Tom Butler-Bowdon Quotes

"Our communications are full of road clocks that prevents real communication with others. Two are "judging" and "sending solutions". With people close to us, we fell we should be critical. Otherwise, we don't see how they will ever change. With others, we feel the need to give them a label. But by doing so, we cease to see the person before us, only a type. Our good advice is rarely constructive. We may be so used to having road blocks that we wonder what would be left if we remove them from the style of our conversation. What remains is the ability to understand and empathize with other people and make our concerns clearly known"

Csikszentmihalyi suggests that the common idea of a creative individual coming up with great insights, discoveries, works, or inventions in isolation is wrong. Creativity results from a complex interaction between a person and their environment or culture, and also depends on timing.

This work led cognitive therapists such as Aaron Beck, David D. Burns, and Albert Ellis to build treatment around the idea that our thoughts shape our emotions, not the other way around. By changing our thinking, we can alleviate depression or simply have greater control over our behavior.

The science of human nature… finds itself today in the position that chemistry occupied in the days of alchemy.” Alfred Adler

The source of extraversion or introversion was in the varying levels of excitability of the brain; the driver

Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

Neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran’s work with phantom limbs seems to confirm the brain’s remarkable ability to create a sense of cognitive unity even if the reality (of many selves, and of many layers of consciousness) is more complex.

In the 1950s, primate researcher Harry Harlow’s legendary experiments replacing the real mothers of baby monkeys with cloth ones proved the extent to which infants need loving physical attention in order to become healthy adults. Remarkably, this sort of touching went against the child-rearing views of the time.

50 Self-Help Classics and 50 Spiritual Classics, which explore books on the more transformational and spiritual sides of psychology.

The study showed that even when the wire mother was the one lactating, the monkeys vastly preferred to be with and have physical contact with the soft-cloth mother.

Melanie Klein focused on how a “schizoid” personality could develop as the result of an infant’s relations with its mother in the first year of life, although she noted that most people grow out of this and establish healthy relations with themselves and the world.

But first we have to accept the idea that thinking long and hard about something does not always deliver us better results, and that the brain actually evolved to make us think on our feet.

It is a myth that there is one “creative personality.” Something all creative people seem to share is complexity — they “tend to bring the entire range of human possibilities within themselves.

All personalities can be measured according to two or three basic biologically determined dimensions.

people choose between two ways of coming to conclusions or judgments: by thinking, using an impersonal process of logic; and by feeling, deciding what something means to them.