evolution… Hardwired 16: Pattern recognition 16 Jul 201913 Jul 2019 It’s not hard to see why this obsession with patterns prevailed in the ancestral environment. The early hunter-gatherer who learned to recognise the association between plants and water would have…
evolution… Hard wired 15: The unthinking mental module 15 Jul 201913 Jul 2019 It’s easy to understand how humans and other species evolved physical characteristics as a result of adaptation and natural selection. Helpful variations confer their advantages down through the generations whilst…
psychology… Stoicism: Anticipating misfortune 14 Jul 201913 Jul 2019 "Rehearse death. To say this is to tell a person to rehearse his freedom. A person who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave." (Seneca)…
psychology… Stoicism: The eternal now 13 Jul 2019 In a previous post (Irvine’s summary) I made the point that… “People generally confuse the things they can control with the things they cannot. The result is frustration and wasted…
Stoicism for mental health… Stoicism: No surprises! 8 Jul 2019 “Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, devious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance…
Alternative therapy… Glastonbury: Alternative therapy central… but is it real? 21 Jun 2019 I’m fed up of coming across people, often with serious psychiatric or medical conditions who stop taking their evidence-based, imperfect but at least understood medications in favour of misunderstood, useless…
duty of care… MCA: Advance decision to refuse treatment 24 Feb 2019 On October 25th 2007 22 year old EG gave birth to twins at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital. A few hours later she was dead because she refused to accept a…
evolution… Today is ‘Darwin Day’ 12 Feb 201912 Feb 2019 160 years ago this year Charles Darwin published his ground-breaking, paradigm shattering volume ‘on the origin of species by means of natural selection’. 210 years ago today on February 12th,…
evolution… Is anxiety a choice? 2 Feb 201931 Jan 2019 Is anxiety a choice? Is an anxiety disorder a choice? Can a person choose not to be anxious? Last night I had an interesting conversation with a stranger in the…
evolution… Hard-wired 14: Why Freud was almost right 1 Feb 201928 Jan 2019 Although not a fan of Darwin's theory of evolution by means of natural selection (he was more influenced by the earlier, Lamarckian evolutionary theory), Sigmund Freud was very nearly right…
