Psychology

You need one strong relationship in your life to remain sane. You need a relationship that doesn't depend on digital transmission! You need somebody who you understand deeply, who you can talk to directly, who can give you a reality check when everything coming through your computer and phone is bewildering.

Evolutionary biologist and podcaster known for critical COVID-19 vaccine commentary

At a point, we developed language sophisticated enough to transmit abstract ideas with precision from one mind to another. That enables high quality parallel processing of problems such that we literally have emergent cognition. When people gather, they talk about difficult puzzles they face, and the product of their thinking exceeds the sum of their individual capacity to reason through it.

Evolutionary biologist and podcaster known for critical COVID-19 vaccine commentary

We can become resilient however, and learn to have peace of mind, even when we experience traumatic events. We can learn to have stable peace of mind... happiness? Maybe not. It's unhelpful to say to someone, 'do these 10 things to be happy' – there are things you can do to get peace of mind, increase your probability of happiness, and your probability of having successful relationships.

Psychiatrist and author of "The Chimp Paradox

The reason we can't be happy, and not worry about other people's opinions, is that we're sharing our minds with a machine that does worry about other people's opinions and which does get anxious. If we can dissociate from that, and learn to manage it, it can improve our lives significantly.

Psychiatrist and author of "The Chimp Paradox

Emotions are like the reward (or punishment) the brain gives us for getting what we need, want, or could be harmed by.

Psychiatrist and author of "The Chimp Paradox

You can almost think of it like three sock puppets! You, this little chimp, and a computer, trying to run your life.

Psychiatrist and author of "The Chimp Paradox

I define robustness as saying that we're fit for purpose, 'I'm sat in my house in the morning, I'm in a great place, I'm robust and ready to face the world and deal with any emotions my brain throws up' It's having a plan and being ready. Once I open the door and life happens to me, I've got to say robust, that's resilience. Robustness is being in a good place and having a plan, resilience is being able to implement that plan and stay in a good place.

Psychiatrist and author of "The Chimp Paradox

Words like mistake, error and complication are not helpful. They carry visceral, emotive, weight which hampers learning and thus obscures what you may be able to take from an event. Over the past 20 years, we've moved away from that terminology towards the language of adverse events.

Super-specialisation at the expense of a breadth of knowledge is a modern-day fallacy. Fundamentally, we need to be able to address facts in an unbiased fashion. If you're super-specialised in one particular area, at the expense of that breadth, at the expense of clarity of vision, it is natural you will accumulate biases that will factor into your decision making.

Surgery, like many other disciplines, is primarily about facts, your relationship with the facts, how you manage, handle, interpret and use those facts. This is something we all begin to do very early in life, in our childhood. We look at information coming in from the external world, determine what is useful, determine how we understand it, build a fuller picture and effect change. A surgical mindset is very much that.

Pleasure has limits, it's fleeting, we habituate to it quickly and get bored of it. You can only experience pleasure against a backdrop of pain, difficulty, or struggle. We allocate pain and pleasure; we balance them out in clever ways.

Psychologist specializing in moral development and human nature research

Meaningful and moral are different in an interesting sense; something can be meaningful, and yet be morally terrible. Adolf Eichmann was clearly engaged in what he thought was a meaningful pursuit, perhaps he was even in a state of flow, thinking that what he was doing was 'good' – even though he was the architect of the death of millions.

Psychologist specializing in moral development and human nature research

Purpose and meaning are inextricably tied to suffering and difficulty. If you tell me a pursuit that you view as meaningful and important, I can guarantee it won't be easy. If it was easy, it wouldn't be meaningful or important. We reserve the notion of meaning for things that have difficulty.

Psychologist specializing in moral development and human nature research

Chosen suffering is part and parcel of a meaningful life. If you don't have any chosen suffering in your life, you're probably not living the best life you could. To put it primitively, we're the mammal that likes Tabasco sauce! We're the only creature that seeks out suffering and pain willingly.

Psychologist specializing in moral development and human nature research

The field of positive psychology, and people in general, would benefit from thinking harder about what a good life is. A lot of people think we're pleasure motivated hedonists, but it turns out we have many other goals. We want happiness, but that comes in many different forms. We want pleasure, we want to be good people, we want to make a difference in the world, we want meaningful pursuits.

Psychologist specializing in moral development and human nature research

Mixed martial arts aren't like boxing. In boxing, if you lose on your way up? It's pretty much career over. In mixed martial arts, there are so many ways to win and lose... When that happens, you say, 'OK, what did I do wrong?' – you have to be honest with yourself.

Former UFC Middleweight Champion & MMA fighter turned commentator