. Campaigners say these bag hoards are causing fresh environmental problems, with reusable bags having a much higher carbon footprint than thin plastic bags. According to one eye-popping estimate, a cotton bag should be used at least 7,100 times to make it a truly environmentally friendly alternative to a conventional plastic bag. The answer to what's the greenest replacement for a single-use plastic bag isn't straightforward, but the advice boils down to this: Reuse whatever bags you have at home, as many times as you can.

When he was dying, the contemporary Buddhist teacher Dainin Katagiri wrote a remarkable book called Returning to Silence. Life, he wrote, "is a dangerous situation." It is the weakness of life that makes it precious; his words are filled with the very fact of his own life passing away. "The china bowl is beautiful because sooner or later it will break.... The life of the bowl is always existing in a dangerous situation." Such is our struggle: this unstable beauty. This inevitable wound. We forget ― how easily we forget ― that love and loss are intimate companions, that we love the real flower so much more than the plastic one and love the cast of twilight across a mountainside lasting only a moment. It is this very fragility that opens our hearts.

Our brains have evolved to remember unexpected events because basic survival depends on the ability to perceive causes and predict effects. If the brain predicts one event and experiences another, the unusualness will be especially interesting and will be encoded accordingly. Neurologist and classroom teacher Judith Willis has claimed that surprise in the classroom is one of the most effective ways of teaching with brain stimulation in mind. If students are exposed to new experiences via demonstrations or through the unexpected enthusiasm of their teachers or peers, they will be much more likely to connect with the information that follows. Willis has written that encouraging active discovery in the classroom allows students to interact with new information, moving it beyond working memory to be processed in the frontal lobe, which is devoted to advanced cognitive functioning. Preference for novelty sets us up for learning by directing attention, providing stimulation to developing perceptual systems, and feeding curious and exploratory behavior.

Psychologists Leon Festinger, Stanley Schachter, and sociologist Kurt Back began to wonder how friendships form. Why do some strangers build lasting friendships, while others struggle to get past basic platitudes? Some experts explained that friendship formation could be traced to infancy, where children acquired the values, beliefs, and attitudes that would bind or separate them later in life. But Festinger, Schachter, and Back pursued a different theory. The researchers believed that physical space was the key to friendship formation; that "friendships are likely to develop on the basis of brief and passive contacts made going to and from home or walking about the neighborhood." In their view, it wasn't so much that people with similar attitudes became friends, but rather that people who passed each other during the day tended to become friends and so came to adopt similar attitudes over time.

As well as making sense of events through narratives, historians in the ancient world established the tradition of history as a(n) source of moral lessons and reflections. The history writing of Livy or Tacitus, for instance, was in part designed to examine the behavior of heroes and villains, meditating on the strengths and weaknesses in the characters of emperors and generals, providing exemplars for the virtuous to imitate or avoid. This continues to be one of the functions of history. French chronicler Jean Froissart said he had written his accounts of chivalrous knights fighting in the Hundred Years' War "so that brave men should be inspired thereby to follow such examples." Today, historical studies of Lincoln, Churchill, Gandhi, or Martin Luther King, Jr. perform the same function.

One of the most valuable outcomes from coaching people is that you also develop yourself in the process of coaching. It is the genuine passion and intention to grow others that spurs us on to transform ourselves. To develop others, we have to first develop ourselves. And to continuously change others, we can't help but continuously transform ourselves. Before we coach, we learn, we prepare, and we reflect on how we can be an effective coach. During the coaching session, we gain hands-on experience and practice coaching skills and techniques. After coaching, we reflect on what happened during the dialogue and what went well, what didn't, and how we can do better next time. This cycle of learning returns over and over again throughout the entire coaching relationship. As we coach more people, we inculcate knowledge, skills, and competencies in coaching that will help us in many aspects of our professional and personal lives.

One benefit of reasons and arguments is that they can foster humility. If two people disagree without arguing, all they do is yell at each other. No progress is made. Both still think that they are right. In contrast, if both sides give arguments that articulate reasons for their positions, then new possibilities open up. One of the arguments gets refuted ― that is, it is shown to fail. In that case, the person who depended on the refuted argument learns that he needs to change his view. That is one way to achieve humility ― on one side at least. Another possibility is that neither argument is refuted. Both have a degree of reason on their side. Even if neither person involved is convinced by the other's argument, both can still come to appreciate the opposing view. They also realize that, even if they have some truth, they do not have the whole truth. They can gain humility when they recognize and appreciate the reasons against their own view.

For hundreds of thousands of years our hunter-gatherer ancestors could survive only by constantly communicating with one another through nonverbal cues. Developed over so much time, before the invention of language, that is how the human face became so expressive, and gestures so elaborate. We have a continual desire to communicate our feelings and yet at the same time the need to conceal them for proper social functioning. With these counterforces battling inside us, we cannot completely control what we communicate. Our real feelings continually leak out in the form of gestures, tones of voice, facial expressions, and posture. We are not trained, however, to pay attention to people's nonverbal cues. By sheer habit, we fixate on the words people say, while also thinking about what we'll say next. What this means is that we are using only a small percentage of the potential social skills we all possess.

Peppered moths are masters of camouflage. In the larval stage, they can change the color of their skin to blend into their settings ― even without seeing those surroundings, a new study found. After raising more than 300 peppered moth larvae, U.K. researchers obscured the vision of some with black paint. The larvae were placed in boxes containing white, green, brown, or black sticks, and given time to adapt. When the researchers opened the boxes, they found that nearly all the caterpillars, with or without vision, had changed their body colors to match the sticks in their box. The researchers then moved the caterpillars into new boxes containing sticks of two different colors, and about 80 percent of the insects chose to rest on sticks that matched their body color. The researchers say their findings provide strong evidence that peppered moth larvae are capable of dermal photoreception ― seeing with their skin.

Psychologists designed an interesting experiment. At the start of this experiment, they asked some of the participants to answer the following question: If a company bought 15 computers at $1,200 each, then, by your calculation, how much did the company pay in total? This was not a mathematical question; its goal was to prime the participants in a more calculating way. The other participants were asked a question that would prime their emotions. After answering the questions, the participants were given the information either about an African girl's sad story as an individual or about the general problem of food shortage in Africa. Then they were asked how much money they would donate to the given cause. The result showed that those who were primed to feel emotion gave much more money to the African girl than to help fight the general food shortage. And those who thought in a more calculating way became equal-opportunity misers by giving a similarly small amount to both causes.