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Showing posts from September, 2012

The Intertwined Brain

‘what we are born with is what worked best for the last 50,000 human generations’ (Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence , p5)   In Emotional Intelligence Goleman discusses what happens when ‘passions overwhelm reason.’ Our reactions to the world around us have evolved over time. These ‘automatic reactions’ are extremely important in dangerous situations. Reactions that don’t always make logical sense, such as the two parents that gave up their lives to rescue their daughter in a train crash; but it could be argued biological and emotional sense. They saved her to protect their genes, as Dawkins might say, and the way this decision was reached was through love. Goleman called emotions ‘impulses to act’, determined by biological and cultural acts: unconsciously when you feel tenderness or love towards a person the body undergoes a relaxation response ‘a general state of calm and contentment’; and how we display this emotion is also determined by our culture. In this...

Ebook Publication

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Here is a link to my ebook:- Temptation and Mozarella published by Thistleinthekiss (Edinburgh).

The Inner Library

‘We carry with us every story we have ever heard and every story we have ever lived, filed away at some deep place in our memory. We carry most of those stories unread, as it were, until we have grown the capacity or the readiness to read them. When that happens they may come back to us filled with unexpected meaning.’ (Rachel Remen, Kitchen Table Wisdom , xli) Remen’s words touch on the idea of an ‘inner library’ which is expressed in Arthur W. Frank’s book, Letting Stories Breathe a Socio-narratology . They articulate a similar notion, that we may carry the kernel of a story with us for a long time until something triggers its memory and in doing so uncovers new meaning. When the right conditions prevent themselves old ideas we have carried with us but never really understood, acknowledged, or accepted, take root; blossoming into a new series of neural networks that can forever altar the idea of who we are. Story and the human brain have grown together over a long time. In our ...