The rats and the humans had to look at a TV screen and press the lever anytime a dot appeared in the top half of the screen. The experimenter didn't tell the human subjects that's what they were supposed to do; they had to figure it out for themselves the same way the rats did.
The experiment was set up so that 70 percent of the time the dot was in the top of the screen. Since there wasn't any punishment for a wrong response, the smartest strategy was just to push the bar 100 percent of the time. That way you'd end up getting a reward 70 percent of the time, even though you didn't have a clue what the pattern was.
That's what the rats did. The just kept pressing the bar every time the screen changed.
But the humans never figured this out. They kept trying to come up with a rule, so sometimes they'd press the bar and sometimes they wouldn't, trying to figure it out. Some of them thought they had come up with a rule, which they then used to tell them when to press the bar and when not to press the bar. But they were deluded. They hadn't come up with the rule at all, and the rats ended up with lost more rewards than the humans.
Zobrazují se příspěvky se štítkemenglish. Zobrazit všechny příspěvky
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sobota 23. března 2013
Rats vs. humans
pátek 22. března 2013
Social and sexual
You can tell from one's sex life how someone might relate to others socially, or we can observe one's social relationships and infer what their sex life will be like.
Arthur Janov: Sex & The Subconscious: Perversions and Diversions in the Realm of the Libido
Vicious hate
As I feel this I get furious and full of rage with being stopped. I growl and fight and hit the walls and refuse to let him win. The intensity of the hate is vicious and I did have feelings of wanting to kill him, which thankfully I didn't act out, but did feel it deeply, and safely, at the Center.
Arthur Janov: Sex & The Subconscious: Perversions and Diversions in the Realm of the Libido
Energy in depression
When the energy of an imprint is blocked, we have little access to ourselves. This also suggests why depression often involves being sexless, as the system is in the energy conservation mode - parasympathetic. All energy is suppressed. The underlying pain has demanded that so much energy be expended in repression that there is little left over for other things.
And the memory endures, keeping the system off balance where the parasympathetic system is dominant.
Note: See Parasympathetic nervous system for explanation.
Arthur Janov: Sex & The Subconscious: Perversions and Diversions in the Realm of the Libido
Bulls do kill
Bulls do kill people with some frequency, but when they do they're almost never trying to kill; they're challenging the person for dominance. Bulls don't kill each other when they're fighting for dominance, but because a bull is so big, and because bulls use head butting to win dominance contests, the human get crushed against a fence. The bull doesn't understand how much bigger and stronger he is.
čtvrtek 21. března 2013
Feel it
That means that during childhood when love is offered by our parents, and still later by lovers, we cannot feel it. Repression has blocked our ability to receive input, even if that input is love. That is repression’s purpose: to keep external stimulation from rocking the internal boat.
Arthur Janov: Sex & The Subconscious: Perversions and Diversions in the Realm of the Libido
Animal violence
People who love animals often think of animals as being aggressive but not violent. Only humans, they'll tell you, commit rapes, murders, or wage wars.
But that turns out not to be true. Some chimpanzees actually fight what Jaak Panksepp calls mini-wars. This is organized violent behavior.
(...)
Many animals can be horrifically violent for no reason, it seems, other than the sheer desire to kill and maybe even to torture. It took many, many years for people to finally realize that dolphins, for instance, aren't he benign, perpetually smiling sea creatures they look like to us. Instead, dolphins are big-brained animal who commit gang rape, brutal killing of dolphin "children", and the mass murder of porpoises. In her book To Touch a Wild Dolphin, Rachel Smolker writes that male dolphins stick together in gangs and will chase a female down and forcibly mate her.
Love is opium
The brain releases endorphins when we're injured to reduce pain, and also when we are with people we love, or when someone we love touches us. A lot of neuroscientists think we probably become addicted to or dependent on people in a similar way to heroin or morphine addiction, too. People who are attached to each other develop a social dependence on each other that's based in a physical dependence on brain opiates.
Just pigs
Breeding pigs commercially is and art. I talked to a man who had one of the most successful records for breeding sow out there and he told me things no one's ever written in a book as far as I know. Each boar had his own little perversion the man had to do to get the boar turned on so he could collect the semen.
The Parrot Who Owns Me
There's a book called The Parrot Who Owns Me, written by an ornithologist at Rutgers University who adopted a thirty-year-old parrot after his owners died. The parrot got so attached to his new owner that he decided she was his mate. Every spring he would court her. He would shred newspaper to make a nest, he would kiss her, he would, he would hoard food to share with her, and he would attack her husband if he saw him getting too affectionate with his wife.
Freud, denial and unconscious
I don't think I have any of Freud's defence mechanism, and I'm always amazed when normal people do. One of the things that blow my mind about normal human beings is denial. When I see a packing plant getting into a bad situation I'll say, "That's not going to work," and everyone will immediately think I'm being really negative. But I'm not. It would be obvious to anyone outside the situation that what they're doing isn't going to work, but people inside the bad situation can't see it because their defence mechanisms protect them from seeing it until they're ready. That's denial, and I can't understand it at all. I can't even imagine what it's like. That's because I don't have an unconscious.
Ambivalence
The main difference between animal emotions and human emotions is that animals don't have mixed emotions the way normal people do. Animals aren't ambivalent; they don't have love-hate relationships with each other or with people. That's one of the reasons humans love animals so much; animals are loyal. If an animal loves you he loves you no matter what. He doesn't care what you look like or how much money you make.
(...)
Children don't either. Emotionally, children are more like animals.
Rapist Roosters
The chicken farmer told me that half of his roosters were rapist-murderers. I was stunned when I heard that. There is no species alive in nature where half males kill reproductive age females. There had to be something seriously wrong with those birds.
(...)
A normal rooster does a little courtship dance before trying to mate with a hen. The dance is hardwired into the rooster's brain; it is instinctual behaviour, or what animal ethologists call a fixed action pattern. All normal roosters do it.
The dance triggers a fixed action pattern in the hen's brain, and she crouches down into a sexually receptive position so the rooster can mount her. She doesn't crouch down unless she sees the dance. That's the way her brain is wired.
But half of roosters had stopped doing the dance, which meant that the hens had stopped crouching down for them. So the roosters had become rapists. They jumped on the hens and tried to mate them by force, and when the hen tried to get away, the rooster would attack her with his spurs or his toes and slash her to death.
Good or bad
Fear of the unknown is universal. If you've never seen something before, you can't make a judgment about it; you don't know if it' good or bad, dangerous or safe. And your brain always wants to make that judgement; that's how the brain works. Researches have found that even nonsense syllables spark positive and negative emotions; to your brain, there's no such thing as neutral. So if you can't tell what something is, you get anxious trying to decide whether it's good or bad.
Garbage dog
He had an Irish setter named Jason who was i big "garbage dog", constantly getting into the garbage whenever Mr. Ross wasn't around. Mr. Ross figured Jason knew he was being bad because if there was a mess on the floor the dog would take off running the minute Mr. Ross got home. On days when he hadn't gotten into the garbage he didn't run, so Mr. Ross thought this meant Jason knew that strewing garbage clear across the kitchen was wrong, and ran away because he felt bad.
He found out differently when a more experienced trainer had him try an experiment. He told Mr. Ross to go get into the garbage himself, when Jason wasn't watching, and dump it out all over the floor. Then he was supposed to bring Jason into the kitchen and see what the dog did.
It turned out Jason did what he always did when there was garbage on the floor - he took off running. He wasn't running away because he felt guilty, he was running away because he felt scared. For Jason, garbage on the floor meant trouble.
Lie is...
A lie is when you say something happened which didn't happen. But there is only ever one thing which happened at a particular time and a particular place. And there are an infinite number of things which didn't happen at that time and that place. And if I think about something which didn't happen I start thinking about all the other things which didn't happen.
Mark Haddon: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Lies
I do not tell lies. Mother used to say that this was because I was a good person. But it is not because I am a good person. It is because I can't tell lies.
Mark Haddon: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
úterý 19. března 2013
Civilization
Freud wrote a book called Civilization and Its Discontents. It was a powerful attack on the idea that civilization was an expression of human progress. Instead, Freud argued, civilization had actually been constructed to control the dangerous animal forces inside human beings.
Windows and SimCity
I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows, where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it. This was not an unusual case.
Joel Spolsky: Joel on Software
Writing book benefits
One of the benefits of writing this book is that I get to put words into your mouth and you can't do a darn thing about it.
Joel Spolsky: Joel on Software
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