52 in 52 Book Summaries

Book Summary: The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life by Joseph Ledoux

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The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life by Joseph Ledoux

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The Essence

The emotional brain argues that the feelings that we subjective identify as emotions are merely markers for underlying somatic and neuro mechanisms. In other words, what we feel is the byproduct of evolutionary selection for things our sensory systems are exposed to and unconsciously harness. The Amygdala (Fear system) is given special attention as it is the lens that LeDoux uses to study emotions mechanisms. LeDoux reports how our brains memory system can imprint synaptic patterns that help explain psychological disorders. Further, the brain’s tendency to wire towards plasticity calls for mental health practitioners to provide assistance in ways that stimulate parts of the brain that scientist like LeDoux has helped identify. 

The Emotional Brain Journal Entry Notes:

This is my book summary of The Emotional Brain. My notes are a reflection of the journal write up above. Written informally, the notes contain a mesh and mix of quotes and my own thoughts on the book. Sometimes, to my own fault, quotes are interlaced with my own words. Though rest assured, I am not attempting to take any credit for the main ideas below. The Journal write up includes important messages and crucial passages from the book.

  • The core of an emotion is not an introspectively accessible conscious representation. Just because your brain can do something does not mean that “you” know how it did it.
  • Flashbulb Memory: A memory that is made especially crisp and clear because of its emotional implications. For example, the moments before car crashes tend to be vivid when recalled.
  • The cause of an emotion can be very different from reasons we use to explain the emotions to ourselves or others after the fact.
  • Hot Dog metaphor. When distinguishing between the lateral and medial portions of the brain.
    Toasted part = outside part of the cortex.
    Pried open = two hemisphere buns (untoasted) signify the middle parts of the cortex.
  • The multiplicity of memory systems: The brain has multiple memory systems, each devoted to different kinds of learning and memory function. E.g. long term, short term, explicit, implicit, declarative, procedural, episodic, semantic.
  • A shift from reaction to action. Cognition is a useful part of our mental arsenal because it allows for this shift.
  • We have more fears than we need, and it seems that our utterly efficient fear condition system, combined with an extremely powerful ability to think about our fears and an inability to control them is probably at fault.
  • From Amygdala activation to emotional experience.
    Direct amygdala influence on the cortex
    2. Amygdala-triggered arousal
    3. Bodily Feedback
  • Anxiety disorder reflects the operation of the fear systems in the brain. If stress persists too long, the hippocampus begins to falter in its ability to control the release of stress hormones, and to perform routine functions.
  • Chronic psychological stress causes apical dendritic atrophy of areas of the hippocampal. Therefore, mild stress may enhance memory, but over time the prolonged modulators start to adversely affect memory. The same may be the case for the prefrontal cortex.

Themes about the nature of emotions

  • The proper level of analysis of a psychological function is the level at which that function is represented in the brain.
  • Brain systems that generate emotional behavior are highly conserved through many levels of evolutionary history.
  • When these systems functions in an animal that also has the capacity for conscious awareness, then conscious emotional feelings occur (From what we know this is only observable in humans).
  • The conscious feeling that we know and love (or hate) our emotions by are red herrings, detours, in the scientific study of emotions. Said another way, the features we commonly associate with feelings we experience are distractions from the study of their biological mechanisms.
  • If emotional feelings and emotional responses are effects caused by the activity of a common underlying system, we can then use the objectively measurable emotional responses to investigate the underlying mechanism, and, at the same time illuminate the system that is primarily responsible for the generation of conscious feelings.
  • Conscious feelings, like being afraid or angry, or happy, etc., are in one sense no different from other states of consciousness (All phenomenological projections).
  • Emotions are things that happen to us rather than things we will to occur.
  • Once an emotion occurs they become powerful motivators for future behaviors.

If you liked what you saw. Here are 3 titles that I recommend based on what was discussed in The Emotional Brain.

  1. Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions by Jaak Panksepp
  2. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain by Antonio Damasio
  3. Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are by Joseph LeDoux

Find the book on Amazon: Print

Check Out More 52 in 52 Challenge Summaries

Note: This page contains affiliate links. This means that if you decide to buy a product through them, I will receive a small commission. This has no additional cost to you. If you would like to support Forces of Habit, please use these links. If you do use them, thank you for the support.

52 in 52 Book Summaries

Book Summary: Human: The Science Behind What Makes Your Brain Unique by Michael Gazzaniga

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Human: The Science Behind What Makes Your Brain Unique by Michael Gazzaniga

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The Essence

Humans are animals. But we are particular interesting due to our niche on the evolutionary tree. While our biological systems function just as many living organism do, we have set of mental faculties that make us unique. Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga’s book Human is a tour de force, exploring how certain mental tools available to only humans help explain why our thinking, emotions, perceptions, and memory are different from our predecessors. For instance, consider how we can create states that simulate the past, and the future, or simulate what animals and even objects intentions and feelings are; our simulation capabilities are outmatched in complexity and power. When sensory information fails to provide enough incoming information, we as humans fill in the gaps with what has been and what can be. Simulations is only one of the many psychological mechanism reviewed by Gazzaniga has he explores a number of issues related to human consciousness, language, aesthetics, and emotions.

Human Journal Entry Notes:

This is my book summary of Human. My notes are a reflection of the journal write up above. Written informally, the notes contain a mesh and mix of quotes and my own thoughts on the book. Sometimes, to my own fault, quotes are interlaced with my own words. Though rest assured, I am not attempting to take any credit for the main ideas below. The Journal write up includes important messages and crucial passages from the book.

  • Consciousness is an emergent property and not a process in and of itself.
  • The human brain is a bizarre device, set in place through natural selection for one main purpose-to make decisions that enhance reproductive success.
  • The ability to simulate emotions from language and imagination, to alter our simulations by using perspective, and project ourselves into the future and past enrich our social world and make our simulations more powerful and complex than those of other species.
  • Much information that we use from our memories or past experiences is highly colored by our non-reflective intuitive beliefs, and some of it can be wrong. It is a challenge to separate the intuitive from the verifiable.
  • Evolutionary Psychology: Attempts to explain mental traits, such as memory, perception, or language, as adaptations-products of natural or sexual selection.
    Distinct systems may have evolved for these negative emotions (e.g. fear, disgust, anger) in order to detect and coordinate flexible responses to different ecological threats.
    Our world has changed too fast for evolution to keep up with it. More types of information are going in, but the mental modules are still triggered in the same old ways.
  • Cognition has a functional structure that has a genetic bases.
  • We have genes that code for certain adaptions, but in order to realize their full potential certain exterior conditions need to be met. “Innate ideas are incomplete ideas… Out evolved inheritance is very rich compared to a blank slate, but impoverished compared to a fully realized person.”
  • Modular brain theory: The concept of a brain with specialized circuits for specific for specific problems.
  • Our social behavior has biological origins. To survive and prosper, we had to become social.
  • Reciprocal Altruism: Selfless favors that are returned at a later date. Hunting and gathering become more efficient, providing protection from predators… larger brains meant we band together in social groups.
  • Gossip: THE social grooming tool. It fosters relationships, elicits information, maintains and reforms facial norms, and builds reputation.
  • Social behaviors correlated with neocortex size in primates:
    Grooming clique size

    Tactical deception (influence without force)
    Social Play
    Social skills in male mating strategy
    Group size. (Dunbar’s Number)

 

  • Agency taking: We reflexively build models in our minds about intentions, feelings, and goals of others, including animals and objects. We can’t help it.
  • Many of the systems that function nonconsciously in the human brain function similarly in the brain of other animals, there is considerable overlap among species in the nonconscious aspects of the self.
  • Everyone is a hypocrite. It apparently is just easier to see from outside than the inside.
  • Most people use anecdotal evidence.
  • People don’t use information in an analytical manner.
  • Reappraise>Suppress: Reappraisal can change your physiological response, while suppression does not, and suppression decreases the experience of positive behavior.
  • Imagination: Crucial for social learning. Helps us reappraise a situation, it allows us to simulate our past emotions and learn from those experiences.
  • Our self-centered perception can lead to errors in social judgement. We need to be able to separate ourselves form others. Inhibition of our own perspective will help take others perspective.
  • Children may be born believing in essences; not taught. Does this mean our innate inference systems are made to judge?
  • The left-hemisphere: Makes sense out of all the other processes it takes in all the input and puts together a story that ‘makes sense’ (though it may be wrong).
  • Self is a byproduct. The self is a knowledge structure, not a mystical entity. Information is integrated in a unique coherent way that creates our habitualized belief of an entity known as self.
  • The ability to imitate must be innate.
  • Our agency-detection device combined with our need to explain and teleological thinking is the basis of creationism.
  • Negativity Bias: Through Natural selection, humans have been optimized for identifying the negatives of life over the positives. This is optimal for a few reason:
    Negative events are complex.
    Negative events can be contagious.
    Negative events can happen suddenly.
    Negative events are potent.
  • Our ability to use contingently true information is unique. This allowed us to be very flexible and adapt to various environments. We break out of the rigid behavioral patterns that other animals are subject to.
  • Humans are natural taxonomist.
  • Reason made the list of options, but emotion made the choice. Pure reason is not enough to make decisions. Scientist have found somatic markers for tasks that are commonly correlated with rational decision making.
  • Theory of Mind: The ability to observe behavior and then infer the unobservable mental states causing it.
  • We sit on a branch of an evolutionary tree, not on the top of a ladder.

If you liked what you saw. Here are 3 titles that I recommend based on what was discussed in Humans.

  1. The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life by Joseph Ledoux
  2. How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Barrett
  3. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker

Find the book on Amazon: Print

Check Out More 52 in 52 Challenge Summaries

Note: This page contains affiliate links. This means that if you decide to buy a product through them, I will receive a small commission. This has no additional cost to you. If you would like to support Forces of Habit, please use these links. If you do use them, thank you for the support.

52 in 52 Book Summaries

Book Summary: This Book Is Not Required: An Emotional Survival Manual for Students by Inge Bell

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This Book Is Not Required: An Emotional Survival Manual for Students by Inge Bell

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The Essence

An introductory work to learning how to gain self-knowledge. Personal reflection during our late teens to early 20s can be daunting, it is a time where we have the opportunity to begin to openly question the ideas we have been socialized into. The non-academic part of academics have no instruction manual though tend to be the most challenging part to navigate. This Book Is Not Requited urges students to take control of the formal educational by becoming more intentional about what it means to participate in that experience. What makes college a meaningful is that you are an exposed to a variety of social, personal, intellectual, and spiritual demands. Managing these demands require a level of equanimity that can acquired by seeing reality for what it is, as it is. Using Buddhist philosophy, students have the tools to cultivate awareness of their tendencies to react to life circumstances.

This Book Is Not Required Journal Entry Notes:

This is my book summary of This Book Is Not Required. My notes are a reflection of the journal write up above. Written informally, the notes contain a mesh and mix of quotes and my own thoughts on the book. Sometimes, to my own fault, quotes are interlaced with my own words. Though rest assured, I am not attempting to take any credit for the main ideas below. The Journal write up includes important messages and crucial passages from the book.

  • When you have become friends with your body and your emotions (sensations), you will begin to know who you are.
  • Accept Criticism: Approach each day with an empty cup which may be filled with new experience.
  • Wisdom: The ability to keep your emotional and mental balance in life; to understand yourself well enough to live comfortably with yourself.
  • Become solution-oriented, rather than just emotionally reactive.
  • Good writing is simple writing.
  • Become suspicious of all the information which you do not get first-hand.
  • Meditate: Seek realms beyond words and thought.
  • Break Free if inherited belief systems.
  • Meet life’s difficulties with equanimity.
  • Just about everything you need to know has been published in a book.
  • Leave your societal niche; explore the social classes.
  • Go ungraded. Imagine taking courses with no grades. For some students it is the weight of the grade that is the most emotional daunting. Strip grades of its influence and focus on the material. Coordinate with professor that you do not want any grades for your assignments to be given to you. Put your best work forward and you will see that the pressure of grades has been impeding focused work. This isn’t to say you do not get feedback from the professor on your progress. It is merely an exercise to show how the effect of grades can change how you work on assignments.
  • Best teachers > Subject Matter
  • Grades: The grading system is not a measure of your worth as a human being.
    What you don’t internalize can’t really hurt you.
    But what do you internalize can destroy you rapidly, and this holds for both low and high performing students.
  • Our expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies.
  • Expectation is the great enemy of satisfaction.
  • The fear of failure is one of the most common causes for failure.
  • The oppressed always see society more clearly than their oppressors. They have to, to survive.
  • If you want to become truly educated, you will have to educate yourself.
  • Media mediate between us and our immediate world by influencing us to define and see that world in a certain way.
  • Be a scholar who makes the effort to help students get an overall picture of the world and their place in it.
  • Two people who are lovers constantly negotiate their reality in what is a continual process of communication.
  • You cannot even know that you have a peculiar view of the world until you come in contact with differing views.
  • We are caught in illusion and it is in part due to our culture.
  • The sense of urgency which fills our days has been turned into a virtue by the folks who lead our institutions.
  • Anger and harsh words solve no problems.
  • The person who takes good sensible care of himself is also capable of giving good sensible care to other people.
  • Ask yourself: How what you are studying relates to your own life or to other subjects you have taken.
  • In order to keep reality from intruding and upsetting our ideas, our brains keep up a constant babble. Babble is designed to keep the illusion of self alive. We become too busy thinking to listen to our bodies or see the world around us as it is.
  • Psychology will make you a little saner.

If you liked what you saw. Here are 3 titles that I recommend based on what was discussed in This Book Is Not Required.

  1. Life After College: The Complete Guide to Getting What You Want by Jenny Blake
  2. 101 Secrets For Your Twenties by Paul Angone
  3. Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett, Dave Evans

Find the book on Amazon: Print

Check Out More 52 in 52 Challenge Summaries

Note: This page contains affiliate links. This means that if you decide to buy a product through them, I will receive a small commission. This has no additional cost to you. If you would like to support Forces of Habit, please use these links. If you do use them, thank you for the support.

52 in 52 Book Summaries

Book Summary: The Ethical Brain: The Science of Our Moral Dilemmas by Michael Gazzaniga

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The Ethical Brain: The Science of Our Moral Dilemmas by Michael Gazzaniga

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The Essence

Neuroscience has impacted a vast number of fields, leaving no rock unturned (neuro-philosophy, neuro-marketing, neuro-law, and neuro-pharmacology just to name a few). With an ever growing relevance, understanding how modern brain science reveals discrepancies in how we ought to live, and how we currently live, has become a staple when voicing an opinion on social issues like morality, and lifestyle. Science and society will interact in ways that we have never considered possible, The Ethical Brain is an excellent primer on the conversations that are to come as biological technology begins to change how think, compete, and punish. Scientific findings must be applied to important ethical decisions or else we risk wielding knowledge that does not fit in the societal scaffold that has been set. For technology to integrate successfully into society, we need to talk about it; Michael Gazzaniga may be one of the first, but surely won’t be the last.

The Ethical Brain Journal Entry Notes:

This is my book summary of The Ethical Brain. My notes are a reflection of the journal write up above. Written informally, the notes contain a mesh and mix of quotes and my own thoughts on the book. Sometimes, to my own fault, quotes are interlaced with my own words. Though rest assured, I am not attempting to take any credit for the main ideas below. The Journal write up includes important messages and crucial passages from the book.

  • A brain based philosophy of life.
  • Neuoethics: The examination of how we want to deal with the social issues of disease, normality, morality, lifestyle, and the philosophy of living informed by our understanding of underlying brain mechanisms.
  • To squelch scientific advancement before it happens, out of fear, is a mistake.
  • We humans seem to adapt to almost anything. We will adapt, set new norms of behavior, and then await the next wave of challenges for our culture.
  • Moral status or an embryo?
  • The fetus is not a sentient, self-aware organism (13 weeks) at this point; it is more like a sea slug, a writhing, reflex bound hunk of sensory-motor processes that does not respond to anything in a directed, purposeful way (intention).
  • Home Depot metaphor: A house may be conceived at home depot, but a home depot is not hundreds of house. Mere possession of genetic material for a future human being does not make a human.
  • The left-hemisphere interpreter is the master of belief creation.
  • As it stands, aging is inevitable and part of life’s deal.
  • Three laws of behavior genetics are widely agreed on:
    1. All behavioral traits are heritable (capable of being passed down from one generation to the next).
    2. The environmental effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effects of genes.
    3. Neither genes nor family environment account for a substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavior traits.
  • The interaction between genes and environment makes us who we are. Genes are the scaffolding but the fine detail is tuned by interaction with the environment; a pure genetic description of the human species does not describe a human being.
  • You are your brain. The neurons interconnecting in its vast network, discharging in certain patterns modulated by certain chemicals, controlled by thousands of feedback networks-that is you. And in order to be you, all those systems have to work properly.
  • Practice changes the brain in areas involved in producing specific movements.
  • All of us think we have a story to tell. Why? It is not hubris. It is because this is what our minds are constantly doing-interpreting events, creating narratives, devising theories. All we need is a couple of facts and we can create a story from them.
  • Accurate memories are an idea, not a reality of the human condition.
  • Divided attention wreaks havoc with our memory.
  • The 7 Sins of memory (Daniel Schacter): Transience, Absent mindedness, Blocking, Misattribution, Suggestibility, Bias, Persistence. All of which are ways that our memories are skewed.
  • Memory is not so much a mechanism for remembering the past as a means to prepare us for the future. Some of the best memories are false.
  • Universal Ethics? There seems to be common subconscious mechanisms that are activated in all members of our species in response to moral challenges.
  • Once something has been figured out, much work must then be applied to the solution, that is the hard part.
  • “Free” Will? Neuroscience shows that by the time any of us consciously experience something, the brain has already done its work.
  • Speedy thought does not necessarily mean wise thought.
  • Brains are automatic, rule-governed, determined devices, while people are personally responsible agents, free to make their own decisions. Just as traffic is what happens when physically determined car interact, responsibility is what happens when people interact. Personal responsibility is a public concept. It exists in a group, not in an individual. If you were the only person on earth, there would be no concept of personal responsibility. Responsibility is a concept you have about other people’s actions and they about yours. Brains are determined; people[s] follow rules, they live together, and out of that interaction arises the concept of freedom of action.

If you liked what you saw. Here are 3 titles that I recommend based on what was discussed in The Ethical Brain.

  1. Who’s in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain by Michael Gazzaniga
  2. Free Will by Sam Harris
  3. The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers by Daniel L. Schacter

Find the book on Amazon: Print | Audio

Check Out More 52 in 52 Challenge Summaries

Note: This page contains affiliate links. This means that if you decide to buy a product through them, I will receive a small commission. This has no additional cost to you. If you would like to support Forces of Habit, please use these links. If you do use them, thank you for the support.

52 in 52 Book Summaries

Book Summary: Mind Matters: How Mind and Brain Interact to Create Our Conscious Lives by Michael Gazzaniga

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Mind Matters: How Mind and Brain Interact to Create Our Conscious Lives by Michael Gazzaniga

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The Essence

Questions regarding what the mind is has been at the forefront of neuroscience since scientist began to study the brain. However through increasing evidence, mind-body dualism has revealed itself to be a fictitious model for understanding how the human comprehensively functions. Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga’s pioneer work in the field has presented evidence for how the mind can directly influence our physiological states, and how we can subsequently use the mind to change the circuitry of the brain to navigate the potential stressors of our lives. Consequently, our understanding has also shed light on the buffer between what we consciously believe and the underlying causes for a felt state. Mind Matters is an introductory work to thinking about the propensity dispositions of the mind within each of us.

Mind Matters Journal Entry Notes:

This is my book summary of Mind Matters. My notes are a reflection of the journal write up above. Written informally, the notes contain a mesh and mix of quotes and my own thoughts on the book. Sometimes, to my own fault, quotes are interlaced with my own words. Though rest assured, I am not attempting to take any credit for the main ideas below. The Journal write up includes important messages and crucial passages from the book.

  • A thought can change the circuits of the brain, just as a physical event ion the brain can alter a thought.
  • Turn destructive situations into a perception positive opportunity
  • Brain and mind are in extricablely linked to our bodily health and well-being.
  • A physical system can have emergent properties that become active in guiding the workings of the physical system that gave rise to them; this is how Gazzaniga conceptualizes the mind at this writing.
  • Stress: Attention to stress levels is fundamental to good health management since stress is a very real bodily stare and influences everything from our memory capacity to our weight and to our ability to fight disease.
  • Constructive vs. Destructive stress: The extent of stress depends on how each adverse experience is interpreted by each individual. WE must teach people to control their physiological response to stressful stimuli.
  • Grand personal theories can develop as to why someone does what he or she does, but the truth us likely to be based on the fact that the interpreter is giving a reasonable theory to account for or rationalize a person’s basic brain capacities and limitations.
  • A lot of pain is in the mind of the beholder. How we respond to pain is largely a learned behavior.
  • The Human ability to explain unexpected situations is overwhelming.
  • “There is no phenomenon, however complex, which when examined carefully will not turn out to be even more complex” –David Krech
  • Mind affects brain, brain affects mind. By accepting this, you commit yourself to a special view of the world.
  • Delusion represents an effective coping strategy; it is the interpreter weaving together a story that fits his or her facts.
  • Our interpretative mind is always attributing a cause to a felt state of mind, and we now know that these interpretations are frequently irrelevant to the true underlying causes of a felt state.
  • The challenge for mind and brain scientist has been to come up with a conceptual framework that can tie together abnormalities of brain tissue, or more normal variations in brain chemistry, with the personal, psychological reality of our individual minds.
  • Various attributes of mind that seem to have a purely psychological origin are frequently a product of the brain’s interpreter rationalizing genetically driven body states.
  • Our brains are extremely adaptive to change.
  • Any systematic change in the complex of behavior and brain circuits leads to new possibilities and new questions.
  • Sensation seeking is a very important trait in humans.
  • The mind and body become delicate and intricate partners in health and personality: Feedback.

If you liked what you saw. Here are 3 titles that I recommend based on what was discussed in Mind Matters .

  1. Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience by Michael S. Gazzaniga
  2. Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique by Michael S. Gazzaniga
  3. Who’s in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain by Michael S. Gazzaniga

Find the book on Amazon: Print

Check Out More 52 in 52 Challenge Summaries

Note: This page contains affiliate links. This means that if you decide to buy a product through them, I will receive a small commission. This has no additional cost to you. If you would like to support Forces of Habit, please use these links. If you do use them, thank you for the support.

52 in 52 Book Summaries

Book Summary: Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ by Daniel Goleman

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Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ by Daniel Goleman

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The Essence

What are the requirements for a successful life? Many would answer this question by describing intelligence in one form one another, and its capacities to lead to a happier life; yet the research states otherwise. Writer Daniel Goldman reports that our how our current metric for accessing success cannot be complete without considering our capacities to navigate the emotional world. In fact, he argues, it is those who are emotional competent that tend to live happier, more fulfilling lives. Though these skills are not gifted to a preordained few, but available to all of us. Emotional Intelligence is a practical guide on how to develop a conversation between the intermingling systems that rule our day-today decisions; the rational and emotional circuits in the brain are, and will never be separate.

Emotional Intelligence Journal Entry Notes:

This is my book summary of Emotional Intelligence. My notes are a reflection of the journal write up above. Written informally, the notes contain a mesh and mix of quotes and my own thoughts on the book. Sometimes, to my own fault, quotes are interlaced with my own words. Though rest assured, I am not attempting to take any credit for the main ideas below. The Journal write up includes important messages and crucial passages from the book.

  • Academic intelligence has little to do with emotional life.
  • Emotional Intelligence consists of things like…
    Keeping distress from swamping the ability to think.
    The ability to motivate one self.
    Controlling impulse.
    Regulating ones mood.
    Empathizing.
    Delaying gratification.
    Hope.
    Persisting in the face of frustrations.
  • Leadership is not domination, but the art or persuading people to work toward a common goal.
  • We need to be able to control ourselves to do right by others. It takes character to keep emotion under the control of personhood.
  • The old paradigm held an ideal of reason freed from the pull of emotion. The new paradigm urges us to harmonize ‘head and heart’ we must understand what it means to use emotion intelligently.
  • Listening is a skill that keeps relationships going.
  • “Anger is never without reason, but seldom a good one” Benjamin Franklin
  • “Stress makes people stupid”

Each domain of EQ represents a body of habit and response that can be improved.

Knowing One’s Emotions

  • Be attuned to feelings
  • Self-awareness: recognizing a feeling as it happens.
  • Emotions that simmer beneath threshold of awareness can have a power impact on how we perceive and react, even though we have no idea.
  • One to see criticism as valuable information about how to do better not as a personal attack.

Managing Emotions

  • Suffering can temper the soul. Offer a constructive contribution.
  • Handling feeling so they are appropriate.
  • “You can change the wat you feel by what you think” –Martian Seligman
  • The goal is balance, not emotional suppression: every feeling has value and significance.
  • The longer we ruminate about what has made us angry, the more “good reasons” and self-justifications for being angry we invent.

Motivating Oneself

  • Marshaling emotions in the service of a goal.
  • Resist impulse.
  • Students who are anxious, angry, or depressed don’t learn; people caught in these states do not take information efficiently or deal with it well.
  • If we are preoccupied by worries that we’re going to fail, we have much less attention to expand upon figuring out the answers. Our worries become self-fulfilling prophecies.

Recognizing Emotion in Others

  • Empathy, a fundamental “People Skill”
  • The key to intuiting another’s feelings is in the ability to read nonverbal channels.
  • Empathy requires calm and receptivity.

Handling Relationships

  • Managing emotions ion others.
  • Handling emotions in someone else requires the ripeness of two other emotional skills: self-management and empathy.
  • Emotions are contagious
  • Two cardinal sins that almost always lead to rejection are trying to lead to soon and being out of synch with the frame of reference.
  • Components of interpersonal intelligence:
    Organizing groups
    Social analysis
    Negotiating solutions
    Personal connections

If you liked what you saw. Here are 3 titles that I recommend based on what was discussed in Emotional Intelligence.

  1. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dweck
  2. Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry
  3. Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships by Daniel Goleman

Find the book on Amazon: Print | Audio

Check Out More 52 in 52 Challenge Summaries

Note: This page contains affiliate links. This means that if you decide to buy a product through them, I will receive a small commission. This has no additional cost to you. If you would like to support Forces of Habit, please use these links. If you do use them, thank you for the support.

52 in 52 Book Summaries

Book Summary: The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

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The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

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The Essence

As history shows, various tools that we humans use to extend our mental faculties greatly change the way we then navigate our realities. However, this time, costs run high. Using the internet has ramifications on our brains that are consistently underplayed. Contemplation, retention, reading, and even basic attention control are all negatively impacted through consistent interaction with the medium. As we give credence to the internet to ‘simplify’ our lives we also strip ourselves of the necessary faculties that make us human. The Shallow reminds us to take count of our course and be wary of how we are in many ways the technology we choose to harness.

The Shallows Journal Entry Notes:

This is my book summary of The Shallows. My notes are a reflection of the journal write up above. Written informally, the notes contain a mesh and mix of quotes and my own thoughts on the book. Sometimes, to my own fault, quotes are interlaced with my own words. Though rest assured, I am not attempting to take any credit for the main ideas below. The Journal write up includes important messages and crucial passages from the book.

• In the long run a medium’s content matter less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act.

Key sources of cognitive overload:

1) Extraneous problem solving
2) Divided attention.These just so happen to also be the central features to the internet as an information medium.

• Efficiency of information exchange vs. Contemplation and introspection.
• The key to memory consolidation is attentiveness.
• As we cede to software more of the toil of thinking, we are likely diminishing our brains power in subtle but meaningful ways. The brighter the software, the dimer the user.
• Commonplace books: a necessary tool for the cultivation of an educated mind. The vehicle and chronicle of intellectual development.
• The new reroutes our vital paths and diminishes our capacity for contemplation, it is altering the depth of our emotions as well as our thoughts.
• Tools of the mind: The Map, Time, Internet
• The tech of the map gave humans a new and vast comprehending mind, better able to understand the unseen forces that shape his surroundings and existence. These tools for better or worse translate natural phenomenon into an artificial and intellectual conception of that phenomenon.
• The equipment takes part in forming the thoughts. Once the clock had redefined time as a series of units of equal duration, our minds began to stress the methodical mental work of division and measurement.

TOOLS…

Extend our physical strength, dexterity, or resilience.
Extend the range or sensitivity of our senses.
Enable us to reshape nature to better serve our needs or desires.
Extend or support our mental powers.

• A net-saturated world contains: interactivity, hyperlinking, search ability, multimedia, and addictive.
• Intellectual Ethics: The message that a medium or other tools transmits into the minds and culture of its users.
• Our indulgence in the pleasures of informality and immediacy has led to a narrowing of expressiveness and a loss of eloquence.
• The net cacophony of stimuli short –circuit both conscious and unconscious thought, preventing our minds from think either deeply or creatively.
• We willingly accept the loss of concentration and focus, the division of our attention and the fragmentation of thoughts, in return for the novel or at least diverting information we receive.
• We have rejected the intellectual tradition of solitary, single-mindedness, and concentration. We have cast our lot with the juggler.
• The shift from paper to screen doesn’t just change the way we navigate a piece of writing. It also influences the degree of attention we devote to it and the depth of our immersion in it.
• We crave the new even when we know that “the new is often more trivial than essential”.
The internet seizes our attention only to scatter it.
As time spent scanning web pages crowds out the time we spend reading books, as the time we spend exchanging bite-sized texts crowds out the time we spend composting sentences and paragraphs, as the time we spend hopping across link crowds out the time we devote to quiet reflection and contemplation, the circuits that support the old intellectual functions and purists weaken and begin to break apart. The brain recycles the disused neurons and synapses for other, more pressing work. We gain a new skill and perspective, but lose old ones.
• Rather than read, we now power-browse. Skimming has become our dominant mode or reading.

If you liked what you saw. Here are 3 titles that I recommend based on what was discussed in The Shallows.

  1. The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan
  2. The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us by Nicholas Carr
  3. Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam Alter

Find the book on Amazon: Print | Audio

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Note: This page contains affiliate links. This means that if you decide to buy a product through them, I will receive a small commission. This has no additional cost to you. If you would like to support Forces of Habit, please use these links. If you do use them, thank you for the support.

52 in 52 Book Summaries

Book Summary: A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra) by Barbara Oakley

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A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra) by Barbara Oakley

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The Essence

Many of the most challenging domains to study are like a two-step authentication process; to comprehend the material is not sufficient, the learning systems surrounding those concepts are just as essential. This is why the learning process itself is an art. Barbra Oakley addresses our learning deficiencies by reviewing the literature on retaining new information, and provides us strategies that have empirically been found to help students excel in fields that are commonly stigmas for being ‘hard’. Language, Math, and the Sciences are disciplines accessible to everyone. However, students ought to learn the dominate pedagogy of such fields. As Oakley describes, it is all about learning in chunks, and consolidating the chunks into a larger mental representation that can be applied to more complex matters further down the road in whatever you are learning. All of which is mediated be balancing between the varying modes of thought; focused and diffused. A Mind for Numbers significance extends far beyond that of the natural sciences; it explains how to become a better problem solver in any instance.

 A Mind for Numbers Journal Entry Notes:

This is my book summary of A Mind for Numbers. My notes are a reflection of the journal write up above. Written informally, the notes contain a mesh and mix of quotes and my own thoughts on the book. Sometimes, to my own fault, quotes are interlaced with my own words. Though rest assured, I am not attempting to take any credit for the main ideas below. The Journal write up includes important messages and crucial passages from the book.

  • The patient ability to keep working away, a little bit at a time is important.
  • We learn a great deal from our failures. With each mistake we are making progress towards a deeper understanding.
  • Law of Serendipity: Lady Luck favors the one who tries.
  • Learn to focus on process, not product. The flow of time, and the habits and actions associated with that flow are far more important than the outcome.
  • Pomodoro technique. Calmly put forth your best effort for the period.
  • Metaphors are powerful tools for learning in math and science.
  • The key to learning is the balance of the modes of thought. We cannot always be focused (highly attentive), and we cannot always be diffused (resting state), it is a balance.
  • Einstellung Effect: an idea you have in your mind already or the simple initial thought presents a better idea or solution from being found. You must unlearn your erroneous older ideas even while you’re learning new ones.
  • Avoid Einstellung, accepting the first idea that comes to mind when you are working on an assignment or test can prevent you from finding a better solution.
  • Procrastination can mean only leaving enough time to do superficial focused mode learning. A long with additional stress, the result is a faint and fragmented neural pattern that will soon disappear due to its shaky foundation.
  • Use it or lose it: If you don’t make it a point to repeat what out want to remember, your “metabolic vampires” can suck away the neural patterns related to that memory.
  • You may think you’re learning in between checking your phone messages but in reality, your brain is not focusing long enough to form the solid neural chunks that are imperative to strong mental representations.
  • Transform distant deadlines into daily ones.
  • Beware of the illusions of competence.
  • Change your thoughts, change your life.
  • The best language programs incorporate structured practice that includes plenty spaced repetition and rote focused mode learning of the language, along with more diffused like free speech with native speakers. The goal is to embed the basic words and patterns so you can speak as freely and creatively in your new language as you do in English.
  • When learning a new concept, do not let it go untouched for longer than a day. Further, trying to learn ‘everything’ in a few cram sessions doesn’t allow time for neural structures to become consolidated in the warehouse (long-term memory).
  • One significant mistake students sometimes make in learning math and science is jumping into the water before they learn to swim.
  • Imagine how your calf muscles would scream if you prepared for a big race by waiting till midnight before your first marathon to do your first practice run. That is the same as cramming. You cannot compete if you just cram at the last minute.
  • Generating (recall) the material helps you learn it much effectively than simply rereading.
  • Testing effect: testing is a powerful learning experience. It changes and shows you what you know and improves retention of material.
  • We procrastinate about things that make us feel uncomfortable. But it is only the anticipation. Eat the frog: Start!
  • Working memory has only so many things it can hold at once. Working memory is the part of memory that has to do with what is immediately and consciously processing in your mind.
  • We must CHUNK:
    1. Focus your attention on the information you want to chunk.
    2. Understand the basic idea you are trying to chunk (this is like the super glue that holds the memory together).
    3. Gain context so you can see not just how, but also when to use this chunk.

If you liked what you saw. Here are 3 titles that I recommend based on what was discussed in A Mind for Numbers.

  1. Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential by Barbara Oakley
  2. How to Become a Straight-A Student: The Unconventional Strategies Real College Students Use to Score High While Studying Less by Cal Newport
  3. 10 Steps to Earning Awesome Grades (While Studying Less) by Thomas Frank

Find the book on Amazon: Print | Audio

Check Out More 52 in 52 Challenge Summaries

Note: This page contains affiliate links. This means that if you decide to buy a product through them, I will receive a small commission. This has no additional cost to you. If you would like to support Forces of Habit, please use these links. If you do use them, thank you for the support.

52 in 52 Book Summaries

Book Summary: How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking by Jordan Ellenberg

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How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking by Jordan Ellenberg

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The Essence

Being wrong a lot less of the time means understanding that mathematics holds the secrets of navigating a world ruled by probabilities. Common sense tends to lie beyond the mathematical traps that day-to-day life lays. Such as falsely assuming linearity when the rate of change may not remain the same. Numbers may not always be what they seem to be, and it is our duty to apply the principles of mathematics to unveil the conventional approach to life as inherently flawed. How not to be wrong takes what math has learned about the world, and makes it palatable enough to avoid being mathematical bested by our lives (or at least understand when we are).

How Not to Be Wrong Journal Entry Notes:

This is my book summary of How Not to Be Wrong. My notes are a reflection of the journal write up above. Written informally, the notes contain a mesh and mix of quotes and my own thoughts on the book. Sometimes, to my own fault, quotes are interlaced with my own words. Though rest assured, I am not attempting to take any credit for the main ideas below. The Journal write up includes important messages and crucial passages from the book.

• Mathematics is the study of things that come out a certain way because there is no other way that they could possibly be.
• The extension of common sense by other means.
• Avoid thoughtless linear extrapolation: Not every curve is a line.
• Twice a tiny number is a tiny number: Risk ratios applied to small numbers in probability can easily mislead us.
• A mathematician is always asking: What assumptions are you making, are they justified?
• Nonlinear thinking means which way you should go depends upon where you already are.
• Diving one number by another is mere computation; figuring out what you should divide by what is mathematics.
• When you’re testing a mathematical method, try computing the same thing several different answers, something is wrong with your method.
• Math is like meditation, it puts you in direct contact with the universe, which is bigger than you, was here before you, and will be here after you.
• A basic rule of mathematical life: If the universe hands you a hard problem, try to solve an easier one instead, and hope the simple version is close enough to the original problem that the universe does not object.
• “P-Hacking”: Due to our publish or die culture, the science community runs a survivorship bias on themselves ‘To live or die by the .05’. We need statically insignificant data, the value is purely arbitrary and prompts dishonesty and elaborate verbal twists in our to be considered for publication.
• The significant test is the detective, not the judge.
• A significant test in an instrument, like a telescope.
• What is improbable is probable.

• Expected Value = Average value would be a better name.
• Almost any condition in life that involves random fluctuations in time is potentially subject to the regression effect.
• Uncorrelated doesn’t mean unrelated; not relationships are linear. Certain mathematical tools only pick up certain relationships, not all phenomena.
• The Baltimore Stockbroker = Survivorship bias
• Proving by day & Disproving by night. Put pressure on all of your beliefs. This will deepen your understanding of why you believe what you do, and how does it weigh up against the evidence.
• If gambling is exciting, you’re doing it wrong.
• Genius is a thing that happens. Not a kind of person. It is something that is hard won and the cumulative achievement of years, even centuries of progress.
• In a Bayesian framework, how much you believe something after you see the evidence depends not just on what the evidence shows, but how much you believed it to begin with (the Base Rates).
• Our priors are not flat, but spiky.
• Variance, a measure of how widely spread out the possible outcomes are, and how likely one is to encounter the extreme on either end is one of the main challenges to managing money.
• Wrongness is like original sin. We are born to it and it remains always with us, and constant vigilance is necessary if we mean to restrict its sphere of influence over our actions.
• Miss more planes! Save your Utils, by eliminating all risk you are carrying the extra cost for the small statistically risk.
• Orthogonal: As far as correlation goes, they are not related. Zero
• Law of Large Numbers: The more coins you flip the less likely you are to get more than 50%. Understand the results of an experiment tend to settle down to a fixed average once the experiment is repeated again and again.
• Ergodicity: “Suppose you want to buy a pair of shoes and you live in a house that has a shoe store. There are two different strategies: one is that you go to the store in your house every day to check out the shoes and eventually you find the best pair; another is to take your car and to spend a whole day searching for footwear all over town to find a place where they have the best shoes and you buy them immediately. The system is ergodic if the result of these two strategies is the same”
• Smaller populations are inherently more variable.

If you liked what you saw. Here are 3 titles that I recommend based on what was discussed in How Not to Be Wrong.

  1. Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  2. Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian
  3. The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don’t by Nate Silver

Find the book on Amazon: Print | Audio

Check Out More 52 in 52 Challenge Summaries

Note: This page contains affiliate links. This means that if you decide to buy a product through them, I will receive a small commission. This has no additional cost to you. If you would like to support Forces of Habit, please use these links. If you do use them, thank you for the support.

52 in 52 Book Summaries

Book Summray: The Joy of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity by Steven Strogatz

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The Joy of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity
Book by Steven Strogatz

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The Essence

Cornell professor Steven Strogatz compartmentalizes and expands his endeavor to popularize math in the New York Times opinionator series “The Elements of Math.” Many of the mathematical concepts that we studied in primary school are reframed as practical anecdotes that revitalize our curiosity for developing the stigmaed skill of mathematical thinking. The language of mathematics has led to discovery after discovery about what our organized, yet chaotic, existence actually is. Intuitive explanations for significant subject matter invite the reader to bask and appreciate how applicable understanding mathematics actually is. From addition to calculus, Strogatz shows us the joy that comes with numeracy.

The Joy of X Journal Entry Notes:

This is my book summary of The Joy of X. My notes are a reflection of the journal write up above. Written informally, the notes contain a mesh and mix of quotes and my own thoughts on the book. Sometimes, to my own fault, quotes are interlaced with my own words. Though rest assured, I am not attempting to take any credit for the main ideas below. The Journal write up includes important messages and crucial passages from the book.

• The right abstraction lead to new insight and new power
• Math supplies us with broader lessons about how to solve problems approximately when you can’t solve them exactly and how to solve them intuitively, for the pleasure of the ‘Aha!’ moment.

• Word problems give us practice in think not just about numbers, but about relationships between numbers…This is essential to math education, relationships are much more abstract than a number. But they’re also much more powerful.

• Mathematical signs and symbols are often cryptic, but the best of them offer visual clues to their own meaning.
• A mathematician needs functions for the same reason that a builder needs hammers and drills, Tools transform things.
• Things that seem hopelessly random and unpredictable when viewed in isolation often turn out to be lawful and predictable when viewed in aggregate.
• The most abstruse and far-fetched concepts of math often find applications to practical things.
• Wrongs answers are educational…as long as you realize they’re wrong.
• Vector: “To carry” carries you from one place to another. Two kinds of information are shown: Direction, and Magnitude.
• Sometimes we ought to sacrifice a little precision for a lot of clarity.
• Lots of phenomena in this world are the new results of tiny flukes.
• The key to thinking mathematically about curved shapes is to pretend they’re made up of lots of little straight pieces.
• Math holds the hidden unity of things that would otherwise seem unrelated.

If you liked what you saw. Here are 3 titles that I recommend based on what was discussed in The Joy of X.

  1. Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife
  2. How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking by Jordan Ellenberg
  3. Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe by Steven Strogatz

Find the book on Amazon: Print

Check Out More 52 in 52 Challenge Summaries

Note: This page contains affiliate links. This means that if you decide to buy a product through them, I will receive a small commission. This has no additional cost to you. If you would like to support Forces of Habit, please use these links. If you do use them, thank you for the support.