“Del Giudice seems to imply that a similar epigenetic mechanism “looks around” at the world during the first few years of life to try to figure out if you’re living in the sort of unpredictable dangerous environment that needs a fast strategy, or the sort of safe, masterable environment that needs a slow strategy. Depending on your genetic predisposition and the observable features of the environment, this mechanism “makes a decision” to “lock” you into a faster or slower strategy, setting your personality traits more toward one side or the other.”

“…’a one standard deviation increase in religiosity decreases the probability of being depressed by 11 percent. By comparison, increasing mother’s education from no high school degree to a high school degree or more only decreases the probability of being depressed by about 5 percent.’

And for the most depressed individuals, religiosity seems to be more effective than cognitive-based therapy ‘one of the most recommended forms of treatment.'”

“In a pure hierarchical model, these connections would not be necessary. In fact, more than 95% of the synapses in the neocortex are not explained by the pure hierarchical model. Additionally, many AI and deep learning networks are built on this hierarchical model. They typically require dozens of levels and millions of examples to learn something, whereas a human can learn something new in just a few exposures. The brain is clearly doing something different, and the general hierarchical view explains some of the story, but not all, so there must be something missing.

We believe we have uncovered the missing piece: all cortical columns have a signal representing location.”

“Emotional management is important because life is hard. The Buddha said: ‘All life is suffering’ and most of us past a certain age can only agree. Religion evolved to handle what I call the ‘vulnerability problem’. When we’re sick, we go to the doctor, not the priest. But when our child dies, or we lose our home in a fire, or we’re diagnosed with Stage-4 cancer, then religion is helpful because it provides some relief and some strength. It also gives us something to do, when there’s nothing we can do.”

“No one wants to experience sadness, but feeling sadness and desiring that the sadness goes away is worse than simply experiencing sadness in the present moment. The Buddha called our reaction to experiences the “second arrow” that hurts us. The first arrow is the experience itself; the second arrow is our unwise reaction to it that magnifies the effect.”

“You need faith to stick with projects that deliver progress in “mysterious” ways over long periods of time. By “faith” I’m not referring to belief in God; I mean having faith that time you spend in contemplative practice is time well spent.”

“If you want to improve your mind and better understand reality, you have to train your mind. If you want to be happy with a human brain and heart not wired to prioritize happiness, you have to train your heart and mind. Train. It’s like going to the gym to exercise: you have to work at it. It doesn’t happen automatically. Meditation is one way to do this.”

“…bonobos always prefer a winner — even when that dominance comes from beating others up.

“They prefer dominant individuals, no matter how they achieve their dominance,” notes Kiley Hamlin, an associate professor studying developmental psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. “Whereas human babies, in this case, are preferring only those who are dominant and not mean.””

[…]

This study fits into a large body of work by her lab and others, Hamlin says, showing that human babies prefer helpers and distain bullies of all kinds.”

“…these studies suggest that our perceived sense of authenticity is continually changing. We do not think of ourselves as stagnant beings. Moreover, people hold positive expectations that they are constantly moving towards becoming their true self, and they place immense value on knowing and expressing who they really are, so much so that they believe their future selves will be a more authentic version of their current selves, and their current selves are more genuine than their past selves.”

“I once interviewed the Dalai Lama, and I said to the Dalai Lama, ‘Why do Buddhists giggle all the time?’ Because they do. They just see the whole thing as a joke, you know, and they’re wonderful to be around. But he answered a different question, he said, ‘What I like about laughter is that when people laugh, they can change their minds.'”

—John Cleese

“These two types of science roles, simplifier and constructor, are both needed for creating the ecosystem of science. But why should it be that understanding the components (in simplifier fashion) does not open up the complete architecture of all science to us? The reason is that complete comprehension of one level of abstraction does not give enough understanding to help know what might happen when we combine components at this first level into a more complicated assembly. The rigidity of bricks does not make arches an inevitability.”

—The Secret Life of Science: How It Really Works and Why It Matters by Jeremy J. Baumberg