when the trauma label has been applied by outside mores – when an event like an explosion, an assault or a sexual event has taken place and our culture insists that it be traumatising. Sometimes this extraneous narrative resonates and provides a sense of relief, but in other instances disagreement and refusal of the label can lead to judgement from... See more
Contemplative dyads, in particular, represent a deep interpersonal meditative practice carried out in pairs with a witness who engages in active listening while the other person reflects on a question or topic.
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
when an army of trauma counsellors descended upon the nation after the tsunami of 2004, the University of Colombo pleaded with them to cease seeing suffering as traumatisation as it was undermining people’s resilience. Sri Lanka happens to top the charts for wellbeing in the ‘The Mental State of the World in 2023’ report despite such denial of the... See more
ChatGPT-4 was pitted against 151 human participants across three divergent thinking tests, revealing that the AI demonstrated a higher level of creativity. The tests, designed to assess the ability to generate unique solutions, showed GPT-4 providing more original and elaborate answers.