Themes: Psychology, Non-Fiction
Status: 🌱
Tags: literature book

An Alchemy of Mind

Diane Ackerman
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Summary

Quotes

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Page 23

“Mind is the comforting mirage of the physical brain. An experience, not an entity”

Quote

Page 32

“What the brain really needed was space without volume. So it took a radical leap and did something unparalleled in the history of life on Earth. It began storing information and memories outside itself, on stone, papyrus, paper, computer chips, and film.”

Insight

Page 43

“Gazzaniga calls the left brain the Interpreter, “a device that seeks explanations for events and emotional experiences.””

Concept

In reference to the splitbrain experiment where subjects rationalized the decisions that their right hemispheres made.

Page 44

““life, though full of purposes, had none, and though everything in life was a sign, life managed, itself, to be meaningless.””

Quote

Page 51

“Afloat somewhere between done and undone, we ride a fluid present from moment to moment.”

Quote

Page 59

“Or as the physiologist Bernard Katz put it so well: “Certain scientists would no more use another’s terminology than they would use another person’s toothbrush.””

Quote

On the debate of consciousness and scientific paradigms.

Page 60

“We may have to accept that some mysteries will remain because we evolved brains specifically designed to hide their workings from us. In any case, we can’t completely shelve our subjectivity.”

Concept

Page 70

“There was a time, Julian Jaynes suggests in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, when we heard voices inside the head, not backchat from a familiar brain, we thought, but otherworldly beings telling us what to do.”

Insight

I have come across this before, would love to research more.

Page 71

“Insight roams the sea of the unconscious like the Loch Ness monster, a rumor whose wake occasionally becomes visible, but even then it’s mystifying and scarcely believed.”

Quote

Page 94

“To do something is to act, but so is doing nothing; acting and not acting are both choices, even if one thinks not acting is not choosing.”

Insight

Page 102

“Hegel says, “the known, just because it is known, is the unknown.” Knowing people better, you notice them less.”

Quote

Page 103

“we can seize a phenomenon with mental pincers and stop the world in its spin, if only briefly.”

Quote

Page 103

“Look patiently, affectionately, at anything, gather six or eight perceptions, and it will never look the same again.”

Quote

Page 104

“We can’t enchant the world, which makes its own magic; but we can enchant ourselves by paying deep attention.”

Quote

Page 111

“What we pay attention to helps define us. With what does a man choose to spend the irreplaceable hours of his life?”

Insight

Page 111

“an MRI study of multitasking (the polite word for attention bingeing) reveals that paying attention to two things at once doesn’t double the brain’s output but lowers it, shortchanging both.”

Concept

Attention bingeing

Page 126

“Our yearning to find whole-ness as holiness, and at-one-ment as atonement, fills a need ancient and essential as air.”

Quote

Page 129

““One time we had a strobe light going and this individual experienced God visiting her. Afterwards we looked at her EEG and there was this classic spike and slow-wave seizure over the temporal lobe at the precise time of the experience—the other parts of the brain were normal.””

Insight

Page 130

“Deep Play”

Insight

Future reading about the psychology of religion

Page 152

“Mind you, memories are kidnappable. Radio, television, and the print media purvey shared national memories that can usurp a personal past.”

Insight

Page 152

“British neuroscientist Steven Rose points out, “means that whereas all living species have a past, only humans have a history.””

Quote

Page 162

“For both storage and retrieval, such memories rely on the sea-horse-shaped hippocampus (from the Greek for “sea monster”).”

Quote

I love etymology. I did not know where we coined this term from.

Page 170

“It’s right on the tip of my tongue, we say picturesquely, as if a moth were perching on the taste buds.”

Quote

This authors use of creative simile, methaphor, and analogy is inspiring.

Page 171

“In time, the disease invades other parts of the brain, attacking all forms of memory, until a recognizable self—one of memory’s better pranks—disappears like chalk underneath the brisk strokes of a blackboard eraser.”

Quote

Again fantastic imagery. I would like to practice this in my own writing.

Page 177

“Forgetting isn’t the absence of remembering, it’s memory’s ally, a device that allows the brain to stay agile and engaged.”

Insight

This is similar to the philosophy behind journaling or note-taking. Use your brain for thinking and rely upon tools for remembering.

Page 190

“lemon balm”

Insight

Improves memory and calmness