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Subconscious communication

We think we communicate mostly with words. But the fact if we don't know exactly how much communication or information exchange is happening on the subconscious level. We understand so little about the brain, and consciousness that this question is unequivocally unanswered - exactly how much information exchange happen on the subconscious level. I think it is far more than we think. The conscious brain is good at reasoning after the fact i.e. coming up with reasons why we think a certain way. And these reasons are not always right - they are just an attempt by the pre-frontal cortex to make sense of how we are feeling at the time. e.g. you meet someone for the first time. There is a lot of information exchange happening. Just you looking at this person, there are processes in your brain forming an idea about this person - they way he looks, the way he walks, the way he moves, the way he smells, the way he talks, his facial expressions etc. etc. there are many other non-verbal data ...
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All life is problem solving

 What is happiness? Popper answered this question the best in his answer to what is the meaning of life. "All life is problem solving" Problem in the Popperian sense is not always something bad. Problem can be any unsolved thing that you are working on and the definition is not limited to science, art etc. Raising your kids well is also a problem in this sense, and so is trying to get better at dodgeball. Working on a problem is a process of knowledge creation. So in a sense, life is a process of knowledge creation. What is a good life then? what is a happy life? It is a life where the problems you are working on, the knowledge that you are creating, are interesting to YOU. This is the key here - YOU find these problems interesting and are free of coercion in choosing these problems. This is easier said than done. I wrote about it in an earlier blog post , but I believe most misery (excluding misery due to physical pain/limitations, or psychological issues that are real e.g. ...
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Workaholic

  At the end of a long day filled with stress and turmoil the man heard his heart say why all this endless toil You work so hard from dawn to dusk maybe let down your guard you ain't Elon Musk Work is a cope of the restless of mind but there is still hope you can choose to be kind So be kind to yourself man and your inner child within really do whatever you can lest the child goes Slytherin Stop running from the true you dreams unchased is a crime life gives chances a few my friend, now is the time
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Creativity and Madness

 Several have postulated that there is a link between "madness" and creativity. I have a theory here (which someone else might have postulated as well) that it is a specific kind of madness and creativity that are linked. The specific kind is being on the schizo spectrum i.e. not full blown schizophrenia but on the spectrum somewhere AND having high analytical IQ. Such individuals are the most creative.  There have been several cases in history of highly creative individuals having these schizo genes. Newton definitely had them. He made all his major contributions long before the age of 30, and then the schizo sorta took over and he spent his time trying to find hidden meanings in the Bible and turning metal into gold. Newton was what we classify today as a 'schizotypal' or a 'schizoid' personality. One of the main manifestations of this personality type is being unforgiving and holding grudges, and Newton was known for that. Apart from being solitary and dist...
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Seeing patterns in others is easier than seeing them in oneself

 It is easy to see when someone else is behaving in a way that is irrational or detrimental to their own well being. But when the same applies to oneself it is very difficult to realize that you are behaving or following similar irrational/ unhealthy patterns. why is that so? I think it is because when someone else is doing it e.g. ending up in a relationship with a person they know is not good for them, we can observe that fact without getting involved. So all our faculties are impartial in the sense that all the computing power can be used for analysis purposes. And we can see the pattern in that person, and the fact that he/she is again repeating it. But when it comes to oneself, the same faculties are actually busy enacting the pattern and some of these faculties are shut down by the pattern itself (the pattern is again just a set of ideas that get executed). So, one of the key features of this pattern is that it shuts down the ideas that can actually recognize it. A good analo...
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Death

 It’s a funny thing- death. We all die. It is the only certain thing they say. Apart from taxes. Religions have sought to make it easier, philosophers have written volumes on it, spiritual seekers have tried to confront their fear of it and most of us in fact deny it without knowing. This is because we human beings are 2 things - our physical body (including our brain) which is mere hardware, and the “person”, the abstract entity, the self-aware conscious being which runs on this hardware but is not defined by the hardware. The person is abstract, and does not die unless the hardware (i.e. the body) does. And currently, all bodies die. So death is inevitable. There is sort of a disjoint between these 2 processes - of the body deteriorating and the person trying to accept it. The person does not deteriorate at the same rate as the body. In fact, the person never deteriorates unless there are issues with the brain (i.e, hardware problems) which do happen with age.  I have writte...
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Anxiety and memory

 How does the brain decide if something is important enough to remember? i.e. something is important enough to be saved into long term memory. The mechanism the brain uses is that of feelings - if something makes us feel an emotion - and the stronger the emotion - the more likely and strongly the memory is saved. And it is disproportionately biased towards fear/anxiety - so events that come with fear/anxiety are more favorably saved into long term memory (and sometimes the process itself can get stuck and cause PTSD). The reasons for this are obvious - evolutionarily speaking anything that could jeopardize the survival of the organism is the most critical to remember for the future.  It doesn't matter how impactful the actual event is, if you don't feel anything much the brain is not going to save it. So if you see a tiger and you don't have any corresponding feeling after seeing the tiger, you will not remember it.  I personally struggled with anxiety for a long time, an...
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