Reddit mentions: The best psychologist biographies

>intelligence indicates failure

That's simply not true at all. Anecdotally we sometimes say smart people have it rough for a few specific reasons some other people might not, but a predictor of failure it is not. In fact, /u/MoliereSC2 posted in this thread an article which says that IQ is actually a great indicator of GDP.
The reason perseverance isn't tied directly into ego is because at some point to remain sane you do have to convince yourself to pursue something in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with who you are, and everything to do with your understanding of the efficacy and importance of what you're doing; of what it is or how it works or what it is for. In order to pursue those things, ego is 'necessarily' out of the equation by definition.
Look, I understand the reaction that most successful people have had big egos, I don't know if you've heard of this or not but this book attempts to go into detail about how and whether the people at the helm of business and perhaps government as well are all crazy in some way. Egotists, psychopaths, you name it. It is cited as saying the percentage for psychopaths in business is 4% which is higher than the percentage of the total population. So there is plenty of reason to 'think' something like ego is involved in it all when considering success.
I don't know if you're aware of it or not, but Trump isn't exactly responsible for his wealth. He has managed what he was given into more money than he started with but he also started with more than enough to take ego completely out of the question when considering what went into the actual decision making process.
In fact, I'm almost inclined to believe the idea of ego necessarily being involved in success has less to do with human nature and an accurate depiction of reality and more to do with the version of celebrity we see on the evening news. When Trump advertises his brand by being the thing he is, it appears ego is all over the picture and it's there by design but to say it bleeds over into all the success and thought processes would be being dishonest about why publicized versions of people aren't accurate.

>No, he was capable of doing so because he obstinately believed in his own odds of success, and this allowed him to overcome many rational perceptions of risks vs potential gains in a way that would cause many rational, "intelligent" people to claim defeat and walk away.

The problem with this is exactly what I already described. The real thought process behind major deals in which a person can retain their sanity by necessity involves a clear understanding of the situation involved and a perseverance not in the face of 'rational perceptions of risk' but perseverance in the championing of the deal they have spent the effort to understand so well.

>part of the reason his presidency has and will continue to be deemed unsuccessful is tied into the fact that he isn't out there criticizing presidents and justifying himself. Bill Clinton spent his last years in office dragging the title of the president through the mud, but now that he's still out in the political world, doing the thumb thing and reminding us how good times were

I'm not sure if you realize this either, but you say in this passage that ego has everything to do with being seen as 'unsuccessful' and not success. I'm not sure if you'll take that as a hit against your view or not since you could believe ego is involved in both success and a lack of success or perceived unsuccessful lives or goals.
So intelligence is a good predictor of success, and perseverance is more honest about the sanity maintaining thought process involved in understanding your risky deals and safe deals than ego would be because ego is often merely part of the branding we see successful people put off in clips on the nightly news.

> That's called capitalism. The owners of each firm are capitalists - they are investing their capital in order to maximize their profits.

One of the central tenets of any type of socialism --and I'd argue that its the primary one-- is worker control of the means of production, whether this is via the state, worker cooperatives, trade unions or in common by all of society. Whether this is done is a market economy or not is irrelevant to calling it socialism.

"The market" is just a mechanism, and neither intrinsically socialist nor capitalist. Socialism and capitalism primarily ask the question: "WHO owns the means of production?" That's it.

> Imagine a factory in your scenario that produces dialysis machines. Since they are a for-profit firm, and earn profits on each machine they sell, they will only provide their machines to sick and dying people who have the money to pay up.
According to you, this is "socialism".

Except in my scenario, the state would provide universal healthcare (including dialysis machines, catheters, medical butt plugs, etc) to all its citizens, making your point moot.

> Everyone is a worker. If the workers never truly cared about profits, how do you explain the widespread existence of capitalism?

I really hate to putting things this bluntly, but from what you're telling me, you know absolutely jack about socialism. Think I'm wrong? You currently have NO positive comment karma in this entire thread. Why is that? Hell, you've even managed to go below the comment threshold.

Prove to me that, under capitalism, workers generally care how much profit the company pulls in. Workers care about keeping their jobs, their benefits, and getting regular raises. Beyond that, why should they care?

Capitalism's "widespread existence" is attributed to many factors, including capitalism's intrinsic greed and need for a workforce, workers' need to not starve to death, the base's influence on the superstructure and the superstructure's subsequent influence on the base, etc.

> Then why do so many people buy lottery tickets, or spend years getting an education in order to earn more money?

Jesus. Because in modern society, especially in America, only wealth can bring a dignified existence (which I define to mean an existence in which one has their needs met to the point where one is free to maximize their personal potential). There are few good social safety nets, and so in order to not live like a glorified rat, a large income is required. Under socialism, workers would own the means of production and get a larger slice of the pie, larger benefits, a large safety net, etc (under a market economy) or have all of their needs met under a non-profit, "use-value" economy (under "regular" socialism).

> Unbelievable. How the hell can you possibly believe that what you are describing has anything whatsoever to do with socialism.

I can possibly believe that what I am describing has anything to do with socialism because I've actually read about socialism! (I especially like the selective editing, in which you declined to include my explanation that goes much more in-depth than just "Let's hope so".)

You, on the other hand, sound like you haven't read anything on the topic short of some Rage Against the Machine lyrics. That being said, here's some recommended introductory texts:

Marx for Beginners -- an excellent book that does a great job of distilling Marx's philosophical, economic, and revolutionary aspects into an easy-to-digest format.

Socialism

Types of socialism

Market Socialism

Socialist Economics

I sincerely and genuinely hope that you'll check out the above links. You're a bit confused about some of the definitions, and educating yourself a bit more on the topic can only benefit you.

He had a natural, inherited inclination toward mystical/supernatura experience. Jung's maternal grandfather was a pastor and possible schizophrenic who "trained" his young daughter (Jung's mother) to ward off evil spirits while he worked on his sermons. As a child, Jung witnessed his mother in conversation with spirits in her room as he hid behind the door. This contrasted with the beliefs of his father, who was also a pastor and had Jung's mother sent to an asylum for long periods at a time. From an early age, Jung had an extremely active dream life, was a strong introvert who spent his free time communing with nature in the woods near his house, and developed many peculiar rituals to protect himself from negative influences. In school he realized he had the power to create and overcome his own neurosis, but he became convinced that he had two personalities: one, a regular Swiss child who followed the boring rules of society, and two, a mysterious 17th century nobleman who was wise and respected scholar with mystical powers (possibly influenced by the legacy of Jung's paternal grandfather, a famous Swiss physician, 33rd degree Freemason, and possible illegitimate child of Goethe). In college, Jung organized seances with his mother and cousin, who seemed a talented medium, to contact the spirit world, and learned how to put himself in a controlled trance and evoke hallucinations.

So you could say Jung was predestined to become who he was. I wrote a bio on Jung in college and obviously it was incredibly fascinating. It's also interesting to see how he changed after college:

Jung at one point realized that his cousin had been faking her medium experiences, after he caught her repeating some stories he had given her to read while she was supposedly channeling a spirit. He became disillusioned and wrote his master's thesis "On the psychology and pathology of so-called occult phenomena", in which he basically labelled his cousin as mentally ill and managed to hide all the details of his own involvement. Soon after this he got a job at a world-renowned mental hospital (Burgholzli), working under the "discoverer" of schizophrenia, Eugene Bleuler, and focused purely on mainstream psychiatry for years, in which he became a famous researcher in his own right. Only after meeting Freud later on did he become interested in psychoanalysis, which eventually led him to study the mythological content of schizophrenic hallucinations. This contributed to his theory of the collective unconscious ("how else could schizophrenics show similar thematology all over the world?") and, I think, gradually reawakened his interest in the occult. I think that tension between keeping up appearances as a mainstream psychiatrist but wanting to explore the deeper truths of mankind was a huge stressor on his psyche, so that when the dams finally burst, he did a complete 180 and got lost in his own mind for a good while. During his "confrontation with the unconscious" he refined his technique of "active imagination", which combined the trance techniques he already knew with the free association methods he had developed as a psychiatrist.

A great read for understanding Jung's life and the development of his thought processes is his quasi-autobiography, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections.

http://www.amazon.ca/Memories-Dreams-Reflections-C-G-Jung/dp/0679723951

A few graphic novels:

1. From Hell - Cerebral, philosophical, and fastidiously researched, this is the story of the most notorious of them all, Jack the Ripper. Masterful, somber drawings and brilliant writing, if a little too high brow for my taste.
   
2. My Friend Dahmer - You won't find gore here, nor a particularly engaging plot. What you will find is authentic autobiographical vignettes written by an actual school mate of Jeffry Dahmer's that try to shed some light on the early years of this nefarious, but fascinating serial killer, but mostly seem to be an outlet for the author to process his own emotions with regards to having known and been friends with such a monster. It's not a very compelling read, i'm afraid, but on the bright side, it's quite short and the artwork is cool.
   
3. The Green River Killer - An account of the investigation of the Green River murders, focusing on one of the lead detectives, who happens to be the author's father. Nice artwork, so-so plot.
   
4. Miss Don't Touch Me - An absolutely delightful fictional novel that takes place in early 20th century Paris. It is fast-moving, suspenseful, sexy and hugely entertaining. Great artwork and a fun story. Highly recommended!
   
   A couple more books that are on my wish list, though i haven't read them yet, are:
   
   

• Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, written by Prof. Robert Hare, the psychologist who invented the standard test for diagnosing psychopaths.
  
  
• The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry - written by the always interesting and entertaining Ron Jonson
  
  
• Ann Rule's The Stranger Beside Me - A classic true crime novel about Ted Bundy written by a woman who worked beside him and knew him personally. She went on to become a prolific true crime novelist.

I second the reading idea! Ask your history or science teachers for suggestions of accessible books. I'm going to list some that I found interesting or want to read, and add more as I think of them.

A short history of nearly everything by Bill Bryson. Title explains it all. It is very beginner friendly, and has some very entertaining stories. Bryson is very heavy on the history and it's rather long but you should definitely make every effort to finish it.

Lies my teacher told me

The greatest stories never told (This is a whole series, there are books on Presidents, science, and war as well).

There's a series by Edward Rutherfurd that tells history stories that are loosely based on fact. There are books on London and ancient England, Ireland, Russia, and one on New York

I read this book a while ago and loved it- Autobiography of a Tibetan Monk It's about a monk who was imprisoned for 30 years by the Chinese.

The Grapes of Wrath.

Les Misérables. I linked to the unabridged one on purpose. It's SO WORTH IT. One of my favorite books of all time, and there's a lot of French history in it. It's also the first book that made me bawl at the end.

You'll also want the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, The Federalist Papers.

I'm not sure what you have covered in history, but you'll definitely want to find stuff on all the major wars, slavery, the Bubonic Plague, the French Revolution, & ancient Greek and Roman history.

As for science, find these two if you have any interest in how the brain works (and they're pretty approachable).
Phantoms in the brain
The man who mistook his wife for a hat

Alex and Me The story of a scientist and the incredibly intelligent parrot she studied.

For a background in evolution, you could go with The ancestor's tale

A biography of Marie Curie

The Wild Trees by Richard Preston is a quick and easy read, and very heavy on the adventure. You'll also want to read his other book The Hot Zone about Ebola. Absolutely fascinating, I couldn't put this one down.

The Devil's Teeth About sharks and the scientists who study them. What's not to like?

No, it's not that unusual. But it's not in the average, "HAY GUISE!" category. I do think it is weird, tho--imo, it's more fuck-with-your-mind than just a normal [crazy] dream.

And I don't know what reality-testing you're doing, but it sounds, to me, like you're doing it wrong? I mean, I can't imagine how I would ever be able to materialise a sandwich in front of me in my waking life. Unless you're saying you can't materialise sandwiches in your dreams because of this, I guess--I can see how that would be possible. What about reading written material, then looking away, then re-reading it? Does it stay consistent? That would be highly impressive to the point of nigh-unbelievable [to me personally] if you said you could do that in a dream.

Tbh, if you want to know more about it, you should read some books or even talk to people in /r/LucidDreaming; I'm not an expert. What I can say from my personal observations is that there do seem to be correlations between different personalities and the kinds of dreams people have.

The best example I can come up with off the top of my head that I didn't just make up: Researches have found memory & dreaming are somehow related. I've read it hypothesised that dreaming might be a mechanism which assists in memory storage. Also, psychopaths are known to both have poor memories as well as, for the most part, actually not experience dreams, or have very weak/pale ones. This is highly unusual, as you may already know, since even though many people can't remember their dreams this is not an indication of them not having dreams; everyone dreams, so it is said. However, psychopaths aren't considered to have the most normal personalities, anyway. (Iirc, these tidbits were cherry-picked from The Head Trip & The Psychopath Test.)

So anyway, as a lay person, I make wild personal speculations about how whatever it is that gives rise to personality also gives rise to types of dreams & dream experiences, but it's just for my own amusement & I haven't looked into it deeply enough to make some kind of insightful statement to you about this kind of "uncanny valley of waking consciousness" dream. But I guess usually that kind of thing seems to pop up when one's life is highly routine..? So perhaps trying something new & breaking out of your comfort zone could be in order?

I mean, if you like.

I don't think there will ever be a perfect rule that can be applied across all possibilities without fail, but for me one of the major things I look for is whether the author is a respected scientist actively working in the field (or, if they're retired, had an active history in the field).

So your Gazzaniga and Brown books I wouldn't even hesitate to recommend to others, without even having read them. It helps that I've read other books by those authors and their research, but their names alone are enough for me to give them a tick. Of course that doesn't guarantee that they're good books, but if you're asking for a rule on how to judge a book before reading it, then that's probably going to result in more success than failure.

The second thing I look for is whether the author has a history of writing polemics and intentionally controversial books in order to increase sales (a sort of "clickbait" approach to books), and whether their names are associated with criticism for misrepresenting basic issues in the areas they discuss. As such, people like Gladwell and Pinker would be ruled out by this.

>I'd also love to hear /r/skeptic 's suggestions for reading specifically about learning, drive, motivation, discipline...

My personal suggestions would be:

Understanding Behaviorism - William Baum (touches a little more on rigorous academic work rather than being a purely pop work, but still has some good pop chapters).

The Science of Self-Control - Howard Rachlin

Breakdown of Will - George Ainslie

Some related books but not directly on those topics:

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat - Oliver Sacks (It's a cliche suggestion but still a good book).

Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience - Sally Satel and Scott Lilienfeld (More methodological issues with neuroscience research and reporting).

Delusion of Gender - Cordelia Fine (Critical look at some of the research on gender differences).

Hi -- I just came across your post.

You've gotten some good replies on here. To add to them, I'd just like to point out that many people who go into a psychology field for their master's degree have a different undergrad degree.

From what I understand, most schools will require you to get a certain score on either the GRE or the MAT, demonstrate that you have decent writing skills, and have a few people recommend you. Also, interviews are common. Typical interview questions often try to get a sense of your maturity, your motivations for wanting to be in the field, possibly some degree of cultural competency, and how well you can present as professional and articulate.

It sounds like you're on the right track to being an appealing candidate, especially signing up for the hotline. I'd recommend, if you haven't already, doing some reading about what the counseling process is like. This will help give you a better sense of what to expect and allow you to speak more fluently about the topic. There are a few good books on the topic to check out.

Also, if you're looking for a master's program with a more clinical focus, it might be a good idea to look at counseling programs as opposed to social work programs.

Best of luck!

I am super interested with no background too! I read Neuroscience For Dummies on my kindle. The format was a little wonky, so I recommend getting the paperback. It was interesting and a semi-easy read. I went to Star Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson and the topic was The Science of the Mind. It was great! I chatted with Cara Santa Maria and asked about her recommendations for interesting neuroscience books. She said I'd love The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat. I've been meaning to read it! Also, checkout Amazon's best sellers in Neuroscience. Read reviews and see if they fit your interest. Let me know if you find anything interesting.

If you're a Nick Hornby fan, here's what you should do - he's got three books that are little collections of the column he writes for The Believer called "Stuff I've Been Reading". They're hilarious, and each one gives you 5 or 6 great suggestions from a guy whose taste is pretty solid.

Start with The Polysyllabic Spree and then go to Housekeeping vs. the Dirt and Shakespeare Wrote for Money.

He's always saying his favourite author is Anne Tyler - I can corroborate, she's pretty good.

This isn't really "literature" but you also might like Mil Millington. He's funny in the same way and even though as I'm reading I'm like "huh.. this isn't that great" his novels are the ones that I end up reading in one 8 hour sitting.

You might like David Sedaris - I'd start with Me Talk Pretty One Day

And someone else said John Irving - he's my very favourite.

A good psychology book (and I'm a major layperson, so it's definitely accessible) is The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks and Mad in America by Robert Whitaker.

I'm in the middle of Homo Deus currently. Its great so far, Yuval is a great writer and his books are a lot more accessible than traditional history books. I'm sure there are a lot of liberties taken with some of the history but I think Sapiens is a must-read. Homo Deus is more assumption based on current reality but its very interesting so far.

Gulag Archipelago is one I read based on the recommendation of Jordan Peterson. Awesome book if you are into WW1-WW2 era eastern europe. being an eastern european myself, i devour everything related to it so this book tickled my fancy quite a bit. good look into the pitfalls of what peterson warns against.

Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning is another history book discussing that time period and how it all transpired and the lesser known reasons why WW2 went down the way it did. some surprising stuff in that book related to hitler modeling europe around how the united states was designed at the time.

apologies for inundating with the same topic for all my books so far but Ordinary Men is an amazing book chronicling the people that carried out most of the killings during WW2 in Poland, Germany and surrounding areas. The crux of the argument which I have read in many other books is that Auschwitz is a neat little box everyone can picture in their head and assign blame to when in reality most people killed during that time were taken to the outskirts of their town and shot in plain sight by fellow townspeople, mostly retired police officers and soldiers no longer able for active duty.

for some lighter reading i really enjoy jon ronson's books and i've read all of them. standouts are So You've Been Publicly Shamed and The Psychopath Test. Highly recommend Them as well which has an early Alex Jones cameo in it.

Some classic young there. Loved this part:

>"But what we have outgrown are only word-ghosts, not the psychic facts which were responsible for the birth of the gods."

While definitely introductory, Patrick Harpur's Daimonic Reality picks up on all these themes via Jung in a really fascinating way.

Really, there is so much to Jung's work that I'm not sure what else I could suggest. You seem to be on a good reading-track. Are you familiar with Jung's lesser-known, and published late-in-life book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky? That's another good one along the same vein of Daimonic Reality.

You might be interested in Jung's essay on Wotan, and the psychology/archetypal force of this god on the German people precipitating WWII. An interesting, arguably archetypal interpretation of events that happened: Wotan

Lastly, Gary Lachman, a consciousness scholar and researcher, wrote a great biography on Jung that seems up your ally (and many readers here at /r/Psychonaut): Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung's Life and Teachings.

OK I'll stop pulling books out of my library now. Maybe this was useful. :-)

I'd suggest the people in this thread read The Unpersuadables by Will Storr. The author talks to a number of well-meaning, smart people who believe in all kinds of crazy ideas--UFOs, holocaust denial, homeopathy, and yes, creationism. It's really easy to make fun of people who believe stuff that's obviously not true (I know, because I do it all the time), but it might be better to try to understand them, the way that Storr does in his book. He also talks to some neurologists and psychologists who agree with the ideas presented in the OP--that we come to our beliefs (whatever they are), and if we're really smart, we can perform all kinds of mental backflips to rationalize them. Maybe you and I are smart enough that we figured out that evolution is true--or maybe we're just lucky that our upbringing and education placed us on the right side to begin with.

Before we get too cocky, it's best to remember that the odds are seriously stacked against the possibility that any of us is absolutely right about everything we believe.

http://www.amazon.com/Pretty-Modern-Beauty-Plastic-Surgery/dp/0822348012 - Less about medicine, more of an ethanography, there was a huge brazilian population where I used to live.

>http://www.amazon.com/Improvising-Medicine-Oncology-Emerging-Epidemic/dp/0822353423 - your call, I've read others that are similar in the past (dark african hospitals, mom was a doctor, it came up) but this is apparently more popular now. 10 years ago it was the horror of aids, those books are almost unreadable, if it were any other subject you'd simply have trouble suspending disbelief. http://www.amazon.com/The-Paradox-Hope-Journeys-Borderland/dp/0520267354 is another similar book.

http://www.amazon.com/Tales-Shamans-Apprentice-Ethnobotanist-Medicines/dp/0670831379 - Is probably better if you don't want all the doom/gloom view of african medicine.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10235.Mountains_Beyond_Mountains - Figure you've read this, it's highly recommended and extremely popular now, part of the whole 're-imagining medicine' movement.

>http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/161121.My_Own_Country - Speaking of my mom, she was a doctor near here, it's definitely a different world.

http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Mistook-His-Wife/dp/0684853949 - Read it because of the neuroscience aspect, but I suppose you could consider it a very specialized ethanography of sorts.

Honestly the most popular nowadays is probably the one about the Hmong girl in my first post. I'd recommend it more because I've known a few Hmong and the cultural differences are fascinating.

I'm talking about now, not "from a historical perspective." Aristotle believed that women were inferior to men ("a deformity," he called them) partly because he claimed that they have fewer teeth than men. Those claims are obviously absurd, but are we expected to give them more respect today simply because they made sense "in relation to the time he was living in" or because someone might find them interesting "from a historical perspective?" Of course not.

Were I teaching a "History of Psychology" course, I'd probably cover Freud, because of his historical significance, in much the same way that the Titanic was historically significant for maritime travel. But, if I'm teaching an intro course or any other science-focused course, I'm mostly avoiding his dreck because his ideas "from a modern perspective" are absurd and tantamount to pseudoscience. I teach science, not pseudoscience.

I'm not aware of any modern interpretations/explanations of his theories that aren't entirely bunk. Maybe they're out there but, if one has to reinterpret his theories in order for them to not be bunk, or the best defense of them is that they "aren't entirely bunk," then that should tell you something about the validity of his ideas in the first place.

Fred Crews wrote a blistering expose on Freud, that I highly recommend to anyone who thinks Freud's critics have been uncharitable: https://www.amazon.com/Freud-Making-Illusion-Frederick-Crews/dp/1250183626/r

Great article here: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/freud-was-a-fraud-a-triumph-of-pseudoscience/

Another one here on why his ideas survive (like cockroaches, I suppose) despite that fact that (much like Aristotle) he was wrong on pretty much everything: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/28/why-freud-survives

As someone who majored in economics as an undergrad and who is now studying decision-making/psychology in grad-school, I suggest you focus more on economic philosophy than on traditional intro to econ stuff, like the text books being suggested, which usually focuses on micro and macro models.

I feel this way for two reasons.

1. The of field of economics has not given up on B.F. Skinner-esk behaviorism. Many of the theories about preference, risk, and decision-making are just now starting to accommodate what Psychologists have understood for around 40 years. People are not perfectly rational decision makers. An example of this: It has only been a decade since Daniel Kahnemen won the nobel prize in Economics for Prospect Theory. A theory he devised in the 70's and which is increasingly seen as out of date/incomplete in the psychology literature.
   
   Utility theory was a useful first attempt at understanding how people make decisions, but like many first attempts, it just doesn't hold water 60 years later. Unfortunately economics has not adapted.
   
   Much of this is focused on the micro side, but I can do an equally long rant about how ridiculously out of date metrics like GDP, CPI, etc are in the realm of macro economics.
   
   
2. Learning the models and mechanism won't actually illuminate which side of debate is right or wrong. Economics simply isn't advanced enough to tell us if Keynes, Marx, or Milton Friedman was right. I could go on at length about this, but I feel strongly that none of these theories will ever really be able to undermine the others because they start with the incorrect hypothesis that human behavior can only be predicted by strictly observing people's choices (meaning that the mechanisms driving those choices do not matter) and that people behavioral rationally.
   
   So, with that being said, I suggest a broader approach. Something like The Big Three which details the lives and philosophies of the 3 most influential thinkers in Economics (Smith, Marx, and Keynes)
   
   To further round out you knowledge I would also recommend Vienna & Chicago Which gives a good overview of classical and modern free market economics.
   
   Finally, I recommend Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman and Predictably Irrational, if you are unfamiliar with the work, as a good moderators of the two fields.

While I like the care you give to the subject, I would just like to fill in some cracks with a few resources. I have a background in AbPsych and one of my mentors did a lot of interesting work with real life psychopaths.

The baseline for psychopathy was first and best (so far) laid out by Robert Hare. This site has a nice explanation.

Two great books on the subject (non-fiction) are: The Anatomy of Evil and The Science of Evil. Something more in the popsci vein would also be Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test, though I have some personal qualms with Ronson’s view.

For fiction, there’s of course any of the works mentioned in the original post, as well as American Psycho and We Need to Talk about Kevin.

If you liked Musicophila, I would definitely recommend some of Oliver Sacks' other books, such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, which is collection of case studies about people with unique neurological disorders. Understanding how the brain falls apart gives an entirely new perspective into what's going on when the brain is working.

I also love the book The Most Human Human by Brian Christian. It's a fascinating mix of tech and philosophy and psychology - one of my favorite non-fiction books.

Maybe look into some of Malcolm Gladwell's books too. They're pretty quick reads - entertaining and thought-provoking, very sociology/social psychology based.

Well this was an ... exuberant start to the episode. The song is "On My Radio" by The Selecter. There's a delightful music video for it. Jeff's musical choices are particularly peppy this week.

They're on segment overdrive! Things Dan Shouldn't Be Allowed to Complain About, Connor's Conundrums, Jeff Describes People -- even an Evernote update (Dan abandoned Evernote temporarily for some reason) and the riffed My Favorite Cereals.

Blindness + flight is a dealbreaker. I'd want to fly almost exclusively to see stuff. I'd pick blindness over deafness, though, because I couldn't do without music and the human voice in general. There's still the internet ... I'd have to give up gifs, though. I'd prefer losing my hearing over being born deaf because I could at least recall my favorite music and have an easier time speaking.

Siike returns! The procedure he's talking about is apparently called endovascular coiling, and the procedure is pretty fascinating. I'm kind of reminded of some patients in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, such as the titular man who couldn't identify everyday objects or people by sight. Great guest segment, of course.

I love Jeff's invocation of a centurion as a Hollywood archetype. It just puts the perfect picture in your head.

The metagaming discussion is taken up once more -- this time in gory detail. Their confusion is kind of amusing ... it's not the most difficult concept, especially for people who either are or work with actors.

A philosopher, or an expert on political ideologies, would argue that capitalism is the form of economy & government most suited to human nature. In truth, everyone on the planet is concerned primarily with themselves and those closest to them. Even at the very top level (excluding outright sociopaths), wealthy businessmen & women care about their family, friends, and themselves. They aren't much different than the poor folk, only they have influence and power.

And in fact, it's that distinction that sets capitalism apart from other ideologies. Name the families who make up the oligarchy, and you'll come up with a dozen or so names. Waltons, Rockefellers, Kochs, etc. But, there are so many more wealthy people out there who actually did start from nothing. I have two within my own family! One invented the UPC barcoding system, one worked his ass off and is now a rocket scientist, working for massive satellite firms, even NASA at one point. These guys started from a town in Wisconsin of less than 4,000 people. They grew up drinking powdered milk and eating leftovers & casserole. Now they own million dollar homes, vineyards, the whole nine yards.

Now, they certainly had some help along the way (no one can succeed without help), but their success was determined by the willingness to work hard, a small dash of luck, and their willingness to take advantage of the resources that were out there.

I know there's a lot of things wrong with the capitalist system, but the whole idea it's founded upon is that anyone, even a poor-ass peasant, can put in the time and effort required to work their way up. And you know, that aspect is still intact.

Check out Jon Ronson! I've only read two of his books, The Psychopath Test and Lost at Sea, but they were both really good.

Here are a couple daily show interviews about the books if you want to get a feel for them. They're super entertaining. He's also had a couple segments on This American Life about similar subject matter.

On a different note, Salt is also way more interesting than it has any right to be.

There are others but oh god I really need to be studying for my exams.

I think my post triggered you.

You want to make the video better, change the title

"RICK SANCHEZ IS A PSYCHOPATH"

should be the title.

You flat out SAY he is a psychopath at the 1:31. He "displays all the typical signs"

Your video is based on this sentence : "people think it means you need to axe murder people but the mental health definition differs from this common public perception"

But that IS NOT the public perception. Your audience is not a bunch of morons.

If anything rick and morty fans are probably smarter than average. ... and there is this shit:

https://www.amazon.com/Psychopath-Test-Journey-Through-Industry/dp/1594485755

which is absolutely in common parlance....

" It spent the whole of 2012 on United Kingdom bestseller lists and ten weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list.[1]"

People know what "psychopath" means, and it's SUPER obvious Rick is one.

Well, if you can sink as much time into Wikipedia as I can, that's a good start. And don't skip the references and links at the bottom; that's 90% of the fun!

There are a lot of good, popular-audience books on these topics. I don't know any about BCI in particular, but check out The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat (and other stuff by Oliver Sacks) and Phantoms in the Brain. Those are the ones we read in COGS 1 and they're great. Right now I'm reading Jonah Lehrer's Proust Was a Neuroscientist; How We Decide was also good. Also, don't shy away from academic literature. It's not really so hard to read if you're interested.

Are you or could you be in college? Check my advice here. If you at least live near a college, sit in on some classes. Write to a professor and see if there's lab work to do, maybe as a volunteer. That could get your foot in the door.

Yes it's possible. Though the current economic climate gives me pause. Peter Jenkins did it in the early 70's and wrote two books about it, A Walk Across America covering his route from Alfred, NY to New Orleans, LA, and The Walk West, covering the rest of the route, to Florence, Oregon. A 5 year trek (mostly because he kept staying with folks he met along the way for weeks or months at a time). So it can be done.

He basically did it by taking on temporary jobs along the walk whenever he ran out of money. For him, it became less about the walk, and more about the people he met along the way. That was really inspirational for me. I did a shorter version of it, a 3-week bicycle tour through 11 mountain passes in Colorado on less than $100 total, on a $10 thrift shop bike. Best three weeks of my whole life. I wish it lasted longer. I've done long walks too though nothing as spectacular.

On my bike trip, I found even going over mountains and up all those passes was a lot easier and faster on bicycle than walking. Instead of carrying 50-100 pounds on my back I put all that on my bicycle and pushed it up--then coast down the other side.

p.s. There are portable folding bicycles, that you can fold up, strap to your back, and carry, if you wish. But if backpacking is what you most want to do--then do that, and forget the bike. It's doable. :)

This is such an incredible contest for you to hold.

I am entering, because I've been craving a Kindle for a long time, but I lack the funds :I Kindles seem like a wonderful idea to me, because an electronic book uses far fewer resources than a printed one.

My name is Margy, and I LOOOOVE to read! If I had a Kindle, I'd read "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat." It's a book I've wanted to read for a long time, but I've just never had the money to grab it at the right time. I love classical literature, and having a Kindle would sure help me build my collection! Most of the older books I have are well-loved (i.e. falling apart), and I don't want to risk reading them again. :/

Again, you're amazing, no matter if you choose me or someone else. You're a doll.

Your old boss was right and if you're interested in reading about this topic more I would highly recommend reading The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson. There's a lot of fascinating info in this book about psychopaths and how they operate and there is a section that talks about the fact that there is a higher rate of psychopaths among CEO's compared to the general public. Unfortunately, in business it does tend to be beneficial to only care about yourself and what you can gain and to not have any qualms about screwing people over to benefit yourself and the company.

Any book that take a scientific look on how we perceive and integrate stimulu. (Here is my choice).

Any Oliver Sacks book. Understanding the broken brain is a very good tool to get the healthy one.(start with this one)

There is that Crash Course Psychology.

For me it's a good to understand what are attention and perception, what is it to learn and the importance of working memory. You can get all that without understanding memory, but it would be interesting to.

It can be cool to have a general idea of when our brain use shortcut because it's important not to waste energy.

And then for the social side of it welcome to the field of influence.

For a bit of history, the declassified documents are on the source section.

If you want to learn more about sociopaths in a simplified but still good form, read this book.

As for what I said, if you're confident in your ability to detect a sociopath by his or her appearance, someone who's able to disguise those traits will be able to play off your misplaced confidence in them if they passed your test.

You would appreciate anything by Oliver Sacks. He was a celebrated neurologist who wrote a bunch of great books about consciousness and fascinating stories about conditions he saw in his practice from a very philosophical rather than strictly clinical point of view. You could start with The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Hallucinations, or Awakenings. He gave a nice TED talk if you want to get a taste for it.

We seem to be programmed in our culture - perhaps by western religious and philosophical traditions - to accept dualism, which is the notion that mind and body are separate. However, several centuries of scientific progress have demonstrated more or less incontrovertibly the material basis of consciousness, thought, emotion, memory, and personality.

You ARE your brain. That is all there is to it.

What is particularly fascinating is how individual parts of the brain can be altered (i.e. damaged) with the result that parts of you are altered.

Oliver Sacks has several fascinating books that discuss case studies of neurological deficit, written for a popular audience, and they are each wonderful. Here are two of them:

http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Mistook-His-Wife/dp/0684853949

http://www.amazon.com/Anthropologist-Mars-Seven-Paradoxical-Tales/dp/0679756973/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319305698&sr=1-1

So many! Dissociative Identity disorder (more commonly know as Multiple Personality Disorder); Psychopathy (especially because we know so little about it.) ; Phantom limbs ; Capgras syndrom ( delusion that a close friend or family member has been replaced by aliens) ; Hyprocondriasis; Narcolepsy; sleep paralysis; Dissociative Fugue ; The case of H.M. (a very well known case study on memory loss. He was a man who suffered retrograde amnesia, but whose working memory was still intact. taught us a lot about different types of memory and their corresponding brain redgions...

There are plenty of others that I cannot think of off the top of my head. But if you are looking for some interesting cases, here are two great books about really strange and interesting psychological phenomenons are "The Man Who Mistook His for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales" by Oliver Sacks , and " Phantoms in the Brain" by V. S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee

The first one includes several cases of patients with inexplicably strange neurological disorders. For example, a man who is no longer able to recognize people and common objects. There is an other story about a man who sometimes wakes suddenly at night, thoroughly convinced that his leg is actually a corpse's leg that somebody has placed in bed with him.

The second book was the text book for my cognitive psych class in second year. Like the first book contains many stories of fantastically strange cases that the author has encountered as a neuroscientist. This book contains more of the psychological and neurological basis for the disorders, and shows how they helped us understand different aspects of behaviour and structures of the brain.

I'm not sure that this is a very productive or useful response, and you seem to be being unnecessarily emotional about this. It is particularly unhelpful to tell people "do your real homework" rather than providing sources.

> Remember that banking reforn bill she campaign on then killed once she got elected?

I'm actually not sure what you are talking about here. It sounds to me like you are talking about a garbled version of the bankruptcy reform which she opposed in 1999 and then favored once she was in the Senate. See e.g. here. In this case, this isn't particularly surprising, nor should it be: New York has many credit card companies and related businesses and she was a Senator from there. Representing constituent interests is a natural thing.

> Remember how after the collapse she told the bankers and walk street guys to "cut it out" while granting them immunity from any crime?

This is a gross oversimplification of a complicated legal situation.

> Remember the times as SoS she helped overthrow whole governments because they were creating a gold backed currency in Africa?

This is again garbled and confused. It is true that the Clinton emails revealed that a specific country, France was concerned about the impact a gold-backed currency would have on the franc. The primary mention of this is in one of the Blumenthal emails, detailing this as one of a variety of French motivations for supporting the intervention. So no, she didn't help overthrow any government because of this.

> She's a lefty on social programs ONLY.

Uhuh. That's why for example she has an 82% from the League of Conservation Voters, which is higher than most Democrats.

The only way I can parse your sentence mean that she's a "warhawk" on foreign policy and that under your terminology every other issue is "social." I'm not completely sure what warhawk means, but it seems that much of the left uses it to mean anyone who ever favored any military intervention that the speaker personally did not. In which case, sure she's a warhawk. But it may be helpful to ask if when labeling her as such, you are actually saying anything at all useful about reality. For example, most people when using the term "warhawk" mean people like Lindsey Graham and John "bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" McCain, or for that matter, Donald Trump. When you use large categories like "warhawk" and lump a very diverse group together you end up losing any trace of nuance.

> sociopath

This sounds more like a boo light, the negative version of an applause light rather than a substantive statement. I recommend reading Ronson's "The Psychopath Test" about sociopathy and psychopathy

> Will say anything to get elected, once elected, will not give one shit about the platform they ran on.

Again, you haven't responded to the fact that empirically her voting record is left of most senators and nearly identical to Bernie's. I pointed you to this Five Thirty Eight analysis which you never responded to. If you'd like to respond to the actual data about the details of her record it might be helpful. But it makes it very difficult to make any claim that that's all she cares about.

Look, I'm not a fan of Hillary far from it. And she's clearly made selfish decisions and has a lot of ambition. But you are apparently confusing that and thinking that she's somehow the worst thing ever which just isn't accurate or born out by her actual statements or senate record. Nuance is important, and it is normally the American right which has trouble understanding nuance and degrees of difference. Don't be that way.

>For instance, nobody desires to be a true sociopath (ie: physically and chemically cannot feel good or evil), and those who are true sociopaths... well... many do not function well in society. Like it or not, what God defines as good... really is good

That is not a sociopath. Sociopaths lack empathy, but they may be acutely aware of societal norms. Jon Ronson just wrote a book about socio/psychopaths. I would suggest you read up on the Euthyphro dilemma. We can debate all day about the meaning of "good", but the god in the bible is not it. Condoning rape, commanding genocide, condemning though crime, those are the acts of the god of the bible. Those are not in any way good. If you want to know a little more about modern views of morality you should read up on the evolutionary causes of morality. Sam Harris wrote a very good book about it recently

>How much evil should God get rid of divinely?

Well, none of it according to the bible. Isiah 45:6-7 (Young's literal translation but you can look it up in whichever version you like)

>So that they know from the rising of the sun, And from the west, that there is none besides Me, I [am] Jehovah, and there is none else, Forming light, and preparing darkness, Making peace, and preparing evil, I [am] Jehovah, doing all these things.'

Somewhat off topic, but I recommend checking out the following (non-Scientology) books which might help you understand what people with some types of dementia may be experiencing. Often people reach out to things like Scientology because they lack people to talk to that they can actually relate to their experiences - or even people that will listen with an open mind.

• Rethinking Madness by Dr. Paris Williams - this is an academic quality work, btw, not some crazy person rambling (that's important to me)
  
  
• Hallucinations by Dr. Oliver Sacks - a neurologist who has written several popular books about unusual neurological phenomena

Off the top of my head:

The Psychopath Test is a wittily written personal study of detecting, treating and (possibly) rehabilitating psychopaths.

The Freakonomics books are written by both an economist and a journalist (so easy to read) and contain slightly left-of-centre economic theories with easy to follow research. These are excellent.

The Omnivores Dilemma is both engaging and though provoking. It's All about the production of food in the modern age. In particular, four different meals.

The Code Book is one of my all-time favourites. As the title suggests it's about all forms of cryptography. If you have a mathematical bent I also like Singh's book about Fermat's Enigma).

I'm no expert but this is what I understand from reading the book. In psychology with this logic does not create scientific behavioral tests but games that people can learn to beat, this is ESPECIALLY true of psychopaths. Basically psychopaths feel no empathy. They don't mind if they hurt anyone and will do so if they can get away with it. They would destroy your life, no mater how close you are to them, if it meant they could get even the smallest thing they desire. They watch them self in the mirror and actively practice how to have the emotional responses they see in others to appear normal. EVERY "test" you give them ends up being practice so they can obtain their own freedom. The book gos over one such test that created a group of psychopaths they thought were cured but became experts in manipulation. A huge percentage of them ended up causing lots of trouble after their release.

The good news is that MRI scans and the like do offer some hope but I'm not sure they have any solid tests there that can work.

The psychological reasons why people believe this kind of stuff are pretty easy to explain. For example see my post in this thread about confirmation bias and the look-elsewhere effect. It also might be worth mentioning that human perception is a bit of a mess; experimenting with psychedelics can be helpful in getting a sense of this, or maybe reading some Oliver Sacks. Basically there is pretty good scientific evidence that you can't always trust what you think you see. Finally, you do have a good question in there that I think is worth taking seriously: "why not?" Besides philosophical issues with mind-body dualism, I'd respond "Because there is simply no scientific evidence for it whatsoever." If there were a separate world of ghosts that could interact with our world, they would presumably be detectable through any of many extremely sensitive scientific experiments.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn is really great. DFTBA :)

This would be great!

I love reading books!

No, I'm objecting to the fact that we assign the greatest currency value to the labor of those who produce the least use-value.

As for the rest, I'll tell you exactly why it matters.

Take all the imaginary currency out of the equation. Does your CEO have a useful skill that can be applied to the (actual, not financial) benefit of mankind? No? What the fuck is he being paid for, then?

A steamfitter makes a difference in the world, as does a cook, a nurse, a midwife, and a biomedical engineer. All of these people, if financial instruments were to simply cease to exist, have value and add value to the world with their labor.

That is use-value. When your labor actually serves some kind of purpose other than pissing about with money, then you create use-value.

Might I suggest an excellent book, if you would like some real understanding of the topic?

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach. The writing is so good you won't care about the squeamish content.

The Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum. A perfect blend of a historical retelling and science.

A Treasury of Deception by Michael Farguhar.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by Oliver Sacks. Short stories of the mentally abnormal patients of Sacks.

My Stroke of Insight by Jill Taylor. Very good insight on what it is like to live with, and recover from brain damage. Also talks science about parts of the brain as a nice intro to the subject.

Mutants: On Genetic Variety in the Human Body by Armand Leroi.

And of course,
Cosmos by Carl Sagan.

I love almost anything by Oliver Sacks, but The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is fascinating. If you have any interest in neurology and neurological disorders, this is a great starting point.

Have you seen their Highlights for High School feature?

Also, there are sites like Academic Earth that might be useful.

Here are a few blogs with potential. You'll have to decide for yourself if they have inappropriate content.

Here are a few book recommendations covering various fields, in no particular order (though they should all read #1):

1. A Short History of Nearly Everything
   
2. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
   
3. Einstein: His Life and Universe
   
4. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
   
5. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
   
6. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
   
7. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
   
8. The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
   
9. This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
   
10. Cosmos
    
11. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
    
12. The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy
    
13. Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind
    
14. The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human
    
15. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
    
16. Thinking, Fast and Slow
    
17. Chaos: Making a New Science
    
18. Isaac Newton
    
19. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
    
20. The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales
    
    And here's a video interview with Richard Feynman they might enjoy.

I'm subscribed to lots of book subreddits, so I assumed one of those... Saw it was askwomen and my first thought was "I bet Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman isn't on any of their lists." Thank you for proving me wrong! :-D


So for kicks, I'll recommend "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat" to you. It's neurology case studies from Oliver Sacks (The doctor from Awakenings, played by Robin Williams), written for laymen. That shit is fascinating!

I'm glad you asked! This Che manga was absolutely hilarious to read. Really goofy stuff.

This comic about Lenin was pretty cool too, though it was a lot more educational than the last one. There's also one on Marx by the same publishing company.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks is an interesting collection of case studies of people with unusual neurological conditions. Oliver Sacks is both a brilliant scientist and a great storyteller.

Not quite the same as your examples, but some of my favorite non-fiction science are...

The Coming Plague

And The Band Played On

The Disappearing Spoon

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat

I could probably come up with a few others if any of these seem to be what interests you.

Start with his autobiography. It's easy reading, and is a fascinating insight into the man. A great jumping off place to get into his works.

Pretty much. I recently read "The Psychopath Test," (just a link to amazon, no affiliate or whatever) and as a conclusion, as with many other diagnoses and diagnostic tools, I came to the conclusion that given the power of such a label it sometimes harms people unnecessarily, but there are people who do not have empathy and they will take advantage of you and other creatures to get pleasure or enjoyment (animal cruelty ranks highly in suggesting psychopathy (aka: antisocial personality disorder)). Sometimes you need someone else to step in if such an individual can't treat other individuals respectably, there is a reason why (even if it might be a last resort) that there are people, given power by your local government, that can intervene when needed.

TL; DR: there's no such thing as black and white (in physics or psychology, but we're getting ahead of ourselves), but there are psychological conditions that cause people to treat others without empathy and sometimes intervention is necessitated if attempts to encourage "reasonable" (where this is determined by the community) behavior fail.

Surprisingly there is actually a list!

I'm definitely not qualified to talk about this at all, as i've literally started reading a book which talks quite a lot about identifying psychopaths (same as a sociopath apparently - used interchangeably as i've read), so this is all I know from the last couple of days.

But there is a list called The Hare Psychopathy Checklist, which is made up of 20 different traits, all of which you're scored either 0, 1 or 2 on. So, psychopaths are usually scoring above 30 out of 40. The book i'm reading is really good, if you're interested it's called - quite fittingly - The Psychopath Test

I have no research experience whatsoever, but 2 things spring to mind.

Do like Dunkin Donuts does to its franchise owners, and spy on them, looking for new cars, large homes, and other signs of consumption.

Or do what Sudhir Venkatesh describes in Gang Leader For A Day and get people to trust you, then ask them for economic data about their illicit activities. If corruption is widespread and relatively acceptable you might be able to get people to tell you dollar amounts at least in general terms.

I'm not sure if this is exactly the kind of book you're looking for, but The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat has always been one of my favorites. I think it does a good job of walking through a lot of history and basic neuroscience in the context of some pretty bizarre neurological disorders. Here's a full text if you wanna give it a look.

There's also Rius' Marx for Beginners It's cute and non-confrontational, it's also relatively simple to understand to the uninitiated, and of course it's funny as heck x3

You could also get them some Smurfs comic books xD

Nearly everyone hallucinates at some point in their life. It's quite common and most cases are not associated with drug intake or mental illness. And a variety of physical or mental stimuli and practices can reliably induce hallucinatory states in most individuals. Some kinds of hallucinations in very young children, for example, can be a normal part of development.

However, just because drugs or mental illness are not the cause of most hallucinations it does not mean that they're medically irrelevant. Spontaneously hallucinating for no discernible reason is not unheard of, but rare compared to cases where a cause can be determined.

For a scientific overview of the matter I suggest Oliver Sacks book "Hallucinations." He's a great writer and famed for his work in the treatment of a variety of neurological disorders (I think Robin Williams played his character in "Awakenings.")

http://www.amazon.com/Hallucinations-Oliver-Sacks-ebook/dp/B0082XLY6G/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1396330412&sr=1-1&keywords=hallucinations

I watched a Ted Talk by Jon Ronson and it made me want to read his book, The Psycopath Test

(It's currently in my Audible wishlist because I like to listen to audiobooks in the car on my commute - but I'd be just as happy with a paperback or kindle version) ;)

True, they are slightly different. I'm willing to bet both will eventually map to defects in the cortical homunculus, though.

IIRC, the patient you're referring to is discussed in The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. A fascinating book that I highly recommend to everyone interested in how the mind works.

Heck yeah they did! If you're a Horney fan you'd love this biography of her.

Not really sure what you're looking for, but check out some of Oliver Saks audiobooks. "The man who mistook his wife for a hat" was excellent for a non-fiction audiobook with a clinical approach that was easily digestible for a laymen.

> The greed of the gun CEOs, on the other hand, can't be explained as easily by mental illness.

It's been theorized that the occurrence of psychopathy is significantly higher in CEOs than the population at large. I believe the figure is 5x higher. Causation is still being determined. I've seen some studies suggest that obtaining power can cause people to lose empathy, and some have theorized that the modern corporate boardroom is simply the ideal environment for psychopaths to thrive so it attracts them.

I'm pretty sure it's covered in this book. If I could find the actual studies or data, I'd link that. If anyone else knows anything that supports or refutes the claim, I'm all ears.

Not exactly profiling, but The Psychopath Test was a very interesting read and tells you how to truly use the Hare test

Yes I have a copy of that book right now in my bag!

Thinking in pictures

This book helped me with communication a lot. I realised that when i try explain a idea I have in my head I get pictures that go with the words.
Other people dont have the pictures which is why people dont always understand me.

Since I read it I have started explaining things in a more visual way which has improved clarity.

It also made me think that to be INTP is to have at the very least some aspergic tendencies.

Not prison per se but Sudhir Venkatesh did a great book about the underground economy of NYC.

https://www.amazon.com/Floating-City-Sociologist-Underground-Economy/dp/1594204160

What's interesting is that unlike places like Chicago where criminals just kind of stay and deal drugs in their own neighborhood, in NYC they float (hence the book name) all over the city and across different social and economic groups.

The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson- Fascinating book about psychology and neuroscience about how psychopathic tendencies are pretty common among us humans. Very readable and entertaining.

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson- Incredibly wide-ranging look at the developments of the universe and natural sciences from the big bang to today. It's an informative read but also contains Bryson's usual wit. Not my favorite book by Bryson but you will likely learn a lot and it's a worthwhile read.

Texts and Reference Books

Days in the Lives of Social Workers

DSM-5

Child Development, Third Edition: A Practitioner's Guide

Racial and Ethnic Groups

Social Work Documentation: A Guide to Strengthening Your Case Recording

Cognitive Behavior Therapy: Basics and Beyond

[Thoughts and Feelings: Taking Control of Your Moods and Your Life]
(https://www.amazon.com/Thoughts-Feelings-Harbinger-Self-Help-Workbook/dp/1608822087/ref=pd_sim_14_3?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=3ZW7PRW5TK2PB0MDR9R3)

Interpersonal Process in Therapy: An Integrative Model

[The Clinical Assessment Workbook: Balancing Strengths and Differential Diagnosis]
(https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0534578438/ref=ox_sc_sfl_title_38?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ARCO1HGQTQFT8)

Helping Abused and Traumatized Children

Essential Research Methods for Social Work

Navigating Human Service Organizations

Privilege: A Reader

Play Therapy with Children in Crisis

The Color of Hope: People of Color Mental Health Narratives

The School Counseling and School Social Work Treatment Planner

Streets of Hope : The Fall and Rise of an Urban Neighborhood

Deviant Behavior

Social Work with Older Adults

The Aging Networks: A Guide to Programs and Services

[Grief and Bereavement in Contemporary Society: Bridging Research and Practice]
(https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0415884810/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1)

Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy

Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change

Ethnicity and Family Therapy

Human Behavior in the Social Environment: Perspectives on Development and the Life Course

The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work

Generalist Social Work Practice: An Empowering Approach

Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association

The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook

DBT Skills Manual for Adolescents

DBT Skills Manual

DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets

Social Welfare: A History of the American Response to Need

Novels

[A People’s History of the United States]
(https://www.amazon.com/Peoples-History-United-States/dp/0062397346/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1511070674&sr=1-1&keywords=howard+zinn&dpID=51pps1C9%252BGL&preST=_SY291_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch)


The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Life For Me Ain't Been No Crystal Stair

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Tuesdays with Morrie

The Death Class <- This one is based off of a course I took at my undergrad university

The Quiet Room

Girl, Interrupted

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

Flowers for Algernon

Of Mice and Men

A Child Called It

Go Ask Alice

Under the Udala Trees

Prozac Nation

It's Kind of a Funny Story

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

The Yellow Wallpaper

The Bell Jar

The Outsiders

To Kill a Mockingbird

In the mean time you can read the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks He talks about a lot of very interesting case studies and several of them have to do with people who have a severed corpus callosum.

Also on his wikipedia page there is a picture of him wearing a shirt that says "WELCOME SQUID OVERLORDS" so you know he's good.

This is true and I am no expert, but I just read a book, which I will post a link to in a moment. The author states that there really is no specific difference, as in the 'definition', and it really is just a matter of preference which one is used when mentioning the condition outside of a clinical or legal classification.

The book is The Psychopath Test. It's informative and really witty so although it tackles a serious subject, it was a fun read. I highly recommend it. BTW, it was written by the guy who wrote The Men Who Stare At Goats.

If you want to learn a bit more about phantom limbs and what is really going on, there was a really nifty ted talk a while ago about it. The guy also was able to help others with the phantom limb pain using a mirror which he talks about in this ted talk somewhere towards the end.

http://www.ted.com/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_mind.html

Also, somewhat unrelated, there is a rather old book called "The man who mistook his wife for a hat, and other clinical tales" which has a section on phantom limbs. It is a FANTASTIC read of various short stories and a at the time psychiatrist talking about the possible reasons.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Man-Who-Mistook-Wife/dp/0684853949

Sorry people are downvoting you. I gave you a couple of ups. I was pretty sure you were joking but the Chicago pd is considered one of the most corrupt in the country. You should read Gang Leader for a Day. Good stuff.

http://www.amazon.com/Gang-Leader-Day-Sociologist-Streets/dp/1594201501

My Stroke of Insight by Jill Taylor: A neuroscientist has a stroke and learns to walk, talk, eat, write, or recall her memories.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks: Interesting case studies of patients who suffered from extreme/rare neurological disorders.

Far From the Tree by Andrew Solomon: Not necessarily speech-language pathology specific, but it includes chapters identity, self-perception, social perception of people with autism, Down syndrome, and Deaf culture. I read this book recently, and it's absolutely brilliant.

I read a book on socio paths/psychopaths(The Psychopath test). So I can recognise the behaviour before its too late. They are the best at faking emotions while not actually having any. I recommend it due to the fact it has enabled me to read people better.

> Like, the idea of "things" is too imperfect of a model of reality to try and do things like reliably say "this is a ship" or "this is a whale.

Do you have any evidence to back this up? Because you seem to be saying that we can't reliably recognize and name things and that's just completely false. In fact, when people start having trouble reliably recognizing and naming things, neurologists like Oliver Sachs write books about them because it is so unusual. The book, The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is an amazing book anyway; you should check it out sometime.

The fact that there are edge cases sometimes that are harder to classify and name doesn't change the basic facts.

Somewhat related, I highly recommend The Psychopath Test; there is a portion of the book that considers the idea that CEO's and people in high positions of power have many of the personality traits that define psychopaths. In general it's a great read.

Anyone who's interested in this should undoubtedly check out the book Gang Leader for a Day. Absolutely fantastic, captivating read.

You should consider reading The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson if you haven't already. Hell, everyone should, it's not a big book and it's a great read!

Oliver Sacks' exploration of mental illness has an existential bent to it that I've always appreciated. His book, "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat" is fascinating and touches on how simple faculties of the mind make up our consciousness, our existence. One of his patients literally cannot distinguish his wife from his hat (the title story), and Sacks discusses how this inability shapes his patient's understanding of himself and the world.

Years later and I'm still geeking out about it.

https://smile.amazon.com/Man-Who-Mistook-His-Wife/dp/0684853949/ref=sr_1_1?crid=M7R0DJM18914&keywords=the+man+who+mistook+his+wife+for+a+hat&qid=1573405204&sprefix=the+man+who+mist%2Caps%2C226&sr=8-1

Recently read Floating City, a book on the underground world of drugs/sex trafficking in NYC. I'm convinced at least 50% of these boutiques are drug fronts or prostitution ring headquarters for rich heiresses and heirs.

This book is well worth picking up if you find this video interesting, very, very interesting:

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales
by Oliver Sacks

Here are a few suggestions:

• Understand marx. wiki,a helpful podcast, an illustrated guide
  
  
• Understand Freud. wiki
  
  
• Understand Lacan. wiki, fantastic podcast on lacan
  
  Finally, here is a good video overview on some of Z's thought: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUjHUtQ_GQY

there's actually a very good (and short) comic out there called Marx for Beginners which is a real basic intro to the philosophical and historical origins of Marxism (describing Hegel, and the basic ideas of historical materialism, going into how it shaped Marx's ideas on socialism), I'd recommend it highly for anyone whose just getting into socialist theory.

I would say that there is a great deal of empirical evidence, particularly when we look at cases of mental illness. There is an amazing book on neuropsychology called The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat that describes various states of profoundly altered states of consciousness based on neurological issues. It's a really great read!

Ultimately though I think that the idea that "mind" is something separate from matter is an expression of one's desire for SELF manifesting. "My body may die, but my MIND will live on eternally because it is a fundamental aspect of the universe." However I think that what we consider to be our "mind" is really just an emergent property of various interdependent processes, some tangible and some intangible.

Really thought-provoking book. If you like that chapter, it gets a lot of its material from another book, Gang Leader For a Day, which I found even more interesting.

You are talking about psychopaths - and yes, its an excellent book, based on many studies, the book deals with CEO's specifically.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Psychopath-Test-Journey-Industry/dp/1594485755

However, my pedantry aside, you make a fine point - it is indeed not about journalism at all, rather it is about his mental problems.


Pretty concerning that people are missing the entire thread of the movie and considering it a comment on cut throat journalism and not the portrait of a psychotic.

These sound like pretty normal hynagogic hallucinations to me (they do not have to be associated with any sleep paralysis).

However, I am not an MD and do not specialize in sleep disorders. A sleep study as others have suggested is a good idea... since you're in the Boston area, here are the major sleep centers in Boston, and here is a website where you can search for other accredited sleep centers.

I also second the recommendation for Sack's book Hallucinations to get some probably-reassuring perspective on how common hallucinations really are.

As for the 3AM thing, it's likely just coincidence (and your mind 'dismissing' times when you've woken at times other than 3AM), but another thing to check is if there is something that is happening routinely at 3AM that might be waking you. As a kid I always thought it was weird that I woke up at 2:14 every night, until I finally figured out that this was the exact time that a really loud cargo plane flew over my house every night (lived by the airport). Maybe a train going past, or a neighbor leaving for their morning shift, or the heat clicking on in your building, etc. More plausible explanation than the supernatural, at least! ;)

But is there someone who said that? If you prefer a logic guy, the one you're defending, like you, misread "probably" as "always" to make his case.

This book, though, would tell you that there are more psychopaths working as CEOs than in any other profession, another placing an estimate of psychopathy in CEOs at four times the average (at 4%). Here's a study I haven't actually read echoing those findings.

While neither are exactly terms happily used by medical psychology, let's put down a bit of vague bullshit and say psychopaths are rarer, overclocked versions of a sociopaths. Logic would then dictate that in professions you'll find psychopaths involved in, you'll find even more sociopaths. By a reasonable, subjective definition of the unreasonable, totally subjective word, say, 20% prevalence of sociopathic behavior in business CEOs would sound like a very low estimate. With big companies in particular, I'd guess we're dealing with much higher numbers, which would lead to a logical formula of either highly successful CEO-ship implying sociopathic behavior, or vice versa.

The very concept of a working-as-intended corporation is often likened to psychopathy, one of the primary cases made by a documentary called The Corporation.

Fancy word is Prosopagnosia. If you're interested, you'll like the collection of short medical tales by Oliver Sachs called The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat (Amazon link).

Maybe this has been in your recent reading? If not, it should be as an enjoyable journey into some related topics. :-)

On Becoming a Person

• Classic book about psychotherapy from a giant in the field and written for the layperson. Really, anything by Rogers is good.
  
  The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat
  
  
• you can probably argue that this collection of case studies is more neurology than psychology, but I think it overlaps and is a very interesting read.

Its not too new, so you may or may not have heard of this. But I really enjoyed this book as intellectual fun reading and thought I'd suggest it!

The link is to the NY Times review, but here is the amazon link.

It explores Scientology's distain of psychiatric practices, the problems of checklists and self diagnosis, psychopathy in the community, and the role of insanity and the media. Just an all around enjoyable read. :)

Man who Mistook His Wife For a Hat - The great Oliver Sacks

> Interesting. I never knew that was considered a migraine.

You too should really read (or listen to the audio book of) "Halucinations" by oliver sacks.

http://www.amazon.com/Hallucinations-Oliver-Sacks/dp/0307947432

Migranes are a considerable part of the book and are explained quite well.

Are you referring to The psychopath test by Jon Ronson? An excellent book.

This isn't a hallucination, it's a misperception. Hallucination is when you see something that isn't actually there, but misperception is when you see what is there incorrectly.

EDIT: Read the introduction of Oliver Sacks's Hallucinations. He can explain the difference between the two better than I can.

For those who don't want to go through the effort of reading the whole thing, here's a relevant excerpt:

>Hallucinations may overlap with misperceptions or illusions. If, looking at someone's face, I see only half a face, this is a misperception. The distinction becomes less clear with more complex situations. If I look at someone standing in front of me and see not a single figure but five identical figures, is this "polyopia" a misperception or a halluc9ination? If I see someone cross the room from left to right, then see them crossing the room in precisely the same way again and again, is this sort of repetition a perceptual aberration, a hallucination, or both? We tend to speak of such things as misperceptions or illusions if there is something there to begin with--a human figure, for example--whereas hallucinations are conjured out of thin air. But many of my patients experience outright hallucinations, illusions, and complex misperceptions, and sometimes the line between these is difficult to draw.

Thanks for the book, I'm going to add it to my list. Have you read The Psychopath Test as well?

i'm reading The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson at the moment. loving this interview.

http://www.amazon.com/Psychopath-Test-Journey-Through-Industry/dp/1594488010/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1311092001&sr=8-1

Ok not a documentary, but this book has been pretty crucial to my understanding of the weird and paranormal.
http://www.amazon.com/Hallucinations-Oliver-Sacks/dp/0307947432/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1405276511&sr=1-1&keywords=hallucinations

Marx for Beginners and Lenin for Beginners are decent books.

Trường Chinh's August Revolution and The Resistance Will Win are amazing.

Gonick also has a History of The U.S., by the way.

Van Lente and Dunlavey's Action Philosophers is also a candidate if you're into the history of philosophy. In fact, while I'm at it, let me recommend the "For beginners" series about different philosophers and philosophic traditions. Examples: Marx, Freud, Existensialism etc. For a preview of the series, check out Philosophy for beginners at Google Books.

Edit: They even have reddit favourite Noam Chomsky for beginners!

I had read Jon Ronson's excellent book "The Psychopath Test" months prior to seeing "The Jinx." Durst would have to score very high on the test.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Psychopath-Test-Journey-Industry/dp/1594485755

Here is a wonderful book by Jon Ronson on the subject. http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1594485755?pc_redir=1408028606&robot_redir=1

If only there were some way to make the text in this image appear horizontal...

In other news: Here is an online copy of the article. And here's the text of the stuff in the image:

>If: He has too many photos of himself…
>
Maybe he’s just: An artist who does self-portraits.
>
But it could mean: He’s a psychopath.

>Kidding! Kind of. Too many solo photos, or an oil painting of himself, can indicate “an overblown sense of self-worth,” says Jon Ronson, author of The Psychopath Test. Too much gold and other flashy objects suggest grandiosity and narcissism, adds Ronson. “Even if he’s not an actual psychopath, I would avoid a narcissist because he’ll be a pain in the ass,” he says. “Instead, women should stick to nerdy intellectuals, like me!” And me!

In my estimation, the bit in this article about guys who own multiple gaming systems is a bit more of a stretch...

People are incredibly good at justifying their beliefs and actions.

People are masters of saying, I'm not X, I'm just X-1. "I'm not an alcoholic; I'm just a guy who likes a fifth of scotch with breakfast." "I'm not a wife beater; that bitch just needs to learn some respect." "I'm not a sexist, I just think neuroscience proves men are better."

The reasoning starts something like this: A "racist" is a monster, and I'm not a monster, so I'm not racist. And if I'm not a racist, then there must be some other reason why I believe these things. Maybe I'll claim to hate everyone equally. Maybe I'll rely on religion. Maybe I'll say I truly believe in separate but equal.

There's a reason racist forums spend so much time posting about "evidence" that supports their beliefs. They feel that if they can "prove" it, then they're just realists, not racists. (Conversely, you'll notice that /r/biology doesn't spend an inordinate amount of time posting evidence that genes are the main mode of inheritance. They believe it, but they're don't need to be defensive about it.)

So, yeah, there might be some people on there who think of themselves as "racist", but I'm guessing most of them would say they are not.

If you want to learn more about how we trick ourselves about our beliefs, I would recommend The Unpersuadables and Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Two things, (1) I'm going to recommend mostly books and not textbooks, since you're going to read plenty of those in the future. And (2) I'm going to only focus on the area of cognitive psychology & neuroscience. With that being said:

Beginner:

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales By Oliver Sacks

Brain Bugs: How the Brain's Flaws Shape Our Lives By Dean Buonomano

Kludge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Mind By Gary Marcus

The Trouble with Testosterone: And Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament By Robert M. Sapolsky

The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers By Daniel L. Schacter

Intermediate: (I'm going to throw this in here, because reading the beginner texts will not allow you to really follow the advanced texts.)

Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind By Michael S. Gazzaniga, Richard B. Ivry & George R. Mangun

Advanced:

The Prefrontal Cortex By Joaquin Fuster

The Dream Drugstore: Chemically Altered States of Consciousness By J. Allan Hobson

The Oxford Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning By Keith J. Holyoak & Robert G. Morrison

Sudhir Venkatesh, perhaps?

His book is very interesting--he's mentioned repeatedly in both "Freakonomics" books as well. Suhir, as well as Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner (authors of Freakonomics and Super Freakonomics) are the reasons Behavioral Economics is kind of a "hobby" of mine.

If you want a good book that explores sociopathy, try the psychopath test.

Another way is a sort of riff off EY's "Minds are made of parts." After creating a decently complex character, imagine that all the people who get in his way are just simple programs and ask yourself: how he would respond to those few lines of code? After all, code has no feelings...

Carl Jung said himself that he consulted with a spirit guide he referred to as "Philemon". He wrote about him in the book Memories, Dreams, Reflections. I advise that you look at a copy of the book.


Here are two articles that briefly describe some of what Jung says about Philemon: Who is Philemon? and Mystical Experiences of Carl Jung.

Everything you will ever experience happens in your brain. Books by Oliver Sacks and V.S. Ramachandran are entertaining without being totally overrun by misrepresentations of science.

I'm a sociology graduate and former social science teacher and lecturer, I don't think I need to read introductory books on Marxism, thanks all the same. This was always my favourite actually, it's almost 30 years since I read it! (Not that edition though)

Given his interest in science and that he's got a reather short attention span I'd go for The man who mistook his wife for a hat. They are short stories about individuals whose brains are just not working right.

25% among CEOs. I wish I were making that up!

EDIT: Oops, I meant sociopaths.

Wiki Source

TED Source

Actual Source (includes studies)

Hallucinations I've been wanting to read this book for a while, it seems interesting!

I second Oliver Sacks - Hallucinations or this oliver sacks book. Also "Tale of Dueling Neurosurgeons" is good and provides a more general overview

Oliver Sacks is a neurologist who writes gripping nonfiction about bizarre conditions. Two great ones to check out are The Island of the Colorblind and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

In his autobiography, Carl Jung puts forth a similar idea. Later in his life, he had came to the conclusion that both partners should each have a room exclusively for themselves, where the other isn't allowed to enter.

His idea was that, for each partner to keep evolving, they need to retain a part of solitary individuality; a part of the self that is independent and unaffected by the relationship. That is what the "exclusive room" was meant to achieve.

I think a lot of young couples would have trouble with that kind of arrangement. Our culture puts so much romantic emphasis on fusional relationships, being able to say "we share everything!" almost becomes a requirement to consider the relationship successful.

Personally, I tend to agree with Jung's idea. I'd definitely require a mancave for myself. I'm used to requiring lot of time to be by myself, regardless of my dating status. So much so that it had me backed out of moving in with a girlfriend more than once. I'd have absolutely no problem with my SO having a womancave neither.

Why do you think so many couples starts experiencing difficulties once they move in together? It's not just the trivial things like fighting over the toilet seat or the dishes. A lot has to do with not having any space to be by yourself at your own home.

I really recommend reading the Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Psychopath-Test-Jon-Ronson/dp/0330492268). He talks about meeting psychopaths, and the ways in which they're different from normal people.

I highly recommend his books, especially The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. They changed my life.

Have you read "the psychopath test"? It may help you to understand people a bit more. Not being mean. Just look into it.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Psychopath-Test-Journey-Industry/dp/1594485755

Thanks.

And thank you for reminding me that I have the Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat tucked away in my room somewhere from when I entered Borders Books and Music™ at a weak moment and left with too many books to start at once. The Sacks book is now next in line, followed by Bowling Alone and Grand Theft Childhood.

Sounds like The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson. A man who claims that he faked being crazy is sent to an asylum and says he can't get out because everything you would do to convince them he was not crazy simply makes him sound crazier.

You could try reading this book as a general investigations of neurological disorder (including Tourette's). I don't think this is the place for medical advice though. Contact a neurologist or inform your doctor that the medicine you are currently taking is insufficient and ask if there is another treatment that might be more successful for you.

Perhaps "the immoral conscience kills experience." It sounds like this kind of situation isn't suited to a conversation on the interwebs, and it wouldn't be right of me to speculate without talking to you in person to learn more. Assuming that what you are describing is something like "psychopathy" in the psychoanalytic sense (not the hollywood portrayal), you might like this book or this book. There are other books about it out there, Robert Hare is one of the more well known researchers on the topic and is mentioned in Ronson's book.

Just read The Psychopath Test, and the theory posited in the book is roughly 1/100 people score on the psychopath spectrum. Not all psychopaths are killers, but they do share certain (sometimes hard to pinpoint) traits.

...realize I know a couple.

That sounds a lot like the guy Jon Ronson interviews in his book The Psychopath Test but he used a pseudonym. Was it in the UK?

Si eu am kindle si vad ca primele 30 carti din el sunt numai de design si ceva self-help (Confessions of an introvert is quite good), plus ebook-urile /r/nosleep.

Citesc mai mult nonfictiune, beletristica rar, si mi-au placut teribil Fast Food Nation, Zero: The biography of a dangerous idea si The man who mistook his wife for a hat.

Si va urasc cu profilele si recomandarile voastre ca am ales deja 6 carti de la voi pe care vreau sa le citesc si n-am timp.

http://www.amazon.com/Psychopath-Test-Journey-Through-Industry/dp/1594488010/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1313985944&sr=8-1

Not making fun, it's more common than people think. FYI, lots of CEO's are psychopaths.

While I agree with this, they are very seldom sucessfull at maintaining relationships. Check out The Psychopath Test. They "collect" people around them in order to use them for some purpose. Eventually someone figures out they are being used and they reject the Psychopath. Adnan really comes off as just a genuinely nice guy; otherwise he would probably instinctively try to use Sarah as a way to get a new appeal, but he does not give this impression at all.

I read in The Psychopath Test that Autism did increase around the same time as immunisations became "popular" but only because the psychology field had expanded the definition of "Autism" including conditions such as Aspergers and whatnot.

read the book the psychopath test apparently glibness / superficial charm is a very strong indicator of psychopathy

I think the biggest warning flag is if a person has a clear sense of humour and such but, as with this kid, never seems to quite have their shit together in certain areas

>Yeah, they're called Zionists, and they want to enslave you in debt, coerce you into fighting and dying fighting Israel's wars, and bomb you with fals flag attacks like 9/11.

That might be true, there might also be evil unicorns living in my closet but I was referring to people who leave evidence, like the Time Square Bomber...well if you can even call him a bomber.

>They're truly dangerous socipaths and fanatacs, all the more so because they have so many brain-dead useful idiots doing a lot of their work for them.

Most Americans would shit their pants if they realize just how common psychopathy really was. Something like 1 in 25 people in the US meet at least a few of the qualifications on the Hare list.

Both of those are amazing books on the subject
http://www.amazon.com/Psychopath-Test-Journey-Through-Industry/dp/1594488010/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1

http://www.amazon.com/Sociopath-Next-Door-Martha-Stout/dp/0767915828/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1322058965&sr=1-1

"The Psychopath Test" is pretty good on the subject

Essentially, there aren't many rules in terms of law governing what we call insanity. It's deferred entirely to doctors. That's not necessarily a bad idea, provided the doctors know what they're doing.

It's primarily about a man who committed burglary(?) and, on the advice of a friend, pleaded insane. He would have served like five years in prison if he plead guilty. He spent decades in the institution. His doctors commented that they believed him when he said he faked it, but that only a psychopath would be so manipulatively self-destructive to commit to such a lie.

It also deals with attempts to diagnose high-functioning forms of psychopathy/sociopathy in fields that would, theoretically, attract such types of people (i.e. cutthroat business and politics.) This is based on the eponymous "psychopath test" used to diagnose people with psychopathic conditions--a set of criteria which encompasses far more types of people than are actually diagnosed. The test also veers into circular logic at times (i.e. denying you are a psychopath is a criterion for being a psychopath. "Of course a psychopath would LIE about it!") The core issue of the book is whether the way we define insanity and psychopathy is fair and scientific.

There was a study (of a sort) done a few years back that showed the incidence of psychopathy was something like 4x among CEOs than it is in the general populace (4% rather than 1%). I say 'of a sort' because it wasn't really held to stringent standards; it was simply for this guy's book.

And let me stop the train here: I am not saying this as a put-down to corporate environments or executives; I am not against 'big business' or high-paid executives. It's just that a functional sociopath would be an extremely good CEO or other executive position, so it would make sense that these people would 'filter to the top' in a corporate environment.

On that note, and along with the point of applying the "demon" term being unfair, this is a great quote from that article linked:

> I can look at, say, Dominique Strauss Kahn, who, if one assumes that what one is hearing about him is true, certainly he hits a huge amount of items on the checklist — the $30,000 suits, the poor behavioral controls, the impulsivity, the promiscuous sexual behavior. But of course when you say this you’re in terrible danger of being seduced by the checklist, which I really like to add as a caveat. It kind of turns you into a bit of a psychopath yourself in that that you start to shove people into that box. It robs you of empathy and your connection to human beings.

To use a quote from the Amazon page: As the study of psychology evolves, we're going to more and more see that "relatively ordinary people are .. defined by their maddest edges". I'm not entirely sure about how good I feel about that, but I do feel it is getting truer every day.

Uhhh so much to unpack here

> a lot of these kids who say they are persecuted are usually assholes and/or have very bad interpersonal skills

I think having poor interpersonal skills is a pretty normal thing, especially for kids/teens, and isn't what I was referring to. I was talking more about the straight-up psychopaths, like the guy who initiated this plot.

> Society usually has a way of putting people exactly where they belong.

... maybe, but not in the sense of them sinking to the bottom. This book says it all better than I could.

The book on CEOs having it at a higher rate than the general public.


It certainly implies that very bad things happen to the public because of CEOs like that.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Psychopath-Test-Journey-Industry/dp/1594485755/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1368106143&sr=8-1&keywords=ceo+psychopath

To go further, it's normal to hear voices depending on the circumstances. Oliver Sacks covers this in his recent book Hallucinations

Whether or not these voices are interpreted as supernatural in origin is due to cultural or personal biases.

You're right that hallucinations come in many forms and manifest for a variety of different reasons that are not "psychiatric" in their origins.

The late Oliver Sacks' book, Hallucinations, really opened my eyes to this.

Nope.
You should read Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks.
http://www.amazon.com/Hallucinations-Oliver-Sacks/dp/0307947432

Have you read this:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Psychopath-Test-Jon-Ronson/dp/0330492268

Marx For Beginners is the closest thing I can think of that's already out there.

This is where I started.

Carl Jung was considered an introvert and wrote an autobiography. He also coined the terms introversion and extroversion. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679723951/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER

A women with autism wrote a book about that.

It's all about the karma.

[Link] (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0684853949/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=QUWK5EUYODF0&coliid=IBDJVDUJMOUEV)

The Professor and the Madman
http://www.amazon.com/Professor-Madman-Insanity-English-Dictionary/dp/0060839783/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1398450830&sr=1-1&keywords=the+professor+and+the+madman
The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Mistook-His-Wife/dp/0684853949/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1398450891&sr=1-1&keywords=the+man+who+mistook+his+wife+for+a+hat

You may find this book right up your alley then: http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Mistook-His-Wife/dp/0684853949

he's talking about a book
http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Mistook-His-Wife/dp/0684853949

Was this from "the man who mistook his wife for a hat?"

Try this one -

Man who mistook his wife for a hat (Oliver Sacks)

https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Mistook-His-Wife/dp/0684853949/ref=sr_1_4?keywords=oliver+sacks&qid=1558785421&s=gateway&sr=8-4

The man who mistook his wife for a hat

Oldy but goody:

Oliver Sacks, Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat:


http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Mistook-His-Wife/dp/0684853949/ref=la_B000APZZY6_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1452669144&sr=1-3

He must be this guy.

"The man who mistook his wife for a hat". Can't. Put. It. Down.

Should go in a cardiological version of this book.

The man who mistook his son for a hat.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0684853949?pc_redir=1406693908&robot_redir=1

Gang leader for a day. The author has ties with [Freakonomics] (http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_levitt_analyzes_crack_economics.html)

I didn't believe this until I read "Gang Leader for a Day" and you see how fucking corrupt and complicit the cops are.

...and that part about prostitution was taken from Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venkatesh

The Psychopath Test, by Jon Ronson

The Psychopath Test and The Sociopath Next Door both touch on the subject that many CEOs express psychopathic qualities or tendencies.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Psychopath-Test-Journey-Industry/dp/1594485755

There's a book called The Psychopath Test that talks about this, it really makes you ask, how can you prove your sanity?

Not read this anywhere else - but Jon Ronson wrote "The Psychopath test" -

http://www.amazon.com/The-Psychopath-Test-Journey-Industry/dp/1594485755

Does this help?

I migliori: Il Maestro e Margherita e The Psychopath Test

DM doesn't just stand for District Manager, it also stands for Dick-Move. Upper management types and such tend to skew heavier toward narcissism than the general populace fwiw. (see The Psychopath Test)

I first read about it in The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson, where he goes in depth and interviews some of the participants and administrators.

Non-mobile: http://www.amazon.com/dp/1594485755?vs=1

^That's ^why ^I'm ^here, ^I ^don't ^judge ^you. ^PM ^/u/xl0 ^if ^I'm ^causing ^any ^trouble. ^WUT?

Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test: http://www.amazon.com/The-Psychopath-Test-Journey-Industry/dp/1594485755

This book is actually really and talks about this subject: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1594485755?vs=1

The terms sociopath and psychopath are mostly interchangeable. Being psychotic is not a symptom of psychopathy and something completely different, which is what my first comment was alluding to.

Source: Finished reading Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test recently.

This should explain everything for you.

Book you're referencing

That's not the book.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1594488010/ref=redir_mdp_mobile/185-0176691-8688564

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1594488010

Just ones I remember:

A not-so-cute "prank" on a gay student.

Blasé illegally impersonating police repeatedly.

The Seamus incident, for which he showed no regret or remorse later.

During the campaign, he would change his stance on topics day-to-day to fit the mood of the day's crowd. This was more than politician-speak. He had no guiding principles or beliefs. A good example was his Massachusetts health care law, which he tried to distance himself from to attack Obamacare.

While with Bain Capital, he bought and gutted companies rather ruthlessly, much like Al Dunlap as described in The Psychopath Test.