How do we regulate our emotions? The answer is surprisingly simple: by thinking about them. The prefrontal cortex allows each of us to contemplate his or her own mind, a talent psychologists call metacognition. We know when we are angry; every emotional state comes with self-awareness attached, so that an individual can try to figure out why he's feeling what he's feeling. If the particular feeling makes no sense–if the amygdala is simply responding to a loss frame, for example–then it can be discounted. The prefrontal cortex can deliberately choose to ignore the emotional brain. Jonah Lehrer
One of the basic Sufi needs is to enable people to see themselves as they really are.
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Idries Shah
The Sufis regard systems which treat everyone alike as mechanical and degenerate.
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Idries Shah
All literature, or most literature, is about sex." (A. Burgess)
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Blanche Bachelar
Religious man was born to be saved, psychological man is born to be pleased.
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Philip Rieff
No matter what I said they insisted on thinking of God as something outside themselves. Something that yearns to take every indolent moron to His breast and comfort him. The notion that the effort has to be their own .. . and that the trouble...
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Robert A. Heinlein
More Quotes By Jonah Lehrer
Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true.
How do we regulate our emotions? The answer is surprisingly simple: by thinking about them. The prefrontal cortex allows each of us to contemplate his or her own mind, a talent psychologists call metacognition. We know when we are angry; every emotional state comes with...
A few years ago, Tor Wager, a neuroscientist at Columbia University, wanted to figure out why placebos were so effective. His experiment was brutally straightforward: he gave college students electric shocks while they were stuck in an f M R I machine. (The subjects were...
Every creative story is different. And every creative story is the same. There was nothing. Now there is something. It's almost like magic.
Even when alternative views are clearly wrong, being exposed to them still expands our creative potential. In a way, the power of dissent is the power of surprise. After hearing someone shout out an errant answer, we work to understand it, which causes us to...
