amy jones, ed.m, lcsw

paul bloom advocates for thinking beyond empathy in the new...

Fri, 17 May 2013 17:11:47 -0400

paul bloom advocates for thinking beyond empathy in the new yorker

“…moral progress involves expanding our concern from the family and the tribe to humanity as a whole. Yet it is impossible to empathize with seven billion strangers, or to feel toward someone you’ve never met the degree of concern you feel for a child, a friend, or a lover. Our best hope for the future is not to get people to think of all humanity as family—that’s impossible. It lies, instead, in an appreciation of the fact that, even if we don’t empathize with distant strangers, their lives have the same value as the lives of those we love.”

a very thoughtful review of a new book about the strengths and...

Fri, 03 May 2013 19:07:02 -0400

a very thoughtful review of a new book about the strengths and weaknesses of psychiatry and psychiatric diagnosis in its current state in slate

why our brain responds to psychologically astute art in the...

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 18:20:00 -0400

why our brain responds to psychologically astute art in the nyt

“So how does our brain respond to portraiture? As we look at a portrait, our brain calls on several interacting systems to analyze contours, form a representation of the face and of the body, analyze the body’s motion, experience emotion, and perhaps, empathy. Along with these instantaneous responses, we form a theory of the subject’s state of mind.”

oscar kokoschka, bessie bruce, 1910

roger ebert on life, death, dirt and the stars in a beautiful...

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 10:09:00 -0400

roger ebert on life, death, dirt and the stars in a beautiful and hopeful essay in salon

“I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.”

an exploration of genetic support for the argument that...

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 09:43:00 -0400

an exploration of genetic support for the argument that psychiatric diagnoses are socially constructed in the guardian

generosity, productivity and death in the nyt

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 12:43:00 -0400

generosity, productivity and death in the nyt

the importance of family narratives in the nyt Kyle...

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 12:11:00 -0400

the importance of family narratives in the nyt

Kyle Kirkpatrick, The Fictional Paper Landscapes

the connection between optimism and resilience in the...

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 14:07:44 -0500

the connection between optimism and resilience in the atlantic:

“Resilient people are good at bouncing back because they are emotionally complex. In each of Fredrickson’s studies, resilient people experience the same level of frustration and anxiety as the less resilient participants. Their physiological and emotional spikes were equally high. This is important. It reveals that resilient people are not Pollyannas, deluding themselves with positivity. They just let go of the negativity, worry less, and shift their attention to the positive more quickly.”

Oliver Sacks on memory in The New York Review of...

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 10:29:00 -0500

Oliver Sacks on memory in The New York Review of Books:

“There is no way by which the events of the world can be directly transmitted or recorded in our brains; they are experienced and constructed in a highly subjective way, which is different in every individual to begin with, and differently reinterpreted or reexperienced whenever they are recollected. (The neuroscientist Gerald M. Edelman often speaks of perceiving as “creating,” and remembering as “recreating” or “recategorizing.”) Frequently, our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other, and ourselves—the stories we continually recategorize and refine. Such subjectivity is built into the very nature of memory, and follows from its basis and mechanisms in the human brain. The wonder is that aberrations of a gross sort are relatively rare, and that, for the most part, our memories are relatively solid and reliable.”

fantastic new york magazine article on the way our high school...

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 10:03:00 -0500

fantastic new york magazine article on the way our high school experience can have far-reaching effects excerpts a moment from Rookie mag:

Among the wisest essays came from Winnie Holzman, the creator of My So-Called Life: “In high school,” she wrote, “we become pretty convinced that we know what reality is: We know who looks down on us, who is above us, exactly who our friends and our enemies are.” The truth of the matter, wrote Holzman, is that we really have no clue. “[W]hat seems like unshakable reality,” she concluded, “is basically just a story we learned to tell ourselves.”

zadie smith on joy vs. pleasure in the new york review of...

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 19:23:00 -0500

zadie smith on joy vs. pleasure in the new york review of books

“Joy is such a human madness…The writer Julian Barnes, considering mourning, once said, “It hurts just as much as it is worth.” In fact, it was a friend of his who wrote the line in a letter of condolence, and Julian told it to my husband, who told it to me. For months afterward these words stuck with both of us, so clear and so brutal. It hurts just as much as it is worth. What an arrangement. Why would anyone accept such a crazy deal? Surely if we were sane and reasonable we would every time choose a pleasure over a joy, as animals themselves sensibly do.”

victor frankl and happiness vs. meaning in the...

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 18:50:00 -0500

victor frankl and happiness vs. meaning in the atlantic

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing,” Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning, “the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way…”

terry gross talks to maurice sendak about growing older...

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 21:49:00 -0500

terry gross talks to maurice sendak about growing older (illustrated by christoph niemann)

On George Saunders in the nyt magazine You could call this...

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 18:09:00 -0500

On George Saunders in the nyt magazine

You could call this desire — to really have that awareness, to be as open as possible, all the time, to beauty and cruelty and stupid human fallibility and unexpected grace — the George Saunders Experiment. It’s the trope of all tropes to say that a writer is “the writer for our time.” Still, if we were to define “our time” as a historical moment in which the country we live in is dropping bombs on people about whose lives we have the most abstracted and unnuanced ideas, and who have the most distorted notions of ours; or a time in which some of us are desperate simply for a job that would lead to the ability to purchase a few things that would make our kids happy and result in an uptick in self- and family esteem; or even just a time when a portion of the population occasionally feels scared out of its wits for reasons that are hard to name, or overcome with emotion when we see our children asleep, or happy when we risk revealing ourselves to someone and they respond with kindness — if we define “our time” in these ways, then George Saunders is the writer for our time.

no filter or “flow” : your brain on...

Sat, 24 Nov 2012 08:44:00 -0500

no filter or “flow” : your brain on freestyling, improvization and art in the atlantic

“In other words, in order to turn on their creative flow, the rappers had to switch off their inner critic. And in fact, the researchers believe that when they’re freestyling, the artists are actually occupying an altered state of mind. A closer look at their brain activity reveals that an entire, unique network emerges during the process, one in which motivation, language, emotion, motor function, sensory processing and the representation of the artists’ subject experience all interact in unusual ways to create the flow state.”

the multi-determination of perfectionism in the nyt “Our...

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 12:19:41 -0500

the multi-determination of perfectionism in the nyt

“Our research shows that successful perfectionists are successful in spite of it, not because of it,” says Tom Greenspon, a psychologist in Minneapolis and author of “Moving Past Perfect” and other books. “If you worrying more about how you are doing than what you are doing, you’ll stumble.”

addiction to the unpredictable in matters of the heart in the...

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 12:12:00 -0500

addiction to the unpredictable in matters of the heart in the nyt

illustration: jeanne detallante

David Horvitz’s Sad, Depressed, People looks at a set of images...

Sat, 03 Nov 2012 10:01:00 -0400

David Horvitz’s Sad, Depressed, People looks at a set of images circulating within stock photography collections. These photographs, in which actors are photographed holding their heads in their hands, ostensibly depressed, are here shown to contain a bizarre tension between their status as stock images and their supposedly emotional content. It also includes an introduction and glossary of terms by Laurel Ptak.

shifting understandings of the brain and consciousness over time...

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 15:59:00 -0400

shifting understandings of the brain and consciousness over time in being human

“Philosophers have wondered for thousands of years how we can be sure whether what we’re experiencing is reality or some shadowy deception. Plato imagined people looking at shadows cast by a fire in a cave. Descartes imagined a satanic genius. Starting in the 1960s, philosophers began to muse about what it would be like to be a brain in a vat, with reality supplied by a computer. ”

andrew solomon on raising a prodigy in the nyt “Marc sat...

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 15:37:00 -0400

andrew solomon on raising a prodigy in the nyt

“Marc sat on a phone book on the piano bench so his hands would be high enough to play comfortably and launched into Chopin’s “Fantasie-Impromptu,” which he imbued with a quality of nuanced yearning that seemed almost inconceivable in someone with a shelf of Cookie Monster videos. “You see?” Chloe said to me. “He’s not a normal child. Why should he have a normal childhood?””