Category: psychology

  • Confabulation, Math, and Self-Knowledge

    As with many other people, I often find myself denigrating things that I consider ridiculous, and on my best days I’ll catch myself and ask myself ‘ok, but *why* is that ridiculous…?’. There’s that weird experience of being in two places at once, the Brian that’s experiencing the ridiculous and seeing it as the silliness…

  • Shower Thoughts

    I love showers. Hot showers. Just one tiny turn off from pain, so it’s just hitting the edge. Because when the shower hits that point, my brain has to focus on the most prominent pain, and turns off the rest, so it’s only in the shower that my body stops hurting. It’s glorious. It also lets…

  • Anxiety, an Internal Struggle

    I wish I understood the mechanisms of anxiety, at least within myself. I believe, perhaps mistakenly, that understanding these mechanisms would make it easier to resolve them, to overcome them. So that they’d stop ruling my life. I had intended to leave my apartment about 5 hours ago to go get a haircut. It still…

  • The Dangerous Seductiveness of Rage

    I’ve spent most of my life dealing with ‘rage’ issues. I’ve never been physically violent, but verbal vitriol, especially online, has been an issue in the past (and something that I continue to work on, of course). So I know of what I speak when I talk about the seductiveness of rage, and the appeal…

  • Beliefs Don’t Change in “Real-Time”

    An acquaintance of mine sent me a link to a conversation between Dan Dennett and Sam Harris, wherein Dennett attempts to explain the holes in Harris’s puerile arguments against the concept of “free will”. In any case, this particular post isn’t about Harris, but a particular point he reiterates repeatedly: that we can (and should)…

  • Anxiety and Hunger

    Here’s a thing that I attribute to my anxiety, but perhaps other people (not suffering from anxiety) deal with it too. I’ll get engrossed in reading articles/playing games that time passes and I get hungry. Not “omfg, I’m going to die if I don’t eat”-hungry, but the pangs aren’t minor. Noticing them, bringing them into…

  • Laundry and Anxiety

    I did laundry today. I can appreciate that this seems like a minor thing. ‘Seriously, Brian? Posting about doing laundry? Ffs…..’ My anxiety has been pretty bad the last couple of weeks. The threat of job loss hanging over my head, alongside dealing with incompetent and unprofessional HR staff (I know, I know, ‘HR staff’…

  • Rhetoric and Context

    How we argue with people sends signals to those around us. We are socially signalling the kind of person we are, and giving them cues as to whether or not they want to engage with us. This is, I think, an important point in rhetoric and persuasion, and can determine how we approach an argument. We…

  • Shaka, When the Walls Fell

    I have to admit, I’m a life-long fan of Star Trek. I grew up watching reruns of The Original Series, went through Secondary School (High School) with Picard in The Next Generation, thoroughly enjoyed the myth-building in Deep Space Nine, and wound down with Janeway in Voyager. We shall not speak of Enterprise here… Now,…

  • Our Brain is a Car

    I’m going to try to lay out what my personal ‘Philosophy of Mind ‘ is. Most of this has been hacked together from a mix of Psychology and Philosophy classes, years of reading articles, and my own subjective experience. As such, it’s going to be fairly light on links and references. On the other hand,…