One:
On the Frontier
Annals of Evolutionary-Buddhism: I'm a huge fan of Robert Wright. Back in the 1990s, he caught my attention when President Clinton made everyone who worked in the White House read his book, Non-Zero. This is sort of the precursor work to both Steven Pinker’s work why violence is declining over time, and a lot of the ideas about empathy I probe in my forthcoming book, Last Tango in Cyberspace (just got our pub date, May 2019). But all this is a little beside the point. The point here is that the topic of Wright’s new book is extra interesting. Why Buddhism is True blends evolutionary-psychology with cutting-edge neuroscience to defend the radical claims at the heart of Buddhist philosophy. As both a lover of Wright and a neurotheology wonk, this got my attention right away.
Quick Taste:
"Lots of information impinges on my brain, and my brain decides which information it will consider as part of my self and which information it won't consider as part of my self, and which information–say, the cry of an offspring–falls somewhere in between. And I take it for granted that those decisions comport with some deep metaphysical truth about what is I and what is other. But in fact, my brain could have been wired in a different way, so that it interpreted this information differently, leaving me with a very different sense of the distinction between I and other.
For example, people with a condition known as mirror-touch synesthesia pretty literally share the feelings of people in their vicinity. If they see someone being touched, they feel the touch, and brain scans show much the same neuronal activity they would have if they were being touched. You can imagine a process for creating organic beings–either natural selection operating under quirky conditions or some process other than natural selection–that would make mirror-touch synesthesia the norm rather than an aberration, in which case the prevailing conception of what self means would be very different.”
SK Bonus:Along similar lines, I wrote a piece for Forbes back in 2013 that argues about the mutable boundary of self and the arbitrariness of identity (a similar case to Wright's). If you want a little more on why the bounds of the Self are arbitrary check it
here.
two:
Visual of the Week
Annals of Futurism: Yuval Noah Harari is one of those razor-sharp thinkers. In this clip, he riffs on what the rise of AI is going to mean for us mere homo-sapiens.
As far as Yuval is concerned this is not just the biggest revolution in human history, but the biggest evolution in the history of biology. Quite the claim–but I'm not saying he's wrong.
three:
Rant of the Week
“When the going gets tough, the tough turn up the volume!"
– This came from the uber-badass that is
Mark Twight. Mark is a world-class climber, writer and the founder of Gym Jones. He came up as a mountaineer in the late 80's by tackling some of the most sickening climbs on the planet. He makes a lot of his living training elite special force operators. He’s also an old punk rocker. This bizarre set of overlapping interests made for a hell-of-a-fun mind jam on his “anti-podcast
podcast.” Definitely worth listening too….
four:
The Art of the Impossible
“When the going gets tough, the tough turn up the volume!"
Annals of Stress Management: In 2012 researchers at the University of Wisconsin published a seriously interesting
study. The researchers took 30,000 participants and asked them two questions. First, "How stressed out are you?". Second, "How much do you like stress?".
Then they monitored participants over the following eight years and looked at who lived and who died. They found that if you had a seriously stressful year and you believed that stress was bad, you have a 43% increased risk of death. That’s a zany number.
Where it gets even zanier is that if you have a stressful year yet you believe stress is a good thing, as a positive sign (an indicator of moving in the right direction, leaning into challenge, rising to the occasion etc) not only does your chance of death decrease, you actually drop to the bottom in terms of risk of mortality. This means your chances of death actually fall below those people who've had low-stress years.
So, being high stress and believing stress is good, is protection against mortality. Crazy right? Well, there's a sound biological explanation for this that links up stress, oxytocin and heart health (if you want to check out the finer details read the study
here).
The point of all this for our purposes:
Do whatever you have to do to reframe stress in your mind. Reassociate that tense feeling with moving forward and rising up. View all stress as eustress–that psychological or physical stress that's not just beneficial but necessary (like exercise). Basically, reframe like hell when you're stressed as hell and watch as your body thanks you.
Get more: I dive a little deeper on this on last week's Monday of the Mind if you want to check it
here.
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