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ilanaprincilus06

How Elastic Is Your Brain? - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ogical-mind-alan-jasanoff.html

book review brain elasticity emotions

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • you are not merely your brain — your body and the broader circumstances of your life also make you who you are.
  • you are not merely your brain — your body and the broader circumstances of your life also make you who you are.
    • ilanaprincilus06
      ilanaprincilus06 on 03 Nov 20
       
      The brain carries all of the information that determines who we are and also makes the decisions that determine who we are. Despite this, there are so many other organs, etc that make us our unique selves.
  • we mythologize brains, creating false boundaries that divorce them from bodies and the outside world, blinding us to the biological nature of the mind.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • our bodies and the world around us affect our thoughts, feelings and actions, but not how body and world become biologically embedded to constitute a mind.
  • These divisions, Jasanoff contends, are why neuroscience has failed to make a real difference in anyone’s life.
    • ilanaprincilus06
      ilanaprincilus06 on 03 Nov 20
       
      We believe that our brain doesn't have many limitations, so we indulge in the false truth that we can do anything as a result.
  • a discussion of how the workings of your body necessarily and irrevocably shape your brain’s structure and function, and vice versa.
  • the experiences we have from infancy onward impact the brain’s wiring. For example, childhood poverty and adversity fundamentally alter brain development, leaving an indelible mark that increases people’s risk of illness in adulthood.
  • she tries to reduce her anxiety, expand her creativity, improve her math ability, calibrate her inner GPS and take control over her perception of the passing of time, using various brain-hacking techniques. Each chapter is a mini-redemption story, with Williams starting out skeptical and ending victorious.
  • treat their discomfort not as a damper but as a signal to press on. This is what Mlodinow calls “elastic thinking”
Javier E

How 'Concept Creep' Made Americans So Sensitive to Harm - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...477939

concept creep psychology liberalism harmful trauma torture

shared by Javier E on 19 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • How did American culture arrive at these moments? A new research paper by Nick Haslam, a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne, Australia, offers as useful a framework for understanding what’s going on as any I’ve seen. In “Concept Creep: Psychology's Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology,”
  • concepts like abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice, “now encompass a much broader range of phenomena than before,”expanded meanings that reflect “an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm.”
  • “they also have potentially damaging ramifications for society and psychology that cannot be ignored.”
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • He calls these expansions of meaning “concept creep.”
  • critics may hold concept creep responsible for damaging cultural trends, he writes, “such as supposed cultures of fear, therapy, and victimhood, the shifts I present have some positive implications.”
  • Concept creep is inevitable and vital if society is to make good use of new information. But why has the direction of concept creep, across so many different concepts, trended toward greater sensitivity to harm as opposed to lesser sensitivity?
  • The concept of abuse expanded too far.
  • Classically, psychological investigations recognized two forms of child abuse, physical and sexual, Haslam writes. In more recent decades, however, the concept of abuse has witnessed “horizontal creep” as new forms of abuse were recognized or studied. For example, “emotional abuse” was added as a new subtype of abuse. Neglect, traditionally a separate category, came to be seen as a type of abuse, too.
  • Meanwhile, the concept of abuse underwent “vertical creep.” That is, the behavior seen as qualifying for a given kind of abuse became steadily less extreme. Some now regard any spanking as physical abuse. Within psychology, “the boundary of neglect is indistinct,” Haslam writes. “As a consequence, the concept of neglect can become over-inclusive, identifying behavior as negligent that is substantially milder or more subtle than other forms of abuse. This is not to deny that some forms of neglect are profoundly damaging, merely to argue that the concept’s boundaries are sufficiently vague and elastic to encompass forms that are not severe.”
  • How did a working-class mom get arrested, lose her fast food job, and temporarily lose custody of her 9-year-old for letting the child play alone at a nearby park?
  • One concerns the field of psychology and its incentives. “It could be argued that just as successful species increase their territory, invading and adapting to new habitats, successful concepts and disciplines also expand their range into new semantic niches,” he theorizes. “Concepts that successfully attract the attention of researchers and practitioners are more likely to be applied in new ways and new contexts than those that do not.”
  • Concept creep can be necessary or needless. It can align concepts more or less closely with underlying realities. It can change society for better or worse. Yet many who push for more sensitivy to harm seem unaware of how oversensitivty can do harm.
  • The other theory posits an ideological explanation. “Psychology has played a role in the liberal agenda of sensitivity to harm and responsiveness to the harmed,” he writes “and its increased focus on negative phenomena—harms such as abuse, addiction, bullying, mental disorder, prejudice, and trauma—has been symptomatic of the success of that social agenda.”
  • Jonathan Haidt, who believes it has gone too far, offers a fourth theory. “If an increasingly left-leaning academy is staffed by people who are increasingly hostile to conservatives, then we can expect that their concepts will shift, via motivated scholarship, in ways that will help them and their allies (e.g., university administrators) to prosecute and condemn conservatives,
  • While Haslam and Haidt appear to have meaningfully different beliefs about why concept creep arose within academic psychology and spread throughout society, they were in sufficient agreement about its dangers to co-author a Guardian op-ed on the subject.
  • It focuses on how greater sensitivity to harm has affected college campuses.
  • “Of course young people need to be protected from some kinds of harm, but overprotection is harmful, too, for it causes fragility and hinders the development of resilience,” they wrote. “As Nasim Taleb pointed out in his book Antifragile, muscles need resistance to develop, bones need stress and shock to strengthen and the growing immune system needs to be exposed to pathogens in order to function. Similarly, he noted, children are by nature anti-fragile – they get stronger when they learn to recover from setbacks, failures and challenges to their cherished ideas.”
  • police officers fearing harm from dogs kill them by the hundreds or perhaps thousands every year in what the DOJ calls an epidemic.
  • After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration and many Americans grew increasingly sensitive to harms, real and imagined, from terrorism
  • Dick Cheney declared, “If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis ... It's about our response.” The invasion of Iraq was predicated, in part, on the idea that 9/11 “changed everything,”
  • Before 9/11, the notion of torturing prisoners was verboten. After the Bush Administration’s torture was made public, popular debate focused on mythical “ticking time bomb” scenarios, in which a whole city would be obliterated but for torture. Now Donald Trump suggests that torture should be used more generally against terrorists. Torture is, as well, an instance in which people within the field of psychology pushed concept creep in the direction of less sensitivity to harm,
  • Haslam endorses two theories
  • there are many reasons to be concerned about excessive sensitivity to harm:
katherineharron

Elijah Cummings knew how to walk the tightrope of racial politics - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 25 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Perhaps no one so visibly crystallized the dissonance between black Americans and their country than Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, who died last Thursday and whose funeral service, at which the Clintons and former President Barack Obama will deliver remarks, is on Friday.
  • "In the Congress, Elijah was considered a north star," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recalled. "He was a leader of towering character and integrity. He lived the American dream." Pelosi also underscored that Cummings "spoke with unsurpassed clarity and moral integrity" -- that "everyone wanted to hear what Elijah had to say."
  • "Every time we spoke of selecting an individual who can rise to the occasion to be in debate with him, we would look for somebody who was strong, and every time someone was selected, they'd come back to be a very best friend of Elijah Cummings," House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy of California said.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • And yet, those accounts, while surely sincere, are also so simplistically heartwarming that they're misleading -- bowing to America's impulse to see certain black lives as a balm for the bruises of the political moment.
  • Consider the congressman's relationship with President Donald Trump. In March 2017, when the administration was only a few months old, Cummings met with Trump in the Oval Office. The two reportedly spoke openly about race, with the former explaining how the latter's comments about black communities, which he had characterized as poverty-addled hellscapes, were "insulting" and that "probably nobody (had) ever told (him) that."
  • Rather than retreat into defensiveness, Trump replied: "You're right -- nobody has ever told me that."
  • "To know our whites is to understand the psychology of white people and the elasticity of whiteness. It is to be intimate with some white persons but to critically withhold faith in white people categorically," Cottom explained. "It is to anticipate white people's emotions and fears and grievances because their issues are singularly our problem. To know our whites is to survive without letting bitterness rot your soul."
manhefnawi

Astrophysicist Janna Levin Reads Ursula K. Le Guin's "Hymn to Time" - Brain Pickings - 0 views

www.brainpickings.org/...-guin-hymn-to-time-janna-levin

Paradoxical Nature of Time Scientists Psychology

shared by manhefnawi on 14 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • “The moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity,” Kierkegaard wrote in contemplating the paradoxical nature of time half a century before Einstein forever changed our understanding of it. As relativity saturated the cultural atmosphere, Virginia Woolf was tussling and taffying with time’s confounding elasticity, the psychology of which scientists have since dissected. We are beings of time and in time — something Jorge Luis Borges spoke to beautifully in his classic 1946 meditation on time: “Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”
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