Just read this great quote based on the thinking of Jonathan Haidt, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, in Asplund and Fleming's book Human Sigma:
Train your emotional mind. Most of our cognition is automatic and intuitive, and it connects directly to our brain's motivations and reward centers. Haidt refers to those more automatic and intuitive processes as the mind's 'elephant,' and our more conscious, controlled will is the rider on that elephant. We can guide the elephant, but when it really wants to do something, it is difficult to control. Training our elephant involves changing our daily habits through behavioral conditioning, meditation, or some other purposeful redirection of our most basic impulses. It also takes time (about 12 weeks) for our brains to learn new habits.
Amazingly enough, Lawrence Gonzales in his "Deep Survival" touched on a fair bit of this. Much to my surprise, his book was as much a laymen's overview of various developments in psychology (as related to survival) as much as pragmatic stories of who survives and why.
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