Freud’s Life and Legacy, in a Comic. By Maria Popova “You have to listen carefully. The unconscious mind is crafty.” While Freud may have engineered his own myth and many of his theories may have been disputed in the decades since his heyday, he remains one of the most influential figures in the history of psychiatry and psychology. And yet for many, Freud is more metaphor than man and his name summons only a vague idea of his work — “something to do with penises,” our marginally informed collective conscience might whisper — rather than a true understanding of just how profoundly he influenced contemporary culture, from our mechanisms of consumerism to our notions about the self.
From how his own childhood informed his ideas to his most famous cases, the captivating story weaves its way through Freud’s life to shed light on both the man and his metaphors for the mind. Freud is absolutely fantastic from cover to cover. Images courtesy of Nobrow Donating = Loving Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. Share on Tumblr. Gluten-free skin and beauty products: Extracting cash from the gullible. Even though yesterday was Easter, and, as unreligious as I am, I was still thinking of taking it easy, there was one target that popped up that I just couldn’t resist.
My wife and I were sitting around yesterday reading the Sunday papers and perusing the Internet (as is frequently our wont on Sunday mornings), when I heard a contemptuous harrumph coming from her direction. She then pointed me to an article in our local newspaper entitled Gluten-free beauty products in demand among some customers. Now, I must admit that I haven’t been keeping up with the gluten-free trend, other than how easily it fits within the niche of “autism biomed” quackery, where, apparently, nearly every “biomed” protocol for autistic children demands that gluten be stripped completely from their diets, lest the evil molecule continue to infect them with the dreaded autism.
I’ve kept an eye the literature, but haven’t really written about gluten. Amy Soergel’s lip gloss was making her sick. Whole Foods. And: Spurious Correlations. A Visual Dictionary of Philosophy: Major Schools of Thought in Minimalist Geometric Graphics. By Maria Popova A charming exercise in metaphorical thinking and symbolic representation. Rodin believed that his art was about removing the stone not part of the sculpture to reveal the essence of his artistic vision.
Perhaps this is what Catalan-born, London-based graphic designer Genis Carreras implicitly intended in chiseling away the proverbial philosopher’s stone to sculpt its minimalist essence. Many moons ago, I discovered with great delight Carreras’s series of geometric graphics explaining major movements in philosophy and now, with the help of Kickstarter, the project has come to new life in book form. Philographics: Big Ideas in Simple Shapes (public library | IndieBound) is a vibrant visual dictionary of philosophy, enlisting the telegraphic powers of design in distilling the essential principles of 95 schools of thought into visual metaphors and symbolic representation.
Skepticism True knowledge or certainty in a particular area is impossible. Carreras writes: Relativism Holism. 10 Famous Psychological Experiments That Could Never Happen Today. Nowadays, the American Psychological Association has a Code of Conduct in place when it comes to ethics in psychological experiments. Experimenters must adhere to various rules pertaining to everything from confidentiality to consent to overall beneficence. Review boards are in place to enforce these ethics. But the standards were not always so strict, which is how some of the most famous studies in psychology came about. 1.
The Little Albert Experiment At Johns Hopkins University in 1920, John B. Watson tested classical conditioning on a 9-month-old baby he called Albert B. 2. Solomon Asch tested conformity at Swarthmore College in 1951 by putting a participant in a group of people whose task was to match line lengths. Thirty-seven of the 50 participants agreed with the incorrect group despite physical evidence to the contrary. 3. Some psychological experiments that were designed to test the bystander effect are considered unethical by today’s standards. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. The dunning-kruger effect. The dunning-kruger effect One of several graphs showing that people who know little (as revealed by tests) still think they know a lot.
“I know one thing: that I know nothing” —Socrates “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge” —Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man “The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt” —Bertrand Russell “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
—William Shakespeare, As You Like It “Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” —Garrison Keillor, A Prairie Home Companion Most of the readers of this blog are familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect (even if we don’t always know what the name means). Since the original paper came out in 1999, there has been a lot of research into why the Dunning-Kruger effect is so common and what drives it. Previous post. What We Can Never, Ever Know: Does Science Have Limits? : Krulwich Wonders... I got two books in the mail that, if they could have, would've poked, scratched and ripped each others' pages out. I don't know if Martin Gardner and Patricia Churchland ever met, but their books show that there are radically, even ferociously, different ways to think about science.
Gardner died last year. He was a science writer whose monthly "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American was wildly popular. Patricia Churchland is a philosopher who teaches at U.C. San Diego. The issue between them is: How much can we know about the universe? iStockphoto.com "I am a mysterian," says Gardner, in his new (posthumously published) autobiography. Forever Unintelligible Gardner allows that humans have wonderful brains, that we can invent thinking machines, microscopes and any number of intelligence-enhancers, but he says there are still limits, hard limits.
Gardner was a fine science writer, fearless, imaginative, daring. Ignorance Is Just Ignorance Patricia Churchland hates this notion. Viva La Evidence. The British amateur who debunked the mathematics of happiness. Nick Brown does not look like your average student. He's 53 for a start and at 6ft 4in with a bushy moustache and an expression that jackknifes between sceptical and alarmed, he is reminiscent of a mid-period John Cleese. He can even sound a bit like the great comedian when he embarks on an extended sardonic riff, which he is prone to do if the subject rouses his intellectual suspicion. A couple of years ago that suspicion began to grow while he sat in a lecture at the University of East London, where he was taking a postgraduate course in applied positive psychology.
There was a slide showing a butterfly graph – the branch of mathematical modelling most often associated with chaos theory. On the graph was a tipping point that claimed to identify the precise emotional co-ordinates that divide those people who "flourish" from those who "languish". According to the graph, it all came down to a specific ratio of positive emotions to negative emotions. It was as simple as that.