Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

I came across this neologism today (from Human Being Curious via Creating Passionate Users and marypcb).

The human brain has a function built into it that’s helped us survive for many thousands of years, and unfortunately, it’s also a function that tends to resist trying new things as well. Your brain tends to make up, and live out worst case scenarios before trying something new, to see what might happen if you were to try this new thing. It’s what’s known as awfulizing. When faced with something that’s different from what we’re used to, our brain awfulizes all of the terrible things that may become of this new situation, and in many cases, believes what it makes up to be true, then responds to what it makes up, as opposed to what is known as objective reality. Let me give you two examples. These examples are quite different, and at the same time, the brain tends to come to the same conclusion for both of these situations.

It made a lot of sense. It's something I do a lot, rolling scenarios over and over and trying to work out what the worst possible thing that could happen would be. When faced with a decision, and something new, I'm still back on those long ago African plains, trying to avoid the hungry leopards.

Now I have a name for it, it could be easier to deal with.

And of course, I should still be able to avoid my metaphorical night-time leopards.

And of course, Human Being Curious becomes another candidate for the ever-growing blogroll

There are a lot of useful blogs out there, beyond LJ - and currently I'm regularly reading a couple of hundred of them (using the excellent NewsGator).

There's a link to an OPML description of my blogroll in the links section of my blog, but I thought it might be worth publishing the whole thing, ( so folk can see just what I'm reading... )

Thank goodness for the OPML to HTML converter...