by Richard J. Davidson
and, Sharon
Begley
I have mixed feelings about this book. Much of the book covers the biological basis for emotional style, how to determine what your emotional style is, and how to slightly tweak your style if it's holding your back...
Emotional style covers six traits which can all be measured in an fMRI-- Outlook, Sensitivity to Context, Social Intuition, Self Awareness, Attention, Resilience.
Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm having problems remembering the difference between "Sensitivity to Context" and "Social Intuition"
The book covers the experiments that lead to this discovery, and exercises that would help one increase or decrease there response to each style.
The book also has a large section on meditation, which actually turned me off of this topic. The benefits of mediation have been popping up in popular research. The book includes a history of how it became popular-- it seams that many of core neuro-emotion researchers were into forms of Buddhism. Not that I'm against Buddhism, just the bias is now more apparent to me. If these authors and researches had been into interpretive dance, would the benefits of interpretive dance be the topic?
Not that I doubt the benefits of meditation. It's just that I am no longer confident of the benefits of mediation relative to other choices.
The book discusses that monks who have gone through thousands of hours of compassion meditation and as a result have distinct signatures in the fMri's of their brains. What if I don't have thousands of hours to dedicate to compassion meditation? What if I instead spent thousands of hours actually being compassionate?
There are benefits to mindfulness mediation. What If I skip the mediation, and pay attention to what I am doing with nonjudgmental awareness?
The book hints at these questions, but never answers them.
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Thinking fast and slow...
http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374275637
by Daniel Kahneman.
A good book that covers the way we think. Of the many brain quirks Kahenman covers in this book, he makes the point that we can more easily spot errors in jundment in others, than in ourselves. And he hopes to enrich our vocubulary when we do so.
He doesn't cover how we should accomplish this. This raises good questions... How do I solicit feedback without becomming too uncertain? How can I give this feeback without being insulting? Of course he doesn't answer these. If there was an easy answer to those questions, then life would be very different.
Thinking fast and slow covers the two styles of thought that we have-- fast and emotional, or slow and more deliberate, Our, our experiencing self, and our remembering self. These two selves have different wants and needs, which can be the source of many of our internal contradictions.
He makes the point that when we are very duration blind. For example, when we look back on an event, we tend to compess our feelings about the event into the peak, and the end, ommiting the duration. We will have similar feelings about a 3 day vacation, or a week long vacation, if both vacations had the same high point, and the same end. This memory compression can lead to many strange decisions.
He argues that for real happiness, we need to focus not only on the peak and the end, but the average happiness through out.
I've read a number of books like this; neuro-psycho-behavior-economic books. The studies that comprise these books are starting to blur together. It's difficult to take the core of truth in these books, and translate it to everyday life.
by Daniel Kahneman.
A good book that covers the way we think. Of the many brain quirks Kahenman covers in this book, he makes the point that we can more easily spot errors in jundment in others, than in ourselves. And he hopes to enrich our vocubulary when we do so.
He doesn't cover how we should accomplish this. This raises good questions... How do I solicit feedback without becomming too uncertain? How can I give this feeback without being insulting? Of course he doesn't answer these. If there was an easy answer to those questions, then life would be very different.
Thinking fast and slow covers the two styles of thought that we have-- fast and emotional, or slow and more deliberate, Our, our experiencing self, and our remembering self. These two selves have different wants and needs, which can be the source of many of our internal contradictions.
He makes the point that when we are very duration blind. For example, when we look back on an event, we tend to compess our feelings about the event into the peak, and the end, ommiting the duration. We will have similar feelings about a 3 day vacation, or a week long vacation, if both vacations had the same high point, and the same end. This memory compression can lead to many strange decisions.
He argues that for real happiness, we need to focus not only on the peak and the end, but the average happiness through out.
I've read a number of books like this; neuro-psycho-behavior-economic books. The studies that comprise these books are starting to blur together. It's difficult to take the core of truth in these books, and translate it to everyday life.
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