3min chapter

#657: Professor John Vervaeke — How to Build a Life of Wisdom, Flow, and Contemplation

The Tim Ferriss Show

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CHAPTER

What Are the Most Seminal Moments in Your Life?

If one were to make a film about your search for meaning or your creation of meaning over your life, what would those seminal moments be? Leaving Christianity, encountering Socrates, finding the Tai Chi meta of a past not ecology of practices. And then teaching a course at U of T called Buddhism and Cognitive Science. That became awakening from the meaning crisis. Meeting people like Guy, meeting Christopher Master Pietro,. seeing him getting to work with him, meeting of course my current partner, that would be, I guess, the arc right now.

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John Vervaeke (@vervaeke_john) is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. He currently teaches courses on thinking and reasoning with an emphasis on cognitive development, intelligence, rationality, mindfulness, and the psychology of wisdom.

Vervaeke is the director of UToronto’s Consciousness and Wisdom Studies Laboratory and its Cognitive Science program, where he teaches Introduction to Cognitive Science and The Cognitive Science of Consciousness, emphasizing the 4E model, which contends that cognition and consciousness are embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended beyond the brain.

Vervaeke has taught courses on Buddhism and Cognitive Science in the Buddhism, Psychology, and Mental Health program for 15 years. He is the author and presenter of the YouTube series “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis” and his brand new series, ‘After Socrates.’

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[05:31] The four ways of knowing (4P).

[10:15] Affordances.

[13:04] Semantic memory.

[13:37] Flow.

[27:03] Did John find Tai Chi, or did Tai Chi find him?

[29:46] Leaving Christianity.

[34:42] Wisdom vs. knowledge.

[36:54] Self-deception.

[41:53] When is logic the illogical choice for solving a problem?

[46:05] The powers and perils of intuition.

[55:05] Spotting patterns that need breaking.

[59:18] Meditation vs. contemplation.