A Layman’s Guide to Mindful Meditation
“Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as bird wings.” ~ Rumi Here’s the thing: we all know we should meditate, right? Even conventional doctors are informing us about the huge benefits of meditation. But how do we go about doing it exactly?
Towards a De-biased Social Psychology: The effects of ideological perspective go beyond politics.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, in press; subject to final editing before publication This is a commentary on: Duarte, J. L., Crawford, J. T., Stern, C., Haidt, J., Jussim, L., & Tetlock, P.
Cognitive neuropsychology
An introduction Cognitive psychology is the scientific investigation of cognition, that is, of all mental abilities: perception, attention, learning, memory, processing of spoken and written language, thinking, reasoning and belief formation (Coltheart, 2002). It assumes that cognition can at least in principle be fully revealed by the scientific method, that is, individual components of mental processes can be identified and understood. These individual components of mind are mental modules, and thus contemporary cognitive psychology often assumes the modularity of mind (Fodor, 1983). Any theory about any domain of cognition will therefore be a theory about (a) what the modules are of the system by which performance in that domain is accomplished, and (b) what the pathways of communication between these modules of the system are; that is, a theory about the functional architecture of the system. Characteristic features of cognitive neuropsychology
Human Behaviour
A common objection to the idea of a Resource Based Economy (RBE) is the assertion that something called 'human nature' would prevent humans from being able to form a peaceful, functioning society. This is because it is supposedly in the 'nature' of humans to be violent, greedy, selfish, and lazy. It is thought that without money, humans would have no motivation to work or contribute meaningfully to society.
How the Mind Works: 10 Fascinating TED Talks
How memory works, what visual illusions reveal, the price of happiness, the power of introverts and more… 1. Peter Doolittle: How “working memory” works
Raising a Moral Child
Genetic twin studies suggest that anywhere from a quarter to more than half of our propensity to be giving and caring is inherited. That leaves a lot of room for nurture, and the evidence on how parents raise kind and compassionate children flies in the face of what many of even the most well-intentioned parents do in praising good behavior, responding to bad behavior, and communicating their values. By age 2, children experience some moral emotions — feelings triggered by right and wrong.
Why Honest People Do Dishonest Things
Every day we are bombarded with temptations — to cheat on our diets, to spend instead of save our paychecks, to tell little white lies. It can be exhausting to have to continually remind ourselves that, long-term, we want to be upstanding people, so we shouldn’t make tempting but unethical short-term decisions. But what if simply thinking about dishonesty could make it easier for us to behave ethically?
How to Recognize and Combat Thinking Traps That May Be Controlling Your Life
As a human being, you probably will have noticed that what people think and say often bears little relation to how they act. Is it because individuals think what they say is accurate when it isn’t? According to the concept of The Thinking Trap, this is the case. We have a misguided view of what we do and why we do it. What we say is not a guide to our real selves and what we do is a much clearer insight into who we really are.
The hard problem: Tom Stoppard on the limits of what science can explain
When Tom Stoppard was writing The Hard Problem, his play about the conundrum of human consciousness, one of the scientists he consulted was American evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson. The play offers, among other things, a challenge to Wilson’s view that altruism, as a consciously motivated action, can be completely accounted for in terms of evolutionary theory. In the play, Hilary, a young psychologist, scornfully rejects the idea that brain activity “explains” emotions such as sorrow. She ends up quitting a brain science institute and heads off to study philosophy in New York. Wilson has just published a book called Does Altruism Exist?, in which he argues that not only does altruism indeed exist, but that science can explain why we are altruistic.
The 12 Cognitive Biases That Prevent You From Being Rational
The human brain is capable of 1016 processes per second, which makes it far more powerful than any computer currently in existence. But that doesn’t mean our brains don’t have major limitations. The lowly calculator can do math thousands of times better than we can, and our memories are often less than useless — plus, we’re subject to cognitive biases, those annoying glitches in our thinking that cause us to make questionable decisions and reach erroneous conclusions. Here are a dozen of the most common and pernicious cognitive biases that you need to know about. Before we start, it’s important to distinguish between cognitive biases and logical fallacies. A logical fallacy is an error in logical argumentation (e.g. ad hominem attacks, slippery slopes, circular arguments, appeal to force, etc.).
Caltech economist nets MacArthur genius grant
A Caltech researcher who fused economics and neuroscience to make sense of human decisions that often don’t make cents has won the MacArthur genius grant. Colin Camerer came to Caltech in 1994 with an MBA in quantitative studies and a doctorate in decision theory from the University of Chicago’s business school, a place he described as “the temple of beliefs in highly rational people who make really good decisions and take into account the future.” “I just thought that was a useful caricature, but not the right model of human nature,” Camerer said. “That’s what got me into behavioral economics.” Veering from the notoriously conservative orthodoxy of economics at the University of Chicago to study human behavior may seem a risky career turn, but things got weirder when Caltech opened its brain imaging lab in 2003. “Caltech is a very adventurous place,” Camerer said.
