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Challenging the loneliness stigma can change your life. Here’s how to start.

From a young age, many of us are taught that being alone means something is wrong, leading to negative thought patterns that reinforce feelings of isolation. Kasley Killam, author of The Art and Science of Connection and an expert in social health, explains how these perceptions of loneliness can shape our experiences and influence our lives.

According to Killam, this stigma around loneliness can trigger a stress response in the body, affecting both mental and physical well being. However, by challenging these narratives and reminding ourselves of how much control we really have, it’s possible to redirect our mindsets. It also helps, she says, to understand the difference between individualistic and collectivist cultures, and how each one can influence the way we interpret and discuss our feelings with others.

For those who have struggled with loneliness or felt trapped in a cycle of negative thinking, this perspective can help us break free. By shifting our thought patterns, we can transform our relationships, enhance our sense of connection, and improve our overall well-being.

Explore the Perception Box series hub ► https://bigthink.com/perception-box/?...

We created this video in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators.

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About Kasley Killam:

Kasley Killam is a social health expert, author, and advocate focused on strengthening connections and enhancing community well-being. With a background in behavioral science and public health from Harvard University, she is a leading voice on the impact of social relationships on mental and physical health.

As the founder of Social Health Labs, Killam collaborates with organizations to develop innovative solutions for combating loneliness and social isolation. Her work has been featured in major publications, and she is a sought-after speaker on the importance of social well-being in creating healthier, more resilient communities.

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This interview is an episode from @The-Well, our publication about ideas that inspire a life well-lived, created with the @JohnTempletonFoundation. Plato famously described the human psyche as two horses and a charioteer: One horse represented instincts, the other represented emotions, and the charioteer was the rational mind that controlled them. Astronomer Carl Sagan continued this idea of a three-layer, “triune brain” in his 1977 book The Dragons of Eden. But leading neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett challenges this idea of the brain evolving in three layers, instead revealing a common brain plan shared by all mammals and vertebrates. The development of sensory systems led to the emergence of the brain, and hunting and predation may have initiated an arms race to become more efficient and powerful predators. Despite advances in neuroscience and genetics, the question of why the brain evolved remains elusive. But Feldman Barrett’s fascinating exploration of the brain’s evolution offers insights into the most important functions of this complex organ, and invites us to think more deeply about the origins of our own intelligence.

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Chapters:

0:00 What a brain costs

0:21 The triune brain (aka lizard brain) theory

1:24 Plato, Carl Sagan, and the making of the myth

2:35 Debunking the ‘lizard brain’ theory

3:39 How the first brain evolved

5:49 The brain’s ultimate job

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About Lisa Feldman Barrett: Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett is among the top 1% most-cited scientists in the world, having published over 250 peer-reviewed scientific papers. Dr. Barrett is a University Distinguished Professor of psychology at Northeastern University with appointments at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, where she is Chief Science Officer for the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior. She is the recipient of a NIH Director’s Pioneer Award for transformative research, a Guggenheim Fellowship in neuroscience, the Mentor Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Association for Psychological Science (APS) and from the Society for Affect Science (SAS), and the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association (APA). She is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Canada, and a number of other honorific societies. She is the author of How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, and more recently, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.

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Not all conflict is bad. Expert @Priya_Parker explains how “heat” can be harnessed for good. In this Big Think interview, Priya Parker, a conflict resolution facilitator and author, discusses the importance of conflict or what she prefers to call "heat" in human relationships. She begins by challenging the common perception that conflict is solely negative, associated with scandal and division. Instead, Parker argues that healthy conflict or heat is essential for meaningful change and human connection. She introduces the concept of heat mapping, a tool used in conflict resolution, which identifies sensitive or heated moments within a group. This mapping is comparable to a doctor locating tender areas. Understanding these moments of heat helps facilitators like Parker guide conversations that are relevant and impactful for individuals and groups. The goal is to enable authentic connections and provide a path forward for resolving conflicts. As a conflict-averse facilitator herself, Parker empathizes with those who feel discomfort in conflictual situations. She highlights the importance of developing the skill to hold rising heat in a room. This skill requires self-awareness and the willingness to become more comfortable with conflict. Both conflict-averse individuals and troublemakers play crucial roles in fostering healthy conflict resolution.

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Chapters:

0:00 Conflict vs. unhealthy peace

1:09 Thinking in terms of ‘heat’

2:38 Heat-mapping conflicts

3:53 Know your own conflict style

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Asking the wrong questions can hold you back. @NatalieNixon explains how to ask divergent questions to become a great thinker. Natalie Nixon, a creativity strategist, emphasizes the importance of asking the right questions in order to foster innovation and creativity. She believes that inquiry and curiosity are crucial for driving innovation, as they can bridge information gaps and encourage expansive thinking. Nixon introduces the "Taxonomy of Questions," which includes divergent questions ("Why?", "What if...?", "I wonder...?") that promote big picture thinking, and convergent questions ("What?", "Where?", "When?") that provide tactical guidance. To thrive in an ambiguous world, we need to balance both types of questions, embracing creativity as a uniquely human trait that sets us apart from technology and automation. Nixon suggests becoming "clumsy students" of something new in order to build confidence in asking questions and seeking help. By practicing this discipline of inquiry, we can develop our ability to think differently and drive innovation.

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Chapters

0:00 Asking better questions

1:11 Inquire and be curious

1:47 Two types of questions: Divergent & convergent

2:30 Creative questions = surviving automation

3:39 How to practice better questions

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Futurist Ari Wallach shares how to become future-conscious.

Futurist Ari Wallach knows it can be very difficult, but he's going to need you to think about yourself. Not yourself right now — that's easy to do. You're already doing it! He means thinking about yourself in the future.

Keeping what may lie ahead in mind — being future-conscious — makes you more likely to eat right and exercise; more likely to plan ahead financially; more likely to forge strong, healthy relationships and treat people right.

Researchers have found we see our future selves like celebrities, like some vaguely knowable figure. And when that extends society-wide, we make decisions that may not benefit us, like spending recklessly or harming the climate for quick gain.

Wallach is the founder and executive director of Longpath, an initiative that wants to foster being future-conscious. If you can keep tomorrow in mind, it can be possible to have a better today.

Chapters for easier navigation:-

0:00 Meet the two yous

1:01 The Matt Damon experiment

2:41 The 'longpath' mindset

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About Ari Wallach:

Ari Wallach is an applied futurist and Executive Director of Longpath Labs. He is the author of Longpath: Becoming the Great Ancestors Our Future Needs by HarperCollins and the creator and host of the forthcoming series on PBS A Brief History of the Future, which is being executive produced by Kathryn Murdoch and Drake. He has been a strategy and foresight advisor to Fortune 100 companies, the US Department of State, the Ford Foundation, the UN Refugee Agency, the RacialEquity 2030 Challenge and Politico’s Long Game Forum. As adjunct associate professor at Columbia University he lectured on innovation, AI, and the future of public policy. Wallach's TED talk on Longpath has been viewed 2.6 million times and translated into 21 languages. Ari was the co-creator of 2008's pro-Obama The Great Schlep with Sarah Silverman. He has been featured in the New York Times, CNN, CNBC, Vox, and more. He lives in the lower Hudson Valley with his wife, three children and wonderdog Ozzie. More at https://www.longpath.org/

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The formula for rational thinking explained by Harvard professor Steven Pinker. In his explanation of Bayes' theorem, cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker highlights how this type of reasoning can help us determine the degree of belief we assign to a claim based on available evidence. Bayes' theorem takes into account the prior probability of a claim, the likelihood of the evidence given the claim is true, and the commonness of the evidence regardless of the claim's truth. While Bayes' theorem can be useful for making statistical predictions, Pinker cautions that it may not always be appropriate in situations where fairness and other moral considerations are important. Therefore, it's crucial to consider when Bayes' theorem is applicable and when it's not.

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Chapters:-

0:00 What is Bayesian thinking?

1:01 The formula

2:41 When Bayes’ theorem obscures the solution

4:25 Bayes’ theorem in a nutshell

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About Steven Pinker: Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist who conducts research in visual cognition, psycholinguistics, and social relations. He grew up in Montreal and earned his BA from McGill and his PhD from Harvard. Currently Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has won numerous prizes for his research, his teaching, and his nine books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Sense of Style, and Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

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Discover Big Think | Smarter Faster™

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Personality clashes at work? Play this card game. Successful communication is at the heart of great teamwork, but words can mean different things to different people. We all tend to project our own biases onto commonly used words. Mary and David Sherwin — experts in team dynamics — have devised Teamwords, a collaborative card-based team-building system that cuts through differences to create consensus. If we can agree on the meaning of words at the start of projects, we will understand each other much better as we work together. About Mary Paynter Sherwin: Mary Paynter Sherwin is a seasoned writer, educator, and public speaking coach with expertise in helping individuals and schools develop rigorous curricula and activities for their learning needs. She has worked on multiple successful training programs and product innovation toolkits, such as Kaiser Permanente’s i60 Innovation Toolkit with Propelland and frog’s Collective Action Toolkit. Along with David, she is on the faculty of PNCA’s MFA in Collaborative Design, and was formerly an adjunct professor at St. Mary’s College of California. About David Sherwin: David is a design leader, teacher, and strategist with deep expertise in creating new products, services, and training solutions. At companies such as frog, Lynda.com, and LinkedIn, he has led and coached dozens of large-scale product and service design teams, as well as helped to create training workshops and events for clients such as UNICEF, DARPA, and the World Economic Forum. Along with Mary, David is co-author of design bestseller Creative Workshop and Turning People into Teams.

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Productivity expert Tiago Forte tells us what schools should learn from YouTubers. Technology has both a concentrating and democratizing force on society. While it allows a billionaire and a college student to use the same computer or phone, access to education and training determines how effectively one can use technology. Author Tiago Forte notes that those who could benefit the most from this education, such as people on the wrong side of the digital divide, often can't access it due to a lack of awareness or resources. That’s why he argues for democratizing the idea that one doesn't have to do everything with their biological mind and that cognitive extension through software can make one's life much easier.

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chapters:

0:00 Tech democracy (with an asterisk)

1:31 The problem: The real digital divide

2:43 The skill everyone needs

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About Tiago Forte: Tiago Forte is one of the world’s foremost experts on productivity. He has taught more than 20,000 people worldwide through his programs and writes and speaks on how technology can help knowledge workers revolutionize their personal effectiveness. Tiago’s online course, Building a Second Brain, has produced more than 5,000 graduates from over 70 countries. The course draws on his experience in academic disciplines such as information science, practical fields such as user experience design, and his work with top organizations and leaders in Silicon Valley. Tiago believes knowledge management is one of the most impactful skills in the world today, and his work is dedicated to making it accessible to individuals for the first time. In a previous life, he worked in microfinance in Latin America, served in the Peace Corps in Ukraine, and consulted for large companies on product development in San Francisco. He lives in Long Beach, California, with his wife Lauren, son Caio, and dog Ximena...

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Evolution doesn’t fix things — it reinvents them. Michael Levin, a biologist, explains. This interview is an episode from @The-Well, our publication about ideas that inspire a life well-lived, created with the @JohnTempletonFoundation. Esteemed biologist Michael Levin explores a captivating biological perspective of evolution — one that’s hard for engineers to come to terms with. In their work, making random changes to a system usually makes things worse, not better. But evolution, on the other hand, doesn't just produce specific solutions to specific challenges; instead, it creates what Levin calls "problem-solving machines." These machines are made up of hierarchical biological hardware with incredible adaptability, capable of tackling various challenges without assuming specific environmental conditions. Contrary to commonly held ideas about evolution, it doesn't just search for the best possible physical characteristics in organisms. It also uses signals and behaviors to shape how organisms function, so when things change or get damaged, the different parts of an organism can continue to function. From metabolic to physiological dilemmas, Levin highlights evolution’s remarkable ability to adapt. About Michael Levin: Michael Levin is a developmental and synthetic biologist at Tufts University, where he is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor and serves as director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts and the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology. Prior to college, Michael Levin worked as a software engineer and independent contractor in the field of scientific computing. He attended Tufts University, interested in artificial intelligence and unconventional computation. To explore the algorithms by which the biological world implemented complex adaptive behavior, he got dual B.S. degrees, in CS and in Biology and then received a PhD from Harvard University. He led an independent laboratory from 2000 to 2007 at Forsyth Institute, Harvard. Now, his lab at Tufts studies anatomical and behavioral decision-making at multiple scales of biological, artificial, and hybrid systems...

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The groundbreaking approach to stopping PTSD before it happens.

Bandages, gauze, sterile eye dressings — these are some standard supplies you can expect to find in a first aid kit. But what about tools to help mend the mental and emotional wounds people suffer during traumatic experiences?

After traveling to Greece to help Syrian refugees during the height of the refugee crisis, child psychiatrist Essam Daod came to the realization that, just as it’s important to treat physical wounds as quickly as possible, tending to psychic injuries is also an urgent matter.

“I think that we have this very short window of opportunity — what I call the “golden hour” — that we can really do the intervention before the, you know, [traumatic] experience can be stored and imprinted in the brain, especially for kids.”

In 2015, Daod and his wife started Humanity Crew, an organization that has so far provided more than 32,000 hours of free mental health services to refugees in the Mediterranean. The organization does its best to reframe traumatic experiences for people when it makes sense to do so — for example, helping a young refugee boy who survived a dangerous ocean journey to see himself as a strong and capable hero. This can nudge the mind to store memories as positive experiences instead of traumatic ones.

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About Dr. Essam Daod:

Essam is a psychiatrist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist who grew up in Israel in a small Arab Palestinian village in the Galilee. He specialized in child and adolescent psychiatry and graduated from psychoanalytic school. In 2015, he flew to Greece for a humanitarian rescue mission where he co-founded Humanity Crew and has been working with refugees ever since. Humanity Crew specializes in the provision of psychological aid to refugees and people in crises, working to deploy mental health and psycho social support to displaced populations in order to improve their wellbeing, to restore order in their lives, and to prevent further psychological escalation. Currently, he is an avid refugee mental health activist and researcher who has spoken at countless conferences and media outlets all over the world advocating for the importance of mental health support for refugees. In 2016 Essam and Humanity Crew were awarded "The Defenders of Refugee Rights Award" at the 4th Edition of Cities Defending Human Rights in Barcelona. In 2018, he became a WHO mental health expert team member, and a TED Fellow.

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About Big Think | Smarter Faster™

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