life on planet earth on Signals

During my college years—in my infinite wisdom—it occurred to me that it made no sense to stop at red traffic lights when there was clearly no traffic around. So I began to stop only briefly—just long ...

Right before my freshman year of high school, I was hospitalized for a severe asthma attack that landed me in the intensive care unit. It was one of a dozen such hospitalizations during my younger yea...

Time talks. It speaks more plainly than words. The message it conveys comes through loud and clear. Because it is manipulated less consciously, it is subject to less distortion than the spoken languag...

What happens in the brain when we are afraid? Remember the little red metal square on the school-room wall with a piece of glass that reads, “Break in case of fire”? Just as the school has a fire alar...

When we tell a story, a lot goes without being explained. For example, I might say, “After I finished speaking, I looked at the audience. They were all smiling. Someone in the back shot me a big okay....

The key to a well-lived life is to have trained the emotions to send the right signals and to be sensitive to their subtle calls.

If you were lucky enough to watch the 2004 Summer Olympic Games in Athens, Greece, you probably remember swimmer Michael Phelps bursting onto the international scene. Phelps won six medals in those ga...

I love old homes. I’m always drawn to them. The character, the drama, the history. The possibility they possess in a different way than a new build does. Often when referring to older homes, people sa...

Anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress are all ways of describing natural human responses to adversity and the experiences of life. And we all face adversity in many different ways: challengin...

Emotions make our minds speak to each other. They are the most faithful reproduction of our inner worlds, broadcast externally in the expression of our faces.

When the telegraph was the fastest means of long-distance communication, a young man applied for a job as a Morse code operator. Answering an ad in the newspaper, he went to the address that was liste...

Communication usually fails, except by accident

Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.

The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue.”

You decide to buy a certain kind of car, and suddenly you see it everywhere. A friend recommends an obscure movie to you, and by the end of the week, three more people have mentioned it. You find out ...

We are surrounded by hundreds, thousands of messages every day that link our deepest emotions to products that objectify people and trivialize our most heartfelt moments and relationships. Every emoti...

"Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws."

Through their wearing apparel, people can say subtle or important things that they could not or would not utter directly.

We want to be interrupted, because each interruption brings us a valuable piece of information. To turn off these alerts is to risk feeling out of touch, or even socially isolated.

Problems are not stop signs, they are guidelines.

The most basic way to get someone's attention is this: Break a pattern.

A fellow who is always declaring that he's no fool, usually has his suspicions.

Advertising - A judicious mixture of flattery and threats.

Never about, always to.

We want big directional signs from God. God just wants us to pay attention.

For thousands of years human beings have communicated with one another first in the language of dress. Long before I am near enough to talk to you on the street, in a meeting, or at a party, you annou...

“When you see a thing like that, a thing that becomes a newsreel, you begin to feel you are a carrier of some solemn scrap of history.”

The television is 'real'. It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusion...

Affirming words from moms and dads are like light switches. Speak a word of affirmation at the right moment in a child's life and it's like lighting up a whole roomful of possibilities.

A group of motion-picture engineers classified the following as the ten most dramatic sounds in the movies: a baby’s first cry; the blast of a siren; the thunder of breakers on rocks; the roar of a fo...