Think of yourself. When you decide to get up and get a drink of water, for example, you don't consciously organize or consider the host of steps involved. Imagine if we had to consider every single muscle that needed to be contracted or relaxed just to stand up and walk. It would be tiresome and very slow ― as patients recovering from a brain injury affecting the motor system know. The autopilot parts of our brain do it for us automatically, freeing up our conscious mind for more important jobs. It is the older parts of our brain that support these automatic processes that allow us to move, hear, see, and use many of our social skills. More recently evolved abilities like talking, reading, and writing are far less automated. So, most of the time, what you are perceiving, feeling, or thinking is based on a very crude and fast analysis that happens completely without your awareness.

Studies in psychology have reported cases in which competitive incentives resulted in lower task effort, and their focus was on the psychological underpinnings of the reduction in motivation. For example, competition presents an inevitable conflict between the motivation to achieve one's personal goal and the desire to maintain good relationships with others. When the maintenance of interpersonal relationships is important, with their counterparts in particular or with others generally, competitors experience an internal conflict that can harm their desire to achieve their goal and taint the good feeling brought about by winning. Exline and Lobel found that the perception of oneself as a target for upward social comparison often makes people uncomfortable. When they believe that others are making envious comparisons with them, people feel uneasiness, distress, or sorrow. Feelings of guilt, an emotion generally associated with high motivation for goal-achievement, lead to weaker motivation and performance in the pursuit of competitive goals. Consequences of this emotional state include lower task motivation in a competition and preferences for more cooperative and altruistic outcomes, such as diminishing the significance of the outcome or sharing the winner's reward.

Literature can be helpful in the language learning process because of the personal involvement it fosters in readers. Core language teaching materials must concentrate on how a language operates both as a rule-based system and as a sociosemantic system. Very often, the process of learning is essentially analytic, piecemeal, and, at the level of the personality, fairly superficial. Engaging imaginatively with literature enables learners to shift the focus of their attention beyond the more mechanical aspects of the foreign language system. When a novel, play or short story is explored over a period of time, the result is that the reader begins to 'inhabit' the text. He or she is drawn into the book. Pinpointing what individual words or phrases may mean becomes less important than pursuing the development of the story. The reader is eager to find out what happens as events unfold; he or she feels close to certain characters and shares their emotional responses. The language becomes 'transparent' ― the fiction draws the whole person into its own world.

Education, at its best, teaches more than just knowledge. It teaches critical thinking: the ability to stop and think before acting, to avoid succumbing to emotional pressures. This is not thought control. It is the very reverse: mental liberation. Even the most advanced intellectual will be imperfect at this skill. But even imperfect possession of it frees a person from the burden of being 'stimulus-driven', constantly reacting to the immediate environment, the brightest colours or loudest sounds. Being driven by heuristic responses, living by instinct and emotion all the time, is a very easy way to live, in many ways: thought is effortful, especially for the inexperienced. But emotions are also exhausting, and short-term reactions may not, in the long term, be the most beneficial for health and survival. Just as we reach for burgers for the sake of convenience, storing up the arterial fat which may one day kill us, so our reliance on feelings can do us great harm.

We are famously living in the era of the attention economy, where the largest and most profitable businesses in the world are those that consume my attention. The advertising industry is literally dedicated to capturing the conscious hours of my life and selling them to someone else. It might seem magical that so many exciting and useful software systems are available to use for free, but it is now conventional wisdom that if you can't see who is paying for something that appears to be free, then the real product being sold is you. Our creative engagement with other people is mediated by AI-based recommendation systems that are designed to trap our attention through the process that Nick Seaver calls captology, keeping us attending to work sold by one company rather than another, replacing the freedom of personal exploration with algorithm-generated playlists or even algorithm-generated art.

Centralized, formal rules can facilitate productive activity by establishing roles and practices. The rules of baseball don't just regulate the behavior of the players; they determine the behavior that constitutes playing the game. Rules do not prevent people from playing baseball; they create the very practice that allows people to play baseball. A score of music imposes rules, but it also creates a pattern of conduct that enables people to produce music. Legal rules that enable the formation of corporations, that enable the use of wills and trusts, that create negotiable instruments, and that establish the practice of contracting all make practices that create new opportunities for individuals. And we have legal rules that establish roles individuals play within the legal system, such as judges, trustees, partners, and guardians. True, the legal rules that establish these roles constrain the behavior of individuals who occupy them, but rules also create the roles themselves. Without them an individual would not have the opportunity to occupy the role.

The expansion of sports tourism in the twentieth century has been influenced by further developments in transportation. Just as the railways revolutionized travel in the nineteenth century, so the automobile produced even more dramatic changes in the twentieth. The significance of the car in the development of sport and tourism generally has attracted considerable coverage and it has had no less an impact on sports tourism specifically. Although originally invented towards the end of the nineteenth century, it started to become a mass form of transport in the 1920s in the USA and rather later in Britain. Apart from its convenience and flexibility, the car has the additional advantages of affording access to many areas not served by public transport, as well as allowing the easy transport of luggage and equipment. As a result, it was invaluable for the development of many forms of sports tourism but especially those which require the transportation of people and equipment to relatively remote locations.

The potential for market enforcement is greater when contracting parties have developed reputational capital that can be devalued when contracts are violated. Farmers and landowners develop reputations for honesty, fairness, producing high yields, and consistently demonstrating that they are good at what they do. In small, close-knit farming communities, reputations are well known. Over time landowners indirectly monitor farmers by observing the reported output, the general quality of the soil, and any unusual or extreme behavior. Farmer and landowner reputations act as a bond. In any growing season a farmer can reduce effort, overuse soil, or underreport the crop. Similarly, a landowner can undermaintain fences, ditches, and irrigation systems. Accurate assessments of farmer and landowner behavior will be made over time, and those farmers and landowners who attempt to gain at each other's expense will find that others may refuse to deal with them in the future.

Watch the birds in your backyard. If one bird startles and flies off, others will follow, not waiting around to assess whether the threat is real. They have been infected by emotional contagion. In a long-term research project that Marc did with some of his students on patterns of antipredatory scanning by western evening grosbeaks, they found that birds in a circle showed more coordination in scanning than did birds who were feeding in a line. The birds in a line, who could only see their nearest neighbor, not only were less coordinated when scanning, but also were more nervous, changing their body and head positions significantly more than grosbeaks in a circle, where it was possible for each grosbeak to see every other grosbeak. Marc wondered whether the birds in line were more fearful because they didn't know what their flockmates were doing. Emotional contagion would have been impossible for individual grosbeaks in the linear array except with their nearest neighbors.

Trade secret law aims to promote innovation, although it accomplishes this objective in a very different manner than patent protection. Notwithstanding the advantages of obtaining a patent, many innovators prefer to protect their innovation through secrecy. They may believe that the cost and delay of seeking a patent are too great or that secrecy better protects their investment and increases their profit. They might also believe that the invention can best be utilized over a longer period of time than a patent would allow. Without any special legal protection for trade secrets, however, the secretive inventor risks that an employee or contractor will disclose the proprietary information. Once the idea is released, it will be free as the air under the background norms of a free market economy. Such a predicament would lead any inventor seeking to rely upon secrecy to spend an inordinate amount of resources building high and impassable fences around their research facilities and greatly limiting the number of people with access to the proprietary information.

By their very nature, the concepts of maintenance and repair are predominantly examined from a process-oriented perspective. The focus in related scholarly discourse often revolves around the lifespan or lifecycle of objects and technologies. In this context, maintenance and repair are considered practices that have the potential to prolong the existence of objects, ensuring their sustained utilization over an extended period. Krebs and Weber critically engage with anthropomorphic metaphors that imply a biography of things, appropriately highlighting that conventional understanding of the lifecycle of a technology, from its acquisition to its disposal from the household, provides an incomplete definition. In reality, objects do not conform to a linear lifecycle model; instead, they undergo breakdowns, await repairs, are stored away, or find themselves relegated to the basement, only to be rediscovered and repurposed later. Additionally, objects may enter recycling or second-hand cycles, leading to a dynamic afterlife marked by diverse applications. As such, the life of an object exhibits a far more complicated and adaptive path than a simplistic linear progression.

People often assume that synthetic food ingredients are more harmful than natural ones, but this is not always the case. Typically, synthetic ingredients can be made in a precisely controlled fashion and have well-defined compositions and properties, allowing careful evaluation of their potential toxicity. On the other hand, natural ingredients often vary appreciably in their composition and properties depending on their origin, the time of year they were harvested, the climate they experienced throughout their lifetime, the soil quality, and how they were isolated and stored. These variations can make testing their safety extremely difficult ― one is never sure about the potential toxicity of minor components that may vary from time to time. In some cases, a natural food component has been consumed for hundreds or thousands of years without causing any obvious health problems and can, therefore, be assumed to be safe. However, one must still be very careful. -> The controllability of the production process for synthetic food ingredients and the variability of natural food ingredients may challenge people's commonly held assumption that the natural ingredients are more secure.

Imagine grabbing a piece of paper between your thumb and index finger. Maybe you already are, as you turn this page. We use this type of forceful, pad-to-pad precision gripping without thinking about it, and literally in a snap. Yet it was a breakthrough in human evolution. Other primates exhibit some kinds of precision grips in the handling and use of objects, but not with the kind of efficient opposition that our hand anatomy allows. In a single hand, humans can easily hold and manipulate objects, even small and delicate ones, while adjusting our fingers to their shape and reorienting them with displacements of our fingertip pads. Our relatively long, powerful thumb and other anatomical attributes, including our flat nails (which nearly all primates possess), make this possible. Just picture trying ― and failing ― to dog-ear this page with pointy, curved claws. With a unique combination of traits, the human hand shaped our history. No question, stone tools couldn't have become a keystone of human technology and subsistence without hands that could do the job, along with a nervous system that could regulate and coordinate the necessary signals. Anybody who's ever attempted to make a spear tip or arrowhead from a rock knows that it requires strong grips, constant rotation and repositioning, and forceful, careful strikes with another hard object. And even with a fair amount of know-how, it can be a bloody business.

Do you remember when Sean used to tell me that I was the best dad in the world? Ethan asked his wife, Grace. Yes, I do. I always envied your relationship with Sean, she replied. Ethan then shared how things had changed since his son started middle school. Grace had noticed Ethan often pushing Sean to study harder. Maybe he isn't that into school right now. How about going hiking, just the two of you? she suggested. He agreed, and realizing that both his and Sean's hiking jackets were still at the laundry, he asked his wife to go and pick them up with him. When did you bring the jackets in? the clerk at the laundry asked. Maybe two weeks ago, Ethan replied. Then, Grace quickly reminded him, Honey, we actually left them here a month ago. The clerk went into the storage area to look for the clothes. Finally, he returned with the jackets and handed them to Ethan. The clerk politely said, I am sorry, but please collect your items earlier next time. Our storage is too full. Ethan felt embarrassed for the late collection and apologized. Ethan and Grace came back home with the jackets and checked if Sean had everything else he needed for hiking. Luckily, in his drawers they found his hat, shoes, sunglasses, and hiking sticks. When Sean returned from school, Ethan softly said, Sean, let's go hiking this Saturday, just the two of us. Though Sean thanked him for the suggestion, he said he had to go to the library. Grace stepped in, You know, the weather this weekend will be the best of the year. Why not enjoy it? After a moment's hesitation, he agreed. The weather was perfect. Ethan and Sean set off hiking along the valley by Aicken Mountain. They walked in silence until Sean fell over a rock and twisted his ankle. Realizing he couldn't walk, Ethan carried his son down on his back. He felt Sean's heartbeat, something he hadn't felt since Sean was a baby. Suddenly, Sean said, Dad, I'm sorry. At some point, I started to become afraid of disappointing you. But you are still the best dad. Energized, he felt no weight on his back and replied, You are the best son, no matter what.