There’s been quite a drive to reduce human beings to purposeless, temporary clusters of molecules. I don’t buy into it. For me, to understand what it is to be human involves taking on board consciousness, an inescapable subjective experience of a self, the interconnectedness of a person with others and with the rest of the [...]
Archive for the ‘psychology’ Category
The magic of being human
Posted in from the living room, from the reading room, life, psychology on April 12, 2012 | 5 Comments »
A passion for living
Posted in from the dark room, perception, photography, psychology, tagged vfs on March 20, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
To live is so startling, it leaves but little room for other occupations….[Emily Dickinson] …..gazing through one of my kaleidoscopes – enjoying this present moment
Learning to trust your feelings
Posted in from the living room, life, psychology, science, tagged vfs on March 4, 2012 | 1 Comment »
When you stop to think about it, there’s an awful lot going on inside your brain that’s nothing to do with thinking. Well, when I say nothing to do with thinking, I don’t exactly mean that….after all, everything is connected to everything else in there. What I mean is that conscious thought and reasoning is [...]
Positive emotions
Posted in from the living room, health, life, personal growth, psychology on February 12, 2012 | 3 Comments »
I’ve been collecting positive emotions recently. The Heartmath technique involves re-creating the heart felt, positive feelings you experienced in your life. So what are these heart felt, positive emotions? I’ve read a number of authors who write about positive emotions – from the perspectives of positive psychology, Heartmath itself, neurobiologists, mindfulness practitioners and so on. [...]
What lies beneath?
Posted in from the dark room, from the living room, personal growth, photography, psychology, tagged discovery of the unconscious, psyches on January 30, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
The buildings opposite me fell down in the storms recently. At the weekend, I looked out of my window at the site which is now being cleared and saw this…..looks like the top of a tree breaking through the puddle and the ice! Just the way my mind works, I guess, but I’ve been [...]
Love from the beginning
Posted in from the consulting room, from the reading room, health, neuroscience, psychology on December 19, 2011 | 2 Comments »
Last year I studies Interpersonal Neurobiology with Dan Siegel, whose book, Mindsight, I highly recommend. He teaches around the essential triad of brain, mind and relationships and understanding the links between these three turns out to be tremendously illuminating. On the relationship front, Dan draws on his training in attachment theory and demonstrates the links [...]
Telling a new story
Posted in from the consulting room, health, psychology on October 18, 2011 | 4 Comments »
Deric Bownds highlights the conclusions of an interesting book about psychological change – “Timothy Wilson’s new book “Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change.” The part which caught my eye was the conclusion – Wilson uses the thought-provoking metaphor of “story editing” to describe the ingredient common to many of the successful interventions he [...]
The importance of stories – fictional stories
Posted in books, creativity, education, from the living room, from the reading room, life, narrative, psychology, writing on September 11, 2011 | 1 Comment »
I’m a great fan of stories. In fact, I think we understand ourselves and others by using narrative, and the central way in which I work as a doctor is to hear people’s stories, and help them to change them from stories of being stuck or in chaos, to stories of flow, and flourishing and [...]
Sensation
Posted in from the consulting room, health, life, perception, psychology on August 25, 2011 | 2 Comments »
I got thinking about sensations the other day. Patients talk to me every day about their sensations – pain, dizziness, nausea, itch, numbness and so on. The medical concept of such sensations is “symptoms”. Interestingly, not a single one of these symptoms are objective. Nobody can know them, experience them or measure them apart from [...]
Wiping your memories
Posted in from the reading room, health, narrative, psychology on August 23, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
One of my favourite lines from Bob Seeger is “I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then”. However, I was a little startled by a piece in the “i” newspaper last week about drugs which can wipe out memory. Here’s a jpeg of the bit of the article which really took me [...]
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