What is Health? – Being Able to Change and Enjoy
Health can be considered as the absence of illness. It was often defined as such in the past centuries. A modern definition of the World Health Organization (WHO) clearly shows another view WHO “Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” It is Read the full article…
Projection – Why We See Mainly Ourselves
The way our brain processes information makes us interesting as well as robust. It also makes us vulnerable to projections and its consequences to health and society. Human vision Human vision is not a one-way affair. It’s a two-way affair. In seeing, more information goes from the brain towards the eye than vice versa. If Read the full article…
Control-Based Therapy – Profound or Superficial?
A car needs no more than superficial control. An organism instead needs deep control, which may be prevented by superficial control, like the surface reflections of a pond may prevent one from seeing its depth. Life is about controlling the environment. Even more, life is about controlling the inner milieu. Controlling the environment aims to Read the full article…
Why Medicalization Sucks
Medicalization is the untoward appropriation of an issue by the medical field as if from now on, it’s part of the physician’s job description to manage this issue. From a satellite view, one can see that humanity wants to get rid of disease. Each culture considers health as one of the highest goods. So we Read the full article…
The Intellectual Elite – Leaving Nobody Behind
This is an idea, a concept. It is not a set of people who, for instance, have accomplished something, did some study, or wrote a book. The elite is a goal, something to which anybody can and should strive, certainly also in the business world. One may attain little, perhaps through genetic predisposition or just Read the full article…
Poems from a Parallel World
You find this book with 343 poems at Amazon (see menu), just published. In them lies a personal appreciation of meditation and Zen. Please savor them carefully. They speak of a meditative way of living. They are also meant to be insights for life. Zen literally means ‘meditation.’ It may be a pure source of Read the full article…
Sticky Thoughts
This is the foreword to my book ‘Sticky Thoughts’ that you can find on Amazon (see menu). The purpose of Sticky Thoughts is to bring in a concise way (so that each of them ‘fits on a sticker’) many ideas that may be ‘sticky’ in that they linger on in the reader’s mind. The stickers Read the full article…
Reinforcement Learning & Compassionate A.I.
This is rather abstract. There is an agent with a goal, a sensor, and an actor. Occasionally, the agent uses a model of the environment. There are rewards and one or more value functions that value the rewards. Maximizing the goal (through acting) based on rewards (through sensing) is reinforcement learning (R.L.). The agent’s policy Read the full article…
31. COVID Management at Society Level – Why, What, How?
I bring together elements discussed in previous blogs/chapters to show that reckoning with the deeper mind and the COVID-whirlpool may lead to specific society-wide (polity) measures that – on top of common-sense hygienic measures – may lessen the pending calamity. Complexity Some insight in complexity is advisable. [see: “Complex is not Complicated“] In the COVID-whirlpool Read the full article…
Tinnitus: Listening to Your Noise – What Does it Tell You?
Of course, it is your noise, by definition, since it’s not generated in the environment outside you. But it can be even more yours than just through this. Good news, since this leads to possible management from inside out. ►►► WHY read this? An increasing number of people are suffering without satisfactory treatment at present, Read the full article…
About Communication
You have to Listen to hear it. ►►► WHY read this? In a more and more complex world, communication becomes ever more important.◄◄◄ You listen to someone. This someone talks about all kinds of things. You know what it’s about. You understand what that person is saying. But that is not enough. Do you also Read the full article…
A Tale of Two Letters About Remdesivir – Enter Mind – Exit Remdesivir?
Remdesivir or ‘We,’ Which Cure Will it Be? Intrigued by the antiviral drug, remdesivir, I delved into scientific studies about it. The result is a duo of ‘Letters to the Editor’ to the new England Journal of Medicine (top journal of medical science), in May and June 2020. Not even hoping they would accept, indeed, Read the full article…
About Hope
Where there is Hope, there is at least one good feeling that can guide people – including yourself – through the direst situations. Hope makes one less vulnerable while keeping sensitivity and Compassion alive. Hope versus hope It’s not altogether an easy distinction. As with any other ‘deep’ concept, hope can be meant and understood Read the full article…
The Basic Cognitive Illusion
‘Basic cognitive illusion’: the fact that we are non-consciously motivated, but are not consciously aware of this (since it’s non-conscious). We also don’t consciously notice our brain in this. So, there are two levels between consciousness and the physical brain, which gives us the strong illusion of mind-brain divide. [This text is a part of Read the full article…
Demo Cracy
‘Power to the people’ is not self-evident. Who is this ‘people’? And what kind of ‘power’ is desirable? Eventually, democracy is the only worthwhile way, but in which way? ►►► WHY read this? Democracy itself will increasingly be under pressure if we do not act now.◄◄◄ Demos Cratos Demos = people; cratos = power. Power Read the full article…
30. COVID: Why Hiding the Mind?
Since March, I try to focus medical colleagues and other people on the mind in COVID progression, as yet to little avail. This is utterly weird. Weirdness Imagine being as convinced as I am that optimally lending attention to mind→COVID is probably the best we can do, given that a strict population-wide quarantine is not Read the full article…
About Human Depth
Everybody knows it, and nobody knows it. It is nowhere and everywhere As a youth, I used to read a lot of ‘elite literature’ that costs almost nothing for what it’s worth, has nothing to do with how-to-earn-money, and everything with depth. The writers are frequently found in history books of literature. What they wrote Read the full article…