#psychology

Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#human-nature #psychology #social-commentary #nature

But I know human nature, my friend, and I tell you that, suddenly confronted with the possibility of being tried for murder, the most innocent person will lose his head and do the most absurd things. ↗

— Agatha Christie

#nature

The common denominator of all jokes is a path of expectation that is diverted by an unexpected twist necessitating a complete reinterpretation of all the previous facts — the punch-line…Reinterpretation alone is insufficient. The new model must be inconsequential. For example, a portly gentleman walking toward his car slips on a banana peel and falls. If he breaks his head and blood spills out, obviously you are not going to laugh. You are going to rush to the telephone and call an ambulance. But if he simply wipes off the goo from his face, looks around him, and then gets up, you start laughing. The reason is, I suggest, because now you know it’s inconsequential, no real harm has been done. I would argue that laughter is nature’s way of signaling that "it’s a false alarm." Why is this useful from an evolutionary standpoint? I suggest that the rhythmic staccato sound of laughter evolved to inform our kin who share our genes; don’t waste your precious resources on this situation; it’s a false alarm. Laughter is nature’s OK signal. ↗

— V.S. Ramachandran

#humor #laughter #humor

No matter what I said they insisted on thinking of God as something outside themselves. Something that yearns to take every indolent moron to His breast and comfort him. The notion that the effort has to be their own . . . and that the trouble they are in is all their own doing . . . is one that they can't or won't entertain. ↗

— Robert A. Heinlein

#religion #religion

In my opinion, our health care system has failed when a doctor fails to treat an illness that is treatable. ↗

— Kevin Alan Lee

#government #health-care #health-care-system #humanism #medical

There are, of course, inherent tendencies to repetition in music itself. Our poetry, our ballads, our songs are full of repetition; nursery rhymes and the little chants and songs we use to teach young children have choruses and refrains. We are attracted to repetition, even as adults; we want the stimulus and the reward again and again, and in music we get it. Perhaps, therefore, we should not be surprised, should not complain if the balance sometimes shifts too far and our musical sensitivity becomes a vulnerability. ↗

— Oliver Sacks

#hypotheses #hypothesis #music #neuroscience #psychology

Sometimes life seems like a poorly designed cage within which man has been sentenced to be free. ↗

— Sheldon B. Kopp

#psychology #design

The neural processes underlying that which we call creativity have nothing to do with rationality. That is to say, if we look at how the brain generates creativity, we will see that it is not a rational process at all; creativity is not born out of reasoning. ↗

— Rodolfo R. Llinás

#cognitive-psychology #creativity #neuroscience #psychology #science

Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly. The fundamental conceptions of psychology are practically very clear to us, but theoretically they are very confused, and one easily makes the obscurest assumptions in this science without realizing, until challenged, what internal difficulties they involve. ↗

— William James

#philosophy #psychology #science #truth #science

To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture. ↗

— Frantz Fanon

#politics #psychology #culture