Science of the SpiritS


Book 2

Stoicism in times of pandemic: Some guidance from Marcus Aurelius

Donald Robertson
The Guardian, UK
Sat, 25 Apr 2020 14:00 UTC
Marcus Aurelius
© DEA/G DAagli Orti/De Agnostini via Getty ImagesA bust of Emperor Marcus Aurelius.
The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was the last famous Stoic philosopher of antiquity. During the last 14 years of his life he faced one of the worst plagues in European history. The Antonine Plague, named after him, was probably caused by a strain of the smallpox virus. It's estimated to have killed up to 5 million people, possibly including Marcus himself.

From AD166 to around AD180, repeated outbreaks occurred throughout the known world. Roman historians describe the legions being devastated, and entire towns and villages being depopulated and going to ruin. Rome itself was particularly badly affected, carts leaving the city each day piled high with dead bodies.

In the middle of this plague, Marcus wrote a book, known as the Meditations, which records the moral and psychological advice he gave himself at this time. He frequently applies Stoic philosophy to the challenges of coping with pain, illness, anxiety and loss. It's no stretch of the imagination to view Meditations as a manual for developing precisely the mental resilience skills required to cope with a pandemic.

Comment: You can download a copy of "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius for free, courtesy of Project Gutenberg: Meditations by Emperor of Rome Marcus Aurelius

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Brain

New study finds sexist beliefs are associated with narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism

Katarina Skelin
PsyPost
Thu, 09 Apr 2020 17:30 UTC
evil stare
The dark triad is a combination of three negative personality traits: narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. It is more common for this set of traits to be found among men, and it can be spotted through characteristics like selfishness, impulsivity, and opportunism. Those who gain success at the workplace without regard to getting along with others are likely to score high on measures of the dark triad.

How does one develop these traits? Is it due to genetics or does society play a role in forming individuals with these undesirable personality characteristics? A study published in Personality and Individual Differences attributes it to sexism.

Researchers from the University of Florida suggest that the dark triad might be misproduced by society's promotion and maintenance of men's dominant social position over women. To test this, Melissa Gluck and her colleagues set out to investigate whether any form of sexism is associated with the development of this particular set of negative traits.
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Eye 2

'Successful' psychopaths learn crucial skills that let them walk among us

David S. Chester PhD
Psychology Today
Sun, 26 Apr 2020 17:09 UTC
Psychopath advisory
They walk among us — psychopaths.

These individuals possess a unique constellation of traits: callousness to others' suffering, a grandiose sense of self-worth, and a manipulative approach to dealing with others. Typically, such antisocial tendencies result in incarceration and other forms of exclusion from society. Yet some psychopathic individuals are able to suppress their psychopathic impulses enough to remain members of society. Many even rise to the upper ranks of business, law, and government.

Yet, what allows some psychopathic individuals to wind up as 'successful' versus those who find themselves incarcerated for their harmful and impulsive behavior?

In a recently-published article in the journal Personality Disorders, Emily Lasko, M.S., and I tested whether a very specific psychological process, impulse control, contributed to the development of 'successful' psychopathy. We analyzed data from the Pathways to Desistance study, which followed over 1,000 adolescents (who were convicted of serious criminal offenses) over multiple years to examine what factors predicted who would get convicted for re-offenses and who would not.

Comment: See also: Ponerology 101: Lobaczewski and the origins of Political Ponerology

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Brain

Thinking about your thinking: 7 ways to improve critical thinking skills

Ransom Patterson
College Info Geek
Thu, 01 Aug 2019 19:19 UTC
Man looking at sunset
© Unsplash/Chetan Menaria
When I was in 7th grade, my U.S. history teacher gave my class the following advice:
Your teachers in high school won't expect you to remember every little fact about U.S. history. They can fill in the details you've forgotten. What they will expect, though, is for you to be able to think; to know how to make connections between ideas and evaluate information critically.
I didn't realize it at the time, but my teacher was giving a concise summary of critical thinking. My high school teachers gave similar speeches when describing what would be expected of us in college: it's not about the facts you know, but rather about your ability to evaluate them.

And now that I'm in college, my professors often mention that the ability to think through and solve difficult problems matters more in the "real world" than specific content.
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Books

Experimenting with Homeschooling offers an opportunity to cultivate the virtues of independence & original thinking

Mordechai Levy-Eichel
Aeon
Fri, 10 Apr 2020 12:56 UTC
homeschooling
I was homeschooled for eight years, from age 11 through to college, before it was a novel way for tiger parents to show off their dynamic commitment to their children's education. Now, if millions of parents and families are suddenly going to be homeschooling their kids for the coming weeks (and, let's be honest, quite likely beyond), it's worth trying to think about how to do this in a manner as smooth, healthy and wise as possible.

Learning at home is quite different from learning at school. It requires us to reorient how we think about learning in general, and how we approach the process with our children - maybe even with ourselves, too. Historically, education has been the province of parents. But the question of how kids spend their time, and learn, and grow, is one to which society as a whole should pay more substantive attention, instead of leaving it to the professional advocates and their tired debates about charter schools, unions and uniforms.

Comment: Read more about homeschooling:

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Alarm Clock

Time management: 6 techniques from the Stoic philosopher Seneca


Daily Stoic
Mon, 20 Apr 2020 18:33 UTC
time seneca
© Quotefancy, Youtube
True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not." ― Seneca
Locked in prison by Henry Bolingbroke (Henry IV) in Shakespeare's Richard II, Richard II gives a haunting speech about his hopeless fate. One line stands out, as it captures perfectly, the reality of nearly every human being — indeed, it sounds like it was cribbed from Seneca's On The Shortness of Life. "I wasted time," Richard II says, "and now doth time waste me."

We think that time is ours to waste. We even say, "We have two hours to kill" or speak of dead time between projects. The irony! Because time is the one that's killing us. Each minute that passes is not just dead to us, it brings us closer to being dead. That's what Richard II realizes in that prison cell. Only now is he realizing that each second that ticks by is a beat of his heart that he won't get back, each ringing bell that marks the hour falls upon him like a blow.

Comment: For more on Stoicism, see:

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Fire

Anger is temporary madness: A Stoic guide to anger management

Massimo Pigliucci‌
Aeon
Fri, 13 Oct 2017 20:17 UTC
Captain Ahab
© Photo by Rex FeaturesRockwell Kent's illustration of Captain Ahab from the 1937 edition of Moby Dick.
People get angry for all sorts of reasons, from the trivial ones (someone cut me off on the highway) to the really serious ones (people keep dying in Syria and nobody is doing anything about it). But, mostly, anger arises for trivial reasons. That's why the American Psychological Association has a section of its website devoted to anger management. Interestingly, it reads very much like one of the oldest treatises on the subject, On Anger, written by the Stoic philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca back in the first century CE.

Seneca thought that anger is a temporary madness, and that even when justified, we should never act on the basis of it because, though 'other vices affect our judgment, anger affects our sanity: others come in mild attacks and grow unnoticed, but men's minds plunge abruptly into anger. ... Its intensity is in no way regulated by its origin: for it rises to the greatest heights from the most trivial beginnings.'

Comment: Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius - timeless stoic philosophy that is essential to the human spirit

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Yoda

How to turn yourself into a Super-Learner

David Robson
The Guardian
Sun, 16 Feb 2020 00:00 UTC
Whether you're taking up the oboe or finessing your Finnish, scientific research offers tips to aid learning.
Teaching
© Maskot/Getty ImagesPerhaps surprisingly, one of the best ways to learn a subject is to teach it.
If your aim for 2020 was to learn a new skill, you may be at the point of giving up. Whether you are mastering a new language or a musical instrument, or taking a career-changing course, initial enthusiasm can only take you so far, and any further progress can be disappointingly slow.

From these struggles, you might assume that you simply lack a natural gift - compared to those lucky people who can learn any new skill with apparent ease.

However, it needn't be this way. Many polymaths - including Charles Darwin and the Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman - claimed not to have exceptional natural intelligence. Most of us have more than enough brainpower to master a new discipline, if we apply it correctly - and the latest neuroscience offers many strategies to do just that.
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SOTT Logo Radio

SOTT Focus: MindMatters: Why We Need Leisure, or What To Do When You Have Nothing To Do

Corey Schink, Elan Martin, Harrison Koehli
Sott.net
Wed, 22 Apr 2020 00:00 UTC
leisure
'Idle hands are the devil's workshop,' we're told. This adage sometimes informs our mad scramble to make ends meet, quite often going non-stop and mostly living to work, with hardly a moment to see who, what and where we are in the vast context of our lives. Many of us are going nowhere fast. Though taking personal responsibility is correctly connected to paying the bills, and is crucial to any kinds of individual growth, there is another type of responsibility we have to ourselves that quite often gets lost in the shuffle in any real and valuable sense.

On this week's MindMatters we look at philosopher Josef Pieper's classic book Leisure: The Basis of Culture and use his ideas as a point of departure to discuss how we spend our free time (since, for the time being, we now seem to have so much more of it!). Among a wide range of issues connected to Pieper's thesis, we ask what we should be doing with ourselves when we're not "getting things done", and what place philosophy, art and any number of other things that culture offers have in our lives. Ultimately, the underlying question is: What may feed the life of the mind in a time and place that is quite often so mindless?


Running Time: 00:51:25

Download: MP3 — 47.1 MB

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Cloud Lightning

Coronavirus hysteria is giving people vivid dreams - here's why

Rebecca Renner
Source
Wed, 15 Apr 2020 12:00 UTC
coronavirus mask
© Deirdre BarrettDeirdre Barrett, a professor of psychology at Harvard University who studies dreams, made this photo illustration of a recent COVID-19 dream she had.
Ronald Reagan pulled up to the curb in a sleek black town car, rolled down his tinted window, and beckoned for Lance Weller, author of the novel Wilderness, to join him. The long-dead president escorted Weller to a comic book shop stocked with every title Weller had ever wanted, but before he could make a purchase, Reagan swiped his wallet and skipped out the door.

Of course, Weller was dreaming. He is one of many people around the world — including more than 600 featured in just one study — who say they are experiencing a new phenomenon: coronavirus pandemic dreams.

Science has long suggested that dream content and emotions are connected to wellbeing while we're awake. Bizarre dreams laden with symbolism allow some dreamers to overcome intense memories or everyday psychological stressors within the safety of their subconscious. Nightmares, on the other hand, can be warning signs of anxieties that we might not otherwise perceive in our waking lives.

Comment: And so a significant number of people aorund the globe are being traumatized over a 'pandemic' that never was:

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