How Does Our Ability to Feel Another Person’s Pain Work?

June 14, 2017 Gary ReinerLeave a comment

To empathize with another person is to literally feel their pain. You run a compelling simulation of what it would be like if you were in that situation. Our capacity for this is why stories – like movies and novels – are so absorbing and so pervasive across human culture. Whether it’s about total strangers or made-up characters, you experience their agony and their ecstasy. You fluidly become them, live their lives, and stand in their vantage points. When you see another person suffer, you can try to tell yourself that it’s their issue, not yours – but neurons deep in your brain can’t tell the difference.

This built-in factory to feel another person’s pain is part of what makes us so good at stepping out of our shoes and into their shoes, neurally speaking. But why do we have this facility in the first place? From an evolutionary standpoint of view, empathy is a useful skill: by gaining a better prediction about what they’ll do next. However, the accuracy of empathy is limited, and in many cases we simply project ourselves onto others.

The Brain: The Story of You
David Eagleman

Background on David Eagleman

Does Penetrating A Mystery Make It Any Less Mysterious?

June 7, 2017 Gary Reiner2 Comments

A problem once solved ceases to be a problem; but the penetration of a mystery does not make it any less mysterious. The more intimate one is with a mystery, the greater shines the aura of its secret. The intensification of the mystery leads not to frustration (as does the increasing of a problem) but to release.

The Faith of Doubt: Glimpses of Buddhist Uncertainty
Stephen Batchelor

Stephen Batchelor
born 1953

. Wikipedia
. Martine & Stephen Batchelor

Stephen Batchelor, along with his wife Martine, are Buddhist teachers and authors, who live in South West France and conduct meditation retreats and seminars worldwide. They both trained as monastics for ten years in traditional Buddhist centers in Asia, and now present a lay and secular approach to Buddhist practice, largely based on the early teachings of the Buddha as found in the Pali Canon.

Books written by Stephen Batchelor include:

How Do We Create Our Version of Reality?

June 2, 2017June 3, 2017 Gary Reiner2 Comments

Your Brain – Your Storyteller

Your brain serves up a narrative – and each of us believes whatever narrative it tells. Whether you’re falling for a visual illusion, or believing the dream you happen to be trapped in, or experiencing letters in color (synethesia), or accepting a delusion as true during an episode of schizophrenia, we each accept our realities however our brains script them.

Despite the feeling that we’re directly experiencing the world out there, our reality is ultimately built in the dark, in a foreign language of electrochemical signals. The activity churning across vast neural networks gets turned into your story of this, your private experience of the world: the feeling of a book in your hands, the smell of roses, the sound of others speaking.

Even more strangely, it’s likely that every brain tells a slightly different narrative. For every situation with multiple witnesses, different brains are having different private subjective experiences. With seven billion human brains wandering the planet (and trillions of animal brains), there’s no single version of reality. Each brain carries its own truth.

So what is reality? It’s like a television set show that only you can see, and you can’t turn it off. The good news is that it happens to be broadcasting the most interesting show you could ask for: edited, personalized, and presented just for you.

The Brain: The Story of You
David Eagleman

David Eagleman
born 1971

. David Eagleman website
. Eagleman Laboratory for Perception and Action
. Wikipedia

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist and writer, serving as an adjunct associate professor at Stanford University in the department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences. He also independently serves as the director of the Center for Science and Law.

Eagleman is known for his work on brain plasticity, time perception, synesthesia, and neurolaw. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, a council member in the World Economic Forum, and a New York Times bestselling author published in 28 languages.

He is the writer and presenter of the international PBS series, The Brain with David Eagleman, and the author of the companion book, The Brain: T he Story of You.

Eagleman has over 100 academic publications, and he has published many popular books. His bestselling book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, explores the neuroscience “under the hood” of the conscious mind: all the aspects of neural function to which we have no awareness or access. His work of fiction, SUM: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, is an international bestseller published in 28 languages and turned into two operas.

Books written by David Eagleman include:

How Can We Wash Away the Dust of Earthly Life?

May 22, 2017October 3, 2017 Gary Reiner9 Comments

“Watch the stars in their courses and imagine yourself running alongside them. Think constantly on the changes of the elements into each other, for such thoughts wash away the dust of earthly life.”

…..Marcus Aurelius, from Meditations, 7.47

It’s almost impossible to stare up at the stars and not feel something. As cosmologist Neil deGrasse Tyson has explained, the cosmos fills us with complicated emotions. On the one hand, we feel an infinitesimal smallness in comparison to the vast universe; on the other hand, an extreme connectedness to this larger whole.

The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living
Ryan Holiday

Books written by Ryan Holiday include:

Marcus Aurelius
121-180 CE

. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
. Wikipedia

Marcus Aurelius was Emperor of Rome from 161 to 180. He ruled with Lucius Verus as co-emperor from 161 until Verus’ death in 169. Marcus Aurelius was the last of the so-called Five Good Emperors. He was a practitioner of Stoicism, and his untitled writing, commonly known as Meditations, is a significant source of the modern understanding of ancient Stoic philosophy, and is considered by many commentators to be one of the greatest works of philosophy.

Aurelius wrote Meditations in Greek while on campaign between 170 and 180. Meditations is still revered as a literary monument to a philosophy of service and duty, describing how to find and preserve equanimity, a state of psychological stability and composure, in the midst of conflict by following nature as a source of guidance and inspiration.

How Can We Cultivate Our Capacity for Solitude When Smartphones Tempt Us with Constant Connection?

May 11, 2017May 14, 2017 Gary ReinerLeave a comment

We are at a crossroads: So many people say they have no time to talk, really talk, but all the time in the world, day and night, to connect. When a moment of boredom arises, we have become accustomed to making it go away by searching for something – sometimes anything – on our phones. The next step is to take the same moment and respond by searching within ourselves. To do this, we have to cultivate the self as a resource. Beginning with the capacity for solitude.

Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age
Sherry Turkle

Sherry Turkle
born 1948

. MIT profile
. Sherry Turkle (her website)
. Wikipedia

Sherry Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). Turkle is the founder (2001) and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. She obtained a BA in Social Studies and later a Ph.D. in Sociology and Personality Psychology at Harvard University.

Turkle now focuses her research on psychoanalysis and human-technology interaction. She has written several books focusing on the psychology of human relationships with technology, especially in the realm of how people relate to computational objects.

Books written by Sherry Turkle include:

Connected, but alone? – TED Talk by Sherry Turkle