Category: Life Ideas

• Our food system: Power and Profit 

  “Power and profit drive what we eat: here’s why the food system needs a revolution” Decades of corporate control have shaped diets, harmed farmers and strained the planet — transforming the system will take collective action. Food Fight: From Plunder and Profit to People and Planet Stuart Gillespie Canongate Books (2025) Stuart Gillespie’s book Food Fight offers a…

  walterstiers

  2025-09-30

  #stakeholder economy, Complexity, Life Ideas, Science, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #EconomicBehavior, food, health, nutrition, wellness

• Brain-body physiology

  “Brain-body physiology: Local, reflex, and central communication” Behavior is tightly synchronized with bodily physiology. Internal needs from the body drive behavior selection, while optimal behavior performance requires a coordinated physiological response. Internal state is dynamically represented by the nervous system to influence mood and emotion, and body-brain signals also direct responses to external sensory cues,…

  walterstiers

  2025-09-11

  Biology of Information, Complexity, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #Neuroscience, #TheInformationLens, health, mental-health, Science, wellness

• “Play should always be led by the child and what the child wants to do”

  “Why kids need to take more risks: science reveals the benefits of wild, free play” Studies reveal how risky play can benefit child development. But encouraging it can be a challenge for parents. Over the past two decades, research has emerged showing that opportunities for risky play are crucial for healthy physical, mental and emotional development.…

  walterstiers

  2025-09-10

  Creative Thinking, Life Ideas, Practical Wisdom, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, children, education, family, mental-health, parenting

• Beyond thinking fast and slow: clinical reasoning

  “Beyond thinking fast and slow: a Bayesian intuitionist model of clinical reasoning” Clinical reasoning is a quintessential aspect of medical training and practice, and is a topic that has been studied and written about extensively over the past few decades. However, the predominant conceptualisation of clinical reasoning has insofar been extrapolated from cognitive psychological theories…

  walterstiers

  2025-09-09

  #sense-making, #Wicked, Biology of Information, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Policy, Practical Wisdom, Science, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, health, mental-health, technology

• Friendship and loneliness

  “Why friendship and loneliness affect our health” Friendships play an especially important role in our lives, providing emotional and other sources of support as well as creating the communities on which our survival has depended. Friendship is underpinned both by core areas within the brain and by β-endorphins. Because β-endorphins have a number of direct…

  walterstiers

  2025-09-09

  Biology of Information, Complexity, Life Ideas, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, mental-health, relationships, writing

• Updating MentalModels of Risk

  “Updating Mental Models of Risk” Disasters are no longer isolated events. This demands a fundamental change in how we think about and respond to complex risk. Wealth is often thought of as a source of protection—a form of risk mitigation. Yet the security that money buys can paradoxically amplify certain risks. “When complex systems break…

  walterstiers

  2025-09-09

  #Wicked, Complexity, Life Ideas, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens

• A Model of Creative Thinking

  “Adaptive Decision-Making “Fast” and “Slow”: A Model of Creative Thinking” The late Daniel Kahneman introduced the concept of fast and slow thinking, representing two distinct cognitive systems involved in decision-making (DM). Fast thinking (System 1) operates intuitively and spontaneously. In contrast, slow thinking (System 2) is characterized by deliberation and analytical reasoning. Following Kahneman’s view, called the…

  walterstiers

  2025-09-04

  #sense-making, Biology of Information, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #Neuroscience, #TheInformationLens, psychology

• Plasticity: A network theory

  “Plasticity in mental health: A network theory“ Plasticity is the ability to modify brain and behavior, ultimately promoting an amplification of the impact of the context on the individual’s mental health. Thus, plasticity is not beneficial per se but its value depends on contextual factors, such as the quality of the living environment. High plasticity is…

  walterstiers

  2025-08-12

  Biology of Information, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology

  #Neuroscience, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, health, mental-health

• Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience

  “Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience: overcoming the clash of research cultures“ As scientists, we want solid answers, but we also want to answer questions that matter. Yet, the brain’s complexity forces trade-offs between these desiderata, bringing about two distinct research approaches in neuroscience that we describe as ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’.  Bottom-up neuroscience The bottom-up research culture…

  walterstiers

  2025-08-07

  Biology of Information, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, philosophy, Science

• Therapy That Isn’t Psychotherapy

  I found this nice discours on an interesting topic, related with individual challlenges, AI and related tools appearing in this relation. Therapy That Isn’t Psychotherapy by Steven Reidbord Reducing the problem to a merely external one leads to therapy that resembles political advocacy; therapy that prizes agreement (“validation”) over all else; therapy that absolves the patient…

  walterstiers

  2025-06-22

  Biology of Information, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Practical Wisdom

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens