Real life is the game that – literally – everyone is playing. But it can be tough. 

This is your guide.

자꾸만 네가 떠올라, Sinking of you, Daehyun Kim, 2010

The Korean title translates into “i keep thinking of you,” but it literally means “you keep floating up”and then the English title is “Sinking of you”so when you think of another person, that mentally woven image will float up to the surface beyond your reach while you are weighted down by your own obsession CROSS LINGUISTIC METAPHORS, MAN, I AM HERE FOR THAT

(Source: undare, via exsouvenir)

HOW TO THINK MORE (BUT NOT BETTER): ALAIN DE BOTTON’S SCHOOL OF LIFE

By: Lisa Levy
Los Angeles Review of Books, May 11, 2013

IS THE VERY IDEA of an intelligent self-help book a paradox? It is certainly trying to serve two demanding masters: philosophical speculation and practical action. After all, readers don’t pick up self-help books just to ruminate on life’s dilemmas, but to be guided to solutions. The new series of self-help books published by the London-based School of Life, co-founded by the Swiss-born popular philosopher Alain de Botton, echoes the school’s lofty approach to problems, claiming to be “intelligent, rigorous, well-written new guides to everyday living.” Yet to peruse the School of Life’s calendar of classes is to fall into a vortex of jargon pitched somewhere between the banal banter of daytime talk shows and the schedule for a nightmarish New Age retreat: “How to Have Better Conversations,” “How to Realise Your Potential,” “Developing a Compassionate Mind: One Day Intensive,” “Philosophy Slam,” “Learning How to Say No,” “Getting Better at Online Dating,” “Resilience: One Day Workshop.” Before long, I was ready to sign up for “How to Stay Calm.”

De Botton himself is a divisive, if not easily dismissed, public intellectual. The author of bestselling books about many of the broad topics the School of Life curriculum covers — love, work, religion, happiness, and philosophy itself — de Botton is often accused of being a purveyor of Philosophy Lite (see, for example, Victoria Beale’s January 3, 2013, attack on him in The New Republic, “How to Be a Pseudo-Intellectual”). His works are securely aimed at the insecure middlebrow reader, the kind of person who knows that Proust can change her life but maybe would rather read about how Proust can change her life than slog through seven life-changing volumes. Indeed, there is something ersatz, if not quite fraudulent, about de Botton’s entire intellectual enterprise: he often seems like a grad student who shows up to seminar having done just enough of the reading to participate by jumping on other people’s comments, but who never makes an original observation of his own. He is constantly quoting and alluding to great figures — Jane Austen, John Stuart Mill, Stendhal, and Freud, among others, all get name-dropped in his self-help book, How To Think More About Sex (about which more below) — but he tends to meander and summarize after a quotation rather than using it to drive his own argument forward.

De Botton has, however, up until recently, been a great champion of philosophy as a way to work through life’s conundrums. His The Consolations of Philosophy (2000) is a charming and, in its own way, useful book that dissects the lives and ideas of major philosophers like Socrates and Nietzsche and applies them to everyday problems like “unpopularity” and “difficulties.” De Botton claims in Consolations that it is possible to “take on a task at once both profound and laughable: to become wise through philosophy.” In this he has positioned himself in a long line of thinkers about the care and maintenance of the self, such that the editing and writing of “intelligent self-help books” would not seem like such a stretch.

Yet the real issue with de Botton’s new book, and the others in the How To series, is not simply a lack of depth but one of purpose: they are certainly shallow in their philosophy, but they are not particularly useful either. The books are combination platters of soft science, anecdotal case studies (some real, some fictional), and exercises or suggestions about steps the reader could take to further his or her goal. Along with de Botton’s volume purporting to inspire more (but not deeper, note) thought about sex, the School of Life series includes How to Stay Sane, by Philippa Perry; How to Change the World, by John-Paul Flintoff; and How to Find Fulfilling Work, by Roman Krznaric. Krznaric’s volume is by far the most successful, perhaps because he is the only one of the authors who does not seem embarrassed by either his topic or the means of treating it. Perry, a psychotherapist, and Flintoff, a journalist, retain a tone like they should be doing their work by more highfalutin means. And de Botton’s book makes an enraging little study (all the books clock in at around 200 pages) of contemporary assumptions about sex, marriage, and relationships, regarded strictly from the point of view of a bored, married, middle-aged man who maybe dabbles in philosophy and fancies himself an intellectual. It’s like being hit on by a paunchy, balding European guy at an office party who tries to seduce you with, well, quotes from Jane Austen and Stendhal, and empty proclamations about the place of sex, marriage, and relationships in contemporary society.

When things in your life seem almost too much to handle, when 24 hours in a day are not enough, remember the mayonnaise jar and the 2 Beers.
A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in front of him. When the class began, he wordlessly picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls. He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was.
The professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls. He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.
The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. Of course, the sand filled up everything else. He asked once more if the jar was full.. The students responded with a unanimous 'yes.'
The professor then produced two Beers from under the table and poured the entire contents into the jar effectively filling the empty space between the sand.The students laughed..

'Now,' said the professor as the laughter subsided, 'I want you to recognize that this jar represents your life. The golf balls are the important things---your family, your children, your health, your friends and your favorite passions---and if everything else was lost and only they remained, your life would still be full. The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house and your car.. The sand is everything else---the small stuff.

'If you put the sand into the jar first,' he continued, 'there is no room for the pebbles or the golf balls. The same goes for life.
If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff you will never have room for the things that are important to you.
Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness.
Spend time with your children. Spend time with your parents. Visit with grandparents. Take your spouse out to dinner. Play another 18. There will always be time to clean the house and mow the lawn.
Take care of the golf balls first---the things that really matter. Set your priorities. The rest is just sand.
One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the Beer represented. The professor smiled and said, 'I'm glad you asked.' The Beer just shows you that no matter how full your life may seem, there's always room for a couple of Beers with a friend.

MOUNTAINS ARE MOUNTAINS

Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and waters as waters.

When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters.

But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For it’s just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters.

-Zen master Ch’ing-yüan Wei-shin

In the 18th and 19th centuries, wealthy British and European lovers exchanged eye miniatures, love tokens that captured the gaze of the recipients significant other. They were worn on the lapel as to be close to the heart. Less than 1,000 are thought to exist, often both the owner of the piece and the subject within it are never identified.

HENRY MILLER'S WRITING COMMANDMENTS →

1.Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2.Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”
3.Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
4.Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
5.When you can’t create you can work.
6.Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7.Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
8.Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9.Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
10.Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11.Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

Happy Chinese New Year You! 

And Stay Curious! <3

THE SCIENCE BEHIND THE SMILE →

Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert is widely known for his 2006 best seller, Stumbling on Happiness. His work reveals, among other things, the systematic mistakes we all make in imagining how happy (or miserable) we’ll be. In this edited interview with HBR’s Gardiner Morse, Gilbert surveys the field of happiness research and explores its frontiers.

HBR: Happiness research has become a hot topic in the past 20 years. Why?

Gilbert: It’s only recently that we realized we could marry one of our oldest questions—“What is the nature of human happiness?”—to our newest way of getting answers: science. Until just a few decades ago, the problem of happiness was mainly in the hands of philosophers and poets.

Psychologists have always been interested in emotion, but in the past two decades the study of emotion has exploded, and one of the emotions that psychologists have studied most intensively is happiness. Recently economists and neuroscientists joined the party. All these disciplines have distinct but intersecting interests: Psychologists want to understand what people feel, economists want to know what people value, and neuroscientists want to know how people’s brains respond to rewards. Having three separate disciplines all interested in a single topic has put that topic on the scientific map. Papers on happiness are published in Science, people who study happiness win Nobel prizes, and governments all over the world are rushing to figure out how to measure and increase the happiness of their citizens.

How is it possible to measure something as subjective as happiness?

Measuring subjective experiences is a lot easier than you think. It’s what your eye doctor does when she fits you for glasses. She puts a lens in front of your eye and asks you to report your experience, and then she puts another lens up, and then another. She uses your reports as data, submits the data to scientific analysis, and designs a lens that will give you perfect vision—all on the basis of your reports of your subjective experience. People’s real-time reports are very good approximations of their experiences, and they make it possible for us to see the world through their eyes. People may not be able to tell us how happy they were yesterday or how happy they will be tomorrow, but they can tell us how they’re feeling at the moment we ask them. “How are you?” may be the world’s most frequently asked question, and nobody’s stumped by it.

There are many ways to measure happiness. We can ask people “How happy are you right now?” and have them rate it on a scale. We can use magnetic resonance imaging to measure cerebral blood flow, or electromyography to measure the activity of the “smile muscles” in the face. But in most circumstances those measures are highly correlated, and you’d have to be the federal government to prefer the complicated, expensive measures over the simple, inexpensive one.

But isn’t the scale itself subjective? Your five might be my six.

Imagine that a drugstore sold a bunch of cheap thermometers that weren’t very well calibrated. People with normal temperatures might get readings other than 98.6, and two people with the same temperature might get different readings. These inaccuracies could cause people to seek medical treatment they didn’t need or to miss getting treatment they did need. So buggy thermometers are sometimes a problem—but not always. For example, if I brought 100 people to my lab, exposed half of them to a flu virus, and then used those buggy thermometers to take their temperatures a week later, the average temperature of the people who’d been exposed would almost surely be higher than the average temperature of the others. Some thermometers would underestimate, some would overestimate, but as long as I measured enough people, the inaccuracies would cancel themselves out. Even with poorly calibrated instruments, we can compare large groups of people.

A rating scale is like a buggy thermometer. Its inaccuracies make it inappropriate for some kinds of measurement (for example, saying exactly how happy John was at 10:42 AM on July 3, 2010), but it’s perfectly appropriate for the kinds of measurements most psychological scientists make.

What did all these happiness researchers discover?

Much of the research confirms things we’ve always suspected. For example, in general people who are in good romantic relationships are happier than those who aren’t. Healthy people are happier than sick people. People who participate in their churches are happier than those who don’t. Rich people are happier than poor people. And so on.

That said, there have been some surprises. For example, while all these things do make people happier, it’s astonishing how little any one of them matters. Yes, a new house or a new spouse will make you happier, but not much and not for long. As it turns out, people are not very good at predicting what will make them happy and how long that happiness will last. They expect positive events to make them much happier than those events actually do, and they expect negative events to make them unhappier than they actually do. In both field and lab studies, we’ve found that winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion, passing or failing an exam—all have less impact on happiness than people think they will. A recent study showed that very few experiences affect us for more than three months. When good things happen, we celebrate for a while and then sober up. When bad things happen, we weep and whine for a while and then pick ourselves up and get on with it. 

THE DARK SIDE OF CREATIVITY →

Creativity is great. In the words of the philosopher Elliot Samuel Paul, “Creativity pervades human life. It is the mark of individuality. The vehicle of self-expression. The engine of progress in every human endeavor.” Still, this doesn’t mean creativity is always ethical. Creativity comes from humans, and humans are complex. Creative people are the most complex of them all. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that creativity has a dark side. You don’t have to look any further than Wall Street to see this!

In a recent study, an all-star cast of creativity researchers — Paul Silvia, James Kaufman, Roni Reiter-Palmon, and Benjamin Wigert — looked at the relationship between creativity and personality. A large sample of adult participants reported their creative achievements and creative activities, as well as their personality. Consistent with prior studies, “Openness to Experience and Extraversion” were significantly related to creativity. But… there was also a dark side. While “Agreeableness” (i.e., hostility) had no effect on creativity, those with lower levels of honesty and humility (i.e., higher levels of arrogance and pretentiousness) reported more creative accomplishments and also reported engaging in more creative activities. This effect was stronger than the relationship between extraversion and creativity, leading the researchers to call for more research on the link between creativity and dishonesty.

<—insert a battery of boring tests—>

In sum: creativity was a better predictor of dishonesty than intelligence. These results are consistent with the study mentioned above by Silvia and colleagues, but go further by showing that not only is there a relationship between creativity and a dishonest personality, but that there is also a relationship between having a creative personality and actually behaving dishonestly in the context of a psychological experiment.

OK, but is anyone, regardless of their personality, likely to be dishonest if their creative mindset is activated? The correlation between personality and dishonesty is only a correlation. A creative personality could cause dishonesty, but dishonesty could also cause someone to be more creative. Or some sort of different relationship could exist. So the researchers put this to the test in their third and fourth studies. Again, they had participants complete the “visual perception task”. But there were now a few conditions. In one condition, participants constructed grammatically correct sentences (e.g., the sky is blue) from a set of words (e.g., sky, is, the, why, blue). 12 of the 20 sentences included words relating to creativity (e.g., creative, innovative, imagination). The researchers did this so that the concept of creativity would be subconsciously “primed.” They also had a control condition in which none of the sentences includes creativity-related words. Participants also took a widely-administered test of divergent thinking, which required participants to identify common associations between seemingly unrelated words.

The result? Those who were subconsciously primed with creativity-related words were more likely to be dishonest (chose “right” in ambiguous trials more frequently). What’s more, people who entered a creative mindset were more motivated to think outside the box on the divergent thinking test, and it was precisely this motivation that led to the increased levels of dishonesty! It gets worse. In their fourth study, they found that those primed with creativity-related words were again more likely to think outside the box and behave more dishonestly, but they were also more likely to justify their cheating. Not only did the creative mindset increase a justification for cheating, but it was this justification for cheating that led to increased levels of dishonesty. It appears as though activating the creative mindset can be a double-edged sword.

The researchers weren’t done. Apparently, they have some sort of vendetta against creativity! In their fifth and final study, they went into the “real world” and administered surveys online to employees across 17 different departments. The employees read two scenarios which described a person given an opportunity to behave dishonestly, and they reported how likely they would be to behave unethically if they were the person in the scenario. The employees also indicated their department within the company and how much creativity was required on their job. The result? Those in the departments and jobs requiring higher levels of creativity were more likely to report that they’d act unethically in the two scenarios.

Yikes! This all sounds pretty damning for creativity (and for corporations that involve creativity). The researchers propose that creativity

“[H]elps individuals develop original ways to bypass moral rules while allowing them to reinterpret available information in a self-serving way as they attempt to justify their immoral actions. The ability to be creative, combined with the motivation to think outside the box, explains the proposed relationship between creative thinking and dishonesty.”

So what are we to make of these findings? Should we call it quits on creativity, and stop promoting it in education, business, and society? Gosh no. Keep in mind these effects are statistically significant, but not completely predictive. These are just trends. There are plenty of extraordinarily creative people who are incredibly honest and engage in ethical behavior. While these results suggest that in the highest positions involving creativity there may be more Bernie Madoff types than Bill Gates types, let’s not forget that Bill Gates types do exist. Since creativity is so important for the progress of our civilization, we must still nurture it. But at the same time, let’s beware of its dark side. Power does influence creativity, so let’s encourage those in positions of power to use the creative force for good.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.] College | A Real Hero (feat. electric youth)

HOW UNIVERSAL IS THE MIND? →

If someone asked you to describe the psychological aspects of personhood, what would you say? Chances are, you’d describe things like thought, memory, problem-solving, reasoning, maybe emotion. In other words, you probably list the major headings of a cognitive psychology text-book. In cognitive psychology, we seem to take it for granted that these are, objectively, the primary components of “the mind” (even if you reject a mind/body dualism, you probably accept some notion that there are psychological processes similar to the ones listed above). I’ve posted previously about whether the distinction between cognitive and non-cognitive even makes sense. But, here, I want to think about the universality of the “mind” concept and its relationship to the modern view of cognition.

In fact, this conception of the mind is heavily influenced by a particular (Western) cultural background. Other cultures assign different characteristics and abilities to the psychological aspects of personhood. Wierzbicka (2005) delves into this problem in detail. She argues that speakers of a particular language make assumptions about what must be universal based on their own ability to imagine doing without a certain concept. Important cross-cultural differences in meaning become lost in translation. For instance, Piaget’s “The moral judgment of the child” was translated to English by substituting the French “juste” with the English “fair.” So, English readers think they are reading about the development of fairness in children, when this was not the author’s intention.

Translation is a deep problem, but it is often ignored in psychology. Generalisations about cognition must be made in some language, but, language is specific to particular cultures. Our choice of language, then, inevitably will bias how we talk about cognition across cultures.

“If we uncritically formulate some hypothetical universals in one particular natural language, for example, English, we run the risk of distorting them by imposing on them the perspective embedded in that particular language; and the same applies to our description of cultural differences” (Wierzbicka, 2005; p. 257).

So, back to the mind and our current view of cognition. Cross-linguistic research shows that, generally speaking, every culture has a folk model of a person consisting of visible and invisible (psychological)  aspects (Wierzbicka, 2005). While there is agreement that the visible part of the person refers to the body, there is considerable variation in how different cultures think about the invisible (psychological) part. In the West, and, specifically, in the English-speaking West, the psychological aspect of personhood is closely related to the concept of “the mind” and the modern view of cognition.But, how universal is this conception? How do speakers of other languages think about the psychological aspect of personhood?

In Korean, the concept “maum” replaces the concept “mind”. “Maum” has no English counterpart, but is sometimes translated as “heart”. Apparently, “maum” is the “seat of emotions, motivation, and “goodness” in a human being” (Wierzbicka, 2005; p. 271). Intellect and cognitive functions are captured by the Korean “meli” (head). But, “maum” is clearly the counterpart to “mind” in terms of the psychological part of the person. For example, there are tons of Korean books about “maum” and body in the same way that there are English texts on “mind” and body.

The Japanese have yet another concept for the invisible part of the person - “kokoro”.”Kokoro” is a “seat of emotion, and also, a source of culturally valued attention to, and empathy with, other people” (Wierzbicka, 2005; p. 272). To illustrate the contrast between “kokoro” and “mind”, Wierzbicka gives the following example: A Japanese television programme proclaims, “The 21st century should be the age of kokoro. Let’s make a point of meeting with other people” (Hasada, 2000: 110). If an English speaker declared the 21st century to be “the age of the mind” then “meeting with other people” probably would not be a priority - thinking and knowing would be. In contrast to the Korean “maum”, “kokoro” is not associated with will and motivation (“hara” meaning belly serves this purpose in Japanese). But, “hara” is not associated with the psychological component of the body, the way “kokoro” is. In other words, “maum” is all about motivation and “kokoro” is all about feelings and “mind” is all about thinking.

Interestingly, Russia, which kind of sits between East and West uses “dusa” as the counterpart to the psychological part of the person. “Dusa” is often translated as “soul”, but also sometimes as “heart” or “mind.” “Dusa” is associated with feelings, morality, and spirituality. The “dusa” is responsible for the ability to connect with other people. This meaning seems to lie somewhat more with the Eastern conception than with the highly cognitive concept of “mind.”

In a larger sense, the fact that there seems to be a universal belief that people consist of visible and invisible aspects explains much of the appeal of cognitive psychology over behaviourism. Cognitive psychology allows us to invoke invisible, internal states as causes of behaviour, which fits nicely with the broad, cultural assumption that the mind causes us to act in certain ways.

To the extent that you agree that the modern conception of “cognition” is strongly related to the Western, English-speaking view of “the mind”, it is worth asking what cognitive psychology would look like if it had developed in Japan or Russia. Would text-books have chapter headings on the ability to connect with other people (kokoro) or feelings or morality (dusa) instead of on decision-making and memory? This possibility highlights the potential arbitrariness of how we’ve carved up the psychological realm - what we take for objective reality is revealed to be shaped by culture and language. 

WHY IS ART SO DAMNED EXPENSIVE? →

“If I can’t sell something, I just double the price.” That’s what Ernst Beyeler, the great Swiss dealer who helped found Art Basel, reportedly said. Some people actually prefer to pay more than makes sense. Zelizer explains that, in all walks of life, we treat the biggest sums -differently, with special respect or even awe, than more-everyday money. “I think very often the price paid for a work is the trophy itself,” says Glimcher, the dealer.

In 2006, the crowds lining up to see a portrait by Gustav Klimt in the private Neue Galerie in New York weren’t there out of any fondness for the artist. They were there because they’d heard that the museum’s founder, cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder, had paid a record $135 million for it.

The sociologist Mitch Abolafia, who has made a study of Wall Street financiers, says that sometimes money speaks for itself. “A trader said to me one day, with glee in his eyes, ‘You can’t see it, but money is everywhere in this room. Money is flying around—millions and millions of dollars.’ It was a generalized excitement about money. Even I felt it.” That’s the excitement we all get from expensive art. One collector, who believes deeply that art should be bought for art’s sake, acknowledges basking in the “robust glow of prosperity” that his purchases give off once their value has soared.

The people who are spending record amounts on art buy more than just that glow. (And much more than the pleasure of contemplating pictures, which they could get for $20 at any museum.) They’ve purchased boasting rights. “It’s, ‘You bought the $100 million Picasso?!,’” says Glimcher. Abolafia explains that his financiers were “shameless” in declaring the price of their toys, because in their world, what you buy is less about the object than the cash you threw at it. The uselessness of art makes any spending on it especially potent: buying a yacht is a tiny bit like buying a rowboat, and so retains a taint of practicality, but buying a great Picasso is like no other spending. Olav Velthuis, a Dutch sociologist who wrote Talking Prices, the best study of what art spending means, compares the top of the art market to the potlatches performed by the American Indians of the Pacific Northwest, where the goal was to ostentatiously give away, even destroy, as much of your wealth as possible—to show that you could. In the art-market equivalent, he says, prices keep mounting as collectors compete for this “super-status effect.”

Love is famously blind; if Eva Braun and Martha Dodd are any indication, it is also willfully ignorant. Both women were afflicted with a chronic romanticism that warped their logic and inured them to the catalog of abominations taking place around them. Blame it on their dizzy blondness. Blame it on an excess of devotion — always becoming in a woman. Dodd went on to write about her years in Berlin and seems to have chalked up her attitude to immaturity; Braun has been written off as an innocent bystander. In fact, their solipsism was part of a larger scheme, in which matters of government and war were the province of men, and being oblivious to them was a woman’s prerogative. It ratified their femininity, this capacity to look the other way. What I Did for Love — that’s a list that many if not most women would just as soon forget. Braun and Dodd outdid themselves in this division.

In the final weeks of the war, the party that had been sequestered at the Berghof moved to the bunker in Berlin, 2,150 damp square feet carved into 15 poorly ventilated rooms. Braun reveled in her role as hostess. “Very happy to be near him, especially now,” she wrote to a friend.

She might easily have escaped, as Hitler urged her to do. Instead, she insisted on dying with him. She was 33. In letters to friends, she embraced her fate, as if a place in history alongside a failed despot whose name would become synonymous with evil were the finest outcome she could imagine for herself. Hitler married her there in the bunker, followed by a brief Champagne reception.

They poisoned the dog first, to see if the pills worked. By this time, telephone connection to the outside world was lost and the Soviet army had reached the Reichstag. Hitler took poison and shot himself in the temple. Braun chose cyanide over a bullet, she explained, because she wanted to be a beautiful corpse. Their bodies were doused with gasoline and burned, buried in a bomb crater in the garden.

There’s a lot to be said for exploring the nuances of clichés in songwriting, and most of it has been said. Listening to Lekman makes me sharply aware of how the generic and the cryptic have come to dominate pop lyrics, from Lady Gaga on down to Girls. The modern lingua franca is an abstract slipstream of memories, slogans, admonitions, and impressions, as if emotional states were free-floating entities, unmoored from specific experiences. This mode is ideal for self-projection and introspection, both valuable quantities. But Lekman’s music makes me think more about other people than myself. For all of their polished mannerisms, his songs are uncommonly free of pretenses— they’re about people, places, and things that happened or could happen in the world; about how we spend our time and how we talk to each other. Against a backdrop of enigmatic universalism, musicians who undertake the ticklish business of pinning down the minutiae of human affairs are very dear. Alongside Dan Bejar and Bill Callahan, Jens Lekman stands tall among them.
Jens Lekman: An Argument With Myself | Album Reviews | Pitchfork

LOVE AMONG THE EQUATIONS →

Real math isn’t some cold, dead set of rules to be memorized and blindly followed. The act of devising a calculus problem from your observations of the world around you – and then solving it – is as much a creative endeavor as writing a novel or composing a symphony. It isn’t easy, but there is genuine pleasure to be found in making the effort.

As with mathematics, so with love. There are no hard and fast rules to be blindly followed, no matter what the self-help gurus may tell you. Sometimes you just need to take a Fourier transform of yourself, shatter the walls and break everything down into the component parts. Once you’ve analyzed the full spectrum, you can rebuild, this time with just the right mix of ingredients that will enable you finally to combine your waveform with that of another person.

Does mathematically analyzing a sunset, or the ocean waves, make either any less romantic? Not to me. It only enhances my sense of wonder. When we listen to the rhythmic cycle of waves crashing on the shore, we can hear those waves because our brains break apart that signal to identify the basic “ingredients.” And every time we gaze at a sunset —a spectacular orange-red, or a soft pinkish glow—our brain has taken a Fourier transform so we can fully appreciate those hues.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Bob Dylan |  My Back Pages

WHY SOME SECONDS SEEM TO LAST FOREVER →

Though our perception of time can be stunningly precise — given a beat to keep, professional drummers are accurate within milliseconds — it can also be curiously plastic. Some moments seem to last longer than others, and scientists don’t know why.

Unlike our other senses, our perception of time has no defined location in our brain, making it difficult to understand and study. But now researchers have found hints that our sense of time stems from specialized units in our brain, channels of neurons tuned to signals of certain time lengths.

“We know keeping track of time is incredibly important, it allows us to coordinate movements, interpret body language,” said optometrist James Heron of the University of Bradford in the U.K., lead author of the study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Aug. 10. “We know the brain does this routinely and accurately, but we’re not sure how. Our evidence strongly suggests the presence of neural units in the brain that are tuned to different durations.”

Heron and his colleagues believe our mental chronometer runs, at least partially, on neuron channels that respond to a specific “frequency of time.” The new experiment exposed people to one hundred beeps or flashes of a certain duration, which adapted the people to signals of that length.

Researchers who study the brain’s perception of time have previously proposed several ways our mental clock might work. It could be like a metronome, ticking at a regular rate, allowing us to keep track of time by unconsciously counting the clicks. Or it may judge time based on the amount of energy needed to process a signal. The more attention we give to something, the longer the processing seems to take.

They then tested the participants’ time judgment by giving them a beep and a flash and asking which had lasted longer. What they found was flashes and beeps that were close in duration to the signals the people had been adapted to were consistently judged to be significantly longer than they really were.

“If I present you with lots of flashes that last 150 milliseconds, then a 300 doesn’t feel like 300, it feels more like 400,” Heron said.

The closer the signals were to the duration they were adapted to, the further off peoples’ guesses were.

“The channel-based system seems the best explanation for this,” Heron said. “It was as if we fatigued the channels tuned to that duration, and the channels near it, but the channels further away were still fresh.”

While not changing our understanding of psychology, Heron’s conclusions give an intriguing “peek at the machinery under the hood,” said neuroscientist David Eagleman, director of the Laboratory for Perception and Action at Baylor College of Medicine.

“What we know about vision and hearing suggests that different populations [of neurons] in the brain are tuned to different properties,” said Eagleman, author of Incognito, “so the idea that there may be populations of neurons tuned to different durations is plausible and in line with previous electrophysiology data.”

The workings of the brain are far from simple, however, and the channel-based model doesn’t explain why, for example, time seems to pass more slowly when we are in a life-threatening situation like falling off a roof or a car crash.

“There is a lot going on in the brain,” Eagleman said. “You’re not just passively tracking the river of time. You’re actively constructing it.”

"…the internet is where we live. It’s where we do business, where we meet, where we fall in love. It is the central platform for business, culture, and personal relationships. There’s not much else left. To misunderstand the centrality of these services to today’s society is to make a fundamental error. The internet isn’t a luxury addition to life; for most people, knowingly or not, it is life."

- from Ben Hammersley’s speech to the IAAC on the future of information security, the translation layer, and the problem with baby-boomers running the world

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Songs That Make You Cry

On this week’s All Songs Considered, thousands of listeners contributed stories about the music that makes them cry, and while there were some usual suspects — Adele, Sufjan Stevens, and Paul Simon, to name a few — Bob and Robin discovered that a song needn’t necessarily be sad to get the waterworks going. Listen to the discussion here, then head to the All Songs blog for more. This is perfect for rainy days like today. So tell me, what songs make you cry?

WHY SADNESS IS GOOD FOR YOU → 
We know that our little toes help us balance, and the hairs on our head keep us warm. But what good does sadness do? How can such a miserable feeling have improved our ancestors’ chances of passing their genes on to the next generation? For some emotions, the benefits are pretty easy to see. Generally, fear is a signal to run away – something that’s going to save your skin when faced with a predator. Similarly, disgust is going to stop you biting into a mouldering pile of rotten food.

Forgas says his research shows that sadness brings benefits that often apply more in the social realm. He offers an example: “Let’s say you are in a group, and you feel that you are not getting on, you’re not being accepted. You would probably find this upsetting and it would put you into a negative mood and it would cause you to pay better attention to what everybody else is saying, pull back a little bit. If you feel sad, it’s basically like a signal, ‘Watch out, don’t push, adapt, pay attention.’ In a way it’s exactly the same kind of alerting signal as fear or disgust but it’s probably a quieter sort of signal.”

In a society where the quest for happiness has never been more intense, there are powerful questions to contemplate. None of us wants to be sad, but as science becomes more adept at manipulating the chemistry of our mind, we need to ask ourselves, do we want to eliminate normal sadness from our lives? Or can we somehow embrace it as an integral, and potentially useful, part of our selves?