Spider on Drugs

Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious

Image via WikipediaDr. Gird Gigerenzer is a German Psychologist who studies "Bounded rationality" and produces evidence about the human decision making based upon Intuition.

"Gigerenzer, a leading expert and author on heuristics, won the AAAS Prize for the best article in the behavioral sciences. He is the author of Calculated Risks: How To Know When Numbers Deceive You, the German translation of which won the Scientific Book of the Year Prize in 2002. His books on heuristics include Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox, with Reinhard Selten, a Nobel laureate in economics - UCSD

Acccording to the speaker, human beings tend to think of intelligence as a deliberate, conscious activity guided by the laws of logic. Yet, he argues, much of our mental life is unconscious, based on processes alien to logic: gut feelings, or intuitions. Dr. Gigerenzer argues that intuition is more than impulse and caprice; it has its own rationale. This can be described by fast and frugal heuristics, which exploit evolved abilities in the human brain. Heuristics ignore information and try to focus on the few important reasons. Says Gigerenzer: "More information, more time, even more thinking, are not always better, and less can be more."

Here is his talk on Fora.TV

Robert Ornstein:MindReal

Image by booleansplit via FlickrDr. Robert Ornstein is a famous psychologists who did his research work in hemispheric lateralization of brain functions with Nobel Prize winning Physiologist Roger W.Sperry.

Dr. Ornstein has taught at the University of California Medical Center and Stanford University, and he has lectured at more than 200 colleges and universities in the U.S. and overseas. He is the president and founder of the Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge (ISHK), an educational nonprofit dedicated to bringing important discoveries concerning human nature to the general public.

Among his many honors and awards are the UNESCO award for Best Contribution to Psychology and the American Psychological Foundation Media Award "for increasing the public understanding of psychology." Source

He has written many books on topics ranging from meditation to mental health with many different famous authors.

He is best known for his pioneering research on the bilateral specialization of the brain, which has given us the terms "right brain" and "left brain" and firmly established them as important concepts in today's lexicon. But just as significant have been his other contributions, among them:

• The pioneering delineation of the close link between the mind and health;
• The initial integration of key insights about human nature from traditional cultures into the framework of modern psychology;
• The depiction of the mind as composed of multiple processing systems rather than being a unified whole;
• The insight that our brain, evolved to suit the conditions of the Pleistocene era, is obsolete in its "software" to meet the formidable challenges of the 21st century and the call for "conscious evolution" to enable the necessary adaptation. Source

In a radio talk he talks about his book mind real and how mind construct his own reality.

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SWAY: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior

Image by turtlemom4bacon via FlickrFor a long time we tried to force people think and act in a logical rational manner but it is becoming very clear that humans are anything but rational creatures. We use rational/logical thought processes to plan, design and construct things but we ourselves are not rational beings.

The work in behavioral Economics/finance shows the irrational side in human decision making.

Why we are attracted to irrational behavior? The question is answered by Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman in this video.

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