The trick to persuading people you’re right, according to experimental psychology
http://ift.tt/2nO7Qle Hugo Mercier in Quartz: It’s an old trope that humans don’t like change—especially when it comes to their opinions. Ancient Greek philosophers complained about the masses refusing to heed their advice. Scholars spearheading the scientific revolution in the 17th century bemoaned their predecessors’ stubbornness. And today, everybody complains about their brother-in-law who won’t admit […]
Oliver Sacks on What a Pacific Island Can Teach Us About Treating Ill People as Whole People
http://ift.tt/2pdDZSP On the redemptive acceptance of the terminally ill as “a living part of the community.” “There is something in personal love, caresses, and the magnetic flood of sympathy and friendship, that does, in its way, more good than all the medicine in the world,” Walt Whitman wrote in his insightful meditation on healthcare and […]
How perspective shapes reality
http://ift.tt/2pKuKHw Models are always imperfect, and the ones we choose greatly shape our experience Picture Jupiter’s moons orbiting the planet. Do you see small dots bouncing back and forth in straight lines as if bound to Jupiter by springs, as Galileo once did? Or an overhead view of small bodies circling the planet in elliptical […]
What lurks beneath
http://ift.tt/2oNyYy5 Towards the end of 1892, ‘Miss Lucy R’, a pale and delicate English governess living in Vienna, made her way to the surgery of a young neurologist on Berggasse 19 for the treatment of a ‘suppurative rhinitis’. Miss Lucy was tired, in low spirits and complained of ‘a muzzy head’. And though she had […]
The Great Humanistic Philosopher and Psychologist Erich Fromm on What Self-Love Really Means and Why It Is the Basic Condition for a Sane Society
http://ift.tt/2p880Tx “In the experience of love lies the only answer to being human, lies sanity.” “We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not,” Joan Didion famously wrote in making her case for the value of keeping a notebook. But […]
Whalevolution
http://img.youtube.com/vi/F_lj8GDlX48/0.jpg Watch as the whale becomes itself: slowly, slowly, from land to sea, through deep time Descending from creatures that were terrestrial and then amphibious before they were aquatic, cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises) possess some of the animal kingdom’s most fascinating evolutionary histories. This video from the UK artist Jordan Collver traces the evolution […]
Love and Will: The Great Existential Psychologist Rollo May on Apathy, Transcendence, and Our Human Task in Times of Radical Transition
http://ift.tt/2r6RbpU “In every act of love and will — and in the long run they are both present in each genuine act — we mold ourselves and our world simultaneously. This is what it means to embrace the future.” “Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present,” Albert Camus wrote in […]
Neuroscientists working on the “hard problem” of consciousness may be doomed to fail. But there is meaning — even pleasure — in the Sisyphean task
http://ift.tt/2skG2nv Early in my neurology residency, a 50-year-old woman insisted on being hospitalized for protection from the FBI spying on her via the TV set in her bedroom. The woman’s physical examination, lab tests, EEGs, scans, and formal neuropsychological testing revealed nothing unusual. Other than being visibly terrified of the TV monitor in the ward […]
Jonathan Haidt is famous for explaining how liberals and conservatives think. Now he’s wagering that social psychology can calm the campus culture war
http://ift.tt/2sAi8EC Timothy Fadek Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU’s business school, is a founder of Heterodox Academy, which promotes wider “viewpoint diversity” in academe. On a February morning in Washington, a hotel ballroom is packed with people eager to hear Jonathan Haidt explain what’s wrong with higher education. His talk is part of the […]
The future is emotional
http://ift.tt/2sYTekN Early last year, the World Economic Forum issued a paper warning that technological change is on the verge of upending the global economy. To fill the sophisticated jobs of tomorrow, the authors argued, the ‘reskilling and upskilling of today’s workers will be critical’. Around the same time, the then president Barack Obama announced a […]