Discussion thread for Personality and Its Transformations - Lecture #15
study group discussion
Discussion as part of our Study Group.
my notes
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02:00 - paper and book mentions - slide at 02:35
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06:00 - hippocampus regulates emotional responses based on current circumstance/environment
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12:00 - motivation - goal setting, behavioural driving, a set of schema where those things make sense - it is a one-eyed micropersonality - it is only aiming at one thing
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13:00 - hypothalamus always wins over the cortex
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17:00 - the brain is always working on the problem of what to ignore - and it must ignore almost everything making it blind to almost anything
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22:00 - prior to the guerrilla experiment, psychologists believed we were primed to spot anomalies, but it turns out that is not the case, what is the case, is that we only notice anomalies only if they interfere with what we set out to accomplish << how does this relate to flow state though? as noises can be incredibly distracting, but sometimes we notice them as infuriating, and other times don’t notice them at all - perhaps depends on the relative safety of the noise and its environment? not the case, as pop music is safe, but infuriating for concentration - yet baby boomers seem not bothered about radio/tv noise, yet perhaps they are not good at complex cognitive loads that require cognitive isolation and thus do not realise the impedance the noise makes - perhaps not about safety but comfort - if the noises are familiar in a current situation then they can be comfortable (repetitive noises) yet erratic rhythmical noises seem to interrupt to extent of cognition required to process their complexity - trivial noises are dismissed without cognition, mobile phone and computer sounds require more cognition to identity (which app, what meaning, whose phone, from who could this be), vehicles can be filtered out until a erratic sound occurs (loud motorbike, police siren changing frequency), erratic drips (is it the same drip? it sounds different, it is a different timing, has it gotten worse, when will I need to address it) >> - it isn’t anomaly or novelty that captures your attention, but the unexpected disruption of your behaviours and the desired outcomes of those disruptions - **only pay attention to things that can make you fail **<< seems the essence of marxism/feminism/blame ideologies - not victimhood/empowerment ideologies, but blame ideologies - if it were ourselves we blamed, we could do something about it empowerment - if it is others, then we can only blame and accuse >> also causes an emotional reaction (discussed more in next lecture) - emotional reaction prepares you for the worst case, and to update your expectations and desires to the changing world
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22:00 - example of guerrilla experiment motivations - winning, compliance - tap into intrinsic motivations so we want to play the game - making us focus our very limited attention resources on accomplishing the motivation << ha, the secret! >> peterson goes onto talk about visual field blurry outside the pinpoint of detail << seems for the anomaly situation, we spot what we are primed to spot - someone with a masked face in a dark alley (survival motivation) - an attractive girl/guy (reproduction motivation) - an aspiring person (imitation motivation) - seems things outside our current motivations we do not see at all - only anomalies that impede our motivations - however, how does that work with confirmation bias, as that is for the dismissing of anomalies >> << how does this play into distractions? especially for when you get distracted from things that are valuable? - is it competing motivations, or a failure to regulate motivations and attention? >> noticing movement seems to be our brain keeping track of what is changing so it only has to update our representation minimally, thus eliminating the irrelevant - irrelevant of the motivationally driven interpretive frame that we are applying to the scene - the rule of perception is don’t pay attention to anything that isn’t related to the desired outcome - exactly how you calculate what you can pay attention to and what you can’t, is knowledge you build over time, that you can be wrong about << the fault of our perception seems to be the equation of outside of motivations = irrelevant - however, how else would one determine irrelevant beyond motivation? >>
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31:00 - slide -
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36:00 - people think they argue about facts - true, but they also somehow have to argue about how to see the facts - and then, which interpretation is more valid when they are equally valid - perhaps which level of interpretation is most applicable, useful, and still relevant/correct - that is to say, valuable
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39:00 - so if you orient yourself around goals, then where do the goals come from? - freud says the ID functions, primary goals/drives, a relatively rigid behavioural algorithm once the state has arisen – peterson; that seems incorrect, as motivations are more than just states - rat maze example, scooting rat, running rat
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42:00 - slide - chaos is all that you understand when you do not know what you are looking at - culture is in part what is outside of you, but it is also the framework of what you use to interpret the outside world - the downside of framing is that it partly isolates what you see - but good side of framing is then it lets you do something and be productive - in some sense, framing always oversimplifies things, one to compress to extent we can deal with it, another is because we need to get things done sooner than later << both limits are based on the resources available, except time, infinite time does not mean we delay everything >>
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44:00 - slide of walled city
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45:00 - people have an infantile fear of death, so they turn to religion
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<< I’ve written about this exact thing, but it’s application to veganism over at https://medium.com/p/c60913a8ca5b >>
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culture not only protects you from death anxiety, it also keeps the lights on and actually protects you from death, which is somewhat more important
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