Quotes About Psychology

Let us remember that Transactional Psychology has proven that, contrary to common sense and the prejudices of centuries, our minds do not passively receive impressions from the external world. Rather we actively create our impressions: out of an ocean of possible signals, our brains notice the signals that fit what we expect to see, and we organize these signals into a model, or reality-tunnel, that marvelously matches our ideas about what is really out there.

None of Dr. Leary's most important studies have either suffered refutation or enjoyed confirmation, because enacted law — statutes enacted after and because of Dr. Leary's research — makes it a crime for any other psychologists or psychiatrists to replicate such research. I know you've heard that the Inquisition ended in 1819, but in many areas of psychotherapy and medicine, the U.S. government has taken up where the Vatican left off.

Don't you think we all go a little mad sometimes? —Psycho

Take this as delightful whimsy or sinister nonsense, file it as you will according to your own reality-tunnel, but — our information bank has grown richer. Dozens of UFO/rabbit stories indicate something about UFOs or something about human psychology, something we never suspected before.

5. Psychologist Barbara Honegger explains synchronicities by saying that the right brain hemisphere (where this circuit is located) moves you in space-time to the place where the synchronicity will occur, while the Rationalist left brain invents rationalizations to go there. Synchronicities are a language through which this circuit communicates with the left brain, in this theory. Try explaining coincidences by that theory. What messages is your right brain trying to send to your left brain?

Thus, under hypnosis, a person who has been given salt and told that it is sugar will taste it as sweet – thereby illustrating the brain-plus-tongue phenomenon. Similarly, a hypnotized subject shown a green circle and told that it is red will see it as red. That is because we see with brain-plus-eye.* ~•~

But, if our brain software programs our selves and our universes, who programs our brain software? The accidents of history and environment, it seems — in most cases. But learning to internalize and use the principles of Quantum Psychology (or similar systems) adds a new factor. In that case we can gradually learn to program our programs . . . Dr. John Lilly calls this metaprogramming.

Do people only re-act as if words really equal things ("sticks and stones may break my bones, and names can also hurt me") in such "touchy" areas? Try opening two restaurants and have the menu in one say "Chef's special: Tender, juicy filet mignon" and have the other menu say "Chefs special: a hunk of dead meat hacked off a castrated bull." Both phrases describe the same nonverbal event, but see which sells better.

Social fields are real enough that, as psychologists have demonstrated, people react visibly when you come within their personal space: they become defensive or nervous. Social fields are not real enough to remain constant, as physical fields do, or usually do. They vary from culture to culture. An American reacts nervously when you get within one foot of him, but a Mexican wants you that close and becomes nervous if you stay further away.

In ordinary language, the semantic circuit is usually called "the mind." (As psychologist Robert Ornstein said in a recent radio show, when we say someone "has a good mind," we generally mean they have a good mouth, i.e., they use the semantic circuit well.)

To put it mildly, men who hate men, like women who hate men, seem to be working on inner psychological problems, not on scientific research.

The second, emotional-territorial circuit, creates a two-dimensional social space in conjunction with first-circuit advance-retreat.

In the very real sense we are, as the Buddhists say, a void. We are empty. We can become anything. Most people have very strong armors to prevent themselves from realizing the void. It's frightening. But once you've accepted the void, you realize you can become anything. You can fill the void with anything you want, if you have the psychological techniques to do it.

Pragmatism has a family resemblance to existentialism and phenomenology and arose out of the same social manifold. This philosophy, or method, derives chiefly from William James — a man so complex that his books land in the philosophy section of some bookstores and libraries, the psychology section elsewhere, and sometimes even appear in the religion section. Like existentialism, pragmatism rejects spooky abstractions and most of the vocabulary of traditional philosophy.

Physics joined linguistics, mathematics and psychology in this metaprogramming hall of mirrors when Schrödinger demonstrated that quantum events are not objective" in the Newtonian sense. For fifty years since then, physicists have been struggling to build a system that will get them out of this Strange Loop. The results have been as funny as a Zen koan.

General Semantics has influenced recent psychology and social science greatly but has had little effect on physical sciences or education and virtually no effect on the problems it attempted to alleviate — i.e., the omnipresence of unacknowledged bigotry and unconscious prejudice in most human evaluations.

Transactional Psychology, based largely on the pioneering research concerning human perception conducted at Princeton University in the 1940s by Albert Ames, agrees with all the above systems that we cannot know any abstract Truth but only relative truths (small t, plural) derived from our gambles as our brain makes models of the ocean of new signals it receives every second.

C.H. Douglas presented a graph to the MacMillan Commission in 1932 showing that as the interest rate rises, the suicide rate rises; as the interest rate drops, the suicide rate drops. His graph was from 1812 to 1932. Psychologists who don't think about factors like that are ignoring the context of their own science.

Of course, these are genetic/historical generalizations which do not precisely match any specific family. The gracious goddess/hostile giant archetypes are not activated in cases where the mother is cold, rejecting, embittered etc. and the father is the warm, supportive figure. The imprints on the first and second circuits are statistically deviant in such families and anything may result — a shaman, a schizophrenic, a genius, a homosexual, an artist, a psychologist, etc.

language controls our thinking.

And does it not appear that virtual selves and virtual realities have infiltrated both psychology and physics because, as this book claims, all sufficiently advanced analysis must eventually abandon Aristotelian certitude and accept models — reality tunnels — based on probabilities?

We do much better," she said, "explaining why people did things than we do at predicting what they will do.

When we settled in to eat, Susan said, "So, tell me about it." "You shrinks are always so cocksure," I said. "Nice word choice," Susan said. "In the current context.

She's a sicko, Hawk." "Ah ain't planning to screw her psyche, babe.