“When we are about to choose a partner, or get married to a certain partner –that’s the kind of decision that we cannot make based on a cold cognitive calculus” says Richard Davidson, the seminal neuroscientist known for his research on what determines our emotional styles. In the interview with Krista Tippet, he adds “we consult our emotions for making that decision, and if our emotions were disrupted, it will really impair our capacity to make those kinds of decisions.” In the assessment of the functioning of the emotional brain, he identifies six innate capacities which constitute our emotional …
Category: Science
In the dance, one finds the cinema, the comic strips, the Olympic hundred meters and swimming, and what’s more: poetry, love and tenderness, said Maurice Bejart, the exceptional choreographer, opera director and dancer. Long before neuroscience confirmed that our brains are wired to move along with music, dancing was there. Babies, children, and adults, all instinctively move to the rhythm of the music. Based on recent cognitive research, it seems like human beings are universally synchronized with the chords of music. Moreover, the rhythmic movement lifts our mood, regulates the mental and emotional fluctuations, and we become happier. Such …
Plants are sentient beings which have emotions, who feel the pain when damaged, enjoy Mozart, can respond to unspoken thoughts of humans and more. Cleve Backster, a former intelligence agent, best known for his experiments with plants using a polygraph (lie detector) instrument in the 1960s long before science has discovered the intelligence of plants capable of cognition, learning, memory and communication. He hooked up the galvanometer of the polygraph instrument to his house plant and to his astonishment, he found that simply by imagining the plant being set on fire, the needle of the galvanometer rose, recording a …
Psychoanalytic therapy aims to explore the hidden emotions, repressed childhood memories, fantasies and thoughts affecting present behavior and relations of the client. The ultimate gain is a sound sense of self, contentment at a higher state of consciousness and self-mastery. The history of the psychoanalytical practice is not only long but it has been evolving ever since S. Freud’s work in psychoanalysis from 1915s up to present. Moving from the divan (couch) to psychoanalytic therapy wherein the client is relocated to the armchair facing the therapist and further on to the developmental approach founded by S. Freud’s daughter Anna …
The practice of psychology had started with two traditional schools: psychoanalytic and cognitive psychology from which further derivatives and styles of therapies would be formulated in tandem with advanced research in cognitive science and developmental psychology. Freud’s pioneering work with psychoanalysis at the turn of the 20th century and the Jungian approach to the unconscious, both prepared the field for psychological practices, primarily paving the way for psychoanalytical therapy in the 1930s. The next major school – Cognitive Behavioral psychology was founded in the late sixties by the developmentalists Bruner and Neisser. Here is a simplified outline …
“Resilience across writing is a good way to get out of the fog and light up your life” says Boris Cyrulnik, neuropsychiatrist and writer, having lost both his parents at the age of five, is a living model of how one develops resilience and can overcome the major dramas of life. When the word “resilience” was first used in physics it referred to a body’s ability to absorb an impact. Transformed to the human psyche, it is the capacity to transcend from traumatic experiences. Brené Brown defines resilience as a character quality “it is how we fold our experiences …
“You can think of an experiment like a song — made up of many moving parts, but structured; sometimes very repetitive. Each little piece has to come together to make a bigger picture, or answer a question about the universe.” Charles Limb, a surgeon, neuroscientist, hearing specialist and musician sets forth, “music is the most complicated sound the brain can process”. He proclaims that the human brain is capable to process such a refined and complicated task due to its innovative capacity. “The idea that one can improvise a jazz solo today is a direct reflection of the fact that …
“The earth is heavy and opaque without dreams “ wrote Anaïs Nin in her diary. Freud described dreams as the “royal road to the knowledge of our unconscious activities.” In his seminal work, The Interpretation of Dreams, he emphasized that “dreams have at their command memories which are inaccessible in waking life.” The way knowledge is recollected in dreams shows us that nothing which we have mentally acquired or learned can be entirely lost. Freud explained many episodes of how memory behaves in dreams: A musician of his acquaintance who once heard in a dream a tune which seemed to …
Pablo Carlos Budassi who is actually a musician makes a simple drawing of the cosmos for his son’s birthday. In doing so, he uses the logarithmic maps of the physicists, photographs taken by Nasa and his photoshop app. The physicists, having liked this picture, have noted it as the simplest up-to-date picture of our cosmos. In the center of this picture lies our sun and the solar system surrounded by our galaxy, with Perseus and Andromeda nearby and other galaxies, all of which are englobed by the Cosmic Web… As for us human beings inhabiting the earth, we are …
“Between the stimulus and response, there is a space and in that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” – Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning Having been in the concentration camp during World War II, Viktor Frankl, in his search for an answer to “What makes a person human?” wrote the following : “ The question to ask is what life expects from us not what we expect from life. ” In his view, the answer does not lie in theories on life or meditative thoughts; rather it …
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