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Conspiracy: Making Distinctions
While the brain is quite good at categorizing, it is not very adept at making distinctions. (Much like the human brain, neither is Google.) We encounter this problem in the area of personality or...
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Intention Seekers (Conspiracy Part 2)
People who believe in conspiracy theories (conspiracists) are motivated by the same thing that motivates everyone: the drive to understand and make sense of the world we live in. Failing to understand...
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Conspiracy Theories and the Storytelling Mind (Conspiracy Part 3)
The most important thing about conspiracy theories isn’t that they aren’t true. They’re stories; of course they aren’t true. There’s no such thing as a “true story.” We see, understand, and explain the...
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Pointers for the Unsettled, Unsituated, and Uncertain
Thanks to our brain we have a sense of a constant, relatively unchanging world. We’re pretty confident we can distinguish reality from unreality. In fact, we’re pretty confident about a lot of things....
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Books to Change Your Mind, Your Brain, and Your Self
Here are brief summaries of a dozen books I consider foundational for understanding brain, mind, and behavior. Most of them were published between 2010 and 2012. There are plenty of books that have...
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Theory of Mind: Less than Meets the Eye
In his second book, Brain Changer (which you don’t need to read), David DiSalvo, who also wrote What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite (which you should read), says: Humans are...
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The Map Is Not the Territory
And the menu is not the meal. In other words, beware of confusing models of reality with reality. It sounds obvious, but it’s much easier said than done, so we end up believing a lot of things that are...
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Games People Play
Since I began rereading Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, I’ve noticed coincidences of birds and of John Updike. (That’s two, and I’m barely into the book, so I’m starting a mental list.) Birds haven’t...
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Something’s Happening Here
Something happens. You get a phone call, say, or a friend invites you to a movie—or cancels a movie date—or you wake up on a Monday or a Saturday or from a nap or from being sedated, or you read a news...
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What [Else] Is It Telling Me?
In 2018, Jim Allison and Tasuku Honjo won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their “discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation.” As a scientist, Allison has...
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Everything Is an Interpretation
In the world in which we live: everything everywhere is in motion all the time everything is a process everything is an interpretation These three facts are interrelated, but they tend to be...
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Butterfly Nets, Smartphones, and Coffee Shops
In A Tale of Two Kitties (my last post), I shared my current working definition of affordance: “an action possibility available to an agent within an environment.” This doesn’t deviate radically from...
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Sensing and Perceiving the Physical World
Sensation is the information the brain receives; perception is the result of the brain selecting, organizing, and interpreting this information. We don’t experience the sensory data directly; we...
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Existential Troublesome Knowledge
There’s troublesome knowledge—and then there’s existential troublesome knowledge. The concept of troublesome knowledge was developed in academia and has since been applied and utilized in many academic...
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Sudoku, Provisional Assessments, and the Space of Possibilities
I enjoy working Sudoku puzzles, especially the hard or challenger level, and I always look forward to the super challenger puzzles on the back pages of Dell’s Crazy for Sudoku books that take days to...
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It’s All about the Action
“I think therefore I am.” So declared Rene Descartes sometime in 1640. Cogito ergo sum! was the culmination of his attempt to identify something he could be certain of, some bedrock truth of which...
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12 Years After
Twelve years ago this month, I headed off on the path I came to call Farther to Go! I was on a path of sorts at the time—well, on a sidewalk, anyway, heading west on Academy, into what I tend to refer...
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