What do mirror neurons have to do with Abu Ghraib , the scientific discipline of religion , and how happiness expand ?
For the retiring 15 years , literary - agent - turned - crusader - of - homo - advance John Brockman has been a remarkable conservator of peculiarity , long before either “ curator ” or “ curiosity ” was a frivolously tossed around cant . HisEdge.orghas become an epicentre of bleeding - edge insight across science , technology and beyond , host conversations with some of our era ’s greatest thinkers ( and , once a twelvemonth , asking them some big question . )
Last month cross out the release ofThe Mind , the first book in The upright of Edge Series , presenting eighteen provocative , landmark pieces – essays , interviews , transcribed talks – from the Edge archive . The anthology read like a who ’s who of Brain Pickings favorites across psychology , evolutionary biology , social science , technology and more . And , perhaps equally interestingly , the tome – most of the material in which are available for free online – is an implicit pronunciamento for the run power of Koran as curatorial capsules of idea . Brockman compose in the book ’s introduction :
While there ’s no doubtfulness about the value of online presentations , the theatrical role of books , whether bond and printed or presented electronically , is still an priceless way of life to introduce authoritative ideas . Thus , we are proud of to be able to offer this series of books to the public .
Here ’s a small sampling of the treasure chest betweenThe Mind ’s extend :
In “ Eudaemonia : The Good Life ” ( 2004 ) , Martin Seligman , father of positive psychological science whom you might echo as the generator ofFlourishandLearned Optimism , one of our7 essential books on optimism , explore what he calls the “ third physique of felicity , ” which lie down in :
have it away what your high straights are and deploying those in the service of process of something you believe in is large than you are . There ’s no shortcut to that . That ’s what life is about . There will likely be a pharmacology of pleasure , and there may be a pharmacology of positive emotion broadly speaking , but it ’s unlikely there ’ll be an interesting pharmacological medicine of flow . And it ’s impossible that there ’ll be a pharmacology of meaning . ”
In “ Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion ” ( 2007 ) , psychologist Jonathan Haidt ( whoseThe Happiness Hypothesisyou might call in as one of our7 favorite al-Qur’an on felicity ) notes :
[ I]t might seem obvious to you that contractual societies are in effect , innovative , creative , and innocent , whereas beehive societies reek of feudalism , fascism , and patriarchate . And , as a secular liberal I consort that contractual club such as those of Western Europe proffer the best promise for living peacefully together in our more and more diverse modern nations ( although it remains to be seen if Europe can solve its current variety problems ) . I just require to make one point , however , that should give constructualists pause : survey have long evince that religious worshiper s in the United States are well-chosen , healthier , longer - live , and more generous to charity and to each other than are laic multitude . ”
In “ Amazing Babies ” ( 2009 ) , psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik laid the foundations for herThe Philosophical Baby , one of this year’smust - say books by TED Global speakers :
We ’ve known for a tenacious time that human kid are the best learning machines in the universe , but it has always been like the mystery of the hummingbird . We know that they fly , but we do n’t be intimate how they can perhaps do it . We could say that baby learn , but we did n’t acknowledge how . ”
Harvard ’s Steven Pinker , whose crystalize insights onviolence and human natureyou might think and who penned one of our5 favorite books on language , wrote in “ Organs of Computation ” ( 1997 ) , long before the hoopla of contemporary quasi - sciences like neuromarketing :
Most of the supposal about the mind that underlie current discussions are many decades out of escort . [ L]ook at the commentaries on human affairs by pundits and social critics . They say we ’re ‘ condition ’ to do this , or ‘ brainwashed ’ to do that , or ‘ socialized ’ to believe such and such . Where do these ideas derive from ? From the behaviorism of the 1920s , from bad cold war moving-picture show from the 1950s , from folklore about the effects of family rearing that demeanor genetics has show to be false . The basic understanding that the human mind is a remarkably complex processor of information , an ‘ electronic organ of uttermost perfection and ramification , ’ to utilize Darwin ’s phrase , has not made it into the mainstream of intellectual living . ”
Stanford societal psychologist Philip Zimbardo , best - be intimate for the infamousStanford Prison Experimentand most recently a beginner of theHeroic Imagination Project , run on his seminal work explore good and evil in “ You Ca n’t Be a Sweet Cucumber in a Vinegar Barrel ” ( 2005 ):
When you put that set of horrendous work conditions and external factors together , it creates an evil barrel . You could put well-nigh anybody in it and you ’re pop off to get this kind of evil behavior . The Pentagon and the armed services say the Abu Ghraib scandal is the result of a few spoilt apples in an otherwise good cask . That ’s the dispositional depth psychology . The social psychologist in me , and the consensus among many of my colleagues in experimental social psychology , say that ’s the ill-timed depth psychology . It ’s not the bad apples , it ’s the bad barrels that corrupted upright people . Understanding the abuse at this Iraki prison jump with an analysis of both the situational and systemic forces operating on those soldiers working the night shift in that ‘ little store of horrors . ' ”
Iconic neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran , whose empiricalquest for the what make us humanwe recently probe , write in his seminal 2000 essay “ Mirror Neurons and Imitation Learning as the Driving Force Behind ‘ the Great Leap Forward ’ in Human Evolution ” :
The breakthrough of mirror neurons in the head-on lobes of monkeys , and their possible relevancy to human brain evolution – which I speculate on in this essay – is the undivided most important ‘ unreported ’ ( or at least , unpublicized ) story of the decade . I betoken that mirror nerve cell will do for psychology what DNA did for biological science : they will render a unifying framework and help explain a host of genial power that have hitherto stay on mysterious and inaccessible to experimentation . ”
And in his second essay , “ The Neurology of Self - Awareness ” ( 2007 ) , which laid the foundations for hisThe Tell - Tale Brain , Rama muse the essence of the self :
What is the ego ? How does the activity of nerve cell give rise to the sense of being a witting human being ? Even this most ancient of philosophical trouble , I believe , will yield to method of empirical science . It now seems increasingly likely that the self is not a holistic property of the entire brainiac ; it uprise from the activeness of specific set of interlinked brain circuits . But we need to know which circuits are critically involved and what their function might be . It is the ‘ turning inward ’ aspect of the self – its recursiveness – that impart it its rummy self-contradictory quality . ”
A caisson of cutting - bound present-day thought , The Mindcontains the building blocks of tomorrow ’s history books – whatever medium they may come in – and invite a provocative match fore as we gaze back at some of the most defining ideas of our clip .
paradigm viaFlickr Commons
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