Deferred gratification is the ability to wait in order to obtain something that one wants. This attribute is known by many names, including impulse control, will power, and self control. It is suggested to be an important component of emotional intelligence. People who lack this trait are said to need instant gratification and may suffer from poor impulse control.

Conventional wisdom considers good impulse control to be a personality trait important for life success. It has been argued that people with poor impulse control suffer from weak ego boundaries. This term originates in Sigmund Freud’s theory of personality where the id is the pleasure principle, the superego is the morality principle, and the ego is the reality principle. Poor impulse control may also be related to biological factors in the brain. Researchers have found that children with fetal alcohol syndrome are less able to delay gratification. 

The marshmallow experiment is a well known test of the deferred gratification concept conducted by Walter Mischel at Stanford University. In the 1960s, a group of four-year-olds were given a marshmallow and promised another, but only if they could wait 20 minutes before eating the next one. Some children could wait and others could not. The researchers then followed the progress of each child into adolescence and demonstrated that those with the ability to wait were better adjusted and more dependable, scoring an average of 210 points higher on the Scholastic Aptitude Test years later. Mischel later found that easily explained tactics allowed children who had waited very short periods to wait for quite long periods.

Charisma is a trait found in persons whose are characterized by a personal charm and magnetism, along with innate and powerfully sophisticated abilities of interpersonal communication. One who is charismatic is said to be capable of using their personal being to interface with other human beings in a direct manner to effectively communicate.

The term was introduced in scholarly usage by German sociologist Max Weber as charismatic authority. He defined it as one of three forms of authority, the other two being traditional authority and rational authority. According to Weber, charisma is defined as a certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue of which one is set apart from ordinary people and endowed with specifically exceptional powers or qualities.

Charisma almost always evolves in the context of boundaries set by traditional or rational authority, but by its nature tends to challenge this authority and is thus often seen as revolutionary. However, the constant challenge that charismatic authority presents to a particular society will eventually subside as it is incorporated into that society. The way in which this happens is called routinization.

Routinization is the process by which charismatic authority is succeeded by a bureaucracy controlled rationally established authority or by a combination of traditional and bureaucratic authority. For example, Muhammad, who had charismatic authority as The Prophet among his followers, was succeeded by the traditional authority and structure of Islam, a clear example of routinization.

Some leaders may employ various tools to create and extend their charismatic authority by utilizing the science of public relations, for example. As in the example of Christianity, a religion which evolves its own priesthood and establishes a set of laws and rules is likely to lose its charismatic character and move towards another type of authority upon the removal of that leader.

In the metaphysical or conceptual sense, balance is used to mean a point between two opposite forces that is desirable over purely one state or the other, such as a balance between the metaphysical Law and Chaos – law by itself being overly controlling, chaos being overly unmanageable, balance being the point that minimizes the negatives of both.

More recently, the term balance has come to refer to a balance of power between multiple opposing forces. Lack of balance is generally considered to cause aggression by stronger forces towards weaker forces less capable of defending themselves. In the real world, unbalanced stronger forces tend to portray themselves as balanced, and use media controls to downplay this, as well as prevent weaker forces from coming together to achieve a new balance of power.

In constructed worlds, such as in video gaming, where nearly all-powerful corporate interests strive to maintain a balance of power among players, players tend to be extremely vocal about what they see as unbalanced mechanics, providing the unbalance negatively affects them. And though the strong and unbalanced or overpowered players are commonly vigorous in denial of any lack of balance, the comparative media equality among all player brings change quickly, to further a sense of balance.

The twentieth century saw the development of both law and chaos in art to the point that the end product became unintelligible at an instinctive or emotional level. Many composers saw one or other of these controlling trends as superior to the other. The truth may lie in a fundamental acceptance of balance as the controlling force in art. In time, we may even come to accept balance between structural and emotional as the essence of beauty.

Automatic drawing was developed by the surrealists as a means of expressing the subconscious. In automatic drawing, the hand is allowed to move randomly across the paper. In applying chance and accident to mark making, drawing is to a large extent freed of rational control. Hence the drawing produced may be attributed in part to the subconscious and may reveal something of the psyche, which would otherwise be repressed. 

Artists who practised automatic drawing include Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Jean Arp and André Breton. The technique was transferred to painting, as seen in Miró’s paintings which often started out as automatic drawings, and has been adapted to other media. Most of the surrealists’ automatic drawings were illusionistic, or more precisely, they developed into such drawings when representational forms seemed to suggest themselves.

In the 1940s and 1950s the French-Canadian group called Les Automatistes pursued creative work based on surrealist principles. They abandoned any trace of representation in their use of automatic drawing. This is perhaps a more pure form of automatic drawing since it can be almost entirely involuntary. To develop a representational form requires the conscious mind to take over the process of drawing, unless it is entirely accidental and thus incidental.

The computer, like the typewriter, can be used to produce automatic writing and automatic poetry. The practice of automatic drawing, originally performed with pencil or pen and paper, has also been adapted to mouse and monitor, and other automatic methods have also been either adapted from non-digital media, or invented specifically for the computer. For instance, filters have been automatically run in some bitmap editor programs such as Photoshop. One of the newest applications of this approach is Dynamic Painting by San Base.

Foreign accent syndrome is a rare medical condition involving speech production that usually occurs as a side effect of a brain injury, such as a stroke or a head injury, though two cases have been reported of individuals as a development problem. The condition was first described in 1907 by the French neurologist Pierre Marie. 

To the untrained ear, those with the syndrome sound as though they speak their native languages with a foreign accent. However, researchers at Oxford University have found that certain, specific parts of the brain were injured in some foreign-accent syndrome cases, indicating that certain parts of the brain control various linguistic functions, and damage could result in altered pitch or mispronounced syllables, causing the speech patterns to have a different sounding accent.

A case of foreign accent syndrome occurred to Linda Walker, a 60 year old woman from the Newcastle area. After a stroke, her normal Geordie accent was transformed and has been variously described as resembling a Jamaican, as well as a French Canadian, Italian and a Slovak accent. More recently, researchers from McMaster University published a study where a woman from Windsor, Ontario, after suffering a stroke, began speaking with what some people describe as a Newfoundland accent.

In 2008, Cindy Lou Romberg of Port Angeles, Washington, who had suffered a brain injury 17 years earlier, developed foreign accent syndrome after a neck adjustment from her chiropractor. A visit to the hospital ruled out a stroke. Afterwards she spoke with a Russian accent and even appeared to make the grammatical mistakes of a Russian speaking English, as if English was not her native language.

Courage, also known as bravery and fortitude, is the ability to confront fear, pain, danger, uncertainty, or intimidation. Its accompanying animal is the lion. Often, Fortitude is depicted as having tamed the ferocious lion, as in the Tarot trump called Strength. It also is a symbol in some cultures as a savior of the people who live in a community with sin and a corrupt church or religious body.

The Tao Te Ching states that courage is derived from love and explains: “One of courage, with audacity, will kill. One of courage, but gentle, spares life. From these two kinds of courage arise harm and benefit.” In Roman Catholicism, courage is referred to as Fortitude, one of the four cardinal virtues along with prudence, justice, and temperance. In both Catholicism and Anglicanism, courage is also one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit.

As a virtue, courage is discussed extensively in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, where its vice of deficiency is cowardice and its vice of excess is recklessness. Soren Kierkegaard opposed courage to angst, while Paul Tillich opposed an existential courage to be to non-being, fundamentally equating it with religion.

Courage is the self-affirmation of being in spite of the fact of non-being. It is the act of the individual self in taking the anxiety of non-being upon itself by affirming itself in the anxiety of guilt and condemnation. Every courage to be has openly or covertly a religious root, for religion is the state of being grasped by the power of being itself.

Courage appears as the first of ten characteristics of religion the Hindu scripture, with the remaining characteristics being forgiveness, tolerance, not to steal, control of senses, cleanliness, intelligence, knowledge, truth, and not to get angry. In Islam, courage is seen as an important attribute to combat evil like the Prophet and to make the sacrifice required, to stand up to evil like the Prophet said and defend the brothers and sisters.

Civil courage, sometimes also referred to as social courage, is defined by many different standards. In general, the term is usually referred to when civilians stand up against something that is deemed unjust and evil, knowing that the consequences of their action might lead to injury or some other form of significant harm.

In some countries civil courage is enforced by law. This means that if a crime is committed in public, the public is obliged to act either by alerting the authorities or by intervening in the conflict. If the crime is committed in a private environment, those who witness the crime must either report it to the authorities or attempt to stop it.

Projection is a psychological defense mechanism whereby one attaches one’s own undesirable thoughts, motivations, desires, and feelings onto someone else. It is a common process that every person uses to some degree.

To understand the process, consider a person in a couple who has thoughts of infidelity. Instead of dealing with these undesirable thoughts consciously, he or she subconsciously projects these feelings onto the other person, and begins to think that the other has thoughts of infidelity and may be having an affair. In this sense, projection is related to denial, arguably the only defense mechanism that is more primitive than projection. Projection, like all defense mechanisms, provides a function whereby a person can protect their conscious mind from a feeling that would otherwise be repulsive.

Compartmentalization, splitting and projection are ways that the ego continues to pretend that it is completely in control at all times, when in reality human experience is one of shifting beingness, instinctual or territorial reactiveness and emotional motives. Further, individuals will sometimes be unable to access truthful memories, intentions and experiences, even about their own nature, wherein projection is just one tool.

It has been described as the operation of expelling feelings or wishes an individual finds wholly unacceptable, too shameful, too obscene, or too dangerous, by attributing them to another. The philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach based his theory of religion in large part upon the idea of projection, in the sense that an anthropomorphic deity is the outward projection of man’s anxieties and desires.

Projection is the opposite defense mechanism to identification. We project our own unpleasant feelings onto someone else and blame them for having thoughts that we really have. It is a defense mechanism in which the individual attributes to other people impulses and traits that which he himself has but cannot accept. It is especially likely to occur when the person lacks insight into his own impulses and traits.

When addressing psychological trauma the defense mechanism is sometimes counter-projection, including an obsession to continue and remain in a recurring trauma causing situation and the compulsive obsession with the perceived perpetrator of the trauma or its projection. Jung writes that all projections provoke counter-projection when the object is unconscious of the quality projected upon it by the subject.

Water puppetry is a tradition that dates back as far as the 11th century when it originated in the villages of the Red River Delta area of northern Vietnam. Today’s Vietnamese water puppetry is a unique variation on the ancient Asian puppet tradition.

The puppets are made out of wood and then lacquered. The shows are performed in a waist deep pool. A large rod supports the puppet under the water and is used by the puppeteers, who are normally hidden behind a screen, to control them. Thus the puppets appear to be moving over the water. When the rice fields would flood, the villagers would entertain each other using this form of puppet play.

The art remains highly developed today in this country. In ancient Vietnam, the rural Vietnamese believed that spirits controlled all aspect of their lives, from the kitchen to the rice paddies. The Vietnamese devised water puppetry as a way to satisfy these spirits, and as a form of entertainment using what natural medium they could find in their environment. In ancient times, the ponds and flooded rice paddies after harvest were the stage for these impromptu shows.

Modern water puppetry is performed in a pool of water 4 meters square with the water surface being the stage. Performance today occurs on one of three venues: on traditional ponds in villages where a staging area has been set up, on portable tanks built for traveling performers, or in a specialized building where a pool stage has been constructed.

Up to 8 puppeteers stand behind a split-bamboo screen, decorated to resemble a temple facade, and control the puppets using long bamboo rods and string mechanism hidden beneath the water surface. The puppets are carved out of wood and often weigh up to 15 kg.

A traditional Vietnamese orchestra provides background music accompaniment. The instrumentation includes vocals, drums, wooden bells, cymbals, horns, gongs, and bamboo flutes. The bamboo flute’s clear, simple notes may accompany royalty while the drums and cymbals may loudly announce a fire breathing dragon’s entrance.

The puppets enter from either side of the stage, or emerge from the murky depths of the water. Spotlights and colorful flags adorn the stage and create a festive atmosphere.