basic instincts

16May09

It’s all clear now. I’m reading the Peter Lunn’s Basic Instincts, a book which according to the Guardian, gives rational economic man the kicking he deserves”. Lunn takes it all much further back than The Trap and the Prisoner’s Dilemma. He takes it back to Adam Smith. Smith’s insight was that trade between a selfish [...]

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Tags: economics, history, Lunn, psychology, Smith

the trap

12May09

… what the whole story is I don’t know, of course. But one of the great things about wikipedia is the links, the “see also”, that sometimes take you off in a new direction. For instance, there’s a link to Adam Curtis’s documentary The Trap: But there was a small problem with Nash’s equations. They [...]

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Tags: anthropology, choice, dilemma, history, Laing, logic, morals, Nash, paradox, prisoner, psychology, video, zemblanity

osmazome

09Mar09

So now I have discovered Jonah Lehrer. Shame there’s a hum on this excellent talk he gave, based on his book Proust Was A Neauroscientist. What I especially like here is his acknowledgemnet – it shouldn’t have been necessary, but bizarrely it is – that many outside the field of psychology and neurology can have [...]

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Tags: brain, history, Lehrer, osmazome, perception, sipidity, umami

the decisive moment

08Mar09

I’m just listening to the BBC “Book of the Week”, The Decisive Moment, by Jonah Lehrer. Coincidentally it covers some of the same ground as chapter one of Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis, which I’ve been chewing on the last few days. The BBC page says: The importance of the emotional brain. Since Plato, philosophers [...]

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Tags: brain, emotion, history, Lehrer, mind, neurology, psychology