Psychologyspeaking topic
“Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says: 'I need you because I love you.'”
— Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (1956)
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
- Most of us talk to ourselves inside our head; we hear a voice when we think. But some people have no inner voice at all and think without words. What is thinking like without the inner monologue? Do we need language to think, or is language just the outfit thought puts on?
- The Yerkes-Dodson law: performance drops when arousal is too low and again when it is too high, peaking somewhere in the middle. Why does a little excitement help you while a lot of it paralyzes you?
- The feeling of knowing: even when we can't answer a question, we can sense in advance whether we would recognize the answer. Where does that inner hunch come from?
- State-dependent memory: we recall something better when we return to the mood we learned it in. Is our internal state itself a retrieval cue?
- What happens when you discover that something you have done your whole life is wrong?