Will > Books: psychology-and-the-brain‎ (39)

Nerd Nite is an event usually held at a bar or other public venue where usually two or three presenters share about a topic of personal interest or ex

Nerd Nite is an event usually held at a bar or other public venue where usually two or three presenters share about a topic of personal interest or expertise in a fun-yet-intellectual format while the audience shares a drink. It was started in 2003 by then-graduate student (now East Carolina University professor) Chris Balakrishan at the Midway Cafe in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston. In 2006 Nerd Nite spread to New York City, where Matt Wasowski was tasked with expanding the idea globally. - from Wikipedia

Be There and Be Square - Nerd Nite logo

Misophonia can attach itself to any repetitive sound, but the most common ones are things, like chewing, breathing, sniffing, and throat clearing. It can be hard for sufferers to talk about because of how difficult it can be to tell someone politely that the sound of them keeping themselves alive is repulsive to you.

there are approximately 100 trillion microorganisms (mainly bacteria), representing as many as 30,000 different species, living in every crevice, nook, and mucosal cranny of your body that you can imagine.

Tribalism is governed by a force so motivationally powerful that it predicts more of your behavior than your race, class, nationality, or religion

Tribalism is governed by a force so motivationally powerful that it predicts more of your behavior than your race, class, nationality, or religion. The formal analysis of this incredible phenomenon has only just begun, but the emerging science reveals that these factors are mere subjugates to our primal instinct to be a member of a tribe. This “Tribe Drive” is an ancient adaptation that has been a prerequisite for survival for 99.9 percent of our species’ evolutionary history. It is a critical piece of cognitive machinery—honed by millions of years of evolution—that gave us the ability to navigate, both cooperatively and competitively, increasingly complex social landscapes. But now that our species spans billions across the globe, does this adaptation continue to serve us, or is it mismatched to its environment? In other words, what happens when humans become either tribeless or destructively consumed by tribalism?

So next time you hear a raving demagogue counseling hatred for other, slightly different groups of humans, for a moment at least see if you can understand his problem: He is heeding an ancient call that—however dangerous, obsolete, and maladaptive it may be today—once benefited our species. — CARL SAGAN AND ANN DRUYAN, 1993

The core of the mismatch is that modern society has made us more physically isolated by decreasing our social support; all the while it has made us more mentally unstable by increasing social pressure, tricking us into thinking that low grade online and institutional social interaction is good enough to live a healthy and fulfilling life. In this sense, the people who dwelled in the first tribes were not challenged as much as we are today. Their units were glued together in a common struggle for survival, not the weak ideological grounds many use as the foundation to their tribal social identities today.

The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship. . . . Putting it another way, it’s the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar. — ROBIN DUNBAR, 1996

When we grow, develop, and live in a world where everything is geared toward the individual, how can we help but view the world with a more narcissistic lens? When we live with other people, share resources within the environment, and work through problems together, the outcome is an individual that is less self-centered and more psychologically flexible.

The brain…is a thrift-store bin of evolutionary hacks Russian-dolled into a watery, salty piñata we call a head.

The brain…is a thrift-store bin of evolutionary hacks Russian-dolled into a watery, salty piñata we call a head.

…consciousness is not something passed on or recycled--like single molecules of water, which are retained as they move about the earth as ice, water, or dew--from one living creature to the next…instead consciousness should be grown from “scratch” with only a few well-timed molecular parts from plans laid out. It is not drawn from a recycled tap of special kinds of cells or dredged from the vein of free will. No, the darn thing grows. From its own rules. All by itself. And we have no idea how or why.

The book is a collection of possible mechanisms, histories, observations, data, and theories of consciousness told nineteen different ways, as translations of a few moments described in a one-page scientific paper in Nature, published in 1998, titled “Electric Current Stimulates Laughter.” The idea is an homage to a short book of poetry and criticism, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, which takes the poem “Deer Park” by Wang Wei and analyzes nineteen different translations of it in the centuries since it was originally written.

There is no one such thing as “consciousness,” and the attempt to study it as a singular phenomenon will go nowhere.

…sensation is not simply a process of gathering information from the periphery and funnelling it to the brain, but that actually the brain can infl

…sensation is not simply a process of gathering information from the periphery and funnelling it to the brain, but that actually the brain can influence the data being captured. This is referred to as bottom-up and top-down processing, respectively. But this two-way flow of information is not limited to sensation, or even our senses; it is a feature of how every tenet of our nervous system works.

…when we listen, what we hear is the result of the process of making sense of these pressure waves all around us, ascribing meaning to these tremblings of molecules. It is an early warning system, an awareness of what lies in wait immediately beyond our bodies or outside our field of vision. It is also an effective mode of communication. As the authors of the textbook Auditory Neuroscience state, ‘Every time you talk to someone, you are effectively engaging in something that can only be described as telepathic activity, as you are effectively “beaming your thoughts into the other person’s head,” using as your medium a form of “invisible vibrations”.’

‘My favourite Tube station was Tottenham Court Road, because there’s so many lovely words in there. “Tottenham” produced the taste and texture of a sausage; “Court” was like an egg – a fried egg but not a runny fried egg: a lovely crispy fried egg. And “Road” was toast. So there you’ve got a pre-made breakfast. But further along the Central Line was one of the worst ones, that used to taste like an aerosol can – you know, the aftertaste you get from hairspray. That was Bond Street.’

not only is there an overlap between olfaction and emotion, but also olfaction and emotional memory. Those regions of the brain involved in olfaction and emotional processing also have a strong role in memory.

‘Perception is nothing more than a controlled hallucination.’ This is a commonly used sentence in the world of cognitive neuroscience. Essentially, our brains work as guessing machines, interpreting what is coming in through our senses in the context of our model of the world. What we perceive relates to our existing beliefs about the world, to how what the information our senses provide us interacts with our virtual-reality simulation of the universe.

the brain is not simply an absorber of information. It is a prediction machine. Our perception of the world is based upon predictions of how we expect our world to be, a necessary shortcut to deal with those three flaws, of data capacity, inherent delay and ambiguity.

…dealing with fellow group members is a much greater mental challenge than manipulating objects. For this reason, many scientists have adopted the

…dealing with fellow group members is a much greater mental challenge than manipulating objects. For this reason, many scientists have adopted the social brain hypothesis, which is the idea that primates evolved large brains to manage the social challenges inherent in dealing with other members of their highly independent groups.

…lying is a uniquely human form of social manipulation that requires substantially greater cognitive sophistication. To tell a lie is to intentionally plant a false belief in someone else’s mind, which requires an awareness that the content of other minds differ from one’s own. Once I understand what you understand, I’m in a position to manipulate your understanding intentionally to include falsehoods that benefit me. That is the birth of lying.

If we had not become bipedal, we almost assuredly would never have learned to throw so well, in which case the social-cognitive revolution that made us human might not have happened, either.

…dealing with fellow group members is a much greater mental challenge than manipulating objects. For this reason, many scientists have adopted the social brain hypothesis, which is the idea that primates evolved large brains to manage the social challenges inherent in dealing with other members of their highly independent groups.

But most of our smarts are going be dedicated to jockeying and manipulating our position among others. And if that’s the case, then the truth is only semi-important. If I can convince you of a world that’s actually favorable to me, then I can get you to back down in conflicts or defer to me when you really shouldn’t; that is a form of power. - from the Vox interview

…potential ancestors who wandered the woods in the moonlight were less likely to survive and procreate, and thereby less likely to pass on their proclivity for midnight strolls. This is how evolution shapes our psychology, with the end result being that no one needs to tell you to be afraid of the dark; it comes naturally.

Of all the preferences that evolution gave us, I suspect the desire to share the contents of our minds played the single most important role in elevating us to the top of the food chain.

We think of wilderness as an absence of sound, movement and event. We rent our rural cottages ‘for a bit of peace and quiet.’ That shows how switch

We think of wilderness as an absence of sound, movement and event. We rent our rural cottages ‘for a bit of peace and quiet.’ That shows how switched off we are. A country walk should be a deafening, threatening, frantic, exhausting cacophony.

If today’s shorn, burned, poisoned apology for wilderness should do that to us, just think what the real wild, if it still existed, would do. It’d be like taking an industrial cocktail of speed, heroin and LSD and dancing through a club that’s playing the Mozart Requiem to the beat of the Grateful Dead, expecting every moment to have your belly unzipped by a cave bear.

All humans are Sheherazades: we die each morning if we don’t have a good story to tell, and the good ones are all old.

I thought that, if I knew where I came from, that might shed some light on what I am…It’s a prolonged thought experiment and non-thought experiment, set in woods, waves, moorlands, schools, abattoirs, wattle-and-daub huts, hospitals, rivers, cemeteries, caves, farms, kitchens, the bodies of crows, museums, breaches, laboratories, medieval dining halls, Basque eating houses, fox-hunts, temples, deserted Middle Eastern cities and shaman’s caravans.

We’re not making the wood into our image: projecting ourselves onto it. It’s making us. If we let it.

To maintain a group that size strictly by grooming, we’d have to groom for about 43% percent of our time, which would be deadly. Something else had to make up for the shortfall, and other things have. We have developed a number of other endorphin-releasing, bond-forming strategies that don’t involve touching [social distancing?]. They are…laughter, wordless singing/dancing, language and ritual/religion/story.

…the first evidence of sedentary communities comes from around 11,000 years ago. We see the first evidence of domesticated plants and animals at about the same time. Yet, it is not for another 7,000 years that there are settled villages, relying on domesticated plants or fixed fields. For 7,000 years, that is, our own model of human life, which we like to assume would have been irresistibly attractive to the poor benighted caveman, was resisted or ignored, just as it is by more modern hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gatherers only become like us at the end of a whip. Our life is a last resort for the creatures that we really are.

I’ve come to wonder whether symbolism is all it’s cracked up to be, and in particular whether its use really is the great watershed separating us from everything else that had gone before.

Later I wrote in panic to biologist David Haskell, an expert on birdsong, begging him to reassure me that music is ‘chronologically and neurologically prior to language.’ It surely is, he replied. ‘It seems that preceding both is bodily motion: the sound-controlling centers of the brain are derived from the same parts of the embryo as the limb motor system, so all vocal expression grows from the roots that might be called dance or, less loftily, shuffling about.

The first time (and one of the only times) I felt useful was shoveling cow shit in a Peak District farm when I was ten. It had a dignity that piano lessons, cub scouts, arithmetic and even amateur taxidermy did not. What I was detecting was that humans acquire their significance from relationship, that relationships with non-humans were vital and that clearing up someone’s dung is a good way of establishing relationships.

The last thing I ate was a hedgehog. That was nine days ago. From the taste of them, hedgehogs must start decomposing even when they’re alive and in their prime. This one’s still down there somewhere, and my burps smell like a maggot farm. I regret it’s death under the wheels of a cattle truck far more than its parents or children possibly do.

We try to learn the liturgy: the way to do things properly; the way to avoid offending the fastidious, prescriptive and vengeful guardians of the place. Everything matters. We watch the rain fall on one leaf, trace the course of the water under a stone, and then we go back to the leaf and watch the next drop. We try to know the stamens with the visual resolution of a bumblebee and the snail slime with the nose of a bankvole and the leaf pennants on the tree masts with the cold eyes of kites.

Charles Foster (born 1962) is an English writer, traveller, veterinarian, taxidermist, barrister and philosopher. He is known for his books and articles on Natural History, travel (particularly in Africa and the Middle East), theology, law and medical ethics. He is a Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford. He says of his own books: 'Ultimately they are all presumptuous and unsuccessful attempts to answer the questions 'who or what are we?', and 'what on earth are we doing here?'

…your memories for what happened…are wrong
———————————————————
Your memory isn’t a video camera, recording a constant stream of every sight and soun

…your memories for what happened…are wrong
———————————————————
Your memory isn’t a video camera, recording a constant stream of every sight and sound you’re exposed to. You can only capture and retain what you pay attention to.
———————————————————
Just because memory sometimes fails doesn’t mean it’s in any way broken. While admittedly frustrating, forgetting is a normal part of being human.

Unlike perception and movement, which reside in specific addresses in our brains, we don’t have specialized memory-storage neurons or a memory cortex. Vision, hearing, smell, touch, and movement can all be mapped to discrete geographic regions in the brain…When we remember something, we’re not withdrawing from a “memory bank.” There is no memory bank. Long-term memories don’t reside in one particular neighborhood in your brain.

….every time we retrieve a stored memory for what happened, it’s highly likely that we change the memory…Memory isn’t a courtroom stenographer, reading back exactly what was said. When we recall what happened, we typically fetch only some of the details we stored. We omit some bits, reinterpret parts, and distort others in light of new information, context, and perspective that are available now but weren’t back then. We frequently invent new information, often inaccurate, to fill in the gaps in our memories so that the narrative feels more complete or pleasing. What we remember about the past is often influenced by how we feel in the present. Our opinions and emotional state now color what we remember from what happened last year. And so, in revisiting episodic memories, we often reshape them.

It is through the erosion of memory that time heals all wounds.

As my father lay dying, Donald went to the movies. If he can in any way profit from your death, he’ll facilitate it, and then he’ll ignore the fact

As my father lay dying, Donald went to the movies. If he can in any way profit from your death, he’ll facilitate it, and then he’ll ignore the fact that you died.

Whereas Mary [Donald’s mother] was needy, Fred [his father] seemed to have no emotional needs at all. In fact, he was a highly-functioning sociopath. Although uncommon, sociopathy is not rare, afflicting as much as 3 percent of the population. Seventy-five percent of those diagnosed are men. Symptoms of sociopathy include a lack of empathy, a facility for lying, an indifference to right and wrong, abusive behavior, and a lack of interest in the rights of others. Having a sociopath as a parent, especially if there is no one else around to mitigate the effects, all but guarantees severe disruption in how children understand themselves, regulate their emotions, and engage with the world.

It was love of books that set her apart when she was growing up… in what she describes as a “shitty Trump apartment” in the gritty housing projects of Jamaica, Queens, quite different to the rarefied air of the nearby Jamaica Estates where the rest of the family lived. That gave her a grounding in reality. She took the subway to school. And she devoured literature. In her memoir, she recounts that her grandfather’s house did not display a single book until her uncle published his ghostwritten The Art of the Deal in the late 1980s. “I started reading when I was three and a half,” Trump says. “My horizons were already broader than anyone else in the family simply by virtue of that.” - from the Financial Times interview

Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York and currently the de facto leader of the country’s COVID-19 response, has committed not only the sin of insufficiently kissing Donald’s ass, but the ultimate sin of showing Donald up by being better and more competent, a real leader who is respected and effective and admired. Donald can’t fight back by shutting Cuomo up or reversing his decisions; having abdicated his authority to lead a nationwide response, he no longer has the ability to counter decisions made at the state level…What he can do in order to offset the powerlessness and rage he feels is to punish the rest of us. He’ll withhold ventilators or steal supplies from states that have not groveled sufficiently…What Donald thinks is justified retaliation is, in this context, mass murder.

“You know how you change yourself into a different person?”
“How?”
“This is gonna sound cheesy, but.” He blushed. “What they say in there, it’s true

“You know how you change yourself into a different person?”
“How?”
“This is gonna sound cheesy, but.” He blushed. “What they say in there, it’s true. You change by making one decision you wouldn’t have made before. You walk into the meeting. Even going to the meeting and leaving before it starts. It’s something. One decision at a time. You are what you choose, right? All you have to do is choose different.”

--------------------------------------

How much can something change before it becomes something else?

I wanted to write a book about amnesia that was a story not about finding out about the past but about building a new life from scratch, and trying to figure out who you would be if you had no memories, and no baggage, and no obligations. For me it was a chance to explore the science of memory, the history of psychology… - from Bookreporter

…can you discuss the various influences on your book?
Bach fugues. General Hospital. Abandoned mental asylums. The hysterics of the Salpêtrière. Dropping out of grad school. Growing up in the Philly suburbs…Loneliness. Rage. Paris. Ongoing existential confusion about what it means to be an adult woman without any of the supposed trappings (partner, kid, house, etc.) of adulthood. - Q/A from Lit Hub interview

What kind of symptom wants to find its own cure?

fugue
/fyo͞oɡ/
noun
noun: fugue; plural noun: fugues
Music - a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase (the subject) is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts
Psychiatry - a state or period of loss of awareness of one's identity, often coupled with flight from one's usual environment, associated with certain forms of hysteria and epilepsy

Benjamin said the fugue was like the self: frugal subjects inverting, subverting, transforming over time, but always, somehow, ineffably and fundamentally the same. He said the fugue was like the mind, rigid rules imposed on finite elements spawning an infinity of combinatorial possibility, a generative complexity from which arose thought, beauty, human consciousness. He said fugue was a junction of reason and unreason, enlightenment rationalism fused with renaissance mysticism, a limited space where finite met infinite. He said Bach used music to encode the divine—like our neurons, Benjamin said, our axons and dendrites, our neurotransmitters, every mind its own creator.

Lizzie had puzzled over this line from the Confessions more than any other. Any duration is divisible into past and future: the present occupies no space. And yet Augustine also said the past and future were only figments. Consequence: there is no now, there are no thens. There is only memory and imagination, no differential of reality wedged between.

Memories make us who we are. They create our worldview in ways we hardly realize. Like a character made of Legos, we're built of blocks of memory that all fit together to form our consciousness. How can it be otherwise? - Aug 8, 2017 – Psychology Today

The will to survive is fundamental to us all. But in a life-or-death situation—when calm, careful planning, and logical thinking are what’s needed

The will to survive is fundamental to us all. But in a life-or-death situation—when calm, careful planning, and logical thinking are what’s needed most—research shows that most of us will lose our shit.

---------------------------------------

Being able to navigate your mental and physical response to fear is your number one survival skill. It can also be the best ally you have in any intimidating situation life throws at you. Managing your fear requires deliberate acts of courage. It is a choice that you make, and it’s one that everyone is capable of making.

…when it seems like the world is ending, being willing to help others is the antidote to fear

Identifying the questions you must ask and the data or evidence you will need is the first step in decision-making, and you can do that more effect

Identifying the questions you must ask and the data or evidence you will need is the first step in decision-making, and you can do that more effectively once you’re aware of the pitfalls posed by the cognitive biases and illusions I’ve cited in this book.

We are prone to blame decision makers for good decisions that worked out badly and to give them too little credit for successful moves that appear obvious only after the fact.

Why do we cling to truths long after they’ve been disproven or lost their usefulness? Is it really just a matter of hearing something preached as true so frequently that our minds accept them not just as fact, but as the default perspective that must be actively dislodged by the jaws of life? Yes, as it turns out.

When a specific fact or example comes to mind more readily, we tend to overemphasize that fact or example—maybe we ascribe too much importance to it, or perhaps we extrapolate and assume that that example is representative of the whole. This phenomenon is called availability bias, and I think it’s one of the easiest biases to understand but one of the hardest to catch in yourself, because it’s not just natural, but easy. Your brain is just doing what you asked, right? You thought about some question, and your brain went right to the hard drive and pulled out something relevant. Your brain didn’t go to the archives, although, and it probably just gave you one thing when you actually needed the whole set.

As a student, realizing that my biology books were of little help explaining chimpanzee behavior, I picked up a copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince. I

As a student, realizing that my biology books were of little help explaining chimpanzee behavior, I picked up a copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince. It offered an insightful, unadorned account of human behavior based on real-life observations of the Borgias, the Medici, and the popes. The book put me in the right frame of mind to write about ape politics at the zoo.

We know our own inner states imperfectly and often mislead both ourselves and those around us. We’re masters of fake happiness, suppressed fear, and misguided love. This is why I’m pleased to work with nonlinguistic creatures. I’m forced to guess their feelings, but at least they never lead me astray by what they tell me about themselves.

The anthropomorphism argument [that we merely project our emotions onto the animals being studied] is rooted in human exceptionalism. It reflects the desire to set humans apart and deny our animality. To do so remains customary in the humanities and much of the social sciences, which thrive on the notion that the human mind is somehow our own invention…Modern neuroscience makes it impossible to maintain a sharp human-animal dualism.

We have trouble imagining fairness as an evolved trait partly due to how we depict nature. Using evocative phrases such as “survival of the fittest” and “nature red in tooth and claw,” we stress nature’s cruelty, leaving no room for fairness, only the right of the strongest. In the meantime, we forget that animals often depend on each other and survive through cooperation. In fact, they struggle far more against their environment or against hunger and disease than against each other.

The idea that we can achieve optimal sociality only by subduing human biology is antiquated. It doesn’t fit with what we know about hunter-gatherers, other primates, or modern neuroscience. It also promotes a sequential view—first we had human biology, then we got civilization—whereas in reality the two have always gone hand in hand.

We may not be in full control of our emotions, but we aren’t their slaves either. This is why you should never say “my emotions took over” as an excuse for something stupid you did, because you let your emotions take over. Getting emotional has a voluntary side. You let yourself fall in love with the wrong person, you let yourself hate certain others, you allowed greed to cloud your judgment or imagination to feed your jealousy. Emotions are never just emotions, and they are never fully automated. Perhaps the greatest misunderstanding about emotions is that they are the opposite of cognition. We have translated the dualism between body and mind into one between emotion and intelligence, but the two actually go together and cannot operate without each other.

I will only rarely refer to other species as “other animals” or “non-human animals.” For simplicity’s sake, I will mostly call them just “animals,” even though for me, as a biologist, nothing is more self-evident than that we are part of the same kingdom. We are animals. Since I don’t look at our species as emotionally much different from other mammals, and in fact would be hard-pressed to pinpoint uniquely human emotions, we had better pay careful attention to the emotional background we share with our fellow travelers on this planet. - Frans De Waal

I'm standing next to my table, everything neatly lined up, and I'm just hoping that my professors can see how much effort I've put into making my desi

I'm standing next to my table, everything neatly lined up, and I'm just hoping that my professors can see how much effort I've put into making my designs practical and ergonomic and sustainable. And I'm starting to get really nervous, because for a long time, no one says anything. It's just completely silent. And then one of the professors starts to speak, and he says, "Your work gives me a feeling of joy."…I asked the professors, "How do things make us feel joy? How do tangible things make us feel intangible joy?” They hemmed and hawed and gestured a lot with their hands. "They just do," they said… So this got me thinking: Where does joy come from? I started asking everyone I knew, and even people I just met on the street, about the things that brought them joy. On the subway, in a café, on an airplane, it was, "Hi, nice to meet you. What brings you joy?" I felt like a detective. I was like, "When did you last see it? Who were you with? What color was it? Did anyone else see it?" I was the Nancy Drew of joy. - from the author’s TED talk

Seeing it all laid out, it was clear that joy was not a mysterious, intuitive force; it emanated directly from the physical properties of the objects. Specifically, it was what designers called aesthetics—the attributes that define the way an object looks and feels—that gave rise to the feeling of joy.

A body of research is emerging that demonstrates a clear link between our surroundings and our mental health. For example, studies show that workers with sunny desks are happier and more productive than their peers in dimly lit offices.

We all have an inclination to seek joy in our surroundings, yet we have been taught to ignore it. What might happen if we were to reawaken this instinct for finding joy?

Wonders never cease, as long as we are willing to look for them.

In principle, then, the Rorschach test rests on one basic premise: Seeing is an act not just of the eye but of the mind, and not just of the visua

In principle, then, the Rorschach test rests on one basic premise: Seeing is an act not just of the eye but of the mind, and not just of the visual cortex or some other isolated part of the brain but of the whole person. If this is true, a visual task that calls upon enough of our perceptual powers will reveal the mind at work.

Descended from artists on both sides of his family, Hermann Rorschach had a lifelong belief in perception as the point of intersection between mind, body, and world. He wanted to understand how different people see, and at the most fundamental level, seeing is, as the painter Cezanne said of color, “the place where our brain and the universe meet.”

Alone among the pioneers of psychology, Rorschach was a visual person and created a visual psychology. This is the great path not taken in mainstream psychology, even though most of us today, even the talkiest and most bookish, live in a predominantly visual world of images on surfaces and screens. We evolved to be visual. Our brains are in large part devoted to visual processing—estimates run as high at 85 percent—and scientists are beginning to take that fact seriously; advertisers in quest of “eyeballs on the page” started to take it seriously a long time ago. Seeing runs deeper than talking.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard, after describing this book to someone: “It’s like the Rorschach test is a Rorschach test~ It can mean anything!” I want to say No, it isn’t. However tempting it may be to “present both sides” and leave it at that, the inkblot test is something real, with a particular history, actual uses, and objective visual qualities. The blots look a certain way; the test either works in a given way or it doesn’t. The facts do matter more than our opinions of them.

Memory scientists often speak of the important difference between knowing that a certain fact is true and knowing how you came to learn it. For example, here’s a simple question: What’s the capital of France? The answer probably leapt to your mind in an instant. Now, here’s another question: When did you learn that Paris is the capital of France? If you’re like most people, you have no idea. That particular fact twinkles in your mind amid an enormous constellation of other facts, most of them forever disconnected from the moment they first sprang to life. The store of mostly disconnected facts is known as your semantic memory.

Your semantic memory is contrasted with your episodic memory, which is your memory of fleshed-out narratives rather than merely facts. When you engage your episodic memory, you engage in a form of mental time travel, bringing yourself back to a particular place and time, reimagining a scene you’ve already lived. When you engage your semantic memory you are doing the mental equivalent of flipping through an encyclopedia or photo album, plucking out bits of information whose origins might be unclear.

Condescension actually shortens lives. What professionals call “elderspeak”—the belittling “sweeties” and “dearies” that people use to address older people—does more than rankle. It reinforces stereotypes of incapacity and incompetence, which leads to poorer health, including shorter lifespans. People with positive perceptions of aging actually live longer–a whopping 7.5 years longer on average—in large part because they’re motivated to take better care of themselves.

We reinforce the association with constant nervous reference to forgetfulness and “senior moments.” I used to think those quips were self-deprecatingly cute, until it dawned on me that when I lost the car keys in high school, I didn’t call it a “junior moment.” Any prophecy about debility, whether or not it comes true, dampens our aspirations and damages our sense of self—especially when it comes to brain power. The damage is magnified by the glum and widespread assumption that, somewhere down the line, dementia is inevitable.

Especially in the emotional realm, older brains are more resilient. As we turn eighty, brain imaging shows frontal lobe changes that improve our ability to deal with negative emotions like anger, envy, and fear. Olders experience less social anxiety, and fewer social phobias. Even as its discrete processing skills degrade, the normal aging brain enables greater emotional maturity, adaptability to change, and levels of well-being.

Our threat response is automatic, but what we fear is largely learned.

…I’m looking at how we experience fear biologically (and the consequences o

Our threat response is automatic, but what we fear is largely learned.

…I’m looking at how we experience fear biologically (and the consequences of continuous heightened fear states), how we construct fear socially, and how we interpret it psychologically.)

… These are my adventures in fear.

thrilling activities provide a safe space to give our impulse-control police a break (and for those who believe that screaming and being scared are signs of weakness, being in a situation in which it is OK to express fear can feel pretty good.)

There’s something freeing, and even a little bit dangerous, in screaming as loud as you want. Screaming is part of our evolved survivor tool kit, protecting us by scaring away predators and alerting others of danger nearby. Pulling our face into a scream is also believed to make us more alert, intensifying our threat response just as squinching our nose in disgust blocks foul odors from going into our nostril). Adam Anderson at the University of Toronto found that when people made a frightened expression, they increase their range of vision and have faster eye movements and a heightened sense of smell from breathing more rapidly through their nostrils. Not to mention, when we scream, our eyes widen, and we show our teeth, making us appear all the more intimidating to any predators.

My current research interests involve understanding the relationship between fear and society. People are reporting they feel more afraid today than 20 years ago and many scholars argue that we live in a ‘fear based’ society.

He pointed out that “a strong lack of conscience” is one of the hallmarks for these individuals. “Their game is self-gratification at the other person

He pointed out that “a strong lack of conscience” is one of the hallmarks for these individuals. “Their game is self-gratification at the other person’s experience,” Hare said. “Psychopathic killers, however, are not mad, according to accepted legal and psychiatric standards. The acts result not from a deranged mind but from a cold, calculating rationality combined with a chilly inability to treat others as thinking, feeling humans.” - the author quoting Robert Hare, author of a book on Psychopathy

I might have disagreed with the conclusion reached by people of faith, but at least that part of their brain was functioning. Every week, they had a set time to consider their place in the universe, to step out of the matrix and achieve some perspective. If you’re never looking up, I now realized, you’re always just looking around.

It was a little embarrassing to be reading a self-help writer and thinking, This guy gets me. But it was in this moment, lying in bed late at night, that I first realized that the voice in my head—the running commentary that had dominated my field of consciousness since I could remember—was kind of an asshole.

Chopra was definitely more fun to hang out with than Tolle—I preferred Deepak’s rascally What Makes Sammy Run? style to the German’s otherworldly diffidence—but I left the experience more confused, not less. Eckhart was befuddling because, while I believed he was sincere, I couldn’t tell if he was sane. With Deepak it was the opposite; I believed he was sane, but I couldn’t tell if he was sincere.

But neither Verizon nor any other cellphone company supports legislation that bans drivers from talking on the phone. And the wireless industry does not conduct research on the dangers, saying that is not its responsibility - From - Dismissing the Risks of a Deadly Habit

If you take yourself back millennia, and you're in the jungle or you're in the forest and you see a lion, then the lion hits your sensory cortices and says to the frontal lobe, whatever you're doing, whatever hut you're building, stop and run.
Well, here's what scientists think is happening in this data era, is that these pings of incoming email, the phone ringing, the buzz in your pocket, is almost like we get little tiny lions, little tiny threats or, let's say, maybe little tiny rabbits that you want to chase and eat, you get little tiny bursts of adrenaline that are bombarding your frontal lobe asking you to make choices. But in some ways these aren't modern bombardments; they're the most primitive bombardments. They're playing to these most primitive impulses and they're asking our brain to make very hard choices, a lot. - from the Terry Gross interview

when you check your information, when you get a buzz in your pocket, when you hear a ring - you get a dopamine squirt. You get a little rush of adrenaline. So you're getting that more and more and more and more. Well, guess what happens in its absence? You feel bored. You're actually conditioned by a kind of neurochemical response. - also from the NPR interview

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 10 percent of fatal crashes and 18 percent of crashes that caused injuries in 2014 were reported to involve drivers distracted by activities including eating, smoking, adjusting the radio or air-conditioning, or being "lost in thought/daydreaming." They caused 3,179 deaths, injuring an estimated additional 431,000 people. In 2014, for the fifth straight year, distracted driving was the top cause of fatal crashes in New Jersey.