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Tag: neuroscience

  • Ancient Torah, Modern Brain: The Science of Jewish Compassionate Reasoning

    For centuries, Jewish tradition has insisted that the struggle between good and evil is not merely theological—it is psychological. The rabbis described this as the tension between the yetzer hara and the yetzer hatov, the human inclinations toward fear and selfishness on the one hand, and compassion and moral responsibility on the other. Today, neuroscience offers a remarkable confirmation of this ancient insight. Modern research shows that human behavior emerges from interacting brain systems, some oriented toward threat and survival, others toward care, reflection, and cooperation. This convergence suggests something profound: Torah may be understood not only as spiritual teaching but as a system for training the moral mind. Ritual becomes practice. Study becomes cognitive training. Compassion becomes a disciplined capacity. What Jewish civilization developed over centuries may represent one of humanity’s earliest sustained efforts to cultivate what we might now call the compassionate brain—the ability to regulate fear, strengthen moral clarity, and act with responsibility toward others.

  • Overcoming Tribalism: A New Way of Thinking

     

    The most important thing to understand about tribalism and gang warfare is that it is deeply damaging to human societies and that it always has been for tens of thousands of years. We like to think that tribalism is somewhere else. It’s not where we exist; it is very far away and primitive. But the fact is that tribalism is something that we all naturally fall into for various complicated reasons in human nature. We tend to affiliate with groups that will make us feel protected, initially the family and the family unit. But it constantly expands to include people we trust in more significant circumstances, expanding to community, culture, and nation.

    Studying the impact of tribalism and its consequences is an important part of the sociology and anthropology of all normal human communities. At the same time, we need to think about the destructive aspect of tribalism that results …

  • A WAR FOR YOUR BRAIN IN POLITICS, AND THE WEAPON OF CHOICE IS LANGUAGE: BE READY

     

    (As it appeared in the Huffington Post. )

    There is a war for your brain in today’s politics, and the weapon of that war is language manipulation. George Lakoff has spent his career demonstrating the power of language and neural nets to trap us into thinking thoughts we do not necessarily want to think, to believe things that we would question if we were not being manipulated. In a wonderful interview , Lakoff describes a series of words that have changed us. For example, people were convinced at a certain point that taxes were not an investment in our future, in our society, but a burden to be relieved. Everyone repeated the phrase “tax relief” that we all forgot that taxes are essential to everything in our lives, our roads, our police, our hospitals, our schools, our safety in every respect. This is the exact neural path through …

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