#expériences
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epsteinweb.bsky.social
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two different directions, a situation that arises when we are forced to choose between two conflicting moral options — for example, a duty to save the lives of many versus the prohibition of killing one person to save the lives of many. There is a common thread here that unites these different experiences. Like our experience of social exclusion, envy is also a form of social pain and to some, deeply painful, as it reveals a sense of deficiency in acquiring resources. Envy also represents a situation in which our positive sense of self conflicts with the negative sense of self engendered by social comparison. Our brain — and the anterior cingulate in particular — informs us that we are less accomplished when compared with others. Envy is socially imposed pain generated by comparison shopping. Envy highlights what we don’t have, which fuels the system of desire, which seeks satisfaction. Unsatisfied, envy runs wild. Unsatisfied, wanting keeps hunting for pleasure. Schadenfreude delivers some prey. Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 72 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_012818
February 7, 2026 at 7:48 AM
epsteinweb.bsky.social
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someone else’s subjective experience to guide our chosen experiences. Orgasms and eating are two of the great pleasures in life, whether you live in Tokyo, Toronto, Toulouse, Tehran or Timbuktu? I doubt any healthy human adult would debate this. What can be debated is what counts as the ultimate orgasm or food experience. It can be debated both among friends and inside our own minds, influenced by personal experience and our knowledge of what else is available, or might be. Consider potato chips. As a snack, potato chips generate a revenue in the United States of about $6-7 billion dollars each year, relying on the slicing and frying of about 2 billion pounds of potatoes. These facts make clear that most Americans love potato chips, and are motivated to consume them. Like other salty snacks, it is hard to eat just one. The American psychologist Carey Morewedge and his collaborators ran an experiment to find out how much people love potato chips, and whether their anticipated fondness for this delicious crisp changes in the face of other options. Subjects sat at a table in front of a bowl of potato chips and an alternative food that was visible, but out of reach. The alternative was either a highly undesirable snack such as sardines, or a highly desirable one such as Godiva chocolate. After subjects contemplated what it would be like to eat each of these foods, they then rated how much they would enjoy them. This is like the study I described in the pleasure section where subjects rated how much they would enjoy different vacation destinations, but without the comparison between one clearly good and one clearly bad spot. Both focus on the anticipation of a pleasurable experience. Subjects’ ratings of potato chip deliciousness soared when sardines were on offer, and plummeted in the presence of chocolate. Context matters. What is clearly delicious when there is nothing else on the table, loses or gains in deliciousness when the table fills up with other delectable
February 7, 2026 at 7:46 AM
pissedoffsagg.bsky.social
We have that in common. Not from my parents but from life experiences. I have to disconnect sometimes for my own mental health. Focus on you and what you enjoy that gives you peace. Make plans, take a trip…. Pop in and out but don’t live here. It can bring you down.
February 7, 2026 at 7:46 AM
epsteinweb.bsky.social
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been associated with a soon to be delivered shot of juice, and humans cooperating with each other. Many unnatural behaviors and objects can also trigger dopamine. Animals trained to press a switch for food, will often become obsessively attracted to the switch, caressing and biting it even in the absence of food; humans with addictions to cigarettes, food and gambling, will often obsessively fondle an empty cigarette carton, fork, and deck of cards, respectively. But these correlations leave open the question of whether dopamine causes the anticipation or experience of reward, or flows from these experiences. To tackle the causality problem requires experiments, either directly changing dopamine concentration or comparing individuals who, due to genetic differences, show differences in dopamine levels. We know from studies of rodents and monkeys that selectively increasing dopamine with drugs results in heightened wanting of food if there are cues to foraging, or sex if opportunity knocks. The Israelian cognitive neuroscientist Tali Sharot pursued a similar approach with healthy humans subjects. She first asked individuals to rate how happy they would be if they vacationed in 80 possible destinations. Then, some subjects took a placebo while others took L-dopa, a drug that selectively increases the release Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 61 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_012807
February 7, 2026 at 7:45 AM
epsteinweb.bsky.social
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that the parasitic enemy shouldn’t be exterminated. This is where scientific explanation gains considerable interest, helping us understand how we develop anticipatory pleasures and past-oriented regrets, struggle to change from habitual rewards, and acquire irrational desires for experiences we no longer enjoy — a problem that appears to maintain most forms of addiction. Humans go to restaurants and bees to flowers because both are associated with food. Within these broad categories, there are good restaurants and flowers, as well as bad ones, where good and bad are determined by experience. The experience can be direct, as when food is actually consumed, or indirect as when humans listen to an animated friend describe a restaurant’s menu and bees watch a hive mate dance, providing a description of the flower’s location and quality. Once the association between food and location is established, simply seeing the restaurant or flower triggers a cascade of neural and chemical activity in the brain linked to reward and the anticipation of pleasure. The restaurant and flower are cues that predict food. If you walked into your favorite restaurant and found that they sold fertilizer rather than food, you would be heartbroken. If you haven’t been to the restaurant in a long time, but memorialized your previous experience as a gastronomic high, you will be deeply disappointed if your first bite doesn’t live up to the standards you anticipated. This mismatch between anticipated and experienced reward will lead to a cascade of brain activity — indicative of an error. The primary engine driving the experience of reward, including predicting when it will occur and with what kind of intensity, is the dopaminergic system, a network of brain areas that releases dopamine in most invertebrates and vertebrates, including the human vertebrate. Many natural behaviors trigger dopamine, including male songbirds singing to attract females, rhesus monkeys seeing a red light that has
February 7, 2026 at 7:45 AM
epsteinweb.bsky.social
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is like to be a mongoose, mouse or monkey. There are, however, ways of measuring liking and disliking that are reliable, objective, and consistent across species. In many animals, including human babies who can’t speak and human adults who have lost this capacity due to brain injury, there are distinctive behaviors that are consistently linked to positive experiences and others linked to negative ones. For example, in mice, monkeys, and human babies, tasting something sweet like sugar causes a lot of lip licking, whereas tasting something bitter such as quinine causes mouth gaping, nose twitching, and arm flailing. These similarities show that evolution has been conservative, maintaining the same underlying mechanisms for handling likes and dislikes. These similarities have enabled scientists to understand how the brain systems involved in wanting and liking can change together or separately, even though they can’t help us understand the harder problem of what, in particular, it is like for a given mouse, monkey or man to like something. To understand the machinery that drives rodent wants or desire, Susana Pecifia and Kent Berridge took advantage of the genetic technique that Joe Tsien —mentioned in the last chapter— used to create Hauser Chapter 2. Runaway desire 59 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_012805
February 7, 2026 at 7:44 AM
epsteinweb.bsky.social
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observations also reveal that when these areas are activated, they can result in addictive, uncontrollable behaviors that are toxic to self and others. They suggest that areas of the brain associated with desire can run out of control. But to understand how the brain motivates us to want some things but not others, how it creates the experience of /iking, and how it enables us to want things we like by /earning about the world, we must turn to experiments on nonhuman animals, brain scans of healthy humans, the mechanics of mind-altering drugs, conscious and unconscious influences on our choices, and the sad stories of individuals with uncontrollable urges to eat, drink, snort, shoot up, and gamble. This is the evidence that scientists, especially the American cognitive neuroscientist Kent Berridge, have gathered to explain the three core elements of pleasure: wanting, liking, and learning. Often, but not always, the experiences we want or desire are the experiences we like. Often, but not always, the experiences we like are rewarding and good for our health. Often, but not always, we are aware of the experiences we like, and make rational plans to experience them again. Often, but not always, our rational plans to experience what we like makes us happy. Often, but not always, we find ways to maintain our happiness by using self-control to moderate our exposure to pleasurable experiences. The ofien refrain refers to the fact that the systems involved in wanting, liking, and learning work in this way most of the time. The but not always refrain is a tip off to exceptions that speak to interesting aspects of the machinery. For example, though we most often want things we like, we can want things we don’t like and like things we don’t want. I want to lift weights, do push-ups and sit-ups to stay fit, but I don’t really like doing any of these exercises. I like the Porsche Boxster sportscar, but don’t want one because it is a gas guzzling environmental nightmare and
February 7, 2026 at 7:44 AM
mobiquotes.bsky.social
Some experiences are so wonderful, we are like those who dreamed experiencing it. Yet some are beyond amazing when compared to our best experiences we are as though we had been sleeping all the while.
February 7, 2026 at 7:39 AM
deepsouthsa.bsky.social
From the article by Mishka Hoosen: "The Language From the Far Places: Experiences of Mental Illness in Literature" for 'Ploughshares', 2017

For the full article, see Mishka Hoosen's 'Call it a difficult night' book page on the Deep South website:
🔑: deepsouth.co.za/product/call...
Mishka Hoosen 2016 Cover Art: 'Letter written by Emma Hauck (1878-1920)'
February 7, 2026 at 7:39 AM
epsteinweb.bsky.social
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cichlid fish spectators observing a winning fight, and soccer spectators seeing their team win the World Cup. What many volumes of experiments reveal is that testosterone plays a fundamental role in social behavior across the animal kingdom, motivating individuals to defend their resources, acquire additional resources when possible, develop confidence following victory, and gracefully walk away following defeat. Testosterone influences behavior, and behavior influences testosterone. If an individual experiences a challenge, this causes an increase in testosterone. The increase in testosterone heightens confidence and risk-taking to defend the resources. Heightened confidence and risk-taking are often associated with winning fights. Winning fights increases testosterone, bringing us full circle to the challenges of social living. Testosterone is joined by several other microcontrollers, including at least one additional hormone — cortisol — two neurochemicals — serotonin and dopamine — and several brain areas that are affected by these hormones and neurochemicals. Our understanding of this assemblage, beautifully synthesized by the psychologist Jack van Honk, accounts for both our adaptive and sometimes highly maladaptive capacity to harm others. Cortisol mediates the stress response in fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals, including all ages of human mammals. When fear kicks in due to aggressive challenges from a dominant individual or from the appearance of a predator, cortisol rises. When individuals confront uncertainty, cortisol rises. When cortisol levels are high, individuals are more sensitive to punishment and more likely to avoid social interactions. Flipping the polarity around, when cortisol levels are low, individuals are more aggressive, more reward focused, and less sensitive to punishment. Testosterone and cortisol therefore play within the bodies of animals like two children sitting on opposite ends of a see-saw. When testosterone is up
February 7, 2026 at 7:38 AM
amandacomms.bsky.social
If you missed it I would urge you to take a few minutes over the weekend to look at the newsletter and the results of a survey I conducted about the experiences of women in crisis management and resilience.

Details below 👇
amandacomms.bsky.social Amanda Coleman @amandacomms.bsky.social · 23h
The latest crisis communication newsletter has a different focus this time. It publishes the results of the survey I carried out last year looking at women's experiences within crisis and emergency planning and resilience roles including communication.

underpressure.substack.com/p/women-in-r...
Women in resilience survey results
Under Pressure 6 February 2026
underpressure.substack.com
February 7, 2026 at 7:37 AM
revjerryjohnson.bsky.social
What if our personal journeys can deepen tradition instead of contradicting it? By honoring diverse experiences, we enrich our collective faith—let’s explore together!
February 7, 2026 at 7:35 AM
nuvy-iel.bsky.social
8/ And no it's not fantasy, it's not faith, it's not belief.

I KNOW. I've died before. I KNOW there is an after. You can think me delusional if you'd like but that will not change my own personal experiences.

I'm not the best at putting it into words but I know what I know.
February 7, 2026 at 7:35 AM
epsteinweb.bsky.social
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Unlike any other species, our brain promiscuously combines and recombines thoughts and emotions to create a virtually limitless range of solutions to an ever-changing environment. This new form of intelligence enabled us to solve many problems, but two are of particular interest given their adaptive consequences: killing competitors and punishing cheaters in a diversity of contexts. But like the painful fall-out from artificially engineering a smarter mouse, so too was there fall-out from the natural engineering of a smarter human: a species that experiences pleasure from harming others. This is part of the recipe for evil. This chapter sets out the evidence to support the idea that evil evolved as an incidental consequence of our brain’s design. I begin by discussing the two general processes that landed us in the unforeseen and uninhabited niche of evildoers: the evolution of byproducts and promiscuous connections within the human brain. Because these are general processes, we will take a short reprieve from matters specifically evil. Hauser Chapter 1. Nature’s secrets 21 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_012767
February 7, 2026 at 7:34 AM
epsteinweb.bsky.social
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rewarding experiences. Some actions have benign or even beneficial consequences for the welfare of others, while others have malignant and costly consequences. Exquisite studies pioneered by the American cognitive neuroscientist Kent Berridge have uncovered the core elements of pleasure, including distinctive systems of wanting, liking and learning. We, and hundreds of other species, often want things we like, and like things we want. This is, obviously, an adaptive coupling. Thanks to experiments at the level of genes, neurons, and behavior, we can tease apart these three systems. Thanks to naturally occurring situations, we can watch these systems come unglued over the course of addictions, leading to the paradoxical and maladaptive situation of wanting more and more, but liking the experience less and less. Addictions, as archetypal examples of excess, provide a model for thinking about evil and its trademark signature of excessive harm. The paradoxical decoupling between wanting and liking is seen most clearly in studies of obesity in rats and humans, where individuals develop skyrocketing desires for food, but fail to experience comparable pleasure from eating. By definition, those who become obese are prone to eat in excess. One reason they do is because eating, or even seeing images of food, no longer delivers the same honey hit to the brain as in their pre-obesity days. The reward system turns off when we turn to excess. This is adaptive because nothing in excess is good. But because the wanting system runs independently, the adaptive response by the liking system has the unfortunate consequence of making us want more even though we enjoy it less. The proposal I develop in this book is that the same process is involved in evil, especially its expression of excessive harm. It is a process that is aided by denial. Everyone engages in denial, negating certain aspects of reality in order to manage painful experiences or put forward a more powerful image. But
February 7, 2026 at 7:33 AM
alandaviesbirds.bsky.social
One of the craziest birding experiences to date! But what beautiful birds.
February 7, 2026 at 7:33 AM
epsteinweb.bsky.social
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that enjoys watching others suffer while singing O Schadenfreude. It is a mind that is capable of feeling good about killing others who are perceived as parasitic on society. It is a mind that can override the anticipated costs of killing by fueling a taste for killing. Desire, denial, aggression and reward are each associated with specific psychological processes, distinct evolutionary histories, and specific adaptive problems. When processed by a promiscuous brain, these systems connect in ways that are both beneficial to human welfare and deeply deleterious. How? Evil occurs when individuals and societies allow desire for personal gain to combine with the denial of others’ moral worth to justify the use of excessive harms. Everyone has desires, resources they want and experiences they seek. Our desires motivate us into action, often to fulfill personal needs or to help others. We all desire good health, fulfilling relationships, and knowledge to explain the world. Some also desire great wealth and power, each culture weighing in on its signature vision of what counts: money, land, livestock, wives, and subordinates. The desire system motivates action in the service of Hauser Prologue. Evilution 14 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_012760
February 7, 2026 at 7:33 AM
iduncs.bsky.social
I know the feeling lol. There’s gonna be great experiences for you in all that unknown too 🤘
February 7, 2026 at 7:31 AM
poppop.studio
"As we navigate through the world, we are changed by a variety of experiences."

Maybe the reason I remember a Shakespeare quote is because it changed me.

"...screw your courage to the sticking place..." makes me feel

But even that I had to look up a few days ago to "retrieve" it accurately.
cmooreanderson.bsky.social Christian Moore-Anderson @cmooreanderson.bsky.social · 57m
Teachers, let's stop referring to students as storers and retrievers. They're not. And when we use this language, we bring forth an epistemology that shapes our practice.

This article misses that enactive cognitive science (not cognitivism) has been saying this since the 80s
aeon.co/essays/your-...
Your brain does not process information and it is not a computer | Aeon Essays
Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer
aeon.co
February 7, 2026 at 7:30 AM
epsteinweb.bsky.social
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Dear reader, Having lived in Uganda and spoken with people who escaped from the savagery of the brutal dictators Milton Obote and Idi Amin, having heard stories of my father’s childhood as a Jew running through Nazi occupied France, and reading past and present-day accounts of genocide, I am familiar with the horrors of evil. I have also been a student of human nature, trained as a scientist. These experiences have propelled me to study the causes of evil, attempt to make some progress in explaining it to myself, and hopefully to you. There is a great urgency to understanding this problem. None of us can afford to passively watch millions of individuals lose their homes, children, and lives as a result of malice. Sloth is a sin, especially when we live in a world where cultures of evil can so easily erupt. Tam also familiar with and deeply moved by human kindness, our capacity to reach out and help strangers. When my father was in a boarding school in the south of France, hiding from the Nazis, a little girl approached him and asked if he was Jewish. My father, conditioned by his parents to deny his background, said no. The girl, sensing doubt, said “Well, if you are Jewish, you should know that the director of the school is handing Jewish children over to the Nazis.” My father promptly called his parents who picked him up, moved him to another village and school, and survived to tell the story. This little girl expressed one of our species’ signature capacities: the ability to show compassion for another person, even if their beliefs and desires are different. In preparation for writing this book, I read transcripts and descriptions of thousands of horrific events, listened to personal stories of survivors from financial ruin and war, worked with abused children who were crucified by unfit parents, and watched both fictional films and documentaries that portrayed psychopaths, dictators of totalitarian regimes, and their hapless victims. As one often does in
February 7, 2026 at 7:30 AM
enigmafilm.bsky.social
It’s why I said Sydney taxis who had a terrible reputation but I’ve had some bad and scary Uber experiences lately.
February 7, 2026 at 7:29 AM
oliviagoddess.bsky.social
Looking for experiences from ppl reading on the Kindle Scribe.

My eyes require such a large font size that I’m constantly turning pages on PW.

My main source for books is downloads through my library but I’ve seen reviews that not all Kindle books work on the Scribe.

Any experiences welcome!
February 7, 2026 at 7:28 AM
pdxoregon50501.bsky.social
Jorge Bautista, a high school student and Secretary of the New Portlanders Policy Commission, is a community advocate. He’ll speak at the Neighbors for Change Civic Fair this Saturday, 7 February, sharing his experiences navigating today’s world. More info here: neighborsforshange.eventbrite.com
February 7, 2026 at 7:27 AM
carol-and-claude.bsky.social
I guess I could say that considering the inner thoughts of an LLM is a distraction.
I only judge it on whether the output is useful or interesting.

But not so with humans, because I consider their inner life to be as real as mine.

Even though we don't know how/why brains have experiences.
February 7, 2026 at 7:27 AM
nokingsportland.bsky.social
Jorge Bautista, a high school student and Secretary of the New Portlanders Policy Commission, is a community advocate. He’ll speak at the Neighbors for Change Civic Fair this Saturday, 7 February, sharing his experiences navigating today’s world. More info here: neighborsforshange.eventbrite.com
February 7, 2026 at 7:27 AM