Building on our previous discussion of emotion and attachment in relationships from this post, I’d like to dig into the practical question of emotional regulation—the ability to manage, soothe, and even control our emotions. This applies both to our independent emotional functioning, and our approachp to the interactive emotional process in relationships. To illustrate some of the central...
If you ask me, one of the more unsettling things about being human is that we tend to experience our selves as intentional agents capable of rational thought and logical decision making; while at the same time, all of our behavior – including that ostensibly rational “thought” – is substantially influenced by mysterious forces called feelings over which we have limited control. ...
So there’s this notoriously mind-bending idea popularized by the neuroscientist Karl Friston called the “Free Energy Principle,” the technical details of which are far beyond my comprehension… but if you listen to its devotees talk about it, it starts to sound suspiciously close to a “grand unified theory of everything,” so you know, grain of salt. I’m not even going to try to explain that, just...
One of the most challenging “engineering challenges” we have to confront as human beings in relationships is what often get called “negative cycles,” “bad patterns,” or “downward spirals.” Basically there’s this weird thing that happens, where – even if we really like each other and genuinely want the best for one another – as we continue to interact over time, we find ourselves...
The idea I want to share today goes by a range of different names, connecting the school of Radical Behaviorism in psychology, to the theories of predictive processing, reinforcement learning, and active inference in the fields of artificial intelligence and neuroscience. Besides being particularly elegant, it’s also a very difficult “pill to swallow,” emotionally and philosophically, but...