PNEUMATOLOGY--the mother of modern psychology. Readers of this forum will be aware of the fact that when I started this thread, I let it be known that, since my student days, I have been deeply interested in in the study of 'pneumatology'(the study of the human spirit)--the study of the human intelligence-based power to will.

Inspired by my personal experiences helping seriously ill people, including myself and my daughter, recover from life-threatening illnesses, I have also let my hope and my opinion be known: Pneumatology ought to be studied in the same way we study all science, objectively.

WILLPOWER
If what the authors of a recent book--WILLPOWER, which I quote, below--write is true, I ask: Does this mean that my opinion and hope is now a reality?

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Roy F. Baumeister And John Tierney,
National Post · Nov. 29, 2011

Quote:
However you define success - a happy family, good friends, a satisfying career, robust health, financial security, the freedom to pursue your passions - it tends to be accompanied by a couple of qualities.

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 rediscovered, how to improve self-control.

Hence this book. We think that research into willpower and self-control is psychology's best hope for contributing to human welfare. Willpower lets us change ourselves and our society in small and large ways.

As Charles Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man, "The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts." The Victorian notion of willpower would later fall out of favour, with some 20th-century psychologists and philosophers doubting it even existed. Even Roy Baumeister, one of this book's authors, started out as something of a skeptic.

But then he observed willpower in the laboratory: how it gives people the strength to persevere, how they lose selfcontrol as their willpower is depleted, how this mental energy is fuelled by the glucose in the body's bloodstream.

He and his collaborators discovered that willpower, like a muscle, becomes fatigued from overuse but can also be strengthened over the long term through exercise.

Since Baumeister's experiments first demonstrated the existence of willpower, it has become one of the most intensively studied topics in social science (and those experiments now rank among the most-cited research in psychology). He and colleagues around the world have found that improving willpower is the surest way to a better life.

They've come to realize that most major problems, personal and social, centre on failure of self-control: compulsive spending and borrowing, impulsive violence, underachievement in school, procrastination at work, alcohol and drug abuse, unhealthy diet, lack of exercise, chronic anxiety, explosive anger.

Poor self-control correlates with just about every kind of individual trauma: losing friends, being fired, getting divorced, winding up in prison. It can cost you the U.S. Open, as Serena Williams's tantrum in 2009 demonstrated; it can destroy your career, as adulterous politicians keep discovering.

It contributed to the epidemic of risky loans and investments that devastated the financial system, and to the shaky prospects for so many people who failed (along with their political leaders) to set aside enough money for their old age. ...


G~O~D--Now & ForeverIS:Nature, Nurture & PNEUMA-ture, Thanks to Warren Farr&ME AT www.unitheist.org