June 2011
14 posts
“
you are not one thing, but instead your brain is made up of these competing networks that are all battling it out to control this single output channel of your behavior. And so your brain’s like a neural parliament, and you’ve got these different parties in there like the Democrats and Republicans and Libertarians, all of whom love their country and feel that they know the best way to steer the ship of state. But they have differing opinions on how to do it, and they have to fight it out. This is why we can cuss at ourselves and cajole ourselves and get angry at ourselves, and this is why you can do behavior and look back and think, “Wow, how did I do that?” It’s because you are not one person, you are not one thing. As Walt Whitman said, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”
And it turns out with neuroimaging you can see these things in competition when people are making a decision, let’s say a moral decision where logically you might feel like you want to go one way, but emotionally you feel like you want to go the other way. You see these battles in action.
” —Audio Excerpt: The Secret Lives of the Brain | Wired Science | Wired.com (via myserendipities)
“If you but knew the flames that burn in me which I attempt to beat down with my reason.”
—Alexander Pushkin (Eugene Onegin)
“In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.”
—Aldous Huxley (via earlyfrost)
“What is the difference between one mind and another? It is simply this, that the discerning (seeing) mind is consciously, deliberately, and voluntarily formed, cultivated, developed, and utilized, whereas the ordinary mind is usually unconsciously formed, developed and cultivated, acting without voluntary effort on its own part. Its development is caused by the force and power of impressions from the exterior world. It usually operates without direction by its ‘owner’. In other words, the ordinary mind is merely a product of circumstances, driven aimlessly by outside forces, and disregarding the wants and wishes of the ‘host’. It lacks the knowledge about the power of selecting ‘defined circumstances’, and having clear focus on achieving them. The discerning mind powers forward on the course mapped out by its own natural intelligence. It is determined and willful-prepared receive inspiration from the outside world, steered by the master (person) at the wheel, and guided by knowledge’. The ordinary mind is like automobile, while the discerning mind is like the driver.”
—5% Of the Population Knows This Is True! Part 1 | Psychology Articles (via myserendipities)
“When we say we “remember” a situation we tend to have a sense of context for it, but when we say we “know” something we usually have no recollection where the memory came from. For example, there is a difference between, “I remember when I met Alexa at dinner last night” and “I know Halifax is the capital of Nova Scotia.” Measuring the difference between the feelings of remembering and knowing is referred to as the “remember–know” paradigm, and since Endel Tulving introduced it in 1985 it has become a way to measure different states of awareness in our memory. Hicks pointed to puzzling conclusions from recent research using the remember–know paradigm. In nearly all memory tests using this paradigm there are “false alarms” – cases in which subjects have a specific feeling of recollection for words they never studied during the test. But these “remember” false alarms surprisingly tend to increase in the space of a week after studying a list of words. In a recent study, Hicks and colleagues Richard L. Marsh and Gabriel I. Cook asked subjects if they “remembered” a particular item but also wanted them to explain why they “remembered” the item. This specific qualifier led subjects to say they remembered fewer items. “These findings suggest that people’s criteria for what constitutes ‘remember’ can change,” said Hicks, “but the how and why they change remains an open research question.” Even with the malleability of “remembering” there has long been thought to be a clear line dividing the process of explicit memory — where we have an active conscious intent to remember — from the process of implicit memory, where no conscious intent exists.”
—Memory and Consciousness: Consciousness to Unconsciousness and Back Again - Association for Psychological Science (via myserendipities)
“The world perishes not from bandits and fires, but from hatred, hostility, and all these petty squabbles.”
—Anton Chekhov (via 12wildswans)
“I wish to argue for information decoration, which means seeking a balance between aesthetic and informational quality. Information designers are usually inclined to place the message at the centre of our field of attention (to make sure it comes across). Did no one ever tell them it was impolite to always come straight to the point? We humans have evolved precisely to attend to information at the edges of our field of attention, and when necessary transfer it to the center ourselves.”
—Information Decoration « NextNature.net
