Discontinuities

Acknowledgements

1. Preface
2. Contributing Authors and Artists
3. Overture

√ Meta-painting & science of the human mind: an epistolary response to Lam Wong’s 21 Elements

1. Preface to the letter
2. A letter
3. Attentively developing expertise through time
4. N-ary relations in art and meta machinery
5. Perception: The construction of conjectures
6. Rational faith and love in the dark
7. Language of cognitive-affective mind
8. Perturbance: loss of control of mental processing of motivators
9. Attachment, acceptance, love and happiness
10. Universality of affect
11. Using visual art to improve ourselves
12. Consciousness, the great integrator (or integration)
13. High art
14. To the tune of Kevin Shields’ Goodbye
15. Symphonic poem: on stories

√ Evolutionary raison-d’être of art

1. The evolution of human consciousness and narrative
2. Consciousness and the human connectome
3. From generalized languages through gesture to public language
4. The goodness paradox and moral psychology
5. Social signaling and status games
6. The mating mind
7. Artists and audience as agents
8. Boyd’s stated evolutionary origins (purposes) of art
9. The critical importance of attention and mental perturbance

√ What can be learned from a Few Good Men that Trump cannot?

1. Links

√ Fiction about fiction: dangers and missed opportunities in processing stories

√ (Not) Learning from stories

1. Fundamental types of learning
2. Story-based bibliotherapy: self-directed and therapist-assisted help
3. Story editing as cognitive redesign
4. Transfer-appropriate learning
5. Why it’s difficult to learn from stories
6. A story was a deal
7. Wonderworks
8. Counter-arguments

√ Practical tips for learning from stories

1. 1. Shift from consumption to questioning
2. 2. Link stories to songs and other media
3. 3. Maintain an “Art-Experienced” spreadsheet
4. 4. Create a desktop folder for deep story work
5. 5. Engage in productive practice
6. 6. AI
7. Realizing the transformative power of stories
8. Canon: social signaling and sapiosexuality

√ The Status Game

1. Overview
2. Book’s thesis
3. Story-telling and heroism
4. Should we be ashamed of playing status games?
5. Status games gone wrong: Culture wars and humiliation
6. Assessing and improving upon status theory
7. An extra positive

√ A Christmas Story

1. Mirth motivates thinking: the HDA theory of humor
2. Surprise and the Incongruous
3. The unpredicted hilariousness of recurrent male fantasy
4. Fantasy themes
5. The Mating Mind and vanity
6. Keeping it Simple – John Cleese on taboo
7. A funny transfer problem
8. Signed

√ The Tree of Knowledge, by Henry James

√ Lovers, intellectual loneliness, and an enigma

1. Helen Fisher’s take on selecting a mate
2. Two aims of science, and kinds of thinking (Crude Divisions)
3. To search for a meta-effective mate?
4. Intellectual obsession and tenacity (particular thinking dispositions)
5. Thinking dispositions (generally)
6. Rationalists vs. mystics (thinking dispositions, thinking tools and beliefs)
7. A Mentor, teacher, coach and lover?
8. Humor and sex
9. History
10. Some personal reflections and a decision
11. Romantic attraction
12. What’s the point?

√ ACT in Three Acts

1. Affective variations

√ Affect: moods, emotions, attitudes and more

Evaluating art with CUPA criteria

1. Motivators: at the intersection of affect and motivation
2. The referential structure of the affective lexicon
3. Core affect, also known as moods
4. What are moods for and what is their etiology?
5. √ Moods vs. emotions

√ How to think soundly about emotions

1. Herbert Simon’s interrupt theory of emotion
2. Mental perturbance and Aaron Sloman’s tripartite theory of emotions
3. Scherer’s Componential Process Model of emotion
4. Panksepp’s theory of affect, revisited
5. Aubé’s commitment theory of emotion
6. A pair of terminological infelicities
7. Conclusion

√ On The relationship-building proclivities of human nature

1. Aubé’s commitment theory of human nature
2. Robert Heinlein’s “Our Noble, Essential Decency”
3. de Waal’s book

√ Attention! have you lost it?

1. Psychology was underprepared for covid-19
2. Our recent paper on perturbance
3. Sketch of a motive-processing architecture

√ Feeling guilty

1. Harnessing feelings of guilt with non-fiction and fiction: deliberately seeking to transfer knowledge
2. Cognitive Productivity and the problem of transfer
3. A tiny list of handy strategies for dealing with situations that might generate guilt
4. Why this post?

√ Experiencing and analyzing emotions on a perturbing election night (2016)

1. Intensity of emotions in terms of Ortony, Clore & Collins (1988)
2. The affective impact of uncertainty
3. Panksepp’s theory of emotions
4. Michel Aubé’s Commitment Theory of Emotion
5. The perturbance theory of emotion
6. Defence: untellectualization
7. Defence: displacement activities and motivational redirection
8. Coda
9. References
10. Subsequent notes

√ Why and how can music really move us?

1. Some conceptual distinctions
2. The motivational effects of music
3. Need for a design-oriented model of agency (including cognition, affect and motivation)
4. A Multi-component model of musical “emotions”: BREC-VE-MACC
5. An evolutionary perspective on music and affect
6. Music-potentiated mental perturbance
7. About aesthetic emotions
8. Individual differences
9. The case against emotions
10. Why do we listen to music?
11. Why is some sad music pleasurable?
12. Learning from songs of overcoming adversity
13. Learning from songs of interdependence
14. Learning the wrong lessons from song: how pop music can be very harmful
15. Music, motivation, mood, and learning: lessons from Huberman
16. Productive practice: using music deliberately
17. Coda

√ The Garden Lodge — by Willa Cather

1. Dialogue reprised

√ Letter from Pierre Curie to Marie Sklodowska

1. Pierre follows up

√ Madeleine by Laura Nys

√ University teaching requires lovingly opposing the student: Claude Lamontagne’s rationalist reflexions

1. Lament

√ Grief as mental perturbance

1. What is grief and what causes it to endure?
2. Learning from stories and music about grief
3. Films
4. Mystical stories
5. Real stories
6. Song
7. Other relevant artifacts
8. Concluding note on art and grief

√ Leonard Cohen’s blues and my own

1. Leonard Cohen: persistent perturbance and creative transformation
2. A contrasting trajectory: my own experience
3. Learning from stories: negative models and motive generation
4. Productive practice: training against perturbance
5. General lesson

√ Betroffenheit

√ Monsieur Lazhar

√ Motherhood and the imaginal journey — by Andrea Paterson

1. PART 1: IMAGINAL DISCS
2. PART II: THE MOTHER SELF
3. PART III: The UNDERWORLD

√ In Memory of Dr. Claude Lamontagne

√ Dear Jocelyn,

1. Rondo on creativity

Caffeine

And now for something completely different

√ Jacques Brel Wrote as He Lived

√ Art and Fear — by Dr. Al Sather

1. Syncopation decelerando

√ How mySleepButton’s visual hammer (icon) was designed to drive home its verbal nail

1. Finding an artist to create our visual hammer
2. Client-designer interactions
3. Iconifying the cognitive shuffle
4. The upshot

√ CogSci Apps®

√ CogZest’s brain-embedded dolphin

1. Unfinished

√ Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus: on the purpose of art by Claude Lamontagne

1. Introduction
2. The ‘purpose of Art’ revelation
3. Here follow rough notes from the final draft I received from Claude Lamontagne. He died before being able to convert them into a coherent text.
4. Discontinuities
5. Coda
6. Backmatter
7. Glossary

Appendix 1: template for interpreting stories

1. 1. Basic information
2. 2. Plot summary
3. 3. Characters
4. 4. Setting
5. 5. Themes
6. 6. Symbolism and imagery
7. 7. Narrative style
8. 8. General personal response
9. 9. Broader context
10. 10. CUPA assessment *
11. 11. Intertextuality, comparative literature
12. 12. Open questions
13. 13. Exercise