Recent political events here in the UK have prompted me to write this blog. I have been struggling with the ideas for a few days and as yet they are far from being fully formed. I am hoping that by trying to express them here they may become clearer to me. I am posting under… Read More What Has Happened to our Moral Compasses?
What, is it May already? Hibernation is one thing, but disappearing from here for close on two years is something else entirely! But I am pertinently awake now to post about alertness. The stimulus for this post comes from our government’s exhortation for us to “Stay Alert!” as we precariously enter the next phase of… Read More Dr Derek’s Guide to Being Alert
For those of you who want to follow my running stories beyond Musselburgh, wherever they may lead, you can find me on my dedicated running blog at Psychologist on the Run. We run to escape, we run to embrace, and we run in the moment. Hindsight, foresight and insight. These are among the themes we… Read More Follow me beyond Musselburgh…
So, we are starting to bed-down in the groove of the new year. A rather mixed-metaphor to kick things off, further adding to the confusion… I have again chosen to remain alcohol-free throughout the month of January. It is an exercise in self-control and self-denial. It gives me the time to reflect on my relationship… Read More Alcohol-free Melancholy
The starting point for this (non-academic) exploratory post is the work done by Philip Barnard and John Teasdale on “interacting cognitive subsystems”. They put forward a model of the mental architectural substrates needed to account for the ways in which cognitive and emotional processes interact with each other, particularly in the maintenance of clinical depressive… Read More The Cat Sat on the Mat
After years of extensive research, I am pleased to launch my Gullibility Test in time for Christmas. Population norms have been derived from thousands of questionnaires completed on-line, and the well-established Lubinski algorithm has been modified to obtain the unique Gullibility Quotient. The GQ has the potential to revolutionalise recruitment across a wide range of… Read More Dr Derek’s Test of Gullibility
Today I want to think about thinking. In particular, to look at the distinction between thoughts and beliefs. We tend to accept our first impressions as being accurate and true. Often this may be the case and the strategy serves us well, but sometimes it can go wrong. We misunderstand someone’s actions or words, possibly… Read More Filosofy on Friday – The Moon is made of Green Cheese
The starting point for today’s post was my absence last week. Silent pages. If the frothy filosofer filosofises out loud in a forest and no-one hears him, does he make a sound? Maybe it is the sound of one hand clapping. A new twist on an old conundrum. Oh, I was not in a forest… Read More Filosofy on Friday – Silence
Ah, a great choice of topic! Full of filosofical possibilities, conundrums and conuncymbals. The latter term is rarely used. It refers to the sound of an argument – not the kind of argument you might hear your neighbours engage in, but a “proper” argument as found in logic. We find the term referenced in common… Read More Filosofy on Friday – Truth and Lies
For some reason, I have been thinking about negentropy this week. The term has different meanings in different contexts. I would like to consider it in relation to information theory. The central tenet is about the relationships between energy and information. Every bit of information has attached to it an energy cost. This was neatly… Read More Filosofy on Friday – Negentropy
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