A Journal of My Thoughts

( EN ) - Ha! Another year comes to an end! ... When I look back, I feel as if the year went by so quickly. Take this photo I took, for example: the time stamp shows the date as Saturday, Jan 7, 2017 at 7:05 pm. But I remember it like it was just a week ago... Yeah, yeah, I know: this is how we perceive time when we look back, especially as we get older ... :) But still... Either way, 2018 is just around the corner and I wonder how you feel about it. You know, we, humans, like to have a closure. Hence, we tend to have one -or several- when we near the end of the year. So, how do you feel? Any resolutions? Any big plans? Any promises to stop doing this or start doing that? Any personal goals to help improve your life? Well, as for me... I love new beginnings! Not just the start of a new year, but all beginnings; every morning is included. So, I don't have any big plans. In fact, I don't plan my life anymore. I just try to live one day at a time. I may not be th...

( EN ) - Ahh, here comes December and with it comes more self-consciousness... I got sick last week. It was probably a virus, causing me trouble for a little bit. Especially for the first two days, I was feeling pretty bad, also weak, and I was in bed, mostly sleeping. Then on the following days, I started getting better. But as my doctors advised me to take a good rest for a speedy recovery, I obeyed and stayed at home, mostly resting. Hence, I had too much time on my hands. Guess what I did with this extra bit of time? Ha haa, yes, I did what I love most: read couple of articles, related to a project I'm building up. And of course, while I was searching for a reading material for the project I had in mind, I came across a couple of -not related but- great blog posts and one of them stayed in my mind longer than expected... and surprising as it may seem, yet it wasn't actually, with it came more awareness... The article¹ was about how we miss what is . Yes, it'...

(How typical of me¹!: Listening to music while running errands) (Nasıl da tam da ben¹!: Angaryaları hallederken müzik dinlemek) 👉 Türkçe'si Aşağıda 👇 ( EN ) - Here, first, let me ask you: what do you do on your "me time"? Hmmm... I think, right now, I hear some of you saying cynically: "Me time? Kidding?" Or may be, some of you are getting angry since I'm reminding you of a non-existent time concept in your life right now ... And I get it, sometimes me time sounds like a fantasy. But in this chaotic nature of today's world, it's obviously a necessity, not a fantasy, in my opinion... So, I'm not backing down: I'm definitely here to remind you... On the other hand, no worries, folks. I'm not going to exaggerate, nor will I overrate, the concept of me time. And I know; life moves pretty fast and there are many things in our lives that we need to catch up on. But the thing is that the attempts to 'catch up' on many t...

( ¹ ) ( EN ) - Could someone really tell me why psychiatrists don't normally look at the brain scans while they are trying to diagnose mental illnesses? To be honest, I've never thought about it until I watched the video above. The speaker is Dr Daniel Amen who is an American psychiatrist, a clinical neuroscientist, a brain disorder specialist and also the director of Amen Clinics. As he puts it in this TEDx talk, psychiatrists are the only medical specialists that virtually never look at the organ they treat ! How come? And come to think of it, how true! I mean, I'm not a doctor of any sorts but as logic dictates, what psychiatrists should really do first is actually to look at the organ they treat, right? And yes, I get it, imaging is still expensive. Yet other doctors do it all the time; that when we go to them, most of the time they order imaging right away and we comply whether it's expensive or not, don't we? So, being expensive is not the issue here a...

( ¹ ) ( EN ) - Thanks to my dear friend, I watched this movie sooner than I thought. And I'm glad that we did! As for the movie, I'm not sure how to describe it, but it certainly is an interesting one. Here, let me share, both my opinion and one of the reviews² of this movie which I find quite close how I felt about it: We all know what comfort zone means and how it makes us feel: safe and at ease. Be that as it may, we need to be aware of its limiting outcomes. Because, comfort zones yield only acceptable results, which is to say that when we choose to live in our comfort zones mostly, then we generally leave innovation and creativity outside, that we go on doing things the way we usually do, as if we're on autopilot. But, when we dare or are forced to leave these comfort zones, it's highly possible that we may face difficulties at first, but then we may very well be positively surprised to see its immense transforming power on ourselves as well as on our live...

( ¹ ) 👉 Türkçe'si Aşağıda 👇 ( EN ) - 4 - There's a constant battle in our heads, whether we realize it or not . What's more, this battle doesn't emerge only when we need to make tough decisions. In our daily lives, we make thousands of small decisions; such as what to eat, what to wear, which way to go, how to respond. But who wins the battle ? Rational me or Emotional me ? Really, how do I decide ? As Eagleman puts it, decision making lies at the heart of everything and in this chapter he shows us that it's a fairly complicated process since every decision we make is born of a 'winner takes all' competition between rival neural networks. Yet, normally, we're not aware of this rivalry. In order to make better sense of how this rivalry effects our decision-making process, let's delve into it and see how Eagleman explains this process in his book²: Early theories of decision making assumed that humans are rational actors, tallying t...