Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Climbing Mount Immortality: Death, Cognition and the Making of Civilization

How awareness of our mortality may be a major driver of civilization
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=climbing-mount-immortality&print=true
I particularly like the concept of "Terror Management Theory - awareness of one's mortality focuses the mind to create and produce to avoid the terror that comes from confronting the mortality paradox that would otherwise, in the words of the theory's proponents psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski, reduce people to 'twitching blobs of biological protoplasm completely perfused with anxiety and unable to effectively respond to the demands of their immediate surroundings.'"

No comments:

Post a Comment