Category Archives: Thought

Thoughts On Shakespeare

People, Thought,

 

Recent events recalled to mind William Shakespeare.  This picture is a photograph from my computer screen, of the article in Wikipedia about William Shakespeare.DSC08263 Introduced to him early by our mother, who read on of his plays to us when we were young children, having seen “Othello” enacted with Richard Burton when I was in high school or college, and having purchased an inexpensive book of his complete works when our own kids were young, I had not thought much about him.  I did see Verdi’s operatic interpretation “Otello”, and heard some famous quotes,

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
—Hamlet in Hamlet

“This above all: to thine ownself be true.
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
—Polonius in Hamlet

You can see these and many more Shakespearean quotes online, and on other websites.

In April 2015, we passed the 451st anniversary of his birth.  I am so impressed at his astute insights.

“So I Could Hear Myself Think”

Media, Science, Thought,

DSC08037 After listening to the radio for awhile this morning on my desktop, I turned it off, because it was distracting me, and I realized that then “I could hear myself think, ”  because I often think in words.  Then I remembered that my dad used to occasionally say that he needed to be able to hear himself think.  So my thoughts turned to him.   I gained both a subject on which to reflect, and a better means to do it, after quieting the background noise.

The Brain On Anger

Brain, Experience, Thought, , ,

brain I borrowed this image on the brain from a post on imagination as an internal sense in the brain on copiosa.org.

We have all experienced anger.  We know what it is, and we know how we are when we are angry.   We have seen a lot of it among the public concerned about particular issues.  We have seen it in presidential candidates.   The blog post below suggests that we need to take a time out of perhaps 20 minutes before we engage activity that is consequential to ourselves or others.

As a hospital staff worker, one of the trainings we had to undergo was on how to de-escalate tensions when somebody threatens violence, perhaps in a hospital emergency room.  We were told that this is one of the most dangerous places in the hospital, and that to reduce tensions one should always face the person, and keep one’s hands in front of one, palms up.

What happens in the brain when we become angry?  Gerry Vassar, in 2011, explained that all senses feed into the amygdala which decides whether to send the information to the thinking part of the brain, the cortex, or to the reactive part of the brain, the limbic system.

The post on Maya Angelou’s book “Why the Caged Bird Sings“, describes an angry person, who recovered from his anger, and went on to make smart decisions about his life.   A person constantly motivated by anger would most pose a risk to our nation, should he become president.