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Our life stories are largely constructed and without mindfulness can prove destructive.
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Rasheed Ogunlaru
“
Making excuses is one of a host of self-defeating behaviours and mental patterns that can block your success.
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Stephen Richards (The Ultimate Focus Builder)
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The best way to detect the destructive element in someone is to watch closely their behavioural pattern when given authority over poverty.
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Michael Bassey Johnson
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The brain does much more than recollect. It compares, synthesizes, analyzes, generates abstractions. We must figure out much more than our genes can know. That is why the brain library is some ten thousand times larger than the gene library. Our passion for learning, evident in the behaviour of every toddler, is the tool for our survival. Emotions and ritualized behaviour patterns are built deeply into us. They are part of our humanity. But they are not characteristically human. Many other animals have feelings. What distinguishes our species is thought. The cerebral cortex is a liberation. We need no longer be trapped in the genetically inherited behaviour patterns of lizards and baboons. We are, each of us, largerly responsible for what gets put into our brains, for what, as adults, we wind up caring for and knowing about. No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain, we can change ourselves.
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Carl Sagan (Cosmos)
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There's a sameness to streetlife. On every world I've ever been, the same underlying patterns play out, flaunt and vaunt, buy and sell, like some distilled essence of human behavior seeping out from whatever clanking political machine has been dropped on it from above.
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Richard K. Morgan (Altered Carbon (Takeshi Kovacs, #1))
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there is good reason for supposing that the archetypes are the unconscious images of the instincts themselves, in other words, that they are patterns of instinctual behaviour.
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C.G. Jung (The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Collected Works))
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The negative patterns that form as a result of this self defeating behaviour actually symbolize the negative belief that we nurture.
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Stephen Richards (Think Your way to Success: Let Your Dreams Run Free)
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If they weren't nice to you when you were growing up, you'll probably be attracted to partners who aren't nice to you now.
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Kate McGahan
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There's no difference between a madman and a professor...it should be clear to you in the way they dress, act and think.
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Michael Bassey Johnson
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A sex addict is also emotionally anorexic – they must be in order to continue participating in isolated behaviour such as being addicted to pornography and being promiscuous or having multiple affairs. All of these secretive behaviour patterns affect a family and home.
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Christopher Dines (The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours)
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... quite naturally, I am curious about behaviour which does not fit the natural patterns, which floats suspended at some unexplored level of the sentient sea and defies the tides and waves of society.
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David Case (The Cell & Other Transmorphic Tales)
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I thought back to the counselling sessions, how we'd talked about thinking things through rationally, recognizing unhelpful patterns of behaviour and being brave enough to try doing things differently.
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Gail Honeyman (Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine)
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Some people go to the gym to get more attractive physically, i've chosen to study the past and patterns i was trapped into. It is more about dropping than lifting weight.
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Alain Bremond-Torrent ("Darling, it's not only about sex")
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If you accept the existence of advertising, you accept a system designed to persuade and to dominate minds by interfering in people's thinking patterns. You also accept that the system will be used by the sorts of people who like to influence people and are good at it. No person who did not wish to dominate others would choose to use advertising, or choosing it, succeed in it. So the basic nature of advertising and all technologies created to serve it will be consistent with this purpose, will encourage this behaviour in society, and will tend to push social evolution in this direction.
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Jerry Mander (Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television)
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Mental stories can literally spoil a human life. It took me a long time to become aware of my mental commentary, such as: “Everything always goes wrong”, “I won’t be accepted”, “I’m a failure” or “What’s the point?” Those fears were deep-rooted and triggered many upsetting addictive patterns of behaviour
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Christopher Dines (The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours)
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The fastest way for a person to change or more precisely to change their behavioral pattern is to remove the environmental triggers that
support the unwanted behavior.
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Sasha Tenodi (Be Your [Better] Self: A Hands on Approach to Become Who You Always Wanted to Be: Change the Status Quo)
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Action is one, two is a coincidence, three of them forms a trend and suggests a pattern.
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Thomas Vato
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In the end he came to the realisation that suffering is not caused by ill fortune, by social injustice, or by divine whims. Rather, suffering is caused by the behaviour patterns of one’s own mind.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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The immense diversity of imagined realities that Sapiens invented, and the resulting diversity of behaviour patterns, are the main components of what we call ‘cultures’. Once cultures appeared, they never ceased to change and develop, and these unstoppable alterations are what we call ‘history’.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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I’m surprised I called you good. Not because I think you’re bad - it would be absurd to describe a whole person as good or bad. You’re just a series of messy, contradicting behaviours like everyone else. Those behaviours can become patterns or instincts, and some are better than others. But as long as you’re alive, the jury’s out.
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Tess Gunty (The Rabbit Hutch)
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If we are interested in cultural processes, the only way in which we can know the significance of the selected detail of behaviour is against the background of the motives and emotions and values that are institutionalized in that culture.
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Ruth Benedict (Patterns Of Culture)
“
Ritual abuse is highly organised and, obviously, secretive. It is often linked with other major crimes such as child pornography, child prostitution, the drugs industry, trafficking, and many other illegal and heinous activities. Ritual abuse is organised sexual, physical and psychological abuse, which can be systematic and sustained over a long period of time. It involves the use of rituals - things which the abusers 'need' to do, or 'need' to have in place - but it doesn't have to have a belief system. There doesn't have to be God or the Devil, or any other deity for it to be considered 'ritual'. It involves using patterns of learning and development to keep the abuse going and to make sure the child stays quiet.
There has been, and still is a great deal of debate about whether or not such abuse exists anywhere in the world. There are many people who constantly deny that there is even such a thing as ritual abuse. All I can say is that I know there is. Not only have I been a victim of it myself, but I have been dealing with survivors of this type of abuse for almost 30 years.
If there are survivors, there must be something that they have survived.
The things is, most sexual abuse of children is ritualised in some way. Abusers use repetition, routine and ritual to forced children into the patterns of behaviour they require. Some abusers want their victims to wear certain clothing, to say certain things. They might bathe them or cut them, they might burn them or abuse them only on certain days of the week. They might do a hundred other things which are ritualistic, but aren't always called that - partly, I think because we have a terror of the word and of accepting just how premeditated abuse actually is.
Abusers instill fear in their victims and ensure silence; they do all they can to avoid being caught. Sexual abuse of a child is rarely a random act. It involves thorough planning and preparation beforehand. They threaten the children with death, with being taken into care, with no one believing them, which physical violence or their favourite teddy being taken away. They are told that their mum will die, or their dad will hate them, the abusers say everyone will think it's their fault, that everyone already knows they are bad. Nothing is too big or small for an abuser to use as leverage.
There is unmistakable proof that abusers do get together in order to share children, abuse more children, and even learn from each other. As more cases have come into the public eye in recent years, this has become increasingly obvious. More and more of this type of abuse is coming to light.
I definitely think it is the word ritual which causes people to question, to feel uncomfortable, or even just disbelieve. It seems almost incredible that such things would happen, but too many of us know exactly how bad the lives of many children are. A great deal of child pornography shows children being abused in a ritualised setting, and many have now come forward to share their experiences, but there is a still tendency to say it just couldn't happen.
p204-205
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Laurie Matthew (Groomed)
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Avoidance is connected with the fear of being damaged or destroyed by hostility. Compliance is concerned with the fear of love being withdrawn. Avoidance suggests doubt as to whether love has ever been proffered. Compliance implies recognition that love is available, but doubts whether it will last. These patterns of behaviour are most obviously manifested in the pathological types of personality which warrant the labels ‘schizoid’ or ‘depressive’, but can also be detected as underlying factors in the attitudes of ‘normal’ people toward others.
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Anthony Storr (Solitude a Return to the Self)
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But the price of flexibility, of being released from the tyranny of rigid, inbuilt patterns of behaviour, is that ‘happiness’, in the sense of perfect adaptation to the environment or complete fulfilment of needs, is only briefly experienced. ‘Call no man happy till he dies,’ said Solon. When individuals fall in love, or cry ‘Eureka’ at making a new discovery, or have the kind of transcendental emotion described by Wordsworth as being ‘surprised by joy’, they feel blissfully at one with the universe: but, as everyone knows, such experiences are transient.
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Anthony Storr (Solitude a Return to the Self)
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Look everywhere. There are miracles and curiosities to fascinate and intrigue for many lifetimes:
the intricacies of nature and everything in the world and universe around us from the miniscule to the infinite; physical, chemical and biological functionality; consciousness, intelligence and the ability to learn; evolution, and the imperative for life; beauty and other abstract interpretations; language and other forms of communication; how we make our way here and develop social patterns of culture and meaningfulness;
how we organise ourselves and others; moral imperatives; the practicalities of survival and all the embellishments we pile on top; thought, beliefs, logic, intuition, ideas; inventing, creating, information, knowledge; emotions, sensations, experience, behaviour.
We are each unique individuals arising from a combination of genetic, inherited, and learned information, all of which can be extremely fallible.
Things taught to us when we are young are quite deeply ingrained. Obviously some of it (like don’t stick your finger in a wall socket) is very useful,
but some of it is only opinion – an amalgamation of views from people you just happen to have had contact with.
A bit later on we have access to lots of other information via books, media, internet etc, but it is important to remember that most of this is still just opinion, and often biased.
Even subjects such as history are presented according to the presenter’s or author’s viewpoint, and science is continually changing. Newspapers and TV tend to cover news in the way that is most useful to them (and their funders/advisors), Research is also subject to the decisions of funders and can be distorted by business interests. Pretty much anyone can say what they want on the internet, so our powers of discernment need to be used to a great degree there too.
Not one of us can have a completely objective view as we cannot possibly have access to, and filter, all knowledge available, so we must accept that our views are bound to be subjective. Our understanding and responses are all very personal, and our views extremely varied. We tend to make each new thing fit in with the picture we have already started in our heads, but we often have to go back and adjust the picture if we want to be honest about our view of reality as we continually expand it. We are taking in vast amounts of information from others all the time, so need to ensure we are processing that to develop our own true reflection of who we are.
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Jay Woodman
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The idea of attention or contemplation, of looking carefully at something and holding it before the mind, may be conveyed early on in childhood. 'Look, listen, isn't that nice?' Also, 'Don't touch!' This is moral training as well as preparation for a pleasurable life. It need not depend on words, but can also be learnt from patterns of behaviour which should in any case back up the words. The far reaching idea of respect is included in such teaching. The, as it might seem, sophisticated concept of a work of art may be acquired easily. Children, if they are lucky, are invited to attend to pictures or objects, or listen quietly to music or stories or verses, and readily understand in what spirit they are to treat these apparently dissimilar things. They may also be encouraged to contemplate works of nature, which are unlike works of art, yet also like them in being 'beautiful.
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Iris Murdoch (Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals)
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Synchronicities then can be said are the product of focused thought which appear as patterns repeating in time. These wheels of time or gears of life then, can only record synchronicites as they occur by consciously manifesting and observing the patterns of behaviour from which they were created.
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L.J. Vanier
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Most organised abuser groups call each particular training a “programme”, as if you were a computer. Many specific trained behaviours have “on” and “off” triggers or switches. Some personality systems are set up with an inner world full of wires or strings that connect switches to their effects. These can facilitate a series of actions by a series of insiders. For example, one part watches the person function in the outside world, and presses a button if he or she sees the person disobeying instructions. The button is connected to an internal wire, which rings a bell in the ear of another part. This part then engages in his or her trained behaviour, opening a door to release the pain of a rape, or cutting the person's arm in a certain pattern, or pushing out a child part. So the watcher has no idea of who the other part is or what she or he does. These events can be quite complicated.
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Alison Miller (Becoming Yourself: Overcoming Mind Control and Ritual Abuse)
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Reading has been proven to sharpen analytical thinking, enabling us to better discern patterns – a handy tool when it comes to the often baffling behaviour of ourselves and others. But fiction in particular can make you more socially able and empathetic. Last year, the Journal of Applied Social Psychology published a paper showing how reading Harry Potter made young people in the UK and Italy more positively disposed towards stigmatised minorities such as refugees.
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Hephzibah Anderson
“
But where should he begin? - Well, then, the trouble with the English was their:
Their:
In a word, Gibreel solemnly pronounced, their weather.
Gibreel Farishta floating on his cloud formed the opinion that the moral fuzziness of the English was meteorologically induced. 'When the day is not warmer than the night,' he reasoned, 'when the light is not brighter than the dark, when the land is not drier than the sea, then clearly a people will lose the power to make distinctions, and commence to see everything - from political parties to sexual partners to religious beliefs - as much-the-same, nothing-to-choose, give-or-take. What folly! For truth is extreme, it is so and not thus, it is him and not her; a partisan matter, not a spectator sport. It is, in brief, heated. City,' he cried, and his voice rolled over the metropolis like thunder, 'I am going to tropicalize you.'
Gibreel enumerated the benefits of the proposed metamorphosis of London into a tropical city: increased moral definition, institution of a national siesta, development of vivid and expansive patterns of behaviour among the populace, higher-quality popular music, new birds in the trees (macaws, peacocks, cockatoos), new trees under the birds (coco-palms, tamarind, banyans with hanging beards). Improved street-life, outrageously coloured flowers (magenta, vermilion, neon-green), spider-monkeys in the oaks. A new mass market for domestic air-conditioning units, ceiling fans, anti-mosquito coils and sprays. A coir and copra industry. Increased appeal of London as a centre for conferences, etc.: better cricketeers; higher emphasis on ball-control among professional footballers, the traditional and soulless English commitment to 'high workrate' having been rendered obsolete by the heat. Religious fervour, political ferment, renewal of interest in the intellegentsia. No more British reserve; hot-water bottles to be banished forever, replaced in the foetid nights by the making of slow and odorous love. Emergence of new social values: friends to commence dropping in on one another without making appointments, closure of old-folks' homes, emphasis on the extended family. Spicier foods; the use of water as well as paper in English toilets; the joy of running fully dressed through the first rains of the monsoon.
Disadvantages: cholera, typhoid, legionnaires' disease, cockroaches, dust, noise, a culture of excess.
Standing upon the horizon, spreading his arms to fill the sky, Gibreel cried: 'Let it be.
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Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses)
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feeling good doesn’t just end with feeling good. It actually changes our patterns of thought and behaviour.
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Ali Abdaal (Feel-Good Productivity: How to Do More of What Matters to You)
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The virtues of character, behavioural patterns determine how great a nation and people are.
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Sunday Adelaja
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suffering is not caused by ill fortune, by social injustice, or by divine whims. Rather, suffering is caused by the behaviour patterns of one’s own mind.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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It suggested that feeling good doesn’t just end with feeling good. It actually changes our patterns of thought and behaviour.
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Ali Abdaal (Feel-Good Productivity: How to Do More of What Matters to You)
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Sometimes, a coincidence is a pattern you haven’t figured out yet.
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Nadine Dalton (Pineapple Pirates of the Caribbean: Part One (Charm))
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I think there are patterns in human behaviour,' he said, 'but not in fate.
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Gill Paul (The Lost Daughter)
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suffering is not caused by ill fortune, by social injustice or by divine whims. Rather, suffering is caused by the behaviour patterns of one’s own mind.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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Rather, suffering is caused by the behaviour patterns of one’s own mind.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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In the first place, a new synthesis never results from a mere adding together of two fully developed branches in biological or mental evolution. Each new departure, each reintegration of what has become separated, involves the breaking down of the rigid, ossified patterns of behaviour and thought. Copernicus failed to do so; he tried to mate the heliocentric tradition with orthodox Aristotelian doctrine, and failed. Newton succeeded because orthodox astronomy had already been broken up by Kepler and orthodox physics by Galileo; reading a new pattern into the shambles, he united them in a new conceptual frame. Similarly, chemistry and physics could only become united after physics had renounced the dogma of the indivisibility and impermeability of the atom, thus destroying its own classic concept of matter, and chemistry had renounced its doctrine of ultimate immutable elements. A new evolutionary departure is only possible after a certain amount of de-differentiation, a cracking and thawing of the frozen structures resulting from isolated, over-specialized development.
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Arthur Koestler (The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe)
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Good sociologists have always had an insatiable curiosity about about even the trivialities of human behaviour, and if this curiosity leads a sociologist to devote many years to the painstaking exploration of some small corner of the social world that may appear quite trivial to others, so be it: Why do more teenagers pick their noses in rural Minnesota than in rural Iowa? What are the patterns of church socials over a twenty-year period in small-town Saskatchewan? What is the correlation between religious affiliation and accident-proneness among elderly Hungarians?
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Peter L. Berger
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In the end he came to the realization that suffering is not caused by ill fortune, by social injustice, or by divine whims. Rather, suffering is caused by the behaviour patterns of one's own mind
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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The growth of the nervous system from beginning to end is dominated by 'a totally integrated matrix, and not a progressive integration of primarily individuated units'. The organism is not a sum of its reflexes, but on the contrary 'the mechanism of the total pattern is an essential component of the performance of the part, i.e. the reflex'. The stimulus-response scheme cannot explain even embryonic behaviour, because movements appear long before the motor neurons of the reflex arc are connected with the sensory neurons. This centrifugal mode of development means that the individual acts on its environment before it reacts to its environment.
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Arthur Koestler (The Act of Creation)
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There is an important distinction between an inherent characteristic, rooted in an individual without regard to his environment, and a response to the environment, a pattern of behaviours developed to ensure survival.
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Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No)
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Do you remember my friend Fumiko Kobayashi? She loaned me a book by a university professor named Taki Sugiyama Lebra, Japanese Patterns of Behaviour, and she writes that death, particularly voluntary death, is surrounded in this country by a heroic, romantic, aesthetic and emotional aura. She says we often find it hard to communicate and use suicide to make our ideas, or beliefs, or sufferings known. I don't know whether I believe that or not.
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James Trager (Letters from Sachiko: A Japanese Woman's View of Life in the Land of the Economic Miracle)
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I've seen how easy it is for people to be manipulated, Emeka,' I say sadly. 'All it takes is careful observation of trends and behavioural patterns and it can be pretty easy to make people do what you want them to do. Especially in a group.
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Femi Kayode (Lightseekers (Philip Taiwo, #1))
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Gods – all gods, I think – are just spells that keep going. Like waterwheels powered by the passage of souls, maybe. Prayer strengthens them, and so does residuum, the portion of the soul that remains in the corpse after death. The gods are not omniscient or omnipotent, just very different from us. More powerful in some ways, but locked into patterns of behaviour they cannot change, so they’re not really sentient, I suppose. Saints are p-p-points of congruency between our world and theirs.
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Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan (The Gutter Prayer (The Black Iron Legacy, #1))
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The study of how injuries in different areas of the brain result in different verbal behaviour patterns has been fundamental to relating cognitive functional models of language, informed by linguistics and cognitive psychology, with neural correlates.
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Albert Costa (The Bilingual Brain: And What It Tells Us about the Science of Language)
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Whatever the correct answer, the Sungir children are among the best pieces of evidence that 30,000 years ago Sapiens could invent sociopolitical codes that went far beyond the dictates of our DNA and the behaviour patterns of other human and animal species.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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We have now also seen that, in precisely the same sense as it is ever possible to talk of a gene ‘for’ a behaviour pattern, it is possible to talk of a gene, in one organism, ‘for’ a behaviour pattern (or other phenotypic characteristic) in another organism.
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Richard Dawkins (The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene)
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There’s a sameness to streetlife. On every world I’ve ever been, the same underlying patterns play out, flaunt and vaunt, buy and sell, like some distilled essence of human behaviour seeping out from under whatever clanking political machine has been dropped on it from above.
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Richard K. Morgan (Altered Carbon (Takeshi Kovacs, #1))
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He spent six years meditating on the essence, causes and cures for human anguish. In the end he came to the realisation that suffering is not caused by ill fortune, by social injustice, or by divine whims. Rather, suffering is caused by the behaviour patterns of one’s own mind.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
other words, while the behaviour patterns of archaic humans remained fixed for tens of thousands of years, Sapiens could transform their social structures, the nature of their interpersonal relations, their economic activities and a host of other behaviours within a decade or two.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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As Pierre Bourdieu signalled as long as two decades ago, coercion has by and large been replaced by stimulation, the once obligatory patterns of conduct by seduction, the policing of behaviour by PR and advertising, and normative regulation by the arousal of new needs and desires.
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Zygmunt Bauman (Consuming Life)
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Physiological stress, then, is the link between personality traits and disease. Certain traits — otherwise known as coping styles — magnify the risk for illness by increasing the likelihood of chronic stress. Common to them all is a diminished capacity for emotional communication. Emotional experiences are translated into potentially damaging biological events when human beings are prevented from learning how to express their feelings effectively. That learning occurs — or fails to occur — during childhood. The way people grow up shapes their relationship with their own bodies and psyches. The emotional contexts of childhood interact with inborn temperament to give rise to personality traits. Much of what we call personality is not a fixed set of traits, only coping mechanisms a person acquired in childhood.
There is an important distinction between an inherent characteristic, rooted in an individual without regard to his environment, and a response to the environment, a pattern of behaviours developed to ensure survival. What we see as indelible traits may be no more than habitual defensive techniques, unconsciously adopted. People often identify with these habituated patterns, believing them to be an indispensable part of the self. They may even harbour self-loathing for certain traits — for example, when a person describes herself as “a control freak.” In reality, there is no innate human inclination to be controlling. What there is in a “controlling” personality is deep anxiety.
The infant and child who perceives that his needs are unmet may develop an obsessive coping style, anxious about each detail. When such a person fears that he is unable to control events, he experiences great stress. Unconsciously he believes that only by controlling every aspect of his life and environment will he be able to ensure the satisfaction of his needs. As he grows older, others will resent him and he will come to dislike himself for what was originally a desperate response to emotional deprivation. The drive to control is not an innate trait but a coping style. Emotional repression is also a coping style rather than a personality trait set in stone.
Not one of the many adults interviewed for this book could answer in the affirmative when asked the following: When, as a child, you felt sad, upset or angry, was there anyone you could talk to — even when he or she was the one who had triggered your negative emotions? In a quarter century of clinical practice, including a decade of palliative work, I have never heard anyone with cancer or with any chronic illness or condition say yes to that question. Many children are conditioned in this manner not because of any intended harm or abuse, but because the parents themselves are too threatened by the anxiety, anger or sadness they sense in their child — or are simply too busy or too harassed themselves to pay attention. “My mother or father needed me to be happy” is the simple formula that trained many a child — later a stressed and depressed or physically ill adult — into lifelong patterns of repression.
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Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress)
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In other words, while the behaviour patterns of archaic humans remained fixed for tens of thousands of years, Sapiens could transform their social structures, the nature of their interpersonal relations, their economic activities and a host of other behaviours within a decade or two.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
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Many people are blocked from self-knowledge and personal growth by the myth they feel compelled to hold on to, of having had a “happy childhood.” A little negative thinking would empower them to see through the self-delusion that helps keep them stuck in self-harming behavioural patterns.
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Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No)
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Isms’ are described as transference of addictive patterns of dysfunctional behaviour, passed down from generation to generation. For instance, if a mother was an alcoholic who never made it into recovery, her behaviour would leave a mark on her children, husband, etc. Unless her adult children join some sort of recovery programme and adopt the mindfulness practice, they will have very similar behaviour traits to their mother but minus the alcohol abuse. There is a strong possibility that they will become codependent and form relationships with other codependents or alcoholics.
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Christopher Dines (The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours)
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The truth is that, for the Folk, stories are everything. Stories are part of them and their world in a fundamental way that mortals have difficulty grasping; a story may be a singular event from the past, but - crucially - it is also a pattern that shapes their behaviour and predicts future events.
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Heather Fawcett (Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries (Emily Wilde, #1))
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It will be remembered that the ‘central theorem’ of the selfish organism claims that an animal’s behaviour tends to maximize its own (inclusive) fitness. We saw that to talk of an individual behaving so as to maximize its inclusive fitness is equivalent to talking of the gene or genes ‘for’ that behaviour pattern maximizing their survival.
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Richard Dawkins (The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene)
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At the age of twenty-nine Gautama slipped away from his palace in the middle of the night, leaving behind his family and possessions. He travelled as a homeless vagabond throughout northern India, searching for a way out of suffering. He visited ashrams and sat at the feet of gurus but nothing liberated him entirely – some dissatisfaction always remained. He did not despair. He resolved to investigate suffering on his own until he found a method for complete liberation. He spent six years meditating on the essence, causes and cures for human anguish. In the end he came to the realisation that suffering is not caused by ill fortune, by social injustice, or by divine whims. Rather, suffering is caused by the behaviour patterns of one’s own mind. Gautama’s insight was that no matter what the mind experiences, it usually reacts with craving, and craving always involves dissatisfaction. When the mind experiences something distasteful it craves to be rid of the irritation. When the mind experiences something pleasant, it craves that the pleasure will remain and will intensify. Therefore, the mind is always dissatisfied and restless. This is very clear when we experience unpleasant things, such as pain. As long as the pain continues, we are dissatisfied and do all we can to avoid it. Yet even when we experience pleasant things we are never content. We either fear that the pleasure might disappear, or we hope that it will intensify. People dream for years about finding love but are rarely satisfied when they find it. Some become anxious that their partner will leave; others feel that they have settled cheaply, and could have found someone better. And we all know people who manage to do both.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
An avoidant attachment style is marked by a strong desire to avoid conflict and to reduce exposure to the other when emotional needs have not been met. The avoidant person quickly presumes that others are keen to attack them and that they cannot be reasoned with. One just has to escape, pull up the drawbridge and go cold. Regrettably, the avoidant party cannot normally explain their fearful and defensive pattern to their partner, so that the reasons behind their distant and absent behaviour remain clouded and are easy to mistake for being uncaring and unengaged, when in fact the opposite is true: the avoidant party cares very deeply indeed, it is just that loving has come to feel far too risky.
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Alain de Botton (The Course of Love)
“
Transgenderism depends for its very existence on the idea that there is an ‘essence’ of gender, a psychology and pattern of behaviour, which is suited to persons with particular bodies and identities.This is the opposite of the feminist view, which is that the idea of gender is the foundation of the political system of male domination. ‘Gender’, in traditional patriarchal thinking, ascribes skirts, high heels and a love of unpaid domestic labour to those with female biology, and comfortable clothing, enterprise and initiative to those with male biology. In the practice of transgenderism, traditional gender is seen to lose its sense of direction and end up in the minds and bodies of persons with inappropriate body parts that need to be corrected. But without ‘gender’, transgenderism could not exist. From a critical, feminist point of view, when transgender rights are inscribed into law and adopted by institutions, they instantiate ideas that are harmful to women’s equality and give authority to outdated notions of essential differences between the sexes. Transgenderism is indeed transgressive, but of women’s rights rather than an oppressive social system.
”
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Sheila Jeffreys (Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism)
“
We often form an opinion, about an idea, or a set of facts based on how they make us feel. In doing this, we mistake our mere attitudes for knowledge about the way the world is. Watch yourself, as you react to the opinions of other people throughout the day, someone will say something, by the consequences of social policy, perhaps, and you'll find yourself liking it or not liking it. And on the basis of that mere sentiment, we are tempted to affirm or deny the claim and even construct an elaborate chain of reasoning to justify doing this. This pattern of behaviour is very likely making you unhappy, and less rational. Real reasoning proceeds on another plane entirely. It is not about liking or not liking the way that facts line up. Or the conclusions of certain arguments. Real reasoning is a method of staying in touch with what is, whether you like it or not.
”
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Sam Harris
“
I’ve been operating according to the idea that it is almost impossible to let go of mental patterns that operate unconsciously and that I have to know such a pattern of thinking first in order to let go of it and abide in my true nature. Leave all those mental habits and patterns alone. The self that is apparently operating, that seems to know these patterns and that would ‘let go of them’ is itself simply one such pattern. These patterns of thinking and feeling have taken their shape, over the years, from the belief that we are a separate self, without our making any particular effort. In just the same way, as our experiential conviction that we are not a limited, located self deepens, so our thoughts, feelings and subsequent behaviour will slowly, effortlessly and naturally realign themselves with this new understanding. In order to know our self we do not need to know the mind. No other knowledge than the knowledge that is present right now in this very moment is required to know our self. What does it mean to know our self? We are our self, so we are too close to our self to be able to know our self as an object. Our simply being our self is as close to knowing our self as we will ever come. We cannot get closer than that. In fact, being our self is the knowing of our self, but it is not the knowing of our self as an object. To say ‘I am’, (in other words to assert that we are present), we must know that ‘I am’. Being and knowing are, in fact, one single non-objective experience. But we do not step outside of our self in order to know our own being. We simply are our self. That being of our self is the knowing of our self. This being/knowing is shining in all experience. This experiential understanding dissolves the idea that our self is not present here and now and that it is not known here and now. And when our desire to know or find ourselves as an object is withdrawn, we discover that our own self was and is present all along, shining quietly in the background, as it were, of all experience. As this becomes obvious we discover that it is not just the background but also the foreground. In other words, it is not just the witness but simultaneously the substance of all experience. Completely relax the desire to find yourself as an object or to change your experience in any way. Relax into this present knowing of your own being. See that it is intimate, familiar and loving. See clearly that it is never not with you. It is shining here in this experience, knowing and loving its own being. It runs throughout all experience, closer than close, intimately one with all experience but untouched by it. As this intimate oneness, it is known as love. In its untouchable-ness it is known as peace and in its fullness it is known as happiness. In its openness and willingness to give itself to any possible shape (including the apparent veiling of its own being), it is known as freedom and, as the substance of all things, it is known as beauty. However, more simply it is known just as ‘I’ or ‘this’. Who Is? Q: All these questions about consciousness
”
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Rupert Spira (Presence: The Intimacy of All Experience)
“
Stories don’t teach us to be good; it isn’t as simple as that. They show us what it feels like to be good, or to be bad. They show us people like ourselves doing right things and wrong things, acting bravely or acting meanly, being cruel or being kind, and they leave it up to our own powers of empathy and imagination to make the connection with our own lives. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. It isn’t like putting a coin in a machine and getting a chocolate bar; we’re not mechanical, we don’t respond every time in the same way…
The moral teaching comes gently, and quietly, and little by little, and weighs nothing at all. We hardly know it’s happening. But in this silent and discreet way, with every book we read and love, with every story that makes its way into our heart, we gradually acquire models of behaviour and friends we admire and patterns of decency and kindness to follow.
”
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Philip Pullman
“
If Roman Catholic Christianity has always struggled with the threat of works righteousness, Reformed Protestantism has always struggled with the threat of cheap grace. For many, if not the majority of Protestants, God's love and acceptance do not lead to personal transformation. Evangelical formation often involves seeking to reestablish a pattern of maturing behaviour that should be integral to one's conversion. So both traditions can be challenged on whether there is a genuinely helpful connection between conversion and transformation.
”
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Gordon T. Smith (Beginning Well: Christian Conversion & Authentic Transformation)
“
What it adds up to is that, with the advent of the pill, woman is beginning to get her finger on the genetic trigger. What she will do with it we cannot quite foresee. But it is a far cry from the bull who gets to be prolific just because he's tops at beating the daylights out all the other bulls. It may be that for homo sapiens in the future, extreme manifestations of the behaviour patterns of dominance and aggression will be evolutionary at a discount; and if that happens he will begin to shed them as once, long ago, he shed his coat of fur.
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Elaine Morgan (The Descent of Woman: The Classic Study of Evolution)
“
A person's attachment status is a fundamental determinant of their relationships, and this is reflected in the way they feel about themselves and others. Neurotic patterns can be seen as originating here because, where core attachments are problematic, they will have a powerful influence on the way someone sees the world and their behaviour. Where there is a secure core state, a person feels good about themselves and their capacity to be effective and pursue their projects. Where the core state is insecure, defensive strategies come into play.
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Jeremy Holmes (John Bowlby and Attachment Theory (Makers of Modern Psychotherapy))
“
There are parallels, I think, between the impact of Europeans on brown bears, and the effects of domestication, particularly on dogs. Both sets of selective pressure have altered the behaviour and diet of the beasts in question. Admittedly, Europe’s bears still live in the wild, but an argument can be made that the Europeans have domesticated wild Europe itself. It would be well worthwhile assaying the behaviours, diets and reproductive patterns of Europe’s wild animals to determine just how greatly human hunting and habitat alteration have changed them.
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Tim Flannery (Europe: A Natural History)
“
I could have gone on about faerie stories—I’ve written several articles on the subject—but I didn’t know how to talk to him about my scholarship, if what I said would be nonsense to his ears. The truth is that, for the Folk, stories are everything. Stories are part of them and their world in a fundamental way that mortals have difficulty grasping; a story may be a singular event from the past, but—crucially—it is also a pattern that shapes their behaviour and predicts future events. The Folk have no system of laws, and while I am not saying stories are as law to them, they are the closest thing their world has to some form of order.
”
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Heather Fawcett (Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries (Emily Wilde, #1))
“
Literature before the Renaissance had frequently offered ideal patterns for living which were dominated by the ethos of the church, but after the Reformation the search for individual expression and meaning took over. Institutions were questioned and re-evaluated, often while being praised at the same time. But where there had been conventional modes of expression, reflecting ideal modes of behaviour - religious, heroic, or social - Renaissance writing explored the geography of the human soul, redefining its relationship with authority, history, science, and the future. This involved experimentation with form and genre, and an enormous variety of linguistic and literary innovations in a short period of time.
Reason, rather than religion, was the driving force in this search for rules to govern human behaviour in the Renaissance world. The power and mystique of religion had been overthrown in one bold stroke: where the marvellous no longer holds sway, real life has to provide explanations. Man, and the use he makes of his powers, capabilities, and free will, is thus the subject matter of Renaissance literature, from the early sonnets modelled on Petrarch to the English epic which closes the period, Paradise Lost, published after the Restoration, when the Renaissance had long finished.
The Reformation gave cultural, philosophical, and ideological impetus to English Renaissance writing. The writers in the century following the Reformation had to explore and redefine all the concerns of humanity. In a world where old assumptions were no longer valid, where scientific discoveries questioned age-old hypotheses, and where man rather than God was the central interest, it was the writers who reflected and attempted to respond to the disintegration of former certainties. For it is when the universe is out of control that it is at its most frightening - and its most stimulating. There would never again be such an atmosphere of creative tension in the country. What was created was a language, a literature, and a national and international identity.
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Ronald Carter (The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland)
“
t this point I would like to return to the question of the plot movement and the different narrative levels of the book. David Lodge raises a crucial issue when he asks 'how Charlotte Brontë created a literary structure in which the domestic and the mythical, the realistic world of social behaviour and the romantic world of passionate self-consciousness, could co-exist with only occasional
lapses into incongruity.' As far as the plot and setting go, however, this states the question rather misleadingly, for in fact at Thornfield there begins a progressive plot movement from realism to fantasy. By 'realism' I do not mean the predominance of the every day and commonplace, or an authorial objectivity of treatment,
but simply the use of material that the reader can accept
as existing in the ordinary world as well, or of events of a kind that might happen in it without being viewed as extraordinary. That is, things that have a face-value currency of meaning prior to any concealed meaning they may hold or suggest. Thus while Gateshead and Lowood School fit neatly into, and contribute importantly to,
the symbolic pattern of the book, they are perfectly believable places in their own right. Even the heavy-handed and obvious satire of Mr Brocklehurst and his family does not invalidate him as a credible conception. But with the beginning of the mystery of the Thornfield attic the plot starts moving away from this facevalue
actuality.
”
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Ian Gregor (Reading the Victorian novel: Detail into form (Vision critical studies))
“
inside “VIRTUE,” according to George Bernard Shaw, “is insufficient temptation.” But new research on the consumption patterns of the environmentally minded suggests that virtue and self-indulgence often go hand-in-hand. A recent paper* by Uma Karmarkar of Harvard Business School and Bryan Bollinger of Duke Fuqua School of Business finds that shoppers who bring their own bags when they buy groceries like to reward themselves for it. For two years the authors tracked transactions at a supermarket in America. Perhaps unsurprisingly, shoppers who brought their own bags bought more green products than those who used the store’s bags. But the eco-shoppers were also more likely to buy sweets, ice cream and crisps. Psychologists call this sort of behaviour “moral
”
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Anonymous
“
A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action. [...] Each people further and further consolidates its experience, and in proportion to the urgency of these drives the heterogenous items of behaviour take more and more congruous shape. [...]
Such patterning of culture cannot be ignored as if it were an unimportant detail. The whole, as modern science is insisting in many fields, is not merely the sum of all its parts, but the result of a unique arrangement and interrelation of the parts that has brought about a new entity. Gunpowder is not merely the sum of sulphur and charcoal and saltpeter, and no amount of knowledge even of all three of tis elements in all the forms they take in the natural world will demonstrate the nature of gunpowder.
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Ruth Benedict (Patterns Of Culture)
“
in order for a behaviour pattern—altruistic or selfish—to evolve, it is necessary that a gene ‘for’ that behaviour should survive in the gene pool more successfully than a rival gene or allele ‘for’ some different behaviour. A gene for altruistic behaviour means any gene that influences the development of nervous systems in such a way as to make them likely to behave altruistically.* Is there any experimental evidence for the genetic inheritance of altruistic behaviour? No, but that is hardly surprising, since little work has been done on the genetics of any behaviour. Instead, let me tell you about one study of a behaviour pattern which does not happen to be obviously altruistic, but which is complex enough to be interesting. It serves as a model for how altruistic behaviour might be inherited.
”
”
Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene)
“
In the end he came to the realisation that suffering is not caused by ill fortune, by social injustice, or by divine whims. Rather, suffering is caused by the behaviour patterns of one’s own mind. Gautama’s insight was that no matter what the mind experiences, it usually reacts with craving, and craving always involves dissatisfaction. When the mind experiences something distasteful it craves to be rid of the irritation. When the mind experiences something pleasant, it craves that the pleasure will remain and will intensify. Therefore, the mind is always dissatisfied and restless. This is very clear when we experience unpleasant things, such as pain. As long as the pain continues, we are dissatisfied and do all we can to avoid it. Yet even when we experience pleasant things we are never content. We either fear that the pleasure might disappear, or we hope that it will intensify.
”
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
Many arms races bankrupt all those who take part in them, without really changing the military balance of power. When Pakistan buys advanced aeroplanes, India responds in kind. When India develops nuclear bombs, Pakistan follows suit. When Pakistan enlarges its navy, India counters. At the end of the process, the balance of power may remain much as it was, but meanwhile billions of dollars that could have been invested in education or health are spent on weapons. Yet the arms race dynamic is hard to resist. ‘Arms racing’ is a pattern of behaviour that spreads itself like a virus from one country to another, harming everyone, but benefiting itself, under the evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction. (Keep in mind that an arms race, like a gene, has no awareness – it does not consciously seek to survive and reproduce. Its spread is the unintended result of a powerful dynamic.)
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
The central figure of Buddhism is not a god but a human being, Siddhartha Gautama. According to Buddhist tradition, Gautama was heir to a small Himalayan kingdom, sometime around 500 BC. The young prince was deeply affected by the suffering evident all around him. He saw that men and women, children and old people, all suffer not just from occasional calamities such as war and plague, but also from anxiety, frustration and discontent, all of which seem to be an inseparable part of the human condition. People pursue wealth and power, acquire knowledge and possessions, beget sons and daughters, and build houses and palaces. Yet no matter what they achieve, they are never content. Those who live in poverty dream of riches. Those who have a million want two million. Those who have two million want 10 million. Even the rich and famous are rarely satisfied. They too are haunted by ceaseless cares and worries, until sickness, old age and death put a bitter end to them. Everything that one has accumulated vanishes like smoke. Life is a pointless rat race. But how to escape it? At the age of twenty-nine Gautama slipped away from his palace in the middle of the night, leaving behind his family and possessions. He travelled as a homeless vagabond throughout northern India, searching for a way out of suffering. He visited ashrams and sat at the feet of gurus but nothing liberated him entirely – some dissatisfaction always remained. He did not despair. He resolved to investigate suffering on his own until he found a method for complete liberation. He spent six years meditating on the essence, causes and cures for human anguish. In the end he came to the realisation that suffering is not caused by ill fortune, by social injustice, or by divine whims. Rather, suffering is caused by the behaviour patterns of one’s own mind. Gautama’s insight was that no matter what the mind experiences, it usually reacts with craving, and craving always involves dissatisfaction. When the mind experiences something distasteful it craves to be rid of the irritation. When the mind experiences something pleasant, it craves that the pleasure will remain and will intensify. Therefore, the mind is always dissatisfied and restless. This is very clear when we experience unpleasant things, such as pain. As long as the pain continues, we are dissatisfied and do all we can to avoid it. Yet even when we experience pleasant things we are never content. We either fear that the pleasure might disappear, or we hope that it will intensify. People dream for years about finding love but are rarely satisfied when they find it. Some become anxious that their partner will leave; others feel that they have settled cheaply, and could have found someone better. And we all know people who manage to do both.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
Sure, spontaneity seems like a good trait, but I don't like it if it’s put into action repetitively. Sometimes things that may seem spontaneous are actually "the other person" only caring about their own schedule and not ours. The same thing goes with "indecisiveness," many say that they’re “open” to a relationship with the right person but not necessarily looking for one... Yes, some by their nature are smooth operators who know how to get what they want and get out; however, buttering me up doesn't lower my defenses.
If someone tries to get into my good graces quickly so they can look for signs that I am down for a cheap hookup, I will let them think whatever they want to (that's their free choice not mine). Meanwhile, I will be analyzing and possible learning new tricks that were not familiar to me... like scientists, who amuse themselves analyzing lab rats. I am not going to sugarcoat it... After a certain age, you simply lose interest and you settle for pretending in order to be entertained.
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Efrat Cybulkiewicz
“
What is a novel, anyway? Only a very foolish person would attempt to give a definitive answer to that, beyond stating the more or less obvious facts that it is a literary narrative of some length which purports, on the reverse of the title page, not to be true, but seeks nevertheless to convince its readers that it is. It's typical of the cynicism of our age that, if you write a novel, everyone assumes it's about real people, thinly disguised; but if you write an autobiography everyone assumes you're lying your head off. Part of this is right, because every artist is, among other things, a con-artist.
We con-artists do tell the truth, in a way; but, as Emily Dickenson said, we tell it slant. By indirection we find direction out -- so here, for easy reference, is an elimination-dance list of what novels are not.
-- Novels are not sociological textbooks, although they may contain social comment and criticism.
-- Novels are not political tracts, although "politics" -- in the sense of human power structures -- is inevitably one of their subjects. But if the author's main design on us is to convert us to something -- - whether that something be Christianity, capitalism, a belief in marriage as the only answer to a maiden's prayer, or feminism, we are likely to sniff it out, and to rebel. As Andre Gide once remarked, "It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written."
-- Novels are not how-to books; they will not show you how to conduct a successful life, although some of them may be read this way. Is Pride and Prejudice about how a sensible middle-class nineteenth-century woman can snare an appropriate man with a good income, which is the best she can hope for out of life, given the limitations of her situation? Partly. But not completely.
-- Novels are not, primarily, moral tracts. Their characters are not all models of good behaviour -- or, if they are, we probably won't read them. But they are linked with notions of morality, because they are about human beings and human beings divide behaviour into good and bad. The characters judge each other, and the reader judges the characters. However, the success of a novel does not depend on a Not Guilty verdict from the reader. As Keats said, Shakespeare took as much delight in creating Iago -- that arch-villain -- as he did in creating the virtuous Imogen. I would say probably more, and the proof of it is that I'd bet you're more likely to know which play Iago is in.
-- But although a novel is not a political tract, a how-to-book, a sociology textbook or a pattern of correct morality, it is also not merely a piece of Art for Art's Sake, divorced from real life. It cannot do without a conception of form and a structure, true, but its roots are in the mud; its flowers, if any, come out of the rawness of its raw materials.
-- In short, novels are ambiguous and multi-faceted, not because they're perverse, but because they attempt to grapple with what was once referred to as the human condition, and they do so using a medium which is notoriously slippery -- namely, language itself.
”
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Margaret Atwood (Spotty-Handed Villainesses)
“
I have identified patterns in the technology and civilisational behaviour that confirms to me, with great certainty, that approximately thirty thousand human years ago, about ten thousand years after the date of the ceephays’ fall, a new center of data and physical traffic accumulated at the Keijir System. Ten thousand years correlates closely with how long I estimate a ceephay vessel would have taken to travel some feasible sublight to avoid detection using jump engines, until being discovered by reeh vessels, possibly in some kind of hibernation. The accumulation of technologies at the Keijir System was very rapid, and was responded to by several of the species who were recording this data. There are even several surviving speculations from their academia at the time, wondering what was happening at Keijir. I believe these events are entirely consistent with the discovery, by an organic species of lesser intelligence and capability, of an entity of greater intelligence and capability. Great technological advances appear to have followed, and the expansion of what became the Reeh Empire commenced shortly thereafter.
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Joel Shepherd (Qalea Drop (The Spiral Wars, #7))
“
while the behaviour patterns of archaic humans remained fixed for tens of thousands of years, Sapiens could transform their social structures, the nature of their interpersonal relations, their economic activities and a host of other behaviours within a decade or two. Consider a resident o Berlin, born in 1900 and living to the ripe age of one hundred. She spent her childhood in the Hohenzollern Empire of Wilhelm II; her adult years in the Weimar Republic, the Nazi Third Reich and Communist East Germany; and she died a citizen of a democratic and reunified Germany. She had managed to be a part of five very different sociopolitical systems, though her DNA remained exactly the same.
This was the key to Sapiens' success. In a one-on-one brawl, a Neanderthal would probably have beaten a Sapiens. But in a conflict of hundreds, Neanderthals wouldn't stand a chance. Neanderthals could share information about the whereabouts of lions, but they probably could not tell - and revise - stories about tribal spirits. Without an ability to compose fiction, Neanderthals were unable to cooperate effectively in large numbers, nor could they adapt their social behaviour to rapidly changing challenging. (p. 38)
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Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
“
To state the proposition, generally, at the outset, I assert that the whole end and object of the Etiquette of Courtship and Matrimony is to insult, persecute, and degrade the bridegroom. I first became satisfied of this disgraceful fact at page thirty-six of the Hand Book or Manual. In the earlier part of the volume it was assumed that I had fallen in love, had made my offer, and had been accepted by my young woman and her family. Etiquette is hard on my heels all through those preliminary processes, and finally runs me down as soon as I appear in the character of an engaged man. My behaviour in my future wife’s company is of the last importance and there Etiquette has me, and never lets me go again. “In private,” says the Manual, “the slightest approach to familiarity must be avoided, as it will always be resented by a woman who deserves to be a wife.” So! I may be brimming over with affection; I may even have put on a soft waistcoat expressly for the purpose; but I am never to clasp my future wife with rapture to my bosom; I am never to print upon her soft cheek a momentary impression of the pattern of my upper shirt-stud! She is to keep me at arm’s length, in private as well as in public and I am actually expected to believe, all the time, that she is devotedly attached to me! First insult.
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Wilkie Collins (The Collected Works of Wilkie Collins: The Complete Works PergamonMedia)
“
Narrow behaviourist thinking
permeates political and social policy and medical practice, the
childrearing advice dispensed by “parenting experts” and academic
discourse. We keep trying to change people’s behaviours without a full
understanding of how and why those behaviours arise. “Inner causes
are not the proper domain of psychology,” writes Roy Wise, an expert
on the psychology of addiction, and a prominent investigator in the
National Institute on Drug Abuse in the U.S.A.3 This statement seems
astonishing, coming from a psychologist. In reality, there can be no
understanding of human beings, let alone of addicted human beings,
without looking at “inner causes,” tricky as those causes can be to pin
down at times. Behaviours, especially compulsive behaviours, are
often the active representations of emotional states and of special
kinds of brain functioning.
As we have seen, the dominant emotional states and the brain
patterns of human beings are shaped by their early environment.
Throughout their lifetimes, they are in dynamic interaction with various
social and emotional milieus. If we are to help addicts, we must strive
to change not them but their environments. These are the only things
we can change. Transformation of the addict must come from within
and the best we can do is to encourage it. Fortunately, there is much
that we can do.
”
”
Gabor Maté
“
However, it looks somewhat different when viewed not from the personalistic standpoint, i.e., from the personal situation of Miss Miller, but from the standpoint of the archetype’s own life. As we have already explained, the phenomena of the unconscious can be regarded as more or less spontaneous manifestations of autonomous archetypes, and though this hypothesis may seem very strange to the layman, it is amply supported by the fact the archetype has a numinous character: it exerts a fascination, it enters into active opposition to the conscious mind, and may be said in the long run to mould the destinies of individuals by unconsciously influencing their thinking, feeling, and behaviour, even if this influence is not recognized until long afterwards. The primordial image is itself a “pattern of behaviour”4 which will assert itself with or without the co-operation of the conscious personality. Although the Miller case gives us some idea of the manner in which an archetype gradually draws nearer to consciousness and finally takes possession of it, the material is too scanty to serve as a complete illustration of the process. I must therefore refer my reader to the dream-series discussed in Psychology and Alchemy, where he will be able to follow the gradual emergence of a definite archetype with all the specific marks of its autonomy and authority.
”
”
C.G. Jung (Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung))
“
There are two parts to growing as a person—well, no, there aren’t, there’s more, but you can simplify it down—the first is pinpointing problematic areas, the toxic parts, as you said, and cutting them out. You are immensely good at this,” he said, and it sounded a quite genuine compliment, “but it is only one half of the equation. The other part, once you have hollowed out all the offensive parts, is to replace them with healthy, constructive parts. New behaviours; new patterns of thought. Something to nurture those empty spaces back to whole. Because otherwise those holes stay open, and they beg to be filled, and they will collapse on themselves and cause even bigger problems than the things that once lived inside of them. And you, Ronoah? You are singularly lacking in imagination in this respect. You take half the bricks out of a veritable castle of behavioural instinct and you expect it to hold—you never put new ones back in. And I shall tell you why. “There is a difference between action and character. One you change on purpose, but the other, it changes clandestine, without your noticing, until one day you have to run to catch up with where it’s got to. There is a difference between making a mistake, and being a mistake,” he said, tapping Ronoah’s shoulder with one, and then two fingers. “Your problem, Ronoah, quite possibly one of the only problems I can offer that you have not already thought of, is that you are constantly conflating the two. To the everyday eye, character is immovable, immutable—how do you solve a problem when the problem is you? You cannot improve a broken system when the only tool you have with which to do the fixing-up is the system itself. You need new parts, better data—and it just so happens you are discarding a rather sizeable portion of the available data on yourself while you’re at it, which makes your calculations even more erroneous. Because, and get ready for this, it might come as a bit of a shock—because you are not actually broken.
”
”
Sienna Tristen (Theory (The Heretic's Guide to Homecoming #1))
“
All addictions — whether to drugs or to nondrug behaviours — share the same brain circuits and brain chemicals. On the biochemical level the purpose of all addictions is to create an altered physiological state in the brain. This can be achieved in many ways, drug taking being the most direct. So an addiction is never purely “psychological” all addictions have a biological dimension. And here a word about dimensions. As we delve into the scientific research, we need to avoid the trap of believing that addiction can be reduced to the actions of brain chemicals or nerve circuits or any other kind of neurobiological, psychological or sociological data. A multilevel exploration is necessary because it’s impossible to understand addiction fully from any one perspective, no matter how accurate.
Addiction is a complex condition, a complex interaction between human beings and their environment. We need to view it simultaneously from many different angles — or, at least, while examining it from one angle, we need to keep the others in mind. Addiction has biological, chemical, neurological, psychological, medical, emotional, social, political, economic and spiritual underpinnings — and perhaps others I haven’t thought about. To get anywhere near a complete picture we must keep shaking the kaleidoscope to see what other patterns emerge. Because the addiction process is too multifaceted to be understood within any limited framework, my definition of addiction made no mention of “disease.”
Viewing addiction as an illness, either acquired or inherited, narrows it down to a medical issue. It does have some of the features of illness, and these are most pronounced in hardcore drug addicts like the ones I work with in the Downtown Eastside. But not for a moment do I wish to promote the belief that the disease model by itself explains addiction or even that it’s the key to understanding what addiction is all about. Addiction is “all about” many things. Note, too, that neither the textbook definitions of drug addiction nor the broader view we’re taking here includes the concepts of physical dependence or tolerance as criteria for addiction.
Tolerance is an instance of “give an inch, take a mile.” That is, the addict needs to use more and more of the same substance or engage in more and more of the same behaviour, to get the same rewarding effects. Although tolerance is a common effect of many addictions, a person does not need to have developed a tolerance to be addicted.
”
”
Gabor Maté (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction)
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What, then, is addiction? In the words of a consensus statement by addiction experts in 2001, addiction is a “chronic neurobiological disease… characterized by behaviors that include one or more of the following: impaired control over drug use, compulsive use, continued use despite harm, and craving.” The key features of substance addiction are the use of drugs or alcohol despite negative consequences, and relapse. I’ve heard some people shrug off their addictive tendencies by saying, for example, “I can’t be an alcoholic. I don’t drink that much…” or “I only drink at certain times.” The issue is not the quantity or even the frequency, but the impact.
“An addict continues to use a drug when evidence strongly demonstrates the drug is doing significant harm…. If users show the pattern of preoccupation and compulsive use repeatedly over time with relapse, addiction can be identified.” Helpful as such definitions are, we have to take a broader view to understand addiction fully. There is a fundamental addiction process that can express itself in many ways, through many different habits. The use of substances like heroin, cocaine, nicotine and alcohol are only the most obvious examples, the most laden with the risk of physiological and medical consequences.
Many behavioural, nonsubstance addictions can also be highly destructive to physical health, psychological balance, and personal and social relationships. Addiction is any repeated behaviour, substance-related or not, in which a person feels compelled to persist, regardless of its negative impact on his life and the lives of others. Addiction involves: 1. compulsive engagement with the behaviour, a preoccupation with it; 2.
impaired control over the behaviour; 3. persistence or relapse, despite evidence of harm; and 4. dissatisfaction, irritability or intense craving when the object — be it a drug, activity or other goal — is not immediately available. Compulsion, impaired control, persistence, irritability, relapse and craving — these are the hallmarks of addiction — any addiction.
Not all harmful compulsions are addictions, though: an obsessive-compulsive, for example, also has impaired control and persists in a ritualized and psychologically debilitating behaviour such as, say, repeated hand washing. The difference is that he has no craving for it and, unlike the addict, he gets no kick out of his compulsion. How does the addict know she has impaired control? Because she doesn’t stop the behaviour in spite of its ill effects. She makes promises to herself or others to quit, but despite pain, peril and promises, she keeps relapsing. There are exceptions, of course. Some addicts never recognize the harm their behaviours cause and never form resolutions to end them. They stay in denial and rationalization. Others openly accept the risk, resolving to live and die “my way.
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Gabor Maté (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction)
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Be careful who you choose to allow into your circle, our behaviour and thought patterns mirror those we hang around with.
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Dee Waldeck
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Are our lives like car-worn ruts
In the face of the ground
Created through habitual use
And so set in place that they dictate
An unalterable course of drudgery,
Complaints, and same 'ol same 'ol,
Which if bucked threatens our security?
That is one long sentence, isn't it?
You can change it.
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Mark LeClair DeGange
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As the search continues for an understanding of the archetypal images, Jung would probably have us remember that an archetype is a hypothetical model, something like the 'pattern of behaviour' in biology. The portraits of the Goddesses in patriarchal mythology are, indeed, patterns of behaviour: They are stories told by men of how women react under patriarchy.
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Charlene Spretnak (Lost Goddesses of Early Greece: A Collection of Pre-Hellenic Myths)
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Nobility would be defined by the privilege of owning other human beings, setting a Russian pattern of behaviour: servility to those above, tyranny to those below.
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Simon Sebag Montefiore (The Romanovs: 1613-1918)
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C18: A child is autistic or has Asperger's syndrome. Should we use one language only with the child? Children diagnosed with a specific autism spectrum disorder have a greater or lesser degree of impairment in language and communication skills, as well as repetitive or restrictive patterns of thought and behaviour, with delays in social and emotional development. Such children use language in restricted ways, expecting much consistency in language and communication, and are less likely to learn through language. However, such children may experience the social and cultural benefits of bilingualism when living in a dual language environment. For example, such children may understand and speak two languages of the local community at their own level. Like many parents of children with language impairment, bilingualism was frequently blamed by teachers and other professionals for the early signs of Asperger's, and a move to monolingualism was frequently regarded as an essential relief from the challenges. There is almost no research on autism and bilingualism or on Asperger's syndrome and bilingualism. However, a study by Susan Rubinyi of her son, who has Asperger's syndrome, provides insights. Someone with the challenge of Asperger's also has gifts and exceptional talents, including in language. Her son, Ben, became bilingual in English and French using the one parent–one language approach (OPOL). Susan Rubinyi sees definite advantages for a child who has challenges with flexibility and understanding the existence of different perspectives. Merely the fact that there are two different ways to describe the same object or concept in each language, enlarges the perception of the possible. Since a bilingual learns culture as well as language, the child sees alternative ways of approaching multiple areas of life (eating, recreation, transportation etc.) (p. 20). She argues that, because of bilingualism, her son's brain had a chance to partly rewire itself even before Asperger's syndrome became obvious. Also, the intense focus of Asperger's meant that Ben absorbed vocabulary at a very fast rate, with almost perfect native speaker intonation. Further Reading: Rubinyi, S. (2006) Natural Genius: The Gifts of Asperger's Syndrome . Philadelphia & London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
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Colin Baker (A Parents' and Teachers' Guide to Bilingualism)
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You Don’t Need the Terminology Charts are very simple and don’t need “cups and handles”, “head and shoulders”, or any of the other fancy terminology that is used to explain them. I guess if you need to charge people and sound educated about charts, you need to use a lot of such terminology and give some intellectual sounding name to a pattern. I won’t put too much weight on these terms and patterns. Just keep in mind that the charts are showing you the collective behaviour of all those who are in the market at that time. With
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Ashu Dutt (15 Easy Steps to Mastering Technical Charts)
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Norms do not as a rule come into existence at a definite point in time, nor are they the result of a manageable number of identifiable acts. The are, rather, the resultant of complex patterns of behaviour of a large number of people over a protracted period of time.
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Edna Ullmann-Margalit (The Emergence of Norms (Clarendon Library of Logic and Philosophy))
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There are three categories of criteria that an individual must meet in order to be diagnosed with ASD. The categories are listed below along with the typical traits, which may indicate whether the individual needs further assessment: 1.Persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction across contexts, not accounted for by general developmental delays: lack of friends and social life friends often much older or younger mumbling and not completing sentences issues with social rules (such as staring at other people) inability to understand jokes and the benefit of ‘small talk’ introverted (shy) and socially awkward inability to understand other people’s thoughts and feelings uncomfortable in large crowds and noisy places detached and emotionally inexpressive. 2.Restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviour, interests or activities: obsession with ‘special interests’ collecting objects (such as stamps and coins) attachment to routines and rituals ability to focus on a single task for long periods eccentric or unorthodox behaviour non-conformist and distrusting of authority difficulty following illogical conventions attracted to foreign cultures affinity with nature and animals support for victims of injustice, underdogs and scapegoats. 3.Restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviour, interests or activities: inappropriate emotional responses victimised or bullied at school, work and home overthinking and constant logical analysis spending much time alone strange laugh or cackle inability to make direct eye contact when talking highly sensitive to light, sound, taste, smell and touch uncoordinated and clumsy with poor posture difficulty coping with change adept at abstract thinking ability to process data sets logically and notice patterns or trends truthful, naïve and often gullible slow mental processing and vulnerable to mental exhaustion intellectual and ungrounded rather than intuitive and instinctive problems with anxiety and sleeping visual memory.
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Philip Wylie (Very Late Diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome (Autism Spectrum Disorder): How Seeking a Diagnosis in Adulthood Can Change Your Life)
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Once you have organized your data, you will need to identify the meanings and categorize them accordingly. This could be based on patterns of behaviour, regulations, and critical events. The final step is your interpretation – what is the general nature of the group and its practices? You can use an existing theoretical framework for structure and support during the interpretation process (Leedy and Ormrod, 2010: 140).
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Gjoko Muratovski (Research for Designers: A Guide to Methods and Practice)
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One of the most revealing studies of the problem concerns a bird, the blue tit. The females of this species show all of the behaviour we have just described for women. Those lucky ones paired to genetically superior males with the best territories are totally faithful. Neighbouring females, paired to genetically inferior males, take every opportunity to seek infidelity with the superior males. They sneak into the better males' territories, solicit intercourse, then return unobserved to the partner they have just cheated. On average, about a third of young birds in a nest have not been sired by their mother's partner. Actual levels range from 0 per cent in the nests of the most favoured males to about 80 per cent in the nests of the least favoured ones.
A surprisingly similar pattern is found in humans. On average, about 10 per cent of children are not sired by their supposed father. Some men, however, have a higher chance of being deceived in this way than others — and it is those of low wealth and status who fare worst. Actual figures range from 1 per cent in high-status areas of Switzerland and the USA, through 5-6 per cent for moderate-status males in Britain and the USA, to 10-30 per cent for lower-status males in Britain, France and the USA.
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Robin Baker (Sperm Wars: Infidelity, Sexual Conflict, and Other Bedroom Battles)
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But even as Nikki was saying it, she knew that wasn’t quite true. Ned was different this time. His anger less focused. His triggers less predictable. His patterns of behaviour, the swoop and swerve of his annoyances, far more erratic
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Ellery Lloyd (The Club)
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We are doomed to endlessly enact patterns of behaviour not of our own creation; not of anyone's creation really, until some seismic shift in the cultural equivalent of tectonic plates lands us somehow in a new, equally inexplicable arrangement.
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David Graeber, David Wengrow