No long post this week, as I’m working on a grant application with a looming, stress-inducing, anxiety-provoking, dread-eliciting, deadline. It’s also Halloween - provoking the perennial (halloween) question: why do our minds generate these stress-inducing, anxiety-provoking, dread-eliciting, dark thoughts, and how do these dark thoughts shape us?
Here’s a collection of past pieces, offering some possible answers.
Stress, fear, pain
General scares
Scary society
Hellraiser
Dark thoughts
Flash fiction
Bad is stronger than good
Ominous foreboding
Economic stressors
Why We Fight podcast book review (with
)👋 Here in the BrainPizza Newsletter, I take a fresh look at life through an informed, empirical, neuroscience and psychology lens. I do regular in-depth treatments of topics such as our very human metabolism, George Orwell, AI hype, brain implants, memory, hunger, NIMBYism, thinking, how to write books, and much, much more, as well as occasional listicles, readings, book reviews, and commentaries. You can browse the archives here; if you’d like to get these regular in-depth emails in your inbox, you can subscribe here.
It’s also my fourth anniversary on
- some prior thoughts on three years of substacking here. And don’t forget: here’s a special offer here for all new subscribers - 20% off if you subscribe before Nov 30, 2024.Some of my books
Talking Heads: The New Science of How Conversation Shapes Our Worlds (latest review is in The Quad: The Oxford University Alumni Association magazine: ‘This is a very important book because it drills down into how we shape realities through conversation and dialogue, including identity, filtering down into bedrock convictions that can result in wars.’
In Praise of Walking: The new science of how we walk and why it’s good for us