A Journal of My Thoughts

(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...