To understand slow thinking, count how many basketball passes the white team make in this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2 ... detailpage

My book just arrived this morning so I haven't begin to read it yet. Having read the posts though, I would just like to say that I like spiders. OK, I don't want their webs all over my living space, but I don't mind how many live with the bats in our coach-house.

I also like snakes, although I know I'd be terrified of walking through long grass where heledd lives and of being bitten by a venomous one. But to look at, in the reptile house at the zoo, they are fascinating and rather beautiful. You can hold them sometimes at our zoo and I was amazed to find that they don't feel the least slimey.

I think we often get our prejudices from our parents and they take some fighting, especially the religion thing.

I don't know how it works, but I found that Yoga medition and breathing, helped me to think much more clearly. When you look at a tray of meat in the supermarket, for instance, one tends to get the feel of the whole creature, and have more respect for the life of the creature. It is possible now to look at brain waves and synapses in operation - when one has a brain scan. Womens' brains work differently to mens. A wonderful, and funny book called, 'Why Women can't read Maps and Men don't Listen' demonstrates this.

There are snakes in UK too, Penelope!

Interbane: Is there any scanning/testing to show underlying mechanisms to these categories, or are they arbitrary? It sounds like a useful distinction, but only in the sense that it's one of many heuristics for understanding human thought. Simplify simplify simplify.

They can see by scans that a woman can think with both sides of her brain at once, the intuitive, artistic side, on the left, and the rational, mathmatical side, on the right. I man only uses one side at a time. Hence, if a man is reading a book, he can't hear his wife talking. What do you do Interbane, if you are watching TV and the phone rings? A man will usually, turn down the TV and then answer the phone. A woman will answer the phone and carry on watching the TV. A woman can knit, watch TV and read all at the same time. This is not necessarily a virtue. Also we cannot read maps without a lot of brain effort. I have to turn the map upside down to the direction we are travelling. I have 'duff' spacial awareness....can't park sideways because I can't visualise what is happening to the wheels of the car as I turn the steering wheel. See, I know in my head 'why' I can't do it.....but I still can't visualise it.
Is this what you were asking?


I haven't begun to read Part I yet, but I am reading the introduction. Now, this is relevant.....I am listening to what this man says, because he is Jewish. How silly, but that is the way I was conditioned....religiously speaking. The Jews, according to the Bible, were meant to teach the rest us of how to live in a relationship with God. I don't believe the Bible, but I can't rid myself of the tendency to listen to Jewish teachers.

I trust this man though, because I like his face....This is not as silly as it sounds.....I have learned to read faces. I trust this ability, because of experience.....I can read a kind face, a cruel face or a face which reads indifference. Now, this is fast thinking.....but I trust it. I trust it because I have lived a long time, comparitively speaking, and I know it works. I only believe in his integrity, btw, not that he is the fount of all knowledge.

Do you think it might boil down to the difference between 'wisdom', learning through experience, as opposed to, 'knowledge', learning through absorbing facts?

Interbane: It wouldn't surprise me. I find that I'm pre-programmed to enjoy looking at boobs. Looking at a spider tickles the same caveman part of my brain, but in a bad kind of way.

You like looking at boobs? You're a young and ultra intelligent bloke with lots of life-force....of course you like looking at boobs!!!

Now what is puzzling is that I am not supposed to have any libido. But I like a certain British Actor called Sean Bean. He once played Mellors the Gardener in a BBC production of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover'. Phrooor!! This week I saw him in one of a series of plays on TV, called 'The Accused' - He played a transvestite. He is so butch looking. He is famous for playing 'Sharp' in the Bernard Cornwall Series of historical/military novels. In this play, he played a transvestite, and I can't stop thinking about him.....What's wrong with me? Well, I don't care. I'm glad. It's the life-force, and I've still got a libido. Hurrah!!!!!!!

There is a very large literature on dual system theories of cognition, including an ever growing body of literature from neuroimaging studies. Here are some examples:

Rational choice involves assessing the probability of events and combining that with their utility. The choice that is most likely to give you what you want is the best choice. When people are making choices while undergoing fMRI scanning, these two types are reasoning can be seen to take place in different parts of the brain (probability estimation in the frontal lobes, utility in the striatum and other areas that comprise the brains reward circuitry). When people make risky choices, there is usually greater activity in the latter than the former.

When making moral judgments, processing takes place in areas associated with emotion and in areas associated with deliberative reasoning. People who have sustained damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (which processes emotion) make moral judgments strictly on the basis of objective "greater good" considerations, ignoring emotional aspects of situations that give an intact person moral qualms. Simple (and oft used) example: An out of control trolley is headed for 5 people. If you push a switch, it will divert the trolley onto another track where only one person is standing. Should you do it? Most people say yes. What if instead of a switch, there is a very obese man standing there who could be pushed onto the tracks to stop the trolley. He would be killed but the 5 people would be saved. Should you do it? Most people (and people with other kinds of brain damage) say no. But VMPFC patients see no difference between these scenarios;

What if instead of a switch, there is a very obese man standing there who could be pushed onto the tracks to stop the trolley. He would be killed but the 5 people would be saved. Should you do it?

if the very obese man were a banker or a corporate overlord the decision would be requiring much less deliberation

perhaps in the heat of the moment one might throw ones own body onto the tracks and thus save fatty AND the five.

if the five were all members of nickelback it would be fatties lucky day

It makes you deliberate though doesn't?

Does one trust to non-interference and let the trolley go its own way? Trust to the Karmic Law?

Does one imagine that fate has placed you there to derail and divert the trolley? Trust to the Karmic Law?

Or does one make a brave decision as Sir Winston Churchill was called to do, by letting the enemy bomb Coventry, even though he knew they were about to do so. He couldn't allow them, at that stage in the war, to know we had radar, or that we had broken the enigma code. (I went on a tour of Bletchley Park last week, the hub of the codebreakers during the war, which was extremely interesting. I couldn't stop taking photos, hence this instance is lodged in my mind.)

An awful decision for Churchill to be forced to make.

Does one trust to non-interference and let the trolley go its own way? Trust to the Karmic Law?

well you know no matter what i did, i would be thinking of 600,000 cambodians, many of who's only crime was to be in front of a US forces carpet bombing trolley.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osKkRmLIldE

short memory

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmoyu4VO5LE

forgotten years

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9eap_cKLP4

I suppose the people of Coventry were equally innocent.

However, Churchill had that decision to make. I don't know that I'd have been brave enough, but brave it certainly was.

When I read John Fowles' novel, 'The Magus' I felt as though I'd never be quite the same again. The man in the novel, lived in a Greek village and was forced by the enemy occupying Greece at the time, to decide whether to betray the village, or loose his own family. Also, the book 'Sophie's Choice', where she was forced to choose between her son and her daughter, which one stayed with her and which went to the concentration camps. Such cruel decisions could make a person insane. There is no way one could make such decisions rationally. We are human beings.....and not rational by nature. I think we are emotional by nature.

If we were completely rational, we would dispose of all babies born with defects, because that weakness carries on through procreation. If we were completely rational, we would be like Hitler and try to produce a master race by only allowing the strongest to live. Thank goodness, we have this natural tendency to care for the weak and vulnerable. It isn't rational.....but it is the best part of humanity. And I hate to imagine what the world would become if we were completely rational.