If your brain were a piece of computer hardware, the software running on your brain would be more advanced than anything a thousand code monkeys on a thousand terminals could crank out in a thousand years – this would software so efficient that its inner workings would be virtually impenetrable to all but the most [...]
via Cognitive Daily The danger of rote procedure, the power of symbol over substance, the shortcomings of human cognition and attentiveness, et cetera… nothing you haven’t heard before. Or is it? Thanks for paying attention.
In American culture, evil is to the flowering of bad seeds within defective people, as obesity is to the manifestation of defective genes into addictive consumption. Evil is feared as the loss of personal willpower to restrain brutishness; obesity is disdained as the failure to contain gluttony. Obesity is not evil, but both share a [...]
I think it’s safe to say that our culture isn’t going to help us to make changes. Ultimately, our culture doesn’t care about us, only about making money and accumulating power. Instead, it is up to each of us individually to decide that a different road is necessary if we wish to find what we [...]
Social optimists, of course, are in the happy position of expecting to be accepted and finding that, generally speaking, they are. Social pessimists, though, face the dark side of what sociologist Robert K. Merton — who coined the expression ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ — has called a ‘reign of error’. Expectation of rejection leads to the projection [...]
There is no argument that Sigmund Freud was an odd duck.* * See also: quack Dominic Streatfeild writes of Freud’s passion for medicine in Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography – the father of psychoanalysis was a driving force behind the introduction of cocaine as local anesthesia (for treatment of “nasal reflex neurosis”) and an antidepressant in [...]
If you decide what you want (instead of letting someone else decide for you) perhaps you could choose the things that would actually bring you and your loved ones the satisfaction you can live with. – Who gets to decide what you want?by Seth Godin What do you want today?
The internet provides an ideal outlet for the ravings of the insane (you’re reading this blog, after all) and the most ridiculous and amazing content is produced exclusively by everyone’s favorite type of crazy: the paranoid schizophrenic. While the predominance of raving lunatics would suggest that there is really no such thing as mild paranoid [...]
Campbell believes something similar happens to many people who experience a terrifying physical threat. In that moment, our sense of invulnerability is pierced, and the self-protective mental armor that normally stands between us and our perceptions of the world is torn away. Our everyday life scripts—our habits, self-perceptions and assumptions—go out the window, and we’re [...]
Rage occurs when oxytocin, vasopressin, and corticotrophin-releasing factor are rapidly released from the hypothalamus. This results in the pituitary gland producing and releasing large amounts of the adrenocorticotropic hormone, which causes the adrenal cortex to release corticosteroids. This chain reaction occurs when faced with a threatening situation (Jezova et al., 1995; Sapolsky, 1992). – Rage [...]
