View allAll Photos Tagged behavior
Ansel at the Halfdome and me on the Space Coast
Know what-cha-wana-do, and just do it!
And it doesn't hurt to model your stuff after a master.
And what is a camera anyways?
My take -
It's the gear you use to create an image,
and sometimes you just gotta go BIG
to capture BIG!
There are still so many photos I want to share from last year's trip to Zambia. Many of those photos include African wild dogs. My top photographic goal for 2023 was to finally capture images of wild dogs. I was blessed with multiple opportunities to do so. We had encounters with three separate packs and were fortunate to witness a wide variety of behaviors. The time spent with them exceeded my wildest expectations.
Visually Inspired Behavior
“The primary cause of disorder in ourselves is the seeking of reality promised by another.”
― Krishnamurti
We teach our students content that makes sense but we do not teach skills in how to prepare for situations that do not make sense. Society works hard to present normality as that without disorder. That is to you know where you are; what you are expected to do; and that the flowers you pass every day are the same flowers. However, we do not teach students, to see different flowers on each passing and that the river is not the same. If one in every five adults experience mental illness why is it that schooling is predominately about 'promised' normality and not preparing for the disorder 'of the promise'. One in every four individuals will suffer from a mental health condition in their lives. Schooling for anxiety, depression, attention deficit disorder, post-traumatic stress, psychosis, and schizophrenia is required. Society could do well by flipping the school. Every student has a story to tell. School as a check-in rather than a check-out.
Are our students simply learning how to follow the path set by our teachers to prepare them for the path set by employers? Is it possible that schooling could be about enabling students to carve a new path that is not set by curriculum and teachers? Where students learn through trial and error and learn how to deal with success and failure? Where it is about making harmony within the wilderness? Where students are not learning about conventions but schools are learning about authentic self-expression as students create their own meaning?
As a tourist, I usually follow a designated tourist path, designed by the cultural perceptions of tourist authorities and like-minded tourists, and I take photos of the same artifact as taken by other tourists over and over again. Even though we pride ourselves on our capitalist freedoms and individualism we chose culturally similar destinations. Even when the pursuit of attaining personal goals is the backbone of capitalist democracies our behaviors are so much the same. Our systems sell us individualism but our perceptions are constructed on the best practices to succeed. Schools covertly teach individualism within their governing systems. That is, understanding individuality in regards to societal opportunity. The outcome is that capitalist society invests in the merit of acquisition. To access acquisitional power meritocratic individualism is gained via quantification, test-scoring, and qualifications. Whilst teachers work towards virtues such as developing intellectual abilities and moral values, the systematization of education is merit to consume.
A highly individualized society works against encouraging community development where collectives discuss problems, seek solutions, and disperse choice. Those in power and are the minority of people that form the top levels of the hierarchy contain the resources and provide the decision-making pathways that the majority travel. Schools formalize the process through 'soft' prison-like rules and regulations and via manipulation of choice. Those in power know that community voice is not best for a the economic freedoms of an individualist based capitalist democracy. Those in power know where the best tourist sites are and where to get the best selfie at the most photogenic location.
I am not writing about coercion and authoritarianism, I am writing about the freedom to acquire what is available. In the big picture, I am writing about designing pathways to secure corporation profitability or as William Sumner wrote in 1881 supporting the "...competition of man with man in the effort to win a limited supply." If individualism is the basis of civilization and capitalist civilization requires profit, herding is an absolute necessity. The herd becomes the resource.
Populations are herded through the promise of gaining individual freedom. The wilderness is clear-felled to make orderly sense.
Choice options are enabled by individual proximity to wealth.
Continuation of knowledge based on inter-generational understandings of societal power.
Similarity - herds are formed and based on the fear that if you operate outside of the system you are vulnerable.
Closure and satisfaction are guaranteed as unknown reckless risk-taking has been removed.
Visual psychological boundaries have been set into place by authorities to guide user behavior and expectations. What is perceived is governed by a consistent belief that there is a promised reality. What isn't understood and prepared for, is when ourselves our wilderness is once again experienced, and the external promise is seen as the disorder.
Read more: www.jjfbbennett.com/2020/07/visually-inspired-behavior.html
One-off sponsorship: www.paypal.me/bennettJJFB
Something im very good in at times ;D
Quick shot was this... need to do it over some time...didnt had much time and felt like doing something!!! >.<
Adaptive behavior- Blueberry hermit crab (Coenobita purpureus ) Location: Hedo beach, Okinawa
Crab with container size: 75mm
Plastic reads 60cc
* All Coenobita species in Okinawa are recognized as a Living Natural Monument.
TEDX OIST talk on subject by Shawn Miller www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6FWCyVQcNA
Read more about this project-
okinawanaturephotography.com/crabs-with-beach-trash-homes...
A friend found this crab on a beach in northern Okinawa.
Japan based contributor - Meet your Neighbours project.
meetyourneighbours.net/okinawa-neighbours/
My series has been featured on-
abcnews.go.com/US/national-geographic-launches-effort-red...
www.businessinsider.com/hermit-crabs-using-trash-as-homes...
www.nationalgeographic.nl/galerij/10x-krabben-in-huisjes-...
petapixel.com/2016/08/30/photos-hermit-crabs-beach-trash-...
www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-trash-homes-of-hermit-c...
www.news.com.au/technology/science/animals/crabs-are-reso...
www.thedodo.com/hermit-crabs-trash-shells-2001062931.html
www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/oceans-so-polluted-crabs...
www.plethorist.com/crabs-adapt-and-uses-plastic-caps-as-h...
www.dailytelegraph.com.au/technology/science/crabs-living...
www.hypedojo.com/you-wont-believe-what-these-hermit-crabs...
Canon 70d 60mm macro x 3 Yn 560 strobes
Two Etosha male Giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis angolensis) posture in dominance behavior on the floor of Etosha Pan in Namibia.
This flyer illustration promoting "Positive Reinforcement Training" was commissioned by Vicki Ronchette for:
Also posted on Vicki's FB - www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1756165060648&set=a.1...
"Most of us are creatures so comforted by habit, it can take something on the order of religion to invoke new, more conscious behaviors -- however glad we may be afterward that we went yo the trouble."
Barbara Kingsolver
"Animal, Vegetable, Miracle"
Model: Taylor Freeze
Photographer: Justin Bonaparte
I'm no movie producer lol...and this is a little long, Hooded Mergansers were going fog crazy...I had to try, warm weather has everything upside down.
Great Swamp NWR, NJ
Three shot series. I watched this grebe for about 40 minutes as she diligently caught fish after fish and made sure both chicks were fed.
In about six weeks, the migration of the songbirds will begin. Songbirds migrate at night. They fly in such numbers that weather radar can actually detect the flocks.
I have noticed that, on dark still nights just before dawn I can hear them chattering during peak migration.
Small bird brushes by www.brusheezy.com
Moon and background by Lenabem-Anna J. www.flickr.com/photos/lenabem-anna/16045633318/in/photost...
Larger bird captured on a trail camera.
It was a very dry and warm day. I was sprinkling water on the plants of my roof garden. Suddenly I spotted a bee drinking water from a small pool of water on a leaf. And then within minutes I found hundreds of them gathered to drink. I was trying to track their path and finally discovered a big beehive under the sunshade of a house 30 yards away from my own. I wonder how they have developed the skill to search for the source of water and communicate for the same to other members of the hive!!!
Later I learned that honey bees sometime drink water. They take the water and put it into their hive. As the bees fan their hive entrance, the water evaporates and helps to cool the beehive. They also use water to dilute honey to feed their larva.
One day when there were lots of brine flies, I noticed the gulls on the shore doing some weird things. You can see two or three of them here getting their heads down low and snapping at the brine flies. They quickly move forward with their heads low and opening their bills. I had never seen anything like it.
This is by far the most common lizard here... and the most interesting. The male has an extendable throat fan that is bright orange or yellow. The female has a wide light stripe on the back that has scalloped borders. While not a native species, it is now well established in southern Florida. (It was introduced from the West Indies centuries ago... not necessarily deliberately.)
IMG_5466; Brown Anole
These two male Boat-tailed Grackles and several others were vying for the attention of a nearby female Grackle. Very, very noisy but interesting to watch!
Thank you for your visits and comments, they are truly appreciated. Have a great day everyone!
Mental Constructs: the cornerstone of self-improvement
Think about what moved you to self-improvement in the first place.
I guess that it probably was some frustration or some obstacle on the pursuit of an objective, which made you stop, step back, and think that maybe it was your own behavior or attitude which needed to change, rather than external circumstances.
Hopefully you solved your problem.
Nonetheless, the assumption you made — that you could change your own point of view and beliefs — would have not been possible for normal people before some centuries ago.
Before the birth of Kantian philosophy and then psychology, people could not even imagine that they had an inner life, that their psychology was separate from external reality, and that the former was viable to errors, and to be even doubted and changed. Your banal assumption is then the product of centuries of philosophical speculation by the finest minds humans have ever known.
What’s truly interesting about that idea though, is that its explicit content — that we can change our way of seeing things — is at once the application of such content to yourself. By thinking that maybe your way of seeing things can be modified, you are indeed already influencing your though patterns. You are moving your focus on different elements, from external elements, to your own thought process.
The consequences are real: your actions might change, your empathy towards others might too — maybe you’ll stop thinking you are right, and you might start thinking that your opinion is one among many. You might experiment with new ways to deal with people, or do things.
There nowadays exist entire professions devoted to studying and influencing our perceptions of things: psychologists, psychiatrists, marketers, politicians, philosophers, journalists. The common thread is the basic, uninteresting idea that our ideas, feelings and reality might not coincide. That we might be wrong.
Welcome to mental constructs.
The anatomy of Mental constructs
The example above is the father of mental constructs, while being a mental construct itself.
Mental constructs are simply the set of ideas and beliefs that we hold. While this seems easy on the surface, truth is that most mental constructs are so deeply ingrained in us, and backed up by so many experiences and emotional baggage, that we fail to see them as opinion, not facts.
Furthermore, I like referencing to them as constructs, rather than only beliefs, because they they indeed possess entire scaffolds to back them up, and we mostly experience them as entire world views, rather than individual ideas. This makes it even harder to separate them from facts.
Mental constructs literally form the structure of our world. This is because they orient our attention, and therefore actions in the World. They give meaning to our experiences. They are meaning itself. Experience without it would be raw data, as much as a foreign language is just mere sound before you know not only its words, but its rules as well.
The very idea of “World” is a mental construct.
We can’t ever really escape mental constructs, nor should we. The very beliefs which might not be fully accurate are the same ones that allow us to feel emotions and give richness to experiences.
The power of Mental Constructs
Mental constructs are power itself, as philosopher Michel Foucault held. They are since power itself is the desire to influence the world, and we define what is the world, and how to influence it, by mental constructs.
Mental constructs form the invisible net through which you live your life, the maze which you try to navigate and which determines which choices you’re allowed to take, and which ones seem inaccessible to you.
Your emotions are products of them, since emotions are our reaction to our perception of events. Between events and feeling stand the transparent world of ideas and beliefs, which determine if we feel sadness or joy, anger or calm.
We like to think that events are reality: we do since events are tangible, and therefore more readily available. Thoughts are not. We also do since most of our mental constructs are strongly backed up by hard emotions, since they constitute our most fundamental mean of power and security in life.
Mental constructs are the fabric of our worlds, and this is not going to change.
What can we do about it?
Some practical tips to use mental models
1)Discerning emotions, thoughts and facts
The basic tip is one from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
When living an experience, learn to discern between emotions and thought, and thought and facts.
You do this by questioning “is this an emotion, a thought, or a fact?”. Everyone gets this wrong from time to time. “I feel you are right” is actually an opinion, and should say “I think you are right, therefore I feel secure”.
The above tool is useful, and is taught in CBT sessions to patients, because emotions, thoughts and facts need to be dealt with differently.
Emotions need to be accepted as they are and experienced. They cannot be directly changed.
Facts must be accepted, but can be influenced with action.
Opinions can be seen, accepted but also questioned. “How much is this opinion realistic, and useful?”. This is the question to apply to opinions, after you’ve spotted it out.
Problems start when:
you treat emotions as facts, so you try to force them to change, you deny them, or you apply judgement (so called secondary beliefs) to them, thus making the feeling usually worse
you treat thoughts as facts or emotions, therefore forgetting that they can be questioned in their usefulness
It’s usually hard to treat emotions as thoughts since emotions are more direct and hardly get mistaken for something colder like a thought.
It is usually helpful to start from emotions, as they are directly noticeable due to their physical quality, then discern the event or fact associated to it, and last individuate the thought which stands in the middle. Thoughts are more elusive and usually taken for granted, so they are harder to pinpoint at first.
2)Finding alternatives to thoughts
Try it now. Pick a thought you had recently, maybe about an argument you had. Try for a moment to imagine an alternative explanation to it. Maybe you thought “they’ve been really rude to me”. Try to think “they behaved rudely, but maybe I need to understand their reasons”. Now check your emotions. Do you feel a difference? At first you felt resentful, annoyed. Now you feel calmer.
This brief experiment is simply to show you how experimenting with different perspectives can truly shift our feelings about a situation, and it also show how two different opinions are not more or less real, as they both feel true when you hold them.
It is not “lying to ourselves” as we do this all the times, albeit unknowingly.
The knowledge of mental models hopefully give you the tool to be more in control of your inner state in a conscious way.
A core idea is that of experimenting with new perspective after you’ve spotted an opinion. This is since we all hold our opinions very dearly and trying to force them to change can actually work against us, causing negative emotions and self-judgement to take place.
3)Accept your emotions, be compassionate of your mental constructs
Emotions are experientially closer to facts than opinions, because they are experienced in the body. Emotions cannot really be influenced directly (without the use of substances) but can be influenced modifying opinions and facts (although the latter are always filtered by mental constructs).
We often feel bad for some emotions we experience, or some thoughts we entertain. You might feel shame, or guilt. These are usually the consequence of secondary thoughts which we formulate about our own emotions.
Fact is, our mental construct were mostly there before we even noticed them. We are not to be held responsible for their creation (nor are our parents). Most importantly, we can put them in perspective and even experiment with alternative ones.
We can react to our own mental constructs, and work on building more useful ones.
An useful mental construct is to see them as something we were endowed with during our growth, but which are passible of change, and improvement.
4)In every situation, know a mental construct is in action
We often get stuck in life and feel there is no way out of situation when we forget that we are employing a mental construct to interpret it.
We see reality and our emotions so tied that we deduce they must be one.
The knowledge of mental constructs lets you now that the key to your wellbeing is really inside of you, not in some deep way but simply in your possibility to choose the mental construct which you live by.
Often facts need to change to make us finally well-off, but cannot influence facts until we come to see them as passible of being acted upon, and that comes through a change of mental construct.
Change comes after we decide we can change, or something makes us realize that we can do it.
The way you see and approach a situation determines the elements you’ll pay attention to, and the action you will take.
By knowing this and reminding yourself of it, you will hopefully feel more empowered and less victim to circumstances.
To conclude
Mental constructs are at work continuously in our lived. There is no escape from them.
While this might seem a prison, and we might never come to see reality as it is, it actually is the source of great power. The power to, literally, choose the form of the world we live in.
Self Improvement
Mindset
Thoughts
Personal Development
Self Awareness
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Potoos are nocturnal insectivores which lack the bristles around the mouth found in the true nightjars. They hunt from a perch like a shrike or flycatcher. During the day they perch upright on tree stumps, camouflaged to look like part of the stump. The single spotted egg is laid directly on the top of a stump. The mother sits in a cryptic pose with the chick on top of the stump.
I took this picture while on a photo tour led by Jeff Munoz of Rainforest Photo Tours (rainforestphototours.com).