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The separation of people from, and the superiority of people to, members of other species is a good candidate for the originating idea of Western thought. And a good candidate for the worst.

Like Plato, Hobbes associates anarchy with animality and civilization with the state, which gives to our merely animal motion moral content for the first time and orders us into a definite hierarchy.

It is rationality that gives us dignity, that makes a claim to moral respect that no mere animal can deserve. “The moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality,” writes Immanuel Kant in “Critique of Practical Reason.” In this assertion, at least, the Western intellectual tradition has been remarkably consistent.

Surviving a school shooting was an initiation of evil. The world didn’t look or feel the same afterward

Despite 12 years and countless other mass shooting incidents across the country, not much has been done by our federal legislators to make anyone safer from gun violence anywhere – let alone at school.

I clutched my eight-month-old son to my chest as the precious faces of young children murdered at school cycled across my television screen on the evening news.

Whenever the importance of history is discussed, epigrams and homilies come tripping easily off our tongues: How can we understand our present or glimpse our future if we cannot understand our past? How can we know who we are if we don't know who we were?

While history may be condemned to repeat itself, historians are condemned to repeat themselves. History is bunk or possibly bunkum.

Historians, more than any other class, spend a great deal of time justifying their trade, defining it and aphorising it, seeming to lavish more attention on historiography than history.

When it comes to making decisions that involve risks, we humans can be irrational in quite systematic ways — a fact that the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman famously demonstrated with the help of a hypothetical situation, eerily apropos of today’s coronavirus epidemic, that has come to be known as the Asian disease problem.

This is irrational because the two questions don’t differ mathematically. In both cases, choosing the first option means accepting the certainty that 200 people live, and choosing the second means embracing a one-third chance that all could be saved with an accompanying two-thirds chance that all will die. Yet in our minds, Professors Tversky and Kahneman explained, losses loom larger than gains, and so when the options are framed in terms of deaths rather than cures, we’ll accept more risks to try to avoid deaths.

Our decision making is bad enough when the disease is hypothetical. But when the disease is real — when we see actual death tolls climbing daily, as we do with the coronavirus — another factor besides Our sensitivity to losses comes into play: fear.

"Perception by the senses rather than by the intellect." (Dictionary.com)

"Perception by or based on stimulation of the senses." (Medical Dictionary)

We perceive the world through our five senses. (Hearing, Sight, Smell, Touch, Taste) our sense receptors are stimulated by sensory information. The brain translates the sensory information into sensations such as sound, taste, temperature, etc. Higher centres in the brain either ignore or recognize the sensations and their meanings, based on neuronal networks of past association and expectation. (Some of this stage 3 work actually involves reasoning).  Click the video to see a coffee-taste expert discuss the intricacies of how different coffees taste.    Sense perception is an important dimension of comprehending the world around us. It allows us to gather information from the outside world, so we can then go on to hopefully make sense of it

What feels like up may actually be some other direction depending on how our brains process our orientation, according to psychology researchers at York University's Faculty of Health.

What feels like up may actually be some other direction depending on how our brains process our orientation, according to psychology researchers at York University's Faculty of Health.

an individual's interpretation of the direction of gravity can be altered by how their brain responds to visual information.

So many of our hopes are based on the idea that the key to change is education.

Second, some researchers argue that the training activates stereotypes in people’s minds rather than eliminates them.

Fourth, the mandatory training makes many white participants feel left out, angry and resentful, actually decreasing their support for workplace diversity.

How do we rationally defend our most fundamental epistemic principles? Like many of the best philosophical mysteries, this a problem that can seem both unanswerable and yet extremely important to solve.

Any way you go, it seems you must admit you can give no reason for trusting your methods, and hence can give no reason to defend your most fundamental epistemic principles.

A legitimate challenge is presumably a rational challenge. Disagreements over epistemic principles are disagreements over which methods and sources to trus

Our five senses–sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell–seem to operate independently, as five distinct modes of perceiving the world. In reality, however, they collaborate closely to enable the mind to better understand its surroundings. We can become aware of this collaboration under special circumstances.

In some cases, a sense may covertly influence the one we think is dominant. When visual information clashes with that from sound, sensory crosstalk can cause what we see to alter what we hear. When one sense drops out, another can pick up the slack.

People with synesthesia have a particularly curious cross wiring of the senses, in which activating one sense spontaneously triggers another.

Without a doubt, our emotions dictate our thoughts, intentions and actions with superior authority to our rational minds. But when we act on our emotions too quickly, or we act on the wrong kinds of emotions, we often make decisions that we later lament.

Negative emotions, like rage, envy or bitterness, tend to spiral out of control, especially immediately after they've been triggered.

Reacting immediately to emotional triggers can be an immense mistake. It is guaranteed that you'll say or do something you'll later regret. Before refuting the trigger with your emotional argument, take a deep breath and stabilize the overwhelming impulse.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with having a little pride. It can propel you forward in tough situations and demonstrates a level of self-assuredness that we all strive for in our personal and professional lives. But there’s a narrow line dividing healthy confidence and stubborn ego, and one of the primary indicators you’ve landed on the wrong side is not being able to admit when you’re wrong.

Struggling to admit our own fault, though — whether it was a major breach or a minor mess-up — doesn’t really serve us well. Not only can it sour some of our closest relationships, but it can even be detrimental to our own personal growth.

In other cases, though, it’s possible to be aware that you’re wrong — whether mildly or outright — but still struggle to wave the guilty flag due to our precious egos.

We might not be conscious of how we interpret the world, because our beliefs are ingrained and habitual.

we can learn to bring our unconscious life philosophy to consciousness by asking ourselves questions.

That might sound incredibly simplistic and over-optimistic. Some philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists would argue that our capacity to choose a path in life is severely constrained by our genes, our childhood, our circumstances.

Many animals store food to use in times of scarcity, but humans are stockpilers too — individuals routinely keep money in the bank (or under their mattress) and cans in the pantry. However, in some individuals, this collecting behavior is taken to extremes in the form of compulsive hoarding — collecting excessive amounts of objects that have little or no value. Preston found that, across species, including humans, anxiety and threats appear to increase the motivation to acquire and collect food and goods

Responses to positive and negative feedback in the ventral striatum were greatly reduced under stress as compared to when there was no stress, suggesting that stress may dampen your perception of the subjective value of a decision.

Gaining a better understanding of how stress affects decision making is critical not only for psychological science, but has important, real-world implications

We form beliefs in a haphazard way, believing all sorts of things based just on what we hear out in the world but haven’t researched for ourselves.

It turns out, though, that we actually form abstract beliefs this way: We hear something; We believe it to be true; Only sometimes, later, if we have the time or the inclination, we think about it and vet it, determining whether it is, in fact, true or false

“People are credulous creatures who find it very easy to believe and very difficult to doubt. In fact, believing is so easy, and perhaps so inevitable, that it may be more like involuntary comprehension than it is like rational assessment.”

That’s because, researchers say, our brains do their best to keep us from dwelling on our inevitable demise.

Various words appeared above the faces on screen. Half of the time these were death-related words such as “funeral” or “burial”. The scientists found that if a person’s own face flashed up next to deathly words, their brain shut down its prediction system. It refused to link the self with death and no surprise signals were recorded.

Being shielded from thoughts of our future death could be crucial for us to live in the present. The protection may switch on in early life as our minds develop and we realise death comes to us all.

"Why do we prefer to do some tasks in quiet places and others with ambient noise? What is our brain doing to keep us from losing our focus every time we leave the peace and quiet of our homes?" said Joanna Scanlon, lead author of the study who conducted the work as a graduate student in the Department of Psychology. "It's important to understand how the brain processes tasks in different environments."

Any time there is background noise, our brain actively works to filter it out -- with the largest effect for fluid, outdoor sounds like vehicle traffic.

"These findings show that our environment affects how we perceive the world around us -- and means that much of what we know about the brain is oversimplified since it has primarily been researched in a laboratory setting.

... say we live on, say we’ll forget the masks that kept us from dying from the invisible, but say we won’t ever forget the invisible masks we realized we had been wearing most our lives, disguising ourselves from each other

Say we won’t veil ourselves again, that our souls will keep breathing timelessly, that we won’t return to clocking our lives with lists and appointments. Say we’ll keep our days errant as sun showers, impulsive as a star’s falling. Say this isn’t our end …

I say this might be the end we’ve always needed to begin again. I say this may be the end to let us hope to heal, to evolve, reach the stars.

our tendency to judge decisions based on how they turn out, known in poker as “resulting.”

our strategy is often based on beliefs that can be biased or wrong. We are quick to form, and slow to update our beliefs. We tend towards absolutes, and indulge in “motivated reasoning,” seeking out confirmation while ignoring contradictory evidence

solution is to embrace uncertainty by calibrating our confidence

“It was really moving to Texas that set me on this path of figuring out how to communicate about climate change,” she told me. “I was the only climate scientist within two hundred miles.”

She records the questions she is asked afterward, using an app, and the two most frequent are: “What gives you hope?” and “How do I talk to my [blank] about climate change?

In the late nineties, a Gallup poll found that forty-six per cent of Democrats and forty-seven per cent of Republicans agreed that the effects of global warming had already begun.

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, writer and regular Guardian columnist Oliver Burkeman faithfully carries the spirit of Seneca’s classic essay forward

It’s a deft and eclectic synthesis of ancient and modern thinking about how humanity can come to terms with our limited time on Earth – the title derives from the length of the average human lifespan – ranging intellectually from ancient Greek and Roman philosophers like Seneca to modern-day Buddhist and existentialist thinkers.

he only touches on politics briefly and sporadically throughout the book’s 245 pages. But those of us in politics and policy – whatever capacity we find ourselves in – can learn quite a bit