Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose calmness is often recalled in discussing Mr. Obama, may have gotten it from his parents. According to Jonathan Alter’s account in "The Defining Moment," when the family was aboard the ocean liner Germania as it plunged beneath a giant wave, F.D.R.’s father remarked coolly, "We seem to be going down." His mother took her fur and nestled 3-year-old Franklin into it: "Poor little boy, if he must go down, he’s going down warm."

from a so-so Times article on calmness.

Reading about how information architecture work is culturally specific led me to Edward Hall's Beyond Culture. Low-context = your typical Protestant, straight square rigid culture, explicit and rule-based. High-context = relationship-based, rules as guidelines, the connection more important than the part. Half of all travel writing describes the comical mishaps that result from a low-context culture individual visiting a country with a high-context culture.

Anyway, this struck me because I've been working in a large, relatively old bureaucracy for the last couple months, and the high-context culture description fits it well (although in other ways these people have nothing in common with, say, Italians.) The organization acts as a web more than a set of silos, and it's very difficult to pin down responsibility anywhere. People have evolved working styles tied to specific relationships, and as you can imagine the whole mess is very difficult to change.

Some entries on this list to be taken with a grain of salt, and not just because of the source.

• 2005 Butnik article in the Journal of Clinical Psychology
• Wikipedia article, which cites a prominent skeptic, as well as (sigh) "Neurofeedback and past life regression"
• Article on a neurofeedback game console, and the vendor's site
• Great survey article that is sort of equivocal on the efficacy of neurofeedback

Would love to see some other articles confirming the Butnik results.