Mary Martin

"A lot of how we feel," she explains, "is all about the systems we interact with, whether they're other people or technology. We're interacting increasingly with technology over time, and I think things like how much time we spend staring at screens, our phones and social media is impacting our mental health. So maybe, by having machines that have... See more

We need to fall back in

Neuroarchitecture and Landscaping: Healing Spaces and the Potential of Sensory Gardens

Empathy, or feeling with another, is not the same as compassion, or feeling for another. In empathy, we suffer with the other or share their joy or other emotions—we feel what they feel. Compassion, by comparison, involves care and concern for the person who suffers, and comes with a strong motivation to help and feelings of warmth and love. We... See more

The hippocampus has been a focus in the study of recombination during simulation – perhaps unsurprising given the established role of this structure in relational processing, including the binding together of disparate elements during working memory as well as episodic encoding and retrieval (Axmacher et al., 2010; Eichenbaum, 2001; Hannula &... See more

Advising is hard. It’s a complex activity that involves negotiating someone’s difficulty in dealing with a problem and their responsibility for dealing with it. Often, it degenerates into telling people what to do or showing off how much we know. Perhaps if more of us understood advising a little better, we could avoid giving overbearing advice and... See more

suffering is the result of the event coupled with the person experiencing the event inside a culture

A popular narrative now casts all living entities as ‘machines’ built by genes, as Richard Dawkins called them. For Mayr, biology was unique among the sciences precisely because its objects of study possessed a program that encoded apparent purpose, design and agency into what they do. On this view, agency doesn’t actually manifest in the moment of... See more