Deep Breathing

In his book entitled Culture in Mind , Bradd Shore proposes how what he calls cultural model can be worked as a link between cultural anthropology and cognitive psychology. According to him, after the movement of cognitive revolution, the contribution of cultural anthropology to the field of cognitive psychology has been marginalized if not diminished. In considering so-called human mind, a certain gap has been taken place between these two disciplines. To understand this gap, we need to know the significance of this cognitive revolution. What is cognitive revolution? This is a kind of methodological shift in understanding the human mind and consciousness. Prior to this movement of cognitive revolution, psychologists used mainly to see the external factors to comprehend the human mind since we see this tendency typically in the field of behavioral psychology. For, they inclined more to the natural scientific, logical positivistic approaches. Due to the influence of such approaches, the...

If we try to simplify the developmental and evolutional perspective of ourselves and our society, it seems that we encounter the so-called three or four levels of categorization. I am not sure if such categorization is derived from the limitation of our perception or else might be related to some kind of archetypical commonalities. In my understanding so far, it may be more related to the biological limitation of our perception. One of the similar cases is that maximum sequence of number we can memorize at glance is at most 7 or 8 digits. As well-known, this is because of the biological capacity of short term memory of our brain. Although it may be possible to expand the number of digits by our intentional training, it seems that 7 or 8 digits are a default set up of our short term memory and its variance to be expanded can not be beyond additional 20% of such default setting. We can never memorize 20 digits of number unless we use a memory technique such as visual association or u...

Reading the book entitled " Mind, Language and Society " by John Searle, I had a chance to reflect again on the mind/body problem. Usually and traditionally in the field of philosophy what is called the mind/body problem is the ever discussed issue. That is to say, whether our consciousness is a kind of independent, substantial entity that can exist as it is without any external supports, or it is a just what is called "the ghost of the machines" – the peripheral illusion that easily disappears when the external support such as body (brain) does not exist. In short, the question was whether our human consciousness exists independently or it is just a reflection of our human bodily function. For many years a lot of thinkers and philosophers are discussing this issue in one way or another. And another variation of the mind/body problem is the question to ask whether or not what we see in our consciousness is really a true reflection of the so-called "external...

The trainings in Japan have been completed and the other necessary preparations for the project seem almost complete. This means that the project is ready to be "live." For any kind projects, when you are implementing them, you need the careful preparation and then once you can see the preparation is well-done, as scheduled, you or someone else has to give a go-signal -- the project is going to be live. But, sometimes or most of the times we may encounter the unpredictable difficulties or troubles. The more the project is novel and challenging, the more often we may encounter such cases. Some consider this tendency stressful, while others can enjoy it as something exciting. In my case, which type do I belong to? Am I enjoying something unpredictable as something exciting and challenging? Or, am I being stressed by these things? Probably the answer is, as I always say, the combination of things -- I am enjoying and yet at the same time being stressed. One of the disadv...

As repeatedly mentioned, so-called business process outsourcing is one of the strategic approaches to generate demands in the third world countries. These countries used to provide cheaper factory laborers. That is why; a lot of industries used to build their factories there. It is a common sense. While this trend continues even nowadays, the more prominent one is the attempt that business process as such is going to be handled in these countries. There are two reasons for this tendency. The first is that in our computer age networking systems have been incredibly advanced and achieved the real-time global infrastructure such as internet based communication; and international courier services have been also incredibly sophisticated. In such futuristic circumstance it seems that we do no longer feel any distanced inconvenience or difficulty for our communication. In short, we can experience the worldwide wholeness simultaneously in both mass media and business networking. Not only h...

It has been almost one month since I stopped writing in this blog. Although there are many reasons and unexpected busyness for this. The mainly reason is probably the change of my job. If you read my previous blog entries, you can see I have been working in certain outsourcing company. And just a few weeks ago I was finally able to leave this company, though the turnover has not been completed. As everybody knows, the change of one's own job or resignation is a kind of big event, if not frustrated, in his or her life physically and psychologically. I submitted my resignation to the company almost several months ago, and yet due to lack of the replacement I had to have remained in the position until recently – a few weeks ago. During such extended period I started my blog diary, and then as you can see in my previous blog entries, during this extend period I was also involved with some other activities such as CMMI presentations , Spiral Dynamics related translations, and even t...

Today's entry is inspired by the question that was given by a friend of mine who visited my blog. Is it true that while happiness comes from outside, joy is from inside; while happiness is depending on the external circumstances and may not last persistently, joy can remain whatever his or her external situation may change as it is from inside? That is an interesting question. I understand the point and agree that there are two kinds of positive feeling -- one is something that comes from inside and the other is from outside. I am not sure if the former can be signified as "joy" and the latter as "happiness." But it seems to me that your signification can be helpful to explain each other's difference. For example, when we say that we seek for our happy lives, it seems that we always tend to pursue something external as if a typical happy life can be made of only the external factors such as beautiful houses, higher educations, promising jobs, compatib...