The Garbage Can Model

Light is known to be a wave. However, light sometimes behaves like a wave and sometimes like a stream of particles.

Think of a window. Each photon has a 95 per cent chance of being transmitted and a 5 per cent chance of being reflected. Each individual photon arriving at a window has exactly the same chance of being transmitted as any of its fellows – 95 per cent – and exactly the same chance of being reflected – 5 per cent. There is absolutely no way to know for certain what will happen to a given photon. Whether it is transmitted or reflected is entirely down to random chance. 

* In life there is chance... 

If two electrons are created together - the first with clockwise spin, the second with anticlockwise spin – their total spin is zero. There is a law of nature that says the total spin of such a system can never change (law of conservation of angular momentum). In 1982, University of Paris created pairs of photons and sent members of each pair to detectors separated by a distance of 13 meters. It is observed that when one electron’s spin direction is changed in less than 10 nanoseconds, the other electron’s spin direction changes automatically, remaining the total spin again as zero.

A typical atom is about 100,000 times bigger than the nucleus at its centre. There is such

a fantastic amount of space in atoms.

"When psychologists isolate the personal qualities that predict “positive outcomes” in life, they consistently find two traits: intelligence and self-control. So far researchers still haven’t learned how to permanently increase intelligence. But they have discovered, or at least discovered how to improve self-control.

The experiments consistently demonstrated two lessons:

1. You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it.

2. You use the same stock of willpower for all manner of tasks.

You might think you have one reservoir of self-control for work, another for dieting, another for exercise, and another for being nice to your family. But experiments showed that two completely unrelated activities – resisting chocolate and working on geometry puzzles - drew on the same source of energy. Those who try to quit smoking while also restricting their eating or cutting back on alcohol tend to fail at all three –probably because they have too many simultaneous demands on their willpower.

The first step in self-control is to set a clear goal. Self-control without goals and other standards would be nothing more than aimless change. For most of us, though, the problem is not lack of goals but rather too many of them.

No glucose, no willpower: Your brain does not stop working when glucose is low. It stops doing some things and starts doing others. When people have more demands for self-control in their daily lives, their hunger for sweet increases. Don’t get into an argument with your buss four hours after lunch. Don’t trash out serious problems with your partner just before dinner.

Decision making depletes your willpower, and once your willpower is depleted, you’re less able to make decisions.

The people who regularly exercised self control in doing physical workouts, studying, or money management got progressively better at ignoring Eddie Murphy’s comedy routine and tracking the moving squares.

Pre-commitment is important: People who draw up a contract without a financial penalty or a referee succeed only 35 % of the time, whereas the ones with a penalty and a ref succeed nearly 80 % of the time, and the ones who risk more than one hundred dollars do better than those who risk less than twenty dollars – at least according to what is reported to stick.com, which doesn’t independently verify the results.

Use your self-control to form a daily habit, and you’ll produce more with less effort in the long run.

Plenty of research suggests that being alone in the world is stressful. Loners and lonely people tend to have more of just about every kind of mental and physical illness than people who live in rich social networks.

The hyperbolic discounting: We can ignore temptations when they are not immediately available, but once they’re right in front of us we lose perspective and forget our distant goals."

According to one Duke study, over 40% of our day is done on autopilot, like getting dressed, commuting, even getting in the car, turning it on and pulling out are all on autopilot for most of us. Scary thought. No wonder there are so many accidents. 

So habits are much more important than we may think. Charles Duhigg's NY Times best seller book "The Power of Habit" studies the important and useful facts about how to manage our habits.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Power-Habit-What-Business/dp/1400069289

According to Duhigg this process within our brains is a three-step-loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future. If you want to set a new habit, you should obey to basic rules:

On the other hand, if you want to change a habit you should know that it cannot be eradicated – it must,

instead be replaced. And we know that habits are most malleable when the Golden Rule of habit change is applied: If we keep the same cue and the same reward, a new routine must be inserted instead of the existing one.

Finally, there are keystone habits, the habits that have the power to change and transforms other things. Typically, people who exercise start eating better and becoming more productive at work. They smoke less and show more patience with colleagues and family. They use their credit cards less frequently and say they feel leess stressed.