Debbie Foster

The inability to switch off, to switch from sympathetic to parasympathetic activation, is a hot topic in medicine and psychology right now. It is measured by heart rate variability (HRV). Which should, if you are well balanced, be high: your heart rate should vary a lot. If you can gear up when you have to, and then switch quickly and comfortably i

The fact that Freud's structural model of the mind provides psychological fuel for narratives as different as The Iliad and Forbidden Planet strongly suggests that it captures essences, core dispositions, deep truths. And it continues to be relevant in an ever-changing, modern context.

Place your warm hand on your cool belly. Does your belly feel the warm or does your hand feel the cool? This, I think, is one of the fundamental mysteries.

this can be viewed as a defining feature of Freud's modernity: his total engagement with compound meanings and contradictions; his continuous excavation of mental life, all the way down to its primal substances. We do not think logically like characters in a novel. The mind is messy and loose chains of association unravel in unexpected directions.

There are three basic systems at work, two enabling us to be ON, one enabling us to switch OFF. Both of the ON systems manage and direct our energies and attention towards or away from things in our world in anxiety, fear, reward or pleasure.

We are a deeply enmeshed republic of physiological, emotional and symbolic systems whose interactions can be thrown into disorder with frightening ease. Our story about our struggles and our suffering needs to try to capture this complexity, and how it will show up differently in every case.

It comes down to your metaphysical assumptions. If you are a computational functionalist, if you assume that computations, carried out on digital computers, are sufficient for consciousness, then sooner or later, computers will imitate all human functions, including consciousness. If not today, then soon. If, on the other hand, you assume that cons

The phenomena that interested Romantic philosophers might appear somewhat arbitrary. Mental illness, ghosts, animal behaviour? But anomalous and exceptional phenomena can be thought of as a point of weakness between the perceived material world and something greater beyond.

The quality of our lives is the sum of decision quality plus luck.

Minds that meditated were supposed to warm up, jump, stretch, hold tight. They made cognitive connections that felt like gathering flowers, concocting a medicine, or building something from salvage. Monks could meditate while they read, or go off-book. The most basic meaning of meditatio was memorization.