Mind

Emotions are not reactions to the world. You are not a passive receiver of sensory input but an active constructor of your emotions. From sensory input and past experience, your brain constructs meaning and prescribes action. If you didn’t have concepts that represent your past experience, all your sensory inputs would just be noise. You wouldn’t

When you wake each morning, you not only become freshly aware of your thoughts, you also resituate yourself in your body. We don’t experience the world purely in our minds, but as ‘embodied agents’, says Roy Salomon, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Haifa in Israel. Your sense of self is as connected to your limbs and guts as to the

At the most basic, some things that we know to be potential objects of experience – sounds at particularly high or low frequencies, for example – are not available to us, though they may be to bats and bears; and that's simply because our brains do not deal with them. We know, too, that when parts of the brain are lost, a chunk of available

In-group bias (or us-versus-them thinking) is a concrete example. We tend to treat those we deem as outgroups as if they are incidental, in our way. We lack compassion for those we place in outgroups, losing the ability to care about them. We do this not just towards human beings but also towards other species.

I used to blame advertisers for that restlessness and dissatisfaction, but I don’t think that’s right. We were already restless; we always have been. The advertisers just figured out how to nurture, tend, exacerbate, and capitalize on the pre-existing condition, that innate restlessness, promising that something new is going to set all to rights.

When we feel stressed, anxious, irritated, or angry, one of the things that happens to the mind is that it shrinks down and zooms in on the challenge at hand—the stressful moment, the emotion we don’t want to feel. There’s a researcher, Andrew Huberman at Stanford, who calls this “the soda straw view” of the mind. This is the view of stress. When