WE ARE KNOWMADS
A blogsite for liquid navigators
What’s behind intuition? Busting the myth about ‘activating’ it
“I would like to point out that my intuitive idea about intuition relies on the fact that it is about experience. For example, you know that your brother is in love with comic books. —>You secretly steal one of them from his shelf. —>You read it while sipping a glass of orange juice in your bed.—> Balls the cat jumps out in the bed and spills the orange juice over your pyjama and the comic book. Then you intuitively know your brother will be mad at you even if he’s not there at the moment to react in any given way and immediately. That’s why I think it comes from experience: the experience that your brother is angry when you take one of his comic books and ruin it.”
What a weekend, man
I don’t know if you have experienced this situation in the past.
This story begins with something really unusual: a whiskey shot.
One second of life (or two)
At the intersection between psychiatry and oncology, there is a branch of clinical practice known as psycho-oncology. It involves health professionals from medicine, psychology, nursing, and many others.
You may well have had the opportunity to have met or been treated by one of them, just because cancer and mental health go hand in hand.
Spaces for brain restoration: reserve and resilience
Why do some people who lived through war, abuse or terrible loss overcome these situations, becoming stronger? In physics, a material is resilient when deformed by a force, recovering after its original shape. In recent years, neuroscientists have realized that the brain behaves similarly.
For different reasons, our brain can react and restructure itself in traumatic situations, although the 'restoration' capacity varies across the population. The scientific community has focused on this capacity in the last decade to understand it, delve into its mechanisms, and try to find out how to enhance it.
On brain balance, overthinking, attention, and a basin
For quite a while I have been thinking about different ideas, such as the balance of the brain, the thoughts that go round and round and the capacity to pay attention. A few days ago I woke up with a need to write about all this. Right after sending the kids to school, I started typing on the computer to see if anything made sense.
After spending some time banging on the keyboard, I realised that all these thoughts needed to come out, perhaps to restore the balance. This article is about biology, brain homeostasis, thoughts, attention and tailoring a story, with a metaphor included.
Dopamine, learning and motivation: Why does this molecule drive our life forward?
Remember Pavlov and his dogs? This researcher, who left theology for medicine and physiology, conducted repeated pairings in which an initially neutral stimulus, such as a bell, accompanied the dogs’ food. He observed that after such training, the animals salivated at the sound of the bell, even if presented with no food.
Conditioning was born, with important implications for the development of behaviourism. The conditioned response, which is a type of learning, represents a nice example to understand how and why many species use experience to learn and to predict reward. And yes, more or less consciously, we are constantly predicting and 'hunting' rewards.