Psychology
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On fear.
Activating the neurons behind fear makes mammals attack. And 45 campaigned on fear.
amygdala, Chicago, civil war, climate change, climate strife, Clinton, Comoli, Daesh, Donald Trump, fear, Functional mapping of the prosencephalic systems involved in organizing predatory behavior in rats, gene expression, immigrant ban, Integrated Control of Predatory Hunting by the Central Nucleus of the Amygdala, ISIL, ISIS, Ivan de Araujo, Laboratory Animal Welfare Act, laser-activated neurons, Manchurian candidate, mind control, prejudice, refugee ban, Restaurant Depot, retrovirus, Syria, terror, terrorism, terrorists, Trump, violence, violence against conspecifics, voluntary research participation, war, Wenfei Han
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On the history of time travel.
Sometimes we have to prove ourselves wrong.
Back to the Future, best time travel movies, Chronocriminales, closed timelike curve, free will, Godel, James Gleick, John Hospers, Kurt Godel, Looper, Nacho Vigalondo, Oedipus, paradox, philosophy, Stephen Hawkins, Terminator, time travel, time travel films, time travel paradox, Time Travel: A History, Timecrimes, Trump, who built the pyramids
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On psychedelic drugs as medicine.
Would a sudden jolt away from our minds’ ruts help treat depression? Or — complacency in general?
acid, acid trip, addict, addiction, autism, ayahuasca, CBT, CIA, clinical trials, cognitive behavioral therapy, David Foster Wallace, depressed, depression, DMT, drugs, ecstasy, entheogen, experiments on children, experiments on orphans, habit, In Search of Lost Time, Infinite Jest, Intoxication, involuntary experimentation, junkie, Lauretta Bender, learning, lost love, LSD, lysergic acid, Marcel Proust, MDMA, mescaline, MK Ultra, molly, mushrooms, neurology, organic synthesis, orphans, peyote, placebo, placebo effect, psilocin, psilocybin, psychedelic, Remembrance of Things Past, Ronald Siegel, Schedule I, shrooms, suicide, virtuous cycle, William Burroughs, you must change your life
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On Facebook and fake news.
Fake news is frustrating, but Facebook makes your brain worse *by design*.
Archaic Torso of Apollo, big ideas take time, boredom, branding, Brawndo, building a website, Cal Newport, climate change, distraction, Donald Trump, duping Facebook users, fabrication, Facebook, fake news, family band, faux-politically-conscious liberals, Franz Kafka, Google, Google ad dollars, holiday album, holiday record, Hotmail, Idiocracy, Indiana Prisoners’ Writing Workshop, irony, Johnny Fuerza, mass incarceration, Myspace, obsession with fame, Pages to Prisoners, persuasion, philosophy, Rainer Maria Rilke, Silicon Valley stole the election, social media, The Recognitions, the signature is worth more than the art, Twitter, undergraduate degrees, vegan, vegetarian, William Gaddis, Yahoo, you must change your life
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On pain.
Habitual drug use ruins lives. But the War on Drugs ends them.
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On throwing sand.
Even when we can’t change the world, we control how we perceive it. Which gives us the strength to press for change.
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On Charles Foster’s ‘Being a Beast’ and battling the empathy gap.
If Charles Foster can learn, & care, what it’s like to be a badger, all citizens should be able to empathize with the experience of Homo sapiens from other ethnic backgrounds.
agricultural revolution, all lives matter, Being a Beast, Black Lives Matter, brains, Charles Foster, civil forfieture, common ancestors, Donald Trump, empathy, empathy gap, evolution, family first, faulty roadside drug tests, Hungary, incarceration crisis, injustice, Jeneen Interlandi, jeremy betham, John Oliver, living as a badger, natural selection, Neil Gaiman, neurological basis of empathy, Peter Singer, power racing, psychology, reading fiction develops empathy, river otters, Roma, swift, The View from the Cheap Seats, tofu, utilitarianism, vegan, vegetarian
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On stalking and the risk of seeming crazy.
Group stalking sounds crazy… but no crazier than the online harassment of women that’s been widely documented already.
Bill McKibben, David James, delusions, graphic threats not taken seriously by law enforcement, group stalking, how to discuss legitimate worries without enabling mental illness?, if you torture the data it will confess, internet harassment, internet trolls, Lorraine Sheridan, middle-school girls harassed to death, National Security Agency, NSA, on-campus stalking, one reason why women drop out of college, online harassment, online harassment of women, post traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, schizophrenia, stalking, suicide, telephone metadata, trolls
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On PTSD and David Means’s ‘Hystopia.’
Saying “thank you” isn’t enough to cure trauma.
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On paranoia, virology, conspiracy theories, & lemmings: my experience reading ‘Gravity’s Rainbow.’
In which our hero stumbles across a Disney-promulgated conspiracy of lemming misinformation.
1958 Disney documentary, accidental death mistaken for suicide, Apophenia, are parents trustworthy, are politicians trustworthy, are scientists trustworthy, authority figures, being honest to your kid, being honest with my kid, bibliophile, book hunting, book review, characters trapped within the grand schemes of their creator, climate change, conspiracy, conspiracy theories, conspiracy theorists, conspiracy theory, disappointment at rampant misbehavior in classic literature, Disney, Disney documentary, do lemmings commit suicide, do you know how they make pepperoni?, does life have any meaning?, Easter Bunny, evil cabal, fabricated documentary footage, faked documentary footage, fatherhood, Fred Tomaselli, Genesis 41, Gravity’s Rainbow, hidden meanings, honesty, human fallacies, human population, hunting to extinction, influenza, influenza virus is one step ahead of our defenses, is life random?, is the world random?, lemming migration, lemming suicide, lemmings, lemmings don’t commit suicide, library booksales, lying to children, lying to children about Santa Claus, lying to kids about Santa Claus, mental illness, novelist as God, overbreeding, overfishing, overpredation, paranoia, parenting, pattern seeking, pop psychology, population booms and busts, population dynamics, predator prey population dynamics, predator prey relationship, psychology, randomness, randomness is scary, Rob Brotherton, santa claus, Santa Claus conspiracy, schizophrenia, should children believe in Santa Claus, Slothrop, storing food for lean years, Suspicious Minds, Thomas Pynchon, truth, unrealistic expectations, used bookstores, water usage rights, White Wilderness
Frank Brown Cloud 