Tag Archives: freedom

Fundamental Values – Chapter 6 and Dr. Love: Paul Zak

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Paul Zak - Dr. Love

Paul Zak - Dr. Love

I strongly encourage you to read Chapter 6: Fundamental Values, found in Thinking Points: A Progressive Handbook AFTER you watch the following TED Talk by Dr. Paul Zak.

Dr. Zak was the first to discover that oxytocin, an ancient chemical released in our brains under certain circumstances, is responsible for us to determine who to trust. There are certain regular and, ideally, daily social circumstances that help release oxytocin and involves physical contact.

Dr. Zak demonstrated the behavior at the end of his TED Talk (watch for it), by hugging a total stranger. He recommends 8 hugs per day to get the daily recommended dosage of oxytocin to increase our empathy surplus and our capacity to trust human collaboration. Continue reading →

Main Street Wilmington, OH

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Main Street Wilmington, OH

Steve Brown, Director, Main Street Wilmington, dropped by my office today and asked a very open ended question (Thanks, Steve): What should we be doing in Wilmington, OH?

In a nutshell I answered that we need business men and women taking time out of the routine of business planning and making money to think about how we can expand human rights and the freedoms of our neighbors. Think of it as giving back.

From a brain insights perspective we need business men and women (all of us really) to spend time every day exercising that part of our brains where empathy and compassion reside. The plutocracy infrastructure of financial language / neural pathways is well-developed; the democracy infrastructure of human rights language / neural pathways is extremely underdeveloped.

If our existing infrastructure of two party representatives per precinct in our county of 38 precincts were actively seeking to facilitate neighborhood conversations that matter in our county, that would mean 76 weekly conversations.

Assuming a dozen people at each weekly gathering to exercise our 1st Amendment freedoms to petition government, where do we find 76 public meeting rooms? Just a thought.