To be human is to long for constancy, to crave the touchingly impossible assurance that what we have and cherish will be ours to hold forever, just as it is now. We build homes — fragile haikus of concrete and glass to be unwritten by the first earthquake or flood. We make vows — fragile promises to be upheld by selves we haven’t met in … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
The human brain is a prediction machine that evolved to render reality as a composite of sensory input and prior expectation, but by continually and consciously testing our predictions against reality, we get to construct our lived experience — largely the product of how the brain handles its natural prediction errors.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Thought | Inquiry
Emotions do not shine forth from the face nor from the maelstrom of your body’s inner core. They don’t issue from a specific part of the brain. No scientific innovation will miraculously reveal a biological fingerprint of any emotion. That’s because our emotions aren’t built-in, waiting to be revealed. They are made. By us. We don’t recognize emotions or identify emotions: we construct our own … [ Read more ]
Author: Lisa Feldman Barrett | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Psychology | Behavior
An emotion is your brain’s creation of what your bodily sensations mean, in relation to what is going on around you in the world… In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. When the concepts involved are emotion concepts, your brain constructs instances of emotion.
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Emotions are not reactions to the world. … [ Read more ]
Author: Lisa Feldman Barrett | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Psychology | Behavior
The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
Author: Mary Oliver | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Art, Concepts, Creativity and Innovation
One must believe in one’s talent to take the long hard push and pull ahead, but a talent is like a plant… It may simply wither if it is not given enough food, sun, tender care. And to give it those things means working at it every day.
Author: May Sarton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Personal Improvement
For certain fortunate people there is something which transcends all classifications of behavior, and that is awareness; something which rises above the programing of the past, and that is spontaneity; and something that is more rewarding than games, and that is intimacy. But all three of these may be frightening and even perilous to the unprepared.
Author: Eric Berne | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Articles & Links
Most of our psychological suffering and most of the pain we inflict on others stem from our confusion about what we want and all the consequent clumsiness with which we go after it.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Desires, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
This is the great and terrifying truth about the creative life: Anything we make — all this longing for beauty and meaning, all these reckonings and raptures, these most passionate and personal fragments of being — is just a tiny seed compacting everything we are, blown into the wind that is the world.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Art, Concepts, Creativity and Innovation
It is not familiarity but comparison that breeds contempt.
Author: G. K. Chesterton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Articles & Links
No man knows how much he is an optimist, even when he calls himself a pessimist, because he has not really measured the depths of his debt to whatever created him and enabled him to call himself anything. At the back of our brains… [there is] a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life … [ Read more ]
Author: G. K. Chesterton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.
Author: Simone Weil | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Religion
In the world of science, we endeavor to uncover fundamental laws and elemental truths indifferent to our opinions of them — those selfsame truths and laws that made us and govern the electrical impulses coursing through our cortices at 100 meters per second to forge the thought-patterns of opinion. But in the human world where we live, we swirl in the movable host of human … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Life & Society, Math & Science, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Sociology | Anthropology
Young people can also be remarkably clannish, and cruel in their exclusion of all those who are “different,” in skin color or cultural background, in tastes and gifts, and often in such petty aspects of dress and gesture as have been temporarily selected as the signs of an in-grouper or out-grouper. It is important to understand (which does not mean condone or participate in) such … [ Read more ]
Author: Erik Erikson | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships, Sociology | Anthropology
The early process of differentiation between inside and outside [is] the origin of projection and introjection which remain some of our deepest and most dangerous defense mechanisms. In introjection we feel and act as if an outer goodness had become an inner certainty. In projection, we experience an inner harm as an outer one: we endow significant people with the evil which actually is in … [ Read more ]
Author: Erik Erikson | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
Human ethics based upon love and personal sympathy only have contributed to narrow the comprehension of the moral feeling as a whole. It is not love to my neighbour — whom I often do not know at all — which induces me to seize a pail of water and to rush towards his house when I see it on fire; it is a far wider, … [ Read more ]
Author: Peter Kropotkin | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Life & Society, Love, Psychology | Behavior
When hope is so strong that it altogether drives out fear, its nature changes and it becomes complacency or confidence. And when we are certain that what we desire will come to pass, even though we go on wanting it to come to pass, we nonetheless cease to be agitated by the passion of desire which caused us to look forward to the outcome with … [ Read more ]
Author: Rene Descartes | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Fear, Hope, Psychology | Behavior
The mere fact of thinking that a good may be acquired or an evil avoided is sufficient to produce the desire for this to come to pass. But when, over and above this, we consider whether our desire is likely to be satisfied or not, the idea that it is likely arouses hope in us, and the idea that it is unlikely arouses fear, of … [ Read more ]
Author: Rene Descartes | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Fear, Hope, Psychology | Behavior
Hope — a faculty decidedly different from and far more muscular than optimism — remains our most potent antidote to the passivity and resignation of cynicism. The great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm admonished against the common laziness of optimism and pessimism, but he extolled the counterpoint to both — active hope that empowers us “to think the unthinkable, yet to act within the … [ Read more ]
Authors: Erich Fromm, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Hope, Psychology | Behavior
Time baffles us with its elasticity, the way it slows down when we’re afraid and speeds up as we age. It harrows us with its stagnancy, the way waiting twists the psyche. It haunts us with its demand for meaning. Time is the breath in the lungs of life, the marrow in the skeleton of space, the substance we are made of… But while we … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Productivity & Time Management