Ask the Author: Designing the Mind
Answered Questions (2)
Designing the Mind
I would definitely go with Become Who You Are for this year!
Designing the Mind
The first catalyst for this book came over a decade ago. I don’t remember the exact event, but ultimately, it was what happened right after that matters. The event was something bad, ostensibly. Some moderately-sized mistake or setback in my life. I had faced many of these before, just like everyone else. But this time was different. The negative emotion which was supposed to proceed from this setback didn’t come. No grieving, no frustration, no anxiety. I did something in my mind that caused me to bypass the emotion I was supposed to have, and then I continued on with my life, responding to the event only in my actions.
What I did in my mind was not suppression or repression or denial, for you fellow armchair psychologists. It was a form of effective emotional self-regulation, and it turns out the ancient Greeks beat me to it a couple thousand years ago. No, I was not unique in this experience - only in the obsession I developed as a result of it. It became clear to me that this experience was only one example of what seemed to be a dark art one could master to become immune to problems some spend entire lives wrestling with. A path for continually upgrading the the basic elements of my mind.
As I studied the human mind, its limitations, and its potential, I found a striking coherence. All the mental problems with which I struggled boiled down to automatic and systematic mental phenomena. More interestingly, the solutions to these problems that worked all fit the same framework. I labeled these patterns algorithms, and the sum of these algorithms became psychological software. Within this software framework, my mental challenges began to make sense.
What I did in my mind was not suppression or repression or denial, for you fellow armchair psychologists. It was a form of effective emotional self-regulation, and it turns out the ancient Greeks beat me to it a couple thousand years ago. No, I was not unique in this experience - only in the obsession I developed as a result of it. It became clear to me that this experience was only one example of what seemed to be a dark art one could master to become immune to problems some spend entire lives wrestling with. A path for continually upgrading the the basic elements of my mind.
As I studied the human mind, its limitations, and its potential, I found a striking coherence. All the mental problems with which I struggled boiled down to automatic and systematic mental phenomena. More interestingly, the solutions to these problems that worked all fit the same framework. I labeled these patterns algorithms, and the sum of these algorithms became psychological software. Within this software framework, my mental challenges began to make sense.
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