How Are You Feeling?

How are you feeling?
Can’t say, because of words.
Words come from thinking 
Which is not the same as feeling
And how we think we feel
Is not always how we really feel
Because thinking distorts feeling
With how I ought to feel
Or how I used to feel
Or how somebody else felt
In a similar situation.
Feeling is warm mittens on a frosty morning
Or the pressure of rounded river rock against the soles while walking down the path
Or the blister on my little toe.
Feeling is also ripples on the water
And a moist breeze beneath cloudy skies
And the wonder of wood ducks lined up along the railing of a bridge.
But, to answer the question:
I’m fine, I guess.


by Michael Hofferber. Copyright © 2018. All rights reserved.s reserved.

"Take a deep breath."

Science is substantiating the mantra of almost every therapy to reduce anxiety and stress.

At the University of Pennsylvania, researchers have found a strong connection between behavior and breathing in neurons associated with the olfactory system. These connections may explain why practices such as meditation and yoga that rely on rhythmic breathing can help people overcome anxiety-based illnesses.

"We wanted to know why and how fear behavior, controlled breathing, and smell centers of the brain were connected," said University of Pennsylvania neuroscientist Minghong Ma. "What really drives our interest is finding out what we can extrapolate about this relationship to learn about the evolution of behavior and apply this knowledge to help ease the pain associated with such disorders as post-traumatic stress disorder."

Researchers are asking, how do we breathe differently in different emotional situations?  A mouse in the wild, for example, will respond to danger by freezing its motion and slowing down its breathing as a survival instinct. Humans have similar physiological responses and researchers are finding out what breathing patterns are most effective in influencing human brain activity and emotional states.

Source: University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine


Artwork: just Breathe poster

Rhythmic Breathing Plus Olfactory Nerve Influence On Respiration
The Breath Book

Evolving Insight

Coming 30 years after publication of Richard Byrne's seminal book, "The Thinking Ape," "Evolving Insight" develops a new theory of the evolutionary origins of human abilities to understand the world of objects and other people. Defining mental representation and computation as 'insight', it reviews the evidence for insight in the cognition of animals.

The book proposes that the understanding of causality and intentionality evolved twice in human ancestry: the "pretty good" understanding given by behaviour parsing, shared with other apes and related to cerebellar expansion; and the deeper understanding which requires language to model and is unique to humans. However, Ape-type insight may underlie non-verbal tests of intentionality and causal understanding, and much everyday human action.

Evolving Insight

by Richard W. Byrne

Oxford University Press, 2016

The Book Stall
Outrider Reading Group
Science Writing

Affinity

Once you learn what kind of animal you are, you can more effectively approach a task. If you're a bird and want to dig, you use your beak and claws and realize that you would be very effective on an archaeological site but less effective if you wanted to dig a den. If you're a bear, you should know that heavy digging is your thing - so if you want to dig, digging large holes is what you do best. And if you're a rabbit, you should know that running fast is what you do well - but if you want to fly, best to get on an airplane. In other words, do what you can do well, and if you don't have an affinity to do what you need for a certain situation, seek someone who can collaborate with you.

Top Brain, Bottom Brain

Surprising Insights into How You Think

by Stephen M. Kosslyn and G. Wayne Miller

Simon & Schuster, 2013

Artwork: Spirit Animals by Cameron Limbrick
Outrider Reading Group
The Nature Pages

Plant-Thinking

"Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life" is an ontology of vegetal life, advocating a view of plants not as individual entities but as "a collective being" worthy of consideration. It deconstructs the mechanical metaphysics rigidly confining non-human life to narrow definitions.

Whether it be a satire on post-structuralist philosophy or a serious dialectic on the nature of plants, this is a thought-provoking analysis of how we think of plants, regardless of their cognizance.

Re-thinking our understanding of plants, of course, begs the ethical question of whether it is right to consume them, to which the author replies:

"If you wish to eat ethically, eat like a plant! Eating like a plant does not entail consuming only inorganic minerals but welcoming the other, forming a rhizome with it, and turning oneself into the passage for the other without violating or dominating it, without endeavoring to swallow up its very otherness in one's corporeal and psychic interiority."

Plant-Thinking

A Philosophy of Vegetal Life

by Michael Marder

Columbia University Press, 2013

Artwork: Girl Studying Plant Life
Science Writing
Outrider Reading Group

How We Think We Think

The notion that the left and right hemispheres of the human brain have different tendencies and that people favor one side over than the other the way they do with handedness goes back over 50 years to the early 1960s. That's when renowned neuroscientist Roger Sperry began his pioneering work with epileptics that demonstrated that the two sides of the brain play measurably different roles in cognitive functioning.

Sperry's research, which won him the Nobel Prize in 1981, confirmed that the two halves of the brain have distinct cognitive capabilities, such as attending to overall shape rather than details during perception. But he cautioned that "experimentally observed polarity in right-left cognitive styles is an idea in general" and that "it is important to remember that the two hemispheres in the normal intact brain tend regularly to function closely together as a unit."

The popular press, however, became enthralled with the idea that "We Are Left-Brained or Right-Brained," as the New York Times Sunday Magazine announced. And few noticed that Sperry's work was done on abnormal brains and that the left brain/right brain has no solid basis in science. The brain doesn't work one part at a time, but rather as a single interactive system, with all parts contributing in concert, as neuroscientists have long known.

In "Top Brain, Bottom Brain: Surprising Insights into How You Think" Stephen M. Kosslyn and G. Wayne Miller propose a way of thinking about the brain in which the bottom part of the brain primarily processes input from the senses while the top part devises and carries out plans of action.

"We have argued that a person's habitual way of thinking does arise from the workings of two protions of the brain, the top and the bottom," they explain. "And we have argiued that simple dichotomies cannot adequately explain what these portions do: They must be viewed as systems - and systems that work together."

Top Brain, Bottom Brain
Surprising Insights into How You Think
by Stephen M. Kosslyn and G. Wayne Miller
Simon & Schuster, 2013

The Book Stall
Outrider Reading Group
Science Writing
Artwork: Brain by Mark Allen Miller

Top Brain, Bottom Brain

Neuroscientist Stephen Kosslyn, founding dean of the Minerva Schools higher education project in San Francisco, proposes a new theory of how the brain functions suggesting a top/bottom rather than a right/left model of thinking.

The Theory of Cognitive Modes, as he calls it, suggests that the bottom part of the brain primarily processes input from the senses while the top part devises and carries out plans of action. While we use both parts of the brain at all times, most of us rely on one brain system more often than the other.

"The degree to which you tend to use each system will affect your thoughts, feelings, and behavior in profound ways," Kosslyn explains.

Together with co-author G. Wayne Mille, Kosslyn debunks the dominant left-brain/right-brain theory of cognition that's been popular for half a century and introduces this new hypothesis in chapters that explain its scientific foundations and detail the four basic cognitive modes - Mover, Perceiver, Stimulator, Adaptor - that appear to underlie our thoughts and behaviors.

Top Brain, Bottom Brain

Surprising Insights into How You Think

by Stephen M. Kosslyn and G. Wayne Miller

Simon & Schuster, 2013

Second Nature
Outrider Reading Group
Science Writing