My first book, Social Media for Family Historians, was published in late 2010 by Unlock The Past. It explains what social media is; what use it is; and introduces you to more than 25 social media sites that can help family historians to communicate, share and collaborate with other family historians and with their own families.

It covers new ways to communicate such as Sykpe and SecondLife; social networking sites such as Facebook and GenealogyWise; blogs and microblogs such as Twitter; sites for sharing family trees such as Ancestry and MyHeritage; sites for sharing photos and videos such as Flickr and YouTube; and community information sites such as wikis and social bookmarking.It explains in some detail how to get started with Facebook and blogging.

Contents:
Preface
1. Introduction
2. What is Social Media?
- The Internet
- Self-publishing
- Social media
3. Why use it?
- Advantages
- Disadvantages
4. Communication
- Chat
- Mailing Lists and Forums
- Social Networking
- Blogs
- Microblogging
- Virtual Worlds
5. Sharing
- Family Trees
- Photographs
- Videos
- Social Cataloguing
6. Collaboration
- Wikis
- Social Bookmarking
- Documents
- Questions and Answers
7. Dangers
- Risks
- Some Simple Rules
8. What Are You Waiting For?
Appendix 1. How to Get Started with Facebook
- Sign Up For Faebook
- Using Facebook
Appendix 2. How to Get Started with Blogging
- Find a Host
- Create an Account
- Name Your Blog
- Set Security
- Create your Profile
- Select a Design
- Start Writing!
- More Advanced Blogging
Glossary
Index

You can buy it from Gould Genealogy, and I hope you do!

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This title is a play on the word of the subtitle of a book on happiness called The Happiness Hypothesis, Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, by social psychologist Jonathon Haidt. I can’t recommend this book highly enough to anyone who is seriously interested in what happiness is and where it comes from. I’ve been reading it, and it seems to me that the best way to understand and process it is to write about it – after all, we learn by thinking about things afterwards; by reflection.

So here, for your enjoyment and edification, is my potted summary of Chapter 1. You really must read it for yourself to understand it properly, and then think about what it says. I’m just writing this to help me understand it, and it in no way represents an accurate summary of the book. Any errors are mine.

The human mind is split. We are divided in ourselves. Even though we intend to do something, like go to the gym, and we tell people we are going to go, we don’t. We are controlled by something other than our conscious will. One way to look at this is to imagine an elephant being controlled by a rider. The rider is smarter but the elephant is big and doesn’t always do what it is told by the rider.

This division can be seen in four different ways:

1. Mind and Body – our bodies behave independently of our minds. Our skin sweats, our stomachs rumble, our sexual organs seem to have “minds of their own”. No matter how determined we are that these things won’t happen to embarrass us, they do.

2. Left and Right Brain – the two hemispheres of our brains are responsible for different functions and can act independently of each other. This has been shown in studies of people with damages parts of the brain, and where the connection between the two hemispheres has been cut for medical reasons. The left hand may suppress, or work against, what the right hand is doing. People make up stories to explain what has happened, or what they have done, that do not reflect the facts. This is called “confabulating” and can be seen everywhere, not just in the brain-damaged.

3. New Brain and Old Brain – the “old brain” is the more primitive parts of the brain that we share with the “lower” animals, such as the hypothalamus, the hippocampus and the amygdala, which control basic drives, memory, and emotional learning and responding, respectively. The “new brain” is the neocortex – the grey matter that mammals, particularly primates, have that performs more complex thinking and decision-making. So the neocortex is perhaps what makes us rational and releases us from the mercy of our basic drives and emotions.

Part of the neocortex, however, the orbitofrontal cortex, is responsible for emotional reaction when we are making judgements or decisions. If it is removed then people are LESS able to make decisions, which shows that emotions do not get in the way of decision-making, but rather emotions make decision-making possible by letting us know how we feel about the options. We make the many everyday decisions without conscious thought, and this is not possible without our emotions. So emotion and reason are not as divided as we think.

4. Controlled and Automatic Mind – the older, more primitive parts of the brain have been functioning for millions of years in an automatic way to keep the animal, the primate, and then the human alive and reproducing. The newer, rational, thinking parts have not had as much time to evolve and perfect the way they function. Which part do you think, then, will take over when things get tough? When a lightning-fast decision is needed? When we are under stress? Which parts are working when we don’t do what we know, rationally, we should do?

The elephant. “Gut feelings, intuitions, and snap judgements happen constantly and automatically” (p.21-22). When we’re asked to explain our reasons our rational mind doesn’t always know so it will make something up – confabulation again. Just because the rational mind decides to do something doesn’t mean that, when the time comes, it will be in charge of making the decision to do it. We’ll turn off the alarm and go back to sleep because more sleep sounds better to the elephant than getting out of bed to go to the gym.

So we have “two minds”. Really, though, they are both us, so it helps us to know how they work and why they behave the way they do.

Source
Jonathon Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. New York: Basic Books, 2006.

By the way, the ancient wisdom came from quotes from Plato, Ovid and others about competing parts of the mind, which I haven’t quoted.

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BBC World’s The Happiness Formula

[I'm writing this as I watch the program on cable TV].

Measuring activity in the brain by oxygen levels when shown a happy or sad picture shows that happiness can be detected directly in the brain ….. or is it pleasure? Is pleasure and happiness the same thing? And does it last? Or is happiness something deeper and more lasting than mere pleasure?

Can you just ask people to rate their own happiness and get a valid result? Professor Ed Diener, psychologist and researcher into happiness, thinks we can. He finds that the happiest people in the world are the Swiss, and those in Belarus are the least happy. Happy countries are richer and democratic, but their happiness is not so much greater than poor, non-democratic ones.

[Why democratic, I wonder? Do we prefer to have some perception of control over our lives that democracy theoretically gives us? This is a question for another time, I think].

Measuring happiness in this way predicts outcomes in peoples’ lives. Are they more likely to commit suicide if they are less happy? Surprisingly, yes! Can someone who scores less on the happiness scale keep his hand in iced water for as long as someone who scored higher? The answer turns out to be no! So are happy people more persistent, more resilient, more likely to succeed in life? Perhaps extrapolating from iced water experiments are pushing the whole thing too far, but it is easy to see how it could work.

Another study, of nuns interviewed a few years ago, found that those who sounded happier in interviews lived longer than the less happy ones, up to 9 years longer. This is not something to be sneezed at! And another one, of performance during memory exercises, showed that people who are pampered a bit more are able to remember objects better.

Professor Layard, an economist, has come to the conclusion that money doesn’t make us happy. Striving to make more money doesn’t make us happier, and perhaps it makes us less happy when we are constantly comparing ourselves to others. Bhutanese polititians measure Gross Domestic Happiness rather than Gross Domestic Product, and make decisions according to whether people will be happier rather than richer. Plastic bags have been banned (not a bad idea). Bhutan is not as rich as it might have been, but the people are happier.

What do we need for lasting happiness? Not endless consumption, but volunteering is what gives our lives meaning, and meaning is necessary for real, lasting, happiness. Happy people volunteer, and volunteers are happier. They also are more likely to get married, stay married, become leaders and help others at work, and have better health, says Ed Diener.

A survey asking whether governments should aim to make us richer or happier, the overwhelming majority went for happiness.

[What would you choose? Will you wait for the government to do something, or will you do it yourself?]

Stay tuned for the next episode in this excellent series on BBC World.

• Modern happiness using ancient wisdom
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• Can writing a journal make you happy?
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I’ve been reading Stephanie Dowrick’s Creative Journal Writing (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2007) and it has reminded me how liberating and fulfilling writing a journal can be. Writing a blog is like writing a journal in that you write whatever is on your mind, and yet it is different because you are always conscious that someone may read your blog (hopefully) and so you are keeping your audience in mind, whereas with a journal it is for you and you alone. It doesn’t have to make sense to someone else, it can be defamatory or dishonest or whatever you like – it is just for you.

Writing a journal can clarify problems in your own mind, or take you to a level of creativity you didn’t know you were capable of. I’ve written a journal on and off since I was a teenager, and mostly it was of the problem-clarifying kind. Getting it down on paper means you have to think clearly and boil all those circular worries down into sentences. It gets it outside of yourself and enables you to look at it more objectively, with less emotion that can stop you seeing it properly. It can also give you ideas for solutions that don’t come when the problem is just going around and around in your head.

I haven’t written one for a few years now, and then I heard Stephanie on the radio the other night talking about journals and her new book and I was inspired to start again. I love to write – no-one who doesn’t would voluntarily start a blog – and the idea that I could introduce more creativity into my writing and my life was instantly appealing.

Just the thought of going out and buying a journal to write in, with nice paper and a proper cover, and deciding which pen, or colour, to use, was immensely satisfying, and actually going out and buying one was even more so. I’ve written in it twice so far, and I’m thinking that there is so much more I can do. I bought a sketchbook type so the pages are thick enough that I can write on both sides of the page without interference from the other side, which always bothers my about normal notebooks; and not having lines on the page means I can draw or write diagonally or in circles if I want to.

Stephanie’s book gives examples and exercises for unleashing the creativity we all have in there somewhere, and I’m looking forward to getting in there and trying them out.

Can writing a journal make me happy? I think so! I’ll let you know how I go.

• Modern happiness using ancient wisdom
  This title is a play on the word of the subtitle of a book on happiness called The Happiness Hypothesis, Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, by social psychologist Jonathon Haidt. I can't recommen...
• The Happiness Formula
  BBC World's The Happiness Formula[I'm writing this as I watch the program on cable TV].Measuring activity in the brain by oxygen levels when shown a happy or sad picture shows that happiness can be de...
• More about positive emotions
  What else could positive emotions be for? Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson believes that positive emotions work differently than negative emotions. Whereas fear, anger, and disgust prompt us to fairly...
• For your pleasure
  Pleasure can be defined as positive subjective emotional states. There are different kinds of pleasure and different intensities, so that the pleasure you feel when you are getting a foot rub is diffe...
• How to age well
  It is a sad fact that for many of us the prospect of getting old is quite scary. We look around and see old people hobbling slowly along the street and we look away. We think of retirement homes with ...