Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life reads a lot like today’s popular science books. In particular it reminds me of Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks, with its conversational style.
Much of the pleasure is the spectacle of all these Viennese doctors revelling in the exciting new theories of psychoanalysis, sharing their little anecdotes. Writing about inadvertent actions and [...]
As I wrote in the last post, I’m a tangle of complexes. Why didn’t I know this before? Lately I’ve been examining how my own self-awareness has changed over the years. I suppose you could call this self-awareness-awareness.
For years I would sometimes have bad moods of a particular kind, and during those moods my thoughts [...]
For the past few months I’ve had this thing – not an earworm, which is the catchy song that you can’t get out of your head (which I’ve written about before in this blog), but what you might call a language worm. Every so often this phrase pops into my head: “Given the preponderance of…”
I’m [...]
We are told by numerous reports that crustaceans feel pain. These things crop up every few months, and some of you may know that I’ve written about it before, in Philosophy Now, that time in reaction to Lynne Sneddon’s research into fish. So my ears pricked up yesterday. Here’s a sample of the headlines:
Lobster pain [...]
Drawn in pen, this elaborate doodle is interesting because while I was drawing it the black was the figure and the white was the ground. So the black was the thing to notice, and the white was just the space in between, the substrate. This was natural, as I was actually drawing the black on [...]
Often when I wake up I start singing the song Sing Hosanna! I was reminded of this on Sunday when I heard the song on a comedy show on the radio.
Most of the time I merely mouth it in a whisper as it runs through my head, or else I hum it or whistle it. [...]
(http://www.koelner-dom.de/)
Most people have wondered what their dreams mean, or if they have any meaning at all. It all comes down to the question why do we dream?
I read an article recently that claimed that the purpose of dreams is to reorder our model of the external world, to tidy it up, assimilating and filing our [...]
