Een aanrader is 'Everything bad is good for you'. Een boek:)
Een boek waarin gesteld wordt dat mensen slimmer worden van tv kijken en computerspelletjes spelen, omdat daar telkens de grenzen worden opgezocht en opgerekt van ons vermogen om complexe verhalen en situaties te begrijpen en te verwerken. Vroeger was het nodig om alles voor te kauwen, en werd het al erg ingewikkeld wanneer er twee verhaallijnen gebruikt werden die elkaar hier en daar kruisten, tegenwoordig lopen er gerust meer dan tien dwars door elkaar en vrijwel niemand die er nog een probleem mee heeft.
Er zit een raak toekomstbeeld in van een ouder die zich zorgen maakt over zijn kind dat elke dag naar de bibliotheek gaat om daar stil te zitten en te staren naar eindeloze lappen tekst waarin een volledig lineair, voorgekauwd verhaal verteld wordt waar dat kind geen enkele invloed op heeft.
Natuurlijk klopt dat niet helemaal, want goede boeken zijn er juist om de verbeelding van de lezer te stimuleren, maar toch; de positieve kant van spelletjes, sociale media e.d. blijft onderbelicht.
Het boek is een goed cadeau voor zeurende ouders :)
My partner wrote a very similar piece about how unscientifically most people (and many scientists) think about animal intelligence. I also recommend the book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? to anyone interested in this topic.
You may want to look more into brain injuries
Norman Doige M.D. wrote a book that conflicts with your statement. It's pretty surprising how resilient the human brain is actually.
It is very hard to distinguish what separates humans from non human animals. Animals, like humans, poses emotions, they can communicate, use tools, build structures, solve complex problems (in some cases they solve math quicker than humans), do politics, have complex social structure, go to war, be self aware, make love for fun of it, be altruistic, do dumb stuff, get bored, learn and teach and so on...
What makes us unique are things that are not obvious at all. Like theory of mind (ability to understand that other beings also posses mind of their own), ability to throw things and mythology (literature).
I would like for someone in this field to correct me if I am wrong, but almost anything you can think of is at least partialy done by some animal form somewhere. This is a great book on the subject
I recommend being skeptical of sensationalist attacks on new tech.
Steven Johnson has a really powerful historical analysis that shows that new tech is always initially viewed as much worse than the established tech. Then he turns it upside down to show how "wholesome" tech like books can be subjected to the same negative spin.
It's a fun read and will change the way you think: https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Bad-Good-You-Actually/dp/1594481946
I highly recommend you read chapter 17 (on violence) of The Blank Slate even if you read nothing else in the book. Hobbes, human disposition for violence, and the state, are what the entire chapter is about.
Sam's quote almost echos Pinker. Pinker says:
> A governing body that has been granted a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence can neutralize each of Hobbes’s reasons for quarrel...Adjudication by an armed authority appears to be the most effective general violence-reduction technique ever invented.
If you happen to not know, there's a great book exxactly about that called Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals are. It's great.
Check out Blank Slate book, it has a ton of material on personality traits are inherited (dna dependent) - probably most of them.
https://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/0142003344
Having said that - some of the brain development is environment-based, and a lot of brain function has to do with macro structures of the brain - those are based on dna, but changing dna once the brain is fully grown wouldn’t change the structure.
​
My personal bet: intelligence-related stuff wouldn’t change much. Everything else like emotionality, empathy, reasoning - a lot. A simple proof: try feeding a homophobe with MDMA :)
Entendo, para min não me pareceu ofensivo, apesar que o último trecho me chamou bastante a atenção sobre e achei tive que ponderar essa questão da misândria, já que é um problema que tem sido pouco discutido especialmente em relação as consequências na vida social de uma pessoa.
Em relação a discussão não acho que estou em posição de contribuir muito, mas recomendo o trabalho do psicológo evolutivo Dr.David M. Buss, e o livro Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind
> I don't watch JBP.
You should, he'll help you
> I can't believe I'm being pressed to dispute the idea that female humans are hardwired to like pink and play with dolls, and that male humans are hardwired to like Disturbed and extreme skateboarding.
The hard-wiring is there, yes, and it is INDISPUTABLE despite what your college professor or whatever says about "social construction".
Pinker wrote this entire book on the topic.
https://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/0142003344
I remember this book talks a bit about sexuality. I think the book agree on starving the fetish but maybe also rewire to healthier sexual acts. "neurons that fire together, wire together" https://www.amazon.com/Brain-That-Changes-Itself-Frontiers/dp/067003830X
I highly-highly recommend reading The Brain's Way of Healing to get a sense of some hopeful recoveries, even for people who were told they'd never recover from their doctors.
Great book on neuroplasticity, and promising new treatments and technologies.
Hugs are good. Maybe the best. Don't feel silly for wanting them.
The Brain's Way of Healing was a step on my journey that really helped give me hope that people even after tons of problems DO find ways to improve.
Yoga classes are a good way to sort of a get a little "hug" sense by being surrounded by people doing the same thing with you.
Traumatic brain injuries can be on the the toughest things to deal with.
/r/tbi might be a community that could be helpful for you.
It's not a Buddhist book, but The Brain's Way of Healing by Dr. Norman Doidge has been really helpful in giving me hope and ideas on my own path of brain injury recovery (that sadly, most medical practitioners aren't up to date on the latest methods).
If I can be of any help deciphering the literature on brain injury recovery, I'm happy to answer any questions or share advice.
The idea of a blank slate is old school behaviorist stuff. No one thinks that anymore.
I haven't seen anything regarding stem cells or HGH, so I could be wildly off here, but it's hard to really imagine their mechanism of action. I'm not aware of HGH being a major player inside the blood-brain-barrier, and stem cells, while potentially-maybe-sorta useful, don't seem to attack the primary issues of neuro-inflammation leading to celular metabolic problems, leading to circuit irregularity.
If you have any time, I can't recommend The Brain's Way of Healing, this has been a 5 year battle for me.
If you're short on time, the only moderately accesible therapy/technology I've seen promising research for is Photobiomodulation aka Red/NIR therapy applied through the skull with LEDs basically. Research example here but just google "photobiomodulation and tbi"
It's a never ending rabbit hole. But, what other choice do we have?
If you haven't googled photobiomodulation and tbi, that's a hopeful set of studies!
Although, more seriously, I highly recommend Norman Doidge's books, but specifically The Brain's Way of Healing if you want to hear case reports of therapies that have actually managed to reverse some people's chronic TBI's.
So far I've only only read 2 or 3 chapters in detail and skimmed some of the rest, so I can't really give a full review of it. The author has a new-agey vibe to her writing style but in general the content seems to stick to practical methods and overviews of historical active dreaming techniques, with brief dips into science (e.g. brain wave patterns in different sleep stages). It's hard to avoid discussion of woo around these subjects entirely since there's so little modern empirically-focused writing on active dreaming, but nothing I've seen so far in the book actually advocated for it or was particularly egregious (and I have a very low woo tolerance).
If you want something more strictly focused on detailed hard science then Thomas Metzinger's <em>The Ego Tunnel</em> might be an option. Its primary focus is on consciousness as a whole, but it has sections on the science behind sleep paralysis, lucid dreaming, and out-of-body experiences. It doesn't contain any information on actively practicing them, but I've found that just having a better understanding of what's actually going on in the brain during these states is itself pretty helpful in practice.
You should find someone who is kind and nice. Unfortunately, most of them are shy and they are afraid to ask girls out. The best thing to do, is try to make a friend not go into a relationship from the first phase and see how they are reacting, for example with people whom have a lower status than him, with his friends, with his family, with animals, check if he is into charity, or giving blood without getting paid, and so on... If he is someone who likes to care about others, then he would definitely (depending on the person) care about you and give you the love that you need. Just don't rush into a relationship where you don't really know the person, some of relationships are based on dopamine's effect (that you want to be with that person because of dopamine, once is gone you feel as the relationship is falling). Try to see all red flags about that person before going into a relationship with him. I recommend you to read this book Women who love too much I tend to recommend it in every comments 😅
> and why is that still a thing nowadays when we're supposed to all be about equality?
What you'll see in Sweden, the most egalitarian country with the most freedom to choose your career path for any gender, is that gender-specific professions are picked more often than in societies with less apparent equality of opportunity.
In other words women simply tend to go for (lower paid) social careers and and men simply tend to go for (higher paid because there's higher demand) STEM careers.
You cannot erase that difference between genders without erasing liberty. Blank slate equalism is simply false. The data we have does not support it.
> but even when I finally do make more than her, I'll still be unable to shake the sexist feeling from my mind that I should be the one earning more...
That is not a feeling. It is a thought. Which has a reason/cause. Perhaps you were socialized to believe it (by parents, teachers, friends, books you read). Perhaps it is rooted in the fear that she would at some point leave you. I can't tell you, you have to do some introspection on your own here and start to be honest with yourself.
I recommend two books for a more in-depth discussion of this.
Since no one answered I will put the best answer I know of.
https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Flesh-Embodied-Challenge-Western/dp/0465056741
Although the book does not mention Jung, it would appear to be talking about the same thing; just using the modern lens of cognitive science.
Those are terrible recommendations. If you want to understand a science, read a textbook on it. Just the introduction to this book on its own would be better than those two books combined. Do you want to know the information or hear an author's thoughts on it? https://www.amazon.ca/Evolutionary-Psychology-New-Science-Mind-dp-1138088617/dp/1138088617/ref=dp_ob_title_bk
Hello. Try to read this book and you will understand much more of how dopamine works https://www.amazon.com/Molecule-More-Chemical-Creativity_and-Determine/dp/1946885118
Chomsky is certainly an expert on syntactic linguistics. His theories, as you know, were hugely influential for computational linguistics. His knowledge of semantics is famously questionable, though. If you desire a long screed on this, I can produce. Lakoff also had a chapter in Philosophy of the Flesh that gets into more details.
Personally, I extend non-aggression to animals but not because of the NAP. I avoid causing suffering to any other sentient being as a buddhist precept.
We have consistently underestimated the intelligence, sociability, and ethical capacity of non-human beings. If anyone would like to learn more about it I highly recommend Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Other Animals Are?
This is a basic premise of Evolutionary Psychology.
Steven Pinker, one of the best non-fiction writers of our time, has an entire book about how we all share a common human (animal) nature.
Exactly. I have that book already, and read his other book: The Brain's Way of Healing. I find it rather difficult to convey these ideas of neuroplasticity to him in a way that he won't feel attacked by it or drop out the conversation because it's hard to follow. Which seems to be an issue I encounter in general. Neuroscience is so complex it's often hard to talk about the implications to people who are in no way familiar with it.