drmstream[writing]

I, for one, wel­come my Nean­der­tal ances­try. It may not sound like a lot — between 1 and 4 per­cent. But that’s the equiv­a­lent of one great-great-great grandparent’s DNA con­tri­bu­tion. In the case of the Nean­der­tal con­tri­bu­tion, more than 1500 gen­er­a­tions ago, it’s an endur­ing legacy of an ancient group of peo­ple, spread across many […]

Eru­dite and thickly-written essay in The Chron­i­cle Of Higher Edu­ca­tion by David Barash speak­ing to the need of “a gen­eral the­ory of indi­vid­u­al­ity.” It’s back to the the­ory of self for us. In part, the resis­tance encoun­tered by human socio­bi­ol­ogy, Dar­win­ian psy­chol­ogy, evo­lu­tion­ary psychology—call it what you will—may reflect that none of the “ulti­mate” inter­pre­ta­tions thus […]

B.F. Skin­ner invented a con­trolled envi­ron­ment designed to give infants and new­borns more inde­pence; it was com­monly known as Baby in a Box.

  The over­crowded mind can lead to an unset­tled soul. Over the years I’ve learned to trust my tech­niques for qui­et­ing my mind. I let my con­scious­ness float, drift into an unde­fined space that sus­pends the for­ward momen­tum of thought, qui­ets down the chat­ter and waits for a struc­ture to form. Even as I wait the […]

Fre­quent and sub­stan­tial con­ver­sa­tions with oth­ers cre­ates a sense of well-being, accord­ing to a psy­chol­ogy study reported in Sci­ence Daily this morn­ing. Greater well-being was related to spend­ing less time alone and more time talk­ing to oth­ers: The hap­pi­est par­tic­i­pants spent 25% less time alone and 70% more time talk­ing than the unhap­pi­est par­tic­i­pants. In […]

The Amer­i­can promise is Life, Lib­erty & the Pur­suit of Hap­pi­ness. Despite the eco­nomic and social chal­lenges we face, our national cri­sis is dif­fer­ent today than in the 1930’s, says Mor­gan Meis of The Smart Set. Our angst is around our abil­ity to pur­sue hap­pi­ness as blithely as we did dur­ing the 1990’s.  The past […]

“At the moment when human beings cut them­selves off from the con­scious­ness of them­selves as nature, all pur­poses for which they keep them­selves alive — social progress, the height­en­ing of mate­r­ial and intel­lec­tual forces, indeed con­scious­ness itself — becomes void, and the enthrone­ment of the means as an end, which in late cap­i­tal­ism is taking […]