Tag: perturbance

✨BSBM Meditation: A Multi-Anchor Practice for Meta-Cognitive Control

I’ve developed a structured meditation technique designed to enhance meta-cognitive control and attentional flexibility.

It’s called BSBM Meditation, short for Body Scanning, Breath, and Mantra. This approach weaves together three core practices—body scanning, breath awareness, and mantra repetition—into a single, cohesive routine. Optionally, it can be followed by a phase of reflective meditation, as outlined by Jason Siff in his book, Unlearning Meditation.

Continue reading ✨BSBM Meditation: A Multi-Anchor Practice for Meta-Cognitive Control

Mental Perturbance and Insomnia in the Pandemic: Ideas and Strategies

Matt Galloway The Current

On Thursday, Dr. Elliot Kyung Lee, medical director of the Sleep Disorder Clinic at the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre, and I were interviewed by Matt Galloway on The Current (CBC National radio) regarding the pandemic, insomnia and mental perturbance. You can listen to the episode on this CBC page which also includes an article about the interview.

In this blog post, I’d like to elaborate on the concepts of mental perturbance and insomnolence that were discussed. I’d also like to put the sleep tips in context.

Preamble: Replacing worry with curiosity

Continue reading Mental Perturbance and Insomnia in the Pandemic: Ideas and Strategies

Reverse Engineering the Human Mind as a Way to Better Understand Ourselves and Each Other

Last summer, I gave a guest lecture in Dr. Angelica Lim’s course on Affective Computing at the Department of Computer Science of Simon Fraser University. I said I’d publish the presentation on YouTube, so here it finally is:

Continue reading Reverse Engineering the Human Mind as a Way to Better Understand Ourselves and Each Other

An integrative design-oriented research approach to autonomous agents

updated 2021-03-22: I’ve finally added the video for this talk, above.

Here are some notes about a guest lecture I will give in Dr. Angelica Lim’s course on Affective Computing (Dpt of Computer Science) at SFU on 2020-07-16. (Twitter handle)

I aim to inspire students about the importance, enjoyability and challenges of trying to understand entire minds of autonomous agents, using an integrative design-oriented approach. I will present several interesting problems and functions that call for such an understanding, and focus mainly on mental perturbance.
Continue reading An integrative design-oriented research approach to autonomous agents

Homage to Aaron Sloman, Winner of the 2020 APA K. Jon Barwise Prize

Last month, Professor Aaron Sloman was awarded the 2020 K. Jon Barwise Prize which recognizes “significant and sustained contributions to areas relevant to philosophy and computing by an APA member. The prize will serve to credit those within our profession for their life long efforts in this field.”

Aaron Sloman university Birmingham
Continue reading Homage to Aaron Sloman, Winner of the 2020 APA K. Jon Barwise Prize

What Causes Grief to Endure? Part 1: Your Turn

There are two sets of “emotions” the understanding of which are most helpful to understanding all perturbant emotions: grief and romantic love. To understand these two requires answering several questions about them. One of the questions is: what causes grief to endure? Continue reading What Causes Grief to Endure? Part 1: Your Turn

Fifty Years after Herbert Simon’s Landmark Contribution to Emotion Research: “Motivational and Emotional Controls of Cognition” (1967)

It is Labour Day week-end! This is a time to celebrate great knowledge work. It is also a time to ask “Have we been using the best conceptual tools?” And “how can we build better knowledge?” Let’s keep these questions in the back of our minds as we consider the following

Fifty years ago this year, Herbert A. Simon published “Motivational and emotional controls of cognition”. There, he expressed one of the most important insights about emotion and motivation (and hence perhaps of psychology) of the last century. Continue reading Fifty Years after Herbert Simon’s Landmark Contribution to Emotion Research: “Motivational and Emotional Controls of Cognition” (1967)

Media Responses to the Cognitive Shuffle: Much Ado about a Research Programme

My R&D on sleep onset and insomnia (including the cognitive shuffle / serial diverse imagining) has received several waves of media attention.  The last one started c. 10 days ago with the May edition of O Magazine (the print edition of Oprah), and then went crazy from there. Last week, I accepted over 20 interview invitations from TV stations, radio stations, web sites, and a magazine who were curious about this topic. Continue reading Media Responses to the Cognitive Shuffle: Much Ado about a Research Programme

The Benefits of Corporate Romance: Left is Right for Me

As you might recall, at ISRE-2015 in Geneva, I presented a paper on romantic emotions (“limerence”), in the context of our affect regulation project. The thing about romance is that like other emotions it is a state characterized by a certain loss of control. Control of what? One’s thinking processes. Continue reading The Benefits of Corporate Romance: Left is Right for Me