Lateral awareness, or the ability to discriminate left from right is an acquired skill. Most people have it by age 10 and most people start to lose in after age 50 (good times). Lateral awareness, of course, falls on a spectrum and here are the results so far: “A recent survey of 800 people […]
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Dead Wild Roses: The DWR Quote of the Day: Kluge – The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind
I’d like to recommend reading this particular book as it offers a laypersons guide to how our minds evolved and the inelegant solutions and workarounds that are now standard in the homo sapiens brain. Consider this summary of why sometime we become angry and that anger dominates our rational capacities.
Continue readingDeath By Trolley: Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought
I am currently reading Philosophy in the Flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought. Authored by Cognitive Scientists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, this book asks 1) What do major lines of Western philosophical thought assume about the mind? 2) What has cognitive science learned about the
Continue readingDeath By Trolley: Don’t We All Hear Voices? A Mindfulness-Informed View of Schizophrenia and the “Normal” Mind
The hallmark of schizophrenia is perceiving things that are not there. Auditory hallucinations, including “hearing voices”, is particularly common. What if this clinically distinguishing feature of schizophrenia differs from the cognitively distinguishing feature? What if, cognitively speaking, what distinguishes schizophrenia is not the presence of voices, but rather how one
Continue readingDeath By Trolley: A transcendent secular solution to the mind-body problem
What is the relationship between mind and matter? Materialism holds that the mental is a product of the physical – the mind is what the brain does. By contrast, dualist accounts are consistent with our common sense notion that the mental is fundamentally different from the physical. How much does
Continue readingDead Wild Roses: Removing the Blinders of Privilege – A Political Moral Awakening
Meaningful discourse requires a mutually accepted set of shared definitions to start. Otherwise the parties involved will unerringly talk past each other and misconstrue what the other is saying. George Lakoff, a cognitive scientist, has mapped this procedure brilliantly in several books ( The Political Mind being the most concise).
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