Cav > Books: psychology‎ (273)

"..I acknowledge that there are complexities around whether and when we should consider some conditions as “dysfunction” as opposed to a type of neurodiversity that society has wrongly become intolerant to—cases of autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and depression are all examples. That said, for each of these conditions, a subset of diagnosed individuals suffer in ways that can benefit from treatment. For those individuals, when our existing treatments fall short, we need better ways to help them. With this empathetic spirit, I use the terms “dysfunction” and “disorder” to refer to the conditions of individuals who need better solutions than the ones we can offer them today."

"I am a neuroscientist, and I have been engaged in brain research for over two decades. For a long time, I’ve been convinced that I have the best of all possible jobs: I get paid to think up new questions about how the brain works and answer them. A large part of what inspires my research is my intense curiosity about how the brain gives rise to the mind, and to ourselves. To answer these questions, I focus on memory. I investigate questions like: When we have the experience of remembering that we’ve seen something before, what is happening in our brains? How do our brains manage to remember so much? And how do our brains curate what we remember and forget?
My work is not driven just by curiosity; I believe that a foundational understanding of how memory works will contribute to future treatments and cures for memory dysfunction, including age-related dementias such as Alzheimer’s. In fact, part of my research program focuses on transforming what we’ve learned about memory into the earliest stages of developing a new treatment for memory impairment. Ours is but one example of what is known as the bench to bedside approach, where fundamental research discoveries are the first step toward developing new clinical treatments."

"Hands down, the most profound and important insight I’ve had while writing this book is that the end goal of treating brain dysfunction amounts to one of the most formidable of all possible challenges: controlling a complex system. Not in the creepy or cartoonish sense of “mind control,” but in the sense that treatments require shifting the brain from an unhealthy to a healthier state. This challenge is so formidable that there are questions about whether it can even be done in principle (much less in practice). The answer depends on exactly what type of complex system we’re dealing with.
To illustrate, let’s look at what happened when we tried to control another complex system: the weather. Today, we don’t try to influence the paths of hurricanes. Why not? It’s not because we haven’t tried. Often forgotten about the history of weather research is that we did try, only to realize that it probably won’t work. Thus, we need to ask ourselves: What makes us think that the brain will be any different? After all, an epileptic seizure or psychosis might be likened to a tornado or a hurricane insofar as it’s a complex system gone awry. Under what conditions can we effectively control a complex system?"

"...I had the good fortune of attending graduate school at a time when new noninvasive brain imaging methods had just become available, providing a golden opportunity to address big anthropological questions with the methods of modern neuroscience. After subsequent postdoctoral training in neuroimaging, I began investigating the neural basis of human behavioral specializations such as cooperation and language. Sometime later, it occurred to me that paternal caregiving was also a human specialization and a neglected and worthy topic of investigation. Spurred on by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation, I redirected my research focus to investigating the biology of fatherhood. In the midst of that Templeton grant, my wife gave birth to our first child, a delightfully plump boy named Toby. Raising him while researching and learning about fatherhood presented me with a remarkable opportunity for my home life to inform my research and vice versa. My daughter Mia was born five years later and provided a whole new set of lessons that helped to shape my knowledge of fatherhood beyond the mere academic. They are now twelve and six years old, and I feel I have learned enough about fatherhood over those twelve years, both at home and at work, to have some useful knowledge to pass on to others. This book is my effort to do so."

"Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler and Mao Tse-tung all shared at least one thing in common: they hated their fathers. All three men had abusive and strongly authoritarian fathers. Mao Tse-tung’s father beat him when he did not work hard enough. When Mao later took merciless revenge on his political enemies, he told the men who were torturing them that he would like to have seen his father treated similarly.1 Joseph Stalin bitterly resented his father, a violent alcoholic who beat him severely.2 Hitler’s father ruled the family “with tyrannical severity and injustice,” and he viewed him as the enemy.3 Remarkably, all three seemed to have loved their mothers, and at least Hitler and Mao saw themselves in alliance with their mother against their father.4
It would be foolish to conclude that these fathers were responsible for the devastation and suffering their sons unleashed on the world. Most people who were abused by their fathers as children do not become tormenters, and some even thrive. There are surely a host of genetic, environmental, historical, and sociopolitical factors that collectively conspired to produce these horrific developmental outcomes. Yet we can still ask how things might have been different if each of these men had been raised instead by a warm, nurturing father who provided strong moral guidance and set appropriate limits without harsh discipline."

"...These elements indeed include things like moral values and the economic value of an option, but they also include the consequences of your past choices, your mood, the opinions of the people around you, and so much more. A reward can be money, but it can also be friendship. It can be seeing something good happen in the world for others, achieving a small goal, or having enough energy and strength to finally run a marathon. There are many things that our brains value, many ways our brains can find reward—but as we find ourselves making the same choices again and again, it doesn’t always feel that way. Getting takeout trumps saving for retirement; hitting deadlines trumps professional development; the Internet vortex trumps spending time with the people we love. In this way, the choices the brain hands down don’t always align with what we might explicitly think of as the thing we value most."

"We found that if parts of a person’s value system, like a region known as the medial prefrontal cortex, ramped up their activity when they saw a message about sunscreen or smoking or exercise, they were more likely to change their behavior to conform to the message—regardless of whether
they said they consciously thought the message was effective. This offered our first glimpse of how the value system was linked to relatively highstakes, real-life choices outside the lab. A plethora of other studies, by my team and others, have shown similar findings when people are deciding what to eat, what to buy, how much to save for retirement, and more.
At first we were only looking to see if activity in the brain correlated with the choices people made outside the lab. Once we saw that it did, we asked: How can we use this to help facilitate change? I believed that the answer was to somehow ramp up activity in the system, but it would take more than a decade of research to understand how.
During that time, in experiments ranging from giving people feedback about their peers’ experiences, to helping them connect with their core values as a way of becoming more open to change, to comparing how the value system responds to immediate rewards versus those that lie in the more distant future, my team and others saw how simple interventions could dial value system activity up or down, which could ultimately help someone change their behavior. We discovered how changing where people put their attention—on different past experiences, current needs, or dreams for the future—changes the value calculation. This research also made it clear that activity in the value system captures something that goes beyond people’s initial instincts about what they’ll do next and can sometimes help explain the discrepancy we observed between what people say they will do and what they actually do."

"In this book, we will shed light on seven key barriers to social connection —each corresponding to a different chapter—and offer research-based strategies for removing them. Some of these strategies might seem obvious (although we suspect that they are often easier to understand than they are to execute), but others might surprise you. (For example, did you know that meditating can help you feel more socially connected, even when you’re doing it alone?) The strategies in the book can help you live a more connected life, and they might also help you live a longer life. As we’ll see, research shows that your feelings of connection are a significant predictor of how long you’ll live!"

"...That wasn’t an isolated incident. I often had moments like these, in which I snatched dissatisfaction from the jaws of happiness.
My life, after all, is and was objectively excellent: I have a solid relationship, an interesting job, and a stable place to live. But neuroticism kept me from enjoying this bounty, and it meant that when some calamity—unemployment, a health scare—did inevitably strike, I crumbled more quickly than most. My personality blinded me to the ways I could expand my life and make it even better, or even just appreciate my good fortune.
In addition to neuroticism, personality consists of four other “factors,” or traits: extroversion (which is basically sociability); agreeableness (or niceness); openness to experience (vaguely, creativity); and conscientiousness (or orderliness). Together, your levels of these five traits predict how you’ll respond to various situations—like, say, if you’ll relish your special photo shoot in a tropical paradise or have a cosmic breakdown.
I had always felt unusually neurotic, introverted, and disagreeable. Over time, I stuck those labels to myself proudly, and I mostly lived by them, even when doing so made me miserable. I avoided anything that didn’t suit my personality perfectly..."

"...These causes are located in three places: your world, your body, and your mind.
When you combine the causes and the places, there are nine ways to make your life better.
All of these are important, but growing resources in the mind has a unique power. It offers the greatest opportunity, since you usually have more influence over your mind than over your body or world. It also offers the greatest impact, since you take your mind with you wherever you go.
You can’t always count on the world, other people, or even your own body. But you can count on durable inner strengths hardwired into your nervous system—and this book is about growing them."

"Relevance, robustness and range are three strong reasons for applying behavioural science in your business. However, knowing you should apply behavioural science and actually applying behavioural science are different things.
When there is such a variety of biases, it can be hard to know where to start. This book aims to address that hurdle. Rather than race through a bewildering range of biases, I’ve selected the most pertinent: 16½ ideas that can both be applied easily and have the potential to make a large impact on marketing."

"...I mean it. Consider precognitive phenomena. I have long thought of these as the most well-documented and philosophically important of all impossible events. As such, they carry immense potential for influencing everything intellectuals and scientists do. If taken as real (by which I simply mean, “they happen”), such experiences and events (and they are both) would transform the entire order of knowledge upon which our present culture depends, the sciences included. For a start, they could tell us something stunning about the practice of history (time goes both ways), the history of religions (divination is globally distributed because it is based on an actual, if unreliable, human ability), the philosophy of mind (consciousness and cognition are not stuck in the present skull cavity or in this temporal slice of a body), and even something as abstract as causality itself (agency can act from the future). If we want to begin to learn how to think impossibly, precognitive phenomena are going to be a key to any such new order of knowledge."

"Impossible things certainly happen in numerous cultural zones and through specific ritual practices on a fairly routine basis. This is why a comparative practice is so necessary, so liberating and healing, but also so devastating to our local assumptions. Trained intellectuals who experience the impossible are commonly shocked and often see and say more or less the same thing: “It is not what we thought.”13
That is the very first lesson of thinking impossibly: recognizing that the impossible is a function not of reality but of our own present social constructions and subsequent perceptions and cognitions. That is also the humanist’s secret taken to its furthest point until it bends back on itself and consumes its own historical perspective. That is the deconstruction of deconstruction. That is the snake biting its own tail."

"...When we think of minds changing we usually think of psychological changes that affect our moods and outlook. Or neurological changes following a head injury or during an illness. But the changes I am interested in run much deeper. They span the evolutionary history of our early human ancestors and shape every aspect of who we are – our emotions, our memories, our languages, our intelligence and, indeed, the very fabric of our cultures and societies. It might not feel like it, but we are all heirs to millions of years of brain evolution: countless trial-and-error experiments in our mind’s relationship with the natural world. As a result, we are cleverer and more interconnected than our forebears ever imagined."

"Scholars in the new field of discursive psychology, a branch of science that investigates how the self is socially constructed, are particularly interested in how people’s pronouns affect their sense of self. According to these scholars, the self is a ‘continuous production’ built from words and culture. Until recently, the first-person pronouns ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘mine’ predominated in Western society. Now, however, dozens of pronouns are used to express various identities: ‘ze’, ‘ey’, ‘hir’, ‘xe’, ‘hen’, ‘ve’, ‘ne’, ‘per’, ‘thon’ and more. Sticklers for grammar view this as an assault on the English language. Sticklers for tradition view it as a slippery slope to government-mandated speech codes.
Yet far from being new-age gobbledygook or an omen of tyranny, novel pronouns in fact have a crucial social function. They reveal your personality, reflect important differences among groups and help knit communities together."

"Even today, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnosis and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-IV, defines autism as a condition manifesting in an ‘abnormal development in social interaction and communication, and a markedly restricted repertoire of activity and interests.’ But I am reluctant to accept the words of a psychiatric organisation that as recently as 1968 defined homosexuality as ‘a mental disorder’."

"We all have defining moments in our lives—meaningful experiences that stand out in our memory. Many of them owe a great deal to chance: A lucky encounter with someone who becomes the love of your life. A new teacher who spots a talent you didn’t know you had. A sudden loss that upends the certainties of your life. A realization that you don’t want to spend one more day in your job. These moments seem to be the product of fate or luck or maybe a higher power’s interventions. We can’t control them.
But is that true? Must our defining moments just happen to us?"

"In this book, we have two goals: First, we want to examine defining moments and identify the traits they have in common. What, specifically, makes a particular experience memorable and meaningful? Our research shows that defining moments share a set of common elements.
Second, we want to show you how you can create defining moments by making use of those elements. Why would you want to create them? To enrich your life. To connect with others. To make memories. To improve the experience of customers or patients or employees.
Our lives are measured in moments, and defining moments are the ones that endure in our memories. In the pages ahead, we’ll show you how to make more of them."

"...Suggestion can make cheap wine taste like Château Margaux, warp our perception of time, and alter our memories. We know that psychedelic substances, illusions, and other dramatic effects can also alter our levels of suggestibility. But, paradoxically, being susceptible to suggestions hardly means we’re feeble-minded or gullible."

"Here, I share some of my best stories about the science of suggestion, the bread and butter of my professional life. Throughout my academic career, I have focused specifically on the role that suggestion plays in the effectiveness of psychiatric medications, alongside how attention, selfregulation, placebo phenomena, and expectations affect human consciousness. For example, sometimes placebos work even when people know that they are taking them. The fields of developmental psychopathology and transcultural psychiatry teach us how much our communities and social standards can shape our thoughts, emotions, and cognitive processing. And using imaging of the living human brain and other state-of-the-art techniques, my research has helped unravel the mental experiences of hypnosis and meditation."

"...by repeatedly showing participants photographs of famous and respected Black people, such as Martin Luther King Jr., and photographs of infamous and disapproved white people, such as criminal and cult leader Charles Manson, negative attitudes waned by more than 50 percent.57 Similarly, videos of Black people during positive activities such as going to church or enjoying a family barbecue also reduced implicit bias.58 These early efforts to change the social context and, through it, reduce automatic prejudice and preference have paved the road to diversity education."

"...In this way, and others, we can apply the science of suggestion—in a way that transcends lip service and performative activism—to result in real social impact, health outcomes, and political change."

"...No surprise, then, that the nocebo effect has been called “the placebo effect’s evil twin.” In our view, the nocebo effect can be summarized as “the occurrence of a harmful event that stems from consciously or subconsciously expecting it.” The core of the nocebo effect is that adverse health effects occur as a result of negative expectations. Expectations come up in everyday conversation, like when you tell a friend that you’re stuck in traffic but expect to meet them for dinner in twenty minutes. But it’s also an important technical term that academics use (sometimes interchangeably with expectancy), and it was popularized by Dr. Irving Kirsch at Harvard University. Expectancies can teach us a lot about our behavior and actions. They are critical to our health and well-being. The nocebo effect, then, can be thought of as the scientific term for saying that when you expect to feel sick, you are more likely to feel sick."

"In this book, we are going to discuss the common triggers of anger, using some new research on the brain’s rage circuits. Then we are going to look at what happens in our body when we have an anger response. After the science-y part of what anger is, we’re gonna do the unfuckening part.
We’re gonna go through all those light-shining activities that help us understand our unique and personal anger responses, and discuss how to channel our anger into better relationships or barnstorming social action. And I’m gonna share all the work I’ve done in my life around learning how important forgiveness is for my own-damn-self. We are going to discuss ways of living with our very real and valid anger responses without losing our shit or swallowing our rage like so much poison. Because if feeling anger is OK, you can be angry and still be OK."

"By shifting from irritation and defensiveness, he validated the experiences of the individuals who have been victimized, which lent support to social change.
2) Own our privilege and power: We are not the sum of our disenfranchisement, we are the sum of our assets. And our assets are not just our fundamental agents of change, our recognition of them informs our compassion for others and our intersectionality. My friend Naomi Brown, who is a minister and social worker, calls this conscious using of privilege to help those who do not have it sneaking in the front door. Power and privilege lets us get into spaces others could not. This doesn’t mean speaking for them, but providing support and amplification of their experiences..."

"...Most of this usage presents mindfulness as a condition solely of the mind and often related to the practice of meditation. But mindfulness—as my students and I have shown—is instead the simple process of actively noticing things, no meditation required. When mindful, we notice things we didn’t notice before, and we come to see that we didn’t know the things we thought we knew as well as we thought we knew them. Everything becomes interesting and potentially useful in a new way..."

"But my use of the word “mindfulness” also, importantly, refers to a condition of the body. Indeed, I believe our psychology may be the most important determinant of our health. I’m not just speaking of harmony between mind and body. I believe the mind and body comprise a single system, and every change in the human being is essentially simultaneously a change at the level of the mind (that is, a cognitive change) as well as the body (a hormonal, neural, and/or behavioral change). When we open our minds to this idea of mind-body unity, new possibilities for controlling our health become real. Making use of the power of a mindful body is well within our grasp."

"Schopenhauer is presumed to have said, “All research passes through three phases: First it is ridiculed; then it is violently opposed; and third it is accepted as self-evident.”

"...People seeking enlightenment or relief from stress, anxiety, and pain have been the primary audience.
Therefore, most mindfulness teachers have continued to discuss mindfulness within that frame. That frame has been so narrow for so long it might seem that mindfulness is only for the spiritually inclined, or for people with challenging medical issues, such as panic attacks, paralyzing anxiety, and deep depression, or people who just want some stress relief.
That couldn't be further from the truth..."

"I don't know why you picked up this book, but given the title it might be that you've had the thought, “What the hell is all the hype about mindfulness?” You may be one of the millions of people who have been curious about mindfulness but don't want to be associated with the spiritual crowd that so often drowns out its core meaning. Perhaps you recoil at the thought of listening to someone breathlessly guide meditations in a sickly sweet voice. Maybe you thought you'd need to join a yoga studio and get a subscription for monthly deliveries of incense. If any of those have been keeping you from trying out mindfulness, this book is for you. In these pages, I peel back the layers of hype and hyperbole about mindfulness and provide a practical and demystified approach to reaping the real benefits from a consistent mindfulness practice over just an 8-week period.
The concept of "Mindfulness" is not new, despite the many new Western practitioners who have emerged in the last few decades. Although mindful practices are just hitting an upswing here, they have been a component of Eastern philosophy, namely Hinduism and Buddhism, for a few thousand years."

"Mindfulness is an ability to keep attention on one's present moment experience without getting too caught up in automatic thoughts and judgments."

"Attending my first mindfulness teacher training course was quite a shock. In the morning on the first day, the teachers came into the room holding small bells, wearing Buddhist beads, and carrying special cushions on which they meditated. This struck me as odd, because I had signed up for the “secular” mindfulness teacher training. It did not take long to gather that this “secular” training was going to be deeply intertwined with overtly spiritual and new-age thoughts, positions, and perspectives. There were–I kid you not–even Tarot card readings at an evening event and scores of participant comments during the training were met with the response, “That's so beautiful.” If you want to turn off a corporate audience and never be invited back beyond what your original contract stipulated, just do what's in this paragraph."

"As you progress through the book and do the exercises, you can gain a greater ability to respond thoughtfully and calmly in the midst of high-pressure and complex situations, become more agile in the face of change, and pay more attention to the things you deem most important. You will learn practices that are known to lead to enhanced mental focus, empathy, and resilience. Through consistent practice, you can become aware of some of your self-created challenges and learn ways to avoid automatically falling into the same patterns so you can get out of your own way. You will learn ways to be less affected by unhelpful internal dialogue, limiting beliefs, and irrational feelings of fear (failure, embarrassment, and criticism), allowing you to see and seize opportunities to grow beyond what you previously thought possible and unlock your latent potential. Finally, you'll also begin to be able to connect with people around you more fully and effectively. These benefits cascade and compound, resulting in improvements in performance, leadership, and well-being."

"Engaging with music, whether as a listener or a player, facilitates entry into the brain’s Default Mode Network (DMN), a path to the subconscious that is instrumental to everything from problem-solving to relaxation, from creativity to immune system function. And for many, music can connect us to a sense of a higher power, of great and enduring beauty, and listening to or playing it can provide some of the most exhilarating and meaningful moments of our lives."

"This is a book to help you change things. We consider change at every level—individual, organizational, and societal. Maybe you want to help your brother beat his gambling addiction. Maybe you need your team at work to act more frugally because of market conditions. Maybe you wish more of your neighbors would bike to work.
Usually these topics are treated separately—there is “change management” advice for executives and “self-help” advice for individuals and “change the world” advice for activists. That’s a shame, because all change efforts have something in common: For anything to change, someone has to start acting differently. Your brother has got to stay out of the casino; your employees have got to start booking coach fares. Ultimately, all change efforts boil down to the same mission: Can you get people to start behaving in a new way?..."

"Since my course was about the scientific approach to understanding happiness, I included studies that sought to explain human behaviour in terms of the underlying mechanisms in the brain. My own areas of interest – child development, the self and neuroscience – played central roles. I wanted to share my passion for the power of data and evidence, so I included lectures on statistics and experimental design to demonstrate how science is the best way to discover truths in the world. Unlike many positive psychology advocates, I was cautious not to oversell the promise of the principles I was teaching. I was determined to approach the Science of Happiness as rigorously as possible, so I had the audience participate in psychometric tests before and after the course to determine whether the recommended activities made any difference to their happiness. I informed them that they were taking part in their own experiment and the outcome would determine the future of the course. And I promised: if it didn’t work, I would abandon the course and return to my studies."

"Across the seven lessons, you will learn that a balance needs to be struck between our egocentric viewpoint and adopting a more allocentric perspective.
Throughout and at the end of each lesson, there will be simple exercises to help you with this shift to becoming more balanced – and therefore happier.
But remember, knowledge is simply not enough. We have repeatedly shown that our course improves students’ mental well-being and reduces their feelings of anxiety and loneliness, but the improvement lasts only as long as the students keep up their practices.7 It’s like physical health: you can be fitter, but only so long as you work at it. If you stop living a healthier lifestyle, then you will stop being healthy. The same is true of happiness. You need to work at it, to practise happiness, in order to achieve the lasting benefits..."

"Biophilia explains why even today we build houses on the lake, why every child wants a teddy bear, and why Apple names itself after a fruit and its software after noble predators, surfing spots and national parks. The company is brilliant at instilling biophilic longing and affiliation at the very same time it lures us inside."

"This book explores the science behind what poets and philosophers have known for eons: place matters. Aristotle believed walks in the open air clarified the mind. Darwin, Tesla and Einstein walked in gardens and groves to help them think. Teddy Roosevelt, one of the most hyperproductive presidents of all time, would escape for months to the open country. On some level they all fought a tendency to be “tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people” as hikerphilosopher John Muir put it in 1901."

"I’ve divided the book into five parts to help make sense of the material, and to make it useful. The first part sets up the two dominant theories that attempt to explain why our brains need nature and that drive much of the research: the first chapter takes us to Japan, where researchers are quantifying nature’s role in lowering stress and boosting mental health using a framework based on the biophilia hypothesis, the idea that we feel most “at home” in nature because we evolved there. The second chapter swerves over to Utah, where American neuroscientists are more interested in how nature helps restore our attention-addled brains to a state of sharper cognition. I’ve organized the rest of the book by nature dose. I explore the immediate effects of quick bursts, or “nearby nature” on our three main senses—smell, sound, sight. Then I look at what happens to our brains and bodies when we hang outside a bit longer to approximate the Finnish recommended nature dose: five hours a month. In Part Four, I take a deeper, longer dive into the wilderness, where really interesting things happen to our brains. This is where, in the words of neuroscientist David Strayer at the University of Utah, “something profound is going on.” Finally, we’ll look at what it all means to the way most of us live, in cities."