Our Inner Emotions: (for y.a. by chat gpt) Chapter 3
Is mental illness a “chemical imbalance” or “All in the genes”
Is mental illness a “chemical imbalance” or “All in the genes”
Each layer can exert its own influenced if needed,
And is modulated into the layer below:
Simplifies an understanding of bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, language, religion, self-awareness, free will, and the experience of being human for the last three million years.
Leavened by fresh ideas, vivid clinical vignettes, and narratives of the emotional life of our ancient human ancestors
The same experiences of mental illness stigmatized through the ages become ancient beacons illuminating a fresh and uplifting vision of Who We Are.
While I can only imagine watching the early hominins from afar, I can easily place myself among these early Homo people. Crouching in a circle, we are all glancing back and forth, not merely imitating one another’s work, but watching for strokes made with the authority of how it should be and always had been …
Like the shadows in Plato’s cave, the genes, chemistry, and cognitive computations inside the brain are diffuse reflections from the evolution of emotions and motivations “outside” in the theater of human minds interacting with human minds.
All manner of rhetorical flourishes and beautifully constructed phrases can pour out in a torrent. Often there is a magnetic quality to this verbal virtuosity, the meaning (semantics) of which can constitute a brilliantly creative flight of ideas. Beyond the grammar and meaning, the sheer musicality of it can elicit rapt fascination.
[Kindle version $5] The Sighting What was it like living in one of these early hominin groups? In my imagination, I picture becoming aware of a continuous chirping sound threading up from below while hiking on a promontory high above the East African savanna three million years ago. After lying down with my binoculars to …
There is plenty to be outraged about in the crude bigotry of our president, but it is little noted that, when he throws around epithets like “psycho,” he is denigrating the mentally ill. Do you or someone you love suffer from “major” depression, panic disorder, schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder? I am a psychiatrist and have …
A glaring weakness of the agenda of the political left is that social justice does not appear to be rooted in the flesh and blood of human nature. The two most influential thinkers on our attitudes about what makes us tick are Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud: we are ape-men who when psychoanalyzed are revealed …
An Evolved Will for Justice Separates Us from Apes Perhaps the world’s foremost scientist on the subject of mind evolution, Michael Tomasello, states in his recent book, A Natural History of Human Thinking (2014): The main problem is that collaboration, communication, and thinking do not fossilize, so we will always be in a position of …
We pick up the narrative as I am describing a prison inmate: He spoke slowly and deliberately with no emotion whatsoever. He had shot his wife dead after drinking one night. He said that he would always love her and was just waiting to die. He then went on to describe in spare, clear language …
The strengthening of across-group marital-family bonds has exerted a relentless “ground-level” cohesive force that has resulted in the capacity to cohabitate in ever larger groups-of-groups—which is our species root adaptive advantage, upon which all our cognitive and cultural achievements rest.
When one grasps the Darwinian dimension of psychoanalytic thinking, all the exquisite riches of a century of this creative thought about the inner dynamics of child development can viewed as the effect of natural selection.
The social mind I was studying developed over millions of years by individuals using the same diagnostic instrument I employed in examining my patients.
Homo naledi is the usual mosaic of ape and human with nothing branching in any other direction.
Liberty is the fruit of justice. In order to make the flower stay in bloom, it is the plant that must be tended.
This alternative view of human nature is a deeper, richer, and far more noble narrative of our exclusively human legacy: that of an indomitable spirit possessed of a will for justice and sustained through the millennia by the bounty that it fosters.
The Relevance of Chimpanzee Studies for Human Nature, and what primatologists have swept under the rug.
