January 2009
28 posts
“The question of the meaning of life is, as the Buddha taught, not edifying. One...”
– Irvin Yalom
How Google Is Making Us Smarter (Discover... →
More significantly, the ominous warnings feed on a popular misconception of how the mind works. We tend to think of the mind as separated from the world; we imagine information trickling into our senses and reaching our isolated minds, which then turn that information into a detailed picture of reality. The Internet and iPhones seem to be crashing the gate of the mind, taking over its natural work...
Books on Irrational Decision-Making →
These books on irrational decision-making are eminently lucid, says Jonah Lehrer.
Goodtherapy.org →
Find a good therapist in your area or explore healthy counseling in general
“If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or...”
– William James (an incredible man with a brilliant mind, often considered the ‘father of modern psychology’)
“Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me.”
– Sigmund Freud
“If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”
– Abraham Maslow
“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is...”
– James Baldwin
“The diabolical thing about melancholy is not that it makes you ill but that it...”
– Hermann Hesse
OCD Screening Quiz (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) →
This is a screening measure to help you determine whether you might have an obsessive-compulsive disorder that needs professional attention. This screening measure is not designed to make a diagnosis of a disorder or take the place of a professional diagnosis or consultation.
Brave, Stupid and Curious: Dangerous Psychology... →
re: DFW and the last post
A few people have wondered where the David Foster Wallace text that I posted last night was excerpted from. Well, in case you haven’t already gone and figured it out, it comes from his now semi-legendary commencement speech at Kenyon College on May 21, 2005, a speech to match any address Vonnegut has ever given, in terms of intelligence, wisdom, humor, and humanity.
You can read the entire...
David Foster Wallace explains, essentially, the...
“The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default...
“Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and...”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us...”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Radiolab: Diagnosis →
In this hour on Diagnosis, we’ll walk into one situation after another and discover that something is not right here. Something’s not right with my pancreas, what do I do? Something’s not right with my son, what do I do? Something’s not right with the phrase “something’s not right.” What? You’ll see.
'Tetris' could help prevent traumatic flashbacks →
The new study takes advantage of the fact that the shape arranging involved in the game Tetris requires the same visuo-spatial mental resources as flashbacks, together with the fact that new memories are known to be fragile for up to six hours before becoming fully consolidated.
“What is to give light must endure burning.”
– Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an...”
– John Keats
Cognitive Daily: Music, art, and the perception of... →
The Mystery of Borderline Personality Disorder... →
Borderlines are the patients psychologists fear most. As many as 75% hurt themselves, and approximately 10% commit suicide — an extraordinarily high suicide rate (by comparison, the suicide rate for mood disorders is about 6%). Borderline patients seem to have no internal governor; they are capable of deep love and profound rage almost simultaneously. They are powerfully connected to the people...
“This is very important — to take leisure time. Pace is the essence....”
– Charles Bukowski
weather as a barrier
After having to cancel at least 3/4’s of my clients over the past two weeks due to snow/ice and road conditions, not to mention the holidays themselves - for, depressing a time as Christmas may be, no one actually wants to be in a therapy session on Christmas eve - I had to cancel all my clients this afternoon due to massive rain and flooding in and around Western Washington.
I’m...
“…for we are all dreadfully cracked about the head and sadly need mending.”
– Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Agony and ecstasy: Using MDMA (ecstasy) to assist... →
Twenty patients with PTSD who had resisted standard treatments were given an experimental drug in combination with psychotherapy. After just two sessions all of them reported dramatic improvement. The compound, methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA, is not new. Known as Ecstasy, it is illegal nearly everywhere…
…The patients who received MDMA showed statistically significant...
A Human Life is Not a Problem to be Solved →