Decoding Of The Primal Emotional Experiences Of Humans And...

Decoding of the Primal Emotional Experiences of Humans and Animals from neuroscience perspective The article on the science news titled ‘What is the cognitive rift between humans and animals’ sheds light on the major cognitive differences between animals and humans. A scientist from the Harvard University synthesized some key variations that is existent in human and animal cognition into what precisely distinct human thought and that of animal. Marc Hauser, professor of psychology from Harvard presents his concept of the uniqueness of humankind, which make human cognition unique. The professor of psychology was of the opinion that animals share a lot of features that is evident in human thought, but ironically, there is a cognitive lacuna between humans and other animals. The professor contends that by analyzing the principal differences in cognitive abilities, some elements are found that are of human cognition and are distinctively human. The challenge that emerges though is the recognition of the systems that animals and human have in common, those that are distinct, and how they interact and interface with one another. In recent times, some scientists have come to the realization that some animals think in ways that at some point were perceived unique to humankind. For instance, some animals have episodic memory or mathematical proficiency that is non-linguistic. Nonetheless, despite these obvious similarities, a cognitive gap still exists between humans and otherShow MoreRelatedEvil a Learned Behavior6329 Words   |  26 Pagesdarkness, no positive without negative, no good without evil.† Throughout the history of humanity, humans have committed inconceivable and unthinkable acts of cruelty towards one another. From the brutal wars during the times of the ancient Greeks and Romans, to the modern area of ethnic cleansing and genocide one cannot help but wonder what is the root cause of this evil. Unthinkable numbers of human life has been lost in every corner of the world from the genocides in Armenia and Nazi Germany to

A Letter from Birmingham Jail Free Essays

Reflection of â€Å"A Letter from Birmingham Jail† by Martin Luther Kingjr. For our honors portfolio this quarter we were required to read three documents. We, then, were quizzed over each of the readings. We will write a custom essay sample on A Letter from Birmingham Jail or any similar topic only for you Order Now First, we read â€Å"Letter from a Birmingham Jail† by Martin Luther King, Jr. , then, we read the transcript of President John F. Kennedys inaugural address, and last but not least, we read â€Å"Millennial Makeover† by Morley Winograd and Michael Hals. Furthermore, we had to read and analyze the documents because the quizzes required us to think deeper than the written words on the paper. I believe these documents are critical because they have shaped the government and our society today. My favorite of these three documents, if I had to pick. would be â€Å"Letter from a Birmingham Jail†, not only because I admire Martin Luther King Jr. , but also because this letter Is a very powerful and Inspiring piece of work. Luther wrote while being confined in a jail in Birmingham, Alabama, for participating in civil rights demonstrations. His letter states that he will continue resisting nonviolently against racial discrimination and pleads the readers to see segregation from a different point f view. Moreover, I noticed that he quoted many people including Apostle Paul, St. Augustine, Reinhold Niebuhr and many others. This made me realize that he most likely had the quotations memorized since he didn’t have access to those sources while imprisoned. He mentions that â€Å"injustice anywhere is a threat to Justice everywhere† and that â€Å"an unjust law is no law at all† (Luther). This means that an unjust law causes harm; for example, If it Is lawful to torture a certain group of people, then that is not a law whatsoever. This idea of injustice affects many directly, ut also affects everyone else indirectly in the fact that prejudice is occurring around them. Furthermore, his words describe in detail what segregation was Ilke and what people like him had to go through. This impacted me because now, the idea of racial discrimination is completely frowned upon, while in the 1900’s it was something that seemed right and normal. It took years of hard work, bloody massacres. and non-stop action to obtain equality and I hate to see that a little bit of racism still exists today. The idea that immigrants are taking away Jobs and opportunities that should be for U. S. citizens. surprises me because this country was founded and created by immigrants. Instead of seeing different countries and different people in one world, we should see the whole world as one, because every human being, no matter what race. has his/her own rights and should have the same opportunities that his neighbor does. Luther is one of the most charismatic and persuasive people in history and has not only inspired many, but also revolutionized a country’s view. He wrote this letter hoping to stir up some emotion and I think he got his point across in very non-violent and mature kind of way that was unexpected and at the same time, admirable. His stance ofa nonviolent action and the desperate cry for an end to social discrimination is as powerful now as It was 50 years ago. We now stand by these liberal values and believe the God has made us all equal and has given us n r gnts tnat no law can take away. A tnougn tnls was not an easy project, I certainly did learn something from it and it inspired me to stand up for my beliefs, but also, in a way, allowed me to see that anything is possible through hard work. How to cite A Letter from Birmingham Jail, Papers

Freud And Dreams Essay Example For Students

Freud And Dreams Essay Dreams have been objects of boundless fascination and mystery for humankind since the beginning of time. These nocturnal vivid images seem to arise from some source other than our ordinary conscious mind. They contain a mixture of elements from our own personal identity which we recognize as familiar along with a quality of `otherness in the dream images that carries a sense of the strange and eerie. The bizarre and nonsensical characters and plots in dreams point to deeper meanings and contain rational and insightful comments on our waking situations and emotional experiences. The ancients thought that dreams were messages from the gods. The cornerstone of Sigmund Freuds infamous psychoanalysis, is the interpretation of dreams. Freud called dream-interpretation the via reggia, or the royal road to the unconscious, and it is his theory of dreams that has best stood the test of time, over a period of more than seventy years (Many of Freuds other theories have been disputed in recent years). Freud reportedly admired Aristotles assertion that dreaming is the activity of the mind during sleep (Fine, 1973). It was perhaps the use of the term activity that Freud most appreciated in this brief definition for, as his understanding of the dynamics of dreaming increased, so did the impression of ceaseless mental activity differing in quality from that of ordinary waking life (Fine, 1973). In fact, the quality of mental activity during sleep differed so radically from what we take to be the essence of mental functioning that Freud coined the term Kingdom of the Illogical to describe that realm of the human psyche. We dream every single night whether it stays with us or not. It is a time when our minds bring together material which is kept apart during out waking hours (Anonymous, 1991). As Erik Craig said while we dream we entertain a wider range of human possibilities then when awake; the open house of dreaming is less guarded (Craig, 1992). Superficially, we are all convinced that we know just what a dream is. But the most cursory investigation into the dreams essence suggests that after describing it as a mental something which we have while sleeping, and perhaps, in accord with experiments currently being carried out in connection with the physiological accompaniments of dreaming, such as Rapid-Eye Movements (REM), the various stages and depths of dream activity as reflected in changing rates of our vital signs (pulse-rate, heart-beat, brain-waves), and the time of the night when various kinds of dreams occur, we come up against what the philosopher Immanuel Kant called the Ding-An-Sich (thing-in-itself), and find ourselves unable to penetrate further into the hidden nature of this universal human experience (Fromm, 1980). It has been objected on more than one occasion that we in fact have no knowledge of the dreams that we set out to interpret, or, speaking more correctly, that we have no guarantee that we know them as they actually occurred. In the first place, what we remember of a dream and what we exercise our interpretative arts upon has been mutilated by the untrustworthiness of our memory. Which seems incapable of retaining a dream and may have lost precisely the most important parts of its content. It quite frequently happens that when we seek to turn our attention to one of our dreams, we find ourselves regretting the fact that we can remember nothing but a single fragment, which itself has much uncertainty. Secondly, there is every reason to suspect that our memory of dreams is not only fragmentary but inaccurate and falsified. On the one hand it may be doubted whether what we dreamt was really as hazy as our recollection of it, and on the other hand it may also be doubted whether in attempting to reproduce it we do not fill in what was never there, or what was forgotten (Freud, pg. 512). Dream accounts are public verbalization and as public performances, dream accounts resemble the anecdotes people use to give meaning to their experience, to entertain friends and to give or get a form of satisfaction ( Erdelyi, 35 ). In order to verbalize the memory of a dream that there are at least three steps one must take. First putting a recollected dream into words requires labeling categories, and labeling categories involves interpretation. Next since the dream is multimodal, putting them into words requires the collapsing of visual and auditory imagery into words. Solar Energy EssaySometimes the capitalist is himself the entrepreneur, and indeed in the case of the dreams, an unconscious wish is stirred up by daytime activity and proceeds to construct a dream. ( Palombo, M. D, 1986 ) The view that dreams carry on the occupations and interests of waking life has been confirmed by the discovery of the concealed dream-thoughts. These are only concerned with what seems important to us and interests us greatly. Dreams are never occupied with minor details. But the contrary view has also been accepted, that dreams pick up things left over from the previous day. Thus it was concluded that two fundamentally different kinds of psychical processes are concerned in the formation of dreams. One of these produces perfectly rational thoughts, of no less than normal thinking, while the other treats these thoughts in a manner, which is bewildering and irrational. Referring to Freuds quote stated in the beginning, by analyzing dreams one can take a step forward in our understanding of the composition of that most mysterious of all instruments. Only a small step forward will enable us to proceed further with its analysis. (Freud, pg. 589 608 ) The unconscious is the true psychical reality, in its innermost nature it is as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world, and it is as incompletely presented, as is the communications of our sense organ. There is of course no question that dreams give us knowledge for the future. But it would be truer to say instead that they give us knowledge of the past. For dreams are derived from the past in every sense. Nevertheless the ancient belief that dreams foretell the future is not false. (Freud, pg. 662) By picturing our wishes as fulfilled, dreams are after all leading us into the future. But the future, which the dreamer pictures as the present, has been molded by his indestructible wish into a perfect likeness of the past. ( Palombo, M. D, 1986 )Although there has been some descriptive study of the incidence and character of feeling in REM dreaming, there has been no investigation of the appropriateness of dream feelings to accompany dream imagery. It has been suggested that, the generation of affect in dreaming may not be as reliable as the generation of other forms of dream imagery. Dream affect generally seems to be consistent with the larger narrative context of the dreams. (David Foulkes Brenda Sullivan, 1988) Research by Cohen and Wolfe has shown that a simple distraction in the morning had a strong negative effect on dream recall. The study concerned a variable relatively neglected in dream research, the level of interest the subjects have about their dreams. One finding was that interest in dreams appeared to vary with sex: woman reported that they more frequently speculated their dreams and discussed them with other people than did men. These differences could reflect a greater tendency for woman to pay more attention to their emotional life and inner self. (Paul R. Robbins Roland H. Tanck, 1988)) One assumes naturally that the past events incorporated in his patients dream imagery may be defensive substitutions for other more objectionable events of the past. Through its relation to the dream, the screen memory, like the day residue, provides access to the associative structures of memory in, which are embedded the wishes and events, whose repression lies at the core of the neurotic process. ( Palombo M. D, 1986 ) But dreams do not consist solely of illusions, If for instance, one is afraid of robbers in a dream, the robbers, it is true, are imaginary- but fear is real. ( Freud, pg. 74 ) Affects in dreams cannot be judged in the same way as the remainder of their content, and we are faced by the problem of what part of the psychical processes occurring in dreams is to be regarded as real. That is to say, as a claim to be classed among the psychical processes of waking life. (Freud, pg. 74 ) The theory of the hidden meaning of dreams might have come to a conclusion merely by following linguistic usage. It is true that common language sometimes speaks of dreams with contempt. But, on the whole, ordinary usage treats dreams above all as the blessed fulfillers of wishes . If ever we find our expectations surpassed by the event, we exclaim, I should never have imagined such a thing even in my wildest dreams ! ( Freud pg. 132-133 )