The Power of Silence, Rest and a Clear Mind | Taoist Wisdom

Forty-two people said they would pay money never to feel that electric shock again. Then they were left alone for fifteen minutes. There was a button in the room. The button delivered that same shock. Sixty-seven percent of the men pressed it. One pressed it a hundred and ninety times. Timothy Wilson's work, in Science, 2014, and the most precise thing we have on our capacity to sit with nothing to do. This is about why emptiness is unbearable, and why nothing works without it. Thirty spokes meet in a hub, but what makes it a wheel is the hole at the centre. And three things that cut against the usual advice. Sitting in silence loses: in a study with a twelve-minute break, the winners were not the resters but the people given a dull monotonous task. Silence in conversation does not bring people closer: four unnoticed seconds of it drop the other person's sense of belonging. And an oak does not snap in the first hurricane, so a hollow tube is strong for quite another reason. It opens with a wheelwright telling a duke he is reading the chaff and dregs of the men of old. That is chapter thirteen of the Zhuangzi, and by its logic this video is chaff too. So it holds only texts with chapter numbers and studies with figures. Disclaimer This video is educational and is not medical or psychological advice. The research on the brain clearing waste during sleep was done on mice, and the video says so plainly: it cannot be carried straight over to humans and is used as an image rather than a claim. It also states that everything said about fertile pauses refers to a state after which some pull toward doing appears; if for weeks you want nothing, the taste has gone out of what you used to enjoy, and neither sleep nor a holiday restores anything, that is a reason to see a doctor rather than a philosopher. The video is equally clear that non-action in the original texts does not mean inactivity, and using it to excuse procrastination inverts the meaning. Studies are presented with their sample sizes and the authors' caveats, and the common claim that an oak snaps in the first hurricane is corrected. Subscribe: @the-quiet-monk Sources Tao Te Ching, chapter 11 — the thirty spokes and the hub, the vessel, the room; original and translation: https://ctext.org/dao-de-jing/ens Zhuangzi, chapter 13 — Duke Huan and Wheelwright Bian, "the chaff and dregs of the men of old": https://www.26reads.com/library/92138... Wilson, T. et al. "Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind," Science, vol. 345, 2014 — eleven studies, full text: https://dtg.sites.fas.harvard.edu/WIL... Baird, B. et al. "Inspired by Distraction: Mind Wandering Facilitates Creative Incubation," Psychological Science, 2012 — 145 participants, four break conditions: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22941... Xie, L. et al. "Sleep Drives Metabolite Clearance from the Adult Brain," Science, 2013 — a study in mice, full text: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles... Koudenburg, N., Postmes, T. & Gordijn, E. "Disrupting the flow: How brief silences in group conversations affect social needs," Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2011 — full text: https://www.rug.nl/staff/n.koudenburg...