哈佛公开课：幸福课第一课英文字幕(2)

stop the class and you look inward. And this is literally a time of silence in a class.I will stop for a minute or two. And you'll have a chance either to just stare at me or anyone else, or think about what we've just discussed, or have a guiding question that I will provide you that you'll address during the class. The reason why I have "Time-ins"... This is something that I am introducing this year for the first time. We didn't have it last time. It's because over the last two years since I last taught it, I've done a lot work in the area of silence. I've read a lot of research in this area about the importance of quiet times whether it's in a class, in a lecture, whether it is at home, whether it is for a leader in the business, for relationship, for children starting from pre-schools. Now many of you, as you are going through these "time-ins" if you decide to take this class may think, "Well, is this what I'm paying 40,000 dollars a year for? To sit a class and be quiet?" First of all, it will only be a minute or two at a time, maybe once or twice a lecture. But second, it is maybe the most important thing you'll take from this class. The notion of embracing stillness. Let me read to you an excerpt from a study that was run by two MIT professors. By the way, all the names that I read and that are not on the power points, you don't need to remember or write down. This is just for your edification.So David Foster and Matthew Wilson. Both of them are from MIT. Indeed the following study that I think confirms the importance of "time-in", time to look inside. What they did is they scanned the brains of rats while they were in a maze and after they went through the maze. And here's what they found. "What the results suggest is that while there certainly is some record of your experience as it is occurring. in other words when they were doing the maze, when you try to figure out: 'What was important? What should I keep and throw away?' during periods of quiet wakeful introspection. What they show was rats who went through the maze and went through the maze again and again, learned far less than rats who took time aside, chilled out a little bit after a maze, had more margarita. Experience, embrace stillness. This has implications and they showed implications to human beings as well. Not only those of the rat race, all human beings. So what they say is that "replay might constitute a general mechanism of learning and memory". Both learning, understanding, as well as memory, retention. When we reflect, when we replay the material, we are much more likely to retain, to remember what we have just been through. So the importance of time aside cannot be over-emphasized.In his wonderful book of teaching, Parker Palmer-- it's called The Courage to Teach, says the following-- Words are not the sole medium of exchange in teaching and learning. We educate with silence as well. Silence gives us a chance to reflect on what we have said and heard. In authentic education, silence is treated as a trustworthy matrix for the inner work students must do, a medium for learning of the deepest sort." Silence is something that is missing from our culture. I know that many of you have probably read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig. He had a second book out, less well-known, called Lila (Lila: an Inquiry into Morals). And Lila is an anthropological study of Native Americans. And one of the distinguishing characteristics between these two cultures is their approach were silence. What he found was when he went and sat around with Native Americans.They would sit around the fire and hang out for two, three hours without saying a word. Just sit around. Look at one another. Smile. Have a good time. Introspect. Just be there for hours. While he points out that in our culture we feel very uncomfortable with the absence of words, with the absence of sound or noise. We have to fill up all the gaps. This is an important cultural difference. And we pay a price for this lack of stillness. A price that we'll talk about a lot, when I talk about relationships, when I talk about virtue and morality and when we talk about happiness and wellbeing in general. Let me give a little bit background on positive psychology: how we came about and how this class came about. In many ways, positive psychology is the brainchild, the product and the grandchild of humanistic psychology. What we have in humanistic psychology is essentially a reaction to the existing psychologies of the time. The founders, considered the founders of humanistic psychology in fact called it "the third force". Why the "third force"?Because the first force was behaviorism. The work of Skinner

(B. F. Skinner), the work of Watson (John B. Watson), the work of Thorndik (Edward Thorndik). This was the first force. The second force was psychoanalysis. The work of Freud (Sigmund Freud), Jung (Carl Jung), Adler (Alfred Adler) to some extent. This was the second force. And the third force, humanistic psychology came as a reaction to it. First it is a reaction to behaviorism. Behaviorism looks at the human entity, at the person as basically a collection of behaviors as a box, like a billiard ball knocked around by reinforcements, by punishment, by reward. And what humanistic psychology said was that we are much more than a billiard ball being knocked around. We have spirit. We have a soul. We have cognitions and thoughts that matter. It's not just behavior that is important for understanding as well as improving life. And then psychoanalysis, the second force. The psychoanalysis is about basically understanding mostly through the subconscious: that's how you understand it; that's how you improve the quality of life. There are defense mechanisms, there are biological instincts, neurosis-- and if you understand these very often dark forces, were better able to d …… 此处隐藏：10484字，全部文档内容请下载后查看。喜欢就下载吧 ……