Dr. Don Stewart and DS Art – MiscBytes Niche of the Month!

What if you’d already not only finished college, but had graduated from medical school and even completed an internship at the Mayo Clinic, then finally admitted to yourself that your passion was not the medicine and surgery you’d spent all that time and effort and money training for, but art instead? I think many of us would think we had no choice but to stick with our original path, even though it might not the best path for us after all. Turns out there’s one guy who had the courage to not only admit to himself that he had found his true niche in life, but to totally leave medicine to pursue being a full-time artist. That guy is Donald B. Stewart, M.D., and his studio, DS Art, is MiscBytes niche of the month!

It wasn’t that Dr. Stewart hadn’t really wanted to be a doctor. He had wanted to be a physician since he was 5 years old, and he never stopped loving science and making people happy, but by the time he completed his internship he had already seen that he met very few surgeons who were having any fun. He saw how the excellent doctors he trained with had already had the fun and spontaneity beaten out of them by the time …

Study: Your confidence in your own thoughts is affected by your posture!

We all know that sometimes other people’s confidence in what we say is affected by our body language, but scientists have now shown that our confidence in our own thoughts is affected the same way! When we sit up straight with great posture, we are more convinced of what we are saying, according to a study published in the October 2009 issue …

Gut feelings

Have you ever just known which choice you want to make even though there was a long list of rational reasons why that should not be your choice? I read Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious lately and found it fascinating. I’m very aware that my unconscious mind knows exactly what I want to do sometimes, even when my conscious mind is busy making lists of reasons to do something totally different!

Gut Feelings was written by Gerd Gigerenzer, director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, and offers many examples of times we absolutely use our “gut feelings” to make a decision – often because there is simply no time to sit and calculate using all the facts.  A gut feeling is not a matter of being psychic.   It’s the product of your brain quickly, often unconsciously using a heuristic (rule of thumb) to arrive at a decision using little evidence. In the book he gives a lot of examples where less evidence can lead to better decisions, because there may be one piece of evidence that is so much more important than the others or your unconscious knows that it is more important based on your own experience/environment/instincts, even if it doesn’t appear to have more weight when …

Facebook makes jealousy and snooping worse

In a blend of fun internet use and scientific method, we have a study from the peer-reviewed journal Cyberpsychology & Behavior which actually proves that spending more time on Facebook can make jealousy worse, and that then leads to a cycle of obsessively looking at your partner’s Facebook page and finding more evidence for jealousy. Previous articles have stated this same thing, but this was the first study to control for personality, individual, and relationship factors and analyze the data in a statistical, scientific way. The analysis shows that Facebook use significantly predicts Facebook-related jealousy. I’m not really surprised! I don’t have a Facebook account right now, but from what I’ve seen with my sons, I had already wondered if people nowadays come home from a good or bad date and rush to see if the other person has changed their …