marshmallows

19Mar09

The BBC has revisited Walter Mischel’s “marshmallow” experiments: If you’re in Britain you can watch it for a while here. Outside, and later, see an excerpt here. Jonathan Haidt refers to it in the chapter one of The Happiness Hypothesis: Imagine that it is 1970 and you are a four-year-old child in an experiment being [...]

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Tags: brain, choice, gratification, Haidt, happiness, marshmallow, mind, Mischel, psychology

The Blue Pill

14Mar09

Photo by Cliph. Continuing with Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis, at least the parts that are online, I’ve been reading chapter four, which is full of social psychology goodness. (I really must buy the book.) Haidt refers to the powerful metaphor of the red and blue pill that Morpheus offers Neo in The Matrix: After [...]

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Tags: Haidt, illusion, metaphor, mind, psychology

elephant and rider

06Mar09

Continueing with chapter one of The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt… He’s looking at ways the mind can be split “It’s hard to think about the mind, but once you pick a metaphor it will guide your thinking.” He looks at animal-rider metaphors, like Buddha”s: “In days gone by this mind of mine used to [...]

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Tags: brain, Buddha, elephant, Haidt, metaphor, mind, morals, psychology, zemblanity

split brain confabulation

02Mar09

Reading Chapter One of Jonathan Haidt’s book The Happiness Hypothesis (online here) there is mention of confabulation, which I’d read  about in Ramachandran’s Phantoms in the Brain (Reith lectures here) – (He was working with people who had had the connection between the two halves of the brain cut) “When Gazzaniga flashed different pictures to [...]

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Tags: brain, confabulation, Gazzaniga, Haidt, happiness, mind, neurology, psychology

left and right

01Mar09

There are a lot of fascinating talks at TED, but this one by Jonathan Haidt seems like the departure point for some good thinking about our our values and our political affinities, thinking from a fresh angle: I like his list of universal moral foundations, that they are so cross-cultural: 1) Harm/care, 2) Fairness/reciprocity, 3) [...]

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Tags: anthropology, Haidt, morals, politics, psychology, TED, video