When I was ven years old and my sister was just five years old, we were playing on top of a bunk bed. I was two years older than my sister at the time -- I mean, I'm two years older than her now -- but at the time it meant she had to do everything that I wanted to do, and I wanted to play war. So we were up on top of our bunk beds. And on one side of the bunk bed, I had put out all of my G.I. Joe soldiers and weaponry. And on the other side were all my sister's My Little Ponies ready for a cavalry charge.
There are differing accounts of what actually happened that afternoon, but since my sister is not here with us today, let me tell you the true story --
which is my sister's a little on the clumsy side. Somehow, without any help or push from her older brother at all, Amy disappeared off of the top of the bunk bed and landed with this crash on the floor. I nervously peered over the side of the bed to e what had befallen my fallen sister and saw that she had landed painfully on her hands and knees on all fours on the ground.
I was nervous becau my parents had charged me with making sure that my sister and I pl米饭做法
窄巴ayed as safely and as quietly as possible. And eing as how I had accidentally broken Amy's arm just one week before
heroically pushing her out of the way of an oncoming imaginary sniper bullet,
for which I have yet to be thanked, I was trying as hard as I could -- she didn't even e it coming -- I was trying hard to be on my best behavior.
And I saw my sister's face, this wail of pain and suffering and surpri threatening to erupt from her mouth and wake my parents from the long winter's nap for which they had ttled. So I did the only thing my frantic ven year-old brain could think to do to avert this tragedy. And if you have children, you've en this hundreds of times. I said, "Amy, wait. Don't cry. Did you e how you landed? No human lands on all fours like that. Amy, I think this means you're a unicorn."
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Now, that was cheating, becau there was nothing she would want more than not to be Amy the hurt five year-old little sister, but Amy the special unicorn. Of cour, this option
was open to her brain at no point in the past. And you could e how my poor, manipulated sister faced conflict, as her little brain attempted to devote resources to feeling the pain and suffering and surpri she just experienced, or contemplating her new-found identity as a unicorn. And the latter won. Instead of crying or ceasing our play, instead of waking my parents, with all the negative conquences for me, a smile spread across her face and she scrambled back up onto the bunk bed with all the grace of a baby unicorn --
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with one broken leg.
What we stumbled across at this tender age of just five and ven -- we had no idea at the time -- was was going be at the vanguard of a scientific revolution occurring two decades later in the way that we look at the human brain. We had stumbled across something called positive psychology, which is the reason I'm here today and the reason that I wake up every morning.
When I started talking about this rearch outside of academia, with companies and scho
现实的图片ols, the first thing they said to never do is to start with a graph. The first thing I want to do is start with a graph. This graph looks boring, but it is the reason I get excited and wake up every morning. And this graph doesn't even mean anything; it's fake data. What we found is --
If I got this data studying you, I would be thrilled, becau there's a trend there, and that means that I can get published, which is all that really matters. There is one weird red dot above the curve, there's one weirdo in the room -- I know who you are, I saw you earlier -- that's no problem. That's no problem, as most of you know, becau I can just delete that dot. I can delete that dot becau that's clearly a measurement error. And we know that's a measurement error becau it's messing up my data.
So one of the first things we teach people in economics, statistics, business and psychology cours is how, in a statistically valid way, do we eliminate the weirdos. How do we eliminate the outliers so we can find the line of best fit? Which is fantastic if I'm trying to find out how many Advil the average person should be taking -- two.
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But if I'm interested in your potential, or for happiness or productivity or energy or creativity, we're creating the cult of the average with science. If I asked a question like, "How fast can a child learn how to read in a classroom?" scientists change the answer to "How fast does the average child learn how to read in that classroom?" and we tailor the class towards the average. If you fall below the average, then psychologists get thrilled, becau that means you're depresd or have a disorder, or hopefully both. We're hoping for both becau our business model is, if you come into a therapy ssion with one problem, we want to make sure you leave knowing you have ten, so you keep coming back. We'll go back into your childhood if necessary, but eventually we want to make you normal again. But normal is merely average.
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