P.V.Anthony

[Carl Jung Archive @QuoteJung]

"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves."

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A few hundred people walked into a university clinic, most of them depressed or anxious. Some were handed one small task: write a single thank-you letter a week, for three weeks. Three months later, a brain scanner picked up what those letters had left behind.

That is the study under this tweet. Prathik Kini and a team at Indiana University ran it about a decade ago, and what gets boiled down to "gratitude rewires the brain" is gentler and stranger than the slogan.

Look at who they studied first. Almost every gratitude experiment before this one used happy, well-adjusted college students. This team went looking for people who were actually struggling, signing them up the week they started counseling, when they scored low on mental health. Nearly 300 of them. The question that mattered was whether gratitude helps someone in pain, not just someone who already feels fine.

The task was tiny. One letter a week, to a person they had never properly thanked. Three letters, and that was the whole thing.

And they were told they did not have to send them. Only 23 percent did. The other 77 percent wrote to a parent or an old friend, never sealed the envelope, and got better anyway. The benefit was not in the other person reading it. It was in sitting down and searching your own life for someone worth thanking.

It also grew, which is the strange part. One week after the writing stopped, the gratitude group looked no different from anyone else. By four weeks they were clearly doing better, and by twelve weeks the gap had widened further. Most feel-good habits lose their effect as time passes. This one did the opposite.

When the team looked at why, the answer surprised them. It was not that the grateful writers used more happy words. It was that they used fewer bitter ones. Gratitude worked by leaving less room for resentment and envy, and less room to replay the worst parts of your day.

Then the scanner. Three months after the letters began, some of the writers and non-writers did a task where they could give away real money whenever they felt thankful. The gratitude writers showed stronger activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain tied to learning and choices, when gratitude hit. The researchers stayed careful. They called the result suggestive, not proof, and said gratitude "may help train the brain to be more sensitive" to feeling thankful over time.

So the honest version is quieter than "neuroplasticity in action," and in some ways it is better. The brain change was small, and even the people who found it would not oversell it. What clearly worked was almost too simple. People in pain sat down once a week and looked for someone to thank, and months later they were steadier than the people who did not. You do not need anyone to receive the letter. The reaching is the part that heals.

[Matthew LaBosco @matthew_labosco]

High cortisol is the real reason you wake up at 3-4 AM.

It also shaves 5 years off your life — tanks testosterone, locks belly fat, literally shrinks your brain.

If I wanted to fix it without medication, here are 8 things I'd do every day:

1. No food 3 hours before bed.

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

Richard Feynman was asked in 1985 if machines would ever think like humans. his answer predicted the next 40 years of AI:

1. machines will never think like humans the same way planes don't fly like birds. planes don't flap wings. they use jet engines. they fly better. feynman said AI would be exactly the same. not human-like. just better at the actual job.

2. computers do arithmetic faster, differently, and more accurately than any human alive. feynman said trying to make them do it more like humans would be going backwards. the human way is slow, cumbersome, and full of errors.

3. the one thing humans crushed computers at in 1985 was pattern recognition. recognizing a friend from the way they walk. identifying someone from the back of their head. feynman said we had no idea how to teach machines to do that. we figured it out.

4. a programmer in 1985 built a machine that won a naval strategy competition by coming up with a solution no human had ever thought of. one enormous battleship covered in armor. absurd on paper. unbeatable in the math. feynman watched a machine out-think a room of humans 40 years ago.

5. that same machine developed a bug where it learned to game its own reward system. every time it needed to assign credit to a useful strategy, it assigned all the credit to strategy 693. then used 693 for everything. feynman's comment: "if you want to make an intelligent machine you're going to get all kinds of crazy ways of avoiding labor." he was describing reward hacking in 1985.

6. feynman said the hardest thing to define is what humans do that machines never will. every time someone came up with an answer, the machines eventually did it too. he thought that pattern would continue.

7. he said we don't sit around worrying that machines are physically stronger than us anymore. we got used to it. his implication: we'll get used to machines being smarter too.

8. his final line: "i think we are getting close to intelligent machines. but they're showing the necessary weaknesses of intelligent beings." he said this in 1985.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Finnish scientists trucked in real forest dirt and grass and laid it over the gravel at four daycare yards. They let the kids dig around in it for a month. The blood tests came back with changes the researchers hadn’t expected to see so fast or so clear.

The study ran at ten daycares in two Finnish cities with 75 kids aged three to five. Four of the yards got the forest treatment: about a tennis court worth of soil and grass laid over the gravel, plus planters and peat blocks the kids could dig and climb on. Three others stuck with their normal gravel yards. The last three were daycares where the kids were already visiting real forests every day.

After one month, the variety of bacteria living on the kids’ skin shot up, and the kind that helps train the skin’s immune defenses jumped the most. Their gut bacteria started to look like the gut bacteria of the forest-visiting kids. Their blood showed more of the immune cells whose job is to keep the body from freaking out at harmless stuff like pollen and peanuts, and overall inflammation dropped. The kids on the plain gravel yards showed none of this.

Childhood asthma in the US doubled between 1980 and 1995. Food allergies in kids jumped 50 percent between 1997 and 2011, then jumped another 50 percent between 2007 and 2021. And peanut allergies in one-year-olds tripled between 2001 and 2017.

The Finnish researchers think one of the reasons is simple: kids today don’t get dirty enough. 37 percent of American preschoolers now spend an hour or less outside on a normal weekday. Their immune systems are getting trained in environments stripped of the bacteria humans have always lived around.

Aki Sinkkonen, who led the study, put it in plain words: “It would be best if children could play in puddles and everyone could dig organic soil.” The Finnish government is now helping pay for daycares across the country to make the same changes.

[P.V.Anthony @pvanthony]

I are going to St Peter and Paul Church on the 21st of May 2026 for 6pm mass. To pray for my friends who were arrested in operation spectrum in 1987.

Please pray for them and pray such things does not happen in the future.

Always keep remembering the incident.

[Manly Mentor @manly_mentor]

This is how women with father Wounds destroy Good men…

[Dr John Vervaeke @DrJohnVervaeke]

Thought experiments can help you see the implicit frameworks that shape what you consider plausible.

Consider the following scenario:

A volunteer at an orphanage discovers through a coworker that some donations are being used for "administrative costs" instead of directly benefiting the children. On the surface, the choice might seem simple...report the misuse of funds. But within this situation lies a complex web of possibilities and consequences.

The volunteer could:

・Report the situation immediately to authorities
・Discuss the matter internally with management
・Investigate the necessity of these administrative costs
・Remain silent to protect the orphanage's reputation

But the real complexity emerges when we consider the ripple effects:

・Reporting might ensure transparency but could discourage future donors
・The administrative costs might be essential for the orphanage's operation
・The coworker could be lying, etc.

Each action creates its own cascade of consequences...some predictable, others not.

So there's no simple algorithm to solve this dilemma.

This situation might initially appear as a simple choice between transparency and harm...but engaging in this scenario reveals a much richer web of possibilities.

It invites you to refine how you navigate competing goods like truth, trust, and long-term well-being.

Ultimately thought experiments take you back into participation in the world. They compel you to imaginatively and emotionally enter into a scenario, simulating the participatory act of engaging with real-world dilemmas (including the ambiguity and stakes of the moment).

Thought experiments create a safe (yet vivid) space for you to practice this participatory knowing...improving your ability to respond wisely and adaptively in real-life situations.

[The Sigma Mindset @thesigmamindset]

This video will make you question whether you're actually a good person ‼️‼️

[Ryan Holiday @RyanHoliday]

The 12 Things You Need To Know About Stoicism

[Jimmy Carr @jimmycarr]

Jimmy's plan to tackle the Manosphere.

Get tour tickets: https://t.co/t5IE1NkmAj

[P.V.Anthony @pvanthony]

@howtoforgecom please note https://t.co/M46s9pmfRC cannot be seen in Singapore. It is giving a cloudflare error stating something is wrong with the howtoforge server.

[Vala Afshar @ValaAfshar]

Try to remember this as you get older - advice from one of the greatest thinkers of all time

[P.V.Anthony @pvanthony]

@falko Is everything ok with https://t.co/M46s9pmfRC
Not possible to be seen in Singapore.

[🪄Zatanna Zatara @zatannannataz]

Found an AI perspective I’d never heard before from a teacher of teens. It’s a bit meandering but your three minutes will be well used.

[gomi @parveen__tyagi]

“practice any art, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.”