Psychologyspeaking topic
“If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?”
— Erich Fromm, To Have or To Be? (1976)
practice with this topic
Set the timer (5-30 min), take 20 seconds of prep if you like, start talking. Jot your thoughts onto the sticky-note board.
similar topics
- Cognitive dissonance: why does it bother us when our behavior clashes with our beliefs, and why do we bend our opinions to make the discomfort go away? What is a smoker really doing when they say 'my grandfather smoked and lived to ninety'?
- System 1 and System 2: you answer two times two without thinking, but 17 times 24 stops you cold. How do these fast and slow modes of thought divide up our daily decisions?
- Working memory: how many things can we hold in mind at once? How does this mental scaffolding let us reach the end of a sentence without forgetting how it began?
- The spacing effect: why does spreading study across several days beat cramming it all into one night? What exactly does the brain do with the time in between?
- Two people with different mother tongues can hear the same music differently; speakers of tonal languages like Mandarin develop absolute pitch far more often. The language you speak tunes your ear. Is language a lifelong ear-training course, or is a musical ear something you're born with?