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• [marginalium] Land Acknowledgement as moral exhibitionism — 4 Dec 2021
• [article] The beauty of stress — 30 Nov 2021
  Stress is one of the most valuable pieces of biological technology we own. Don’t confuse ancient lion chases with email notifications. Our responses to modern stressors are just as well calibrated then as now. The difference is that some stressors we choose.
• [article] The amygdala is a distraction — 13 Nov 2021
  The amygdala doesn’t determine your fear response. You do. Don’t focus on calming the amygdala, focus on calming your response.
• [marginalium] We typically think of our idyllic past as one of egalitarian hunter gatherers — 27 Oct 2021
• [article] Meaning and its patterns in the brain — 26 Oct 2021
  The brain primarily links chunks of meaning into patterns of neural pathways. Pathways and patterns of meaning help us intuitively solve the problems of everyday life. But they also trap us in those patterns, and stop us from seeing beyond them.
• [article] Animals First — 10 Oct 2021
  When we use the architecture of the brain to scaffold our thinking about the mind, we come to learn that humans are primarily animals first.
• [marginalium] Having a concept of death, far from being a uniquely human feat, is a fairly common trait in the animal kingdom — 21 Sep 2021
• [article] Amusing Ourselves to Death — 21 Sep 2021
  Since the invention of the telegraph, information has become increasingly atomized, incoherent, and irrelevant. Our media technology encourages entertainment, not discourse. Information ‘from nowhere’, ‘to no one’ about which we can do nothing. We don’t have to lean in.
• [article] Voluntary Censorship — 8 Sep 2021
  Our education bestows on us a ‘common sense’ that narrows our vision to only those things that ‘can be said’. We censor ourselves and, as a result, have a schizoprenic approach to important issues.
• [article] The Value of the Sacred — 24 Aug 2021
  The sacred isn’t a social myth; a delusion of the religious. It is what happens when we bind moments of personal meaning and power to something greater than ourselves. And, without the sacred, we are left unable to transform meaning into purpose.
• [article] In praise of the sage — 19 Jul 2021
  Our culture spurns the ‘guru’ as a charletan and the traditionalist as a relic. Legitimate knowledge comes from reasoned observation, not intuition. Except that this is a lie that we tell ourselves and which blinds us to how useful the sage can be.
• [article] Emotion and the Mind — 2 Jun 2021
  The rational mind is new, and it is weak in the face of emotion. Emotions motivate us to act, but our mind takes these visceral feelings and tangles them. Pay not attention to the mind or the emotion, but to the source of the emotion and its meaning.
• [article] The Scientific Ritual — 13 May 2021
  The scientific method is just another belief system, a ritual subject to errors of application like any other. In being thus, it has become ‘a machine for generating exaggerations’.
• [marginalium] Excellent literature review of the effects of intermittent and periodic fasting — 3 May 2021
• [article] Insight and the Sciences — 21 Apr 2021
  Varela’s gestures of awareness—suspension, redirection, letting go—align with cognitive science findings on insight, emphasizing their value in understanding human thought and experience.