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Javier E

Training the Emotional Brain : An Interview with Richard J. Davidson : Sam Harris - 0 views

www.samharris.org/...training-the-emotional-brain

emotion character neuroplasticity personality types patterns psychology

shared by Javier E on 09 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • From quite early on in my career, there were two critical observations that came to form the core of my subsequent life’s work.  The first observation is that the most salient characteristic of emotion in people is the fact that each person responds differently to life’s slings and arrows.  Each of us is unique in our emotional make-up and this individuality determines why some people are resilient and others vulnerable, why some have high levels of well-being despite objective adversity while others decompensate rapidly in the response to the slightest setback.
  • the great fortune I had early in my career to be around some remarkable people.  They were remarkable not because of their academic or professional achievements, but rather because of their demeanor, really because of their emotional style.  These were extremely kind and generous people.  They were very attentive, and when I was in their presence I felt as if I was the sole and complete focus of all of their attention.  They were people that I found myself wishing to be around more.  And I learned that one thing all of these people had in common was a regular practice of meditation.  And I asked them if they were like that all of their lives and they assured me they were not, but rather that these qualities had been nurtured and cultivated by their meditative practices.
  • It wasn’t until many years later that I encountered neuroplasticity and recognized that the mechanisms of neuroplasticity were an organizing framework for understanding how emotional styles could be transformed.  While they were quite stable over time in most adults, they could still be changed through systematic practice of specific mental exercises.  In a very real and concrete sense, we could change our brains by transforming our minds.  And there was no realm more important for that to occur than emotion.  For it is so that our emotional styles play an incredibly important role in determining who will be vulnerable to psychopathology
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • I describe 6 emotional styles that are rooted in basic neuroscientific research.  The 6 styles are: 1. Resilience: How rapidly or slowly do you recover from adversity? 2. Outlook: How long does positive emotion persist following a joyful event? 3. Social Intuition: How accurate are you in detecting the non-verbal social cues of others? 4. Context: Do you regulate your emotion in a context-sensitive fashion? 5. Self-Awareness: How aware are you of your own bodily signals that constitute emotion? 6. Attention: How focused or scattered in your attention?
  • each of these styles has arisen inductively from the large corpus of research my colleagues and I have conducted using rigorous neuroscientific methods over the past 30 years.
  • they can explain the constituents of commonly found personality types. 
ilanaprincilus06

Could a brain scan diagnose you as a psychopath? | Chris Chambers | Science | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...n-diagnose-you-as-a-psychopath

psychopathology logical fallacies neuroscience scientific method

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 01 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Society is intrigued by psychopaths, at least from a distance. Hollywood paints them as powerful and emotionless predators – a small few who have embraced their inner dark passengers.
  • Psychopathy is of course a very real disorder and a lot more complex than portrayed on film.
  • What Fallon found was his own scan, which appeared to show reduced activity in a part of the brain associated with empathy. Based on this, and some genetic tests, Fallon concluded that he himself was a psychopath
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • One of the most obvious mistakes in Fallon’s reasoning is called the fallacy of reverse inference.
  • areas of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and orbitofrontal cortex are important for empathy and moral reasoning. At the same time, empathy and moral reasoning are lost or impaired in many psychopaths.
  • The flaw with this argument – as Fallon himself must know – is that there is no one-to-one mapping between activity in a given brain region and complex abilities such as empathy. There is no empathy region and there is no psychopath switch.
  • these parts of the brain aren’t like hammers or screwdrivers that perform only one task. They’re more like Swiss army knives that have evolved to support a range of different abilities.
  • just because two things are associated with each other doesn’t mean one of them caused the other.
  • In neuroscience, confusing correlation with causation is close to unforgivable.
  • “The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion…draws all things else to support and agree with it.” If we only seek to confirm rather than falsify our beliefs then we will find that we are always right – or at least it will seem that way.
  • This confirmation bias is one of the most powerful traps in reasoning because we all like to be right, and we prefer to be consistent.
  • By consistently interpreting weak evidence in favour of his beliefs, Fallon’s investigation is a case study in bias.
  • real advances require a self-critical mindset and a strict adherence to the scientific method.
  • it can be tempting to forget these rules and exploit logical fallacies that we think others won’t notice.
  • “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool”.
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