"The Whole Brain Child", "The Consolations of Philosophy", "The Wishing Spell"

[fiefoe]

By Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson. Notes:

"connect & redirect": when kid is upset, appeal to right brain emotion, then logic
"name it to tame it": retell the story
"engage, don't enrage": avoid downstairs brain takeover
: draw attention to other people's emotions to work on empathy;
"use it or lose it": making choices like allowances, controling body/emotion, self-knowledge;
: help child anticipate reactions and how to deal, morality questions like when to run a red-light
"move it or lose it": moving body helps controling brains
: neutrons fire together link together (to form memory), implicit vs explicit memory, implicit memory forms model of mind, or 'priming' (e.g. PTSD). forming explict memory= story you can control
: replaying memory to integrate explicit and implicit memory like using a remote of mind
"remember to remember": ask 1 thing that happened and 1 thing that's fake
"brain wheel": one emotion just one spoke, not hub，"when do u think u'll feel better"
"SIFT game": sensation, image in mind, feeling, thoughts
calming mind exercises: focus on hearing/breathing; choose to think of other spokes
insight+empathy =mindsight: other ppl's brain, mirror neurons, teach non-verbal cues and model them
dopamine games: playing together like improvise stories

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Alain de Botton was really good at making the scene of Socrates' death come alive for me, but my attention fell off with the later philosophers.

• Being incomprehensible offers unparalleled protection against having nothing to say...but writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those with a tenacious belief that the impassable prose is a hallmark of intelligence.
• while to be surrounded by friends is constantly to have our identity confirmed; their knowledge and care for us have the power to pull us from our numbness.
• Christianity had, in Nietzsche’s account, emerged from the minds of timid slaves in the Roman Empire who had lacked the stomach to climb to the tops of mountains, and so had built themselves a philosophy claiming that their bases were delightful... Every feeling of weakness was overlaid with a sanctifying name, and made to seem ‘a voluntary achievement, something wanted, chosen, a deed, an accomplishment’. Addicted to ‘the religion of comfortableness’, Christians, in their value system, had given precedence to what was easy, not what was desirable, and so had drained life of its potential.
• Nothing satisfies the man who is not satisfied with a little.
• Nietzsche was striving to correct the belief that fulfillment must come easily or not at all, a belief ruinous in its effects, for it leads us to withdraw prematurely from challenges that might have been overcome if only we had been prepared for the savagery legitimately demanded by almost everything valuable.
• All lives are difficult; what makes some of them fulfilled as well is the manner in which pains have been met.
• In Montaigne’s redrawn portrait of the adequate, semi-rational human being, it is possible to speak no Greek, fart, change one’s mind after a meal, get bored with books, know none of the ancient philosophers and mistake Scipios. A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
• Epicurus observed that: Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one’s entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.
• 1828 Turns forty. ‘After his fortieth year,’ he consoles himself, ‘any man of merit … will hardly be free from a certain touch of misanthropy.

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Author Chris Colfer also did the audiobook. Another sibling adventure.