Between Stimulus Quotes

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which had lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world — a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring — this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth. Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else — but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself. It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.

Human freedom involves our capacity to pause between the stimulus and response and, in that pause, to choose the one response toward which we wish to throw our weight. The capacity to create ourselves, based upon this freedom, is inseparable from consciousness or self-awareness. (p. 100)

Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In the space there is the power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. —Victor Frankl

In the space between stimulus (what happens) and how we respond, lies our freedom to choose. Ultimately, this power to choose is what defines us as human beings. We may have limited choices but we can always choose. We can choose our thoughts, emotions, moods, our words, our actions; we can choose our values and live by principles. It is the choice of acting or being acted upon.

Frankl’s book: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.

The more we are able to create space between stimulus and reaction, the more control we will have over our emotional lives.

Create gaps between stimulus and reaction and the gap will show you the path.

There is a tension between what is good for someone and what they want to do. This is because people, especially older people, like to do things as they've always done them. The problem is that when the brain develops ingrained habits, it doesn't need to think anymore. Things get done very quickly and efficiently on automatic pilot, often in a very advantageous way. This creates a tendency to stick to routines, and the only way of breaking these is to confront the brain with new information.

Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

In the midst of the most degrading circumstances imaginable, Frankl used the human endowment of self-awareness to discover a fundamental principle about the nature of man: Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose.

To quote Viktor Frankl, “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.

The Western States nervous under the beginning change. Texas and Oklahoma, Kansas and Arkansas, New Mexico, Arizona, California. A single family moved from the land. Pa borrowed money from the bank, and now the bank wants the land. The land company--that's the bank when it has land --wants tractors, not families on the land. Is a tractor bad? Is the power that turns the long furrows wrong? If this tractor were ours it would be good--not mine, but ours. If our tractor turned the long furrows of our land, it would be good. Not my land, but ours. We could love that tractor then as we have loved this land when it was ours. But the tractor does two things--it turns the land and turns us off the land. There is little difference between this tractor and a tank. The people are driven, intimidated, hurt by both. We must think about this. One man, one family driven from the land; this rusty car creaking along the highway to the west. I lost my land, a single tractor took my land. I am alone and bewildered. And in the night one family camps in a ditch and another family pulls in and the tents come out. The two men squat on their hams and the women and children listen. Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep these two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other. Here is the anlarge of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here "I lost my land" is changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate--"We lost our land." The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one. And from this first "we" there grows a still more dangerous thing: "I have a little food" plus "I have none." If from this problem the sum is "We have a little food," the thing is on its way, the movement has direction. Only a little multiplication now, and this land, this tractor are ours. The two men squatting in a ditch, the little fire, the side- meat stewing in a single pot, the silent, stone-eyed women; behind, the children listening with their souls to words their minds do not understand. The night draws down. The baby has a cold. Here, take this blanket. It's wool. It was my mother's blanket--take it for the baby. This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning--from "I" to "we." If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into "I," and cuts you off forever from the "we." The Western States are nervous under the begining change. Need is the stimulus to concept, concept to action. A half-million people moving over the country; a million more restive, ready to move; ten million more feeling the first nervousness. And tractors turning the multiple furrows in the vacant land.

Between stimulus and response, there is space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.

Between stimulus and response there is a gap. It's a moment of choice about our actions and reactions. Most people blow past this, react out of habit and then claim they were helpless against themselves. Mind the gap.

Love is a joint experience between two persons—but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet in the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer.

My son used to believe that he could look at a plane in flight and make it explode in midair by simply thinking it. He believed, at thirteen, that the border between himself and the world was thin and porous enough to allow him to affect the course of events. An aircraft in flight was a provocation too strong to ignore. He’d watch a plane gaining altitude after taking off from Sky Harbor and he’d sense an element of catastrophe tacit in the very fact of a flying object filled with people. He was sensitive to the most incidental stimulus and he thought he could feel the object itself yearning to burst. All he had to do was wish the fiery image into his mind and the plane would ignite and shatter. His sister used to tell him, Go ahead, blow it up, let me see you take that plane out of the sky with all two hundred people aboard, and it scared him to hear someone talk this way and it scared her too because she wasn’t completely convinced he could not do it. It’s the special skill of an adolescent to imagine the end of the world as an adjunct to his own discontent. But Jeff got older and lost interest and conviction. He lost the paradoxical gift for being separate and alone and yet intimately connected, mind-wired to distant things.

Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. —Viktor E. Frankl

Victor Frankl’s insight: Between stimulus and response there is a space.In that space is our power to choose our response.In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

Waiting or pausing takes enormous skill and practice. However it is a skill that for you has become an essential way of being in the world without being so overwhelmed by it. Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, went even further when he famously said, 'Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response likes our growth and our freedom.' Waiting in the Light enables you to create a space for grace.

What more do they want? She asks this seriously, as if there's a real conversion factor between information and lives. Well, strange to say, there is. Written down in the Manual, on file at the War Department. Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as a spectacle, as a diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets. Organic markets, carefully styled "black" by the professionals, spring up everywhere. Scrip, Sterling, Reichsmarks, continue to move, severe as classical ballet, inside their antiseptic marble chambers. But out here, down here among the people, the truer currencies come into being. So, Jews are negotiable. Every bit as negotiable as cigarettes, cunt, or Hersey bars.

We inherited the reactivity of this part of our brain, and particularly the sensitive amygdala, from our skittish fight-or-flight ancestors. Yet so much of the inner journey means freeing ourselves from this evolutionary response so that we do not flip our lid or lose our higher reasoning when facing stressful situations. The real secret of freedom may simply be extending this brief space between stimulus and response. Meditation seems to elongate this pause and help expand our ability to choose our response.

We are product of neither nature nor nurture; we are a product of choice, because there is always a space between stimulus and response. As we wisely exercise our power to choose based on principles, the space will become larger. (p. 62)

love is a joint experience between two persons—but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer.

Between stimulus and response, there is a space.In that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness. Mindfulness practice gives calmness and clarity which increases the space for us.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”15

Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons—but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world—a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring—this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” —VIKTOR FRANKL, author, neurologist, psychiatrist, philosopher, and Holocaust survivor

Mark had helped me see that the point of getting behind the waterfall wasn’t to magically solve all of your problems, only to handle them better, by creating space between stimulus and response. It was about mitigation, not alleviation.

When we are no longer able to change the situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. _________ Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

...small government gives you big freedoms--and Big Government leaves you with very little freedom. The opposite of Big Government is not small government, but Big Liberty. The bailout and the stimulus and the budget and the trillion-dollar deficits are not merely massive transfers from the most dynamic and productive sector to the least dynamic and productive. When governments annex a huge chunk of the economy, they also annex a huge chunk of individual liberty. You fundamentally change the relationship between the citizen and the state into something closer to that of junkie and pusher--and you make it very difficult ever to change back.

The letter is only an aid to philosophical communication, the actual essence of which consists in arousing a particular train of thought. Someone speaking thinks and produces—someone listening reflects—and reproduces. Words are a deceptive medium for what is already though—unreliable vehicles of a particular, specific stimulus. The true teacher is a guide. If the pupil genuinely desires truth it requires only a hint to show him how to find what he is seeking. Accordingly the representation of philosophy consists purely of themes—of initial propositions—principles. It exists only for autonomous lovers of truth. The analytical exposition of the theme is only for those who are sluggish or unpracticed. The latter must learn thereby how to fly and keep themselves moving in a particular direction. Attentiveness is a centripetal force. The effective relation between that which is directed and the object of direction begins with the given direction. If we hold fast to this direction we are apodictically certain of reaching the goal that has been set. True collaboration in philosophy then is a common movement toward a beloved world—whereby we relieve each other in the most advanced outpost, a movement that demands the greatest effort against the resisting element within which we are flying.

As Viktor Frankl wrote, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” You have the power to choose how you respond. You are a product of your decisions, not your conditions. In

Economists had found an almost one-to-one match between PISA scores and a nation's long term economic growth. Many other things influenced economic growth, of course, but the ability of a workforce to learn, think and adapt was the ultimate stimulus package...For students, PISA scores were a better predictor of who would go to college than report cards...PISA wasn't measuring memorization; it was measuring aspiration.

Viktor Frankl tells us in Man’s Search for Meaning that “between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” And in that growth and freedom lies the heartbeat of a life well lived. Question

I tend to imagine the self-regulating system like little gremlins hoping on the pain side of the balance to counteract the weight on the pleasure side. The gremlins represent the work of homeostasis, the tendency of any living system to maintain physiologic equilibrium. Once the balance is level, it keeps going, tipping an equal and opposite amount to the side of pain. In the 1970s social scientists Richard Solomon and John Corbett called this reciprocal relationship between pleasure and pain "The Opponent Process Theory". Any prolonged or repeated departure from hedonic or adaptive neutrality has a cost. That cost is an after-reaction, that is opposite in value to the stimulus, or as the old saying goes: "What goes up, must come down".

Because memory…is everything. Physically speaking, a memory is nothing but a specific combination of neurons firing together—a symphony of neural activity. But in actuality, it’s the filter between us and reality. You think you’re tasting this wine, hearing the words I’m saying, in the present, but there’s no such thing. The neural impulses from your taste buds and your ears get transmitted to your brain, which processes them and dumps them into working memory—so by the time you know you’re experiencing something, it’s already in the past. Already a memory.” Helena leans forward, snaps her fingers. “Just what your brain does to interpret a simple stimulus like that is incredible. The visual and auditory information arrive at your eyes and ears at different speeds, and then are processed by your brain at different speeds. Your brain waits for the slowest bit of stimulus to be processed, then reorders the neural inputs correctly, and lets you experience them together, as a simultaneous event—about half a second after what actually happened. We think we’re perceiving the world directly and immediately, but everything we experience is this carefully edited, tape-delayed reconstruction.

What is more, the whole apparatus of life has become so complex and the processes of production, distribution, and consumption have become so specialized and subdivided, that the individual person loses confidence in his own unaided capacities: he is increasingly subject to commands he does not understand, at the mercy of forces over which he exercises no effective control, moving to a destination he has not chosen. Unlike the taboo-ridden savage, who is often childishly over-confident in the powers of his shaman or magician to control formidable natural forces, however inimical, the machine-conditioned individual feels lost and helpless as day by day he metaphorically punches his time-card, takes his place on the assembly line, and at the end draws a pay check that proves worthless for obtaining any of the genuine goods of life. This lack of close personal involvement in the daily routine brings a general loss of contact with reality: instead of continuous interplay between the inner and the outer world, with constant feedback or readjustment and with stimulus to fresh creativity, only the outer world-and mainly the collectively organized outer world of the power system-exercises authority: even private dreams must be channeled through television, film, and disc, in order to become acceptable. With this feeling of alienation goes the typical psychological problem of our time, characterized in classic terms by Erik Erikson as the 'Identity Crisis.' In a world of transitory family nurture, transitory human contacts, transitory jobs and places of residence, transitory sexual and family relations, the basic conditions for maintaining continuity and establishing personal equilibrium disappear. The individual suddenly awakens, as Tolstoi did in a famous crisis in his own life at Arzamas, to find himself in a strange, dark room, far from home, threatened by obscure hostile forces, unable to discover where he is or who he is, appalled by the prospect of a meaningless death at the end of a meaningless life.

I may be simply repeating what has always been known, but I do believe that for love to grow there must first be the impact of novelty. Between two people who have always known each other, that necessary stimulus. can never be felt. Like the first whiff of burning incense, or like the taste of one's first cup of saké, there is in love that moment when all its power is felt. There may be fondness, but not love, between two people who have come to know each other well without ever having grasped that moment.

The choice is between two ways of life: between individual liberty and State domination; between concentration of ownership in the hands of the State and the extension of ownership over the widest number of individuals; between the dead hand of monopoly and the stimulus of competition; between a policy of increasing restraint and a policy of liberating energy and ingenuity; between a policy of levelling down and a policy of opportunity for all to rise upwards from a basic standard. [WOLVERHAMPTON, 23 JULY 1949]

Christians know that joy is more than a feeling or an on-again, off-again sentiment that changes according to the circumstances they face. Followers of Jesus Christ distinguish between lasting joy and situational happiness. Fun and joy are not necessarily synonymous. We believe we can experience inner joy with no special external stimulus to make us happy.

To create a pause between the stimulus and your reaction, add a truth to every defensive answer. For a healthy adult, the truth is the only defense and the best resource.

Vision is active, not passive. There is more than one way for the visual system to interpret the stimulus, and so it flips back and forth between the possibilities.

Between the stimulus and the response there is a space, and in that space is your power and your freedom.

Seneca’s account in On Anger of the passions, and especially of the distinction between “first movements” in response to a stimulus (by blushing or shivering or bursting into tears) and actual emotions, was transformed into a list of eight sins based on temptations to yield to bad thoughts 8 —a list that was then transformed again, by Pope Gregory the Great in the seventh century, into the Seven Deadly Sins that we know today.

Empowering process. But if you are in a compulsive cycle of reactivity, memory distorts your perception of the present, and your thoughts, emotions, and actions become disproportionate to the stimulus. The choice is always before you: to respond consciously to the present; or to react compulsively to it. There is a vast difference between the two. And it can make the world of a difference. If terrible things have happened to you, you ought to have grown wise. If the worst possible events have befallen.

Intelligent and cultivated people of either sex will never limit themselves to communing with their own households. Men and women equally, when they have the range of interests that real cultivation gives, need the stimulus of different points of view, the refreshment of new ideas as well as of new faces. The long hypocrisy which Puritan England handed on to America concerning the danger of frank and free social relations between men and women has done more than anything else to retard real civilisation in America.

Like the Obama administration, Chinese officials in 2009 provided an unprecedented $586 billion fiscal stimulus. As a result, the Chinese can now travel on fast trains between their major cities. In contrast, they ask, what did the US get for its $983 billion infusion?33

The pre-attentional parts of the self use a complicated analytic process to determine relevance. They weigh a large variety of factors to gauge relevance; this includes such things as the intensity of the sensory inflow, its novelty, the degree of contrast between a sensory stimulus and its sensory background, and its rarity.

Psychologists have devised some ingenious ways to help unpack the human "now." Consider how we run those jerky movie frames together into a smooth and continuous stream. This is known as the "phi phenomenon." The essence of phi shows up in experiments in a darkened room where two small spots are briefly lit in quick succession, at slightly separated locations. What the subjects report seeing is not a succession of spots, but a single spot moving continuously back and forth. Typically, the spots are illuminated for 150 milliseconds separated by an interval of fifty milliseconds. Evidently the brain somehow "fills in" the fifty-millisecond gap. Presumably this "hallucination" or embellishment occurs after the event, because until the second light flashes the subject cannot know the light is "supposed" to move. This hints that the human now is not simultaneous with the visual stimulus, but a bit delayed, allowing time for the brain to reconstruct a plausible fiction of what has happened a few milliseconds before. In a fascinating refinement of the experiment, the first spot is colored red, the second green. This clearly presents the brain with a problem. How will it join together the two discontinuous experiences—red spot, green spot—smoothly? By blending the colors seamlessly into one another? Or something else? In fact, subjects report seeing the spot change color abruptly in the middle of the imagined trajectory, and are even able to indicate exactly where using a pointer. This result leaves us wondering how the subject can apparently experience the "correct" color sensation before the green spot lights up. Is it a type of precognition? Commenting on this eerie phenomenon, the philosopher Nelson Goodman wrote suggestively: "The intervening motion is produced retrospectively, built only after the second flash occurs and projected backwards in time." In his book Consciousness Explained , philosopher Daniel Dennett points out that the illusion of color switch cannot actually be created by the brain until after the green spot appears. "But if the second spot is already 'in conscious experience,' wouldn't it be too late to interpose the illusory content between the conscious experience of the red spot and the conscious experience of the green spot?

As Kiefer et al. note, again in an insult to clear languaging, “The capture of visuo-spatial attention by unconscious stimuli likewise was shown to depend on the match between the stimulus feathers and a fitting top-down search template.”17 In other words, some things have to be believed to be seen or, another way of putting it: if you assume something is not there, then, to you, it won’t be.

is easy to recall from everyday experience that neither electricity nor magnetism have visual properties. So, on its own, it’s not hard to grasp that there is nothing inherently visual, nothing bright or colored about that candle flame. Now let these same invisible electromagnetic waves strike a human retina, and if (and only if) the waves each happen to measure between 400 and 700 nanometers in length from crest to crest, then their energy is just right to deliver a stimulus to the 8 million cone-shaped cells in the retina. Each in turn sends an electrical pulse to a neighbor neuron, and on up the line this goes, at 250 mph, until it reaches the warm, wet occipital lobe of the brain, in the back of the head. There, a cascading complex of neurons fire from the incoming stimuli, and we subjectively perceive this experience as a yellow brightness occurring in a place we have been conditioned to call “the external world.” Other creatures receiving the identical stimulus will experience something altogether different, such as a perception of gray, or even have an entirely dissimilar sensation. The point is, there isn’t a “bright yellow” light “out there” at all. At most, there is an invisible stream of electrical and magnetic pulses. We are totally necessary for the experience of what we’d call a yellow flame. Again, it’s correlative.

> In effect, though Wiener didn't quite express it this way, cybernetics was offering an alternative to the Skinnerian worldview, in which human beings were just stimulus-response machines to be manipulated and conditioned for their own good. It was likewise offering an alternative to von Neumann's worldview, wherein human beings were unrealistically rational technocrats capable of anticipating, controlling, and managing their society with perfect confidence. Instead, cybernetics held out a vision of humans as neither gods nor clay but rather "machines" of the new kind, embodying purpose—and thus, autonomy. No, we were not the absolute masters of our universe; we lived in a world that was complex, confusing, and largely uncontrollable. But neither were we helpless. We were embedded in our world, in constant communication with our environment and one another. We had the power to act, to observe, to learn from our mistakes, and to grow. "From the point of view of cybernetics, the world is an organism," Wiener declared in his autobiography. "In such a world, knowledge is in its essence the process of knowing. . . . Knowledge is an aspect of life which must be interpreted while we are living, if it is to be interpreted at all. Life is the continual interplay between the individual and his environment rather than a way of existing under the form of eternity.

One day, naked and alone in a small room, he began to become aware of what he later called “the last of the human freedoms”—the freedom his Nazi captors could not take away. They could control his entire environment, they could do what they wanted to his body, but Viktor Frankl himself was a self-aware being who could look as an observer at his very involvement. His basic identity was intact. He could decide within himself how all of this was going to affect him. Between what happened to him, or the stimulus, and his response to it, was his freedom or power to choose that response.

At a cellular level of the human mind, Islamophobia is not really a matter of social stigma, rather it is a natural biological fear response of the general human mind, conditioned through countless pairings between terrorist attacks (unconditioned stimulus) and their apparent association with Islam (conditioned stimulus). Hence, Islamophobia cannot be eradicated completely, unless that pairing is severed and thereafter the conditioned stimulus of Islam is paired with something optimistic such as the heartwarming works of the 13th century Persian Muslim poet Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi.

For instance, the United States now has the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world: 39.1 percent (35 percent federal tax plus the average state tax). Even in Sweden, it’s only 22 percent. In France, it’s 34.4 percent—and their leaders are actual, card-carrying socialists! If that’s not enough to scare corporations away from building factories in America, consider all the other disincentives placed on them: the Obamacare mandates; the explosion of government regulations from the EPA, the FTC, and the whole alphabet soup of federal agencies; the fact that if they want to move money they made and had already paid taxes on in other nations back to America, where it could create jobs, we tax it again, eliminating their profits. The private research firm Audit Analytics calculated that between 2008 and 2013, American-owned corporations amassed over $2.1 trillion in profits overseas that were not brought back to the United States to be reinvested because they would be subject to double taxation. Imagine how big a “stimulus” it would be to job creation here at home to inject $2.1 trillion of nonborrowed money directly into private sector investment. Companies used to run to America; now they run from America.

What most people forget is that the past exists within each one of us only as memory. Memory has no objective existence. It is not existential; it is purely psychological. If you retain your ability to respond, your memory of the past will become an empowering process. But if you are in a compulsive cycle of reactivity, memory distorts your perception of the present, and your thoughts, emotions, and actions become disproportionate to the stimulus. The choice is always before you: to respond consciously to the present; or to react compulsively to it. There is a vast difference between the two. And it can make the world of a difference.

Making money in the markets is tough. The brilliant trader and investor Bernard Baruch put it well when he said, “If you are ready to give up everything else and study the whole history and background of the market and all principal companies whose stocks are on the board as carefully as a medical student studies anatomy—if you can do all that and in addition you have the cool nerves of a gambler, the sixth sense of a clairvoyant and the courage of a lion, you have a ghost of a chance.” In retrospect, the mistakes that led to my crash seemed embarrassingly obvious. First, I had been wildly overconfident and had let my emotions get the better of me. I learned (again) that no matter how much I knew and how hard I worked, I could never be certain enough to proclaim things like what I’d said on Wall $ treet Week: “There’ll be no soft landing. I can say that with absolute certainty, because I know how markets work.” I am still shocked and embarrassed by how arrogant I was. Second, I again saw the value of studying history. What had happened, after all, was “another one of those.” I should have realized that debts denominated in one’s own currency can be successfully restructured with the government’s help, and that when central banks simultaneously provide stimulus (as they did in March 1932, at the low point of the Great Depression, and as they did again in 1982), inflation and deflation can be balanced against each other. As in 1971, I had failed to recognize the lessons of history. Realizing that led me to try to make sense of all movements in all major economies and markets going back a hundred years and to come up with carefully tested decision-making principles that are timeless and universal. Third, I was reminded of how difficult it is to time markets. My long-term estimates of equilibrium levels were not reliable enough to bet on; too many things could happen between the time I placed my bets and the time (if ever) that my estimates were reached. Staring at these failings, I realized that if I was going to move forward without a high likelihood of getting whacked again, I would have to look at myself objectively and change—starting by learning a better way of handling the natural aggressiveness I’ve always shown in going after what I wanted. Imagine that in order to have a great life you have to cross a dangerous jungle. You can stay safe where you are and have an ordinary life, or you can risk crossing the jungle to have a terrific life. How would you approach that choice? Take a moment to think about it because it is the sort of choice that, in one form or another, we all have to make.

end of the continuum are the ineffective people who transfer responsibility by blaming other people, events, or the environment—anything or anybody “out there” so that they are not responsible for results. If I blame you, in effect I have empowered you. I have given my power to your weakness. Then I can create evidence that supports my perception that you are the problem. At the upper end of the continuum toward increasing effectiveness is self-awareness: “I know my tendencies, I know the scripts or programs that are in me, but I am not those scripts. I can rewrite my scripts.” You are aware that you are the creative force of your life. You are not the victim of conditions or conditioning. You can choose your response to any situation, to any person. Between what happens to you and your response is a degree of freedom. And the more you exercise that freedom, the larger it will become. As you work in your circle of influence and exercise that freedom, gradually you will stop being a “hot reactor” (meaning there’s little separation between stimulus and response) and start being a cool, responsible chooser—no matter what your genetic makeup, no matter how you were raised, no matter what your childhood experiences were or what the environment is. In your freedom to choose your response lies the power to achieve growth and happiness.

The more the methods of propaganda have been used to produce excitement, the greater will be the reaction, until in the end a quiet life comes to seem the only thing worth having. When, after a period of repose, the population again becomes capable of excitement, it will need a new stimulus, since all the old stimuli have become boring. Hence creeds which are used too intensively are transitory in their effects. In the thirteenth century, men's imaginations were dominated by three great men: the Pope, the Emperor, and the Sultan. The Emperor and the Sultan have disappeared, and the Pope's power is a pale shadow of what it was. In the sixteenth and early seventeeth centuries, the wars between Catholics and Protestants filled Europe, and all large-scale propaganda was in favour of one or other of the two creeds. Yet ultimate victory went to neither party, but, to those who thought the issues between them unimportant. Swift satirised the conflict in his wars of Big-Endians and Little-Endians; Voltaire's Huron, finding himself in prison with a Jansenist, thinks it equally silly of the government to demand his recantation and of him to refuse it. If the world, in the near future, becomes divided between Communists and Fascists, the final victory will go to neither, but to those who shrug their shoulders and say, like Candide, ‘cela est bien dit, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin’. The ultimate limit to the power of creeds is set by boredom, weariness, and love of ease.

In real brains neural networks do not exist in isolation. They communicate with other networks by way of synaptic transmission. For example, in order to see an apple, instead of a roundish, reddish blob, the various features of the stimulus, each processed by different visual subsystems, have to be integrated. As we saw in Chapter 7, the problem of understanding the manner in which this occurs is called the binding problem. One popular solution to this problem is based on the notion of neuronal synchrony. Synchronous (simultaneous) firing, and thus binding, has been proposed as an explanation of consciousness (chap. 7), but our interest here is more in the ability of synchronous firing between cells in different interconnected regions to coordinate plasticity across the regions.

Thus three conclusions emerge from the eye story: (1) it is easier to inherit a ‘vision acquisition device’ than a full-blown hard-wired visual analyser; (2) the visual analyser, once ‘set up’, is refractory to radical restructuring—hence the existence of a critical period in its development in cats; (3) the eye seems to have evolved in steps from a light-sensitive, innervated cell to our complex organ by common evolutionary mechanisms. Something similar may have been taking place in evolution of the language organ, and may be occurring during individual development. An argument, put forward forcefully by Noam Chomsky and his followers, refers to the ‘poverty of stimulus’. Most permutations of word order and grammatical items in a sentence leads to incomprehensible gibberish. There is no way that children could learn without some internal ‘guide’ which sentence is grammatical and which is not, only on the basis of heard examples. To make matters worse, many parents do not correct their children’s grammatical mistakes (they seem to be much more worried about the utterance of four-letter words). Recent investigations clearly confirm that children’s ‘instinctive’ understanding of grammatical intricacies, between the ages 2 and 4, is far better than one would expect from a conventional learning mechanism. Thus there seems to be a ‘language acquisition device’ (LAD) in the brain, which must be triggered by linguistic input so that its working ultimately leads to proper language. It is the LAD, and not a fully developed linguistic processor, which seems to be innate.

Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist at Stanford University, warned about the dangers of stress for a full decade before she realized that maybe it was her advice, rather than stress itself, that was sending people to their graves faster. “I’m converting a stimulus [stress] that could be strengthening people into a source of disease.” With a breakthrough in her thinking, and some powerful new research, McGonigal made a complete turnaround. Turns out, stress might just be our friend. Just as you put stress on a muscle to make it stronger (by lifting weights or running), emotional stress can make us physically and psychologically stronger too. McGonigal now highlights new research showing that when you change your mind about stress, you can literally change your body’s physical reaction to it. In an eight-year study, adults who experienced a “lot of stress” and who believed stress was harmful to their health had a 43% increase in their risk of dying. (That sure stressed me out.) However, people who experienced an equal amount of stress but did not view stress as harmful were no more likely to die! McGonigal says that physical signs of stress (a pounding heart, faster breathing, breaking out in a sweat) aren’t necessarily physical evidence of anxiety or signs that we aren’t coping well with pressure. Instead, we can interpret them as indications that our body is energized and preparing us to meet the next challenge. The bottom line is, science has now proven that how you think about stress matters—the story you attach to stress. Telling yourself it’s good for you instead of harmful could mean the difference between a stress-induced heart attack at 50 or living well into your 90s.

What are the health effects of the choice between austerity and stimulus? Today there is a vast natural experiment being conducted on the body economic. It is similar to the policy experiments that occurred in the Great Depression, the post-communist crisis in eastern Europe, and the East Asian Financial Crisis. As in those prior trials, health statistics from the Great Recession reveal the deadly price of austerity—a price that can be calculated not just in the ticks to economic growth rates, but in the number of years of life lost and avoidable deaths. Had the austerity experiments been governed by the same rigorous standards as clinical trials, they would have been discontinued long ago by a board of medical ethics. The side effects of the austerity treatment have been severe and often deadly. The benefits of the treatment have failed to materialize. Instead of austerity, we should enact evidence-based policies to protect health during hard times. Social protection saves lives. If administered correctly, these programs don’t bust the budget, but—as we have shown throughout this book—they boost economic growth and improve public health. Austerity’s advocates have ignored evidence of the health and economic consequences of their recommendations. They ignore it even though—as with the International Monetary Fund—the evidence often comes from their own data. Austerity’s proponents, such as British Prime Minister David Cameron, continue to write prescriptions of austerity for the body economic, in spite of evidence that it has failed. Ultimately austerity has failed because it is unsupported by sound logic or data. It is an economic ideology. It stems from the belief that small government and free markets are always better than state intervention. It is a socially constructed myth—a convenient belief among politicians taken advantage of by those who have a vested interest in shrinking the role of the state, in privatizing social welfare systems for personal gain. It does great harm—punishing the most vulnerable, rather than those who caused this recession.

On paper, at least, none of this would necessarily stop us from getting a stimulus bill passed. After all, Democrats enjoyed a seventy-seven-seat majority in the House and a seventeen-seat majority in the Senate. But even in the best of circumstances, trying to get the largest emergency spending bill in history through Congress in record time would be a little like getting a python to swallow a cow. I also had to contend with a bit of institutionalized procedural mischief—the Senate filibuster—which in the end would prove to be the most chronic political headache of my presidency. The filibuster isn’t mentioned anywhere in the Constitution. Instead, it came into being by happenstance: In 1805, Vice President Aaron Burr urged the Senate to eliminate the “motion to proceed”—a standard parliamentary provision that allows a simple majority of any legislature to end debate on a piece of business and call for a vote. (Burr, who seems never to have developed the habit of thinking things through, reportedly considered the rule a waste of time.) It didn’t take long for senators to figure out that without a formal way to end debate, any one of them could bring Senate business to a halt—and thereby extract all sorts of concessions from frustrated colleagues—simply by talking endlessly and refusing to surrender the floor. In 1917, the Senate curbed the practice by adopting “cloture,” allowing a vote of two-thirds of senators present to end a filibuster. For the next fifty years the filibuster was used only sparingly—most notably by southern Democrats attempting to block anti-lynching and fair-employment bills or other legislation that threatened to shake up Jim Crow. Gradually, though, the filibuster became more routinized and easier to maintain, making it a more potent weapon, a means for the minority party to get its way. The mere threat of a filibuster was often enough to derail a piece of legislation. By the 1990s, as battle lines between Republicans and Democrats hardened, whichever party was in the minority could—and would—block any bill not to their liking, so long as they remained unified and had at least the 41 votes needed to keep a filibuster from being overridden.

The experience of stress has three components. The first is the event, physical or emotional, that the organism interprets as threatening. This is the stress stimulus, also called the stressor. The second element is the processing system that experiences and interprets the meaning of the stressor. In the case of human beings, this processing system is the nervous system, in particular the brain. The final constituent is the stress response, which consists of the various physiological and behavioural adjustments made as a reaction to a perceived threat. We see immediately that the definition of a stressor depends on the processing system that assigns meaning to it. The shock of an earthquake is a direct threat to many organisms, though not to a bacterium. The loss of a job is more acutely stressful to a salaried employee whose family lives month to month than to an executive who receives a golden handshake. Equally important is the personality and current psychological state of the individual on whom the stressor is acting. The executive whose financial security is assured when he is terminated may still experience severe stress if his self-esteem and sense of purpose were completely bound up with his position in the company, compared with a colleague who finds greater value in family, social interests or spiritual pursuits. The loss of employment will be perceived as a major threat by the one, while the other may see it as an opportunity. There is no uniform and universal relationship between a stressor and the stress response. Each stress event is singular and is experienced in the present, but it also has its resonance from the past. The intensity of the stress experience and its long-term consequences depend on many factors unique to each individual. What defines stress for each of us is a matter of personal disposition and, even more, of personal history. Selye discovered that the biology of stress predominantly affected three types of tissues or organs in the body: in the hormonal system, visible changes occurred in the adrenal glands; in the immune system, stress affected the spleen, the thymus and the lymph glands; and the intestinal lining of the digestive system. Rats autopsied after stress had enlarged adrenals, shrunken lymph organs and ulcerated intestines.

My conception of genius. — Great men, like great ages, are explosives in which a tremendous force is stored up; their precondition is always, historically and physiologically, that for a long time much has been gathered, stored up, saved up, and conserved for them — that there has been no explosion for a long time. Once the tension in the mass has become too great, then the most accidental stimulus suffices to summon into the world the "genius," the "deed," the great destiny. What does the environment matter then, or the age, or the "spirit of the age," or "public opinion"! Take the case of Napoleon. Revolutionary France, and even more, prerevolutionary France, would have brought forth the opposite type; in fact, it did. Because Napoleon was different, the heir of a stronger, older, more ancient civilization than the one which was then perishing in France, he became the master there, he was the only master. Great men are necessary, the age in which they appear is accidental; that they almost always become masters over their age is only because they are stronger, because they are older, because for a longer time much was gathered for them. The relationship between a genius and his age is like that between strong and weak, or between old and young: the age is relatively always much younger, thinner, more immature, less assured, more childish.

I read Dickens and Shakespear without shame or stint; but their pregnant observations and demonstrations of life are not co-ordinated into any philosophy or religion: on the contrary, Dickens's sentimental assumptions are violently contradicted by his observations; and Shakespear's pessimism is only his wounded humanity. Both have the specific genius of the fictionist and the common sympathies of human feeling and thought in pre-eminent degree. They are often saner and shrewder than the philosophers just as Sancho-Panza was often saner and shrewder than Don Quixote. They clear away vast masses of oppressive gravity by their sense of the ridiculous, which is at bottom a combination of sound moral judgment with lighthearted good humor. But they are concerned with the diversities of the world instead of with its unities: they are so irreligious that they exploit popular religion for professional purposes without delicacy or scruple (for example, Sydney Carton and the ghost in Hamlet!): they are anarchical, and cannot balance their exposures of Angelo and Dogberry, Sir Leicester Dedlock and Mr Tite Barnacle, with any portrait of a prophet or a worthy leader: they have no constructive ideas: they regard those who have them as dangerous fanatics: in all their fictions there is no leading thought or inspiration for which any man could conceivably risk the spoiling of his hat in a shower, much less his life. Both are alike forced to borrow motives for the more strenuous actions of their personages from the common stockpot of melodramatic plots; so that Hamlet has to be stimulated by the prejudices of a policeman and Macbeth by the cupidities of a bushranger. Dickens, without the excuse of having to manufacture motives for Hamlets and Macbeths, superfluously punt his crew down the stream of his monthly parts by mechanical devices which I leave you to describe, my own memory being quite baffled by the simplest question as to Monks in Oliver Twist, or the long lost parentage of Smike, or the relations between the Dorrit and Clennam families so inopportunely discovered by Monsieur Rigaud Blandois. The truth is, the world was to Shakespear a great "stage of fools" on which he was utterly bewildered. He could see no sort of sense in living at all; and Dickens saved himself from the despair of the dream in The Chimes by taking the world for granted and busying himself with its details. Neither of them could do anything with a serious positive character: they could place a human figure before you with perfect verisimilitude; but when the moment came for making it live and move, they found, unless it made them laugh, that they had a puppet on their hands, and had to invent some artificial external stimulus to make it work.

When I come home from work and my dog rushes out to greet me, wagging his tail and jumping up and down, why exactly is it that I am so confident that he is conscious and indeed that there is a specific content to his consciousness, he is happy to see me? The usual answer given to this question is that because his behavior is so much like that of a happy person I can infer that he is a happy dog. But that seems to me a mistaken argument. To begin with, happy people do not in general wag their tails and try to lick my hands. Furthermore, and more importantly, someone might easily build a robot dog that would wag its tail and jump up and down without having any inner feelings whatever. What is so special about the real dog? I think the answer is that the basis on which I am confident that my dog is conscious and has a specific content to his consciousness is not simply that his behavior is appropriate, but that I can see that the causal underpinnings of the behavior are relatively similar to mine. He has a brain, a perceptual apparatus, and a bodily structure that are relevantly similar to my own: these are his eyes, these are his ears, this is his skin, there is his mouth. It is not just on the basis of his behavior that I conclude that he is conscious, but rather on the basis of the causal structure that mediates the relation between the input stimulus and the output behavior.

Why would you do that with me? A simple kiss was enough. What could you be thinking?" "What indeed." He pushed a hand through his hair, more than a little offended at her accusatory tone. "I'm male. You rubbed your... femaleness all over me. I didn't think. I reacted." "You reacted." "Yes." "To..." She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. "To me." "It is a natural response. Aren't you a scientist? Then you should understand. Any red-blooded man would react to such stimulus." She stepped back. She dipped her chin and peered at him over her spectacles. "So you find me stimulating." "That's not what I-" He bit off the rest of that sentence. The only way to end a nonsensical conversation was to simply cease talking. Colin drew a deep breath and squared his shoulders. He closed his eyes briefly. And then he opened them and looked at her. Really looked at her, as though for the first time. He saw thick, dark hair a man could gather by the fistful. Prim spectacles, perched on a gently sloped nose. Behind the lenses, wide-set eyes- dark and intelligent. And that mouth. That ripe, pouting, sensual mouth. He let his gaze drift down her form. There was a wicked thrill to knowing lushness smoldered beneath that modest sprigged muslin gown. To having felt her shape, scouting and chartering her body with all the nerve endings of his own. Their bodies had met. More than that. They'd grown acquainted. Nothing more would come from it, of course. Colin had rules for himself, and as for her... she didn't even liked him, or pretend to. But she showed up in the middle of the night, hatching schemes that skirted the line between academic logic and reckless adventure. She started kisses she had no notion how to continue. Taken all together, she was simply... A surprise. A fresh, bracing gust of the unexpected, for good or ill. "Perhaps," he said cautiously, "I do find you stimulating.

As respects its isolation and its indifference to the basic requirements of all organic activity, the pecuniary power complex discloses a startling resemblance to a newly discovered center in the brain-that which is called the pleasure center. So far as is known, this pleasure center performs no useful function in the organism, unless it should prove that in some still obscure way it plays a part in more functional pleasure reactions. But in laboratory monkeys this localized center can be penetrated by electrodes which permit a micro-current to stimulate the nervous tissue in such a fashion that the flow of current-and hence the intensity of pleasure-can be regulated by the animal himself. Apparently the stimulation of this pleasure center is so rewarding that the animal will continue to press the current regulator for an indefinite length of time, regardless of every other impulse or physiological need, even that for food, and even to the point of starvation. The intensity of this abstract stimulus produces something like a total neurotic insensibility to life needs. The power complex seems to operate on the same principle. The magical electronic stimulus is money. What increases the resemblance between this pecuniary motivation and that of the cerebral pleasure center is that both centers, unlike virtually all organic reactions, recognize no quantitative limits. What has always been true of money, among those susceptible to its influence, applies equally to the other components of the power complex: the abstraction replaces the concrete reality, and therefore those who seek to increase it never know when they have had enough. Each of these drives, for power, for goods, for fame, for pleasure, may-it goes without saying-have as useful a part to play in the normal economy of a community as in the human body itself. It is by their detachment, their isolation, their quantitative over-concentration, and their mutual re-enforcement that they become perverse and life-corroding.

Dr Joe Dispeza also explains Neuroplasticity in the hit film, What The Bleep do we Know!? Down the Rabbit Hole: The brain does not know the difference between what it sees in its environment, and what it remembers, because the same specific neural nets are firing. The brain is made up of tiny nerve cells called neurons. These neurons have tiny branches that reach out and connect to other neurons to form a neural net. Each place where they connect is integrated into a thought, or a memory. Now, the brain builds up all its concepts by the law of associative memory. For example, ideas, thoughts and feelings are all constructed then interconnected in this neural net, and all have a possible relationship with one another. The concept in the feeling of love, for instance, is stored in the vast neural net, but we build the concept of love from many other different ideas. Some people have love connected to disappointment. When they think about love they experience the memory of pain, sorrow, anger and even rage. Rage maybe linked to hurt, which maybe linked to a specific person, which then is connected back to love. Who is in the driver’s seat when we control our emotions or response to emotion? We know physiologically the nerve cells that fire together, wire together. If you practise something over and over, those nerve cells have a long-term relationship. If you get angry on a daily basis, be it frustrated on a daily basis, if you suffer and give reason for the victimization in your life, you’re rewiring and re-integrating that neural net on a daily basis. That net then has a long-term relationship with all those other nerve cells called an identity. We also know that when nerve cells don’t fire together, they no longer wire together. They lose their long-term relationship, because every time we interrupt the thought process that produces a chemical response, every time we interrupt it, those nerve cells that are connected to each other start breaking their long-term relationship. When we start interrupting and observing, not by stimulus and response to the automatic reaction, but by observing the effects it takes, then we are no longer the body, mind, conscious, emotional person that is responding to its environment as if it is automatic. ‘A life

In the space between stimulus (what happens) and how we respond, lies our freedom to choose. Ultimately, this power to choose is what defines us as human beings. We may have limited choices but we can always choose. We can choose our thoughts, emotions, moods, our words, our actions; we can choose our values and live by principles. It is the choice of acting or being acted upon.

Empiricism is not just an empirical method but also a theory of experience. Essentially, it conceives of human beings as passive and sense perception as providing replicas or copies of reality that are based on association. As key proponents of empiricism, Piaget identified Hume, Locke, and behaviorist stimulus-response theories, but he also thought that empiricism is trenchant in psychology (and, one might add, even today, see Müller & Giesbrecht, 2008). According to Piaget, empiricists misconstrue the fundamentally active relation between infant and environment as a passive, causal relation: “Even before language begins, the young infant reacts to objects not by a mechanical set of stimulus-response associations but by an integrative assimilation to schemes of action, which impress a direction on his activities and include the satisfaction of a need or an interest” (Piaget, 1965/1971, p. 131; see also OI, p. 411). Furthermore, Piaget (1970) rejected the idea that knowledge is a copy of reality. Rather, he was influenced by Kant's (1787/1929) idea that objectivity is constituted by the subject (see Chapter 3, this volume). Kant argued that our intuition (i.e., sensibility) and understanding use a priori (i.e., independent of all experience) forms and categories, which are the condition of the possibility for experiencing objectivity. Piaget subscribed to the ordering and organizing function of the mind, but he believed that the forms and categories are not a priori but undergo development as a result of the subject's interaction with the world (OI, pp. 376–395).

Frankl wrote, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”3

glued to the top of the head. On conscious trials only, an ample voltage wave sweeps through this region. It starts around 270 milliseconds and peaks anywhere between 350 and 500 milliseconds. This slow and massive event has been called the P3 wave (because it is the third large positive peak after a stimulus appears) or the P300 wave (because it often starts around 300 milliseconds).14 It is only a few microvolts in size, a million times smaller than an AA battery. However,

The evidence continues to accumulate that not only are dogs sensitive to where humans’ attention is directed, but dogs are also sensitive to the social context. They know when it is appropriate to attend to their human’s attention and when it is not. This means that dogs have more than a theory of behavior. They have a theory of mind. In humans, theory of mind, or ToM, means that we can imagine what another person might be thinking. Reflecting the importance of humans’ social lives, most of our large frontal lobes seem to be concerned with this function. We spend huge amounts of mental energy navigating the complex social structure of human society. Knowing how to read people and how to behave in distinct social settings is the difference between success and failure. And at the extreme, autism may represent a failure of the ToM system in the brain. If dogs have ToM abilities, they are probably simpler than ours. The small frontal lobes in the dogs’ brains are clear evidence of that. But even if dogs have only a rudimentary ToM, that would mean dogs are not just Pavlovian stimulus-response machines. It would mean that dogs might have about the same level of consciousness as a young child.

Employing the NLP Fast Phobia Cure The NLP Fast Phobia Cure allows you to re-experience a trauma or phobia without experiencing the emotional content of the event or having to face the trigger that normally sets off the phobic response. You need to ensure that you work on this process in an environment where you know yourself to be completely safe, in the presence of another person who can help to keep you grounded if you begin to panic. This process ensures that you examine an experience while you’re doubly dissociated from the memory, creating a separation between you (in the now) and the emotions of a trauma or a phobic response. In the following list, the double dissociation is done through having you watch yourself in a cinema (dissociation), while watching yourself on a cinema screen (double dissociation) (you can find more on dissociation in Chapter 10): 1. Identify when you have a phobic response to a stimulus or a traumatic or unpleasant memory that you want to overcome. 2. Remember that you were safe before and are safe after the unpleasant experience. 3. Imagine yourself sitting in the cinema, watching yourself on a small, black-and-white screen. 4. Now imagine floating out of the ‘you’ that’s sitting in the cinema seat and into the projection booth. 5. You can now see yourself in the projection booth, watching yourself in the seat, watching the film of you on the screen. 6. Run the film in black and white, on the very tiny screen, starting before you experienced the memory you want to overcome and running it through until after the experience when you were safe. 7. Now freeze the film or turn the screen completely white. 8. Float out of the projection booth, out of the seat, and into the end of the film. 9. Run the film backwards very quickly, in a matter of a second or two, in full colour, as if you’re experiencing the film, right back to the beginning, when you were safe. 10. You can repeat steps 8 and 9 until you’re comfortable with the experience. 11. Now go into the future and test an imaginary time when you may have experienced the phobic response

Freedom is the pause between stimulus and action. In the moment after something occurs and before we react, we are free to choose how we will show up. What will you choose?

2. Abstract concepts. It is extremely difficult to explain how any set of purely physical actions and interactions could possibly invest consciousness with the immaterial—which is to say, purely abstract—concepts by which all experience is necessarily interpreted and known. It is almost impossible to say how a purely material system of stimulus and response could generate universal categories of understanding, especially if (and one hopes that most materialists would grant this much) those categories are not mere idiosyncratic personal inflections of experience, but real forms of knowledge about reality. In fact, they are the very substance of our knowledge of reality. As Hegel argued perhaps more persuasively than any other philosopher, simple sense-knowledge of particular things, in itself, would be utterly vacuous. My understanding of anything, even something as humbly particular as that insistently red rose in my garden, is composed not just of a collection of physical data but of the conceptual abstractions that my mind imposes upon them: I know the rose as a discrete object, as a flower, as a particular kind of flower, as a kind of vegetation, as a horticultural achievement, as a biological system, as a feature of an ecology, as an object of artistic interest, as a venerable and multi-faceted symbol, and so on; some of the concepts by which I know it are eidetic, some taxonomic, some aesthetic, some personal, and so on. All of these abstractions belong to various kinds of category and allow me, according to my interests and intentions, to situate the rose in a vast number of different sets: I can associate it eidetically not only with other flowers, but also with pictures of flowers; I can associate it biologically not only with other flowers, but also with non-floriferous sorts of vegetation; and so on. It is excruciatingly hard to see how any mechanical material system could create these categories, or how any purely physical system of interactions, however precisely coordinated, could produce an abstract concept. Surely no sequence of gradual or particulate steps, physiological or evolutionary, could by itself overcome the qualitative abyss between sense experience and mental abstractions.

The primary human endowments are 1) self-awareness or self-knowledge; 2) imagination and conscience; and 3) volition or willpower. The secondary endowments are 4) an abundance mentality; 5) courage and consideration; and 6) creativity. The seventh endowment is self-renewal. All are unique human endowments; animals don’t possess any of them. But they are all on a continuum of low to high levels. • Associated with Habit 1: Be Proactive is the endowment of self-knowledge or self-awareness—an ability to choose your response (response-ability). At the low end of the continuum are the ineffective people who transfer responsibility by blaming other people, events, or the environment—anything or anybody “out there” so that they are not responsible for results. If I blame you, in effect I have empowered you. I have given my power to your weakness. Then I can create evidence that supports my perception that you are the problem. At the upper end of the continuum toward increasing effectiveness is self-awareness: “I know my tendencies, I know the scripts or programs that are in me, but I am not those scripts. I can rewrite my scripts.” You are aware that you are the creative force of your life. You are not the victim of conditions or conditioning. You can choose your response to any situation, to any person. Between what happens to you and your response is a degree of freedom. And the more you exercise that freedom, the larger it will become. As you work in your circle of influence and exercise that freedom, gradually you will stop being a “hot reactor” (meaning there’s little separation between stimulus and response) and start being a cool, responsible chooser—no matter what your genetic makeup, no matter how you were raised, no matter what your childhood experiences were or what the environment is. In your freedom to choose your response lies the power to achieve growth and happiness.

Agamben speaks of the difference between men and animals being that animals are in thrall to stimuli. Think a deer in the headlights. He describes experiments where scientists give a worker bee a source of nectar. As it imbibes, they cut away its abdomen, so that instead of filling the bee up, the nectar falls out through the wound in a trickle that pours as fast as the bee drinks. You’d think the bee might change its behavior in response, but it doesn’t. It keeps happily sucking away at the nectar and will continue indefinitely, enthralled by one stimulus—the presence of nectar—until released by another—the sensation of satiety. But that second stimulus never comes—the wound keeps the bee drinking until it finally starves.

Tactile sensitivities, often called tactile defensiveness, are characterized by a negative reaction to a tactile stimulus that is generally considered nonirritating by most people. The nonirritating tactile stimuli that irritate me include: seams (especially in socks), tags, ruffles, lace, synthetics, wool, tags, tight/high waists, exposed elastics, stitching that I can feel against my skin, collars that are too high, collars that are too open, TAGS, shirts that are too loose or formless, and sleeves that are anything other than standard short- or long-sleeve length. My tactile sensitivities have also led to dozens of little quirks, most of which started in childhood. I’ve never liked the feeling of water spraying on my face (oddly, I’m fine with having my face underwater). If I’m eating something messy with my fingers, I clean them on a napkin between every bite. When my skin gets too cold, it itches worse than a case of poison ivy. If someone kisses me on the cheek, I immediately wipe the little wet spot from my face. Tactile defensiveness is believed to be caused by overly sensitive light touch receptors in the skin. We

FINANCIAL FREEDOM For the Lord your God will bless you as he has promised, and you will lend to many nations but will borrow from none. You will rule over many nations but none will rule over you. Deuteronomy 15:6 God promised Israel that if they were obedient to Him, they’d lack nothing. He’d bless Israel so abundantly that they’d have plenty to lend to others. Interesting how the verse goes from not being a borrower to not being ruled. The link between indebtedness and control is reiterated in Proverbs 22:7: “The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender.” America is so many trillions of dollars in debt it’s almost impossible to account. Yet we have leaders refusing to acknowledge it, refusing to cut spending, and refusing to exercise fiscal prudence. What’s worse is the very real danger of being owned by lenders. When we are dependent on China, a nation that does not particularly like us, we’re in big trouble. Washington spends our money in unbelievably wasteful ways. The government’s backing of the green-energy company Solyndra cost us half a billion dollars alone! The Obama “stimulus” package, enacted in 2009, is expected to cost well over $800 billion by 2019, and the only real stimulus it has provided has been to government spending. The stories of government waste are legion. How about the $16 billion of ammunition the government purchased, only to decide it didn’t need it, so it spent $1 billion to destroy it! How’s that for prudently handling the nation’s money and resources? SWEET FREEDOM IN Action Today, vow to pay closer attention to how politicians spend your money. Those who do not exercise fiscal restraint do not deserve your vote. Find candidates who do. Remember that bigger government is the problem, not the cure.

Michael Eysenck’s attention control theory of anxiety conceptualizes the cognitive basis of worry.87 He distinguishes two attention systems: one that is goal directed and one that is stimulus driven. His theory proposes that anxiety and worry disrupt the goal-directed system, allowing the stimulus-driven system to dominate. Worry produces thoughts that use the executive attention resources of working memory, making it less available for dealing with one’s professional, personal, and social obligations. Executive functions are also engaged by the consequent efforts to avoid thinking about threats and their consequences. One becomes more distractible because attention is being competed for by worry, and it is harder to stay on task. With working memory focused on threats, the stimulus-driven form of attention allows threatening stimuli to more easily seize attention. In addition, as noted earlier, anxious people treat nonthreatening stimuli as dangerous because their ability to discriminate between threat and safety is weakened, and they overvalue the danger of weak threats. Threats come to play a larger role in their lives than would otherwise be the case.

Figure 11.4: Recovery of Extinguished Threats. a. Through extinction, the ability of learned threats to control defense responses is weakened. Successful extinction results in low levels of defensive responses like freezing. However, the original threat memory can be revived, suggesting that extinction is a form of inhibitory learning that suppresses the original threat memory. Recovery can occur due to the mere passage of time (spontaneous recovery), exposure to the context in which the original memory was formed (renewal), or by exposure to the unconditioned stimulus (reinstatement). b. Spontaneous Recovery occurs when there is a long delay between conditioning and extinction; it is less likely to occur with a short delay. c. Renewal occurs in the training context but not in novel context. d. Reinstatement involves the delivery of the unconditioned stimulus (US) after extinction. If the subsequent test occurs in the same context, then freezing is reinstated. FROM QUIRK AND MUELLER (2008), ADAPTED WITH PERMISSION FROM MACMILLAN PUBLISHERS LTD.: NEUROPSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY (VOL. 33, PP. 56–72, © 2008, AND MYERS AND DAVIS (2007), ADAPTED WITH PERMISSION FROM MACMILLAN PUBLISHERS LTD.: MOLECULAR PSYCHIATRY (VOL. 12, PP. 120–50)), © 2007.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. —VIKTOR FRANKL

Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

Any suggestion that the 'neoliberal state' is not already an interventionist state is sheer nonsense. Were the huge stimulus packages that bailed out the banks not interventionist? The capitalist state always, in the end, does what is necessary to sustain capitalism, regardless of the differing ideologies between social democrats, liberals, conservatives and fascists, who argue only over their various self-interests, how best to sustain capitalism and how much carrot and stick to use in managing the working class. Ultimately they form an anti-communist, anti-working class coalition. Bourgeois democracy is in effect a one-party state, ie an all capitalist state. Like any party, it comprises numerous factions. This reality is neatly obscured by the pretence of various party colours.

the concept of “creative freedom,” in which the origin and stimulation of the action is entirely in the agent, as against “choice-freedom,” in which the stimulus of the act is in the agent's environment, which presents the alternatives and evokes the motive for choosing between them. One who exercises creative freedom may not experience choosing and yet not be compelled, and this realization should mean a more profound appreciation of what freedom, action, and the person as agent really are. This has something to do with the identity that I think we discover in prayer, and I will come back to this point.

But little by little, our communication deepened and we began to talk more and more about our internal worlds—about our upbringing, our scripting, our feelings and self-doubts. As we were deeply immersed in these communications, we also observed them and observed ourselves in them. We began to use that space between stimulus and response in some new and interesting ways which caused us to think about how we were programmed and how those programs shaped how we saw the world.

In Thinking Fast and Slow, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman described the human mind as operating in two basic modes of thought. System 1 thoughts are typically fast, automatic, effortless, associative, and implicit, which means they are not available to immediate introspection. They often carry a lot of emotional weight and are ruled by habit and, as a result, are very good at getting us hooked. System 2 thoughts are slower and more deliberative. They require much more effort and a deeper level of attention. They are also more flexible and amenable to rules that we consciously establish. It is these System 2 operations that allow us to create the space between stimulus and response that Victor Frankl spoke of, the space that provides for the full expression of our humanity and allows us to thrive.

Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose

Of course, I’m talking about what most people know as “brain freeze.” Scientists identify it as a stimulus headache, or sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia for all you science nerds. You may be surprised to learn that serious studies have been conducted on brain freeze at major institutions such as Harvard University. These studies have shown that brain freeze happens when an extremely cold substance quickly hits the roof of the mouth, causing the capillaries to constrict, followed by an equally quick rewarming when warm air is reintroduced to the mouth. This warming causes vasodilation, or a widening of the blood vessels. The rapid changes in temperature in the upper mouth lead to this painful sensation. Most of this is standard knowledge, but a study by Dr. Jorge Serrador revealed that there is a correlation between brain freeze and migraine sufferers. His research found that those suffering from migraines are more likely to get brain freeze, which suggests that there may be similar biological processes at work. Understanding how the contraction and widening of blood vessels in the brain take place may help scientists develop better headache medicines.