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 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

exactly what kind of elephant?

07Mar09

WordPress kindly linked my last post to one by Neuronarrative that also mentioned the elephant-rider metaphor. These metaphors help to fix a way of looking at ourselves in our mind, and also help to shed light on patterns of thought and behaviour. Neuronnarrative gives another fine metaphor, this one from the book Managing Your Mind: [...]

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Tags: brain, Buddha, elephant, metaphor, neurology, psychology

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