Mary Martin

In ordinary language, we frequently speak of machinery or ideas ‘doing’ things in our lives. But they do nothing. People – human persons – produce, operate and apply their creations. The problem with assigning agency, even informally, to the nonhuman is that this disguises the strength of human control, limited though it is in other respects. It... See more

In other words, there’s never been a better time to become an effective altruist! Get in now, while it’s still unpopular! The times when everyone fawns over us are boring and undignified. It’s only when you’re fighting off the entire world that you feel truly alive.

a polyvagal futures literacy offers foresight practitioners and learners a powerful framework for meeting the future with agency, hope, and inner resourcefulness in the face of its complexity.

Note also that this view is consistent with and indeed emerges from the multi-component model of hippocampal contributions to episodic future simulation put forth by Addis and Schacter (2012), which links the hippocampus with distinct components of future simulations, including both retrieval of episodic details and recombining those details.

The picture of the mind that most people have is still one in which passion and reason are separate, and emotions get in the way of clear thinking. But metacognitive feelings show the constant interaction of ‘reason’ and ‘passion’ in our mental processes. Moreover – as we’ll explain – these feelings are consequential. In fact, cognitive prowess... See more