November 2012 Archives

Here are my notes from a book strange book called "Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard". I found it hard to read and hard to understand. One reason could also be that the translation was not very good.

• p3 To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn't have. One implies a presence, the other and absence.
• p6 it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum
• p7 In order for ethnology to live, its object must die; by dying, the object takes its revenge for being "discovered" and with its death defies the science that wants to grasp it.
• p12 Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, ...
• p13 Disneyland: a space of the regeneration of the imaginary as waste-treatment plants are elsewhere, and even here. Everywhere today one must recycle waste, and the dreams, the phantasms, the historical, fairylike, legendary imaginary of children and adults is a waste product, the first great toxic excrement of a hyperreal civilization. On a mental level, Disneyland is the prototype of this new function. But all the sexual, psychic, somatic recycling institutes, which proliferate in California, belong to the same order. People no longer look at each other, but there are institutes for that. They no longer touch each other, but there is contactotherapy. They no longer walk, but they go jogging, etc. Everywhere one recycles lost faculties, or lost bodies, or lost sociality, or the lost taste for food. One reinvents penury, asceticism, vanished savage naturalness: natural food, health food, yoga.
• p18 It would take too long to traverse the entire range of the operational negativity of all those scenarios of deterrence, which, like Watergate, try to regenerate a moribund principle through simulated scandal, phantasm, and murder - a sort of hormonal treatment through negativity and crisis. It is always a question of providing the real through the imaginary, providing truth through scandal, proving law through transgression, providing work through striking, proving system through crisis, and capital through revolution, ... Everything is metamorphosed into its opposite to perpetuate itself in its expurgated form. All the powers, all the institutions speak of themselves through denial, in order to attempt, by simulating death, to escape their real death throes.
• p24 Death is never an absolute criterion, but in this case it is significant: the era of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and the Kennedys, of those who really died simply because they had a mythic dimension that implies death ( not for romantic reasons, but because of the fundamental principle of reversal and exchange) - this era is long gone. It is not the era of murder by simulation, ... Power floats like money, like language, like theory. Criticism and negativity alone still secrete a phantom of the reality of power. It they became weak for one reason or another, power has no other recourse but to artificially revive and hallucinate them. ... One must not resist this process by trying to confront the system and destroy it, because this system that is dying from being dispossessed of its death expects nothing but that from us: that we give the system back its death, that we revive it through the negativity.
• p33 The balance of terror is the terror of balance.
• p79 The Implosion of Meaning in the Media
• p79 We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.
• p84 Is it the media that induce fascination on the masses, or is it the masses who direct the media into the spectacle? Mogadishu-Stammheim: the media make themselves into the vehicle of the moral condemnation of terrorism and of the exploitation of fear for political ends, but simultaneously, in the most complete ambiguity, they propagate the brutal charm of the terrorist act, they are themselves terrorists, insofar as they themselves march to the tune of seduction.
• p85 Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive, inert, obedient, conforming objects.
• p87 Today what we are experiencing is the absorption of all virtual modes of expression into that of advertising. All original cultural forms, all determined languages are absorbed in advertising because it has no depth, it is instantaneous and instantaneously forgotten. Triumph of superficial form, of the smallest common denominator of all signification, degree zero of meaning, triumph of entropy over all possible tropes. The lowest form of energy of the sign. This unarticulated, instantaneous form, without a past, without a future, without the possibility of metamorphosis, has power over all the others. All current forms of activity tend toward advertising and most exhaust themselves therein.
• p134 Those who used to sacrifice animals did not take them for beasts. And even the Middle Ages, which condemned and punished them in due form, was in this way much closer to them than we are, we who are filled with horror at this practice. They held them to be guilty: which was a way of honoring them. We take them for nothing, and it is on this basis that we are "human" with them. We no longer sacrifice them, we no longer punish them, and we are proud of it, but it is simply that we have domesticated them worse: that we have made them a racially inferior world, no longer even worthy of out justice, but only of our affection and social charity, no longer worthy of punishment and of death, but only of experimentation and extermination like meat from butchery.
• p149 The university is in ruins: nonfunctional in the social arenas of the market and employment, lacking cultural substance of an end purpose of knowledge.
• p152 Yet it is there that one must fight, if even fighting has any meaning anymore. We are simulators, we are simulacra (not in the classical sense of "appearance"), we are concave mirrors radiated by the social, a radiation without a light source, power without origin, without distance, and it is in this tactical universe of the simulacrum that one will need to fight - without hope, hope is a weak value, but in defiance and fascination. Because one must not refuse the intense fascination that emanates from this liquidation of all power, of all axes of value, of all axiology, politics included.
• p155 In this sense the university remains the site of a desperate initiation to the empty form of value, and those who have lived there for the past few years are familiar with this strange work, the true desperation of nonwork, of nonknowledge. Because current generations still dream of reading, of learning, of competing, but their heart isn't in it - as a whole, the ascetic cultural mentality has run body and possessions together.
• This is why the strike no longer means anything. It is also why we were trapped, we trapped ourselves, after 1968, into giving diplomas to everybody.
• p162 Melancholia is the brutal disaffection that characterizes our saturated systems. Once the hope of balancing good and evil, true and false, indeed of confronting some values of the same order, once the more general hope of a relation of forces and a stake has vanished.
• p163 The system is itself also nihilistic, in the sense that it has the power to pour everything, including what denies it, into indifference.
• p164 There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal.

My notes from book Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most.

• p9 The number of things I am right about would fill a book.
• p10 These are not questions of right and wrong, but questions of interpretation and judgement. Interpretations and judgements are important to explore. In contrast, the quest to determine who is right and who is wrong is a dead end.
• p12 From the front seat looking back, it is easy to see how each child has contributed to the fight. It's much more difficult to see how we've contributed to the problems in which we ourselves are involved. But in situations that give ride to difficult conversations, it is almost always true that what happened is the result of things both people did - or failed to do.
• p13 And once we've gotten our feelings off our chest, it's their turn. Are we to hearing all about their anger and pain?
• p14 Understanding feelings, talking about feelings, managing feelings - these are among the greatest challenges of being human. There is nothing that will make dealing with feelings easy and risk-free.
• Asking for a raise? What if you get turned down? In fact, what if your boss gives you good reason for turning you down? What will that do to your self-image as a competent and respected employee? Ostensibly the subject is money, but what's really making you sweat is that your self-image is on the line.
• p25 We disagree with people all the time, and often no one cares very much.
• p28 We don't see ourselves as the problem because, in fact, we aren't. What we are saying does make sense. What's often hard to see is that what other person is saying also makes sense.
• p29 Arguing creates another problem in difficult conversations: it inhibits change. Telling someone to change makes it less rather than more likely that they will. This is because people almost never change without first feeling understood.
• p30 First, we take in information. We experience the world - sights, sounds, and feelings. Second, we interpret what we see, hear, and feel; we give it all meaning. Then we draw conclusions about what's happening. And at each step, there is an opportunity for different people's stories to diverge.
• p31 Each float, it seems, was pulled by a truck. Andrew, truck obsessed as he was, saw nothing else. His Uncle Doug, truck indifferent, hadn't noticed a single truck. In a sense, Andrew and his uncle watched completely different parades.
• p32 Often we go through an entire conversation - or indeed an entire relationship - without ever realizing that each of us is paying attention to different things, that our views are based on different information.
• p34 The past gives meaning to the present. Often, it is only in the context of someone's past experience that we can understand why what they are saying or doing makes any kind of sense.
• p35 We get into trouble when our rules collide.
• p36 We look for information to support our view and give that information the most favorable interpretation. Then we feel even more certain that our view is right.
• p37 "I sometimes failed to persuade the court that I was right, but I never failed to persuade myself!" --Roger Fisher
• p37 There's only one way to come to understand the other person's story, and that's by being curious. ... Certainty locks us out of their story; curiosity lets us in.
• p38 One way to shift your stance from the easy certainty of feeling that you've thought about this from every possible angle is to get curious about what you don't know about yourself.
• p39 Many of us agree with this rule, but it is not a truth, just a rule.
• p49 Each would claim that their own statements were made in self-defense. Those are the two classic characteristics of the cycle: both parties think they are the victim, and both think they are acting only to defend themselves. This is how well-intentioned people get themselves into trouble.
• p50 When we think others have bad intentions toward us, it affects our behavior. And, in turn, how we behave affects how they treat us. Before we know it, our assumption that they have bad intentions toward us has come true.
• p60 "Who is to blame?" => First, did this person cause the problem? Second, if so, how should her actions be judged against some standard of conduct? And third, if the judgment is negative, how should she be punished? => "This was your fault" => it is shorthand for giving condemning answers to all three questions.
• p64 There are situations in which focusing on blame is not only important, but essential. Our legal system is set up to apportion blame, both in the criminal and civil courts. Assigning blame publicly, against clearly articulated legal or moral standards, tell people what is expected of them and allows society to exercise justice.
• p71 One of the most common contributions to a problem, and one of the easiest to overlook, is the simple act of avoiding.
• p74 The problem is that things don't change, because each is waiting for the other to change.
• p85 Feelings are too powerful to remain peacefully bottled. They will be heard one way or another, whether in leaks or bursts. And if handled indirectly or without honesty, they contaminate communication.
• p87 When we lay our feelings on the table, we run the risk of hurting others and of ruining relationships. We also put ourselves in a position to get hurt. What if the other person doesn't take our feelings seriously or responds by telling us something we don't want to hear?
• p89 We don;t cry or lose our temper because we express our feelings too often, but because we express them too rarely. Like finally opening a carbonated drink that has been shaken, the results can be messy.
• p90 It's hard to hear someone else when we are feeling unheard, even if the reason we feel unheard is that we have chosen not to share.
• p91 Before we can get to where we're going, we need to know where we are. When it comes to understanding our own emotions, where most of us are is lost.
• p91 As we grow up, each of us develops a characteristic "emotional footprint" whose shape is determined by which feelings we believe are okay to have and express and which are not.
• p92 Depending on how we handle them, feelings can lead to great trouble. But the feelings themselves just are. In that sense, feelings are like arms or legs. If you hit or kick someone, then your arms or legs are causing trouble. But there's nothing inherently wrong with arms or legs. The same with feelings.
• p93 Don't knock down a wall until you know why it was put up.
• p93 Learn That Your Feelings Are as Important as Theirs. Some of us can't see our own feelings because we have learned somewhere along the way that other people's feelings are more important than ours.
• p94 When you are more concerned about others' feelings than your own, you teach others to ignore your feelings too. And beware: one of the reasons you haven't raised the issue is that you don't want to jeopardize the relationship. Yet by not raising it, the resentment you feel will grow and slowly erode the relationship anyway.
• p97 Peanuts aren't nuts. Whales aren't fish. Tomatoes aren't vegetables. And attribution, judgments, and accusations aren't feelings.
• p100 It isn't the shark that's changed; it's the story you tell yourself about what's happening. In any given situation our feelings follow our thoughts.
• p112 Our anxiety results not just from having to face other person, but from having to face ourselves. The conversation has the potential to disrupt our senses of who we are in the world, or to highlight what we hope we are but fear we are not. The conversation poses a threat to our identity - the story we tell ourselves about ourselves - and having our identity threatened can be profoundly disturbing. Am I Competent? Am I a Good Person? Am I Worthy of Love? Suddenly, who we thought we were when we walked into the conversation is called into question.
• p115 Working to keep negative information out during a difficult conversation is like trying to swim without getting wet.
• p118 Life is too complex for any reasonable person to feel otherwise. Indeed, a self-image that allows for complexity is healthy and robust; it provides a sturdy foundation on which to stand.
• p120 When you hold yourself to an all-or-nothing standard, even a small mistake can seem catastrophic and almost impossible to admit. If you are busy trying to shore up your "no mistakes, no failures" identity, you won't be able to engage in a meaningful learning conversation. And if you can't do that, you are likely to make the same mistakes again.
• p122 "You never lose your balance. What is your secret?" - "You are wrong," O Sensei replied. "I am constantly losing my balance. My skill lies in my ability to regain it."
• p133 Sometimes what's difficult about the situation has a whole lot more to do with what's going on inside you than what's going on between you and the other person. In that case, a conversation focused on the interaction isn't going to be very illuminating or productive, at least until you've had a longer conversation with yourself.
• p137 There's nothing wrong with hoping for change. The urge to change others is universal. We want them to be more loving, to show more appreciation for our hard work, to give us more personal space, or to be more social at parties. To accept our career choice or our sexual orientation. To believe in our God or our views on important issues of the day.
• p143 An important barrier to letting go occurs when we integrate the conflict into our sense of who we are. In our mind's eye, we are the least favorite son, the long-suffering wife, part of the oppressed group. We define ourselves in relation to our conflict with others.
• p144 Difficult conversations operate at the core of our being - where the people and the principles we care about most intersect with our self-image and self-esteem.
• p145 What information do they see that we missed or don't have access to? What past experiences influence them? What is their reasoning for why they did what they did? What were their intentions? How did our actions impact them? What do they think we are contributing to the problem? What are they feeling? What does this situation mean to them? How does it affect their identity? What's at stake?
• p163 ... we have a deep desire to feel heard, and to know that others care enough to listen.
• p167 The single most important thing Greta has done is to shift her internal stance from "I understand" to "Help me understand."
• p168 Listening is only powerful and effective if it is authentic. ... The issue, then is this: Are you curious? Do you care?
• p169 Only when you're fully aware of your thoughts can you begin to manage them and focus on the other person.
• p181 Why is acknowledgment so important? Because attached to each expression of feelings is a set of invisible questions: "Are my feelings okay?" "Do you understand them?" "Do you care about them?" "Do you care about me?" These questions are important, and we have trouble moving on in the converstaion until we know the answers.
• p183 The deepest form of understanding another person is empathy. Empathy involves a shift from my observing how you seem on the outside, to imagining what it feels like to be you on the inside, wrapped in your skin with your set of experiences and background, and looking out at the world through your eyes.
• p185 In a difficult conversation your primary task is not to persuade, impress, trick, outwit, convert, or win over the other person. It is to express what you see and why you see it that way, how you feel, and maybe who you are. Self-knowledge and the belief that what you want to share is important will take you significantly further than eloquence and wit.
• p187 My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. ... --Audre Lorde
• p197 We go through the motions of trying, but incompetently, so that in the end we fail. We wait to speak until there's not enough time to deal with our concerns. We conveniently forget our materials. All our points suddenly disappear from our head. And voilà! All of our interests are satisfied: we can feel good about trying, and secretly satisfied that we didn't succeed. This is the art of self-sabotage.
• p188 Angela broke off her engagement because her fiancé was "too nice". He never stated a preference, never argued, never raised his voice, never asked for anything. While she appreciated his kindness, she felt something was missing: him.
• p191 This is unfortunately all too typical of many difficult conversations. We say the least important things, sometimes over and over again, and wonder why the other person doesn't realize what we really think and how we really feel.
• p193 Being disappointed that someone isn't reading our mind is one of our contributions to the problem.
• p200 The secret of powerful expression is recognizing that you are the ultimate authority on you. You are an expert on what you think, how you feel, and why you've come to this place. If you think it or feel it, you are entitled to say it, and no one can legitimately contradict you. You only get in trouble if you try to assert what you are not the final authority on - who is right, who intended what, what happened. Speak fully the range of your experience and you will be clear. Speak for yourself and you can speak with power.
• p232 "Life is just one damn thing after another."
• p239 Moreover, when memory is a factor, the level of uncertainty increases dramatically. Studies show that people are, on the whole, not very reliable witnesses, even when they are paying attention.
• p240 So inquire into their view looking for the sense rather than the nonsense in it. Paraphrase it back, share where and why you see it differently, and ask them for their reactions. Look for different information, different interpretations and ambiguous information, or different assumtions about missing information that help explain your differing views.
• p241 By the way, it's also worth asking yourself what you would have to learn to change your view.
• p242 In this sense, the critical question is less whether there is absolute truth than whether and how well we can perceive it. Perhaps the only thing a human being can be truly sure of is that one can't be completely sure. That is the realm of God, even if you don't believe in God.
• p242 Surprisingly often, an "obvious" and self-serving lie turns out to be a person's actual belief.
• There are times to give in - when you're persuaded the other person is right; when the other person cares a lot about the outcome and you care little; when any solution is better than no solution and you need an answer immediately. But as a long-term strategy for dealing with difficult behavior, it's not going to help. Giving in rewards bad behavior, and what gets rewarded gets repeated.
• p258 Control is the unilateral ability to make something happen. Influence is the ability yo affect someone else's thinking.
• p269 The phenomenon of an internal voice and the three conversations within it [The "What Happened?" Conversation, The Feelings Conversation, The Identity Conversation] seems to be a universal and fundamental aspect of being human. What does differ across cultures is whether, when, and how the internal voice is expressed.
• p278 And on the flip side, it is not negative feelings in themselves that distract us from productivity, but the failure to acknowledge them, and to deal with them directly, efficiently , and honestly.
• p284 Unresolved conflict in our work and personal relationships sucks up energy and attention in sneaky ways that we often don't take account of. We should be adding up the time we spend fuming to our spouses, designing a workaround, lying awake thinking about what we should have said to them, and looking up their personality disorders on the Internet to bolster our case.
• p285 Even if the friend can see what we're doing to make the situation worse, we rarely give them permission to challenge us - to help u see the other side's perspective and out own contribution.
• p293 Life is not easy. What we need is a little empathy for ourselves.
• p294 You're allowed to give up. As we've said, you can't change other people. When you finally give up the idea that you have the power to change others, you are giving up something you never had anyway - control. If someone is unwilling to examine their own contribution to a problem or take responsibility for the impact of their actions, you can't force them to. All you can do is take a hard look at yourself, be open to seeing things differently, change your own contribution, and be honest about what matters to you.

Here are my notes form book Social Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

• p4 The most fundamental revelation of this new discipline: we are wired to connect.
• p5 That link is a double-edged sword: nourishing relationships have a beneficial impact on out health, while toxic ones can act like slow poison in our bodies.
• p7 In 2003 single-person households became the most common living arrangement in the United States. And while once families would gather together in the evening, now children, parents, and spouses find it increasingly difficult to spend time together.
• p10 The most telling news here may be that the social brain represents the only biological system in our bodies that continually attunes us to, and in turn becomes influenced by, the internal stato of people we're with. All other biological systems, from our lymphatic glands to our spleen, mainly regulate their activity in response to signals emerging from within the body, not beyond our skin. The pathways of the social brain are unique in their sensitivity to the world at large. Whenever we connect face to face (or voice to voice, or skin to skin) with someone else, our social brains interlock.
• p11 ... psychologist Edward Thorndike created the original formulation of "social intelligence." One way he defined it was as "the ability to understand and manage men and women," skills we all need to live well in the world.
• p12 The biological influence passing from person to person suggests a new dimension of a life well lived: conducting ourselves in ways that are beneficial even at this subtle level for those with whom we connect.
• p17 Man is not a rational animal, but a rationalizing one. --Robert Heinlein
• p19 When I wish to find out how good or how wicked anyone is, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my own mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression. --Edgar Allan Poe
• p23 Gardner admitted that one of the things that attracted her to the charming bigamist was what she called "that honest trait": he looked her directly in the eyes, smiling, even as he lied through his teeth.
• p34 But beneath this visible synchrony, the musicians are joined in a way an audience can never know: in their brains. If any two of those musicians were to have their neural activity measured during their rapture, it would show a remarkable synchronicity. For instance, when two cellists play the same bit of music, the rhythms of neural firing in their right hemispheres are extraordinary close. The synchrony of these zones for musical abilities is far greater across brains of the two than os the case for the left and right hemispheres within each brain.
• p37 These session are a kind of tutorial: the protoconversation marks a baby's first lesson in how to interact. We learn how to synchronize emotionally long before we have words for those feelings. Protoconversations remain our most basic template for interacting, a tacit awareness that quietly gets us in step as we link with someone else. The ability to get into synch as we did when we were babies serves us through life, guiding us in every social interaction.
• p43 Stern concludes that our nervous systems "are constructed to be captured by the nervous systems of others, so that we can experience others as if from within their skin." At such moments we resonate with their experience, and they with ours. We can no longer, Stern adds, "see our minds as so independent, separate and isolated," but instead we must view them as "permeable," continually interacting as though joined by an invisible link.
• p48 Plays, concerts and movies all let us enter a shared field of emotions with large number of strangers. Looping together in an upbeat register is, as psychologists like to say, "inherently reinforcing" - that is, it makes everyone feel good.
• p54 In short, self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves, out world contract as our problems and preoccupations look large. But when we focus on others, out world expands. Our own problems drift to the periphery of the mind and so seem smaller, and we increase our capacity for connection - or compassionate action.
• p57 As the legendary acting coach advised, "We must study other people and get as close to them emotionally as we can, until sympathy for them is translated into feelings of our own."
• p58 In today's psychology, the world "empathy" is used in three distinct senses: knowing another person's feelings; feeling what that person feels; and responding compassionately to another's distress. These three varieties of empathy seem to describe a 1-2-3 sequence: I notice you, I feel with you, and so I act to help you.
• p60 When we see someone else in distress, similar circuits reverberate in our brain, a kind of hardwired empathic resonance that becomes the prelude to compassion.
• p62 As Preston and de Waal note, In today's era of e-mail, commuting, frequent moves, and bedroom communities, the scales are increasingly tipped against the automatic and accurate perception of others' emotional state, without which empathy is impossible. Modern-day social and virtual distance have created an anomaly in human living, though one we now take to be the norm. This separation mutes empathy, absent which altruism falters.
• p63 Neuroscience now tells us something akin to the poetic idea that the eyes are windows on the soul: the eyes offer glimpses into a person's most private feelings. More specifically, the eyes contain nerve projections that lead directly to a key brain structure for empathy and matching emotions, the orbitofrontal (or OFC) area of the prefrontal cortex.
• p69 The OFC, drawing on data such as context, strikes a balance between a primal impulse (get out of here) and what works best (make an acceptable excuse for leaving). We experience what the OFC decides not as a conscious understanding of the rules guiding the decision but as a feeling of "rightness." In short, the OFC helps guide what we do once we know how we feel about someone. By inhibiting raw impulse, the OFC orchestrates actions that serve us well - at the very least, by keeping us from doing or saying something we would regret.
• p74 Something like the out-of-place sex talk in the lab has been documented ever since the earliest years of the Internet: "flaming," in which adults make childishly offensive comments online. Ordinarily the high road keeps us within bounds. But the Internet lacks the sort of feedback the OFC needs to help us stay on track socially.
• p75 As we alter our perceptions, we can change our emotions.
• p76 Pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it, and this you have the power to revoke at any moment. --Marcus Aurelius
• p83 It's a display of the highest order of neural jujitsu, transforming the boys' shared emotional chemistry from a hostile range to a positive one -sheer relationship brilliance.
• p85 Even though we can stop talking, we cannot stop sending signals (our tone of voice, our fleeting expressions) about whet we feel. Even when people try to suppress all signs of their emotions, feelings have a way of leaking anyway. In this sense, when it comes to emotions, we cannot not communicate.
• p88 Listening well has been found to distinguish the best managers, teachers, and leaders.
• p94 Our society has subtle norms for who "should" express what emotions, implicitly constraining both men and women. In private life, women are generally perceived as more appropriately expressing fear and sadness, and men anger - a norm that tacitly approves of a woman crying openly but frowns on men shedding tears when upset. In professional situations, however, the taboo against crying extends to women. And when a woman holds a position of power, the prohibition on showing anger evaporates. On the contrary, a powerful leader is expected to display anger when a group's goal has been frustrated. Alpha women, it seems, meet the entrance requirement. Regardless of whether anger is the most effective response in a given moment, it does not seem socially out of place when it comes from the boss.
• p99 When I trusted my gut, I was more often right. As cognitive science tells us, we know more than we can say. To put it differently, this low-road job goes best when the high road just shuts up.
• p100 A focus on cognition about relationships neglects essential noncognitive abilities like primal empathy and synchrony, and it ignores capacities like concern. A purely cognitive perspective slights the essential brain-to-brain social glue that builds the foundation for any interaction.
• p101 Now social neuroscience challenges intelligence theorists to find a definition for our interpersonal abilities that encompasses the talents of the low road - including capacities for getting in sync, for attuned listening, and for empathic concern.
• p105 Beber coined the term "I-It" for the range of relations that runs from merely detached to utterly exploitative. In that spectrum others become objects: we treat someone more as a thing than as a person.
• p108 Amae points to the empirical fact that we attune most readily with the people in our lives we know and love - our immediate family and relatives, lovers or spouses, old friends. The closer we are, the more amae.
• p109 At the neural level, my "getting to know you" means my acquiring a resonance with with your emotional patterns and mental maps. And the more our maps overlap, the more identified we feel and the greater the shared reality we create.
• p117 The Dark Triad
• p117 "How could you do such a terrible thing to people? Didn't you feel any pity for them?" To which the killer replied very matter-of-factly, "Oh, no - I had to turn that part of me off. If I had felt any of their distress, I couldn't have done it."
• p117 When being tuned out of caring is a person's defining trait, they typically belong to one of the types that psychologists dub "the Dark Triad": narcissists, Machiavellians, and psychopaths.
• p119 Such ambitious and self-confident leaders can be effective in the present cutthroat business world. The best are creative strategists who can grasp the big picture and navigate risky challenges to leave a positive legacy. Productive narcissists combine a justified self-confidence with openness to criticism - at least to criticism that comes from confidants.
• p122 The narcissistic organization becomes a moral universe of its own, a world where its goals, goodness, and means are not questioned but taken as holy writ. It's a world where doing whatever we need to, to get whatever we want, seems perfectly fine. The ongoing self-celebration fogs over how divorced from reality we've become. The rules don't apply to us, just to the others.
• p123 According to one standard test, a narcissist is someone who has a grandiose sense of self-importance, harbors obsessive fantasies of unbounded glory, feels rage or intense shame when criticized, expects special favors, and lacks empathy. That deficiency in empathy means narcissists remain oblivious to the self-centered abrasiveness that others see in them so clearly.
• p125 When Niccolò Machiavelli wrote The Prince, the sixteenth-century manual for seizing and holding political power through cunning manipulation, he took for granted that the aspiring ruler had only his own interests at heart, caring not at all about the people he rules nor those he crushed to gain power. For Machiavellian, the ends justify the means, no matter what human pain he may cause.
• p128 The coolheadedness means that psychopaths can be dangerous in ways rarely seen in Machs or narcissists. Because psychopaths feel no anticipatory fears, staying utterly calm under even the most intense pressure, they are virtually oblivious to the threat of punishment. This indifference to consequences that keep others lawabiding makes psychopaths the most likely candidates for prison among the Dark Triad.
• p129 Like Machs, psychopaths can be adept at social cognition, learning to get inside someone's head to surmise their thoughts and feelings so they can "push all the right buttons." They can be socially smooth, believing that "even when others are upset with me, I can usually win them over with my charm." Some criminal psychopaths make a point of reading self-help books to better learn how to manipulate their targets - something like a "paint-by-numbers" approach to getting what they want.
• p131 The basic emotions of anger, fear, and joy are all hardwired into the brain or soon afterward, but social emotions require self-consciousness, a capacity that begins to emerge in the second year of life as a child's orbitofrontal region grows more mature. At around fourteen months babies start recognizing themselves in a mirror. This recognition of oneself as a unique entity brings the reciprocal understanding that other people are separate too - and the ability to feel mortified about what others may think of us.
• p131 But as the realization dawns that she is a separate person, someone others can notice, she has all the ingredients for feeling embarrassed - typically a child's first social emotion. It requires her to be aware not only of how others feel about her, but of how she ought to feel in turn.
• p134 Freud proposed that all jokes juxtapose two different frames on reality.
• p134 This ability to apprehend what seems to be going through someone else's mind is one of our most invaluable human skills.
• p135 Children younger than eighteen months will generally offer the snack they like; older ones will offer the snack you preferred. The older toddlers have recognized that their own likes and dislikes can differ from other people's, and that others may think differently than they.
• p136 As growing children master these social lessons - typically in their fourth year - their empathy approaches that of an adult. With this maturity, part of innocence ends: children become clear about the difference between what they merely imagine and what actually happens.
• p136 Mind sight stands as a prerequisite for younger children's ability to joke, or to get a joke. Teasing, tricks, lying, and being mean all demand this same sense of the other's inner world. Deficiency in these capacities sets autistic children apart from those who develop a normal social repertoire.
• p138 We are all mindreaders.
• p139 Baron-Cohen devised a test to determine how easily someone senses what others feel. The test is called the EQ, for "empathy quotient", and women on average outscore men. Women also outscore men measures of social cognition like understanding what would be a faux pas in a given social situation, and on empathic accuracy, intuiting what another person would be feeling or thinking. Finally women tend to outscore men on Baron-Cohen's test of reading a person's feelings from their eyes alone. But when it comes to systems thinking, the advantage tips to the male brain.
• p152 Like a plant adapting to rich or to depleted soil, a child's brain shapes itself to fit its social ecology, particularly the emotional climate fostered by the main people in her life.
• p189 In the terrain of the human heart, scientists tell us, at least three independent but interrelated brain systems are at play, all moving us in their own way. To untangle love's mysteries, neuroscience distinguishes between neural networks for attachment, for care giving, and for sex. Each is fueled by a different set of brain chemicals and hormones, and each runs through a disparate neuronal circuit. Each adds its own chemical spice to the many varieties of love. Attachment determines who we turn to for succor; these are the people we miss the most when they are absent. Care giving gives us the urge to nurture the people for whom we feel most concern. When we are attached, we cling; when we are care giving we provide. And sex is, well, sex. ... When attachment entwines with caring and sexual attraction, we can savor full-blown romance. But when any of these three goes missing, romantic love stumbles.
• p192 Panksepp finds a neural corollary between the dynamics of opiate addiction and our dependence on the people fro whom we feel our strongest attachments. All positive interactions with people, he proposes, owe part of their pleasure to the opioid system, the very circuitry that links with heroin and other addictive substances.
• p193 Panksepp theorizes that the gratification that addicts get from their drugs biologically mimics the natural pleasure we get from feeling connected to those we love; the neural circuitry for both are largely shared. Even animals, he finds, prefer to spend time with those in whose presence they have secreted oxytocin and natural opioids, which induce a relaxed serenity - suggesting that these brain chemicals cement our family ties and friendships as well as our love relationships.
• p193 That poignant exchange illustrates how differences in attachment styles can put a couple out of synch - in dealing not only with a shared trauma but with virtually everything else.
• p199 "Men look for sex objects, and women for success objects."
• p204 "What does women want?" As Epstein answers, "She wants a partner who cares what she wants."
• p218 On the other hand, something rather remarkable tends to happen with couples who live together for decades, finding happiness with each other. Their continual rapport even seems to leave its mark on their faces, which comes to resemble each other, apparently a result of the sculpting of facial muscles, as partners smile or frown in unison they strengthen the parallel set of muscles.
• p219 "Indifference - not caring about, or even paying attention to, your mate - is one of the worst forms of cruelty in marriage."
• p219 In dating couples, the most important predictor of whether the relationship will last is how many good feelings the couple shares. In marriages, it's how well the couple can handle their conflicts. And in the later years of a long marriage, it's again how many good feelings the couple shares.
• p232 The social brain makes a crucial distinction between accidental and intentional harm, and it reacts more strongly if it seems malevolent.
• p273 The hippocampus is especially vulnerable to ongoing emotional distress, because of the damaging effects of cortisol. Under prolonged stress, cortisol attacks the neurons of the hippocampus, slowing the rate at which neurons are added or even reducing the total number, with a disastrous impact on learning.
• p275 Many effective leaders sense that - like compliments - well-titrated doses of irritation can energize. The measure of how well callibrated a message of displeasure might be is whether it moves people toward their performance peak or plummets them past the tipping point into the zone where distress corrodes performance.
• p278 No child can avoid emotional pain while growing up, and likewise emotional toxicity seems to be a normal by-product of organizational life - people are fired, unfair policies come from headquarters, frustrated employees turn in anger on others.
• p281 "So often behavior problems are because a student feels insecure about being unable to do the work," Pamela told me. "Maeva couldn't even sound out words. I was shocked she had gotten to sixth grade without learning how to read."
• p299 Once the others are set at a psychological distance, they can become a target for hostility.
• p300 But once a negative bias begins, out lenses become clouded. We tend to seize on whatever seems to confirm the bias and ignore what does not. Prejudice, in this sense, is a hypothesis desperately trying to prove itself to us. And so when we encounter someone to whom the prejudice might apply, the bias skews our perception, making it impossible to test whether the stereotype actually fits. Openly hostile stereotypes about a group - to the extent they rest on untested assumptions - are mental categories gone awry.
• p304 Pettigrew said. "For example, acts of violence against minorities are much more frequent in the former East Germany than West. When we studied those arrested for such violence, we found two things: they are intensely prejudice, and they have had virtually no conntect with the groups they hate so much."
• p306 From social psychology he knew one dynamic of moving from Them to Us: as people from hostile groups work together toward a common goal, they end up liking one another.
• p318 Vitality arises from sheer human contact, especially from loving connections. The people we are about most are an elixir of sorts, and ever-renewing source of energy. The neural exchange between a parent and child, a grandparent and a toddler, between lovers or a satisfied couple, or among good friends, has palpable virtues.
• p319 "We must love one another or die." --W. H. Auden