fitness

01Feb10

Talking about “the last mile”, Sendhil Mullainathan, looks at how some of mental models stop us thinking rationally.

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Tags: anthropology, brain, choice, dilemma, economics, emotion, happiness, illusion, mind, neurology, paradox, perception, psychology, Sendhil Mullainathan, TED, video, zemblanity

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

more/better

10Mar09

That paradox, more is not necessarily better, has been with us for a long time. One of the earliest Greek writers, Hesiod said, “They do not know the half is better than the whole.” Prophets and philosophers the world over have spoken about it in all sorts of ways. Myths, from Midas to the Chaucer’s [...]

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Tags: brain, choice, Gilbert, happiness, illusion, mind, paradox, psychology, TED, video, zemblanity

idols

08Mar09

Which puts me in mind of Francis Bacon’s distinction in his Novum Organum (1620) between different kinds of “Idols”. By “Idol” he mans, I think, a kind of limiting illusion. Perhaps Bacon’s ideas are one of the turning points, at least in Europe, between the ancient ways of expressing these psychological ideas and the modern [...]

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Tags: anthropology, Bacon, illusion, psychology, zemblanity