Psychology is an academic and applied discipline that involves the scientific study of human or animal mental functions and behaviors.
Over the Christmas holidays I’ve been doing a fair amount of training in preparation for the race I’ve entered. Despite getting up before dawn during my holidays, I found I was highly motivated, full of energy and putting in some personal bests on various rides and runs. That stopped on Monday, my first day back in the office.Read More »Mind over Matter – How our mood influences our immune system
Traditional Eastern medicine can be traced back thousands of years; well before the advent of science as we know it – many of the ideas found across Asia can be traced back to the Upanishads of around 1200 to 900 BCE. Rather than cast these ideas aside because they do not conform to the Western idea of science, I think of them as mechanisms for explaining patterns that were observed over hundreds if not thousands of years, but have yet to be explained in Western terms.Read More »Yoga, Qigiong and PsychoNeuroImmunology
Nassim Nicholas Taleb describes his book, “The Black Swan“, as a book about confirmation bias. The black swan is very rare, and if you had never seen nor heard of a black swan you might be inclined to say that they do not exist. In an effort to make sense of the world, we create schema, or mental images of how things are (and should be). Furthermore, we tend to search for information that confirms our schema. Let’s say that my schemata for dogs is that dogs are vicious creatures liable to attack at any time, then I am probably going to attend information that confirms my prior belief. For instance, when reading the newspaper, I would attend to an article about a dog attack a small child, but ignore one about a dog saving a child from drowning. You see, attending to any information that runs counter to my dog schemata, then I would create what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance”, and dissonance creates a feeling of unease.Read More »The psychology of goal setting
I have been reading Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now” I was wondering how I could begin to introduce some of my thoughts on the book to my kungfu class. I then thought to ask a simple question; “where are you now?”
Tolle differentiates between clock time and psychological time. I was beginning to wonder, if we are always in the “now” what happens to goal setting. He places goal setting in “clock time”. Remember when you asked me the question about happiness and I answered “when I am …”, I was in psychological time, and I have been living in the “future”. I remember saying to a friend that I missed 15 years of my life because I was always thinking about “when I get … then …”. I had anchored happiness to an ego need (to have my masters degree, or to own a BMW Z4 and so on).Read More »Where are you now?
Are we just a collection of sparking neural messages whizzing about our brains? It might be disturbing for some to consider that our attitudes and beliefs, our thoughts and feelings are the result of a complex mix of neural connections and chemicals that work together to construct our unique view of the world. Or are we more than that?Read More »Just a collection of sparking neurons?