Category: prudence

Charm is no easy thing. I think most of us assume we get by with pleasantry we’ve learned, yet after you’ve lingered in the syrup of true charm, it’s clear there’s special humanity very few of us know. That’s a pretty good thing to appreciate.

I clicked [next page] at Dance Magazine September 1997 and here’s some text I found:

→ hopefuls squirm on the floor alongside stagestruck guardians
→ girls, girls, girls fill the room. Many sprawl on the floor
→ never seen so many pretty girls in one place
→ She looks up at her pointed toe, wiggling it
→ Stunned, I struggle clumsily to my feet.
→ All I can feel at that instant is relief at escaping this ordeal

HA!

Fun is a very special thing. It’s a story about the Depression not told, how we cared for each other and lifted spirits together.

1. About a third of eyewitnesses choose the wrong person.
2. Courts are not preventing wrongful identifications.

A landmark report commissioned by the Supreme Court of New Jersey recommends that our courts recognize the current state of the science on eyewitness testimony. The Special Master requests far-reaching safeguards on eyewitness identification of suspects.

1. Prosecutors should bear the burden of proving eyewitness testimony.
2. Juries and judges must be informed about eyewitness fallibility.

Mind Hacks rubbing the uncomfortable misconnection between the problems we study and the problems we face.

Sean Spence:

If homelessness were genetic,
Institutes would be constructed
With tall white walls,
And ‘driven’ people (with thick glasses)
Would congregate
In libraries

…

If homelessness were genetic
Rats from broken homes
Would sleep in cardboard shoeboxes
Evading violent fathers,
Who broke their bones,
While small white mice
With cocaine habits
Would huddle in fear,
Sleeping in doorways,
Receiving calibrated kicks from gangs of passers-by

emily dickinson gets real

Once, when her mother was trying to make a houseguest comfortable, Dickinson couldn’t help but transform her mother’s solicitous questions into provocations: “Wouldn’t you like to have the Declaration of Independence to read? Or the Lord’s Prayer repeated?

Can you get Legionnaires’ disease from your car?

Legionella bacteria grow in any standing water and have recently been found in one in five windshield washer reservoirs that did not use cleaning fluid.

The Health Protection Agency calculated that about 22% of infections could be attributed to driving or being a passenger in a car.

Expect to be happier in your early 80s than during your 20s.

via MindBlog:

Stress declines from age 22 onward, reaching its lowest point at 85.

Worry stays fairly steady until 50, then sharply drops off.

Anger decreases steadily from 18 on.

Sadness rises to a peak at 50, declines to 73, then rises slightly again to 85.

Enjoyment and happiness both decrease gradually until we hit 50, rise steadily for the next 25 years, and then decline very slightly at the end, but they never again reach the low point of our early 50s.

People start out at age 18 feeling pretty good about themselves, and then, apparently, life begins to throw curve balls. They feel worse and worse until they hit 50. At that point, there is a sharp reversal, and people keep getting happier as they age. By the time they are 85, they are even more satisfied with themselves than they were at 18.

It’s not being driven predominantly by things that happen in life. It’s something very deep and quite human that seems to be driving this.

The millions of people who depend on coffee are barking up the wrong tree.

A cup of coffee, suggests a study, only counteracts the effects of caffeine withdrawal that has built up overnight.

“Someone who consumes caffeine regularly when they’re at work but not at weekends runs the risk of feeling a bit rubbish by Sunday,” said Peter Rogers, who led the research at Bristol University. “It’s better to stick with it or keep off it altogether.”

Caffeine did not increase the alertness of any group above the levels of non-users who were given the placebo.

Our hippocampus is necessary:

Then the researchers examined the brains of the monkeys that kept drinking … and found that they had a 80-90% reduction in stem cells in a portion of their brain known as the hippocampus compared with the monkeys kept sober.

Emily White:

There was a relentlessness to my loneliness.

I felt a certain dumbing down in the midst of my loneliness. I couldn’t read as quickly or as well as I used to. I wasn’t as imaginative. I said less. Without people around me, I began to feel as though I were taking up less space. I sometimes felt so ungrounded, so immaterial and unreal, that I thought I might just drift away.

Sanity involves learning to enjoy conflict:

Tyrannical fantasies of our own perfectibility lurk in even our simplest ideals, Darwin and Freud intimate, so that any ideal can become another excuse for punishment. Lives dominated by impossible ideals, complete honesty, absolute knowledge, perfect happiness, eternal love are experienced as continuous failure.

Adam Phillips, psychoanalyst:

If you have a sense of reality you are going to be really troubled. Anybody in this culture who watches the news and can be happy – there’s something wrong with them.

Stephen Baldwin:

Like many serious historians of antiquity, I often find myself wondering what happened to Hannibal’s elephants when the triumphant beasts returned to Carthage.

Were they rewarded for their Alp-crossing heroics with peaceful and well-fed retirement on the Afrique plains of plenty? Or did they succumb to an elephantine form of shell-shock, flapping their enormous ears in nervous terror as sudden recollections of Scipio’s artillery barrages exploded inside their noble skulls?

Of course, since we know from ancient sources such as Juvenal and Strabo that Roman matrons employed an early type of parasol (umbraculum) to defend their delicate complexions from the harsh Italian sun, it is always possible that some unscrupulous Athenian merchant purchased the animals after the Punic wars so he could cut their feet off and thereby produce the first souvenir umbrella stands.

After all, that is surely what would happen today.

Mind Hacks:

Stats from 6 million horse races showed we tend to overestimate long shots. We consistently over-estimate the success of underdogs.

Called the ‘favorite-long-shot bias’ at the horse track, bettors throw money at underdogs and under bet on the favorites.

Full story on ‘The Underdog Effect‘

Look, for example, at this witty little experiment.

Baba Shiv, a neuroeconomist at Stanford, supplied a group of people with an energy drink that was supposed to make them feel more alert and energetic. The bottle promised its potent brew of sugar and caffeine imparts ‘superior functionality’).

Some paid full price for the drinks, others a discount, then asked to solve word puzzles. People who paid discounted prices solved far fewer puzzles than the people who paid full price. They were convinced that the stuff on sale was much less potent, even though all the drinks were identical.

Jonah Lehrer:

When you give people bottles of wine without any price information, there is no correlation between the cost of the wine and its subjective ratings. An $8 bottle is as enjoyable as an $80 bottle.

What if you had bought Apple stock instead of an iPod?

Apple iPod 5 GB, 10 GB – 2001-10-23 – $399 – $11914.13

Australia reports that obesity has overtaken smoking as the leading cause of premature death and illness. “What we have done about obesity is not working. This issue needs concentrated and determined action,” via the Council of Australian Governments.

Similar to the US, more than 60 per cent of Australian adults and one in four children are overweight or obese.

Obesity is contagious and can spread like a pox from one friend to another, and then another, and then to one more. Both cooperation and selfishness can spread like a virus. Poor sleep and pot smoking are contagious among teens.

Dave Johns:

Not until midcentury did economists, sociologists, and psychologists begin to study contagion with rigor.

One strand of research has examined the spread of relatively simple behaviors: things like coughing, applause, and face-rubbing. Another strand has looked at more complex contagions—speeding, baby-making, and suicide.

A newer area of interest is emotional contagion, which has gotten a boost from the discovery of so-called “mirror neurons”—contagion receptors in the brain that supposedly facilitate the transmission of contagious anxiety, satisfaction and fear.

Results from logistic regression analyses indicated that mortality was significantly reduced for individuals who reported providing instrumental support to friends, relatives, and neighbors, and individuals who reported providing emotional support to their spouse. Receiving support had no effect on mortality….

How being selfless can be the best way to be selfish.

Marketers manipulate our cortical setup.

1. Our prefrontal cortex gets most excited when the cost is lower than normal.
2. Our cautious insula is most active when prices are higher than normal.
3. Our brain then compares pleasure versus pain to tell us what to purchase.

Costco is the ninth largest retailer in the world, and last year their annual revenue was more than $70 billion. The function of our brain has much to do with that.

Jonah Lehrer on Costco:

I walk in for some toilet paper and leave with a new television, a tub of cashews and a lifetime supply of chapstick.

The bare bones warehouse aesthetic, the discounted house brand, the constant reassurance that we’re paying “wholesale” prices – it’s all an effective means of convincing us to not worry so much about the price tag. As a result, we’re able to focus entirely on our anticipated pleasures, which is why I walk out of the store with all this stuff I don’t need.

We don’t look at the electric grill or box of chocolates and perform an explicit cost-benefit analysis. Instead, we outsource much of this calculation to our emotional brain, and rely on relative amounts of pleasure versus pain to tell us what to purchase.

Adults as well as children tend to say they can solve psychology questions on their own.

Then why is it hard to understand two people talking at once?

Because control over our own psychological faculties – memories, emotions and so forth – likely lead us to believe psychology is easy to understand.

What Is So Bad About Dying?

Spiegel: Dr. de Ridder, as an emergency physician, you fight to save lives every day. Which makes it interesting that you, all people, are now calling for a new definition of death in an era of high-tech medicine. Isn’t that a contradiction?

De Ridder: In my field in particular, I see how the limits of life are constantly expanding, without regard for the well-being or will of the patient. In some emergency rooms, half of all admissions now come from nursing homes. If someone who is chronically ill has a heart attack or gets pneumonia there, the most sensible thing to do is to make sure that they don’t suffer, and to refrain from doing anything else. But this is all too rare. Instead, old people, who are dying, are torn out of their familiar surroundings, rushed off to hospital in an ambulance, resuscitated and given artificial respiration. If they’re unlucky, they die in the elevator. These are horrible, undignified situations.

Spiegel: Why does it happen like this?

De Ridder: Dying a simple death is no longer an option in our society, even in places where one might expect to. Hardly anyone dies without an infusion or artificial feeding. For a long time, dying has not been natural.

SPIEGEL: What do you consider “natural death”?

De Ridder: I’m reminded of a woman in her late 80s who was still very vigorous. Her daughter brought her to our emergency room with massive intestinal bleeding. A colonoscopy showed that it was caused by a tumor. The bleeding could only have been stopped with an operation. She didn’t want it. She said that she had lived a full life and now preferred to die rather than embark on an indefinite path of suffering. The daughter agreed, and the woman died that same day. It was a totally plausible decision that no one could object to, particularly as bleeding to death is a gentle way of dying. But the doctors felt snubbed. There were bitter discussions over whether this should even have been allowed to happen.

Spiegel: But don’t doctors see themselves as guardians of human life?

De Ridder: The mandate to heal is primary, of course. But the mandate to allow someone to die well is equally important in terms of ethics. In reality, however, the chain of resuscitation and treatment often takes on a life of its own. The person who is supposed to benefit from it, with his or her individual ideas about living and dying, is no longer relevant.

Processed food is everywhere you turn. Worldwide. And now there’s something new to consider. Cheeseburgers and milk shakes may alter the brain as much as hard drugs.

As heroin or cocaine users need to up their intake to get high, junk food also becomes addictive by altering dopamine receptors.

Like many pleasurable behaviors—including sex and drug use—eating can trigger the release of dopamine, a feel-good neurotransmitter in the brain.

This internal chemical reward, in turn, increases the likelihood that the associated action will eventually become habitual through positive reinforcement conditioning.

“The products have become much more processed and manufactured and therefore energy-dense, and they have worked out what things to add like sugar, salt and fat and a whole bunch of other chemicals to make it tasty.

“The brain’s reward pathways are over-stimulated. As a result the reward pathways become hypo-functional, they just don’t work as well, ” says obesity expert Professor Boyd Swinburn.

The one-two punch might be the neural effects of combining sugars and fats.

The Department of Molecular Therapeutics at Scripps is analyzing many of the food items widely available today:

They found, for example, that animals binge-eating fats and animals binge-eating sugars experience different physiological effects. They affect the brain in very different ways.

“This energy-dense stuff is very new to us as a species. It’s probably corrupting brain circuitry.”

Meditators were found to have thicker cortex in the dorsal anterior cingulate and bilaterally in secondary somatosensory cortex.

Yes I think I can be pretty sure you read it here first.

Going anywhere, doing anything, we leave a trail of ‘our unique bacteria’.  And yes, law enforcement has discovered we leave a ‘germ print’ as useful as our fingerprints.