Das Merken:

"Gedächtnisinhalte sind umso besser, je eingehender wir uns Gedanken über neue Informationen machen und sie mit schon vorhandenem Wissen verknüpfen, und zwar schon beim Abspeichern der Information."

Martin Korte

"Learning always builds on a store of prior knowledge. We interpret and remember events by building connections to what we already know."

Brown, Roediger, McDaniel

Lernen im Lebensalltag:

"Im normalen Lebensalltag ist Lernen ein automatisches Nebenprodukt der Gedanken, die wir uns über ein erlebtes Ereignis machen."

Martin Korte

Selbstkontrolle:

Selbstkontrolle lässt sich erhöhen, indem impulsiven Entscheidungen gegensteuert wird. Das Gegensteuern besteht beispielsweise darin, indem man sich bei diversen Entscheidungsvorgängen bewusst Zeit nimmt bzw. indem man sich bei diversen Entscheidungsvorgängen bewusst Zeit lässt.

Langsames Denken ist gegebenenfalls effektiver als rasches impulsives Denken, da in einem rasch-impulsiven Gedankengang mit höherer Wahrscheinlichkeit Entscheidungsfehler akkumulieren. Insofern macht es gegebenenfalls Sinn, beim Nachdenken über ein komplizierteres Problem das Denken bewusst abzubremsen, um durch einen gewissen Verlust an Geschwindigkeit an Gründlichkeit und Akkuratheit zu gewinnen.

Gedankengänge:

Gedankengänge beruhen auf Ausleseprozessen. Von diversen Denkinhalten, die uns im Rahmen eines Gedankengangs zu Bewusstsein kommen könnten, gelangt schließlich nur eine kleine Auslese in den Arbeitsspeicher.

Evolutionary Psychiatry: Affective Disorders

Evolutionary Psychiatry, Anthony Stevens & John Price, 2000
http://meinnaturwissenschaftsblog.blogspot.co.at/2017/12/affective-disorders.html

Can depression, anxiety and somatization be understood as appeasement displays?

John S. Price, Russell Gardner Jr., Mark Erickson, 2004

http://meinnaturwissenschaftsblog.blogspot.co.at/2017/12/can-depression-anxiety-and-somatization.html

Konzentration im Denken:

Will man sein Denken besser strukturieren und einer gewissen Sprunghaftigkeit im Denken gegensteuern, scheint es hilfreich, sich eine überschaubare Anzahl an Themen zu suchen, in die man sich regelrecht verbeißt. Die Einschränkung gibt dem Denken schließlich mehr Durchschlagkraft.

Mußestunden:

Stunden, in denen wir völlig frei über unsere Zeit verfügen können, und nicht von äußeren oder inneren Zwängen zu gewissen Tätigkeiten genötigt werden.

Insofern lässt sich behaupten, dass sich Mußestunden mit dem Aufkommen einer Suchterkrankung gegebenenfalls drastisch reduzieren.

Das Streben nach mittlerer Performance:

Zwar kann jemand im Vergleich zu einer Population oder Bevölkerung auf einem bestimmten Gebiet relativ konstant Top-Performance erbringen, doch macht es wenig Sinn, permanent nach persönlicher Top-Performance zu streben. Es ist unmöglich ständig Leistungen zu erbringen, die z.B. über der persönlichen 95sten Performance-Perzentile liegen. Das Streben danach wird schlichtweg zu Frustration führen. Die Hälfte der Leistungen wird oberhalb, die andere Hälfte der Leistungen wird unterhalb des persönlichen Performance-Medians liegen. Generell ist es sinnvoller, anstatt die Latte utopisch hoch zu legen, sich in diversen Situationen darauf auszurichten, mittlere Performance zu erbringen. Längerfristiges Ziel sollte es sein, nicht die naturgegebene Streuung der Leistungen zu ignorieren, sondern das gesamte Leistungsspektrum zu heben.

Grooming:

"In short, self-grooming probably is about hygiene and only hygiene, whereas social grooming seems to have more to do with relationships. The principal evidence to support that claim comes from two facts. One is that social grooming time correlates strongly with social group size (Fig. 4), a finding that has also been replicated for allopreening in birds (Radford and Du Plessis, 2008). Second, grooming is far from random within social groups: grooming partnerships tend to be consistent as well as persistent through time."

RIM Dunbar, The social role of touch in humans and primates: Behavioural function and neurobiological mechanisms

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"In fact, it seems that physical touch has emotional and social connotations that often far outweigh anything that can be expressed in language (Burgoon, 1991; Burgoon et al., 1992; Bottoroff, 1993; Dunbar, 2004). Touch can often convey the real meaning or intention of an interaction in a way that the accompanying speech simply cannot do. To coin a phrase, a touch is worth a thousand words."

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"Although the kinds of relationships found in primates clearly impose a significant cognitive demand, it is nonetheless equally clear that the cognitive dimension does not provide a complete explanation of what is involved in such relationships (Dunbar, in press). Indeed, our own experience of human relationships is that more is involved than just strategic thinking. Work on the social psychology of human friendships over the past decade or so suggests that relationships involve two independent dimensions that are usually described as ‘‘behaving close’’ and ‘‘feeling close’’ (Aron et al., 1992; Depue and Morrone-Strupinsky, 2005). Behaving close clearly accords with the suggestion that pairbonds rely on close behavioural coordination. In contrast, feeling close seems to point to something at the emotional level that is less easy to define because we ourselves often have difficulty verbalizing about it: it is something that quite literally we feel rather than cognize about (Dunbar, in press). It is in respect of this second component that grooming seems to play such a crucial role in primates."

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"a factor analysis of six different measures of closeness, including the RCI, identified a two-factor model whose elements were labelled ‘feeling close’ and ‘behaving close’(Aron et al. 1992). Aron et al. argued that there are two underlying types of closeness: subjective closeness (‘feeling close’) and an objective closeness (‘behaving close’). These do not necessarily bear a close relation to each other: you may have frequent interactions with individuals whom you are not emotionally close to (e.g. work colleagues) and, equally, feel emotionally close to individuals whom you do not interact with very often (e.g. immediate family or very close friends who live far away)."

Mental imagery:

"In 1883 [Galton] published a book, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development[.] Among [other] things, the book contained a long section on "mental imagery," the first study of this kind anybody had ever done. What Galton was after was very simple. He wanted to know what kind of pictures people carried in their heads, and so he wrote to a number of his scientific friends and asked what they saw when they thought of an object. ("Suppose it is your breakfast table as you sat down to it this morning.") The result of this survey flabbergasted Galton. Most of his friends wrote back that they didn't see anything and asked what in the world he was talking about. After this complete letdown by his fellow scientists, the bewildered Galton turned to "persons whom I met in general society." They made him feel much better.

...

After some more research, Galton found that pictures in the mind's eye are quite common among most people, but highly uncommon among scientists and abstract thinkers in general. He concluded that deep thinkers consider mental pictures a nuisance and get rid of all this imagery by disuse."

Rudolf Flesch

"So here is your definition of thinking: It is the manipulation of memories."

Rudolf Flesch

"Before considering whether individuals with ASD show abnormalities in learning, a fundamental question that must be considered is whether positive reinforcers (rewards) such as food or social stimuli contain the same motivational value for individuals with ASD as they do for typically developing individuals."

[Source]

"The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. The four twentieth century writers whose work is most responsible for it are probably Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and the poet Dylan Thomas. They are the writers who largely formed our vision of an existential English-speaking wasteland where people have been cut off from one another and live in an atmosphere of emotional strangulation and despair."

Stephen King

Details and Theories:

"He has the same attitude toward chemistry that I do. It is the beauty of the details rather than any overarching theory. In that way it's very different from physics."

"I read a lot of biology and particularly the huge Science of Life book which is 1600 pages long by Wells, Huxley and Wells. That's a marvelous book. It has the whole of biology in one volume.  And again it's all about details and not about theory."

Freeman Dyson

"Although it was such a barbaric place, the library was good, and I could always escape to the library."

Freeman Dyson

Laughter

Keith Johnstone, Impro for Storytellers:

"Laughter is a great help in making forbidden ideas so acceptable that the students have no need to snap back into numbness. The best trick I know for releasing the imagination is to persuade the students that their imaginations have nothing to do with them."

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Ein anderer Gedanke von Johnstone: Gerade beim Improvisieren fällt vieles dann besonders schlecht aus, wenn sich der Improvisierende allzu sehr bemüht.

Vielleicht verhält es sich ja folgendermaßen: Wenn man z.B. Geschichten schreiben will, aber keine Übung darin hat, sollte man sich einfach vornehmen, ein paar schlechte bis mittelmäßige Geschichten zu schreiben. Die ersten Geschichten werden mit hoher Wahrscheinlichkeit keine Meisterwerke werden. Die Bemühung aber, sogleich "perfekte Geschichten" zu schreiben, wäre mit hoher Kraftanstrengung verbunden, und würde dennoch zu nahezu sicheren Misserfolgen führen.

Keith Johnstone:

>An artist who is inspired is being obvious. He's not making any decisions, he's not weighing one idea against another. He's accepting his first thoughts. How else could Dostoyevsky have dictated one novel in the morning and one in the afternoon for three weeks in order to fulfil his contracts? If you consider the volume of work produced by Bach then you get some idea of his fluency (and we've lost half of it), yet a lot of his time was spent rehearsing, and teaching Latin to the choirboys. According to Louis Schlosser, Beethoven said: 'You ask me where I get my ideas? That I can't say with any certainty. They come unbidden, directly, I could grasp them with my hands.' Mozart said of his ideas: 'Whence and how they come, I know not; nor can I force them. Those that please me I retain in the memory, and I am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them.' Later in the same letter he says: 'Why my productions take from my hand that particular form and style that makes them Mozartish, and different from the works of other composers, is probably owing to the same cause which renders my nose so large or so aquiline, or in short, makes it Mozart's, and different from those of other people. For I really do not study or aim at any originality.'<

>Students need a 'guru' who 'gives permission' to allow forbidden thoughts into their consciousness. A 'guru' doesn't necessarily teach at all. Some remain speechless for years, others communicate very cryptically. All reassure by example. They are people who have been into the forbidden areas and who have survived unscathed. I react playfully with my students, while showing them that there are just as many dead nuns or chocolate scorpions inside my head as there are in anybody's, yet I interact very smoothly and sanely. It's no good telling the student that he isn't to be held responsible for the content of his imagination, he needs a teacher who is living proof that the monsters are not real, and that the imagination will not destroy you.<

Lebewesen:

An sich ist es bemerkenswert, von  so einer großen Fülle von Phänomenen umgeben zu sein, von denen sich ein jedes um die eigene Fortexistenz und Vervielfältigung kümmert.

Das Schöne, das Wahre, das Gute:

Im Leben von Menschen gewinnt häufig die Idee des Guten zum ersten Mal tieferen Inhalt, wenn der Mensch seine erste nähere Bekanntschaft mit einem hochgradig konstruktiven Menschen macht. Die Idee des Schönen, wenn der Mensch ein Objekt oder Objekte findet, an denen er sich regelrecht nicht mehr satt sehen kann. Die Idee des Wahren, wenn er erstmalig ein Thema oder Themen findet, über die er sich nicht genug informieren, über die er regelrecht permanent nachdenken kann.

Der Wille:

Ein wichtiges Merkmal, das den Menschen von anderen Tieren unterscheidet, ist seine Fähigkeit, etwas bewusst-explizit zu wollen. Wenn auch unterschiedliche Menschen in unterschiedlichen Ausmaßen von diesem Vermögen Gebrauch machen, ist der menschliche Wille dennoch dadurch charakterisiert, dass er sich prinzipiell ausformulieren lässt. Ein ausformuliertes Wollen bringt, verglichen mit einem diffusen Streben, den Vorteil mit sich,  dass es sich verhältnismäßig effektiv gegen eine Vielzahl von in der Zeit-Dimension auftretenden Widerständen verwirklichen lässt.

Willensstärke:

Wenn man etwas tun will, werden sich des öfteren Impulse einstellen, anstatt dessen etwas anderes zu tun, und also die gewollte Handlung nicht auszuführen. Willensstärke besteht nun darin, die gewollte Handlung dennoch zu tun.

Wenn man etwas Bestimmtes nicht tun will, werden sich gegebenenfalls Impulse einstellen, die nicht-gewollte Handlung dennoch zu tun. Willensstärke besteht nun darin, diesen Impulsen nicht Folge zu leisten, und also die nicht-gewollte Handlung nicht zu tun.

Intelligenz als die Fähigkeit zum Schlussfolgern:

Menschen unterscheiden sich darin, wie effektiv sie Schlüsse ziehen. Wird eine Person beispielsweise regelmäßig mit dem Phänomen A konfrontiert, so wird sie gegebenenfalls induktiv eine Beziehung zwischen dem Phänomen A und dem Phänomen B annehmen oder feststellen. Beobachtet sie nun im konkreten Fall das Phänomen A, und weiß sie um den Zusammenhang zwischen den Phänomenen A und B, kann sie dieses Wissen dazu verwerten, um deduktiv schlussfolgernd auf die konkrete Beschaffenheit des Phänomens B zu schließen bzw. die konkrete Beschaffenheit des Phänomens B einzugrenzen.

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Z.B.: Empirisch können wir für Menschen eine Beziehung zwischen Körperhöhe und Körpermasse feststellen und quantifizieren. Ist uns nun, im konkreten Fall, die Körperhöhe einer Person bekannt, können wir dieses Wissen verwerten, um eine Vermutung bezüglich der Körpermasse dieser Person aufzustellen.

>The problems of inner-city schools are g related and epitomize what Humphreys has referred to as inadequate learning syndrome, or ILS. Observing educators' attempts to improve learning in inner-city schools, Maeroff noted: "[T]here is a tendency to revel delusions of improvement. Order may be restored, but oppression reigns. Test scores may rise, but concepts remain ungrasped. Facts may be memorized, but students cannot apply them in solving problems. Dropouts may be kept in school, but the diplomas they receive are not backed by skills and knowledge".<

The g factor, Arthur R. Jensen

Human Male Mating Strategies: I. Courtship Tactics of the "Quality" and "Quantity" Alternatives

Human Male Mating Strategies: I. Courtship Tactics of the "Quality" and "Quantity" Alternatives
Linda R. Hirsch and Luci Paul


Abstract

Human males may adopt the "quality" strategy, a long-term pair bond with considerable paternal investment, or the "quantity" reproductive strategy, short-term pair bonds with little paternal investment. We hypothesized that (1) the two strategies require different courtship tactics, which can be derived from their different goals, and (2) the behavior used by quality courters is perceived as honest while the quantity strategist is of. ten exploitative. Act nominations of 79 subjects and the investigators generated a set of 71 dating behaviors. Sixty-four other subjects classified each behavior by the theoretically derived tactics. Fifty-four males rated the likelihood of usage of each behavior by a man interested in marriage (quality courter) and by men interested in sexual relationships (quantity courters) who typically deceive, manipulate, or coerce women. Fiftythree other males rated each behavior on ethical scales of honesty, deception, manipulation, and coercion. Both kinds of ratings indicated that (1) tactics of quality courtship involve honest advertisement through mutual assessment, resource expenditure, and a delay in sexual relations, and (2) tactics of quantity courtship involve indirect or direct threats, psychological pressure, and talking about sex. Ethical ratings and the range of behaviors likely to be used by quality and quantity courters confirmed the hypothesis about ethical perceptions of the two strategies and suggested that quantity courters are opportunistic as well as exploitative.

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Tactics of the quality strategy:

As hypothesized, the tactics associated with the quality strategy permit mutual evaluation and thus probably involve honest advertisement. Interacting on dates with family and friends was most clearly associated with quality courtship. All five instances of this tactic were judged as highly honest, not at all exploitative, and more likely to be used by a man interested in marriage. Discussing values and goals was also a quality tactic. Four of the twelve behaviors in this tactic were judged as highly honest, not exploitative, and more likely to be used by the quality courter. Three of them, asking if she wants children, talking about plans and goals, and talking about the meaning of life, allow self-disclosure and mutual evaluation of expectations for long term. The other behavior, wanting a friendship before sex, expresses a willingness to wait before having sexual relations. In addition, five relatively honest behaviors belonged to this tactic. Some instances were not associated with the quality strategy. They do not appear to provide strong proof that the man is, in fact, a quality courter. For example, "saying he wants to marry her" on just the second date expresses a proximate goal of the quality courter but conflicts with the slow pace required of the quality courter if he is to evaluate her and allow her to evaluate him. Resource expenditure was associated with the quality strategy, as predicted. Expenditures of time, energy, or money are costly signals that tend to be used only by high-quality individuals (e.g., Grafen 1990; Zahavi 1975). In the human context, they help to validate commitment to the relationship. Instances of this tactic were attributed to quality courters and were considered categorically or relatively honest. No instance of resource expenditure was attributed to the quantity courter, and no instance qualified as either categorically or relatively exploitative. Other work associates material resource display with male quality strategists (Cashdan 1993; Shields and Shields 1983). However, effort and time appeared as prominently in quality courter behaviors as did monetary expenditure. Indeed, Draper (1989) has suggested that the desire to expend resources, rather than the absolute amount expended, may be more important to a woman's choice. One might not expect resource expenditure to so strongly differentiate the two strategies. By definition, quantity strategists expend resources in mating effort; quality strategists expend resources after courtship in parental investment. However, the quality courter needs to provide costly signals to indicate that they are reliable while the quantity strategist needs to minimize the cost of mating. In addition, their different goals suggest that the quantity strategist should make his expenditures contingent on sexual relations while the quality strategist should not expect an immediate return on his expenditures. Indeed, quality strategists may be reluctant to begin sexual relations quickly. No behavior that referred to sex, except "wants a friendship before sex" was perceived as likely to be used by the man interested in marriage. Of course, such reluctance behooves any organism planning considerable parental investment (Trivers 1972). Reluctance could be advantageous to the quality courter in several ways. It would promote assessing the female's quality as mate and mother. For a male who is psychologically ready to form a pair bond, rushing into sexual relations might cement an inappropriate pair bond. Second, male reluctance might serve to test female fidelity, a crucial characteristic for males contemplating paternal investment (e.g., Daly et al., 1982). If a woman did not reciprocate the quality courter's reluctance, he should question her choosiness and, therefore, her fidelity and his certainty of paternity. Third, reluctance would promote producing offspring at an optimal time.


Tactics of the quantity strategy:

The quantity strategy was strongly identified with two tactics, threats and sex talk. Some threat behaviors were not obviously coercive. Examples are "saying that everyone else is doing it" and "telling her that he can't control himself and he needs sex or it will hurt him." These behaviors represent a manipulative ploy that imposes psychological costs on the female for rejecting him. Ridicule from her peers or guilt over not fulfilling his need might be more aversive to the female than rejecting him, despite her reluctance. The other tactic, talking about sex, as suggested earlier, may produce sexual arousal. Women are readily aroused by verbal erotic material (Heiman 1975; Kinsey et al. 1953; Steinman et al., 1981), and quantity courters appear to be aware of the fact. Contrary to prediction, the tactics of getting her alone and physical contact were only weakly associated with the quantity strategy. Also, contrary to the prediction that they would be shared tactics, one instance of flattery and a number of instances of promises were attributed to quantity courters. The possibility that promises characterize the courtship of quantity strategists is intriguing. However, there are alternative interpretations. For example, promises made early in a dating relationship may be considered deceptive while promises made later might be considered legitimate. Clearly, more work is needed to fully describe the tactics of a quantity courter. The quantity strategy is probably characterized by opportunism. First, no behavior was eliminated from the repertoire of the exploitative courters. A comment from a subject, that men will do or say anything to get sex from a woman, illustrates the idea. It is similar to Thornhill and Thornhill's (1992) view that all men use a mixture of coercive and noncoercive tactics in courtship. However, this seems to be true of quantity courters but not of quality courters who were considered unlikely to use most of the quantity-courter behaviors. Perhaps, however, these data depend on the particular set of behaviors presented to subjects. For example, if the set had included a number of costly behaviors, they might have been rated as unlikely to be used by quantity courters. Nevertheless, other considerations strengthen the conclusion that quantity courters are opportunistic. First, we attempted to provide a wide range of commonly performed dating behaviors. Second, subjects did not make substantial distinctions between deceptive, manipulative, and coercive styles of quantity courtship. Probably, quantity courters match their behavior to characteristics of each situation and potential partner. Third, the data from the companion study also suggest that quality strategists do not use exploitative, quantity-strategy behaviors whereas quantity strategists may use quality-strategy behavior.


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Indeed, when a long-term mate is sought, men are about as selective as women (Buss and Schmitt 1993; Kenrick et al., 1990 Kenrick et al., 1993; Simpson and Gangestad 1991, 1992). Accordingly, providing for mutual assessment should underlie the tactics of the quality courter. True mutual assessment requires openness and honesty, suggesting that tactics of quality courtship should be perceived as moral. In addition, overlapping interests, as in pair bonds, favor honest communication (e.g., Alexander 1987; Dawkins and Krebs 1978).

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The quantity strategy, maximizing the number of females inseminated while minimizing costs, requires tactics that increase the probability of achieving sexual intercourse. Female reluctance conflicts with that goal. The choosy female who delays her choice or rejects him expends the quantity strategist's resources and limits his ability to mate with other females.

Deception, manipulation, or psychological coercion can gain a mating that, otherwise, the female would avoid. Quantity strategist may mimic high quality or lie about quality or intentions, especially those characteristics that are easy to fake and that can be produced cheaply (Daly and Wilson 1983; Shields and Shields 1983; Tooke and Camire 1991). Manipulative behavior may impair or distort the female's judgments ...

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"choosiness" behooves any individual intending substantial parental investment (Trivers 1972). Thus, the quality courter should not attempt to rush into sexual relations, the quintessential proximate goal of the quantity courter. 

Mating Optimism:

"A period of mating optimism among young adult women may be a regular feature of female psychology. A woman’s reproductive value—hence her chances of marrying upward in the social scale—is at its height when she is young. These odds may favor the type of sexual restraint and concern with sexual reputation that would make finding such a mate more likely. As a woman ages, particularly if she experiences disappointments that suggest she is unlikely to get what she wants, a shift in mating tactics may be expected."

Elisabeth Cashdan

Effects of Paternal Investment on Mate Attraction Strategies

Attracting Mates: Effects of Paternal Investment on Mate Attraction Strategies,

Elisabeth Cashdan, 1993:

Should Women Flaunt or Suppress Their Resources and Competence? Effects of Paternal Investment (Hypothesis la)

If fitness functions for humans are (perhaps after some threshold) downward sloping, it presents females with an interesting dilemma: while a female with abundant resources makes an attractive mate for a male (his fitness will be higher with her, other things equal), it also makes him less likely to invest in her offspring. To attract a male’s initial sexual interest, then, she should emphasize her competence and resources, but to attract post-reproductive investment in her children, she might do better to emphasize her need for male investment-i.e., to suppress her appearance of competence and resources. What is a woman to do? To the extent that she cannot play it both ways (and she may try), her optimal strategy will be influenced both by her own wealth and competitive ability, relative to those of the male, and by her chances of finding an investing mate. If she can expect high male parental investment, and it pays her to try to get it, she should minimize her competence and emphasize her need for male investment. If the men available to her are unlikely to invest (if they are, in the memorable phrases of Draper and Harpending [1982], “Cads” rather than “Dads”), then she should emphasize her own competence. Doing so will not only make her an attractive mate, but will enhance her ability to compete for material resources and invest successfully in her offspring. This argument leads to the following prediction, which will be tested below: females who expect to find investing males (“Dads”) will be more likely to emphasize their need for investment than will females who expect non-investing males (“Cads”). In other words, females who expect Dads will suppress their competence and resources around potential mates, whereas females who expect Cads will be more likely to emphasize their ability to acquire resources.

Should Women Flaunt or Suppress Their Resources and Competence? Effects of Resources (Hypothesis lb) 

The prediction made above ignores the effect of the female’s own wealth and competitive ability, yet this can be expected to affect both the costs of deference and the benefits of male parental investment. A female with little to invest should place a higher value on a given amount of help from a male than a female with abundant resources of her own. Furthermore, to the extent that her ability to acquire resources on her own is limited, the cost of presenting a helpless appearance should be reduced. Other things equal, therefore, a female with abundant resources (or the ability to acquire them on her own) should be less likely to minimize her apparent competence and resources than a female without this ability. Taking these two factors (resources and paternal investment) together, we should expect deferential and self-deprecating behavior to be most prevalent among women with high expectations of paternal investment but few resources. Conversely, such behavior should be least prevalent among women with low expectations of paternal investment who are able to procure resources on their own.

Should Women Flaunt Their Sexuality, or Emphasize Chastity and Fidelity? (Hypothesis 2) 

A female will be better off if her mate invests, irrespective of her own level of investment. However, there are two ways in which she can procure this investment, and she cannot do both at once. One option is to mate with a “Dad,” who will provide resources for an extended period after her children are born (we can call this “post-reproductive investment”). In order to do this, she must emphasize her chastity and fidelity in order to assure her mate that the children are his. If her opportunities for this type of investment are few, however, it will pay her to get what resources she can from as many mates as possible, perhaps in exchange for mating itself (we can call this “pre-reproductive investment”). A reputation for this type of behavior can be expected to lower her perceived mate value among investing males due to decreased confidence of paternity, but might well be worth the cost where investing males are few. If she adopts this strategy, we can expect her to form alliances with as many males as possible, since this will increase her total resources, and to attract these males by flaunting her sexuality. Both pre-reproductive and post-reproductive investment will help a woman enhance her reproductive success, but she cannot easily flaunt both her sexuality and her chastity. The difficulty of doing both at the same time (which would involve using deception to play a “mixed strategy”) are underscored by Gangestad and Simpson’s (1990) finding that personality traits associated with sociosexual behavior are bimodally distributed. The optimal strategy for a woman should depend on her likelihood of obtaining paternal investment. A woman who is unlikely to find much post-reproductive investment does not lose much by not appearing chaste, so such a woman can be expected to seek pre-reproductive investment where the alternative is unlikely to be available. The prediction of this third argument can be summarized as follows: females who expect to find investing males will attract mates by acting chaste and emphasizing their fidelity. Females who expect non-investing males will be more likely to flaunt their sexuality and to engage in more promiscuous sexual behavior. Draper and Harpending (1982) have, similarly, argued that father-absent females, who are less likely to expect much investment from their own mates, will flaunt their sexuality more than father-present females. This relationship has some support in the empirical literature (Hetherington 1972). However, the argument proposed by Draper and Harpending, while also drawing from evolutionary theory, differs from the one proposed here. They suggest that such females reproduce “fast and early,” since such females “may maximize reproductive success by minimizing time loss” (Draper and Harpending 1982, p. 262). I suggest that the aim of this greater sexuality is to obtain prereproductive investment from males, not necessarily to increase number of offspring per se.

Should Men Advertise Their Ability and Willingness to Invest? (Hypothesis 3) 

Females, as the “choosy” sex, will prefer (other things equal) a mate with abundant resources. It will, therefore, pay a male to emphasize his material resources and competitive ability. Buss (1987) has summarized a number of studies showing that females, more than males, value resources in a mate and the personality characteristics associated with acquiring them. He has also shown that this pattern holds true across a wide variety of cultures (Buss 1989). In a study with a U.S. sample. he has shown that males are more likely than females to attract mates by showing off their material resources (Buss 1988). Some females, however, may be more choosy in this regard than others. We might expect that females who expect Dads will be less willing than females who expect Cads to mate without evidence of significant resources. If a male lives in a world where females expect high paternal investment, therefore, he should gain a higher payoff from investing time and energy in acquiring and displaying material resources than a male who can mate without this investment. This suggests the following hypothesis: investing males should be more likely than non-investing males to attract mates by flaunting their resources and their ability to acquire them. Since long-term paternal investment is attractive to females, we might also expect a Dad to emphasize his interest in a serious relationship with his mate, and his willingness to invest in the children. While false advertising in this regard might also help a Cad, the best way to show good intentions is to do some real investing, which is a costly strategy. As with other species where male investment is important to the survival of the offspring, we might expect females to demand actual demonstration of investment (financial and/or emotional) from prospective mates. We might expect, therefore, that Dads would be more likely than Cads to signal their willingness to invest in this fashion.

Should Men Flaunt Their Sexuality, or Emphasize Chastity and Fidelity? (Hypothesis 4) 

Males can attract females by showing their willingness to invest, but in doing so they face their own dilemma: one way a man can convince a woman of his intention to invest is to emphasize his fidelity by not acting promiscuous. Yet this exacts a considerable cost in reproductive opportunities. Will the cost be worth it? Males can enhance their fitness by putting resources into mating or into parental investment, but since resources are limited they cannot maximize both simultaneously. A male without the intention to invest, therefore, should weigh the cost of chastity more heavily. This leads to the prediction that investing males should be less promiscuous than non-investing males, and place greater emphasis on advertising their fidelity. There is a second reason to expect this relationship. Females who do not expect much investment from males, and do not expect their own sons to have significant resources to invest, should be more concerned to mate with a male who has demonstrated his sexual attractiveness to females. To the extent that this sexual attractiveness is heritable, such a male will give her “sexy” sons who themselves will have high reproductive success because of their attractiveness to females. Therefore, a male who either cannot invest much or thinks he can get away without it can be expected to emphasize his sexual attractiveness to females, and his success at getting them. These two arguments, then, lead to the following related predictions: non-investing males should be more promiscuous than investing males, and should flaunt their sexuality and attractiveness to females as a tactic for attracting mates.

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These hypotheses were evaluated among undergraduates by administering questionnaires measuring (a) attitudes toward paternal investment and (b) reported tactics used to attract mates. Hypotheses 2–4 were supported by the data, while hypothesis 1 received only partial support. The mixed results for hypothesis 1 indicate that self-deprecating acts and deferential acts may be signaling different things.

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out:

Richard Feynman:

"All those students are in the class: Now you ask me how should I best teach them? Should I teach them from the point of view of the history of science, from the applications? My theory is that the best way to teach is to have no philosophy, [it] is to be chaotic and [to] confuse it in the sense that you use every possible way of doing it. That's the only way I can see to answer it, so as to catch this guy or that guy on different hooks as you go along, [so] that during the time when the fellow who's interested in history's being bored by the abstract mathematics, on the other hand the fellow who likes the abstractions is being bored another time by the history—if you can do it so you don't bore them all, all the time, perhaps you're better off. I really don't know how to do it. I don't know how to answer this question of different kinds of minds with different kinds of interests—what hooks them on, what makes them interested, how you direct them to become interested. One way is by a kind of force, you have to pass this course, you have to take this examination. It's a very effective way. Many people go through schools that way and it may be a more effective way. I'm sorry, after many, many years of trying to teach and trying all different kinds of methods, I really don't know how to do it."

"I got a kick, when I was a boy, [out] of my father telling me things, so I tried to tell my son things that were interesting about the world. When he was very small we used to rock him to bed, you know, and tell him stories, and I'd make up a story about little people that were about so high [who] would walk along and they would go on picnics and so on and they lived in the ventilator; and they'd go through these woods which had great big long tall blue things like trees, but without leaves and only one stalk, and they had to walk between them and so on; and he'd gradually catch on [that] that was the rug, the nap of the rug, the blue rug, and he loved this game because I would describe all these things from an odd point of view and he liked to hear the stories and we got all kinds of wonderful things—he even went to a moist cave where the wind kept going in and out—it was coming in cool and went out warm and so on. It was inside the dog's nose that they went, and then of course I could tell him all about physiology by this way and so on. He loved that and so I told him lots of stuff, and I enjoyed it because I was telling him stuff that I liked, and we had fun when he would guess what it was and so on. And then I have a daughter and I tried the same thing—well, my daughter's personality was different, she didn't want to hear this story, she wanted the story that was in the book repeated again, and reread to her. She wanted me to read to her, not to make up stories, and it's a different personality. And so if I were to say a very good method for teaching children about science is to make up these stories of the little people, it doesn't work at all on my daughter—it happened to work on my son—okay?"

"Because of the success of science, there is, I think, a kind of pseudoscience. Social science is an example of a science which is not a science; they don't do [things] scientifically, they follow the forms—or you gather data, you do so-and-so and so forth but they don't get any laws, they haven't found out anything. They haven't got anywhere yet—maybe someday they will, but it's not very well developed, but what happens is on an even more mundane level. We get experts on everything that sound like they're sort of scientific experts. They're not scientific, they sit at a typewriter and they make up something like, oh, food grown with, er, fertilizer that's organic is better for you than food grown with fertilizer that's inorganic—may be true, may not be true, but it hasn't been demonstrated one way or the other. But they'll sit there on the typewriter and make up all this stuff as if it's science and then become an expert on foods, organic foods and so on. There's all kinds of myths and pseudoscience all over the place.

I may be quite wrong, maybe they do know all these things, but I don't think I'm wrong. You see, I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something, how careful you have to be about checking the experiments, how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know what it means to know something, and therefore I see how they get their information and I can't believe that they know it, they haven't done the work necessary, haven't done the checks necessary, haven't done the care necessary. I have a great suspicion that they don't know, that this stuff is [wrong] and they're intimidating people. I think so. I don't know the world very well but that's what I think."

"To do high, real good physics work you do need absolutely solid lengths of time, so that when you're putting ideas together which are vague and hard to remember, it's very much like building a house of cards and each of the cards is shaky, and if you forget one of them the whole thing collapses again. You don't know how you got there and you have to build them up again, and if you're interrupted and kind of forget half the idea of how the cards went together—your cards being different-type parts of the ideas, ideas of different kinds that have to go together to build up the idea—the main point is, you put the stuff together, it's quite a tower and it's easy [for it] to slip, it needs a lot of concentration—that is, solid time to think—and if you've got a job in administrating anything like that, then you don't have the solid time. So I have invented another myth for myself—that I'm irresponsible. I tell everybody, I don't do anything. If anybody asks me to be on a committee to take care of admissions, no, I'm irresponsible, I don't give a damn about the students—of course I give a damn about the students but I know that somebody else'll do it—and I take the view, "Let George do it," a view which you're not supposed to take, okay, because that's not right to do, but I do that because I like to do physics and I want to see if I can still do it, and so I'm selfish, okay? I want to do my physics."

Störsignale:

Diverse Signale unserer Um- und Innenwelt lassen sich schließlich als "Störsignale" bezeichnen, da sie sich nicht für die Erreichung unserer Ziele verwerten lassen, oder die Registrierung dieser Signale einer Zielerreichung aktiv hemmend im Wege steht.

The role of neuronal synchronization in selective attention

The role of neuronal synchronization in selective attention 
Thilo Womelsdorf and Pascal Fries, 2007


Abstract

Attention selectively enhances the influence of neuronal responses conveying information about relevant sensory attributes. Accumulating evidence suggests that this selective neuronal modulation relies on rhythmic synchronization at local and long-range spatial scales: attention selectively synchronizes the rhythmic responses of those neurons that are tuned to the spatial and featural attributes of the attended sensory input. The strength of synchronization is thereby functionally related to perceptual accuracy and behavioural efficiency. Complementing this synchronization at a local level, attention has recently been demonstrated to regulate which locally synchronized neuronal groups phase-synchronize their rhythmic activity across long-range connections. These results point to a general computational role for selective synchronization in dynamically controlling which neurons communicate information about sensory inputs effectively.

Grenzziehung beim Beachten der Wirklichkeit:

Da niemand der gesamten Wirklichkeit Aufmerksamkeit widmen kann, haben wir Ausschnitte und Teilbereiche der Wirklichkeit zu wählen, die wir intensiv beachten wollen.

Comforts and Pleasures:

>"comforts," as distinguished from "pleasures" by the late Stanford economist Tibor Scitovsky, are in fact "pleasures that you've stopped paying attention to", says Kahneman. "The difference between them is clearly one of attention."<

Rapt, 2009

Motive und Ziele:

"Motive entwickeln sich unbewusst oder zumindest sind sie in ihrer primären Entstehung nicht erinnerungsfähig. Ziele dagegen entwickeln sich bewusst oder werden uns bewusst vermittelt. Es kann nun zwischen Motiven und Zielen kleinere und größere Diskrepanzen geben, die unterschiedliche Ursachen haben können."

Gerhard Roth

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"Es kommt also bei der Motivation immer auf Kongruenz der unbewussten Motive und der bewussten Ziele an, dann sind wir zufrieden und leistungsfähig. Wir machen dann (neben der Liebe) die wichtigste Erfahrung in unserem Leben, nämlich dass das Verfolgen selbstbestimmter Ziele, das Meistern einer Herausforderung, eine Belohnung in sich trägt und keine Belohnung von außen nötig hat."

"Was uns Menschen wirklich vom Tier unterscheidet, ist, gegen unseren eigenen 'Bauch' handeln zu können."

Thomas Bergner

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"Wille ist ein entscheidender Faktor des Menschseins: Mit ihm können wir tätig werden trotz Unlust, Müdigkeit, Ängsten oder Langeweile."

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Wille brauchen wir immer dann, wenn:

- die Motivation fehlt oder nicht ausreicht, eine Handlung auszuführen oder

- die Handlungsdurchführung schwierig ist oder

- innerlich oder äußerlich konkurrierende Ziele existieren.

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"Der Wille wird häufig der Motivation zugeordnet, was angezweifelt werden kann. Es ist das Gegenteil der Fall: Wenn wir keine Motivation verspüren, brauchen wir Willen. Wenn wir Motivation verspüren, brauchen wir keinen oder wenig Willen."

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"Der Wille hat eine mindernde bis auslöschende Wirkung auf die Begeisterung. Sobald wir Willen brauchen, um voranzukommen, hat unsere Begeisterung für das Thema bereits nachgelassen. Begeisterung gegen den Bauch gibt es nicht. Sie entwickelt sich, wenn man seine inneren Stimmen wahrnimmt und ihnen folgt."

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[Z.B. beim Einlesen in ein Themengebiet macht es einen Unterschied, ob man seinem "Bauch" folgt, d.h. gerade die Dinge liest, die einen am meisten interessieren, sich der Lektüre widmet, die einen am meisten Freude bereitet, oder ob man sich den Lernstoff mittels einer gewissen Willensakrobatik erarbeitet.]

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[Siehe auch: John Cleese on English Education]

Aufmerksamkeit:

Indem wir aufmerksam sind, wenden wir uns einem kleinen Ausschnitt der Wirklichkeit zu, und versuchen, diesen hochdetailliert wahrzunehmen.

Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment

Ennui, anomie, alienation, and other forms of belief that life is futile and purposeless are at odds with the zest and life-affirming energy needed to produce great art or great science.

Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment

When we want something we can go back to again and again, we choose the same giants that the experts choose. 

Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment

Realized capacities are pleasing not only when they are exercised, but also when they are seen to be exercised. Or to recast the first two-thirds of the Aristotelian principle: Human beings enjoy watching the exercise of the realized capacities of their species, and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized. 

To be in the presence of greatness is exciting, even when we are not capable of appreciating all the nuances of the achievement. The best has a magic about it, whether we are eating a meal cooked by a great chef, watching a great athlete perform under pressure, or witnessing anything done superbly well, far beyond our own reach. 

Now comes the last clause of the Aristotelian principle: “. . . or the greater its complexity.” The depth of gratification we get from watching people perform at the pinnacle increases as the difficulty and importance of what they are doing increases. 

Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment

Some specific propositions about the roles of the shapers of accomplishment:

In the arts, the richness of the structure has most of its effect on the amount of work that is produced within a field; access to transcendental goods has most of its effect on the enduring quality of that work.

Where artists do not have coherent ideals of beauty, the work tends to be sterile. Where they do not have coherent ideals of the good, the work tends to be vulgar. Lacking access to either beauty or the good, the work tends to be shallow.

In the sciences (and humanities and the social sciences): Where scholars do not have allegiance to ideals of truth, the work tends to be false.

Accomplishment in the arts and sciences that is sterile, vulgar, shallow, or false does not endure.

Calhoun's mouse experiments:

Transcript: Calhoun's mouse experiments

Calhoun:

The last thousand animals born never learned to develop the social behaviors. They never learned to be aggressive, which is necessary in defense of home sites. They never learned to court; there was no mating. Being no mating, there were no progeny and the older animals, whose behavior is already becoming disrupted, they eventually reach to, an age too old to reproduce. And so it was all left up to these last thousand or so, who we call the beautiful ones, because, not engaging in any stressful activity and only paying attention to themselves, they groomed themselves well so they look uh, very fine specimen. But from that point on, which was about the time that you were here two and a half years ago, this reproduction totally ceased and the animals have just aged and died.

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Calhoun:

Real mice, that is mice who are in the social sphere. All the others have been rejected in one way or another.

Interviewer:

What’s happened…

Calhoun:

…reproductive behavior's completely inhibited. It's inhibited because the last few hundred maintained them as juveniles and although they are now adults uh they no longer engage in aggressive behavior or in reproductive behavior. And we call them the beautiful ones because they are so excellent physically, they are unstressed. Now I see one down here. Most of these live in the apartment houses and rarely come out, but I see one who's taken temporary refuge in one of the nesting material supply cans. I’ll go over and pull him out, so that you can see what a beautiful specimen this animal is. 

Interviewer:

But as far as the mouse is concerned he’s a nothing?

Calhoun:

He’s a total nothing.

...

Here he is lying in the can. It’s a place of temporary retreat. He’s colored very few, practically no wounds, he’s in excellent physical shape. He has two or three nicks but compared to most of the animals, he’s in excellent shape. And these animals from previous study shows that they are, are unstressed. They’re just not here insofar as involvement.

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Interviewer:

Have you noticed any changes in tissue?

Calhoun:

Well the major thing...

Interviewer:

The stress.

Calhoun:

The major thing, well certain classes of these for instance, comparing these males on the floor here who are withdrawn. They are highly stressed animals but the stress comes from each other because of the peculiar violence that they exhibit. Which leaves them as this animal, with his tail all chewed up, but they do it to each other. He's a highly stressed individual. On the other hand, the beautiful one which I just showed you, are very, extremely unstressed. Dr. Julius Axelrod has run the assay of the enzyme which converts noradrenaline to adrenaline as the basis for this. On the other hand, we’ve been removing females from other populations just terminated and looking at their uteri, and for animals up to a year of age who’ve come up in the latter history of the colonies there’s essentially no evidence of conceiving. So they’ve, at this stage, this is part of the over-living phenomenon. And it's these individuals who are not conceiving are the ones which are not stressed. They’re the beautiful ones who lack involvement.

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"'Socially active' for this simple species implies roles in the contention for, acquisition of, or maintenance of a territory. Some young males who enter the social milieu may succeed in replacing a territorial male. Other young males contend for a time before total rejection from the social flux of status striving. All such replaced dominants or rejected contestors became recruits in a socially pathological category of withdrawn males. No longer having access to the sheltered living spaces, these males aggregated in compact pools in exposed public space. The withdrawn males restricted their motor activity to the minimum required to obtain food and water. They exhibit a marked lowering of the threshold of tolerance to disturbance; very minor dislocations of their usual sedentary relations precipitate violent episodes of aggression that culminate in severe mutual wounding without any attempt to escape." 

"Both males and females fail to mature socially. Behaviorally, they continue into adult life as juveniles, without the capacity for either mating or aggression; their normal adult roles never emerge. Females move into adulthood with rare, if any, pregnancies. Males return to the nesting boxes where they associate with their nonreproducing sisters, with males like themselves, or with the few remaining reproducing females. We term these males the “Beautiful Ones” because they are physically perfect specimens, free of the wounds characteristic of behaviorally more adequate males, who moved out into the social scene."

"At the maximum attained density, about 18 times the optimum, all of the more recently born males are Beautiful Ones; no new contenders emerge. The socially active males senesce and die, as do the large aggregates of withdrawn males living in public space. A few of the older, aggressive, male-like females exhibit territorial defense, but the bulk of surviving adults have lost their potentiality for engaging in the normal reproductive and aggressive roles."

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Matthew Alexandar Sarraf and Michael A. Woodley:

>It is also interesting to note that Calhoun (1973) observed that the decline of the mouse utopia colonies was accompanied by an increase in the prevalence of behaviorally abnormal mice—termed “beautiful ones.” Calhoun described these mice as “autistic-like creatures” (Calhoun, 1973, p. 86)<

Der Mensch als Gatekeeper:

Zum einen wird in unserem Gehirn durch implizite Entscheidungsprozesse entschieden, welche Sinnesinformation ins Bewusstsein gelangt, und welche Sinnesinformation nicht dorthin gelangt. Das geschieht durch eine vorbewusste Abschätzung von Sinnesinformation auf Neuigkeit und Wichtigkeit. Zum anderen sind wir auch selbst "Gatekeeper unseres Bewusstseins", da wir auch bewusst und explizit darüber entscheiden, welche Gesprächspartner wir wählen, welche Bücher wir lesen, welche Filme wir schauen, et cetera, et cetera.

Der Filter:

Bloß lose zusammenhängend:

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Filtern ist schließlich ein zweischneidiges Schwert. Wie, wenn man die Fähigkeit besäße, den Filter vorübergehend abzustellen, um einen Teil der Wirklichkeit, für eine bestimmte Dauer, hochgradig ungefiltert mit quasi "autistischem Mindset" wahrzunehmen? (Es geht somit darum, einen Ausschnitt der Wirklichkeit über eine bestimmte Zeitspanne "maximal" detailliert wahrzunehmen.)

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Der Filter sorgt gegebenenfalls auch dafür, dass wichtige und hochgradig relevante Inhalte nicht in den Kopf gelangen. Es besteht ja keineswegs die Garantie, dass von Natur aus eine optimale Filtereinstellung vorliegt.

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Z.B.: Eine Person liest sich über mehrere Stunden in ein Telefonbuch ein. Sie kann danach eine volle Stunde lang aus dem Inhalt des Telefonbuchs erzählen. Ist jemand mit normaler Filterfunktion gezwungen, der Telefonbucherzählung zuzuhören, so wird er während dem Zuhören vermutlich Langeweile oder Unruhe empfinden.

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Wissenserwerb:

Wir treten in die Welt, zwar nicht unwissend, doch aber, bloß mit einem diffusen Wissen über unsere physikalische, organische oder soziale Umwelt. Indem wir eintreffende Signale verarbeiten, und indem wir gegebenenfalls bewusst Signalquellen aufsuchen, sind wir in der Lage, Ungewissheit bezüglich physikalischen, organischen oder sozialen Phänomenen zu reduzieren. D.h. wir lehnen im Rahmen unseres Erkenntnisprozesses mehr und mehr Hypothesen ab. Dadurch stellen wir fest, wie sich Dinge nicht verhalten, und auch, wie sich Dinge verhalten. Bis wir schließlich Teile unseres diffusen, impliziten Wissens durch präzises, explizites Wissen ersetzen können.

[Siehe auch: Informationsverarbeitung]

>In their best work, the giants transcend the excellent and rise to a level of achievement that is, to the rest of us, inexplicable. The quality that sets them apart from the rest can be labeled by the reactions their masterpieces evoke among experts and layman alike - "How can a human being have done that?"<

Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment

Filterausprägung:

In welchen Fällen ist ein starker Filter von Vorteil? In welchen Fällen ein schwacher Filter?

"Positive emotions, such as love and joy, seem useful while negative emotions, such as anger and anxiety, seem maladaptive. This is an illusion, the same "clinician's illusion" that makes it hard to see the utility of bodily defensive responses such as fever and pain. The high costs of negative emotions and body defenses demonstrate not that they are useless, but the opposite: their high costs confirm that they offer substantial benefits in certain situations. They will sometimes be expressed in situations where they are maladaptive, and the systems that regulate defenses make mistakes (Nesse, 200lb; Nesse, 2005), but overall they give an advantage.

Although it is harder to see the utility of negative emotions, most people readily recognize the utility of anxiety. In the face of a potential danger, protective responses prevent damage or loss. Sadness, however, typically occurs after a loss. The horse is already out of the bam, as it were, so how can any kind of response be helpful now? However, an evolutionary view highlights different questions: Is the loss of a valuable resource an event of adaptive significance? To put it more specifically, are there things an organism can do after a loss that might increase its fitness? There are many, including attempting to undo the loss, trying to prevent future losses and warning others."

An Evolutionary Framework for Understanding Grief, Randolph M. Nesse, 2005

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"Sadness differs from low mood and depression. A discrete loss that does not block long-term goals will arouse sadness that soon fades. If, however, the loss makes it impossible to reach important goals, continued striving toward an unreachable goal gives rise to low mood, that is, mild depression. Klinger describes how low mood can be useful in disengaging effort from unachievable goals and how persistence in pursuit of such goals could escalate ordinary low mood into full-fledged depression (Klinger, 1975). This paradigm has now developed so it is widely recognized that mood is influenced by events that indicate a change in expected rate of progress towards crucial goals (Carver&: Scheier, 1990, 1998) although recognition of the relevance of these discoveries for psychiatry is still nascent (Nesse, 2000a)." 

Philosophy:

"What separates the Western and Asian philosophy inventories is represented by Kant[.] In China the great figures after Confucius and Laozi were their exegetes and reinterpreters. The same was true in India of the great figures after the Upanishads and Buddha - even Sankara was an interpreter of an existing tradition. The West followed that pattern through 17C, with all the great figures drawing substantially from the Platonic or Aristotelian traditions. But then came Kant, whose contributions amounted to an expansion of philosophic thought after the founders that is unique among the three great philosophic traditions. He was followed by innovative and influential 19C contributions of Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche."

Charles Murray - Human Accomplishment

"For individual countries and time periods, the difference between the actual and expected number of significant figures is often substantial."

Charles Murray

Alles geben die Götter, die unendlichen,
Ihren Lieblingen ganz,
Alle Freuden, die unendlichen,
Alle Schmerzen, die unendlichen, ganz.

J. W. Goethe - 1777

Good Models:

"Every good model in science needs to be able to make lots of predictions. This is the hallmark of a sort of progressive research program."

Michael A. Woodley

Extraversion (II):

"In a dangerous social environment it's not obvious that being an extroverted person is a good idea. Because extroverted people, they stand out. Especially if they are extroverted and creative. Because not only are they noisy and dominant and assertive, they are also colorful and flamboyant and provocative. Well that's great if your are in a society that rewards that sort of thing, but if you are ruled by an authoritarian king, who wants absolutely no threat whatsoever to his stability ever, then dressing in grey and shutting the hell up is a really good survival tactic."

Jordan B. Peterson

Interessantheit:

In welchem Ausmaß, stellt sich die Frage, wird es vorbewusst entschieden, was uns interessiert und was uns nicht interessiert, und in welchem Ausmaß sind wir in den Entscheidungsprozess bewusst mitinvolviert?

Latent Inhibition:

"When individuals are repeatedly exposed to a stimulus without consequence or reinforcement, they learn future associations to that stimulus more slowly. This phenomenon, known as latent inhibition (LI), has been extensively studied and appears robust across a variety of mammalian species, including mice, rabbits, cats, and humans (Lubow & Gewirtz, 1995). There are several explanations for the latent inhibition effect (Schmajuk, Lam & Gray, 1996). Weiner, Shadach, Tarrach and Kidron (1996) suggested that repeated pre-exposure to a non-reinforced stimulus allows the individual to process that stimulus at a preconscious level and to categorize it as currently irrelevant so that it may be consciously ignored. Pre-exposure without reinforcement reduces the novelty of the stimulus and its associated capacity to attract attention (Gray & McNaughton, 1996). This ability to ignore a non-reinforced stimulus is a biologically adaptive function of implicit attention (Lubow & Gewirtz, 1995) which allows an individual to 'gate', or keep out of conscious awareness stimuli irrelevant to survival or to present goal attainment."

Jordan B. Peterson, Shelley Carson

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Swerdlow NR et al.:

"Latent inhibition (LI) refers to the retarded acquisition of a conditioned response that occurs if the subject being tested is first preexposed to the to-be-conditioned stimulus (CS) without the paired unconditioned stimulus (UCS). Because the 'irrelevance' of the to-be-conditioned stimulus is established during non-contingent preexposure, the slowed acquisition of the CS-UCS association is thought to reflect the process of overcoming this learned irrelevance."

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Hans Eysenck:

"Latent inhibition is defined by an experimental paradigm which requires, as a minimum, a two-stage procedure. The first stage involves stimulus pre-exposure, i.e. the to-be-CS (conditioned stimulus) is exhibited without being followed by any unconditioned stimulus (UCS); this leads theoretically to the CS acquiring a negative salience, i.e. it signals a lack of consequences, and thus acquires inhibitory properties."

"The cognitive elements in latent inhibition theory are emphasized by Lubow (1989) in terms of his conditioned attention theory. According to this theory, non-reinforced pre-exposure to a stimulus retards subsequent conditioning to that stimulus because during such pre-exposure the subject learns not to attend to it."

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Webcache - lowlatentinhibition.org:

"Latent inhibition is a term used to explain how our observation of a familiar stimulus (e.g. something we see, hear, smell, feel or taste that we’ve had before) takes longer to acquire meaning than a new stimulus. It’s essentially a mental tool you develop in order to experience the world in a manageable way."

"For example, consider how you experience a doorknob. You are familiar with door handles and how they work, what the purpose of them is and in most cases a door handle wouldn’t interest you enough for you to pay it any notice. Why should you? You know how they work already and have seen them before."

"With low latent inhibition, an individual almost treats familiar stimuli in the same manner as they would new stimuli. Think of the details you notice when you see something new for the first time and how it grabs your attention."

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Colin DeYoung:

"Latent inhibition is an automatic pre-conscious process that blocks stimuli previously categorized as irrelevant from entering awareness. Dopamine appears to be the primary neuromodulator of latent inhibition, with increased dopaminergic activity producing reduced latent inhibition (Kumari et al., 1999)."

"latent inhibition, an automatic process by which stimuli previously categorized as irrelevant are blocked from entering consciousness."

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S. H. Carson et al.:

"Creative individuals appear characterized in part by the ability to perceive and describe what remains hidden from the view of others. Individual variation in latent inhibition (LI), a cognitive inhibitory mechanism discovered by animal experimentalists in the late 1950s, may account for the apparent revelation to the creative mind of what appears “clos’d by the senses five” to others. LI refers to the varying capacity of the brain to screen from current attentional focus stimuli previously experienced as irrelevant (Lubow, 1989)."

"Many researchers (e.g., Simonton, 1988, 1999) have proposed that the cognitive processes of individuals capable of creating the highest achievements in their fields are both qualitatively and quantitatively different from those of normal thinkers (although some, like Weisberg, 1993, dispute the “qualitative” distinction). If qualitative differences do exist, however, one potential source of difference in the cognitive processes between eminent creative achievers and other intelligent thinkers may be in the relative attenuation of LI."

Low Latent Inhibition, IQ and Creativity:

"It looks like in order to handle the excess sensory input of low latent inhibition it's really useful to have very high IQ and high working memory[.] It seems probable that if you are prone to be overwhelmed by sensory information that you need the cognitive capacity to handle that and also perhaps ... the personality/ability to sort through that critically. So you don't end up overwhelmed."

Jordan Peterson

Personality and Self-Deception:

"In order to figure out what characteristic adaptations must be changed or added to produce a well-integrated personality, one must be willing to explore anomalies, as they arise (Peterson, 1999). This means avoiding self-deception, which we have defined as ignoring subjective evidence that one’s current plans and beliefs might be in error (Peterson, Driver-Linn, & DeYoung, 2002; Peterson et al., 2003)."

Colin DeYoung

Art:

"Now, one of the things we started to contemplate, this was back twenty years ago ..., was the role that artists play in revivifying perception. So if you look at [certain paintings it is] as if the artist makes you recall how those remarkable phenomena manifest themselves. As if you are seeing them again for the first time. What we thought was that perhaps what the artist was doing was stripping away your latent inhibition, so that you can see things the way you saw them the first time."

Jordan Peterson

Creativity & Neoteny:

"I suspect it's probably a process of neoteny. I think that the creative people stay immature. ... It looks to me like the creative types are sustaining that plasticity they have as really early children. Maybe they are permanently locked to some degree into that pretend play mode that is so characteristic of children between the age of four and maybe eleven."

Jordan Peterson

The process of correction:

"[The] process of correction is experienced subjectively ... as something unexpected or startling happening to us."

"There is then a sense of shock or surprise, and the projected model may subsequently be reiternalized in a corrected form whereby its prediction is likely to be more accurate in the next occasion. Unless something interferes with this corrective process, the models are normally subject to continuous revision ...."

Openness and Schizotypy:

"What Openness and positive schizotypy share is an elevated tendency to perceive patterns and meaning in loosely related stimuli. In positive schizotypy this tendency is taken to an extreme in which patterns may be identified as objectively real even when they are not (a phenomenon also known as “apophenia”). Intelligence may play a key role in determining whether identification of patterns by people high in Openness leads to adaptive cognitive abilities—such as creativity, which is strongly linked to Openness (DeYoung, 2015; Kaufman et al., 2016)— or to the apophenia that characterizes positive schizotypy."

Grazioplene RG et al. - White matter correlates of psychosis-linked traits support continuity between personality and psychopathology, 2016

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"Broadly speaking, neurostructural and neurofunctional findings indicate that psychotic-spectrum diseases are linked to disrupted or aberrant patterns of neural connectivity. This body of evidence has led to the dysconnectivity theory of psychosis, which states that the core symptoms of psychosis are the result of altered connectivity between brain regions, particularly between specific thalamocortical and frontotemporal regions (Pettersson-Yeo, Allen, Benetti, McGuire, & Mechelli, 2011). Connectivity is typically observed as aberrantly low between these regions (hypoconnectivity), although some specific interconnections may be aberrantly high (hyperconnectivity; e.g., Filippi et al., 2014). Such altered connectivity patterns are thought to lead to abnormal sensory and cognitive integration (Pettersson-Yeo et al., 2011)."

Colin DeYoung on Cybernetics and the Science of Personality:

David C. Geary on Sex Differences

Erkennen und Wirken:

Der Mensch versucht:
(1) Festgelegtheit aufzudecken
(2) festzulegen

Denken:

Denken lässt sich als ein Versuch verstehen, die Festgelegtheit von Phänomenen aufzudecken.

[Siehe auch: Festgelegtheit, Das Ausmaß an Vorherbestimmtheit, Intelligenz, Verringerung von Ungewissheit, Erkennen und Wirken]

The copy is the original

https://aeon.co/essays/why-in-china-and-japan-a-copy-is-just-as-good-as-an-original

[via hbd chick]

"T

he Chinese have two different concepts of a copy. Fangzhipin (仿製品) are imitations where the difference from the original is obvious. These are small models or copies that can be purchased in a museum shop, for example. The second concept for a copy is fuzhipin (複製品). They are exact reproductions of the original, which, for the Chinese, are of equal value to the original. It has absolutely no negative connotations."

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"From the start, the production of replicas of the terracotta warriors proceeded in parallel with the excavations. A replica workshop was set up on the excavation site itself. But they were not producing ‘forgeries’. Rather, we might say that the Chinese were trying to restart production, as it were – production that from the beginning was not creation but already reproduction. Indeed, the originals themselves were manufactured through serial mass-production[.]"

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"The Ise Grand Shrine, the supreme Shinto sanctuary located on Honshu island, is 1,300 years old for the millions of Japanese people who go there on pilgrimage every year. But in reality this temple complex is completely rebuilt from scratch every 20 years. This religious practice is so alien to Western art historians that, after heated debates, UNESCO removed this Shinto temple from the list of World Heritage sites. For the experts at UNESCO, the shrine is 20 years old at most."

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"[The] difference between original and copy vanishes altogether. Instead of a difference between original and copy, there appears a difference between old and new. We could even say that the copy is more original than the original, or the copy is closer to the original than the original, for the older the building becomes, the further it is from its original state. A reproduction would restore it, as it were, to its ‘original state’, especially since it is not linked to a particular artist."

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"In the West, when monuments are restored, old traces are often particularly highlighted. Original elements are treated like relics. The Far East is not familiar with this cult of the original."

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Festgelegtheit:

Sind bei einem bestimmten Prozess oder Experiment sämtliche Ausgänge gleichwahrscheinlich, dann gilt: je mehr Ausgänge möglich sind, umso weniger Festgelegtheit oder Determiniertheit besteht. Festgelegtheit in dem Sinne, in welchem Ausmaß wir, unter den uns bekannten Bedingungen, ein Einzelereignis vorhersagen können. Angenommen, wir wissen, eine perfekt symmetrische Münze, ein perfekt symmetrischer sechsseitiger Wüfel, und ein perfekt symmetrischer zwölfseitiger Würfel werden geworfen. Wir haben aber keinerlei Informationen darüber, unter welchen spezifischen Bedingungen, d.h. mit welchen Handbewegungen, usw., der Einzelwurf stattfinden wird. Diese Bedingungen, obwohl vorhanden, messen wir nicht und lassen wir nicht in unsere Berechnung einfließen. Somit, bei Unkenntnis der Einzelbedingungen, kommen den Ausgängen der Ereignisse Informationgehalte von 1 bit (log2(2)), 2.58 bit (log2(6)) und 3.58 bit (log2(12)) zu. D.h. unter den uns bekannten Bedingungen ist der Ausgang des einzelnen Wurfs mit dem zwölfseitigen Würfel weniger festgelegt als der Ausgang des einzelnen Wurfs mit dem sechsseitigen Würfel, und dieser Ausgang ist wiederum weniger festgelegt als der Ausgang eines einzelnen Münzwurfs. Je weniger festgelegt nun Prozesse sind, oder je weniger festgelegt wir Prozesse wahrnehmen, umso informationshaltiger und umso weniger vorhersagbar sind sie für uns. Umso größere Ungewissheit besteht darüber, wie sie ausgehen werden.

"Wichtig und Wesentlich"

"Gauger unterscheidet im erwähnten Büchlein >Angina temporis< scharf zwischen >wichtig< und >wesentlich<. >Wichtig< ist nach ihm alles, was man mit Geld kaufen, was man mit technischen oder organisatorischen Maßnahmen bewirken kann, was zum äußeren Erfolg oder zur Hebung des Lebensstandards beiträgt. >Wesentlich< dagegen ist, was man für Geld nicht kaufen kann, was mit dem Wesen des Menschen zu tun hat, mit seiner Haltung, und der Atmosphäre, die er verbreitet. >Der Eisschrank, der Staubsauger und die Küchenmaschinen ... sind >wichtig<; sie könnten es wenigstens sein. Aber >wesentlich< sind sie nicht! >Wesentlich< ist die innere Wärme eines Hauses, nicht die Zentralheizung, obschon eine Zentralheizung, wenn sie funktioniert, angenehmer, sauberer und zeitsparender ist als z.B. ein Kanonenöfchen. Aber die >innere Wärme< eines Hauses und Heimes, die so wesentlich vor allem auch für Kinder ist, hängt von der menschlichen >Haltung< ab ...; hängt davon ab, wie der Mann und die Frau zu den wesentlichen Inhalten des Lebens, ihres Lebens stehen<.

Von da aus gesehen ist es also wesentlich, dass das Innerste und Persönlichste unseres Lebens zum Ausdruck komme, in unserer unmittelbaren Umgebung sicht- und fühlbar werde[.] Dazu braucht es aber >freie< Zeit, das heißt solche, die von innen, vom Wesen aus gesteuert wird und nicht von vornherein durch äußere, unpersönliche Anliegen in Beschlag genommen ist."

Theodor Bovet

Das Ausmaß an Vorherbestimmtheit:

"The idols of the tribe are common to mankind and derive from the mind's tendency to assume more order and regularity in nature than there really is."

Francis Bacon

Eine wichtige Funktion des menschlichen Denkens besteht in der Abschätzung von Regelmäßigkeiten. Ein abergläubiger Mensch begeht nun tendenziell den Fehler, in bestimmten, mit seinen Aberglauben in Verbindung stehenden, Situationen, die Anzahl möglicher Ausgänge zu unterschätzen, und somit die Bedeutung des Zufalls zu ignorieren. Personen, die an Filterstörung leiden, dementgegen, tendieren dazu, auch ein Ereignis, das aus einer deutlich erkennbarern Regelmäßigkeit heraus resultiert, als zufälliges Ereignis, als einen Ausgang unter unzähligen möglichen Ausgängen, zu interpretieren.

Sich selbst im Wege stehen:

Für viele Menschen gilt wohl: Sie stehen sich selbst am meisten im Wege. So, um ein harmloseres Beispiel zu nennen, z.B. der chronisch überkonsumierende Kaffeetrinker, der an Dauernervosität leidet, sich allerdings dennoch diese tagtäglich aufs Neue erzeugt. (Es würde nicht allzu viel Aufwand erfordern, hundert weitere Beispiele aufzuzählen.) Was, wenn ein Mensch beschließt, sich nicht mehr selbst im Wege zu stehen?

Practice:

"[For] the mastery of skills of even modest complexity [practice is necessary]. A person cannot learn a skill by first listening to a verbal description of how the task is to be done, and then perform it in a competent manner the very first time. If this were possible, driving schools would soon go out of business, because teaching a novice to drive a car would take 15 minutes."

Deep Learning, Stellan Ohlsson

Errors:

"Although errors can be disastrous and we do what we can to eliminate them, they are informative. Every action is a probe that bounces off the environment like a sonar signal, returning with the outlines of otherwise unseen causes, objects and processes. Deviations between expected and observed returns tell us that the world is not as we assumed and hence provide an opportunity to correct our assumptions."

Deep Learning, Stellan Ohlsson

"As in Mathematicks, so in Natural Philosophy, the Investigation of difficult Things by the Method of Analysis, ought ever to precede the Method of Composition. This Analysis consists in making Experiments and Observations, and in drawing general Conclusions from them by Induction, and admitting of no Objections against the Conclusions, but such as are taken from Experiments, or other certain Truths. For Hypotheses are not to be regarded in experimental Philosophy. And although the arguing from Experiments and Observations by Induction be no Demonstration of general Conclusions; yet it is the best way of arguing which the Nature of Things admits of, and may be looked upon as so much the stronger, by how much the Induction is more general. And if no Exception occur from Phenomena, the Conclusion may be pronounced generally. But if at any time afterwards any Exception shall occur from Experiments, it may then begin to be pronounced with such Exceptions as occur. By this way of Analysis we may proceed from Compounds to Ingredients, and from Motions to the Forces producing them; and in general, from Effects to their Causes, and from particular Causes to more general ones, till the Argument end in the most general. This is the Method of Analysis: And the Synthesis consists in assuming the Causes discover'd and establish'd as Principles, and by them explaining the Phenomena proceeding from them, and proving the Explanations."

Isaac Newton [via Cristopher Chabris]

Alan Watts on Creativity:

"You have to have an essential sense of li, but there is no way of prescribing it. This is very difficult for teachers, because in all of our modern schools and universities we are attempting to teach creativity. The trouble is that if we found a method whereby we could teach creativity, and everybody could explain just how it was done, it would no longer be of interest. The mysterious, the dark black of lacquer, the impenetrable and profound depth out of which glorious things come, is always an essential element in creativity."

Alan Watts (audio)

[According to Alan Watts creativity in its essence cannot be taught. These statements seem to be much more reasonable than David Lynch's opinion that everyone can become super-happy and super-creative by doing transcendental meditation (e.g.: a, b).]