{"id":1434,"date":"2023-12-19T10:12:10","date_gmt":"2023-12-19T10:12:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meumon.synology.me\/wordpress\/?p=1434"},"modified":"2024-08-06T10:02:18","modified_gmt":"2024-08-06T10:02:18","slug":"lhome-antropologia-psicologia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/meumon.synology.me\/wordpress\/lhome-antropologia-psicologia\/","title":{"rendered":"L&#8217;home. Antropologia. Psicologia"},"content":{"rendered":"<div data-pm-slice=\"0 0 []\" data-en-clipboard=\"true\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/books\/under-review\/the-science-of-the-psychedelic-renaissance\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/books\/under-review\/the-science-of-the-psychedelic-renaissance<\/a>\u00a0\u00fas de drogues psicod\u00e8liques<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><a href=\"https:\/\/www.npr.org\/sections\/goatsandsoda\/2018\/06\/07\/617097908\/why-grandmothers-may-hold-the-key-to-human-evolution?utm_source=pocket&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=pockethits\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">https:\/\/www.npr.org\/sections\/goatsandsoda\/2018\/06\/07\/617097908\/why-grandmothers-may-hold-the-key-to-human-evolution<\/a> les iaies van ser m\u00e9s importants a l&#8217;hora de la superviv\u00e8ncia de l&#8217;esp\u00e8cia en les societats ca\u00e7adores-recolectores, que no pas el mascle ca\u00e7ador.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><a href=\"https:\/\/www.inverse.com\/article\/48300-why-is-it-hard-to-focus-research-human\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">https:\/\/www.inverse.com\/article\/48300-why-is-it-hard-to-focus-research-human<\/a>s Nom\u00e9s estem conscients 4 vegades per segons, la resta del temps el cervell va en pilot autom\u00e0tic<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2018\/09\/10\/what-personality-tests-really-deliver\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2018\/09\/10\/what-personality-tests-really-deliver<\/a>\u00a0test de myers briggs<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><a href=\"https:\/\/www.atlasobscura.com\/articles\/how-to-echolocate\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">https:\/\/www.atlasobscura.com\/articles\/how-to-echolocate<\/a>\u00a0orientar-se amb el so [what is like to be a bat]<\/div>\n<hr \/>\n<div><a href=\"https:\/\/aeon.co\/essays\/schools-love-the-idea-of-a-growth-mindset-but-does-it-work?utm_source=pocket&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=pockethits\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">https:\/\/aeon.co\/essays\/schools-love-the-idea-of-a-growth-mindset-but-does-it-work<\/a>\u00a0educaci\u00f3, fer creure als nens que tot \u00e9s possible i que la capacitat no est\u00e0 predetermianda -&gt; pot dur a expectatives frustrrades?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.com\/future\/story\/20190326-are-we-close-to-solving-the-puzzle-of-consciousness\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">http:\/\/www.bbc.com\/future\/story\/20190326-are-we-close-to-solving-the-puzzle-of-consciousness<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0Tononi proposes that we can identify a person\u2019s (or an animal\u2019s, or even a computer\u2019s) consciousness from the level of \u201cinformation integration\u201d that is possible in the brain (or CPU). According to his theory, the more information that is shared and processed between many different components to contribute to that single experience, then the higher the level of consciousness.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><a href=\"https:\/\/getpocket.com\/explore\/item\/what-are-the-ethical-consequences-of-immortality-technology\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">https:\/\/getpocket.com\/explore\/item\/what-are-the-ethical-consequences-of-immortality-technology<\/a>\u00a0 l&#8217;\u00e0nsia d&#8217;immortalitat:\u00a0\u00a0rejuvenation technology, and mind uploading.\u00a0Like a futuristic fountain of youth, <a href=\"https:\/\/aeon.co\/essays\/are-myths-about-the-rejuvenating-power-of-young-blood-true\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">rejuvenation<\/a> promises to remove and reverse the damage of ageing at the cellular level.\u00a0 The other option would be mind uploading, in which your brain is digitally scanned and copied onto a computer. This method presupposes that consciousness is akin to software running on some kind of organic hard-disk \u2013 that what makes you <i>you<\/i> is the sum total of the information stored in the brain\u2019s operations, and therefore it should be possible to migrate the self onto a different physical substrate or platform. This remains a highly <a href=\"https:\/\/aeon.co\/essays\/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">controversial<\/a> stance. [seria com una pres\u00f3? no interaccionem, no tenim cos]<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/2016\/04\/susie-mckinnon-autobiographical-memory-sdam\/?utm_source=pocket&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=pockethits\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">https:\/\/www.wired.com\/2016\/04\/susie-mckinnon-autobiographical-memory-sdam\/<\/a>\u00a0la dona que pot recordar informaci\u00f3 per\u00f2 no experi\u00e8ncies, sempre viu en el present.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/1993\/12\/27\/anthropologist-mars?mbid=&amp;source=EDT_NYR_EDIT_NEWSLETTER_0_imagenewsletter_Classics_ZZ&amp;utm_campaign=aud-dev&amp;utm_source=nl&amp;utm_brand=tny&amp;utm_mailing=TNY_Classics_Sunday_091819&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;bxid=5bd670be2ddf9c619438dc49&amp;cndid=23176701&amp;utm_content=B&amp;utm_term=TNY_SundayArchive\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/1993\/12\/27\/anthropologist-mars<\/a>\u00a0 Oliver Sacks sobre l&#8217;autisme<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><a href=\"https:\/\/getpocket.com\/explore\/item\/this-emotional-intelligence-test-was-so-accurate-it-was-creepy\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">https:\/\/getpocket.com\/explore\/item\/this-emotional-intelligence-test-was-so-accurate-it-was-creepy<\/a>\u00a0Intel\u00b7Lig\u00e8ncia emocional<\/div>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<div><b>Empathy:<\/b> \u201cDo I really listen to people when they talk about their issues, or do I just try to give them a solution? Do people tend to confide in me?\u201d<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div><b>Emotional self-awareness:<\/b> \u201cWhen my body gives me physical signals that something is wrong, do I pay attention to it and sense what\u2019s going on?\u201d<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div><b>Self-actualization:<\/b> \u201cAm I doing the things in life that I really feel passionate about\u2014at home, at work, socially?\u201d<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div><b>Impulse control:<\/b> \u201cDo I respond to people before they finish telling me something?\u201d<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div><b>Interpersonal relationships:<\/b> \u201cDo I enjoy socializing with people, or does it feel like work?\u201d<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div><a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/books\/under-review\/do-we-have-minds-of-our-own\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/books\/under-review\/do-we-have-minds-of-our-own<\/a><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><a href=\"https:\/\/getpocket.com\/explore\/item\/why-you-can-t-help-but-act-your-age\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">https:\/\/getpocket.com\/explore\/item\/why-you-can-t-help-but-act-your-age<\/a>\u00a0l&#8217;estat mental influeix en l&#8217;epigen\u00e8tica: un grup de persones traslladat a un entorn d&#8217;una \u00e8poca en que eren m\u00e9s joves, va mostrar que el cos tamb\u00e9 havia rejovenit. L&#8217;edat biol\u00f2gica dels teixits no coincideix amb l&#8217;edat cronol\u00f2gica, pot anar m\u00e9s endavant o m\u00e9s enrere.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2020\/01\/13\/a-world-without-pain\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2020\/01\/13\/a-world-without-pain<\/a>\u00a0l&#8217;estudi d&#8217;una dona que t\u00e9 sentiments pe`ro no sent dolor<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><a href=\"https:\/\/getpocket.com\/explore\/item\/how-knowledge-about-different-cultures-is-shaking-the-foundations-of-psychology\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">https:\/\/getpocket.com\/explore\/item\/how-knowledge-about-different-cultures-is-shaking-the-foundations-of-psychology<\/a>\u00a0les generalitzacions de la psicologia es basen sobretot en resultats obtinguts amb experiments fets amb estudiants d&#8217;universitats occidentals, per tant, blancs, relativament rics, religi\u00f3 cristiana. Segurament els resultats no s\u00f3n extrapolables.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/future\/article\/20200313-how-your-personality-changes-as-you-age\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/future\/article\/20200313-how-your-personality-changes-as-you-age<\/a> la personalitat \u00e9s pl\u00e0stica, ens tornem m\u00e9s oberts i adaptables quan ens fem grans i r\u00edgids quan som molt grans.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/d41586-020-00922-8?utm_source=pocket&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=pockethits\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/d41586-020-00922-8<\/a>\u00a0les divisions del DSM no recullen la realitat que gaireb\u00e9 sempre diferents s\u00edmptomes apareixen alhora. Per\u00f2 com que es fa servir epr facturar a les asseguradores, no s&#8217;ha modificat. S&#8217;intenta un plantejament basat en la biologia.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencemag.org\/news\/2020\/05\/meet-psychobiome-gut-bacteria-may-alter-how-you-think-feel-and-act?utm_source=pocket&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=pockethits\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">https:\/\/www.sciencemag.org\/news\/2020\/05\/meet-psychobiome-gut-bacteria-may-alter-how-you-think-feel-and-act<\/a>\u00a0les bact\u00e8ries tamb\u00e9 poden influir el cervell<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/books\/second-read\/how-dreams-change-under-authoritarianism\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/books\/second-read\/how-dreams-change-under-authoritarianism<\/a>\u00a0registre dels somnis durant el tercer Reich<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2020\/08\/24\/the-therapeutic-power-of-gardening\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2020\/08\/24\/the-therapeutic-power-of-gardening<\/a>\u00a0la jardineria com a ter\u00e0pia\u00a0\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.suestuartsmith.com\/the-barn-garden\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">https:\/\/www.suestuartsmith.com\/the-barn-garden<\/a><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/future\/article\/20200929-what-your-thoughts-sound-like\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/future\/article\/20200929-what-your-thoughts-sound-like<\/a>\u00a0sentim com una veu interior quan pensem perqu\u00e8 en processar el llenguatge al cervell, s&#8217;hi impliquen ones sonores, encara que no ho diguem en veu alta.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><a href=\"https:\/\/getpocket.com\/explore\/item\/physics-explains-why-time-passes-faster-as-you-age\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">https:\/\/getpocket.com\/explore\/item\/physics-explains-why-time-passes-faster-as-you-age<\/a>\u00a0 perqu\u00e8 ens sembla que el temps passa m\u00e9s de pressa quan ens fem grans : processem menys &#8220;clics&#8221; d&#8217;informaci\u00f3 [ jo no tinc la sensaci\u00f3 que el temps vagi m\u00e9s de pressa ]<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><a href=\"https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/articles\/how-to-stop-the-negative-chatter-in-your-head-11609876801\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/articles\/how-to-stop-the-negative-chatter-in-your-head-11609876801<\/a> passem una quarta part del nostre temps desperts sense atendre el present , xerrotejant interiorment a un ritme de 4000 paraules\/minut\u00a0 (Ethan Kross, a neuroscientist, has a book coming out this month called \u2018Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why it Matters, and How to Harness It)<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><a href=\"https:\/\/getpocket.com\/explore\/item\/susceptibility-to-mental-illness-may-have-helped-humans-adapt-over-the-millennia\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">https:\/\/getpocket.com\/explore\/item\/susceptibility-to-mental-illness-may-have-helped-humans-adapt-over-the-millennia<\/a>\u00a0 First of all, there are two very\u00a0 different categories of illness that should be kept separate. One is the\u00a0 emotional disorders, which are potentially normal, useful responses to\u00a0 situations. And in all such responses, variability and sensitivity are\u00a0 influenced by lots of different genes.<\/div>\n<div>There\u00a0 are also mental disorders that are the most severe ones that are just\u00a0 plain old genetic diseases: bipolar disease and autism and\u00a0 schizophrenia. They\u2019re genetic diseases, and whether you get them or not\u00a0 is overwhelmingly dependent on what genes you have. But why would a\u00a0 strong, inheritable trait that cuts fitness by half not be selected\u00a0 against? I think this is one of the deepest mysteries in psychiatry.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><a href=\"https:\/\/www.vice.com\/en\/article\/v7mwa3\/why-your-true-self-is-an-illusion\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">https:\/\/www.vice.com\/en\/article\/v7mwa3\/why-your-true-self-is-an-illusion<\/a> criem que tenim una naturalesa profunda que \u00e9s essencialment bona, i que algunes accions ens n&#8217;allunyen i altres ens apropen.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Beure en societat ajuda a fer lligams, com la religi\u00f3<\/div>\n<div><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/magazine\/archive\/2021\/07\/america-drinking-alone-problem\/619017\/\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/magazine\/archive\/2021\/07\/america-drinking-alone-problem\/619017\/<\/a><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>As far back as his graduate work at Stanford in the 1990s, he\u2019d found it bizarre that across all cultures and time periods, humans went to such extraordinary (and frequently painful and expensive) lengths to please invisible beings.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>In 2012, Slingerland and several scholars in other fields won a big grant to study religion from an evolutionary perspective. In the years since, they have argued that religion helped humans cooperate on a much larger scale than they had as hunter-gatherers. Belief in moralistic, punitive gods, for example, might have discouraged behaviors (stealing, say, or murder) that make it hard to peacefully coexist. In turn, groups with such beliefs would have had greater solidarity, allowing them to outcompete or absorb other groups.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Around the same time, Slingerland published a social-science-heavy self-help book called Trying Not to Try. In it, he argued that the ancient Taoist concept of wu-wei (akin to what we now call \u201cflow\u201d) could help with both the demands of modern life and the more eternal challenge of dealing with other people. Intoxicants, he pointed out in passing, offer a chemical shortcut to wu-wei\u2014by suppressing our conscious mind, they can unleash creativity and also make us more sociable.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>At a talk he later gave on wu-wei at Google, Slingerland made much the same point about intoxication. During the Q&amp;A, someone in the audience told him about the Ballmer Peak\u2014the notion, named after the former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, that alcohol can affect programming ability. Drink a certain amount, and it gets better. Drink too much, and it goes to hell. Some programmers have been rumored to hook themselves up to alcohol-filled IV drips in hopes of hovering at the curve\u2019s apex for an extended time.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>His hosts later took him over to the \u201cwhiskey room,\u201d a lounge with a foosball table and what Slingerland described to me as \u201ca blow-your-mind collection of single-malt Scotches.\u201d The lounge was there, they said, to provide liquid inspiration to coders who had hit a creative wall. Engineers could pour themselves a Scotch, sink into a beanbag chair, and chat with whoever else happened to be around. They said doing so helped them to get mentally unstuck, to collaborate, to notice new connections. At that moment, something clicked for Slingerland too: \u201cI started to think, Alcohol is really this very useful cultural tool.\u201d Both its social lubrications and its creativity-enhancing aspects might play real roles in human society, he mused, and might possibly have been involved in its formation.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>this is the core of Slingerland\u2019s argument: Bonding is necessary to human society, and alcohol has been an essential means of our bonding. Compare us with our competitive, fractious chimpanzee cousins. Placing hundreds of unrelated chimps in close quarters for several hours would result in \u201cblood and dismembered body parts,\u201d Slingerland notes\u2014not a party with dancing, and definitely not collaborative stone-lugging. Human civilization requires \u201cindividual and collective creativity, intensive cooperation, a tolerance for strangers and crowds, and a degree of openness and trust that is entirely unmatched among our closest primate relatives.\u201d It requires us not only to put up with one another, but to become allies and friends.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>As to how alcohol assists with that process, Slingerland focuses mostly on its suppression of prefrontal-cortex activity, and how resulting disinhibition may allow us to reach a more playful, trusting, childlike state.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Just as people were learning to love their gin and whiskey, more of them (especially in parts of Europe and North America) started drinking outside of family meals and social gatherings. As the Industrial Revolution raged, alcohol use became less leisurely. Drinking establishments suddenly started to feature the long counters that we associate with the word bar today, enabling people to drink on the go, rather than around a table with other drinkers. This short move across the barroom reflects a fairly dramatic break from tradition: According to anthropologists, in nearly every era and society, solitary drinking had been almost unheard\u2011of among humans.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>What\u2019s more, as Christine Sismondo writes in America Walks Into a Bar, by kicking the party out of saloons, the Eighteenth Amendment had the effect of moving alcohol into the country\u2019s living rooms, where it mostly remained.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>[ la idea \u00e9s que l&#8217;alcohole ra saludable mentre era quelcom social, per\u00f2 perjudicial quan es fa en solitari]<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>(As Iain Gately reports in Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol, in the month after 60 Minutes ran a widely viewed segment on the so-called French paradox\u2014the notion that wine might explain low rates of heart disease in France\u2014U.S. sales of red wine shot up 44 percent.)<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Although both men and women commonly use alcohol to cope with stressful situations and negative feelings, research finds that women are substantially more likely to do so. And they\u2019re much more apt to be sad and stressed out to begin with: Women are about twice as likely as men to suffer from depression or anxiety disorders\u2014and their overall happiness has fallen substantially in recent decades.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>In the 2013 book Her Best-Kept Secret, an exploration of the surge in female drinking, the journalist Gabrielle Glaser recalls noticing, early this century, that women around her were drinking more.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>ast August, the beer manufacturer Busch launched a new product well timed to the problem of pandemic-era solitary drinking. Dog Brew is bone broth packaged as beer for your pet. \u201cYou\u2019ll never drink alone again,\u201d said news articles reporting its debut. It promptly sold out. As for human beverages, though beer sales were down in 2020, continuing their long decline, Americans drank more of everything else, especially spirits and (perhaps the loneliest-sounding drinks of all) premixed, single-serve cocktails, sales of which skyrocketed.<\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><strong id=\"sciencemindreading\">The Science of mind reading<\/strong><\/p>\n<div><a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2021\/12\/06\/the-science-of-mind-reading\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2021\/12\/06\/the-science-of-mind-reading<\/a><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>One night in October, 2009, a young man lay in an fMRI scanner in Li\u00e8ge, Belgium. Five years earlier, he\u2019d suffered a head trauma in a motorcycle accident, and since then he hadn\u2019t spoken. He was said to be in a \u201cvegetative state.\u201d A neuroscientist named Martin Monti sat in the next room, along with a few other researchers. For years, Monti and his postdoctoral adviser, Adrian Owen, had been studying vegetative patients, and they had developed two controversial hypotheses. First, they believed that someone could lose the ability to move or even blink while still being conscious; second, they thought that they had devised a method for communicating with such \u201clocked-in\u201d people by detecting their unspoken thoughts.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>In a sense, their strategy was simple. Neurons use oxygen, which is carried through the bloodstream inside molecules of hemoglobin. Hemoglobin contains iron, and, by tracking the iron, the magnets in fMRI machines can build maps of brain activity. Picking out signs of consciousness amid the swirl seemed nearly impossible. But, through trial and error, Owen\u2019s group had devised a clever protocol. They\u2019d discovered that if a person imagined walking around her house there was a spike of activity in her parahippocampal gyrus\u2014a finger-shaped area buried deep in the temporal lobe. Imagining playing tennis, by contrast, activated the premotor cortex, which sits on a ridge near the skull. The activity was clear enough to be seen in real time with an fMRI machine. In a 2006 study published in the journal Science, the researchers reported that they had asked a locked-in person to think about tennis, and seen, on her brain scan, that she had done so.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>With the young man, known as Patient 23, Monti and Owen were taking a further step: attempting to have a conversation. They would pose a question and tell him that he could signal \u201cyes\u201d by imagining playing tennis, or \u201cno\u201d by thinking about walking around his house. In the scanner control room, a monitor displayed a cross-section of Patient 23\u2019s brain. As different areas consumed blood oxygen, they shimmered red, then bright orange. Monti knew where to look to spot the yes and the no signals.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>I first heard about these studies from Ken Norman, the fifty-year-old chair of the psychology department at Princeton University and an expert on thought decoding. Norman works at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, which is housed in a glass structure, constructed in 2013, that spills over a low hill on the south side of campus. P.N.I. was conceived as a center where psychologists, neuroscientists, and computer scientists could blend their approaches to studying the mind; M.I.T. and Stanford have invested in similar cross-disciplinary institutes. At P.N.I., undergraduates still participate in old-school psych experiments involving surveys and flash cards. But upstairs, in a lab that studies child development, toddlers wear tiny hats outfitted with infrared brain scanners, and in the basement the skulls of genetically engineered mice are sliced open, allowing individual neurons to be controlled with lasers. A server room with its own high-performance computing cluster analyzes the data generated from these experiments.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Norman, whose jovial intelligence and unruly beard give him the air of a high-school science teacher, occupies an office on the ground floor, with a view of a grassy field. The bookshelves behind his desk contain the intellectual DNA of the institute, with William James next to texts on machine learning. Norman explained that fMRI machines hadn\u2019t advanced that much; instead, artificial intelligence had transformed how scientists read neural data. This had helped shed light on an ancient philosophical mystery. For centuries, scientists had dreamed of locating thought inside the head but had run up against the vexing question of what it means for thoughts to exist in physical space. When Erasistratus, an ancient Greek anatomist, dissected the brain, he suspected that its many folds were the key to intelligence, but he could not say how thoughts were packed into the convoluted mass. In the seventeenth century, Descartes suggested that mental life arose in the pineal gland, but he didn\u2019t have a good theory of what might be found there. Our mental worlds contain everything from the taste of bad wine to the idea of bad taste. How can so many thoughts nestle within a few pounds of tissue?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Now, Norman explained, researchers had developed a mathematical way of understanding thoughts. Drawing on insights from machine learning, they conceived of thoughts as collections of points in a dense \u201cmeaning space.\u201d They could see how these points were interrelated and encoded by neurons. By cracking the code, they were beginning to produce an inventory of the mind. \u201cThe space of possible thoughts that people can think is big\u2014but it\u2019s not infinitely big,\u201d Norman said. A detailed map of the concepts in our minds might soon be within reach.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Norman invited me to watch an experiment in thought decoding. A postdoctoral student named Manoj Kumar led us into a locked basement lab at P.N.I., where a young woman was lying in the tube of an fMRI scanner. A screen mounted a few inches above her face played a slide show of stock images: an empty beach, a cave, a forest.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>\u201cWe want to get the brain patterns that are associated with different subclasses of scenes,\u201d Norman said.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>As the woman watched the slide show, the scanner tracked patterns of activation among her neurons. These patterns would be analyzed in terms of \u201cvoxels\u201d\u2014areas of activation that are roughly a cubic millimetre in size. In some ways, the fMRI data was extremely coarse: each voxel represented the oxygen consumption of about a million neurons, and could be updated only every few seconds, significantly more slowly than neurons fire.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>The origins of this approach, I learned, dated back nearly seventy years, to the work of a psychologist named Charles Osgood. When he was a kid, Osgood received a copy of Roget\u2019s Thesaurus as a gift. Poring over the book, Osgood recalled, he formed a \u201cvivid image of words as clusters of starlike points in an immense space.\u201d In his postgraduate days, when his colleagues were debating how cognition could be shaped by culture, Osgood thought back on this image. He wondered if, using the idea of \u201csemantic space,\u201d it might be possible to map the differences among various styles of thinking.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Osgood conducted an experiment. He asked people to rate twenty concepts on fifty different scales. The concepts ranged widely: BOULDER, ME, TORNADO, MOTHER. So did the scales, which were defined by opposites: fair-unfair, hot-cold, fragrant-foul. Some ratings were difficult: is a TORNADO fragrant or foul? But the idea was that the method would reveal fine and even elusive shades of similarity and difference among concepts. \u201cMost English-speaking Americans feel that there is a difference, somehow, between \u2018good\u2019 and \u2018nice\u2019 but find it difficult to explain,\u201d Osgood wrote. His surveys found that, at least for nineteen-fifties college students, the two concepts overlapped much of the time. They diverged for nouns that had a male or female slant. MOTHER might be rated nice but not good, and COP vice versa. Osgood concluded that \u201cgood\u201d was \u201csomewhat stronger, rougher, more angular, and larger\u201d than \u201cnice.\u201d<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Osgood became known not for the results of his surveys but for the method he invented to analyze them. He began by arranging his data in an imaginary space with fifty dimensions\u2014one for fair-unfair, a second for hot-cold, a third for fragrant-foul, and so on. Any given concept, like TORNADO, had a rating on each dimension\u2014and, therefore, was situated in what was known as high-dimensional space. Many concepts had similar locations on multiple axes: kind-cruel and honest-dishonest, for instance. Osgood combined these dimensions. Then he looked for new similarities, and combined dimensions again, in a process called \u201cfactor analysis.\u201d<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>When you reduce a sauce, you meld and deepen the essential flavors. Osgood did something similar with factor analysis. Eventually, he was able to map all the concepts onto a space with just three dimensions. The first dimension was \u201cevaluative\u201d\u2014a blend of scales like good-bad, beautiful-ugly, and kind-cruel. The second had to do with \u201cpotency\u201d: it consolidated scales like large-small and strong-weak. The third measured how \u201cactive\u201d or \u201cpassive\u201d a concept was. Osgood could use these three key factors to locate any concept in an abstract space. Ideas with similar co\u00f6rdinates, he argued, were neighbors in meaning.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>In the end, the Bell Labs researchers made a space that was more complex than Osgood\u2019s. It had a few hundred dimensions. Many of these dimensions described abstract or \u201clatent\u201d qualities that the words had in common\u2014connections that wouldn\u2019t be apparent to most English speakers. The researchers called their technique \u201clatent semantic analysis,\u201d or L.S.A.<\/div>\n<div>In the following years, scientists applied L.S.A. to ever-larger data sets. In 2013, researchers at Google unleashed a descendant of it onto the text of the whole World Wide Web. Google\u2019s algorithm turned each word into a \u201cvector,\u201d or point, in high-dimensional space. The vectors generated by the researchers\u2019 program, word2vec, are eerily accurate: if you take the vector for \u201cking\u201d and subtract the vector for \u201cman,\u201d then add the vector for \u201cwoman,\u201d the closest nearby vector is \u201cqueen.\u201d Word vectors became the basis of a much improved Google Translate, and enabled the auto-completion of sentences in Gmail.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>In 2001, a scientist named Jim Haxby brought machine learning to brain imaging: he realized that voxels of neural activity could serve as dimensions in a kind of thought space. Haxby went on to work at Princeton, where he collaborated with Norman. The two scientists, together with other researchers, concluded that just a few hundred dimensions were sufficient to capture the shades of similarity and difference in most fMRI data. At the Princeton lab, the young woman watched the slide show in the scanner. With each new image\u2014beach, cave, forest\u2014her neurons fired in a new pattern. These patterns would be recorded as voxels, then processed by software and transformed into vectors. The images had been chosen because their vectors would end up far apart from one another: they were good landmarks for making a map. Watching the images, my mind was taking a trip through thought space, too.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>One described a 2017 study by Christopher Baldassano, one of his postdocs, in which people watched an episode of the BBC show \u201cSherlock\u201d while in an fMRI scanner. Baldassano\u2019s guess going into the study was that some voxel patterns would be in constant flux as the video streamed\u2014for instance, the ones involved in color processing. Others would be more stable, such as those representing a character in the show. The study confirmed these predictions. But Baldassano also found groups of voxels that held a stable pattern throughout each scene, then switched when it was over. He concluded that these constituted the scenes\u2019 voxel \u201csignatures.\u201d<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Through decades of experimental work, Norman told me later, psychologists have established the importance of scripts and scenes to our intelligence. Walking into a room, you might forget why you came in; this happens, researchers say, because passing through the doorway brings one mental scene to a close and opens another. Conversely, while navigating a new airport, a \u201cgetting to the plane\u201d script knits different scenes together: first the ticket counter, then the security line, then the gate, then the aisle, then your seat. And yet, until recently, it wasn\u2019t clear what you\u2019d find if you went looking for \u201cscripts\u201d and \u201cscenes\u201d in the brain.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Minnery\u2019s most fanciful idea\u2014\u201cNever an official focus of the program,\u201d he said\u2014was to change how databases are indexed. Instead of labelling items by hand, you could show an item to someone sitting in an fMRI scanner\u2014the person\u2019s brain state could be the label. Later, to query the database, someone else could sit in the scanner and simply think of whatever she wanted. The software could compare the searcher\u2019s brain state with the indexer\u2019s. It would be the ultimate solution to the vocabulary problem.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Jack Gallant, a professor at Berkeley who has used thought decoding to reconstruct video montages from brain scans\u2014as you watch a video in the scanner, the system pulls up frames from similar YouTube clips, based only on your voxel patterns\u2014suggested that one group of people interested in decoding were Silicon Valley investors. \u201cA future technology would be a portable hat\u2014like a thinking hat,\u201d he said. He imagined a company paying people thirty thousand dollars a year to wear the thinking hat, along with video-recording eyeglasses and other sensors, allowing the system to record everything they see, hear, and think, ultimately creating an exhaustive inventory of the mind. Wearing the thinking hat, you could ask your computer a question just by imagining the words. Instantaneous translation might be possible. In theory, a pair of wearers could skip language altogether, conversing directly, mind to mind. Perhaps we could even communicate across species. Among the challenges the designers of such a system would face, of course, is the fact that today\u2019s fMRI machines can weigh more than twenty thousand pounds. There are efforts under way to make powerful miniature imaging devices, using lasers, ultrasound, or even microwaves. \u201cIt\u2019s going to require some sort of punctuated-equilibrium technology revolution,\u201d Gallant said. Still, the conceptual foundation, which goes back to the nineteen-fifties, has been laid.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>In some ways, the story of thought decoding is reminiscent of the history of our understanding of the gene. For about a hundred years after the publication of Charles Darwin\u2019s \u201cOn the Origin of Species,\u201d in 1859, the gene was an abstraction, understood only as something through which traits passed from parent to child. As late as the nineteen-fifties, biologists were still asking what, exactly, a gene was made of. When James Watson and Francis Crick finally found the double helix, in 1953, it became clear how genes took physical form. Fifty years later, we could sequence the human genome; today, we can edit it.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Thoughts have been an abstraction for far longer. But now we know what they really are: patterns of neural activation that correspond to points in meaning space. The mind\u2014the only truly private place\u2014has become inspectable from the outside. In the future, a therapist, wanting to understand how your relationships run awry, might examine the dimensions of the patterns your brain falls into. Some epileptic patients about to undergo surgery have intracranial probes put into their brains; researchers can now use these probes to help steer the patients\u2019 neural patterns away from those associated with depression. With more fine-grained control, a mind could be driven wherever one liked. (The imagination reels at the possibilities, for both good and ill.) Of course, we already do this by thinking, reading, watching, talking\u2014actions that, after I\u2019d learned about thought decoding, struck me as oddly concrete. I could picture the patterns of my thoughts flickering inside my mind. Versions of them are now flickering in yours.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>The larger goal of thought decoding is to understand how our brains mirror the world. To this end, researchers have sought to watch as the same experiences affect many people\u2019s minds simultaneously. Norman told me that his Princeton colleague Uri Hasson has found movies especially useful in this regard. They \u201cpull people\u2019s brains through thought space in synch,\u201d Norman said. \u201cWhat makes Alfred Hitchcock the master of suspense is that all the people who are watching the movie are having their brains yanked in unison. It\u2019s like mind control in the literal sense.\u201d<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><a href=\"https:\/\/www.inputmag.com\/culture\/dr-peter-scott-morgan-als-ai-cyborg\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">https:\/\/www.inputmag.com\/culture\/dr-peter-scott-morgan-als-ai-cyborg<\/a> com un home paralitzat es torna cyborg i s&#8217;expressa amb veu i imatge artificial<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>\n<hr \/>\n<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/books\/page-turner\/the-mystery-of-s-the-man-with-an-impossible-memory\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/books\/page-turner\/the-mystery-of-s-the-man-with-an-impossible-memory<\/a> mem\u00f2ria i imaginaci\u00f3<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>The researcher who met with S. that day was twenty-seven-year-old Alexander Luria, whose fame as a founder of neuropsychology still lay before him. Luria began reeling off lists of random numbers and words and asking S. to repeat them, which he did, in ever-lengthening series. Even more remarkably, when Luria retested S. more than fifteen years later, he found those numbers and words still preserved in S.\u2019s memory. \u201cI simply had to admit that the capacity of his memory had no distinct limits,\u201d Luria writes in his famous case study of S., \u201cThe Mind of a Mnemonist,\u201d published in 1968 in both Russian and English.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Luria\u2019s monograph became a psychology classic both in Russia and abroad, and it had considerable influence over the nascent field of memory studies. S.\u2019s case became a parable about the pitfalls of flawless recall. Luria catalogues various difficulties that S. experienced navigating everyday life, linking them to profound deficits he identified in S.\u2019s ability to conceive the world in abstract terms. These cognitive deficiencies, Luria suggests, were related to S.\u2019s extraordinary episodic memory\u2014the memory we have for personal experiences, as opposed to semantic memory (which tells us, for instance, that the dromedary has only one hump). Deriving meaning from the world requires us to relinquish some of its texture. S.\u2019s case, as many readers have noted, resembles the Jorge Luis Borges story \u201cFunes the Memorious,\u201d a fictional work about a man plagued by the persistence of his memory. \u201cTo think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract,\u201d Borges writes. \u201cIn the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details.\u201d Similarly, Luria writes that for S., almost every word, every thought, was freighted with excessive detail. When he heard \u201crestaurant,\u201d for example, he would picture an entrance, customers, a Romanian orchestra tuning up to play for them, and so on. Like Funes, S. had a sort of private language to catalogue the richness of his mental associations. The word for \u201croach\u201d in Yiddish could also mean, in his mind, a dent in a metal chamber pot, a crust of black bread, and the light cast by a lamp that fails to push back all the darkness in a room.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>For years now, since first reading Luria\u2019s book as an undergraduate studying Russian, then after encountering it again as a research assistant in a memory lab, I\u2019ve searched, on odd weekends and nights, for what information I could find about S., whose real name was Solomon Shereshevsky. Eventually, I tracked down a relative. Then, more recently, I got hold of a small, blue school notebook, preserved by Luria\u2019s grandniece in the psychologist\u2019s archives. It contains Shereshevsky\u2019s own handwritten autobiographical account of how he became a mnemonist. Written not long before his death and left incomplete, it opens with his impressions of that first meeting with Luria twenty-eight years earlier. It even provides the exact list of things Luria gave him to memorize that day.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>My search for Solomon Shereshevsky revealed a person who fit uneasily in the story of the Man Who Could Not Forget, as he has so often been portrayed. He did not, in fact, have perfect recall. His past was not a land he could wander through at will. For him, remembering took conscious effort and a certain creative genius.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Something else I learned that afternoon threatened to change my entire sense of who Shereshevsky was: His uncle, Reynberg said, could be forgetful. If he didn\u2019t consciously try to commit something to memory, he didn\u2019t always recall it later. I had imagined, based on Luria\u2019s case study and the mythology that had grown up around it, a Soviet Funes, with flawless and involuntary recollection of his past. Reynberg told me that his uncle trained hours a day for his evening performances. Was he a mere showman after all?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>As described by Luria, some of Shereshevsky\u2019s mental operations bear a strong resemblance to the sort of garden-variety mnemonic tricks that have been known for many centuries\u2014for example, the \u201cmemory palace,\u201d or \u201cmethod of loci,\u201d in which an imagined physical space is used to organize information in its proper sequence. In Shereshevsky\u2019s version of this device, he would imagine Gorky Street, Moscow\u2019s main thoroughfare, or a village street from his childhood, mentally distributing what he wanted to remember along its length, often creating an impromptu story out of the sequence, then strolling back through later to recollect (re-collect) these items in his mind.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Luria also notes that Shereshevsky had an extraordinarily strong case of synesthesia, the heritable condition in which the senses become intermingled in the mind, and the psychologist recognized that this had something to do with Shereshevsky\u2019s powers of recall. (Vladimir Nabokov wrote about both his \u201ccolored hearing\u201d and exceptional recall in his memoir, \u201cSpeak, Memory,\u201d first published in 1951.) When Luria rang a small bell, for instance, the sound would evoke in his subject\u2019s mind \u201ca small round object . . . something rough like \u0430 rope . . . the taste of salt water . . . and something white.\u201d Shereshevsky thought of numbers in the same colors and fonts that he first saw them in as a child; in his unpublished notebook, he writes that \u201call the numbers had names, first and last, and nicknames, which changed depending on my age and mood.\u201d The number one \u201cis a slender man with ramrod posture and a long face; \u2018two\u2019 is a plump lady with a complicated hairdo atop her head, clad in a velvet or silk dress with a train that trails behind her.\u201d Luria speculates that Shereshevsky used his web of multimodal associations to cross-check his memory.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>There were serious drawbacks in having so many channels open to the world. Shereshevsky avoided such things as reading the newspaper over breakfast because the flavors evoked by the printed words clashed with the taste of his meal.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Luria\u2019s famous case study of extraordinary memory turns out to be less about perfect recall and more about something at once more fundamental and more strange: our ability to conjure such sensory details even without the direct input of our senses, to swim against the usual currents of perceiving minds. It\u2019s this same ability that allows us to daydream, or to do thought experiments in physics, or to read words on a page and hear the dim inner echo a piano makes when rolling across the cobbles of a Moscow courtyard. But what do imagination and make-believe have to do with memory\u2014a mental faculty we value precisely for its supposed veracity?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Schacter\u2019s interest in the connection between memory and imagination stretches back to the nineteen-eighties, when he and his mentor, Endel Tulving, interviewed a profoundly amnesiac patient known by the initials K. C. A victim of a motorcycle accident, K. C. had become incapable of forming episodic memories. He couldn\u2019t say what he was doing a day or even an hour prior. He was also, somewhat unexpectedly, unable to speculate in any detail about what he would be doing the following day. He couldn\u2019t call up any detailed scenes in his mind\u2019s eye, whether these scenes lay in the actual past or in some imagined future.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>The experimental evidence suggests to Schacter that our imagination draws heavily on memory, recombining bits and pieces of actual experience to model hypothetical and counterfactual scenarios. This seems intuitive. But he goes further, arguing that our all-too-fallible recollections of the past are in fact adaptive, providing the flexibility that allows us to reconfigure memory to imagine our possible futures.<\/div>\n<div>Luria relates that Shereshevsky was capable of sitting in a chair and consciously modifying his heart rate from sixty-four beats per minute to a hundred by picturing himself either lying in bed or racing after a train just leaving the station, respectively. According to Luria\u2019s experiments, Shereshevsky could alter the skin temperature of his hands by several degrees by visualizing himself touching a hot stove or a block of ice. Imagining a loud noise caused an involuntary protective reflex in his eardrums, as though the sound had actually occurred.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Instead of burning memories on scraps of paper, Shereshevsky found a different kind of erasure in his final years, according to his nephew: he turned to drinking. He did not, as it has been claimed, end up in an insane asylum, though his drinking may have been an expression of what Soviet citizens called \u201cinternal emigration.\u201d As Luria writes, \u201cOne would be hard put to say which was more real for him: the world of imagination in which he lived, or the world of reality in which he was but a temporary guest.\u201d Shereshevsky died in 1958 from complications related to his alcoholism. The last dated entry in his notebook is from December 11, 1957, but in it he writes only of the past, remembering experiments and performances from his earlier days as a professional mnemonist. After that, it breaks off into blank pages, as though inviting us to imagine other possible endings.<\/div>\n<div>\n<hr \/>\n<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2022\/08\/08\/how-universal-are-our-emotions<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>In \u201cBetween Us: How Cultures Create Emotions\u201d (Norton), the Dutch psychologist Batja Mesquita describes her puzzlement, before arriving in the United States, at the use of the English word \u201cdistress.\u201d Was it \u201ccloser to the Dutch angst (\u2018anxious\/afraid\u2019),\u201d she wondered, \u201cor closer to the Dutch verdriet\/wanhoop (\u2018sadness\/despair\u2019)?\u201d It took her time to feel at home with the word: \u201cI now no longer draw a blank when the word is used. I know both when distress is felt, and what the experience of distress can feel like. Distress has become an \u2018emotion\u2019 to me.\u201d<\/div>\n<div>For Mesquita, this is an instance of a larger, overlooked reality: emotions aren\u2019t simply natural upwellings from our psyche\u2014they\u2019re constructions we inherit from our communities. She urges us to move beyond the work of earlier researchers who sought to identify a small set of \u201chard-wired\u201d emotions, which were universal and presumably evolutionarily adaptive. (The usual candidates: anger, fear, disgust, surprise, happiness, sadness.) Mesquita herself once accepted that, as she writes, \u201cpeople\u2019s emotional lives are different, but emotions themselves are the same.\u201d<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Here, Mesquita\u2014joining her sometime co-author Lisa Feldman Barrett and other contemporary constructionists\u2014enlists linguistic data to undermine the universalist view of emotions. Japanese, Mesquita points out, has one word, haji, to mean both \u201cshame\u201d and \u201cembarrassment\u201d; in fact, many languages (including my own first language, Tamil) make no such distinction. The Bedouins\u2019 word hasham covers not only shame and embarrassment but also shyness and respectability. The Ilongot of the Philippines have a word, b\u0113tang, that touches on all those, plus on awe and obedience.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>In Mesquita\u2019s book, Westerners have succumbed to a mode of thinking sufficiently widespread to be the subject of a Pixar film. In \u201cInside Out,\u201d a little girl, Riley, is shown as having a mind populated by five emotions\u2014Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger\u2014each assigned an avatar. Anger is, of course, red. A heated conversation between Riley and her parents is represented as similar red figures being activated in each of them. \u201cInside Out\u201d captures, with some visual flair, what Mesquita calls the MINE model of emotion, a model in which emotions are \u201cMental, INside the person, and Essentialist\u201d\u2014that is, always having the same properties.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>What all this established, for Mesquita, is that \u201ccultural differences go beyond semantics\u201d; that emotions lived \u201c \u2018between\u2019 people rather than \u2018within.\u2019 \u201d<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>[ recordo que el wagens deia que el llenguatge tendia a simplificar la grafia u jov ei amolt clar que tendia a simplificar els fonemes, peru\u00e8 el llenguatge \u00e9s b\u00e0sicament parlat]<\/div>\n<div>[ les conclusions s\u00f3n precipitades, tots ens expressem de manera diferent]<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>\n<hr \/>\n<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2023\/01\/16\/how-should-we-think-about-our-different-styles-of-thinking<\/div>\n<div>In \u201cThinking in Pictures,\u201d Grandin suggested that the world was divided between visual and verbal thinkers.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>The imagistic minds in \u201cVisual Thinking\u201d can seem glamorous compared with the verbal ones depicted in \u201cChatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It,\u201d by Ethan Kross, a psychologist and neuroscientist who teaches at the University of Michigan. Kross is interested in what\u2019s known as the phonological loop\u2014a neural system, consisting of an \u201cinner ear\u201d and an \u201cinner voice,\u201d that serves as a \u201cclearinghouse for everything related to words that occurs around us in the present.\u201d If Grandin\u2019s visual thinkers are attending Cirque du Soleil, then Kross\u2019s verbal thinkers are stuck at an Off Broadway one-man show. It\u2019s just one long monologue.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>In the nineteen-seventies, Russell\u00a0T. Hurlburt, a professor at the University\u00a0of Nevada, Las Vegas, came up with the idea of giving people devices that would beep at certain times and asking them to record what was going on in their heads at the sound of the beep. In theory, if they responded quickly enough, they\u2019d offer an unvarnished look at what he called \u201cpristine inner experience\u201d\u2014thought as it\u00a0happens spontaneously. After spending decades working with hundreds of subjects, Hurlburt concluded that, broadly speaking, inner experience is made of five elements, which\u00a0each of us mix in different proportions. Some thoughts are rendered in \u201cinner speech,\u201d and others appear through \u201cinner seeing\u201d; some make themselves felt through our emotions (I\u2019ve got a bad feeling about this!), while others manifest as a kind of \u201csensory awareness\u201d (The hairs on my neck stood on end!). Finally, some people make use of \u201cunsymbolized thinking.\u201d They often have \u201can explicit, differentiated thought that does not include the experience of words, images, or any other symbols.\u201d<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Quantum physicists confront a problem with observation. Whenever they look at a particle, they alter and fix its quantum state, which otherwise would have remained indeterminate. A similar issue afflicts our attempts to understand how we think; thinking about our thinking risks forcing it into a form it does not have.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Hurlburt would say that describing one\u2019s inner life is hard. Schwitzgebel would say that our inner lives are not necessarily describable. On a deep level, he contends, our own thinking is a little like bat sonar. We\u2019ll never know what it\u2019s really like. [Nagel, what is like to eb a bat]<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>If we can\u2019t say exactly how we think, then how well do we know ourselves? In an essay titled \u201cThe Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity,\u201d the philosopher Daniel Dennett argued that a layer of fiction is woven into what it is to be human. In a sense, fiction is flawed: it\u2019s not true. But, when we open a novel, we don\u2019t hurl it to the ground in disgust, declaring that it\u2019s all made-up nonsense; we understand that being made up is actually the point. Fiction, Dennett writes, has a deliberately \u201cindeterminate\u201d status: it\u2019s true, but only on its own terms. The same goes for our minds. We have all sorts of inner experiences, and we live through and describe them in different ways\u2014telling one another about our dreams, recalling our thoughts, and so on. Are our descriptions and experiences true or fictionalized? Does it matter? It\u2019s all part of the story.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>\n<hr \/>\n<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><a href=\"https:\/\/www.vox.com\/even-better\/23537229\/improve-your-memory-concentration-tips\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">https:\/\/www.vox.com\/even-better\/23537229\/improve-your-memory-concentration-tips<\/a> com millorar la mem\u00f2ria<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><a href=\"https:\/\/aeon.co\/essays\/how-infant-temperament-extends-its-reach-into-young-adulthood\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">https:\/\/aeon.co\/essays\/how-infant-temperament-extends-its-reach-into-young-adulthood<\/a> aspectes innats dels nens, reactivitat, autoregulaci\u00f3, sociabilitat<\/div>\n<div>\n<hr \/>\n<\/div>\n<div><a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2023\/01\/30\/what-monks-can-teach-us-about-paying-attention-wandering-mind-jamie-kreiner\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2023\/01\/30\/what-monks-can-teach-us-about-paying-attention-wandering-mind-jamie-kreiner<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 monjos, concentraci\u00f3, palau de la mem\u00f2ria<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Kreiner compares the minds of medieval monastics to construction sites, describing the machinery they employed \u201cto reorganize their past thoughts, draw themselves deeper into present thoughts, and establish new cognitive patterns for the future.\u201d Some of this is World Memory Championships territory, with monks using mnemonic devices and multisensory prompts to stuff their brains with Biblical texts and holy meditations. Today, we think mostly of memory palaces, but many medieval monks turned to images of trees or ladders to create elaborate visualizations, meant not only to encode good knowledge but also to override bad impulses and sinful memories. Other imagery flourished, too. By the twelfth century, the six-winged angel described by the prophet Isaiah doubled as what Kreiner calls an \u201corganizational avatar,\u201d with monks inscribing holy subtopics on each wing and feather, while other monks filled an imaginary Noah\u2019s Ark twosie-twosie with sacred history and theology.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Whether monks built arks, angels, or palaces, vigilance was expected of them all, and metacognition was one of their most critical duties, necessary for determining whether any given thought served God or the Devil. For the truly devout, there was no such thing as overthinking it; discernment required constantly monitoring one\u2019s mental activity and interrogating the source of any distraction. Some monasteries encouraged monks to use checklists for reviewing their thoughts throughout the day, and one of the desert fathers was said to keep two baskets for tracking his own. He put a stone in one basket whenever he had a virtuous thought and a stone in the other whenever he had a sinful thought; whether he ate dinner depended on which basket had more stones by the end of the day.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Such careful study of the mind yielded gorgeous writing about it, and Kreiner collects centuries\u2019 worth of metaphors for concentration (fish swimming peaceably in the depths, helmsmen steering a ship through storms, potters perfecting their ware, hens sitting atop their eggs) and just as many metaphors for distraction (mice taking over your home, flies swarming your face, hair poking you in the eyes, horses breaking out of your barn). These earthy, analog metaphors, though, betray the centuries between us and the monks who wrote them. For all that \u201cThe Wandering Mind\u201d helps to collapse the differences between their world and ours, it also illuminates one very profound distinction. We inherited the monkish obsession with attention, and even inherited their moral judgments about the capacity, or failure, to concentrate. But most of us did not inherit their clarity about what is worthy of our concentration.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Medieval monks shared a common cosmology that depended on their attention. Justinian the Great claimed that if monks lived holy lives they could bring God\u2019s favor upon the whole of the Byzantine Empire, and the prayers of Simeon Stylites were said to be like support beams, holding up all of creation. \u201cDistraction was not just a personal problem, they knew; it was part of the warp of the world,\u201d Kreiner writes. \u201cAttention would not have been morally necessary, would not have been the objective of their culture of conflict and control, were it not for the fact that it centered on the divine order.\u201d<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Perhaps that is why so many of us have half-done tasks on our to-do lists and half-read books on our bedside tables, scroll through Instagram while simultaneously semi-watching Netflix, and swipe between apps and tabs endlessly, from when we first open our eyes until we finally fall asleep. One uncomfortable explanation for why so many aspects of modern life corrode our attention is that they do not merit it. The problem for those of us who don\u2019t live in monasteries but hope to make good use of our days is figuring out what might. That is the real contribution of \u201cThe Wandering Mind\u201d: it moves beyond the question of why the mind wanders to the more difficult, more beautiful question of where it should rest.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>\n<hr \/>\n<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2023\/02\/13\/the-dubious-rise-of-impostor-syndrome\" rev=\"en_rl_none\">https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2023\/02\/13\/the-dubious-rise-of-impostor-syndrome<\/a> un estudi que revelava que molta gent competent i d&#8217;\u00e8xit tenien la sensaci\u00f3 de ser uns impostors.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<\/div>\n<p>2024<\/p>\n<p>https:\/\/getpocket.com\/explore\/item\/on-meditation-and-the-unconscious-a-buddhist-monk-and-a-neuroscientist-in-conversation?utm_source=pocket_mylist<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/books\/under-review\/the-science-of-the-psychedelic-renaissance\u00a0\u00fas de drogues psicod\u00e8liques https:\/\/www.npr.org\/sections\/goatsandsoda\/2018\/06\/07\/617097908\/why-grandmothers-may-hold-the-key-to-human-evolution les iaies van ser m\u00e9s importants a l&#8217;hora de la superviv\u00e8ncia de l&#8217;esp\u00e8cia en les societats ca\u00e7adores-recolectores, que no pas el mascle ca\u00e7ador. https:\/\/www.inverse.com\/article\/48300-why-is-it-hard-to-focus-research-humans Nom\u00e9s estem conscients 4 vegades per segons, la resta del temps el cervell va en pilot autom\u00e0tic https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2018\/09\/10\/what-personality-tests-really-deliver\u00a0test de myers briggs https:\/\/www.atlasobscura.com\/articles\/how-to-echolocate\u00a0orientar-se amb el so [what &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/meumon.synology.me\/wordpress\/lhome-antropologia-psicologia\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;L&#8217;home. Antropologia. Psicologia&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[49],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/meumon.synology.me\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1434"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/meumon.synology.me\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/meumon.synology.me\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/meumon.synology.me\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/meumon.synology.me\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1434"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/meumon.synology.me\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1434\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1799,"href":"http:\/\/meumon.synology.me\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1434\/revisions\/1799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/meumon.synology.me\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/meumon.synology.me\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/meumon.synology.me\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}