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Showing posts from 2012

Over- rationalisation

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I am reading The social animal by David Brooks at the moment. It is full of so many interesting snippets but this morning's reading set me cogs off! Particularly this bit...... It all started with Plato. He said that the higher, more rational functions that the human brain were capable of, were the best bits and the 'underlying,' more basic passions and sentiments were brutish and unruly. He said, the conscious part that could reason and apply logic was the part that should be nurtured. Then the dark ages came along and that section of the brain took a back seat and more irrational superstition and folklore were in charge again. Then along can the renaissance and the higher thinking returned and pretty much stayed. Logic, science and theories of prediction prevailed. Of course there is nothing wrong with this kind of thinking. It has brought about huge health and technological benefits for example. But then we might have become a little over-zealous with our scientific pr

World Salvation

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OK so I went for a cycle ride and a pub lunch with a friend and we had an agenda. The agenda was a tongue-in-cheek attempt to bring some structure to our rambling conversations. One item on the agenda was 'world salvation' (others included 'optimising chocolate experiences' and 'spring' for example). With world salvation, we started with a little altercation over whose responsibility it was but we ultimately agreed that my friend would do it but that I would help. The previous item on the agenda had been 'attachment' (see last post) but because of our tendency towards wandering open-ended thoughts we linked attachment to the current item. It was quite easy actually. Our thinking went like this: Attachment theory is currently establishing the idea that while nature provides some basic building blocks, humans are born with a lot of hard-wiring yet to be put in place (usually pre-one year of age). The survival reason for this is that our eventual hard-wirin

Attachment - relationships

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I was lucky enough this week to have some training delivered by a psychologist (run more like a group therapy session!) on attachment this week. I have had previous training sessions on attachment but they were either overly detailed, too much about research and/or delivered knowledge that could not really be practically applied to the children I work with. In a nutshell - (like I like it!) The trainer started with the premise that every child is born with hard-wiring for survival. Obviously this makes a lot of sense in evolutionary terms. Therefore, whatever circumstance, family set-up, family behaviours etc a child is born into, they will adapt (and subsequently develop the hard-wiring) that will optimise their chances of survival. Getting a parent's attention is a crucial part of this survival so disorders to do with poor attachment are due to a child receiving, little, inconsistent and/or frightening attention from their parent/s. Strategies for getting these parents' a

Debates

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Last night I stumbled across one of those 'debates' that erupt on Facebook every now and then. You know the ones - where one person posts their view and before you know it there are seventy or so post on the thread. You get the: •the rationalist •the idealist •the militant conspiracy theorist •the aggressor •the misses-the-point-the-other-person-made-er •the flippant •the questioner •the jump to someone's defence-er •the academic with evidence •etc all putting their throbbing pennyworth in the pot. What fascinates me is how those 'debates' go. This particular one I would surmise had little impact in terms of idea development or opening up others' mind to accepting another viewpoints. In fact, because there was some aggression and personal comments I would go so far as to say it probably shut down a few minds. This debate in part reflected the way we tend to approach conflict of ideas generally - in law, in education and in meetings: we are adversarial/oppositio