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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 58e061c | dark red stain on the floor that couldn't be anything | Kathryn Hughes | ||
| 54b04ea | In another study subjects waited an unknown length of time to receive a shock.12 This lack of predictability and control was so aversive that many chose to receive a stronger shock immediately. And | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 967ad31 | SUN WAS in the room when he woke. He sat up and looked toward the bars, but the bars weren't there. Just a window, lower than it should have been until he realized he was up | Dennis Lehane | ||
| 3f9126f | There's also subliminal cuing about beauty.18 From an early age, in both sexes and across cultures, attractive people are judged to be smarter, kinder, and more honest. We're more likely to vote for attractive people or hire them, less likely to convict them of crimes, and, if they are convicted, more likely to dole out shorter sentences. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 3b78fd7 | Cognitive therapists, like Aaron Beck of the University of Pennsylvania, even consider depression to be primarily a disorder of thought, rather than emotion, in that sufferers tend to see the world in a distorted, negative way. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 2f8b7f8 | Yes, and this is mine. (Baldrick produces a single scruffy piece of paper.) My magnificent octopus. | Richard Curtis | ||
| bf4cbb7 | The insula activates when we eat a cockroach or imagine doing so. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 8e317ed | In the West we nearly all have strong moral intuitions about the wrongness of slavery, child labor, or animal cruelty. But that sure didn't used to be the case. Their wrongness has become an implicit moral intuition, a gut instinct concerning moral truth, only because of the fierce moral reasoning (and activism) of those who came before us, when the average person's moral intuitions were unrecognizably different. Our guts learn their intuit.. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| bfd14c0 | Pretty straightforwardly, the more categories of adversities a child suffers, the dimmer his or her chances of a happy, functional adulthood.45 | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 463c359 | The artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky once defined free will as "internal forces I do not understand."26 People intuitively believe in free will, not just because we have this terrible human need for agency but also because most people know next to nothing about those internal forces. And even the neuroscientist on the witness stand can't accurately predict which individual with extensive frontal damage will become the serial mu.. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 4df3230 | Brain-imaging studies of drug users at that stage show that viewing a film of actors pretending to use drugs activates dopamine pathways in the brain more than does watching porn films. This | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 9e3c0a9 | Work by Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania, Tom Boyce of UCSF, and others demonstrates something outrageous: By age five, the lower a child's socioeconomic status, on the average, the (a) higher the basal glucocorticoid levels and/or the more reactive the glucocorticoid stress response, (b) the thinner the frontal cortex and the lower its metabolism, and (c) the poorer the frontal function concerning working memory, emotion regu.. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| b7034d5 | Once people with epilepsy were virtuously punished for their intimacy with Lucifer. Now we mandate that if their seizures aren't under control, they can't drive. And the key point is that no one views such a driving ban as virtuous, pleasurable punishment, believing that a person with treatment-resistant seizures "deserves" to be banned from driving. Crowds of goitrous yahoos don't excitedly mass to watch the epileptic's driver's license be.. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| f1b277b | I didn't feel obliged to first disclose my feelings about the gland. But the equivalent feels appropriate here. Thus: I was raised highly observant and Orthodox, felt intensely religious. But then, around age thirteen, the whole edifice collapsed; ever since, I've been incapable of any religiosity or spirituality and more readily focus on religion's destructive than its beneficial aspects. But I like being around religious people and am mov.. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 22a68e7 | In a study of employees throughout the world working for the same multinational bank, what was the most important reason cited to help someone? Among Americans it was that the person had previously helped them; for Chinese it was that the person was higher ranking; in Spain, that they were a friend or acquaintance. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 37c0af3 | Now we have hundreds of carefully engineered, designed, and marketed commercial foods filled with rapidly absorbed processed sugars that cause a burst of sensation that can't be matched by some lowly natural food. Once, we had lives that, amid considerable privation and negatives, also offered a huge array of subtle and often hard-won pleasures. And now we have drugs that cause spasms of pleasure and dopamine a thousand-fold higher than any.. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 8bd4659 | The Southern sense of honor in place is also seen in Robert E. Lee; he opposed Southern secession, even made some ambiguous statements that could be viewed as opposed to slavery. Yet when offered the command of the Union Army by Lincoln, Lee wrote, "I wish to live under no other government and there is no sacrifice I am not ready to make for the preservation of the Union save that of honor." When Virginia chose secession, he regretfully ful.. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 084d56d | This is thought to reflect the killer combination that these folks are often burdened with, namely, high work demands but little autonomy--responsibility without control. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 90a558e | The childhood capacity for empathy progresses from feeling someone's pain because you are them, to feeling for the other person, to feeling as them. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| d166913 | How's this for fascinating: Heritability of various aspects of cognitive development is very high (e.g., around 70 percent for IQ) in kids from high-socioeconomic status (SES) families but is only around 10 percent in low-SES kids. Thus, higher SES allows the full range of genetic influences on cognition to flourish, whereas lower-SES settings restrict them. In other words, genes are nearly irrelevant to cognitive development if you're grow.. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 7b0cb7c | This level is egoistic in that rules and their application come from within and reflect conscience, where a transgression exacts the ultimate cost--having to live with yourself afterward. It recognizes that being good and being law-abiding aren't synonymous. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 41fd3e7 | Similar intermixing of the real and the metaphorical occurs with temperature sensation. In another study from Bargh's group, the researcher, hands full with something, would ask a subject to briefly hold a cup of coffee for them. Half the subjects held warm coffee, half iced coffee. Subjects then read about some individual and answered questions about them. Subjects who held the warm cup rated the individual as having a warmer personality (.. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| b2e5e38 | In a healthy environment, increased threat sensitivity, poor emotion control and enhanced fear memory in MAOA-L [i.e., the "warrior" variant] men might only manifest as variation in temperament within a 'normal' or subclinical range. However, these same characteristics in an abusive childhood environment--one typified by persistent uncertainty, unpredictable threat, poor behavioral modeling and social referencing, and inconsistent reinforce.. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| f2cabd1 | Moderate, transient stress (i.e., the good, stimulatory stress) promotes hippocampal LTP, while prolonged stress disrupts it and promotes LTD--one reason why cognition tanks at such times. This is the inverted-U concept of stress writ synaptic.4 | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 9799269 | In other words, once reward contingencies are learned, dopamine is less about reward than about its anticipation. Similarly, work by my Stanford colleague Brian Knutson has shown dopamine pathway activation in people in anticipation of a monetary reward.91 Dopamine is about mastery and expectation and confidence. It's "I know how things work; this is going to be great." In other words, the pleasure is in the anticipation of reward, and the .. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 4316877 | Lots of work has examined the genes involved, most broadly showing that variants that produce lowered dopamine signaling (less dopamine in the synapse, fewer dopamine receptors, or lower responsiveness of these receptors) are associated with sensation seeking, risk taking, attentional problems, and extroversion. Such individuals have to seek experiences of greater intensity to compensate for the blunted dopamine signaling. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 04b7ea6 | Robert Sapolsky, professor of neurology at Stanford, makes the extremely strong statement: "It's boggling that the legal system's gold standard for an insanity defense--M'Naghten--is based on 166-year-old science. Our growing knowledge about the brain makes notions of volition, culpability, and, ultimately, the very premise of a criminal justice system, deeply suspect." | Michael S. Gazzaniga | ||
| 21d2c4b | One study showed kids, ages five to thirteen, pairs of faces of candidates from obscure elections and asked them whom they'd prefer as captain on a hypothetical boat trip. And kids picked the winner 71 percent of the time.31 | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| da38a6b | A high incidence of 7R, associated with impulsivity and novelty seeking, is the legacy of humans who made the greatest migrations in human history. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 65a630d | She was lionized, canonized, Nobel Prized (and was wonderfully inspirational, as disinterested in acclaim as in her ostracism, working until her nineties). | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 4eae5fc | One stretch of the gene is repeated a variable number of times, and the version with seven repeats (the "7R" form) produces a receptor protein that is sparse in the cortex and relatively unresponsive to dopamine. This is the variant associated with a host of related traits--sensation and novelty seeking, extroversion, alcoholism, promiscuity, less sensitive parenting, financial risk taking, impulsivity, and, probably most consistently, ADHD.. | Robert M. Sapolsky | ||
| 4ee6aca | Many hold that by floating the dollar, Nixon converted the U.S. currency into pure "fiat money"--mere pieces of paper, intrinsically worthless, that were treated as money only because the United States government insisted that they should be." | David Graeber | ||
| 37a9b38 | twy zndn khh bwdm, fhmydm drm khwdm r gwl my znm; chwn tmm `mrm bh Hrf zdn gdhshth. ykh rwz bh khwdm my gwym khh byrwn my rwm w z nw shrw` my khnm. rwz b`d hm my gwym khh my khwhm ykh khry khnm t pwldr shwm. wly wqty khh azd my shwm w byrwn my aym, my bynm khh mn hmn khrb hstm w dny hm frqy nkhrdh. my fhmy chh my gwym? | Walter Dean Myers | ||
| cd22382 | I have been thinking more and more that I shall always be a lone wanderer of the wilderness. God, how the trail lures me. You cannot comprehend its resistless fascination for me. After all the lone trail is the best. . . . I'll never stop wandering. And when the time comes to die, I'll find the wildest, loneliest, most desolate spot there is. The beauty of this country is becoming part of me. I feel more detached from life and somehow gentl.. | Jon Krakauer | ||
| dc03680 | Why would they use up their precious moments for living by worrying about something they can't do anything about? | Wayne W. Dyer | ||
| 3fd804c | Westerberg's latter conjecture, as it turned out, was a fairly astute analysis of the relationship between Chris and Walt McCandless. Both father and son were stubborn and high-strung. Given Walt's need to exert control and Chris's extravagantly independent nature, polarization was inevitable | Jon Krakauer | ||
| c8e9c0f | afternoon, Cheeko vanished. Syl made a startling discovery | Matt Christopher | ||
| bbf2151 | At the same time, minor failings or incidental impropriety may, he feels, be interpreted as a direct expression of his stigmatized differentness. Ex-mental patients, for example, are sometimes afraid to engage in sharp interchanges with spouse or employer because of what a show of emotion might be taken as a sign of. Mental defectives face a similar contingency: It also happens that if a person of low intellectual ability gets into some s.. | Erving Goffman | ||
| af44ccd | Given what the stigmatized individual may well face upon entering a mixed social situation, he may anticipatorily respond by defensive cowering. This may be illustrated from an early study of some German unemployed during the Depression, the words being those of a 43-year-old mason: How hard and humiliating it is to bear the name of an unemployed man. When I go out, I cast down my eyes because I feel myself wholly inferior. When I go alon.. | Erving Goffman | ||
| b360e92 | As already suggested, when the individual first learns who it is that he must now accept a his own, he is likely, at the very least, to feel some ambivalence; for these others will not only be patently stigmatized, and thus not like the normal person he knows himself to be, but ma also have other attributes with which he finds it difficult to associate himself. What may end up as a freemasonry may begin with a shudder. A newly blind girl on.. | Erving Goffman | ||
| b195417 | the model of "social order." Briefly, a social order may be defined as the consequence of any set of moral norms that regulates the way in which persons pursue objectives." | Erving Goffman | ||
| 0a9024e | The existence of a different value system among these persons is evinced by the communality of behavior which occurs when illiterates interact among themselves. Not only do they change from unexpressive and confused individuals, as they frequently appear in larger society, to expressive and understanding persons within their own group, but moreover they express themselves in institutional terms. Among themselves they have a universe of resp.. | Erving Goffman | ||
| 22696fd | This qualification aside, I shall use the term gathering to refer to any set of two or more individuals whose members include all and only those who are at the moment in one another's immediate presence. By the term situation I shall refer to the full spatial environment anywhere within which an entering person becomes a member of the gathering that is (or does then become) present. Situations begin when mutual monitoring occurs, and lapse .. | Erving Goffman | ||
| 7d15755 | As a linguist suggests: " There are messages primarily serving to establish, to prolong, or to discontinue communication, to check whether the channel works (" Hello, do you hear me?"), to attract the attention of the interlocutor or to confirm his continued attention (" Are you listening?" or in Shakespearean diction, "Lend me your ears!"-- and on the other end of the wire "Um-hum!")." | Erving Goffman |