Mya Proctor
Cynical, sardonic nerd.
Fifteen Writing Exercises. Writing exercises are a great way to increase your writing skills and generate new ideas. They give you perspective and help you break free from old patterns and crutches. To grow as a writer, you need to sometimes write without the expectation of publication or worry about who will read your work. Don’t fear imperfection. That is what practice is for.
Pick ten people you know and write a one-sentence description for each of them. Focus on what makes each person unique and noteworthy. Record five minutes of a talk radio show. Write a 500-word biography of your life. Write your obituary. Write a 300-word description of your bedroom. Write an interview with yourself, an acquaintance, a famous figure or a fictional character. Read a news site, a newspaper or a supermarket tabloid. Write a diary or a blog of a fictional character. Rewrite a passage from a book, a favorite or a least favorite, in a different style such as noir, gothic romance, pulp fiction or horror story. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman – review. A human being "is a dark and veiled thing; and whereas the hare has seven skins, the human being can shed seven times seventy skins and still not be able to say: This is really you, this is no longer outer shell. " So said Nietzsche, and Freud agreed: we are ignorant of ourselves. The idea surged in the 20th century and became a commonplace, a "whole climate of opinion", in Auden's phrase.
It's still a commonplace, but it's changing shape. It used to be thought that the things we didn't know about ourselves were dark – emotionally fetid, sexually charged. These days, the bulk of the explanation is done by something else: the "dual-process" model of the brain. System 2 is slow, deliberate, effortful. System 2 is slothful, and tires easily (a process called "ego depletion") – so it usually accepts what System 1 tells it.
The general point about the size of our self-ignorance extends beyond the details of Systems 1 and 2. The same goes for all of us, almost all the time. Alphabet Evolution.gif (GIF Image, 988x200 pixels) Words to Try to Use in Colloquial Speech Without Sounding Like a Pretentious Ass - Wordnik List. Social Science Resources: Sociology and Anthhropology. Cognitive Anthropology - Anthropological Theories - Department of Anthropology - The University of Alabama. The guides to anthropological theories and approaches listed below have been prepared by graduate students of the University of Alabama under the direction of Dr. Michael D. Murphy. As always, ! Caveat Retis Viator! Bobbie Simova and Tara Robertson and Duke Beasley (Note: authorship is arranged stratigraphically with the most recent author listed first) Basic Premises: Cognitive anthropology addresses the ways in which people conceive of and think about events and objects in the world. In the first decades of practice, cognitive anthropologists focused on folk taxonomies, including concepts of color, plants, and diseases.
The methodology, theoretical underpinnings, and subjects of cognitive anthropology have been diverse. Cognitive anthropologists regard anthropology as a formal science. It was not until the 1950s that cognitive anthropology came to be regarded as a distinct theoretical and methodological approach within anthropology. Leading Figures: The Complete Guide to Not Giving a Fuck. Ok, I have a confession to make. I have spent almost my whole life– 31 years–  caring far too much about offending people, worrying if I’m cool enough for them, or asking myself if they are judging me. I can’t take it anymore. It’s stupid, and it’s not good for my well being. It has made me a punching bag–  a flighty, nervous wuss. But worse than that, it has made me someone who doesn’t take a stand for anything. It has made me someone who stood in the middle, far too often, and not where I cared to stand, for fear of alienating others. Today, ladies and gentlemen, is different. We’re going to talk about the cure.
Do you wonder if someone is talking shit about you? Well, it’s time you started not giving a fuck. FACT NUMBER 1. Yes, it’s really happening right at this moment. What people truly respect is when you draw the line and say “you will go no further.” Right. Regular people are fine– you don’t actually hear it when they’re talking behind your back. FACT NUMBER 2. FACT NUMBER 3. How to Ditch Big Brother and Disappear Forever.
» 9 Mindfulness Rituals to Make Your Day Better. “Smile, breathe and go slowly.” - Thich Nhat Hanh, Zen Buddhist monk Post written by Leo Babauta. Are you simply moving through your day, without fully living? I did this for many years. It was as if life were just passing by, and I was waiting for something to happen. I always felt like I was preparing for something later. But today isn’t preparation for tomorrow. Fully live today by being mindful. You don’t need to do all of these, but give a few of them a try to see if they make your day better. Mindfulness Rituals Ritual isn’t about doing a routine mindlessly. Here are a few of my favorites: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
These rituals aren’t the only time you should be mindful, but they’re great reminders. Famous Buddhist Quotes & Sayings. New Research Shows How the Brain Processes Language. By Janice Wood Associate News Editor Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on November 26, 2011 A new study shows the importance of the white matter pathways in the brain in how we process language. Advances in brain imaging made within the last 10 years have revealed that highly complex cognitive tasks such as language processing rely not only on particular regions of the cerebral cortex, but also on the white matter fiber pathways that connect them. “With this new technology, scientists started to realize that in the language network, there are a lot more connecting pathways than we originally thought,” said Stephen Wilson, who recently joined the University of Arizona’s department of speech, language and hearing sciences as an assistant professor.
“They are likely to have different functions because the brain is not just a homogeneous conglomerate of cells, but there hasn’t been a lot of evidence as to what kind of information is carried on the different pathways.” Music, Mind, and Meaning. This is a revised version of AI Memo No. 616, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. An earlier published version appeared in Music, Mind, and Brain: The Neuropsychology of Music (Manfred Clynes, ed.) Plenum, New York, 1981 Why Do We Like Music? Why do we like music? Our culture immerses us in it for hours each day, and everyone knows how it touches our emotions, but few think of how music touches other kinds of thought. It is astonishing how little curiosity we have about so pervasive an "environmental" influence. Have we the tools for such work? Certainly we know a bit about the obvious processes of reason–the ways we organize and represent ideas we get. The old distinctions among emotion, reason, and aesthetics are like the earth, air, and fire of an ancient alchemy.
Why do we like music? I feel that music theory has gotten stuck by trying too long to find universals. Sonata as Teaching Machine Music makes things in our minds, but afterward most of them fade away. Cadence. Sexual orientation – wired that way. In a recent post, I presented the evidence that sexual preference is strongly influenced by genetic variation. Here, I discuss the neurobiological evidence that shows that the brains of homosexual men and women are wired differently from those of their heterosexual counterparts. First, we must consider the differences between the brains of heterosexual males and females. These differences are extensive and arise mainly due to the influence of testosterone during a critical period of early development (see Wired for Sex).
They include, not surprisingly, differences in the number of neurons in specific regions of the brain involved in reproductive or sexual behaviours as well as differences in the number of nerve fibres connecting these areas. But they also involve areas not dedicated to these types of behaviours, such as the cerebellum, for example, which is involved in motor control among other things, and which shows a very large difference between men and women. Swaab DF (2008). A stranger in half your body. An amazing study has just been published online in Consciousness and Cognition about a patient with epilepsy who felt the left half of his body was being “invaded by a stranger” when he had a seizure.
As a result, he felt he existed in one side of his body only. The research is from the same Swiss team who made headlines with their study that used virtual reality to make participants feel they were in someone else’s body, and one where brain stimulation triggered the sensation of having an offset ‘shadow body’ in patients undergoing neurosurgery. The researchers suggest that having an integrated sense of our own bodies involves three types of perception: self-location – the area where we experience the self to be located; first-person perspective – the perceived centre of the conscious experience; and self-identification – the degree to which we identify sensations with our own bodies.
Patient 1 is a 55 year old, left-handed male patient suffering from epilepsy since the age of 14 years. Cognitive Atlas. The depression map: genes, culture, serotonin, and a side of pathogens | Wired Science Maps can tell surprising stories. About a year ago, Northwestern University psychologist Joan Chiao pondered a set of global maps that confounded conventional notions of what depression is, why we get it, and how genes — the so-called “depression gene” in particular — interact with environment and culture. So she gathered it. Chiao and one of her grad students, Katherine Blizinsky, found all the papers they could that studied serotonin or depression in East Asian populations.
These papers, along with similar studies in other countries and some World Health Organization data on mental health, painted a pretty good picture of short-SERT variant and depression rates not just in North American and Europe, but in East Asia. You can see it in the maps. Fig 1. Fig 2. You can chart the data in other ways too, and it still looks weird. Squaring two maps with a third Why did fewer East Asians get depressed even though more of them carried the depression risk gene? Fig 3. The new math. Brain Tour. Neurostress: How Stress May Fuel Neurodegenerative Diseases. In 2007, James Watson eyed his genome for the very first time.
Through more than 50 years of scientific and technological advancement, Watson saw the chemical structure he once helped unravel now fused into a personal genetic landscape laid out before him. Yet there was a small stretch of nucleic acids on chromosome 19 that he preferred to leave uncovered, a region that coded the apolipoprotein E gene. APOE, as it’s called, has been a telling genetic landmark of Alzheimer’s risk, strongly correlated to the disease since the early 90s.
Watson’s grandmother suffered from Alzheimer’s, and without any reasonable treatments or suitable preventive strategies, the father of DNA decided the information was too volatile, its revelation creating more potential harm than good. Watson’s apprehension was warranted. When studying identical twins, researchers can sift through such questions, says Plassman. More or less, all of the primates raised in normal size cages had the same amount of plaque. The Human Brain - Stress. Chronic over-secretion of stress hormones adversely affects brain function, especially memory. Too much cortisol can prevent the brain from laying down a new memory, or from accessing already existing memories. The renowned brain researcher, Robert M. Sapolsky, has shown that sustained stress can damage the hippocampus , the part of the limbic brain which is central to learning and memory. The culprits are "glucocorticoids," a class of steroid hormones secreted from the adrenal glands during stress.
They are more commonly know as corticosteroids or cortisol . During a perceived threat, the adrenal glands immediately release adrenalin. Topics. History of Neuroscience.