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How To Be Spiritual In A Material World
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22 Jul 2024
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6 key signs you’re in a toxic relationship with yourself – and what you can do about it

 If you’re anything like me, the think-pieces you’ve read on how to spot red flags or deal with a friend’s trauma dumping will have become imprinted on your brain. However, it’s also true that sometimes we need to look at the relationship we have with ourselves before analysing the relationships we have with others.

“Being in a toxic relationship comes from the belief you hold about yourself; you deserve love and respect from yourself,” writes psychologist Dr Lalitaa Suglani in an Instagram post on the subject. “It can go beyond just engaging in constant negative self-talk. It can also mean you ignore your health and personal wellness and blame yourself for everything.”

You frequently talk down to yourself and criticise things you do

Negative self-talk is something a lot of people struggle with, and your inner critic can feel incredibly difficult to silence.

“If you find yourself saying something to yourself you wouldn’t say to a friend or even a stranger, that’s something to be aware of,” suggests Dr Suglani. “You have to catch yourself because it starts to feel so normal you don’t even realise you’re doing it.”

You ignore your own boundaries 

If the rise of therapy-speak has taught us anything, it’s the importance of boundaries. Without boundaries, we can feel depleted, taken advantage of, taken for granted or intruded upon.

But if we’re not respecting our own limitations, how can we expect others to do the same?

Whether it’s prioritising rest, allowing yourself to say no or tapping in to your internal monologue to figure out how you really feel, it’s crucial to maintain mental wellbeing.

You struggle with self-care and putting your needs first

Let’s be real: self-care is never as easy as Instagram makes it look. Baths, face masks and candles all have their place, but rarely have a lasting impact.

Instead of relying on sporadic gestures, you could try ‘everyday mental maintenance’ – a technique that takes a proactive, bite-sized approach to looking after your mental health.

It involves setting aside dedicated time to look after yourself, whether it’s a few hours on a Sunday evening to prep meals or a regular exercise class that makes you feel buoyant once you’ve completed it. Taking a few moments to focus on what makes you feel calm, centred and ready to tackle what lies ahead is always a good use of time.

You engage in unhealthy coping strategies

Nobody’s perfect, and we all have less-than-desirable traits and behaviours that we’d rather not see the light of day, even if they do slip out from time to time.

But we owe it to ourselves to do what’s best for both our minds and bodies, in whatever way we can. Holding yourself accountable and committing to a positive action or change is key.

However, if you’re concerned about the way you respond to stress or trauma, it’s advisable to seek professional advice and help from a therapist, counsellor or doctor.

You thrive on drama and chaos

Living life to the wire, with no plan, direction or headspace might feel exciting and vibrant, but there’s something to be said for choosing peace, calm and tranquillity.

You don’t have to give up beloved nights out or start practising daily meditation, but a huge part of protecting your energy and maintaining your boundaries involves stepping away from anything that drains you.

Instead, learn to prioritise the things, people and situations that give you energy rather than take it away from you.

You can be really hard on yourself and feel like nothing you do is good enough

There’s a reason why imposter syndrome has become a mental health buzzword over the past few years. More of us are suffering from it than ever, and it can easily lead us into a spiral of negative thoughts and self-punishment.

If you feel disconnected from yourself, or emotionally burnt out, who can blame you? There’s so much going on in the world that is difficult and painful for us to process.

Overcoming these feelings starts with recognition and acceptance. Remind yourself: “I’m not perfect; I’m a human being and I have my own vulnerability,” while leading from a place of self-compassion.

How to change your relationship with yourself 

If you’ve identified with any or all of the above, don’t panic. According to Dr Suglani, the steps below can help you to begin to improve your relationship with yourself.

  • Don’t dwell too much on the past, even if repairing the relationship will likely involve addressing past events
  • View yourself with compassion. Think: “Would I say this to a friend?”
  • Start therapy
  • Journal your thoughts to start becoming aware of what/how you think
  • Practise healthy communication with the people around you
  • Hold yourself accountable
  • Be patient with yourself
  • Hold space for yourself to change. Healing is a journey

 

 

Original article here

 

 

 

 

 

12 Jul 2024
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Everyday Philosophy: Is it better to forget your past or keep revisiting it?

 

I have conflicting thoughts about letting go of the past and repressing negative feelings. Does documenting our bad experiences in personal writing, a diary, or poetry actually help us in the long run?

~ Dee, US

 

 

 

 

Immanuel Kant had a manservant named Martin Lampe, whom he cared deeply about. Kant was a strict and austere man, but he committed to his relationships with the resolve of a man whose entire philosophy was based on doing the right thing. For forty years, the two wedded their lives together. The peculiar Kant and his dutiful servant. But then, one day, things turned sour. History is unclear on the details—it might have been drunkenness or theft—but Kant had to let Lampe go. Kant was devastated. Living hand in glove with another human for 40 years is a kind of love, and this was a kind of divorce. And so he pinned a note above his desk saying, “Forget Lampe.” Every day he would not forget to forget Lampe.

Of course, this is ridiculous. You cannot easily force yourself to forget something or someone. In fact, the more you try, the harder it becomes. But you can stop yourself from reliving those memories. This is what lies at the heart of this week’s question. When something bad happens to you — something traumatic, even — how far should we try to move on and how far should we try to unpack our past? I do not have a psychology degree, and I am not a psychotherapist, so I will approach this from a philosophical point of view and ask: How important is our past to our future? Should Kant try to forget Lampe or carry his memory as part of him? Should Dee let go of the past or dig it up and face it down?

To answer that question, we will look at two radically different answers. The first comes from Friedrich Nietzsche, who says that, sometimes, forgetting is an act of self-creation. The second, Edmund Burke, offers a curious, and possibly controversial, opinion: Sometimes reliving our past is a beautiful experience and worthy of that alone.

Nietzsche: Live like the beasts

Philosophers have a curious relationship with animals. Some, like John Stuart Mill, see them as a source of pity. When he wrote, “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied,” he was arguing that human intelligence and higher faculties are what allow us to be supremely happy. But, roughly around the same time as Mill, Nietzsche was arguing the complete opposite. He wrote:

 

Observe the herd, which is grazing beside you. It does not know what yesterday or today are. It springs around, eats, rests, digests, jumps up again, and so from morning to night and from day to day, with its likes and dislikes closely tied to the peg of the moment, and thus neither melancholy nor weary. To witness this is hard for man because he boasts to himself that his human race is better than the beast and yet looks with jealousy at its happiness.

 

There is an innate in-the-momentness to being a beast. They are unworried by the past. They do not care about their past mistakes and wrong turns; they just keep moving forward. The beast is not bowed low by the “invisible and dark burden” of their memory, but rather they live what Nietzsche calls “unhistorically.” Of course, no one can meaningfully live without remembering things to at least some degree. Cows might enjoy chomping on grass all day long, but I am not a cow. I cannot change that. Nietzsche’s answer is a kind of mental realignment and a useful self-help strategy: View the past as a resource to be mined.

You have a whole library of memories. Some are traumatic, and some are happy. Some are pointless, and some are deeply important. For Nietzsche, we should “appropriate or forcibly take from the past” what we can. We use the past and bring it into ourselves like an elixir. But if that past is poison and weakens us, then forget it. Move on.

So, Dee, Nietzsche would ask this: Does your diarizing about your hard past make you better, stronger, and fuller? If yes, go on and do it. Breathe it in and “transform it into blood.” But if it leaves you broken, scared, or worse, forget it.

Burke: The beauty of trauma

 

Writing a century or so before Nietzsche, the Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke offers an interesting take on this: What if there’s an aesthetic benefit from remembering our trauma? For Burke, the “sublime” is an aesthetic experience that is “capable of producing delight — not pleasure, but a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquility tinged with terror — which, as it belongs to self-preservation, is one of the strongest of all passions. Its object is the sublime.” The sublime is when we stand at the foot of a huge, crashing waterfall or in the middle of a flashing thunderstorm. It’s the booming chant of a stadium in song, and you’re staring at the enormity of the night’s sky. It’s appreciating the terrible from a safe position.

Traumatic experiences and a broken past are terrible. They are life-wrenching and often life-breaking. But they are in the past. They are no longer, in and of themselves, a threat to us. So, when we dig up and stare at these experiences, we encounter a moment of the sublime. We are pulled to the terrible beauty of the darkness inside of us. We pick at scabs and relive past trauma because we enjoy the aesthetic experience of the matter. The masochistic pleasure we get from digging up our past is not new wisdom — it’s found in ancient philosophy and in Freud — but Burke’s spin is interesting. It treats our past as a kind of artifact to appraise — an item in a museum to enjoy, safely behind the rope.

Dig it up or bury it deep?

As is almost always the case in these kinds of dilemmas, so much depends on what we do not know. We do not know exactly what “bad experiences” Dee is talking about, and we do not know what’s going on in her mind when she relives them.

Ultimately, I think Nietzsche’s advice is sound. It amounts to the saying, “If you’re better off forgetting, do so” and, “If it makes you stronger, remember.” This is true for everyday acts like keeping a diary and talking with friends. It also applies to therapy. Anecdotally, it therapy seems to work. Almost everyone I know who is in or has come through therapy says the experience is a good and healthy one. But the Nietzsche test ought to apply here as well. After six months, a year, or whatever, it’s useful to ask, “Am I a better person after talking about all this?” If not, then perhaps it’s time to try something else. Perhaps it’s time to forget instead.

 

 

Original article here

05 Jul 2024
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If the calling runs through you…

 

Eight years ago my husband and I gave away pretty much all that we owned and headed off on a year and a half of travel round the world. This was the third time in my life that I had let go of a version of my life and leapt into the abyss without knowing where I’d land. In all three instances they were the best thing I could have done … as each of those leaps led me to here. And here is a destination so far beyond my earlier life reckoning of who I was and what I could be up to, that I am even now still astounded by it.

My point: If the calling runs through you, if you see a dream of a different life in your visions, if you know you’re meant for greater things than you’re currently experiencing … then dive my friends, dive. The water is awesome and the beaches deevine!

 

About the Author:

 

Soleira Green is a visionary author, quantum coach, ALLchemist & future innovator. She has been creating leading edge breakthroughs in consciousness, quantum evolution, transformation, innovation, intelligence and more over the past 25 years, has written and self-published eleven books, and taught courses all over the world on these topics.

 

 

 

 

20 Jun 2024
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The Social Benefits of Getting Our Brains in Sync

 

The renowned Polish piano duo Marek and Wacek didn’t use sheet music when playing live concerts. And yet onstage the pair appeared perfectly in sync. On adjacent pianos, they playfully picked up various musical themes, blended classical music with jazz and improvised in real time.

“We went with the flow,” said Marek Tomaszewski, who performed with Wacek Kisielewski until Wacek’s death in 1986. “It was pure fun.”

The pianists seemed to read each other’s minds by exchanging looks. It was, Marek said, as if they were on the same wavelength. A growing body of research suggests that might have been literally true.

Dozens of recent experiments studying the brain activity of people performing and working together — duetting pianists, card players, teachers and students, jigsaw puzzlers and others — show that their brain waves can align in a phenomenon known as interpersonal neural synchronization, also known as interbrain synchrony.

“There’s now a lot of research that shows that people interacting together display coordinated neural activities,” said Giacomo Novembre, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Italian Institute of Technology in Rome, who published a key paper on interpersonal neural synchronization last summer. The studies have come out at an increasing clip over the past few years — one as recently as last week — as new tools and improved techniques have honed the science and theory.

They’re finding that synchrony between brains has benefits. It’s linked to better problem-solving, learning and cooperation, and even with behaviors that help others at a personal cost. What’s more, recent studies in which brains were stimulated with an electric current hint that synchrony itself might cause the improved performance observed by scientists.

“Cognition is something that happens not just in the skull but in connection with the environment and with other people,” said Guillaume Dumas, a professor of computational psychiatry at the University of Montreal. Understanding when and how our brains synchronize could help us communicate more efficiently, design better classrooms and help teams cooperate.

Getting in Sync

Humans, like other social animals, have a propensity to sync their behaviors. If you walk next to someone, you will likely begin walking in step. If two people sit alongside one another in rocking chairs, chances are they will start rocking at a similar pace.

Such behavioral synchrony, research shows, makes us more trusting, helps us bond and turns up our sociable instincts. In one study, dancing in sync made participants feel emotionally close to one another — much more so than groups that moved asynchronously. In another study, participants who chanted words rhythmically were more likely to cooperate in an investment game. Even a simple walk in unison with a person from an ethnic minority can reduce prejudice.

“Coordination is a hallmark of social interaction. It’s really crucial,” Novembre said. “When coordination is impaired, social interaction is deeply impaired.”

When our movements coordinate, myriad synchronizations invisible to the naked eye also arise inside our bodies. When people drum together, their hearts beat together. The heart rates of therapists and their patients can sync up during sessions (especially if the therapeutic relationship is working well), and those of married couples can too. Other physiological processes, such as our breathing rate and skin conductance levels, may also line up with those of other people.

Only in the past 20 years has technology emerged that lets neuroscientists study interbrain synchrony. Hyperscanning uses functional near-infrared spectroscopy, worn on a swim-cap-like device, to monitor the neural activity of multiple individuals engaging socially.

Can activity in our brains sync up? In 1965, the journal Science published the results of an experiment that suggested it can. Scientists from Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia tested pairs of identical twins by inserting electrodes under their scalps to measure their brain waves — a technique called electroencephalography. The researchers reported that when the twins stayed in separate rooms, if one of them closed their eyes, the brain waves of both would reflect the movement. The spikes on the electroencephalograph of one twin mirrored spikes on the other’s.

The study, however, was methodologically flawed. The researchers had tested several pairs of twins but published results only from the pair in which they observed synchrony. This didn’t help the burgeoning academic field. For decades, research on interbrain synchrony got shoved into the “weird paranormal quirk” category and was not taken seriously.

The field’s reputation began to change in the early 2000s with the popularization of hyperscanning, a technique that lets scientists simultaneously scan the brains of several interacting people. At first, this involved asking pairs of volunteers to lie in separate fMRI machines, which greatly restricted the kinds of studies that scientists could perform. Researchers were eventually able to use functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), which measures the activity of neurons in the outer layers of the cortex. The great advantage of that technology is its ease of use: Volunteers can play drums or study in a classroom while wearing fNIRS caps, which resemble swimming caps with a multitude of cables sticking out.

 

Cognition is something that happens not just in the skull but in connection with the environment and with other people.”

 

When multiple people interacted while wearing fNIRS caps, scientists began finding synced interneural activity in regions throughout the brain, which varied by task and study setup. They also observed brain waves, which represent electrical patterns in neuronal firing, synchronizing at several frequencies. On an electroencephalograph reading of two synchronized brains, the lines representing each person’s neural activity fluctuate together: Whenever one spikes up or plunges down, so does the other, although sometimes with a time lag. Occasionally brain waves appear in mirrored images — when one person’s goes up, the other’s goes down at the same time and with a similar magnitude — which some researchers also consider a form of synchrony.

With new tools, it became increasingly clear that interbrain synchrony was neither metaphysical mumbo-jumbo nor the product of faulty research. “[The signal] is definitely there,” said Antonia Hamilton, a social neuroscientist at the University College London. What proved harder to understand was how two independent brains, in two separate bodies, could show similar activity across space. Now, Hamilton said, the big question is “What does that tell us?”

The Recipe for Synchrony

Novembre has long been fascinated by how humans coordinate to achieve common goals. How do musicians — duetting pianists, for example — collaborate so well? Yet it was thinking about animals, such as fireflies syncing their flashes, that set him on the path to study the ingredients needed for interbrain synchrony to arise.

Given that synchrony is “so widespread across so many different species,” he recalled, “I thought: ‘OK, then there might be some very simple way to explain it.’”

Novembre and his colleagues set up an experiment, published last summer, in which pairs of volunteers did nothing but sit facing each other while camera equipment tracked the movements of their eyes, face and body. Sometimes the volunteers could see one another; at other times they were separated by a partition. The researchers found that as soon as the volunteers looked each other in the eyes, their brain waves instantly synced up. Smiling proved even more powerful in aligning brain waves.

“There is something spontaneous about synchrony,” Novembre said.

Movement, too, is linked to synchronized brain wave activity. In Novembre’s study, when people moved their bodies in sync — if, say, one lifted their hand and the other did the same — their neural activity would match up, on a slight lag. However, interbrain synchrony goes beyond mirroring physical movements. In a study of pianists playing duets published last fall, a breakdown in behavioral synchrony did not cause the two brains to desynchronize.

Another important ingredient for face-to-face neural synchrony appears to be mutual prediction: anticipating another person’s responses and behaviors. Each person is “moving their hands or their face or their body, or they’re speaking,” Hamilton explained, “and also responding to the actions of the other person.” For example, when people played the Italian card game Tressette, the neural activity of partners synced together — but their opponents’ brains did not align with them.

 

When people played the Italian card game Tressette, the neural activity of partners synced together — but their opponents’ brains did not align with them.

 

Sharing goals and joint attention often appear crucial to interbrain synchronization. In an experiment conducted in China, three-person groups had to cooperate on solving a problem. There was a twist: One team member was a researcher who only pretended to engage in the task, nodding and commenting when appropriate but not really caring about the outcome. His brain didn’t synchronize with those of genuine team members.

However, some critics argue that the appearance of synced brain activity is not evidence of any kind of connection but rather can be explained by people responding to a shared environment. “Consider two people listening to the same radio station in two different rooms,” wrote Clay Holroyd, a cognitive neuroscientist at Ghent University in Belgium who does not study interbrain synchrony, in a 2022 paper. “[Interbrain synchrony] might increase during songs that they both enjoy compared to songs that they both find boring, but this would not be a consequence of direct brain-to-brain coupling.”

To test this criticism, scientists from the University of Pittsburgh and Temple University designed an experiment in which participants worked differently on a focused task: completing a puzzle. The volunteers either assembled a puzzle collaboratively or worked on identical puzzles separately, side by side. While there was some interneural synchrony between puzzlers working independently, it was much greater in those who collaborated.

To Novembre, these and similar findings suggest that interbrain synchrony is more than an environmental artifact. “As long as you measure brains during social interaction, you will always have to deal with this problem,” he said. “Brains in social interaction will be exposed to similar information.”

The Mutual Wave Machine, which toured cities around the world from 2013 to 2019, let passersby explore interbrain synchrony in pairs while generating data for neuroscience research. 

Unless they’re in different places, that is. During the pandemic, researchers grew interested in understanding how interbrain synchrony might change when people talk face-to-face over video. In one study, published in late 2022, Dumas and his colleagues measured the brain activity of mothers and their preteen children when they communicated through online video. The pairs’ brains barely synchronized, much less so than when they talked in person. Such poor interbrain synchrony online could help explain why Zoom meetings tend to be so tiring, according to the study’s authors.

“There’s a bunch of things in a Zoom call that are missing compared to a face-to-face interaction,” said Hamilton, who was not involved in the research. “Your eye contact is a bit different because the camera positioning is wrong. Even more importantly, your joint attention is different.”

Identifying the necessary ingredients for interbrain synchrony to arise — be it eye contact, smiling or sharing a goal — could help us better attain the benefits of syncing with others. When we are on the same wavelength, things simply get easier.

Emergent Advantages

The cognitive neuroscientist Suzanne Dikker likes to embrace her creative side by using art to study how human brains work. To capture the elusive notion of being on the same wavelength, she and her colleagues created the Mutual Wave Machine: half art installation, half neuroscience experiment. Between 2013 and 2019, passersby in a variety of cities around the world — Madrid, New York, Toronto, Athens, Moscow and others — could pair up with another person to explore interneural synchrony. They would sit in two shell-like structures facing each other while wearing an electroencephalograph headset to measure their brain activity. As they interacted for 10 minutes, the shells would light up with visual projections that served as neurofeedback: The brighter the projections, the more coupled their brain waves. However, some pairs were not told that the projections’ brightness reflected their synchrony level, while others were shown false projections.

When Dikker and her colleagues analyzed the results, published in 2021, they found that pairs who knew they were seeing neurofeedback grew more in sync over time — an effect driven by their motivation to stay focused on their partner, the researchers explained. More importantly, their heightened synchrony increased how socially connected the pair felt. Getting on the same brain wavelength, it appeared, could help build relationships.

Dikker also studied this idea in a less artsy setting: the classroom. In a makeshift classroom in a laboratory, a high school science teacher tutored groups of up to four students while Dikker and her colleagues recorded their brain activity. In a study posted to the preprint server biorxiv.org in 2019, the researchers reported that the more the students’ and teacher’s brains synced, the better the students retained the material when tested a week later. A 2022 analysis that looked at 16 studies confirmed that interbrain synchrony is indeed linked with better learning.

“The person who is paying most attention or best locking to the signal of the speaker is also going to be most synchronized with other people who are also paying best attention to what the speaker is saying,” Dikker said.

It’s not only learning that appears boosted when our brains are in sync but also team performance and cooperation. In another study by Dikker and her colleagues, groups of four people brainstormed creative uses for a brick or ranked items essential for surviving a plane crash. The results showed that the better their brain waves synchronized, the better they performed these tasks as a group. Other studies have found, meanwhile, that neurally synchronized teams not only communicate better but also outdo others on creative activities such as interpreting poetry.

While many studies have linked interbrain synchrony with better learning and performance, the question remains whether the synchrony actually causes such improvements. Could it instead be a measure of engagement? “The kids who are paying attention to the teacher are going to show more synchrony with that teacher because they’re more engaged,” Holroyd said. “But that doesn’t mean that synchronous processes are actually contributing somehow to the interaction and to the learning.”

Yet animal experiments suggest that neural synchrony can indeed lead to changes in behavior. When the neural activity of mice was measured by having them wear tiny top-hat-shaped sensors, for example, interbrain synchrony predicted whether and how the animals would interact in the future. “That’s pretty strong evidence that there is a causal relationship between the two,” Novembre said.

In humans, the strongest evidence comes from experiments that use electric brain stimulation to generate interneural synchrony. Once electrodes are placed on people’s scalps, electric currents can be passed between the electrodes to cause neuronal activity in people’s brains to synchronize. In 2017, Novembre and his team performed the first of such experiments. The results suggested that syncing brain waves in the beta band, which is linked with motor functions, enhanced the ability of participants to synchronize their body movements — in this case, drumming a rhythm with their fingers.

Several studies have recently replicated Novembre’s findings. In late 2023, researchers found that once people’s brain waves are synchronized by electrical stimulation, their ability to cooperate in a simple computer game improved significantly. And last summer, other scientists showed that once two brains become synchronized, people become better at transferring information and understanding each other.

The science is new, so the jury’s still out on whether there is true causation between synchrony and cooperative human behavior. Even so, the science of neural synchrony is already showing us how we benefit when we do things in sync with others. On a biological level, we are wired to connect.

 

 

Original article here

31 May 2024
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Once Upon A Place In Today’s Mythic Stories

 

Two ideas feature at the core of all quest stories: these are the Abyss and the World Journey.

The Abyss is one of humanity’s oldest and most tenacious ideas that has been used for millennia to describe a place that is deep, inaccessible, extremely dangerous, and somehow at the core of understanding. In some ancient texts, it is synonymous with the deep ocean and is often portrayed as the sea in films today. But its broader meaning encompasses all the dark, deep places we go when we embark on an adventure to find answers. It’s where the obstacles lie and the challenges are found, often in the form of a beast or monster that must be overcome. The Abyss shapes the idea of what a challenge means.

The World Journey is a much newer term, adapted from Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. You may be familiar with the storyline, or plot, of the Hero’s Journey, as it was coined by the Sarah Lawrence College professor of literature in the twentieth century. In it, the hero goes through a sequence of experiences designed to help them face and overcome the many challenges of life, often in the context of a quest or adventure. Campbell presented a structure for this process, and it has become a reliable plot outline for the stages of character development in modern film and stories, such as J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings or George Lucas’s Star Wars. Campbell’s process leads toward self-actualization with deliberate stages that create a plot which leads a man (or sometimes a woman) through each step in specific order to experience certain hardships and, ultimately, achieve epiphany or personal growth.

The Abyss and the World Journey — where the heroes go and what they experience — embody the very nature of human change, though many stories can be overlooked as simple child’s play, especially in fairy tales. Heroic knights fighting dragons or a girl carrying a basket to her grandmother? Many could dismiss these as bedtime tales. But while these stories may seem soft, they likely began as images directed squarely at those about to experience a profound life change, such as puberty. These tales and their enchanting symbols have influenced not only our idea of what a hero’s adventure should be, but also of what success looks like and how personal achievement is earned.

Originally etched into stone slabs and scribbled on papyrus, many of these stories and children’s fairy tales have become Disney blockbusters, printed best-sellers, and on-screen hits. The symbol of the Abyss perennially renews itself, showing up at movie theaters every month with its deep-rooted ideas of descent and resurrection, and films inspired by the World Journey, such as Jurassic Park and Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? are enjoyed by people of all ages.

Why do they endure? Why are World Journey stories some of the most popular stories shared again and again in cultures around the world? Because we can relate to a situation where a person falls (or is pushed) into a terrifying cave and must survive. We understand what it means to find oneself in a frightening “wilderness” with no support, no skills, no training, no hand to hold. We’ve been there ourselves through adversities such as the loss of a loved one, by being orphaned, being the new kid at school, or failing in a business or relationship. Or as simply as missing a chance, forgetting an idea, or failing to live up to our own (or others’) expectations.

Today’s audiences love the same images that captivated people hundreds of years ago: water, darkness, dragons, beasts, labyrinths, forests, and caverns. These symbols endure because they don’t speak about money or politics. They don’t appeal to our wallets or even, in a direct sense, to our minds. Instead, they speak to our innermost fears and desires, to the obstacles we all face and the meaningful purpose we feel when we overcome them.

The story of a person who falls into the Abyss and is never seen again is not an inspiring story. It teaches nothing except to watch where you walk. But the story of a woman who braves the face of a lion to pluck its whisker, or of a desperate man who crosses the deep water in a small boat from the shore thousands of miles from his home, or of a scientist who plumbs the ocean’s depths in search of meaning and returns home as a much stronger person — that is an intriguing story and one that implies self-fulfillment and maturity.

In other words, Newton’s gravitational notion of “what goes up must come down” is not nearly as old or as relevant as “what goes down must come up.” Such a story inspires and motivates, and it even implies heroism, which is what most of these stories are mistaken for on the surface (and how Campbell named them). But the reason these stories have survived centuries, and in some cases millennia, is not because they celebrate heroism but because they teach that these traits of survival and fulfillment are attainable by everyone, even the most mortal of us. Even the silliest, poorest, most confused, and frightened of us can make changes in our lives to experience not only enlightenment but epiphany. Recognizing this when we have screens in every room, distractions at every turn, and challenges in every aspect of our lives is essential; the quest is not only for the hero, but it is for each of us.

The Value Of A Challenge

The ideas of adversity, hardship, and conflict are not concepts we are naturally drawn to. Parents and caregivers generally try to shield their children from hardship in an attempt to safeguard them from the hurtful obstacles of life and keep them safe. But the process of maturing means facing difficulties head-on rather than avoiding them. While it includes terrible adversity, the purpose of the World Journey is not to scare or punish us, but rather to support our growth, and to do that we must look in the face of that which frightens us the most.

Unfortunately, many of today’s stories of princesses and dragons are sugary and fluffy, diluted shades of what used to be quite powerful symbols. Modern adaptations of fairy tales would have us believe that success is easy  — that if we only wish upon a star or wrinkle our noses our dreams will come true. The original versions, however, showed that change is far more difficult. Original fairy tales guide us down a darker path with frightening beasts and scary forests that no seeker truly wants to walk into.

And I would argue that while those original stories, especially those collected and recorded hundreds of years ago by Charles Perrault and the Grimm brothers, were indeed dark, frightening, and often overtly violent or callous, they should not be sugared over simply because they are scary, depressing, or harsh. They served a much needed purpose by symbolically painting a reality that most people experienced and still do experience in their lives: namely, challenging situations that push us to our limits and are, in fact, our very best opportunities for change and growth. Those storytellers and parents long ago knew that persistence allows us to become strong and resilient adults. That facing our fears can make us compassionate, forgiving, and joyful. That making difficult decisions instills in us a feeling of accomplishment and maturity. And, that experiences of confusion and uncertainty can open our minds to new ideas and creative expression that allow us as individuals, and as societies, to flourish.

World Journey stories teach us to overcome adversity, but more importantly, they teach us how to experience adversity in the first place. Successful myths, religious texts, and fairy tales — and modern screenplay and film — do not skirt the issue of hardship and conflict, nor do they encourage us to finish the hard work as quickly as possible. The characters in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter do not face obstacles and beasts simply to advance the plot, but to develop the inner courage and tenacity needed to grow as individuals within society. Mythic stories put us squarely in the middle of the hardest tasks we can imagine, and they force us to work hard, to guess, to take leaps of faith, and to test ourselves to the limit.

They also teach us that it’s worth it to “dive deep” and to experience a change so drastic that it is profound. In fact, though they seem superficial now in the age of animated princesses, the early stories of Little Red Riding Hood and Snow White are popular precisely because they show these challenges, as do the Bible story of Jonah and the Mesopotamian poem of Gilgamesh, which is perhaps the oldest story we’ve ever found. Written more than 4,000 years ago, Gilgamesh was an amazingly influential and well-loved character whose journey taught scores of generations of children the meaning of perseverance, curiosity, and spiritual growth. His tale depicts a hero in terribly dire circumstances who does not shrug off hardship but instead plows right through it, diving deep (literally and symbolically) to work through his fear of death. Only after completing difficult tasks and overcoming obstacles does he mature as a person. Of course, he fails to find immortality, but that’s the point.

It’s important to recognize that exploring and understanding these concepts is not only for the experts. In fact, it’s for every person to engage in these questions and to open their minds to the possibilities that exist within human nature and within the self, to explore stories and symbols and push into growth. Curiosity is what drives human transformation, and I invite us all to be curious. To be open and willing to see the metaphor in these stories as chances for personal growth is an opportunity for taking the symbols of storycraft and digging deeper into reflections of self-growth, core purpose, and even epiphany.

 

 

 

Original article here

04 May 2024
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Just This Moment

I am having one of those days where my thoughts are leaning towards anticipating negative scenarios and engaging in the “what if’s” the mind is so compelled to do. And while, at this point, I know enough of the machinations of the mind to not go down those rabbit holes, it still can nag away at me as it was doing on this particular day.

While I have many techniques I use to bring my mind back into balance, something happened quite naturally on this day that really struck me. After a walk with my husband where I had laid out my potential what if’s, we made our way over to gather eggs and look at what was happening with the starts and seeds we had recently planted.

It took no time at all for my anticipating mind to tune into something life-giving, shifting me out of a chaotic mind to one quite naturally and easily at peace — a mind at ease as it found itself immersed in the bigger picture of life. All of this with no effort on my part, other than to be in relationship with something greater than myself, while spontaneously repeating over and over, “just this,” as I moved through the garden.

The “just this” was my way of focusing only on what was right before me — whether that was the lettuce I was picking, the conversation I was having or the observations I was making of the seedlings, — in effect, immersing my mind in the right now versus the “what if” future.

We take whatever we think to be true as something to believe in and act on, even when all signs point to the fact our minds have gone off the rails with fear, anxiety and judgment. And while in this day and age there is no end to solutions for an imbalanced mind from medication to meditation, we often skip right over the most accessible and effortless of approaches to healing our minds — the natural world.

Our very home and all the elements and conditions and living beings that we have co-evolved with since we first appeared on the planet are the clearest reflection of who we are, where we come from, and what we need. Why would we go anywhere else to gain perspective and to ground ourselves in truth?

We have been conditioned to believe that our well-being resides in a screen, a pill, more stuff, more prestige, more likes, etc. We have come to experience ourselves as separate from, and therefore not needing the support and the tutelage of what Earth has to offer us. Unfortunately, many of us have strayed so far and for so long, we have come to see the natural world as foreign, dark and scary, an enemy as opposed to an ally.

We are nature herself. We are created and sustained by the same force. To know this is to tap into the good news that even if we have forgotten, even if we never learned to begin with, all we have to do is to put ourselves in the presence of the natural world for it to do its work on us.

Find a reason every single day to linger, even for one minute, somewhere outside. Go without agenda. Go and be a listener. Go and allow yourself to get lost in the breeze, a bird singing, some fragrance, a starry night, the feel of rain on your skin. And say to yourself, “just this.”

 

 

Original article here

23 Apr 2024
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How Did Consciousness Evolve? An Illustrated Guide

 

What is consciousness, and who (or what) is conscious — humans, nonhumans, nonliving beings? Which varieties of consciousness do we recognize? In their book “Picturing the Mind,” Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka, two leading voices in evolutionary consciousness science, pursue these and other questions through a series of “vistas” — over 65 brief, engaging texts, presenting some of the views of poets, philosophers, psychologists, and biologists, accompanied by Anna Zeligowski’s lively illustrations.

Each picture and text serves as a starting point for discussion. In the texts that follow, excerpted from the vista “How Did Consciousness Evolve?” the authors offer a primer on evolutionary theory, consider our evolutionary transition from nonsentient to sentient organisms, explore the torturous relation between learning studies and consciousness research, and ponder the origins and evolution of suffering and the imagination.

Evolutionary Theory

Evolutionary theory is a deceptively simple theory, which is why many people who have only a cursory acquaintance with it are nevertheless convinced that they fully understand it. Its basic assumptions are indeed simple. The first assumption, which was systematically explored first by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and then by Charles Darwin, is that there was a single ancestor, or very few ancestors, of all living organisms. This is the principle of Descent with modification: all organisms are descended, with modifications, from ancestors that lived long ago.

The second principle, which is central to Darwin’s theory, is the principle of Natural selection: organisms with hereditary variations that render them better adapted to their local environment than others in their population leave behind more offspring. Darwin showed that this simple process, when applied recursively, can account for the evolution of complex organs like the eye, and, with the addition of some plausible auxiliary hypotheses, can explain the diversity of living species and their geographic distribution. In the last paragraph of “The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection,” Darwin summarized his ideas:

 

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less- improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

 

Once he put forward his ideas, various scientists tried to crystallize and summarize Darwin’s view. For example, in the twentieth century, John Maynard Smith suggested that four basic processes underlie evolution by natural selection:

(i) Multiplication: an entity gives rise to two or more others.

(ii) Variation: not all entities are identical.

(iii) Heredity: like usually begets like. Variant X usually begets offspring X, but infrequently begets offspring Y.

(iv) Competition: some heritable variations affect the success of entities in persisting and multiplying more than others.

Although it sounds simple, when we unpack these processes, we appreciate how complex evolutionary theory actually is. There are multiple ways in which reproduction occurs and there are different types of inherited variations. Maynard Smith, like most 20th-century biologists, focused on DNA- based genetic variability, but since the early 2000s, the idea that variations in DNA drive all evolutionary change has been abandoned; it is now recognized that heritable variations in DNA, in patterns of gene expression, in behavior, and in culture are all important. Variation in these hereditary units can arise randomly or can be partially directed because heredity and development can be coupled. For example, stressful conditions during development can induce changes in gene expression that can be transmitted to the next generation. It has also been accepted that there are multiple targets and levels of selection within individuals, between individuals and between lineages, and that organisms have fuzzy boundaries. (Are the symbiotic bacteria in your gut part of you?) Crucially, organisms are not passive subjects of natural selection — they actively construct the environment in which they are selected and bequeath these ecological legacies to their offspring.

 

As evolutionary biologist Mary Jane West-Eberhard put it: “Genes are followers, not leaders, in evolution.”

 

How, then, should evolutionary analysis proceed? We could start by tracing evolutionary change at the molecular-genetic, physiological-developmental, behavioral, or cultural levels. However, since organisms adjust to changing conditions in the external world and in their own genome by altering their behavior and physiology, cultural and behavioral adaptations frequently precede genetic changes and shape the conditions in which variations are selected. Genetic changes that stabilize or fine-tune the behavioral or developmental changes follow. As evolutionary biologist Mary Jane West-Eberhard put it: “Genes are followers, not leaders, in evolution.”

In the 21st century, this integrative approach to evolutionary reasoning, which incorporates the effects of variations in DNA, development, behavior, and culture is being embraced by a growing number of biologists, including us.

 

 

 

Evolutionary Transitions

How should we think about the evolutionary transition from non-sentient to sentient organisms? There are several useful ways of carving up the living world and thinking about evolutionary transitions between forms and ways of life. Ecologists distinguish between modes of living such as terrestrial, aquatic, and aerial modes, and study the transitions from water to land or from land to air. In contrast, evolutionary biologists John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry have described major evolutionary transitions in terms of qualitative changes in the way information is stored, processed, and transmitted. Examples of such transitions include the transition from single cells to multicellular organisms, and the transition from nonlinguistic communication to communication through symbolic language.

The philosopher Daniel Dennett suggests another way of thinking about broad patterns of life. He distinguishes four progressively sophisticated, hierarchically nested types of selection, which underlie what he calls a “generate-and- test- tower.” Organisms such as bacteria, sponges, and plants, which can adapt evolutionarily through natural selection, dwell on the first floor; the second floor is inhabited by organisms such as snails, fish, and mice, which, in addition to selection during evolutionary history, learn through trial-and-error and selective reinforcement during their lifetime. Organisms that can also select among imagined actions and scenarios, like elephants, dolphins, and great apes, live on the third floor, while human beings, with the extra capacity to select among symbolically represented possibilities and who are subject to cultural selection, live on the fourth.

None of these classifications explicitly mentions sentience. Sentience is, however, central to the view of Aristotle, which we described in the first vista. Aristotle distinguished between three goal-directed and hierarchically nested types of “soul,” or modes of living organization: the “nutritive-reproductive” soul of non-sentient organisms like plants, the goals of which are survival and reproduction; the “sensitive” soul of sentient organisms, whose goals are the fulfillment of desires and appetites; and the “rational” soul of humans, whose goal is to satisfy abstract symbolic values such as justice and beauty. In our book “The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul,” we reframed Aristotle’s hierarchy within the framework of evolutionary theory, and offered a unifying scheme for explaining the evolutionary transitions to life, sentience, and reflectivity.

An Evolutionary-Transition Approach to Consciousness

How can we develop an evolutionary theory of consciousness when there is so much disagreement over what consciousness is and which organisms are conscious? Our way of approaching this question takes as its inspiration the way the Hungarian chemist Tibor Gánti tackled a similar problem, the problem of how life (another elusive notion) originated. Gánti started by compiling a list of capacities that, in spite of the different views about the nature of life, are generally deemed jointly sufficient for the simplest, “minimal” life. He then built a theoretical model of a minimal living system that implements all these capacities.

Following Gánti’s methodology, our first task is to identify a list of capacities that, when all are present, most consciousness researchers would regard as sufficient for an organism to be deemed minimally conscious. Such an organism would be able to perceive, feel, and think, from its own private point of view.

A consensus list of consciousness capacities is a step forward, but identifying each and every capacity may be difficult, and a list does not tell us how they interact to form a conscious being. If we could find a single system-property — an evolutionary marker of consciousness — that indicates that the organism has evolved all the capacities in the consensus list, we would be in a much better position. Finding such a single, diagnostic transition marker would make it possible to identify the simplest evolved conscious being, reconstruct the processes and structures that underlie it, and figure out how they interact. If we can follow the evolution of the marker and therefore the evolution of consciousness, we can discover when and how the conscious mode of being originated.

As we will see, evolutionary transition markers to the living, the living conscious, and (tentatively) the living-conscious-rational modes of being (the three Aristotelian “souls”) have been suggested. Each of these evolutionary transition markers entails a consensus list of capacities that are sufficient to allow us to ascribe the corresponding mode of being to an entity.

Learning and Consciousness: An Unlikely Relation?

Is there a single, tangible property that when present in an entity means that all the characteristics of consciousness are in place — an evolutionary transition marker of consciousness? We believe that we have identified such a marker. Our marker is a form of open-ended associative learning, which we call unlimited associative learning (UAL).

Before we describe this marker and argue our case, we must say a few words about learning and about the torturous relation between learning studies and consciousness research in the 20th century.

Learning, an experience-dependent change in behavior, requires (i) that a sensory stimulus leads to a change in the internal state of the system; (ii) that a memory trace of the internal change is stored through a process that involves positive or negative reinforcement; and (iii) that later exposures to the same or a similar stimulus are manifest as changes to the threshold of the behavioral response. Characterizing these processes, the relations between them, and the mechanisms underlying them in living organisms is a complex endeavor. Just as with evolutionary processes, where the nature of reproduction, variation production, and selection have to be qualified, the study of learning requires that we consider the kinds of stimuli that are attended to, the mechanisms of storage and of recall, the relevant rewards and punishments and the ways the organism responds.

 

Nineteenth-century biologists thought that being able to learn by making new behavioral adjustments or modifying old ones was a criterion of consciousness.

 

Nineteenth-century biologists thought that being able to learn by making new behavioral adjustments or modifying old ones was a criterion of consciousness. This way of thinking changed dramatically with the advent of behaviorism, a strand of experimental psychology that dominated the English-speaking world from the beginning of the twentieth century until the 1970s. Behaviorists redefined psychology as the study of learned behavior, scornfully objecting to any mention of terms like consciousness or mind. An influential psychology textbook from 1953 explained that notions like “mind” and “ideas” “are being invented on the spot for the sole purpose of providing spurious explanations. . . . Since mental or psychic events are asserted to lack the dimensions of physical science, we have an additional reason for rejecting them” (B. F. Skinner, “Science and Human Behavior”).

 

 

The behaviorists focused on two types of associative learning. In the first, classical or Pavlovian conditioning (named after the physiologist Ivan Pavlov), an animal learns that something it perceives, which is of no relevance to it (a “neutral stimulus” in the behaviorists’ jargon), predicts a stimulus that invariably accompanies a reward or a punishment such as food or pain, to which it reflexively responds. For example, the smell of food that accompanies the reward (food) elicits the salivation reflex in a hungry dog. The sound of a buzzer (or bell), on the other hand, normally does not elicit salivation — it is “neutral” with respect to salivation. However, it will eventually elicit salivation, even when there is no smell of food, if the buzz repeatedly occurs before the smell. Pavlov measured the internal state of the dog by counting the number of drops of saliva at different stages of learning.

In the second type of associative learning, Skinnerian conditioning (named after the psychologist B. F. Skinner), an animal learns what to do in order get a reward or avoid a punishment (known in behaviorist jargon as positive or negative reinforcement). For example, a hungry rat can learn to press a lever in its cage if this action is followed by the delivery of food. In general, actions that are followed by a positive (or negative) outcome will be more (or less) likely to occur in the future, under similar circumstances.

Skinner’s experiments, like those of Pavlov, were conducted in drastically impoverished and artificial conditions, totally different from those in which animals live in the real world. Nevertheless, Skinner suggested that complex behavior, including the “verbal behavior” of humans (this was his term for language comprehension and production), is the result of a sequence of reinforcements.

 

Skinner’s experiments, like those of Pavlov, were conducted in drastically impoverished and artificial conditions, totally different from those in which animals live in the real world.

 

The increasing tensions between the obvious limitations and the grandiose pretensions of behaviorism eventually led to its demise. However, the ongoing study of associative learning led to new insights. For example, it was discovered that learning depends on how surprising, how unexpected, the predictive neutral stimulus or action is of the reinforcement. A totally predictable stimulus requires no learning, whereas one that does not match expectations is newsworthy. Learning in animals, on which machine- learning algorithms are patterned, involves the updating and minimization of mismatched expectations.

The study of associative learning today includes the investigation of the underlying cognitive and neurobiological mechanisms in ecologically relevant conditions such as the social conditions in which animals learn from each other. It is a rich and productive research program, which is no longer constrained by the behaviorists’ maxims. There is an irony in our (qualified) return to the 19th-century suggestion that open-ended associative learning is an evolutionary transition marker of consciousness, the very term that behaviorists tried to purge from psychology.

 

Of course I do as I’m told.

Hunger and shock are great reinforcers

Push lever and

Obey the rule

And NEVER

Show my inner soul

~ Jane Monet

 

Unlimited Associative Learning (UAL) Is the Evolutionary Transition Marker of Consciousness

What is the evolutionary transition marker of minimal consciousness? Following Gánti’s methodology we started by compiling a consensus list of consciousness characteristics based on the work of psychologists, philosophers, and neurobiologists:

  • Binding/unification: seeing the apple as a composite whole (red, round, smooth) yet with discernable features
  • Global accessibility and broadcast: back and forth interactions among specialized brain modules allowing comparisons, discriminations, generalizations, and evaluations that inform decision-making
  • Selective attention and active exclusion: excluding or amplifying signals according to past and present context
  • Intentionality (aboutness; representation): the mapping (representations) of body, world, action, and their relations
  • Integration through time: Holding on to incoming information long enough for it to be integrated and evaluated, so the present can be said to have duration
  • Flexible evaluative system and goals: evaluating perceptions and actions as rewarding or punishing according to context
  • Agency and embodiment: inherent spontaneous activity and goal-directed behavior
  • A sense of self: registration of self/other and a stable perspective

On the basis of this list, we suggest that the evolutionary transition marker of minimal consciousness, which is the within-lifetime analog of unlimited heredity in evolutionary time, is Unlimited associative learning (UAL). UAL is the within-lifetime analog of unlimited heredity in evolutionary time. An organism with a capacity for UAL can, during its own lifetime, go on learning from experience about the world and about itself in a practically unrestricted way.

 (i) It can distinguish between novel complex patterns of stimuli and actions. For example, it can learn to navigate in a new terrain — to discriminate between different types of animals, between different routes leading to food and shelter. The learned patterns are genuinely novel: they are not reflex-eliciting patterns, nor have they been learned in the past.

(ii) It manifests second-order learning: Once it learns a new complex image or a new pattern of action, these patterns can themselves become associated with new compound patterns, allowing the organism to build up chains of associative links.

(iii) It can learn even if there is a time gap between the “neutral” complex stimulus and the reinforcement (the reward or punishment). Such “trace conditioning” requires that the memory of the neutral predictive stimulus is stored even when the reinforcing stimulus is transiently unperceived.

(iv) The value of a learned pattern can be readily changed: the reward or punishment value of a particular stimulus or a particular action is not fixed. It can change when the conditions change. Something that once predicted punishment (e.g., danger) can predict reward (safety) when conditions alter.

If an animal shows unlimited associative learning (that is, practically unrestricted learning) it means that all the capacities of consciousness are in place. Unification and differentiation are needed to construct compound stimuli (an apple is perceived as both red and round); global accessibility is needed to enable integration of information from multiple systems (e.g., the visual, olfactory, memory and evaluative systems — the red apple has a specific fragrance and following past experience is expected to be rewarding); selective attention is needed to pick these stimuli out from the background (e.g., ignore green or badly smelling apples and pick only the red fragrant ones); intentionality is needed, since the system maps or represents stimuli and the relations between them (e.g., the animal has a cognitive map of its environment); integration over time is needed for being able to learn even when there is a time gap between the neutral and rewarding stimulus; a flexible evaluation system is needed to make context-dependent learning possible (e.g., alter the value of a stimulus from punishing to rewarding); embodied agency is needed for exploring the world and for learning associations between actions; a “self,” entailing a stable point of view, is needed to compare stimuli and actions from the same perspective, and self/world distinction is needed so that the organism will not confuse stimuli generated by its own actions with stimuli generated by the external world. An animal with UAL is able to exhibit many complex behaviors, and can attain many different goals. Moreover, there is evidence that an animal can manifest UAL only when it is conscious. UAL is therefore a good transition marker for consciousness.

The Origins of Suffering

Ecclesiastes said: “For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” Knowledge and suffering are also entangled in the myth of original sin, in Aeschylus’s “Agamemnon,” and in the myth of the eternally suffering Prometheus who blessed humans with the civilizing power of fire. What was the price of the knowledge-through-feelings that UAL inflicted on animals?

Like all great innovations, UAL opened a Pandora’s box of new challenges and problems. We believe that the greatest problem stemmed from overlearning: since parts of a sensory image can have different values (neutral, beneficial, life-threatening) in different conditions, false alarms are very likely. For example, for a fish, a particular pattern of vibrations combined with a particular pattern of colors can indicate a dangerous predator, while the color pattern alone and the vibration pattern alone may sometimes be associated with a nonthreatening passing animal. But since the rapid flight that the vibration or color pattern elicits is less costly than deathly injury, flight is preferable even if the vibration or color patterns turns out to be nonthreatening on most occasions. It is surely better to err on the side of caution. Randolph Nesse called the adaptive logic of erring on the side of caution the “smoke detector principle.”

 

Chronic anxiety and stress are costly, leading not only to a waste of time and energy but also to a greater propensity for painful diseases.

 

The price of overreacting includes, however, anxiety, paranoia, neuroses. Chronic anxiety and stress are costly, leading not only to a waste of time and energy but also to a greater propensity for painful diseases. Nevertheless, the cost-benefit balance is on the side of knowledge — a wise, suffering animal is better off than a nonsuffering, doomed fool.

Animals that could mitigate the high costs of UAL without giving up its benefits would have a great advantage. The evolutionary elaboration of the ubiquitous stress response and the evolution of active forgetting are some of the ameliorating mechanisms that we expect to find in all associatively learning animals, and in particular, in UAL animals. Suffering was not eliminated, but it became more controlled.

In the last paragraph of “On the Origin of Species,” Darwin wrote: “Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.” It was in the Cambrian, we suggest, that the great war of nature began to involve suffering — the subjective experiencing of the anguish and pain that is entangled with knowledge.

The Evolution of Imagination

The first conscious animals explored and learned about their world and the effects of their actions by seeking the satisfactions of food, sex, and social bonding and avoiding the pains and fears imposed by predators, deprivation, and disease. Their explorations were guided by what they learned in the past, which, in turn, led to further learning and exploration.

Driven by learning, consciousness and cognition evolved further. In some lineages, selection for increased learning capacity led to the gradual evolution of imaginative, dreaming animals. They did not just learn about aspects of their world; they also learned about how events unfolded in time. They recalled past events— they could recall when and where a particular event happened, and they planned ahead by recombining aspects of their recollections and evaluating the planned, imagined event. These animals, which inhabit the third floor in Dennett’s generate-and-test tower, could imagine different scenarios and choose between them.

 

 

Here is a famous example: Western scrub jays cache (in many locations) different types of foodstuff, such as tasty worms that rot within a short time, and less-favored peanuts that stay edible for much longer. They later remember not only where they cached the different foods, but also when: they recover worms soon after caching, and peanuts when they return to feed long after caching. Interestingly, they are aware of the possibility of theft by other jays. They re- cache food if they were watched while caching, but only if they themselves are thieves!

There are many examples of imaginative planning by birds and mammals, and there are more limited examples of the imaginative ability of some fish, bees, and cuttlefish. It is likely that imagination evolved gradually and to different degrees in different species. Curiously, most imaginative animals are social. Are their social sensibilities related to their imaginative capacities? Whatever the answer and however striking animal imagination is, it remains in the private domain. The ability to communicate about what one imagines is peculiar to humans.

 

 

 

Original article here

18 Apr 2024
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Friend or FOMO?

 

Despite our best efforts, we often find ourselves readily believing everything our friends post on their social media feeds.

Regardless of any nuance that may exist offline, our friends’ cheery, filtered posts show them feeling loved, seeing their loved ones every day, and never fighting or struggling to get their emotional needs met. They seem to move through the world with ease and community, having found their people when they were 2 years old and retained their friendships for the remainder of their lives. Therefore, those of us who have friendships that aren’t always as seamless feel like we are definitely failing.

What we forget when we do this is that there’s a social pressure to show each other that we belong, and that we are doing everything the “right way.” It’s not just you who feels that pressure. It’s also the very friends to whom we’re comparing ourselves. While we may know this on some level, once we start mindlessly scrolling—as these platforms encourage us to do as often as possible—we begin to take our friends’ posts at face value.

We forget that this post about a “perfect birthday party” might not be the whole story, because we’re not detectives looking for lies in the innocuous posts of our loved ones. But it’s important to remember they’re not “lies”; most people tend to project perfection and gloss over the hard stuff when they’re posting online. Unfortunately, what happens when people fall into that habit is that the rest of us feel like we’re failing in comparison—and we’re failing alone.

This feeling of comparison and the accompanying loneliness and shame that it brings inspired me to write my 2023 book, You Will Find Your People: How to Make Meaningful Friendships As an Adult. When my book was first published, I was shocked that so many people told me they felt this shame and loneliness too. They whispered to me, “I always think everyone but me has great friends they’ve known for 80 years and never struggle in their friendships. I didn’t know anyone else was feeling that way too.”

While it’s true that most of us are struggling, many people aren’t going to post when they’re crying at 2 a.m. over a friend breakup, when they’re having a fight with a friend, or when they’re hit with anxiety that a friend of theirs didn’t like their posts lately and must therefore be upset with them. They’re going to post when they see their friends in person (possibly for the first time in weeks or months) and are still riding that high from finally feeling connected to others. Still, we can’t know the complex backstory of that celebratory post. Our perception is that they’re succeeding and we’re failing. That may be because we haven’t met our people yet, or our friendships don’t look exactly like that, or our friendships are kind of weird and strained right now and we don’t have as much community as we need.

So, what can we do other than ask all our friends to include detailed facts about the overall health of “my girls,” and if they’ve ever had some seriously messy shit go down in their friend group that might make us feel a little better about our own friendships? The complex but simple answer is that we have to be kinder to ourselves when we’re scrolling. But how can we soothe ourselves when we’re scrolling and it feels like we’re really drowning and everyone else is sailing on a pristine yacht?

When I find myself in that space, I remind myself that I don’t know the detailed interactions between people and that only those who truly know their friendships are the ones within them. For all I know, that friendship is on its last legs or that group has two people in it who hate the other two. And while I absolutely don’t wish that on them, or hope someone is hurting, my point is that it’s important to entertain more than one possibility when we’re stuck in that comparison spiral.

Once we remove the shame of “they’re right, I’m wrong” from our brains, we have more space to nurture our own friendships and our own communities at our own pace. It’s hard to do that when you’re beating yourself up. So once you’ve talked yourself down from the ledge, ask yourself: How can I reach out to the friends I do have or want to have? How can I connect with them further? How can I find more joy in the friendships I have? How can I set more boundaries and communicate better with them? And perhaps: How can I let go of the friendships that aren’t making me truly happy? 

As soon as we finally stop comparing ourselves to the limited view we’re getting from other people posting about their friendships, we can truly be free to take that energy and put it toward what we really want: not envying a picture-perfect friendship that might not exist, but to finally, bravely, cultivate deeply nurturing friendships that—even if they’re flawed—are absolutely real.

 

 

Original article here

 

 

15 Apr 2024
Comments: 0

Open-minded people have a different visual perception of reality

 

 

Psychologists have only begun to unravel the concept of “personality,” that all-important but nebulous feature of individual identity. Recent studies suggest that personality traits don’t simply affect your outlook on life, but the way you perceive reality.

One study published earlier this year in the Journal of Research in Personality goes so far as to suggest that openness to experience changes what people see in the world. It makes them more likely to experience certain visual perceptions. In the study, researchers from the University of Melbourne in Australia recruited 123 volunteers and gave them the big five personality test, which measures extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. That last personality trait involves creativity, imagination, and a willingness to try new things.

They then tested who experienced a visual perception phenomenon called “binocular rivalry.” This phenomenon occurs when each eye is shown a different image—in this case, a red patch in one eye and a green patch to another. Most people switch back and forwards between the two incompatible images, as the brain can only perceive one at a time. But some people merge the two images into a unified red-green patch. Participants who scored higher on openness were more likely to perceive this combined image.

This makes sense, according to the researchers, because openness to new experiences is linked with creativity. In an article on their results in The Conversation, they write that the ability to combine two images seems “like a ‘creative’ solution to the problem presented by the two incompatible stimuli.”

Anna Antinori lead author of the study, explains that we’re constantly filtering out what sensory information to focus on. For example, you might well be subconsciously ignoring the noise around you or the feeling of a chair against your back. And this then determines what we perceive. “The ‘gate’ that lets through the information that reaches consciousness may have a different level of flexibility,” she says. “Open people appear to have a more flexible gate and let through more information than the average person.”

This isn’t the only study that connects personality with perception. As the researchers note in The Conversation, an earlier study shows that those who score high in openness are less likely to experience “inattentional blindness.”

This visual phenomenon occurs when people are focusing so hard on one feature of a scene that they completely fail to notice something entirely obvious—such as in the video below.

Around half of people are so busy watching ball-passes that they miss the man in a gorilla costume.

Though the research suggests that personality affects the way we filter conscious experience, it’s not clear exactly how this process works. The authors speculate that overlapping neurochemicals in the brain may link perception to personality. “Thus the abundance of the same neurochemical, or lack thereof, may affect both one’s personality and low-level vision,” adds Antinori.

There is also evidence to suggest that personality traits aren’t fixed. One study has shown that meditation can affect binocular rivalry, and training can make people more open to new experiences. Then there’s research that shows psilocybin (the key ingredient in magic mushrooms) makes people more open.

But while studies show that personality can shift over time, there’s currently little research on whether perception also changes to correspond with new personality traits. But given the above cited evidence that meditation can shift perception, Antinori believes the way we see the world may well change in line with personality. “It may be possible that a change in people’s personality may also affect how they see the world,” she says.

The mechanics behind how personality is formed—and the effects it has—are still unknown. But mounting evidence suggests that our personalities are affecting our experience of the world in more ways than we realize.

 

 

Original article here

07 Apr 2024
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7 Incredible Benefits of Lifting Weights That Have Nothing to Do With Building Muscle

We hate to sound like a broken record, but it really is crucial to incorporate lifting weights into your workout regimen. In fact, when it comes to exercise for older adults, strength training actually trumps cardio because preserving muscle is more important than losing fat as you age.

“Every decade, starting in your mid 30s, you lose a percentage of muscle, which affects your metabolism, balance, and ability to brace yourself in the event of an injury,” explains Larysa DiDio, a certified personal trainer and Prevention’s contributing fitness editor. “By weight training, you build more muscle to protect your body against injury.”

So, how often should you lift weights?

Ideally, twice a week—whether you lift free weights, use machines, or do bodyweight exercises, says Rachelle Reed, PhD, CPT, Pure Barre’s manager of training development and barre kinesiologist.

That said, as you get stronger and fitter, both Reed and DiDio agree that you should bump up your sessions to more than two times a week. “You can totally lift every day—just make sure to work on different body parts or train your body differently each day,” DiDio says.

Wondering which muscle groups to focus on? Reed says that depends on your goals. For a full body workout, “many trainers will tell clients to focus on the upper body one day and the lower body a couple days later,” she says. To help you get the most bang for your buck, consider folding in compound exercises and supersets into your routine, a form of strength training in which you move from one exercise to the next with no rest in between.

In addition to building strength, lifting weights has a host of benefits. Keep reading to learn all the reasons you should pick up a pair of dumbbells (or kettlebells, or dare we say, a barbell) today.

You’ll lose weight and burn more calories

While cardio can help you get rid of belly fat, lifting weights helps you build more muscle, which can also help you burn more calories. That’s because muscles are metabolically active, meaning they burn calories even when you’re not exercising. “In fact, muscle tissue burns seven to 10 calories per pound daily, while fat burns only two to three calories per pound daily,” DiDio explains.

What’s more, a 2017 study in Obesity suggests that weight training combined with a healthy, low-calorie diet, can help preserve lean muscle mass that’s lost through aerobic workouts. “When weight loss occurs in the absence of strength training, all facets of body composition are lost,” Reed says. “You lose some weight in fat, some in muscle, and some in bone—and it’s unfavorable to lose weight that’s coming from both muscle and bone.” That’s why strength training is so important. When people exercise to lose weight, the majority of the weight loss is fat loss.

You’ll protect your bones

As you age, your bones become more brittle and weaker, especially if you’re post-menopausal, which is due to lower estrogen levels—the hormone responsible for maintaining bone mass. But lifting weights can help you build bone mineral density through Wolff’s Law, which states that bones can grow in response to forces that are placed upon it. In other words, creating pressure on your joints through weight-bearing exercises can actually help you build stronger, healthier bones.

“Strength training involves muscles contracting against the bones they’re surrounding,” Reed explains. “This force applied to the bones helps improve bone density overtime.”

In fact, an October 2017 study from the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research shows that high-intensity resistance training exercises, like deadlifts, overhead presses, and back squats, can help improve bone mineral density in women with osteopenia and osteoporosis.

You’ll manage stress and boost your mood

Had a hard day at work and need to release some tension? Time to pick up those weights. Just like any form of exercise, strength training can enhance your mood by releasing feel-good hormones called endorphins.

Recent research also suggests that exercise, including weight training, may help protect against Alzheimer’s and dementia. Researchers from Columbia University Irving Medical Center discovered that the hormone irisin, which is released during exercise, may help promote neuronal growth in the hippocampus—the area of the brain dedicated to learning and memory.

“Any type of exercise is a mood booster, but weight training makes you feel stronger and it builds the back and neck muscles that are most directly associated with stress,” DiDio says.

You’ll improve your posture 

If you have a desk job, chances are you’re dealing with a case of rounded shoulders and a hunched back, which place additional pressure on your low back. This can lead to bad posture and limited range of motion in the shoulders, which are the most flexible joint in the body.

But lifting weights can help reverse this by opening up the chest, strengthening the back muscles, and improving freedom of movement. “It also strengthens your core, which keeps the back in alignment and upright,” DiDio says.

Go for multi-joint compound exercises (think a squat to overhead press or a lateral lunge to twist), which can help you work in different planes of motion and muscle groups, saving you time and effort.

You’ll reduce back pain

There’s no one reason for back pain, but muscular imbalances, like weak knees and an unstable core, can contribute, among other things. Most people think aches and pain are due to strains, but sometimes, it’s a result of bad biomechanics. Your muscles work in a kinetic chain, so if there’s a weak link, it can often manifest into a bigger problem in different areas of the body. But by building total-body strength, you can bypass most injuries.

For example, if you have weak hip flexors, it also means you have weak glutes—their opposing muscles. And, “typically they [muscles] don’t weaken evenly, so this can also throw your pelvis out of whack, which could affect your gait,” DiDio says. “As weak and tight muscles tug and pull, they can cause imbalances and pain, which is your body telling you that something is wrong.”

You’ll improve memory and brain health

A 2016 review from the British Journal of Sports Medicine shows that physical activity can help prevent or delay cognitive decline in people over 50, regardless of their current neurological state.

When you’re moving, your body pumps oxygen-rich blood to your brain, boosting neuroplasticity—your brain’s ability to create new neural connections and adjust to changes in environment. By increasing neuroplasticity, you can better handle stressful situations that come with life and stay sharp.

“Indeed, the American College of Sports Medicine has published several studies investigating the positive effects of different types of exercise on cognitive performance in older adults, and they agree that this is an area of research worthy of further pursuit,” Reed notes.

You’ll be better in tune with your body

There’s nothing like lifting a pair of weights to help you tune into your senses when you work out. Whether you’re doing an overhead press, a plank row, or a goblet squat, lifting weights creates greater awareness around using your breath to help you get the most out of each rep. Plus, doing complex moves can test your listening and cognitive skills—it takes some brain power to process a trainer’s cues and execute a move properly!

 

 

Original article here