Psychology – Stories From the Ground.

Reason’s Emotional Roots

“Do we not perhaps feel thought, and do we not feel ourselves in the act of knowing and willing?” – Bruce Lee, Striking Thoughts

“Nature appears to have built the apparatus of rationality not just on top of the apparatus of biological regulation, but also from it and with it.” – Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error

Critical of Critical Thinking

Rationality has always faced an uphill battle. It stirs few passions and obeys no creed, meaning that when it challenges ethnic, religious, or political loyalties, it can typically be subdued with a simple appeal to the human heart. Some people ignore reason more eagerly than others but we are all, to some extent, averse to rationality.

Delusion and the Useful Futility of Defining Meditation

“Our lives are lived in two realms – the physical and the narrative.” – Will Storr, The Unpersuadables

Misled by Nature

It’s easy to feel high and mighty about our place in the animal kingdom. Despite the physical prowess and surprising ingenuity of our animal cousins, we can’t help but regard them with some degree of pity. Sure, it’s impressive that leafcutter ants farm fungi (and have done so for millions of years), that some birds can fly over 10,000km without stopping, and that male emperor penguins incubate eggs for two months in frigid darkness, but isn’t it also a bit … meaningless?

How Does Hypnosis Work?

“And as to the people you want to help, they are in their respective worlds for the sake of their desires; there is no way of helping them except through their desires.”—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, I Am That

High School Hypnosis

Hypnotists cast a captivating spell. It is a curious sight to see people apparently stripped of autonomy and persuaded to act against their will—so curious, in fact, that few can watch hypnosis without being intrigued by what, exactly, is happening.

Four Arguments for the Nonexistence of Free Will

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[NOTE TO READER: This essay has been updated. Please read the more recent version (scroll up).]

“The only reason, for example, that you are not a rattlesnake is that your mother and father weren’t rattlesnakes. You deserve very little credit for being what you are – and remember, the people who come to you irritated, bigoted, unreasoning, deserve very little discredit for being what they are.” — Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

Bending Intuition

Knowledge comes through many channels. It can be acquired by conscious effort, per academic ways of learning. It can accumulate unconsciously, seeping in through exposure to various cultures and contexts. It can arise suddenly, via flashes of insight produced by the veiled churnings of the subconscious mind. Or it can develop over aeons of natural trial and error, resulting in dispositions suited for survival in an oft-unforgiving world. But for all its different modes and forms, every bit of knowledge shares one crucial requisite: a dependence on intuition. Continue reading “Four Arguments for the Nonexistence of Free Will”

Are We Ruled by Thought or Emotion?

“… no sharp line divides thinking from feeling, nor does thinking inevitably precede feeling or vice versa (notwithstanding the century of debate within psychology over which comes first).”—Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works

“I’m hooked on a feeling; I’m high on believing.”—Mark James, popularised by Blue Swede

Deceptive Dichotomies

We interpret the world through perception, but our perceptions are limited and often exclude basic relations. For instance, we might think that inside and outside, up and down, or left and right are mutually exclusive, but they are also interdependent: the existence of an outside entails an inside, up only exists relative to down, and left delineates right. Our mental landscapes are peppered with such dichotomies, tricking us into thinking interrelated phenomena are separate. Continue reading “Are We Ruled by Thought or Emotion?”