evolution… Hard-wired 17a: Coincidence and irrational humanity 22 Jul 201917 Jul 2019 In terms of the psychological spandrels we discussed earlier, the tendency to make 'false positive' (type 1) errors is an evolved characteristic. Paranoia, pattern-seeking and agency-detection may well be the…
evolution… Hard-wired 17: Bias and the evolutionary ‘spandrel’ 19 Jul 201915 Jul 2019 In this video we’ll consider three of the most widespread (and misleading) of our evolved mental modules. We’ll look at ‘selective abstraction‘, ‘arbitrary inference’ and ‘confirmation bias’. Each of these…
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,…
