If I'm going to talk really loud or really fast, that would be kind of a graded system versus a discreet word or referential signal. So this is one really big debate in animal communication. And dolphins have both types of signals.
pissed off all the time thinking the technical term for this is self-referential processing um this is just a fancy way of um saying that I'm thinking about myself all the time for no particular reason we've all had a friend like that in college you know like it's like
It's Homo sapiens sapiens. It's this self-referential awareness that we can think. And that cuts to the core of maybe your definition of mindfulness.
And I think one of the real pitfalls of traditional financial advice is it's so somber and deadly serious, and sort of self-referential , and often self-righteous. And one of the things I've learned over the years is that yes, it's true.
And especially people who have the experience of being parents know what it feels like to experience an emotion where the focus is completely the other, where there's no self-referential or self-agenda involved. A biologist, a cynic, might say, yes.
This portrait that's hanging there on the wall not too far from the hospital cafeteria was assembled by kids who were in the hospital in summer So this isn't really the self-referential aspect of Escher.
And then from the neuroscience perspective, there's a large overlap in activation patterns of various cortical regions. So both activate regions involved in self-referential thought-- that is thinking about something in relationship to self and evaluating it in a certain way-- overlap of activations in areas involving memory.
it helps a lot of people. So so please don't take this the wrong way. But there was something about it that felt almost too self-referential and too like it almost encouraged at least me to blame others or to blame my past or
But they didn't finance it, so there's that. But I think amongst us there were different opinions about how referential should it be versus not. I think what we set on ultimately is we would take maybe one of the old jokes and then we'd put new spins on it.
you'll permit me a god moment I think Jesus sort of precisely says this that you may be one I suppose he could have been more self referential but it's about us that you may be one and I think that's exactly right all of us are called to be what Alice
And so there's a kind of a humor there in that TLA is itself a three-letter acronym. Now let's consider a slightly more evolved version of that kind of self-referential quality. And let's consider the acronym XINU.
But a lot of people weren't familiar in the professional community with WorldWide Telescope even in the academic education community because they thought it was just this outreach tool. And then if you want to see something that's really like bizarrely self-referential , you can go here.
his homosexuality and and as a result he was tried and he was condemned to uh mathematics computer science self-reference of course you have to be self-referential uh and uh uh we go through both
This is to get home afterwards or to get to the base. So I do talks all over and I like to kind of show people referentially where it is. Show of hands here, how many people have never been to Yosemite, the second most beautiful place on the planet?
And that freaked-out peace relates very well with anxiety. There are neuroimaging studies showing that this default mode network of the brain, the self-referential processing network of the brain, gets activated. The more worried we are, the more activated it gets.
Neuroscience is my favorite science because it's the only science where something studies itself it's really referential and very meta because human
And there's no way for an observer to describe the universe without it being self-referential in some sense, because the observer's
But notice that none of those things are truly unique to the painting and many of them are actually quite self-referential .
But yeah. The whole language becomes very, very referential , or deferential. Really quiet.
It's also more appropriate than what most people think that we should do to get people's gender nailed down, which tends to be a referential to your sex--
He says that what he thinks about the voice in his head-- he feels like he's been hijacked by the most boring person alive who just says the same shit over and over-- most of it negative, all of it self-referential . And Tolle was really the first person I had ever heard who was pointing out that when you're unaware of this nonstop conversation
and the revelatory. But in contemporary photography, flash has recently come to take on a strong self-referential
Again, we suspect there's a lot of information there that we don't know about. The big question with dolphin sounds, at least-- and all animal communication, for that matter-- are the signals referential , meaning they refer to something, they label something, like a name or word for an object, or are they graded?
And dolphins have both types of signals. We know signature whistles, for example, their names, are technically a referential signal. They can call each other and they can broadcast their own name.
So you'll notice that the cover of my book, of course, is a referential piece if you know that piece.
says the same shit over and over again, most of it negative, all of it self-referential .
And of course, as Keynes said in this quote, you can take that to the third degree, and the fourth degree, and so on, and so on, and it becomes very self-referential .