An Experiment in Love: Martin Luther King, Jr. on the Six Pillars of Nonviolent Resistance and the Ancient Greek Notion of ‘Agape’ by Maria Popova “Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can only be done by projecting the ethic of love to the center of our lives.” Although Dr. Nowhere does he transmute spiritual ideas from various traditions into secular principles more masterfully than in his extraordinary 1958 essay “An Experiment in Love,” in which he examines the six essential principles of his philosophy of nonviolence, debunks popular misconceptions about it, and considers how these basic tenets can be used in guiding any successful movement of nonviolent resistance. In the first of the six basic philosophies, Dr. It must be emphasized that nonviolent resistance is not a method for cowards; it does resist. He turns to the second tenet of nonviolence: Nonviolence … does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his friendship and understanding. Illustration by Olivier Tallec from 'Waterloo and Trafalgar.' Here, Dr.
Fear Thou Not: Activity of Frontal and Temporal Circuits in Moments of Real-Life Courage Figure 1 The Experimental Setup and Protocol (A) The participants' task was to reach maximal proximity to either a live snake (Snake) or a toy bear (Toy Bear), by repeatedly choosing whether to bring the object closer (Advance) or move it away (Retreat), while undergoing fMRI brain scanning. (B) Each trial began with a black screen occluding the participant's view (Black screen), after which it was lowered (Expose Object) to allow full view of the object on the trolley. Following removal of the screen a brief delay was enforced (Delay), after which the word “Choose” was sounded via earphones. The participant then expressed the choice (Advance or Retreat) by pressing one of two response device buttons (Choice). Figure 2 Fear and Anxiety Evoked by the Experimental Stimuli (A–C) Mean of self-reported fear ratings (A), state anxiety (B), and choice-related skin conductance responses (SCRs) (C) of the Fearful (FF) and Fearless (FL) groups for Snake and Toy Bear. Figure 3 See also Figure S1 .
Why We Hurt Each Other: Tolstoy’s Letters to Gandhi on Love, Violence, and the Truth of the Human Spirit by Maria Popova “Love is the only way to rescue humanity from all ills.” In 1908, Indian revolutionary Taraknath Das wrote to Leo Tolstoy, by then one of the most famous public figures in the world, asking for the author’s support in India’s independence from British colonial rule. The exchange sparked an ongoing correspondence between the two that lasted until Tolstoy’s death — a meeting of two great minds and spirits, eventually collected in Letters from One: Correspondence (and more) of Leo Tolstoy and Mohandas Gandhi and rivaled only by Einstein’s correspondence with Freud on violence and human nature. Tolstoy’s letters issue a clarion call for nonviolent resistance — he admonishes against false ideologies, both religious and pseudo-scientific, that promote violence, an act he sees as unnatural for the human spirit, and advocates for a return to our most natural, basic state, which is the law of love. Illustration by Maurice Sendak for Tolstoy's 'Nikolenka's Childhood.'
Stress Response The Four Desires Driving All Human Behavior: Bertrand Russell’s Magnificent Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) endures as one of humanity’s most lucid and luminous minds — an oracle of timeless wisdom on everything from what “the good life” really means to why “fruitful monotony” is essential for happiness to love, sex, and our moral superstitions. In 1950, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for “his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought.” On December 11 of that year, 78-year-old Russell took the podium in Stockholm to receive the grand accolade. Later included in Nobel Writers on Writing (public library) — which also gave us Pearl S. Russell begins by considering the central motive driving human behavior: All human activity is prompted by desire. Russell points to four such infinite desires — acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power — and examines them in order: The world would be a happier place than it is if acquisitiveness were always stronger than rivalry.
2897.full.pdf Telling Is Listening: Ursula K. Le Guin on the Magic of Conversation and Why Human Communication Is Like Amoebas Having Sex Every act of communication is an act of tremendous courage in which we give ourselves over to two parallel possibilities: the possibility of planting into another mind a seed sprouted in ours and watching it blossom into a breathtaking flower of mutual understanding; and the possibility of being wholly misunderstood, reduced to a withering weed. Candor and clarity go a long way in fertilizing the soil, but in the end there is always a degree of unpredictability in the climate of communication — even the warmest intention can be met with frost. Yet something impels us to hold these possibilities in both hands and go on surrendering to the beauty and terror of conversation, that ancient and abiding human gift. Why and how we do that is what Ursula K. In the spirit of Kurt Vonnegut’s diagrams of the shapes of stories, Le Guin argues that “our ruling concept of communication is a mechanical model,” which she illustrates thusly: She explains: Box A and box B are connected by a tube.
How brain performs 'motor chunking' tasks You pick up your cell phone and dial the new number of a friend. Ten numbers. One. Number. After dialing the number a few more times, you find yourself typing it out as a series of three successive bursts of movement: the area code, the first three numbers, the last four numbers. "You can think about a chunk as a rhythm," said Nicholas Wymbs, a postdoctoral researcher in UC Santa Barbara's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, and the lead author of a new study on motor chunking in the journal Neuron, published by Cell Press. The rhythm is the human brain taking information and processing it in an efficient way, according to Wymbs. But it is also in our brain's best interest to assemble single or short strings of movements into longer, integrated sequences so that a complex behavior can be made with as little effort as possible. The study was conducted using human subjects in the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner in the Brain Imaging Center.
The Psychology of Writing and the Cognitive Science of the Perfect Daily Routine Reflecting on the ritualization of creativity, Bukowski famously scoffed that “air and light and time and space have nothing to do with.” Samuel Johnson similarly contended that “a man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.” And yet some of history’s most successful and prolific writers were women and men of religious daily routines and odd creative rituals. Such strategies, it turns out, may be psychologically sound and cognitively fruitful. [There is] evidence that environments, schedules, and rituals restructure the writing process and amplify performance… The principles of memory retrieval suggest that certain practices should amplify performance. Kellogg reviews a vast body of research to extract a few notable findings. These effects, of course, are relative to one’s psychological constitution — Kellogg surmises that writers more afflicted with the modern epidemic of anxiety tend to be more disconcerted by noisy environments.
Coordinated memory replay in the visual cortex ... [Nat Neurosci. 2007 Ursula K. Le Guin on Aging and What Beauty Really Means “A Dog is, on the whole, what you would call a simple soul,” T.S. Eliot simpered in his beloved 1930s poem “The Ad-dressing of Cats,” proclaiming that “Cats are much like you and me.” Indeed, cats have a long history of being anthropomorphized in dissecting the human condition — but, then again, so do dogs. We’ve always used our feline and canine companions to better understand ourselves, but nowhere have Cat and Dog served a more poignant metaphorical purpose than in the 1992 essay “Dogs, Cats, and Dancers: Thoughts about Beauty” by Ursula K. Le Guin (b. Le Guin contrasts the archetypal temperaments of our favorite pets: Dogs don’t know what they look like. Cats, on the other hand, have a wholly different scope of self-awareness: Cats know exactly where they begin and end. More than that, Le Guin notes, cats are aesthetes, vain and manipulative in their vanity. Cats have a sense of appearance. A master of bridging the playful and the poignant, Le Guin returns to the human condition: