[8] How to gain control of your free time.

Laura Vanderkam gives us some advices how to manage our free time.

Click here to watch the talk

When Laura says that she is a specialist in time management, people thinks two things about her: first, that she is always on time (which is not true), and second, that she has some tricks how to find an extra hour a day. But, in fact, she does not. 

She has done a time diary project looking on a 1001 days in the lives of extreme busy women. She has kept a record of their activities for a week to find out how much they worked and slept snd the interviewed them about their strategies. During the project one woman has her water heater broken and she had to devote a whole Wednesday's night to clean up the basement. She found 7 hours in her busy schedule because it was her priority.

Time is highly elastic. We cannot make more time, but we can choose what to put into it. The key to time management is treating our priorities as the equivalent of that broken water heater. "I don't have time for it" often means "It's not my priority". We need to find what our priorities are, list them out and plan our weeks before they happen in order to find time for what is the most important to us.

Vocabulary

tardiness - slowness or lateness in happening or arriving.

- Sorry for my tardiness, my train was delayed and I had to wait for almost two hours.

savor - to enjoy an experience slowly in order to appreciate it as much as possible.

- I want to savor my time spent with you. It's wonderful.

payroll - a list of people employed in the company

- The boss in this company has 300 people on his payroll. Most of them are working in the offices.

scintillating - funny, exciting and clever

- I am having a scintillating conversation with Mary. She is so funny and clever!

hustle - energetic action

- Our team showed a lot of passion and hustle while doing that project.

Sources of pictures: 1, 

Sources of definitions: 1,

[7] Why some people are more altruistic than others?

Abigail Marsh talks about extraordinary altruism and people who care more about others than about themselves.

Click here to watch the talk

When Abigail was 19 years old, she had a car accident. Some stranger stopped his car and helped her, saving her life. Years after that she became a psychologist and she researched on the phenomenon of extraordinary altruism. 

She says, that people believe that they are selfish by nature. So why some of them risk their lives for others? Is it also nature? Abigail started to test psychopacts in search of some characteristic features of their brains. She discovered that psychopaths have problem with recognising the expression of fear on other people's faces. It is connected with a part of their brains, called amygdala, which is responsible for it. Altruists, on the other hand, are the opposite: they have better ability to see someone's fear, and their amygdala is bigger than average person's. 

As a summary she says that it is the matter of nature that some people are more likely to be altruistic than others, but we all can develop this feature in our lives. 

Vocabulary:

gnawing - continuously uncomfortable, worrying or painful

- After four days without the food, we felt gnawing hunger. We were starving.

- I feel gnawing pain in my head. I can't stand it!

dart out - to move quickly of sometihng/ towards something

- Our dog darted out at the cat. It almost catched our furry friend!

- The mouse darted out of its mousehole, because it smeeled cheese.

swerve - to suddenly change direction

- The driver swerved to avoid the pedestrian on the street.

- I had to swerve because I saw a dog darting out at me.

welfare - help given to people of need (especially money from the government)

- Immigrants received welfare from our country, because they lived in poverty.

- Welfare was given to the poorest famillies as a help for upcoming Christmas.

innermost - most sercet and hidden

- In this diary I write my innermost dreams. I do not want anyone to know about them.

- No one knows my innermost desires. I am the only one.

ludicrous - stupid or unreasonable 

- I consider blood donation ludicrous. Why should I share my internal goods with strangers?

- I find it ludicrous to keep a mouse in cage. It only eats, sleeps and makes noise. What a stupid animal...

Sources of pictures: 1,

Sources of definitions: 1, 2, 

[6] How yarn bombing grew into a worldwide movement.

Magda Sayeg talks about how a knitted door handle changed the world.

Click here to watch the talk

"Yarn bombing is when you take knitted or crocheted material out into the urban environment, graffiti-style (...) it means without permission and unsanctioned", says Magda. When she started, she didn't have any ambition in it. She wanted only to see something warm and fuzzy on the cold, steel things that she looked at every day. She wrapped the door handle into the knitted material.
Little did she know that it will change her life. After that, she started to looking for other places to wrap, so she wrapped the stop signal pole near her house. People were stunned - they used to park their cars and make photos of the wrapped sign. Magda wanted more, so she did the same thing for every sign in her neighbourhood. Then she started to think why people react so strongly to it and she discovered that in this overdeveloping world we want to see something relatable. She wanted to do it in a bigger scale so... She wrapped the bus.

After this incident she realised, that she may have started the yarn bombing, but she don't owns it anymore. People do it all around the world. Magda often travels to places that are wrapped into knitted material by other people.
At the end she encourages people to put down phones and controllers and try to do something with treir own hands.

Vocabulary:

enhance - to improve the quality, amount of something

- Training grammar will enhance your skills in English - you will be good at it!

- New equipment will enhance our earnings. We will earn more.

mundane - very ordinary and therefore not interesting

- Mundane things like going to work or paying bills do not excite me at all.

- Mommy! This day is so mundane! I am bored! 

inanimate - having none of the characteristics that any of living creature has

- Toys are inanimate - they do not live.

- Even if you think you teddy bear has soul, it hasn't. It's inanimate.

insurmountable (problem) - so great that it can't be dealt with succesfully

- This problem is so insurmountable. I cannot deal with it by myself. Will you help me?

- Are you Polish? Because you can solve every insurmountable problem.

ponder - to think carefully about something, usually for a long time

- He stopped for a moment to ponder his next move. He had to consider it carefully.

- I am totally lost. I pondered for a while where to go, but I have no idea.

Sources of the images: 1, 2, 

[5] Mindfullness - a simple way to break a bad habit.

Judson Brewer's talk is about the role of mindfullness in the process of breaking bad habits.

Judson says that bad habits have their beginngs in our brains. As examples he brings up the matters of smoking and stress eating. People who do this have some specific process which is codded in their heads: trigger, behaviour, reward. They are stressed, they eat/smoke, they feel good, and they repeat the process the next time. How does he cure it? He suggests focusing of what you're doing. When you smoke, you have to pay attention to it - just like in meditation. Why do you do it? What are you exactly doing? How does it affect you? When we focus on our bad habits, we can fight with them. We have to focus on every moment we have temptation in, and think about why we're doing it.

Vocabulary:

morbidity - the morbidity of a disease is how many people have it in a particular population.

Morbidity of the cancer is really high - more and more people suffer from it.

cognitive - connected with thinking or conscious mental processes

His cognitive skills are developing very slowly, he is behind his peers.

disenchanted - no longer believing in the value of something, especially having learned of the problems with it

I am really disenchanted by you. I thought you are much more responsible.

restrain -  to control the actions or behaviour of someone by force, especially in order to stop them from doing something, or to limit the growth or force of something.

When he started fighting, it took four police officers to restrain him

clobbered - hit hard and rapidly

Sven was clobbered by Mark. He has broken nose now.

Sources of the pictures: 1,

Sources of definitions: cambridge dictionary

[3] Can we depend on our memory?

Can we remember something, that actually never happened? Can we really rely on our memory? Elizabeth Loftus, who studies human memories, answers these questions.

Elizabeth started studying false memories when she came into contact with the case of Steve Titus. Steve was wrongly accused of commiting a crime because a victim saw his photo and she pointed him as the most resembling the rapist. Some time later, she was sure that it was him. Elizabeth wanted to know, what happened in the woman's mind, that she changed his mind from "he's the most similar one" to "I am totally positive with this guy". Elizabeth found out that it's not the only case, when person accused was innocent, but victims recognised them as their executioners.

Most people think that our memory is a recording device, but the truts is that our mind is very subject to suggestion. She proved it by conducting a number of research. For example, she was showing the simulated crime scenes to the people and asked them about what they remember. When she used stong words, like "smash" instead of "hit" (smashed cars, or so on) people tended to talk about higher speed or broken glass, when there was any. She also examined people under some stressful situations. In both cases people were subject to the suggestions.

She tells us that when you feed people with an information what they might have experienced, you can distort or even change their memories. Therefore she gives a conclusion that memory is really fragile and even if we are sure that we remember things perfectly clearly, there is already a lot of false in them.

Vocabulary:

sob - cry hard

- She was lying on the floor sobbing. Her boyfriend had broken off with her a few minutes earlier. She was devastated.

- Come on, there's no reason to sob like this. You didn't fail your exam, it's just a bad grade, but it's passed. 

to distort - to change something from its usual shape, meaning or condition, to deform

- Your memories are distorted. When you were six, you didn't fell down from the ladder. You just fell down from the chair, but you were so little that it was such a big heigth for you.

- Oh no! The cake is distorted! It no longer resembles a cat...

to contaminate - to make something less pure or to poison it.

- Your sandwich is contaminated. You'd better throw it away, there is poison in it.

- The river was contaminated by the oil spill, we have to clear it in some way.

inadvertently - not intentional

- I am sorry! I did it inadvertently. I didn't want to hurt you, I swear!

- I spoiled the surprise? I am so sorry, it was done inadvertently. I hadn't known that it was a secret.

erroneous - wrong or false

- You gave me some erroneous information. The lecture took place in the room 101, not in the room 304!

- The diagnosis was erroneous. He didn't have a gastric flu, it was just a food poisoning.

Sources of the pictures:

 1, 2,

[2] Why we should talk to strangers?

We are really suspicious about strangers. Kio Stark explains, why it is unnecessary.

Click here to listen to the talk.

Kio tries to convince us that talking with strangers may give us some pleasant experiences. She started thinking about that when an old man saved her on the crosswalk. She felt noticed as a human being. Then she began to practise talking to strangers. Kio gives an oppinion that people may feel more understood by strangers than by spouses. Why? Because when we talk with unfamiliar people, we tell them more details about the topic and they may comprehend your feelings better than your relative, at who you only glance and you hope that he know, what you are thinking about. Talking with strangers has also other advantages. You receive a quick reaction. It has no consequences - you may say anything you want, because you may never see this person again. There is a lot of ways how to start a conversation with a stranger and she also mentioned it. At the end, she encouraged listeners to try this.

Vocabulary:

liberating - giving freedom

 - It was such a liberating moment when I told you the whole truth. 

 - The most liberaing day in our school year is the last day.

counter-intuitive - contrary to common sense

 - Your behaviour was so counter-intuitive! You hurt her with your misguided words!

 - Some professions are really counter-intuitive and you have to behave in the way that is opposite to your common sense. For example, policemen does not escape from difficult situations, because they have to face them.

preach - speak publicly (mostly about beliefs)

 - There was a man yesterday at Winter Street and she was preaching on the street as if it was a school.

 - Do not preach on this pavement like same insane speaker!

conduit - passage, pipe

Okay, this word was used in the phrase "social conduit" and I couldn't find an explanation of this, so I think is maybe something that connects people?

Sources of the pictures:

head / separator line

[1] Let's talk about death.

I personally hate this topic, but I have to provide two articles connected with death, so here they are...

1) Do you know the differences in burrial rituals among the people of certain religions and beliefs? If not, click here!

2) If you want to find out what happens to a human body after death, click here. Warning! The article is not for squeamish people. I've read it anyway, but it wasn't a pleasant experience.