INVENTIONS IN BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE

 

Over the course of my career I've come up with a number of innovative concepts.  For example, I identified two phobias: subanimaphobia is the fear that there is a life after death.  Subsubanimaphobia is the fear that there is a life after death and it's just like the life you're living now forever.  

The Recurrence Theorem helps explain the ease or difficulty we experience when traveling from one place to another locally, regionally, or internationally.  Each arena of behavior has a recurrence index which tells how similar or different it is from other arenas.  Basically, we are able to go from room to room, home to street, school, or work, and travel locally, regionally, and internationally because the structures we encounter tend to be roughly at least identifiable, accessible, and not obstructions to our actions.   Buildings, entrances and exits (doors), windows, stairs, escalators, elevators, stores, hospitals, public transportation, streets, street crossings, traffic lights, have high recurrence indexes all over the world.  Low recurrence rates can be increased by signs in different languages. Even igloos in Inuit lands have recognizable entrances, as do Mongolian gers and yutes.  Norms, values, ethics, and beliefs - ideational structures as opposed to material structures – are difficult to navigate and tend to have low recurrence indexes.

Dissocism: the inability to "see" the social and to see it as a nexus of social causes (social blindness).  Compare: mind blindness in autism.

The cooperative principle in human evolution: evolution invents cellular and colonial cooperation which evolve through the stages of grouping behavior, sociation, and social networks.  These adaptations are established before humans arrive on the evolutionary stage so they necessarily arrive as always, already, and everywhere social.  Humans are the most radically social of the social animals and differently social than the social insects.  This suggests that among the earliest humans, survival, society, belongingness, compassion, and solidarity were of a piece supporting the conjecture of primordial communism or anarchism.

Decorptia: Physical decline, which tends to get less attention than dementia because we (at least in the West) tend to define and understand selfhood in terms of consciousness and ideas.  We have not recognized decorptia's effects on welllness because we (in the West) are still under the Platonic fear of the flesh.  

 

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