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Introducing Consciousness: A Graphic Guide by David Papineau and Howard Selina is the latest book in this series I've read. It explores what this thing is that we call consciousness. There are no answers, because consciousness remains pretty elusive, but the book doesn't aim to give you answers. One of the ideas raised was philosopher… Continue reading Book Review: Introducing Consciousness: A Graphic Guide
Introducing Psychology: A Graphic Guide by Nigel C. Benson is from the same series as Introducing Evolutionary Psychology, which I recently reviewed. It essentially takes the most interesting and relevant bits from an Intro to Psychology course and simplifies it, adding some fun graphics to boot. Explanations are bite-sized, chapters are short and sweet, and… Continue reading Book Review: Introducing Psychology: A Graphic Guide
I got thinking about this after watching an interview with Steven Pinker, one of my academic crushes, and then another interview with Jordan Peterson. Both referred to biological differences between men and women, although in different ways, and I wanted to do a post exploring my own take on sex and gender differences, and the… Continue reading Separating Out Sex/Gender, Biology and Social Construct
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week we'll look at the difference between innate and acquired characteristics. While intuitively it would seem reasonable that there are some capacities or abilities that are innate and some that are learned, there's fundamental disagreement within the academic community over… Continue reading What Is… an Innate vs. Acquired Characteristic
Feeling Wheel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week's term is emotions. This may seem like a rather obvious topic; after all, we all have emotions. But there's actually more than meets the eye, so I thought it would be… Continue reading What Is… an Emotion
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week, we take a bit of a detour to look at philosophical razors. I first heard of philosophical razors quite recently, in a poem by Suzette Benjamin that mentioned Occam's razor. So, what is it and why is philosophy doing some… Continue reading What Is… A Philosophical Razor
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week's term is critical thinking. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says that, while there are various different definitions, the basic underlying idea is "careful thinking directed to a goal." Wikipedia describes critical thinking as "the analysis of facts to form… Continue reading What Is… Critical Thinking
Our minds play all kinds of tricks on us. We've got all kinds of cognitive biases that influence what we do with our thoughts, and our brains do interesting things with the what it picks up through our senses. There's a philosophical argument as to whether or not there is a truly objective reality, but… Continue reading Perceived vs. Objective Reality
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week's term is stoicism. Stoicism came up in a book I recently reviewed, You Got This, and I wanted to find out more about it. It means taking a detour from psychology into the world of philosophy. Stoicism in Ancient… Continue reading What Is… Stoicism
What is it that makes you, you? Is there even a self? Let's consider a few different approaches. Buddhism A fundamental concept in Buddhism is non-self. The word Anatta is used for the principle that "there is in humans no permanent, underlying substance that can be called the soul" (Wikipedia). The belief that there is… Continue reading What Does the Self Consist of?