A Dictionary of Symbols: Juan Eduardo Cirlot’s Classic Study of Symbols Gets Republished in a Beautiful, Expanded Edition

in Art, History, Psychology | November 5th, 2020

How, exact­ly, does one go about mak­ing a glob­al dic­tio­nary of sym­bols? It is a Her­culean task, one few schol­ars would take on today, not only because of its scope but because the philo­log­i­cal approach that gath­ers and com­pares arti­facts from every cul­ture under­went a cor­rec­tion: No one per­son can have the exper­tise to cov­er every­thing. Yet the attempts to do so have had tremen­dous cre­ative val­ue. Such explo­rations bring us clos­er to what makes humans the same the world over: our pro­duc­tive imag­i­na­tions and the arche­typ­al well­spring of images that guide us through the unknown.

When Span­ish poet, crit­ic, trans­la­tor, and musi­col­o­gist Juan Eduar­do Cir­lot began his 1958 Dic­tio­nary of Sym­bols, he did so with Carl Jung in mind, writ­ing against a cur­rent of pos­i­tivism that deval­ued the sym­bol­ic.

Cir­lot quotes Jung in his intro­duc­tion: “For the mod­ern mind, analo­gies… are noth­ing but self-evi­dent absur­di­ties. This wor­thy judge­ment does not, how­ev­er, in any way alter the fact that such affini­ties of thought do exist and that they have been play­ing an impor­tant role for cen­turies.” Like it or not, we inter­act through the sym­bol­ic realm all the time. Those inter­ac­tions are freight­ed with his­tor­i­cal and cul­tur­al mean­ing we would do well to under­stand if we are to under­stand our­selves.

 

In his method, Cir­lot writes in a Pref­ace:

I want­ed to embrace the broad­est pos­si­ble range of objects and cul­tures, to com­pare the sym­bols of the post-Roman West with sym­bols from India, the Far East, Chaldea, Egypt, Israel and Greece. Images, essen­tial myths, alle­gories, for my pur­pos­es, all these need­ed to be con­sult­ed, not, self-evi­dent­ly, with the inten­tion of mak­ing an exhaus­tive reck­on­ing, but rather to comb out pat­terns in mean­ing, in what counts as essen­tial, in fields both near and far.

Cir­lot draws his inspi­ra­tion from Dada and Sur­re­al­ism and the com­par­a­tive method in reli­gious stud­ies pop­u­lar­ized by schol­ars like Mircea Eli­ade, who influ­enced promi­nent stu­dents of myth like Joseph Camp­bell (and through Camp­bell, the pop­u­lar cul­ture of film, tele­vi­sion, and the inter­net). “Thus I drew near the lumi­nous labyrinth of sym­bols,” Cir­lot writes, “con­cerned less with inter­pre­ta­tion than with com­pre­hen­sion and con­cerned most of all, real­ly, with the con­tem­pla­tion of how sym­bols dwell across time and cul­ture.” And “dwell” they do, as we know, in ele­men­tal fig­ures like drag­ons and ser­pents, destruc­tive gods and evil eyes. (In 1954, Cir­lot pub­lished The Eye in Mythol­o­gy, a pre­cur­sor to A Dic­tio­nary of Sym­bols.)

 

In times of trou­ble and uncer­tain­ty like ours, sym­bols become impor­tant ways of orga­niz­ing chaos in our col­lec­tive imag­i­na­tion, and are inte­gral to what Sind­ing Bentzen, pro­fes­sor of eco­nom­ics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Copen­hagen, calls “reli­gious cop­ing” in the face of COVID-19. Ripped from their his­toric con­text, as hap­pened with the swasti­ka, sym­bols can be used to inten­tion­al­ly manip­u­late and mis­lead, to turn col­lec­tive anx­i­ety into acqui­es­cence to tyran­ny and total­i­tar­i­an­ism. Cir­lot was acute­ly aware of this as an artist work­ing under the rule of Fran­cis­co Fran­co. As a lead­ing mem­ber of a group of painters and poets who called them­selves Dau al Set (“the sev­en-spot­ted dice”), Cir­lot and his con­tem­po­raries “cham­pi­oned cre­ative lib­er­ty and resis­tance to the dom­i­nant Fas­cist regime.”

In the 21st cen­tu­ry, we can just as well read Cirlot’s dic­tio­nary with this same mis­sion. It is not an arti­fact of anoth­er time but as an ever-rel­e­vant, eru­dite, and fas­ci­nat­ing resource for our own. Through the study of sym­bols we learn to see, Cir­lot wrote, that “noth­ing is mean­ing­less or neu­tral: every­thing is sig­nif­i­cant,” every idea con­nect­ed to oth­ers across time and space. “It is only by read­ing through the vol­ume steadi­ly that one can become aware of the intri­cate inter­re­la­tions of sym­bol­ic mean­ings,” wrote Cather­ine Rau in a 1962 review of the book. We can “devel­op such aware­ness by start­ing off with any ran­dom entry,” Angel­i­ca Frey observes at Hyper­al­ler­gic.

Do so in the “orig­i­nal, sig­nif­i­cant­ly enlarged” new edi­tion of the Cirlot’s Dic­tio­nary of Sym­bols, just pub­lished by the New York Review of Books in an Eng­lish trans­la­tion by Valerie Miles. We can read the book for ref­er­ence or for plea­sure, Her­bert Read writes in an intro­duc­tion to the new edi­tion, “but in gen­er­al the great­est use of the vol­ume will be for the elu­ci­da­tion of those many sym­bols which we encounter in the arts and in the his­to­ry of ideas. Man, it has been said, is a sym­bol­iz­ing ani­mal; it is evi­dent that at no stage in the devel­op­ment of civ­i­liza­tion has man been able to dis­pense with sym­bols.”

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

40,000-Year-Old Sym­bols Found in Caves World­wide May Be the Ear­li­est Writ­ten Lan­guage

18 Clas­sic Myths Explained with Ani­ma­tion: Pandora’s Box, Sisy­phus & More

48 Hours of Joseph Camp­bell Lec­tures Free Online: The Pow­er of Myth & Sto­ry­telling

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness

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The Gruesome Dollhouse Death Scenes That Reinvented Murder Investigations

in Art, Education, Life, Psychology, Science | October 30th, 2020

Who can resist minia­tures?

Wee food, painstak­ing­ly ren­dered in felt­ed wool…

Match­book-sized books you can actu­al­ly read…

Clas­sic record albums shrunk down for mice…

The late Frances Gless­ner Lee (1878–1962) def­i­nite­ly loved minia­tures, and excelled at their cre­ation, knit­ting socks on pins, hand rolling real tobac­co into tiny cig­a­rettes, and mak­ing sure the vic­tims in her real­is­tic mur­der scene dio­ra­mas exhib­it­ed the prop­er degree of rig­or mor­tis and livid­i­ty.

Lee began work on her Nut­shell Stud­ies of Unex­plained Death at the age of 65, as part of a life­long inter­est in homi­cide inves­ti­ga­tion.

Her pre­oc­cu­pa­tion began with the Sher­lock Holmes sto­ries she read as a girl.

In the 1930s, the wealthy divorcee used part of a siz­able inher­i­tance to endow Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty with enough mon­ey for the cre­ation of its Depart­ment of Legal Med­i­cine.

Its first chair­man was her friend, George Burgess Magrath, a med­ical exam­in­er who had shared his dis­tress that crim­i­nals were lit­er­al­ly get­ting away with mur­der because coro­ners and police inves­ti­ga­tors lacked appro­pri­ate train­ing for foren­sic analy­sis.

The library to which Lee donat­ed a thou­sand books on the top­ic was named in his hon­or.

The home­made dio­ra­mas offered a more vivid expe­ri­ence than could be found in any book.

Each Nut­shell Study required almost half a year’s work, and cost about the same as a house would have at the time. ($6000 in the 1940s.)

“Luck­i­ly, I was born with a sil­ver spoon in my mouth,” Lee remarked. “It gives me the time and mon­ey to fol­low my hob­by of sci­en­tif­ic crime detec­tion.”

Although Lee had been brought up in a lux­u­ri­ous 13 bed­room home (8 were for ser­vants’ use), the domes­tic set­tings of the Nut­shell Stud­ies are more mod­est, reflec­tive of the vic­tims’ cir­cum­stances.

She drew inspi­ra­tion from actu­al crimes, but had no inter­est in repli­cat­ing their actu­al scenes. The crimes she authored for her lit­tle rooms were com­pos­ites of the ones she had stud­ied, with invent­ed vic­tims and in rooms dec­o­rat­ed accord­ing to her imag­i­na­tion.

Her intent was to pro­vide inves­ti­ga­tors with vir­gin crime scenes to metic­u­lous­ly exam­ine, culling indi­rect evi­dence from the painstak­ing­ly detailed props she was a stick­ler for get­ting right.

Stu­dents were pro­vid­ed with a flash­light, a mag­ni­fy­ing glass, and wit­ness state­ments. Her atten­tion to detail ensured that they would use the full nine­ty min­utes they had been allot­ted ana­lyz­ing the scene. Their goal was not to crack the case but to care­ful­ly doc­u­ment obser­va­tions on which a case could be built.

The flaw­less­ness of her 1:12 scale ren­der­ings also speaks to her deter­mi­na­tion to be tak­en seri­ous­ly in what was then an exclu­sive­ly male world. (Women now dom­i­nate the field of foren­sic sci­ence.)

Noth­ing was over­looked.

As she wrote to Dr. Alan Moritz, the Depart­ment of Legal Medicine’s sec­ond chair, in a let­ter review­ing pro­posed changes to some ear­ly scenes:

I found myself con­stant­ly tempt­ed to add more clues and details and am afraid I may get them “gad­gety” in the process. I hope you will watch over this and stop me when I go too far. Since you and I have per­pe­trat­ed these crimes our­selves we are in the unique posi­tion of being able to give com­plete descrip­tions of them even if there were no witnesses—very much in the man­ner of the nov­el­ist who is able to tell the inmost thoughts of his char­ac­ters.

It’s no acci­dent that many of the Nut­shell Stud­ies’ lit­tle corpses are female.

Lee did not want offi­cers to treat vic­tims dis­mis­sive­ly because of gen­der-relat­ed assump­tions, whether the sce­nario involved a pros­ti­tute whose throat has been cut, or a house­wife dead on the floor of her kitchen, the burn­ers of her stove all switched to the on posi­tion.

Would you like to test your pow­ers of obser­va­tion?

Above are the remains of Mag­gie Wil­son, dis­cov­ered in the Dark Bath­room’s tub by a fel­low board­er, Lizzie Miller, who gave the fol­low­ing state­ment:

I roomed in the same house as Mag­gie Wil­son, but knew her only from we met in the hall. I think she had ‘fits’ [seizures]. A cou­ple of male friends came to see her fair­ly reg­u­lar­ly. On Sun­day night, the men were there and there was a lot of drink­ing going on. Some time after the men left, I heard the water run­ning in the bath­room. I opened the door and found her as you see her.

Grim, eh?

Not near­ly as grim as what you’ll find in the Par­son­age or the Three-Room Dwelling belong­ing to shoe fac­to­ry fore­man Robert Jud­son, his wife, Kate, and their baby, Lin­da Mae.

The peri­od-accu­rate mini fur­nish­ings and fash­ions may cre­ate a false impres­sion that the Moth­er of Foren­sic Sci­ence’s Nut­shell Stud­ies should be rel­e­gat­ed to a muse­um.

In truth, their abun­dance of detail remains so effec­tive that the Office of the Chief Med­ical Exam­in­er in Bal­ti­more con­tin­ues to use 18 of them in train­ing sem­i­nars to help homi­cide inves­ti­ga­tors “con­vict the guilty, clear the inno­cent, and find the truth in a nut­shell.”

Explore 5 Nut­shell Studies—Woodman’s Shack, Attic, Liv­ing Room, Garage, and Par­son­age Parlor—in 360º com­pli­ments of The Smith­son­ian Amer­i­can Art Muse­um Ren­wick Gallery’s exhib­it Mur­der Is Her Hob­by: Frances Gless­ner Lee and The Nut­shell Stud­ies of Unex­plained Death.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

A Record Store Designed for Mice in Swe­den, Fea­tur­ing Albums by Mouse Davis, Destiny’s Cheese, Dol­ly Pars­ley & More

“20 Rules For Writ­ing Detec­tive Sto­ries” By S.S. Van Dine, One of T.S. Eliot’s Favorite Genre Authors (1928)

Lucy Law­less Joins Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast #5 on True Crime

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Secret to High Performance and Fulfilment: Psychologist Daniel Goleman Explains the Power of Focus

in Neuroscience, Psychology | October 29th, 2020

“Con­cen­tra­tion is one of the hap­pi­est things in my life,” says nov­el­ist Haru­ki Muraka­mi in a 2011 New York Times Mag­a­zine pro­file. “If you can­not con­cen­trate, you are not so hap­py.” In this, the author of A Wild Sheep Chase sure­ly has the agree­ment of the author of Emo­tion­al Intel­li­gence, the psy­chol­o­gist and writer Daniel Gole­man. But Gole­man express­es it a bit dif­fer­ent­ly, as you can hear — in detail and at length — in “Focus: The Secret to High Per­for­mance and Ful­fill­ment,” an Intel­li­gence Squared talk based on the book he pub­lished eigh­teen years after the best­selling Emo­tion­al Intel­li­gence, Focus: The Hid­den Dri­ver of Excel­lence.

Atten­tion, Gole­man tells us, is under siege, not least by devices “devised to inter­rupt us, to seduce us, to draw our atten­tion from this to that.” He quotes the famed econ­o­mist, polit­i­cal sci­en­tist, and cog­ni­tive psy­chol­o­gist Her­bert Simon’s obser­va­tion that “infor­ma­tion con­sumes atten­tion. Hence a wealth of infor­ma­tion cre­ates a pover­ty of atten­tion” — but he does­n’t men­tion that Simon made it near­ly fifty years ago, long before the inven­tion of most of what besieges our atten­tion today. (Then again, even medieval monks com­plained of con­stant dis­trac­tion.) Most of us can feel, on some lev­el, that to the extent we have trou­ble focus­ing, we also have trou­ble per­form­ing at the lev­el we’d like to in our pro­fes­sion­al and social life.

What can we do about it? After offer­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal expla­na­tions of what’s going on with our abil­i­ty to focus (or lack there­of), Gole­man sug­gests strate­gies we can use to mas­ter our “emo­tion­al dis­trac­tors” and work out the “men­tal mus­cle” that is our atten­tion. (This anal­o­gy with phys­i­cal exer­cise would get no argu­ment from Muraka­mi, who runs as rig­or­ous­ly as he writes.) Though “mind-wan­der­ing is absolute­ly essen­tial for cre­ative insight,” as we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly dis­cussed here on Open Cul­ture, the crit­i­cal skill is to bring our mind back from its wan­der­ing at will. This we can prac­tice through Bud­dhist-style breath­ing med­i­ta­tion, a sub­ject to which Gole­man has since devot­ed a good deal of research, and just one of the prac­tices that can help us live our lives to the fullest by allow­ing us to see, hear, con­sid­er, and engage with what’s right in front of us.

As Gole­man lays out a suite of atten­tion-build­ing tech­niques and their ben­e­fits, he touch­es on the­o­ries and find­ings from cog­ni­tive psy­chol­o­gy that have by now been pop­u­lar­ized into famil­iar­i­ty: the Stan­ford “marsh­mal­low test,” for exam­ple, which appears to show that chil­dren who can delay grat­i­fi­ca­tion have bet­ter life out­comes than those who can­not. Such out­comes can be ours as well, he argues, if we make a habit of “length­en­ing the gap between impulse and action” in our own habits. “I’m not a fast thinker, but once I am inter­est­ed in some­thing, I am doing it for many years,” as Muraka­mi says. “I’m kind of a big ket­tle. It takes time to get boiled, but then I’m always hot.” As for the rest of us, could­n’t we all stand to become big­ger ket­tles than we are?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Focus: Five Talks Reveal the Secrets of Con­cen­tra­tion

How Infor­ma­tion Over­load Robs Us of Our Cre­ativ­i­ty: What the Sci­en­tif­ic Research Shows

The Case for Delet­ing Your Social Media Accounts & Doing Valu­able “Deep Work” Instead, Accord­ing to Prof. Cal New­port

How to Take Advan­tage of Bore­dom, the Secret Ingre­di­ent of Cre­ativ­i­ty

How Med­i­ta­tion Can Change Your Brain: The Neu­ro­science of Bud­dhist Prac­tice

Medieval Monks Com­plained About Con­stant Dis­trac­tions: Learn How They Worked to Over­come Them

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” & Bach’s “Prelude in C Major” Get Turned into Dazzling Musical Animations by an Artist with Synesthesia

in Film, Music, Neuroscience, Psychology | October 28th, 2020

Colour is the key­board, the eyes are the har­monies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touch­ing one key or anoth­er, to cause vibra­tions in the soul.

—Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky

We may owe the his­to­ry of mod­ern art to the con­di­tion of synes­the­sia, which caus­es those who have it to hear col­ors, see sounds, taste smells, etc. Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky, who pio­neered abstract expres­sion­ism in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, did so “after hav­ing an unusu­al­ly visu­al response to a per­for­mance of Wagner’s com­po­si­tion Lohen­grin at the Bol­shoi The­atre,” the Den­ver Muse­um of Art notes. He was so moved by the moment that he “aban­doned his law career to study paint­ing at the pres­ti­gious Munich Acad­e­my of Fine Arts. He lat­er described the life-chang­ing expe­ri­ence: ‘I saw all my col­ors in spir­it, before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me.’”

Kandin­sky nev­er heard Coltrane, but if he had, and had access to 3D ren­der­ing soft­ware, he might have made some­thing very much like the short ani­ma­tion above from Israeli artist Michal Levy. “Rough­ly 3 per cent of peo­ple expe­ri­ence synaes­the­sia,” writes Aeon, “a neu­ro­log­i­cal con­di­tion in which peo­ple have a recur­ring sen­so­ry over­lap, such as … envi­sion­ing let­ters and num­bers each with their own inher­ent colour.”

Levy’s con­di­tion is one of the most com­mon forms, like Kandinsky’s: “chro­maes­the­sia, in which sounds and music pro­voke visu­als.” Where the Russ­ian painter saw Wag­n­er in “wild, almost crazy lines,” Levy sees the “rol­lick­ing notes” of Coltrane’s Giant Steps as a “kinet­ic, cas­cad­ing cityscape built from colour­ful blocks of sound.”

After visu­al­iz­ing her expe­ri­ence of Coltrane, Levy cre­at­ed the ani­ma­tion above, Dance of Har­mo­ny, to illus­trate what hap­pens when she hears Bach. Dur­ing a mater­ni­ty leave, work­ing with her friend, ani­ma­tor Hagai Azaz, she set her­self the chal­lenge of show­ing, as she describes it, “the cas­cad­ing flow of emo­tion, to make the feel­ing con­ta­gious, by using only col­or, the basic shape of cir­cles, and min­i­mal­ist motion, assign­ing to each musi­cal chord the visu­al ele­ments that cor­re­spond to it synaes­thet­i­cal­ly.”

It is fas­ci­nat­ing to com­pare Levy’s descrip­tions of her con­di­tion with those of oth­er famous synes­thetes like Vladimir Nabokov and, espe­cial­ly Kandin­sky, who in essence first showed the world what music looks like, there­by giv­ing art a new visu­al lan­guage. Levy calls her synes­the­sia art, an “emo­tion­al voy­age of har­mo­ny,” and includes in her visu­al­iza­tion of Bach’s famous pre­lude an “unex­pect­ed ele­giac side­bar of love and loss,” Maria Popo­va writes. Read Levy’s full descrip­tion of Dance of Har­mo­ny here and learn more about the “extra­or­di­nary sen­so­ry con­di­tion called synes­the­sia” here.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

An Artist with Synes­the­sia Turns Jazz & Rock Clas­sics Into Col­or­ful Abstract Paint­ings

Jazz Decon­struct­ed: What Makes John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” So Ground­break­ing and Rad­i­cal?

Decon­struct­ing Bach’s Famous Cel­lo Prelude–the One You’ve Heard in Hun­dreds of TV Shows & Films

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagnes

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Why Do People Join Cults? An Animated Primer Explains

in Psychology | October 7th, 2020

As much as we might like to think we make free choic­es as ratio­nal indi­vid­u­als, we are all more or less sug­gestible and sub­ject to social pres­sures. Social media mar­keters aren’t under any illu­sions about this. Guides for how to exploit psy­cho­log­i­cal vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties and influ­ence behav­ior pro­lif­er­ate. (One of the top-sell­ing busi­ness books on Ama­zon is a man­u­al titled Influ­ence: The Psy­chol­o­gy of Per­sua­sion.) Such tech­niques form the basis of a mas­sive, glob­al ad-based indus­try that also hap­pens to traf­fic in polit­i­cal pro­pa­gan­da and dis­in­for­ma­tion. None of this would be as wild­ly prof­itable and effec­tive as it is if human beings could eas­i­ly resist manip­u­la­tion.

But there are degrees of influ­ence and sus­cep­ti­bil­i­ty. Not every­one who makes an easy mark for adver­tis­ers, for exam­ple, is liable to join a cult or an extrem­ist group. What makes peo­ple sub­ject to the induce­ments of a cult leader? What makes them—in the clichéd phrase cal­lous­ly drawn from the mass sui­cide at Jonestown—“drink the Kool-Aid”? The TED-Ed video above, script­ed by cult expert Dr. Jan­ja Lalich, pro­fes­sor emeri­ta of Soci­ol­o­gy at Cal­i­for­nia State Uni­ver­si­ty, Chico, begins with some basic qual­i­fi­ca­tions.

Not all cults are reli­gious: some are polit­i­cal, ther­a­py-based, focused on self-improve­ment, or oth­er­wise.

Not all new reli­gions are cults.

Lalich defines a cult as a “group or move­ment with a usu­al­ly extreme ide­ol­o­gy, typ­i­cal­ly embod­ied in a charis­mat­ic leader…. Most cults share some basic char­ac­ter­is­tics,” such as a “high-lev­el of com­mit­ment from its mem­bers,” a strict hier­ar­chy, and “claims to pro­vide answers to life’s biggest ques­tions.” Cults have lit­tle tol­er­ance for dis­sent from either the inside or out­side.

The dis­tinc­tions between cults and reli­gions can seem slight, but cults sep­a­rate their mem­bers from the larg­er soci­ety and seek direct and total con­trol over their lives, while most main­stream reli­gions (which may have begun as cults) do not. Reli­gions may pros­e­ly­tize, but cults use meth­ods more akin to pyra­mid schemes to pres­sure recruits into per­son­al­ly iden­ti­fy­ing with the ide­ol­o­gy and spread­ing it. By exploit­ing our desires for con­nec­tion, com­fort, mean­ing, and belong­ing, they cre­ate what the DSM‑V terms “iden­ti­ty dis­tur­bance due to pro­longed and intense coer­cive per­sua­sion.”

Cults “dis­cour­age crit­i­cal think­ing, mak­ing it hard to voice doubts when every­one around you is mod­el­ing absolute faith.” New recruits expe­ri­ence painful cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance that, over time, they try to over­come by strength­en­ing their devo­tion. The sense of sunk cost makes it increas­ing­ly hard for them to admit they have been lied to, manip­u­lat­ed, and used. Cults stunt their mem­bers’ “psy­cho­log­i­cal and emo­tion­al growth,” which is “a par­tic­u­lar prob­lem for chil­dren” who are born or indoc­tri­nat­ed into them. Belief, Lalich’s les­son states, should not force a per­son to sac­ri­fice their fam­i­ly, friends, per­son­al moral­i­ty, and mon­ey to an author­i­tar­i­an leader.

Lalich her­self under­stands cults not only as an aca­d­e­m­ic researcher but as a for­mer mem­ber of a polit­i­cal cult in which, she says, “you weren’t allowed to think for your­self at the same time as you were told to think for your­self.” Which brings us to the burn­ing ques­tion that has been asked so many times over the past four years. Does the absolute, unwa­ver­ing devo­tion to the cur­rent pres­i­dent con­sti­tute cult-like behav­ior? Is “Trump­ism” a cult? An open let­ter on Lalich’s Cult Research site, signed by a num­ber of promi­nent psy­chol­o­gists, psy­chi­a­trists, and oth­er experts, advis­es, “We should look to the evi­dence, and there is evi­dence aplen­ty.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan Pre­dicts the Decline of Amer­i­ca: Unable to Know “What’s True,” We Will Slide, “With­out Notic­ing, Back into Super­sti­tion & Dark­ness” (1995)

Christo­pher Hitchens Dis­miss­es the Cult of Ayn Rand: There’s No “Need to Have Essays Advo­cat­ing Self­ish­ness Among Human Beings; It Requires No Rein­force­ment”

Isaac Asi­mov Laments the “Cult of Igno­rance” in the Unit­ed States (1980)

Umber­to Eco Makes a List of the 14 Com­mon Fea­tures of Fas­cism

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Free Courses to Maintain Mental & Physical Health During a Pandemic

in Health, MOOCs, Psychology | August 20th, 2020

As I write this, the smoke from the numer­ous for­est fires across Cal­i­for­nia are mak­ing the air qual­i­ty ter­ri­ble, so we are being told to stay inside. How­ev­er, the heat­wave is mak­ing it insuf­fer­able to *be* inside. And we also have to be wary of COVID-19 and wear a mask. You could say this is a slight­ly stress­ful sit­u­a­tion. And a lot of us are deal­ing with even more than that–job sta­bil­i­ty, rent, and on and on. Just typ­ing this made me anx­ious!

Dur­ing this time we should try not to neglect our men­tal health. For­tu­nate­ly Cours­era offers free online cours­es about Men­tal Health and Well-Being.

The Cours­era video above comes from a Face­book live event that fea­tures Yale University’s Lau­rie San­tos, who teach­es Coursera’s Sci­ence of Well-Being course. This 30 minute Q&A dives right in to our cur­rent sit­u­a­tion, with San­tos out­lin­ing a pro­to­col for men­tal health that should be as much a part of your reg­i­men as wear­ing a mask and wash­ing your hands with soap (while singing Hap­py Birth­day to your­self, don’t for­get.)

Here’s a top ten of Cours­er­a’s most pop­u­lar health & well-being cours­es to check out:

  1. Mind Con­trol: Man­ag­ing Your Men­tal Health Dur­ing COVID-19 from Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to
  2. The Sci­ence of Well-Being from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty
  3. Find­ing Pur­pose and Mean­ing In Life: Liv­ing for What Mat­ters Most from Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan
  4. Stan­ford Intro­duc­tion to Food and Health from Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty
  5. A Life of Hap­pi­ness and Ful­fill­ment from Indi­an School of Busi­ness
  6. Pos­i­tive Psy­chi­a­try and Men­tal Health from The Uni­ver­si­ty of Syd­ney
  7. Hack­ing Exer­cise For Health. The sur­pris­ing new sci­ence of fit­ness. from McMas­ter Uni­ver­si­ty
  8. Intro­duc­tion to Self-Deter­mi­na­tion The­o­ry: An approach to moti­va­tion, devel­op­ment and well­ness from Uni­ver­si­ty of Rochester
  9. Bio­hack­ing Your Brain’s Health from Emory Uni­ver­si­ty
  10. Man­ag­ing Your Health: The Role of Phys­i­cal Ther­a­py and Exer­cise from Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to

San­tos answers ques­tions from view­ers, cov­er­ing top­ics like avoid­ing ten­sion and argu­ments with our loved ones, stay­ing informed on the world with­out cre­at­ing more anx­i­ety, how can frontline/healthcare work­ers com­bat anx­i­ety, how to keep your­self pos­i­tive when liv­ing alone with­out fam­i­ly or friends, how to keep pro­duc­tive and healthy at work with the threat of lay­offs, how to look for a new job after being laid off because of COVID, how to help your child who is miss­ing their school friends, how do we cre­ate good expe­ri­ences to cre­ate good mem­o­ries, what we can do about sleep prob­lems, how to care for fam­i­ly mem­bers with COVID while also work­ing a job, and how to show ran­dom acts of kind­ness dur­ing this time (which is what San­tos cov­ers often in her Hap­pi­ness Lab pod­cast).

Over­all, focus on self-com­pas­sion, San­tos says, which has to be the start­ing point for all of this. When you enroll in these cours­es, Cours­era gives you two options. You can enroll as a paid stu­dent and get a cer­tifi­cate at the end. Or choose to “audit” the course (as shown here) and the course is free. Just like in col­lege! All the learn­ing, none of the blue book essays!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy & Neu­ro­science Cours­es

Cours­era Makes Cours­es & Cer­tifi­cates Free Dur­ing Coro­n­avirus Quar­an­tine: Take Cours­es in Psy­chol­o­gy, Music, Well­ness, Pro­fes­sion­al Devel­op­ment & More Online

1,500 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

Free Cours­es on the Coro­n­avirus: What You Need to Know About the Emerg­ing Pan­dem­ic

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

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Building Your Resilience: Finding Meaning in Adversity–Take a Free & Timely Course Online

in Health, Online Courses, Psychology | May 8th, 2020

The Great Courses has made avail­able a free and rather time­ly course–Build­ing Your Resilience: Find­ing Mean­ing in Adver­si­ty. Divid­ed into 24 lec­tures and taught by Mol­ly Birk­holm, the course gets intro­duced with the fol­low­ing text:

Recent research shows that we grow into our best and most joy­ful selves not when we avoid our prob­lems but when we embrace them, con­fi­dent that we are resilient enough to work through them to an appro­pri­ate res­o­lu­tion. Our prob­lems are an impor­tant part of our path.

Resilience is our abil­i­ty to phys­i­cal­ly, emo­tion­al­ly, and men­tal­ly bounce back from adverse cir­cum­stances. With­out it, we would be down for the count every time we ran into a prob­lem. Stuck in traf­fic and late for a meet­ing? It’s your resilience that allows you to make the nec­es­sary phone calls and keep mov­ing for­ward, con­fi­dent that you can han­dle this stress­ful sit­u­a­tion as it evolves. With­out it, you’d make a U‑turn and give up. Recov­er­ing from the flu or recent surgery? It’s your resilience that helps you take care of your­self appro­pri­ate­ly and look for­ward to a bet­ter future. Our capac­i­ty to thrive in life depends direct­ly on our resilience.

Shar­ing her own fas­ci­nat­ing jour­ney, as well as the lat­est research by neu­rol­o­gists and psy­chol­o­gists, trau­ma spe­cial­ist Mol­ly Birk­holm shows us how to gauge our cur­rent lev­el of resilience and improve from there. In Build­ing Your Resilience: Find­ing Mean­ing in Adver­si­ty, you’ll learn how all of our challenges—from every­day stress­es to life-alter­ing traumas—can bring wis­dom and growth. In 17 fas­ci­nat­ing class­es and 7 “hands-on” prac­tice ses­sions, you’ll learn about and expe­ri­ence the process of build­ing the inner calm and clar­i­ty of mind that cre­ate greater resilience. With Ms. Birkholm’s warm and opti­mistic demeanor, you’ll feel her encour­age­ment every step of the way as you move toward build­ing your best and most ful­fill­ing life.

Watch all 24 lec­tures above, or over on YouTube. Build­ing Your Resilience: Find­ing Mean­ing in Adver­si­ty will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Find more cours­es in The Great Courses cat­a­logue here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Bud­dhism & Neu­ro­science Can Help You Change How Your Mind Works: A New Course by Best­selling Author Robert Wright

Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­o­gy: A Free Course from Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty 

What Are the Keys to Hap­pi­ness?: Take “The Sci­ence of Well-Being,” a Free Online Ver­sion of Yale’s Most Pop­u­lar Course

How to Find Emo­tion­al Strength & Resilience Dur­ing COVID-19: Advice from Eliz­a­beth Gilbert, Jack Korn­field, Susan David & Oth­er Experts

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How to Find Emotional Strength & Resilience During COVID-19: Advice from Elizabeth Gilbert, Jack Kornfield, Susan David & Other Experts

in Current Affairs, Health, Life, Psychology, TED Talks | April 23rd, 2020

There are many roads through the coro­n­avirus cri­sis. One is denial, which only makes things worse. Anoth­er is ser­vice and self-sac­ri­fice, a choice we hon­or in the med­ical pro­fes­sion­als putting their lives at risk every day. For most of us, how­ev­er, the best course of action is non-action—staying home and iso­lat­ing our­selves from oth­ers. Days bleed into weeks, weeks into months. It can seem like life has come to a com­plete halt. It hasn’t, of course. All sorts of things are hap­pen­ing inside us. We don’t know how long this will last; cur­rent cours­es of action don’t bode well. What do we do with the fear, anger, lone­li­ness, grief, and buzzing, ever-present anx­i­ety?

Maybe the first thing to do is to accept that we have those feel­ings and feel them, instead of stuff­ing them down, cov­er­ing them up, or push­ing them onto some­one else. Then we can rec­og­nize we aren’t by any means alone. That’s eas­i­er said than done in quar­an­tine, but psy­chol­o­gists and inspi­ra­tional writ­ers and speak­ers like Eliz­a­beth Gilbert have come togeth­er under the aus­pices of the TED Con­nect series, host­ed by the head of TED Chris Ander­son, to help.

TED, known for show­cas­ing “thinkers and doers [giv­ing] the talk of their lives in 18 min­utes (or less),” has wise­ly rec­og­nized the need to dig much deep­er. Ander­son and head of cura­tion Helen Wal­ters’ con­ver­sa­tion with Gilbert, above, runs a lit­tle over an hour.

As for that cease­less anx­i­ety, Gilbert sug­gests we should all give our­selves “a mea­sure of mer­cy and com­pas­sion.” We might feel like we need per­mis­sion to do so in soci­eties that demand we con­stant­ly jus­ti­fy our exis­tence. But admit­ting vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty is the begin­ning of strength. Then we find con­struc­tive ways for­ward. The kind of resilience we can build in iso­la­tion is the kind that can out­last a cri­sis. Still, it is hard won. As Ander­son says above, in addi­tion to the exter­nal bat­tle we must fight with the virus and our own gov­ern­ments, “there’s this oth­er bat­tle as well, that is prob­a­bly equal­ly as con­se­quen­tial. It’s a bat­tle that’s going on right inside our minds.”

Rather than killing time wait­ing fit­ful­ly for some accept­able form of nor­mal to return, we can build what psy­chol­o­gist Susan David calls “emo­tion­al courage.” In con­ver­sa­tion with TED’s Whit­ney Pen­ning­ton Rogers, above, David reveals that she her­self has good rea­son to fear: her hus­band is a physi­cian. She also under­stands the con­se­quences of a col­lec­tive denial of suf­fer­ing and death. “The cir­cum­stance that we are in now is not some­thing that we asked for, but life is call­ing on every sin­gle one of us to move into the place of wis­dom in our­selves… into the space of wis­dom and for­ti­tude, sol­i­dar­i­ty, com­mu­ni­ty, courage.” We move into that space by rec­og­niz­ing that “life’s beau­ty is insep­a­ra­ble from its fragili­ty.”

Themes of courage and con­nec­tion come up again and again in oth­er TED Con­nects inter­views, such as that above with Rab­bi Lord Jonathan Sacks and below with author Priya Park­er. Else­where on the inter­net, you’ll find sim­i­lar kinds of advice.

On the Tim Fer­ris show, you can hear inter­views with Jack Korn­field on find­ing peace in the pan­dem­ic, Esther Per­el on nav­i­gat­ing rela­tion­ships in quar­an­tine, and Ryan Hol­i­day on using Sto­icism to choose “alive time over dead time.”

Sto­icism has gath­ered a par­tic­u­lar­ly rich store of wis­dom about how to live in cri­sis. In his own med­i­ta­tion on iso­la­tion, Michel de Mon­taigne drew on the Sto­ics in advis­ing read­ers to “reserve a back­shop, whol­ly our own and entire­ly free, where­in to set­tle our true lib­er­ty, our prin­ci­ple soli­tude and retreat…. We have a mind pli­able in itself, that will be com­pa­ny; that has where­with­al to attack and to defend, to receive and to give: let us not then fear in this soli­tude to lan­guish under an uncom­fort­able vacu­ity.” In oth­er words, the road through iso­la­tion, though fraught with painful emo­tions and uncer­tain­ties, can be, if we choose, one of sig­nif­i­cant per­son­al and col­lec­tive growth.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Cours­es on the Coro­n­avirus: What You Need to Know About the Emerg­ing Pan­dem­ic

How Stress Can Change Your Brain: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Sto­icism, the Ancient Greek Phi­los­o­phy That Lets You Lead a Hap­py, Ful­fill­ing Life

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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