Hi there, this is Josh.

Welcome.

Thanks for stopping by.

This is the regular Tuesday night.

Dharma punks gathering and everything I do, I do entirely by donation only.

No advertisements or hidden sponsors or anything like that.

So if you do get anything from the talks, any small donation helps.

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tonight we're going to be talking about personality its origins and why at times it can feel in life like we're stuck, that we're not growing or evolving,

and also the ways that we can become more flexible and develop new attributes or the traits that we rely on the most.

I'm going to start from the foundation of personality.

And to do that, we have to explain a concept,

which I've talked about many times in the past, which in psychology is known as

mental models.

Essentially, our brains don't passively construct our experience based on the sights, sounds,

smells, tactile sensations that are riving from the outside world,

even though it certainly appears like we are aware of and living in the present,

and living in sights, sounds, smells, and so on that are arriving to us via the world,

but the brain doesn't receive any clear, transparent stimuli from the world at all.

Brains are organs that are enclosed skulls that only receive stimuli in the form of electrical signals,

none of which have labels or explanations what they are. So from word go, the brain has to

essentially guess what is creating those signals.

...