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

in Life, Media, Productivity, Psychology, TED Talks | August 15th, 2017

A famil­iar ding comes from your pock­et, you look up from what you’re doing and reach for the smart­phone. Before you can think, “it can wait,” you’ve dis­ap­peared into the screen like lit­tle Car­ol Anne Freel­ing in Pol­ter­geist. Tak­en by a ghost­ly pres­ence with designs upon your soul—your time, emo­tion­al well-being, cre­ativ­i­ty—Face­book. Some­one has request­ed my friend­ship! You like my video? I like you! Why, I’ve got an opin­ion about that, and that, and that, and that…. All the lit­tle per­for­ma­tive ges­tures, imprint­ed in the fin­gers and the thumbs.

Twit­ter, Snapchat, Insta­gram, Tum­blr, What­sApp, VKon­tact, Sina Wei­bo…. Just maybe, social media addic­tion is a glob­al epi­dem­ic, a col­lec­tion of emo­tion­al­ly, social­ly, and polit­i­cal­ly, tox­ic behav­iors. As Suren Rama­sub­bu reports, “social media engage­ment has been found to trig­ger three key net­works in the brain” that make us think intense­ly about our self-image and pub­lic per­cep­tion, cre­ate new neur­al path­ways, and release dopamine and oxy­tocin, which keep us com­ing back for more lit­tle red hearts, tiny thumbs-ups, and diminu­tive gold stars (good job!).

While the nature of addic­tion is a con­tro­ver­sial top­ic, it will arouse lit­tle dis­agree­ment to say that we live—as George­town Uni­ver­si­ty Com­put­er Sci­ence Pro­fes­sor Calvin New­port writes in the sub­ti­tle of his book Deep Work—in a “dis­tract­ed world.” (The full title is Deep Work: Rules for Focused Suc­cess in a Dis­tract­ed World.) Newport’s pre­scrip­tion will go down less eas­i­ly. Quit, drop out, tune out, opt out, get out of the Matrix, New­port argues, more or less, in his book and his TEDx talk above. He acknowl­edges the odd­i­ty of being a “mil­len­ni­al com­put­er sci­en­tist book author, stand­ing on a TED stage” who nev­er had a social media account and urges oth­ers to give up theirs.

Any one of his over­lap­ping demo­graph­ics is like­ly to have a sig­nif­i­cant web pres­ence. Put all of them togeth­er and we expect New­port to be pitch­ing a start­up net­work to an audi­ence of ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists. Even the sto­ry about why he first abstained could have made him a minor char­ac­ter in The Social Net­work. But feel­ings of pro­fes­sion­al jeal­ousy soon turned to wari­ness and alarm. “This seems dan­ger­ous,” he says, then lets us know—because we sure­ly wondered—that he’s okay. “I still have friends. I still know what’s going on in the world.” Whether you’re con­vinced he’s hap­pi­er than the rest of us poor saps is up to you.

As for the claim that we should join him in the wilder­ness of the real—his argu­ment is per­sua­sive. Social media, says New­port, is not a “fun­da­men­tal tech­nol­o­gy.” It is akin to the slot machine, an “enter­tain­ment machine,” with an insid­i­ous added dimension—the soul steal­ing. Para­phras­ing tech guru and icon­o­clast Jaron Lanier, New­port says, “these com­pa­nies offer you shiny treats in exchange for min­utes of your atten­tion and bytes of your per­son­al data, which can then be pack­aged up and sold.” But like the slot machine, the social media net­work is a “some­what unsa­vory source of enter­tain­ment” giv­en the express intent of its engi­neers to make their prod­uct “as addic­tive as pos­si­ble,” com­pa­ra­ble to what dieti­tians now call “ultra-processed foods”—all sug­ar and fat, no nutri­ents.

New­port names anoth­er objec­tion to quitting—the neces­si­ty of social media as an essen­tial busi­ness tool—then piv­ots to his book and his com­mit­ment to what he calls “deep work.” What is this? You can read the book to find out, or get a Cliff’s Notes ver­sion in Bri­an Johnson’s video above. John­son begins by con­trast­ing deep work with “shal­low work,” where we spend most of our time, “con­stant­ly respond­ing to the lat­est and loud­est email and push noti­fi­ca­tion for social media, or text mes­sages or phone ring­ing, what­ev­er.”

While we may get lit­tle endor­phin boosts from all of this heav­i­ly medi­at­ed social activ­i­ty, we pay a high price in stress, anx­i­ety, and lost time in our per­son­al, pro­fes­sion­al, and cre­ative lives. The research on over­work and dis­trac­tion sup­ports New­port’s con­clu­sions. The real rewards come from deep work, he argues, that which we do when we have total focus and emo­tion­al invest­ment in a project. With­out get­ting too spe­cif­ic, such work, New­port says, is not only per­son­al­ly ful­fill­ing, but valu­able “in a 21st cen­tu­ry econ­o­my” for its rar­i­ty.

Social media, on the oth­er hand, he claims, con­tributes lit­tle to our work lives. And as you (or maybe it’s me) scan the open social media tabs in your over­loaded brows­er, and tune in to the clut­tered state of your mind, you might find your­self agree­ing with his hereti­cal propo­si­tion. You might even share his talk on social media. Or decide to fol­low us on Face­book and/or Twit­ter.

To delve fur­ther into New­port’s think­ing, see his books: Deep Work: Rules for Focused Suc­cess in a Dis­tract­ed World and Dig­i­tal Min­i­mal­ism: Choos­ing a Focused Life in a Noisy World. Both books are also avail­able in audio for­mat on Audible.com. Sign up for a free tri­al here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lyn­da Bar­ry on How the Smart­phone Is Endan­ger­ing Three Ingre­di­ents of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Lone­li­ness, Uncer­tain­ty & Bore­dom

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

New Ani­ma­tion Explains Sher­ry Turkle’s The­o­ries on Why Social Media Makes Us Lone­ly

The Neu­ro­science & Psy­chol­o­gy of Pro­cras­ti­na­tion, and How to Over­come It

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

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Artist Draws 9 Portraits While on LSD: Inside the 1950s Experiments to Turn LSD into a “Creativity Pill”

in Art, Creativity, Psychology, Science | August 15th, 2017

LSD was first syn­the­sized in 1938 by chemist Albert Hoff­man in a Swiss lab­o­ra­to­ry but only attained infamy almost two decades lat­er, when it became part of a series of gov­ern­ment exper­i­ments. At the same time, a UC Irvine psy­chi­a­trist, Oscar Janiger (“Oz” to his friends), con­duct­ed his own stud­ies under very dif­fer­ent cir­cum­stances. “Unlike most researchers, Janiger want­ed to cre­ate a ‘nat­ur­al’ set­ting,” writes Brandy Doyle for MAPS (the Mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary Asso­ci­a­tion for Psy­che­del­ic Stud­ies). He rea­soned that “there was noth­ing espe­cial­ly neu­tral about a lab­o­ra­to­ry or hos­pi­tal room,” so he “rent­ed a house out­side of LA, in which his sub­jects could have a rel­a­tive­ly non-direct­ed expe­ri­ence in a sup­port­ive envi­ron­ment.”

Janiger want­ed his sub­jects to make cre­ative dis­cov­er­ies in a state of height­ened con­scious­ness. The study sought, he wrote, to “illu­mi­nate the phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal nature of the LSD expe­ri­ence,” to see whether the drug could effec­tive­ly be turned into a cre­ativ­i­ty pill. He found, over a peri­od last­ing from 1954 to 1962 (when the exper­i­ments were ter­mi­nat­ed), that among his approx­i­mate­ly 900 sub­jects, those who were in ther­a­py “had a high rate of pos­i­tive response,” but those not in ther­a­py “found the expe­ri­ence much less pleas­ant.” Janiger’s find­ings have con­tributed to the research that orga­ni­za­tions like MAPS have done on psy­choac­tive drugs in ther­a­peu­tic set­tings. The exper­i­ments also pro­duced a body of art­work made by study par­tic­i­pants on acid.

Janiger invit­ed over 100 pro­fes­sion­al artists into the study and had them pro­duce over 250 paint­ings and draw­ings. The series of eight draw­ings you see here most like­ly came from one of those artists (though “the records of the iden­ti­ty of the prin­ci­ple researcher have been lost,” writes Live­Science). In the psych-rock-scored video at the top see the pro­gres­sion of increas­ing­ly abstract draw­ings the artist made over the course of his 8‑hour trip. He report­ed on his per­cep­tions and sen­sa­tions through­out the expe­ri­ence, not­ing, at what seems to be the drug’s peak moment at 2.5 and 3 hours in, “I feel that my con­scious­ness is sit­u­at­ed in the part of my body that’s active—my hand, my elbow, my tongue…. I am… every­thing is… changed… they’re call­ing… your face… inter­wo­ven… who is….”

Trip­py, but there’s much more to the exper­i­ment than its imme­di­ate effects on artists’ brains and sketch­es. As Janiger’s col­league Mar­lene Dobkin de Rios writes in her defin­i­tive book on his work, “all of the artists who par­tic­i­pat­ed in Janiger’s project said that LSD not only rad­i­cal­ly changed their style but also gave them new depths to under­stand the use of col­or, form, light, or the way these things are viewed in a frame of ref­er­ence. Their art, they claimed, changed its essen­tial char­ac­ter as a con­se­quence of their expe­ri­ences.” Psy­chol­o­gist Stan­ley Kripp­n­er made sim­i­lar dis­cov­er­ies, and “defined the term psy­che­del­ic artist” to describe those who, as in Janiger’s stud­ies “gained a far greater insight into the nature of art and the aes­thet­ic idea,” Dobkin de Rios writes.

Artis­tic productions—paintings, poems, sketch­es, and writ­ings that stemmed from the experience—often show a rad­i­cal depar­ture from the artist’s cus­tom­ary mode of expres­sion… the artists’ gen­er­al opin­ion was that their work became more expres­sion­is­tic and demon­strat­ed a vast­ly greater degree of free­dom and orig­i­nal­i­ty.

The work of the unknown artist here takes on an almost mys­ti­cal qual­i­ty after a while. The project began “serendip­i­tous­ly” when one of Janiger’s vol­un­teers in 1954 insist­ed on being able to draw dur­ing the dos­ing. “After his LSD expe­ri­ence,” writes Dobkin de Rios, “the artist was very emphat­ic that it would be most reveal­ing to allow oth­er artists to go through this process of per­cep­tu­al change.” Janiger was con­vinced, as were many of his more famous test sub­jects.

Janiger report­ed­ly intro­duced LSD to Cary Grant, Anais Nin, Jack Nichol­son, and Aldous Hux­ley dur­ing guid­ed ther­a­py ses­sions. Still, he is not near­ly as well-known as oth­er LSD pio­neers like Ken Kesey and Tim­o­thy Leary, in part because, writes the psy­choac­tive research site Erowid, “his data remained large­ly unpub­lished dur­ing his life­time,” and he was not him­self an artist or media per­son­al­i­ty (though he was a cousin of Allen Gins­berg).

Janiger not only changed the con­scious­ness of unnamed and famous artists with LSD, but also exper­i­ment­ed with DMT with Alan Watts and fel­low psy­chi­a­trist Humphry Osmond (who coined the word “psy­che­del­ic”), and con­duct­ed research on pey­ote with Dobkin de Rios. To a great degree, we have him to thank (or blame) for the explo­sion of psy­che­del­ic art and phi­los­o­phy that flowed out of the ear­ly six­ties and indeli­bly changed the cul­ture. At Live­Science, you can see a slideshow of these draw­ings with com­men­tary from Yale physi­cian Andrew Sewell on what might be hap­pen­ing in the trip­ping artist’s brain.

Note: IAI Acad­e­my has just released a short course called The Sci­ence of Psy­che­delics. You can enroll in it here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rare Footage Shows US and British Sol­diers Get­ting Dosed with LSD in Gov­ern­ment-Spon­sored Tests (1958 + 1964)

Hofmann’s Potion: 2002 Doc­u­men­tary Revis­its His­to­ry of LSD

Ken Kesey Talks About the Mean­ing of the Acid Tests

Aldous Huxley’s Most Beau­ti­ful, LSD-Assist­ed Death: A Let­ter from His Wid­ow

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

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Harvard Course on Positive Psychology: Watch 30 Lectures from the University’s Extremely Popular Course

in Harvard, Online Courses, Psychology | August 15th, 2017

Sev­er­al years back Tal Ben-Sha­har taught a course on Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­o­gy at Har­vard, which became, at least for a while, the most pop­u­lar course at the uni­ver­si­ty. About the course NPR wrote: “Twice a week, some 900 stu­dents attend Tal Ben-Sha­har’s class on what he calls ‘how to get hap­py.’ … His class offers research from the rel­a­tive­ly new field of pos­i­tive psy­chol­o­gy, which focus­es on what makes peo­ple hap­py, rather than just their patholo­gies.”

Avail­able in an admit­ted­ly grainy for­mat, you can watch the 30 lec­tures from that course above, or over on YouTube. Accord­ing to the orig­i­nal syl­labus, top­ics dis­cussed include “hap­pi­ness, self-esteem, empa­thy, friend­ship, love, achieve­ment, cre­ativ­i­ty, music, spir­i­tu­al­i­ty, and humor.”

If you’re inter­est­ed in delv­ing deep­er into Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­o­gy, we’d rec­om­mend Tal Ben-Sha­har’s books: Hap­pi­er: Learn the Secrets to Dai­ly Joy and Last­ing Ful­fill­ment and Short Cuts to Hap­pi­ness: Life-Chang­ing Lessons from My Bar­ber. The same goes for read­ing the works of Mar­tin Selig­man, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia pro­fes­sor who effec­tive­ly invent­ed the field. You can also take free cours­es on Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­o­gy. Just head over to our col­lec­tion of Free Psy­chol­o­gy Cours­es, a sub­set of our meta col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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:

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

Intro­duc­tion to Psy­chol­o­gy: A Free Course from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

A Crash Course on Psy­chol­o­gy: A 30-Part Video Series from Hank Green

All You Need is Love: The Keys to Hap­pi­ness Revealed by a 75-Year Har­vard Study

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36 Abstract Covers of Vintage Psychology, Philosophy & Science Books Come to Life in a Mesmerizing Animation

in Animation, Books, Design, Psychology, Science | August 11th, 2017

Ani­mat­ed ebook cov­ers are the wave of the future.

Graph­ic and motion design­er Hen­ning M. Led­er­er surfs that wave on the most unex­pect­ed of boards—a col­lec­tion of abstract mid-cen­tu­ry cov­ers drawn from the Insta­gram feed of artist Julian Mon­tague, who shares his enthu­si­asm for vin­tage min­i­mal­ism.

Led­er­er first came to our atten­tion in 2015, when we cov­ered the first install­ment of what seems des­tined to become an ongo­ing project.

His lat­est effort, above, con­tin­ues his explo­rations in the sub­jects which most fre­quent­ly trad­ed in these sorts of geo­met­ric covers—science, psy­chother­a­py, phi­los­o­phy and soci­ol­o­gy.

No word on what inspired him to toss in the first cov­er, which fea­tures a cheer­ful, Play­mo­bil-esque mush­room gath­er­er. It’s endear­ing, but—to quote Sesame Street—is not like the oth­ers. Those of us who can’t deci­pher Cyril­lic script get the fun of imag­in­ing what sort of text this is—a mycol­o­gy man­u­al? A children’s tale? A psy­cho­log­i­cal examination—and ulti­mate­ly rejection—of mid­cen­tu­ry pub­lish­ers’ fas­ci­na­tion for spi­rals, diag­o­nal bars, and oth­er non-nar­ra­tive graph­ics?

Whether or not you’d be inclined to pick up any of these titles, you may find your­self want­i­ng to dance to them, com­pli­ments of musi­cian Jörg Stier­le’s trip­py elec­tron­ics.

Or take your cue from yet anoth­er cov­er  con­tained there­in: I. P. Pavlov’s Essays in Psy­chol­o­gy and Psy­chi­a­try with a Spe­cial Sec­tion on Sleep and Hyp­no­sis.

Here’s the one that start­ed it all:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

55 Cov­ers of Vin­tage Phi­los­o­phy, Psy­chol­o­gy & Sci­ence Books Come to Life in a Short Ani­ma­tion

Artist Ani­mates Famous Book Cov­ers in an Ele­gant, Under­stat­ed Way

500+William S. Bur­roughs Book Cov­ers from Across the Globe: 1950s Through the 2010s

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

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

in Creativity, Neuroscience, Productivity, Psychology | August 5th, 2017

Flickr Com­mons pho­to by J Stimp

Every­one used to read Samuel John­son. Now it seems hard­ly any­one does. That’s a shame. John­son under­stood the human mind, its sad­ly amus­ing frail­ties and its dou­ble-blind alleys. He under­stood the nature of that mys­te­ri­ous act we casu­al­ly refer to as “cre­ativ­i­ty.” It is not the kind of thing one lucks into or mas­ters after a sem­i­nar or lec­ture series. It requires dis­ci­pline and a mind free of dis­trac­tion. “My dear friend,” said John­son in 1783, accord­ing to his biog­ra­ph­er and sec­re­tary Boswell, “clear your mind of cant.”

There’s no miss­ing apos­tro­phe in his advice. Inspir­ing as it may sound, John­son did not mean to say “you can do it!” He meant “cant,” an old word for cheap decep­tion, bias, hypocrisy, insin­cere expres­sion. “It is a mode of talk­ing in Soci­ety,” he con­ced­ed, “but don’t think fool­ish­ly.” Johnson’s injunc­tion res­onat­ed through a cou­ple cen­turies, became gar­bled into a banal affir­ma­tion, and was lost in a grave­yard of image macros. Let us endeav­or to retrieve it, and rumi­nate on its wis­dom.

We may even do so with our favorite mod­ern brief in hand, the sci­en­tif­ic study. There are many we could turn to. For exam­ple, notes Derek Beres, in a 2014 book neu­ro­sci­en­tist Daniel Lev­itin brought his research to bear in argu­ing that “infor­ma­tion over­load keeps us mired in noise.… This saps us of not only willpow­er (of which we have a lim­it­ed store) but cre­ativ­i­ty as well.” “We sure think we’re accom­plish­ing a lot,” Lev­itin told Susan Page on The Diane Rehm Show in 2015, “but that’s an illu­sion… as a neu­ro­sci­en­tist, I can tell you one thing the brain is very good at is self-delu­sion.”

Johnson’s age had its own ver­sion of infor­ma­tion over­load, as did that of anoth­er cur­mud­geon­ly voice from the past, T.S. Eliot, who won­dered, “Where is the wis­dom we have lost in knowl­edge? Where is the knowl­edge we have lost in infor­ma­tion?” The ques­tion leaves Eliot’s read­ers ask­ing whether what we take for knowl­edge or infor­ma­tion real­ly are such? Maybe they’re just as often forms of need­less busy­ness, dis­trac­tion, and over­think­ing. Stan­ford researcher Emma Sep­pälä sug­gests as much in her work on “the sci­ence of hap­pi­ness.” At Quartz, she writes,

We need to find ways to give our brains a break.… At work, we’re intense­ly ana­lyz­ing prob­lems, orga­niz­ing data, writing—all activ­i­ties that require focus. Dur­ing down­time, we immerse our­selves in our phones while stand­ing in line at the store or lose our­selves in Net­flix after hours.

Sep­pälä exhorts us to relax and let go of the con­stant need for stim­u­la­tion, to take longs walks with­out the phone, get out of our com­fort zones, make time for fun and games, and gen­er­al­ly build in time for leisure. How does this work? Let’s look at some addi­tion­al research. Bar-Ilan Uni­ver­si­ty’s Moshe Bar and Shi­ra Baror under­took a study to mea­sure the effects of dis­trac­tion, or what they call “men­tal load,” the “stray thoughts” and “obses­sive rumi­na­tions” that clut­ter the mind with infor­ma­tion and loose ends. Our “capac­i­ty for orig­i­nal and cre­ative think­ing,” Bar writes at The New York Times, “is marked­ly stymied” by a busy mind. “The clut­tered mind,” writes Jes­si­ca Still­man, “is a cre­ativ­i­ty killer.”

In a paper pub­lished in Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence, Bar and Baror describe how “con­di­tions of high load” fos­ter uno­rig­i­nal think­ing. Par­tic­i­pants in their exper­i­ment were asked to remem­ber strings of arbi­trary num­bers, then to play word asso­ci­a­tion games. “Par­tic­i­pants with sev­en dig­its to recall resort­ed to the most sta­tis­ti­cal­ly com­mon respons­es (e.g., white/black),” writes Bar, “where­as par­tic­i­pants with two dig­its gave less typ­i­cal, more var­ied pair­ings (e.g. white/cloud).” Our brains have lim­it­ed resources. When con­strained and over­whelmed with thoughts, they pur­sue well-trod paths of least resis­tance, try­ing to effi­cient­ly bring order to chaos.

“Imag­i­na­tion,” on the oth­er hand, wrote Dr. John­son else­where, “a licen­tious and vagrant fac­ul­ty, unsus­cep­ti­ble of lim­i­ta­tions and impa­tient of restraint, has always endeav­ored to baf­fle the logi­cian, to per­plex the con­fines of dis­tinc­tion, and burst the enclo­sures of reg­u­lar­i­ty.” Bar describes the con­trast between the imag­i­na­tive mind and the infor­ma­tion pro­cess­ing mind as “a ten­sion in our brains between explo­ration and exploita­tion.” Gorg­ing on infor­ma­tion makes our brains “’exploit’ what we already know,” or think we know, “lean­ing on our expec­ta­tion, trust­ing the com­fort of a pre­dictable envi­ron­ment.” When our minds are “unloaded,” on the oth­er hand, which can occur dur­ing a hike or a long, relax­ing show­er, we can shed fixed pat­terns of think­ing, and explore cre­ative insights that might oth­er­wise get buried or dis­card­ed.

As Drake Baer suc­cinct­ly puts in at New York Mag­a­zine’s Sci­ence of Us, “When you have noth­ing to think about, you can do your best think­ing.” Get­ting to that state in a cli­mate of per­pet­u­al, unsleep­ing dis­trac­tion, opin­ion, and alarm, requires anoth­er kind of dis­ci­pline: the dis­ci­pline to unplug, wan­der off, and clear your mind.

For anoth­er angle on this, you might want to check out Cal New­port’s 2016 book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Suc­cess in a Dis­tract­ed World.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Neu­ro­science & Psy­chol­o­gy of Pro­cras­ti­na­tion, and How to Over­come It

Why You Do Your Best Think­ing In The Show­er: Cre­ativ­i­ty & the “Incu­ba­tion Peri­od”

How Walk­ing Fos­ters Cre­ativ­i­ty: Stan­ford Researchers Con­firm What Philoso­phers and Writ­ers Have Always Known

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

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People Who Swear Are More Honest Than Those Who Don’t, Finds a New University Study

in Literature, Psychology | July 27th, 2017

I’ve heard it said many times: “I don’t trust peo­ple who don’t swear.” It’s not an empir­i­cal state­ment. Just an intu­ition, that peo­ple who shy away from salty lan­guage might also shy away from cer­tain truths—may even be, per­haps, a lit­tle delu­sion­al. Few peo­ple char­ac­ter­ize tee­to­talers of swear­ing with more bite than Stephen Fry, who believes “the sort of twee per­son who thinks swear­ing is in any way a sign of a lack of edu­ca­tion or of a lack of ver­bal inter­est is just a fuck­ing lunatic.” George Car­lin would approve. A com­i­cal­ly exag­ger­at­ed view. No, swear­ing isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly a sign of men­tal ill­ness. But it does cor­re­late strong­ly with truthtelling.

It seems all the sus­pi­cious salts out there may have hap­pened upon a mea­sur­able phe­nom­e­non. A study pub­lished last year with the cheeky title “Frankly, We Do Give a Damn: The Rela­tion­ship Between Pro­fan­i­ty and Hon­esty,” notes, “the con­sis­tent find­ings across the stud­ies sug­gest that the pos­i­tive rela­tion between pro­fan­i­ty and hon­esty is robust, and that rela­tion­ship found at the indi­vid­ual lev­el indeed trans­lates to the soci­ety lev­el.” It’s true, some research shows that peo­ple who swear may be like­ly to vio­late oth­er social norms, god bless ‘em, but they are also less like­ly to lie dur­ing police inter­ro­ga­tions.

After review­ing the lit­er­a­ture, the researchers, led by Maas­tricht Uni­ver­si­ty Psy­chol­o­gist Gilad Feld­man, describe the results of their own exper­i­ments. They asked 276 peo­ple to report on their swear­ing habits (or not) in detail. Those peo­ple then took a psy­cho­log­i­cal test that mea­sured their lev­els of hon­esty. Next, the team ana­lyzed 70,000 social media inter­ac­tions, and report­ed that “pro­fan­i­ty and hon­esty were found to be sig­nif­i­cant­ly and pos­i­tive­ly cor­re­lat­ed, indi­cat­ing that those who used more pro­fan­i­ty were more hon­est in their Face­book sta­tus updates.” They did not say whether high lev­els of hon­esty on Face­book is desir­able.

Final­ly, Feld­man and his col­leagues widened their scope to 48 U.S. states, and were able to cor­re­late social media data with mea­sures of gov­ern­ment account­abil­i­ty. States with high­er lev­els of swear­ing had a high­er integri­ty score accord­ing to a 2012 index pub­lished by the Cen­ter for Pub­lic Integri­ty. (Believe or not, New Jer­sey had some of the high­est scores.) All three of their stud­ies yield­ed sim­i­lar results. “At both the indi­vid­ual and soci­ety lev­el,” they con­clude, “we found that a high­er rate of pro­fan­i­ty use was asso­ci­at­ed with more hon­esty.” This does not mean, as Ephrat Livni writes at Quartz, that “peo­ple who curse like sailors” won’t “com­mit seri­ous eth­i­cal crimes—but they won’t pre­tend all’s well online.”

As to the ques­tion of whether swear­ing betrays a lack of edu­ca­tion and an impov­er­ished vocab­u­lary, we might turn to lin­guist, psy­chol­o­gist, and neu­ro­sci­en­tist Steven Pinker, who has made a learned defense of foul lan­guage, in dri­ly humor­ous talks, books, and essays. “When used judi­cious­ly,” he writes in a 2008 Har­vard Brain arti­cle, “swear­ing can be hilar­i­ous, poignant, and uncan­ni­ly descrip­tive.” His is an argu­ment that relies not only on data but on philo­soph­i­cal reflec­tion and lit­er­ary appre­ci­a­tion. “It’s a fact of life that peo­ple swear,” he says, and so, it’s a fact of art. Shake­speare invent­ed dozens of swears and was nev­er afraid to work blue. Per­haps that’s why we find his rep­re­sen­ta­tions of human­i­ty so peren­ni­al­ly hon­est.

You can read “Frankly, We Do Give a Damn: The Rela­tion­ship Between Pro­fan­i­ty and Hon­esty” here. In addi­tion to Gilad Feld­man, the research paper was also writ­ten by Hui­wen Lian (The Hong Kong Uni­ver­si­ty of Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy,) Michal Kosin­s­ki (Stan­ford), and David Still­well (Cam­bridge).

via Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stephen Fry, Lan­guage Enthu­si­ast, Defends The “Unnec­es­sary” Art Of Swear­ing

Steven Pinker Explains the Neu­ro­science of Swear­ing (NSFW)

George Car­lin Per­forms His “Sev­en Dirty Words” Rou­tine: His­toric and Com­plete­ly NSFW

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy & Neu­ro­science Cours­es 

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

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Franz Kafka Agonized, Too, Over Writer’s Block: “Tried to Write, Virtually Useless;” “Complete Standstill. Unending Torments” (1915)

in Creativity, Literature, Psychology, Writing | June 26th, 2017

No one sings as pure­ly as those who inhab­it the deep­est hell—what we take to be the song of angels is their song.

- Franz Kaf­ka, 1920

Poor Kaf­ka, born too ear­ly to blame his writer’s block on 21st-cen­tu­ry dig­i­tal excus­es:  social media addic­tion, cell phone addic­tion, stream­ing video… 

Would The Meta­mor­pho­sis have turned out dif­fer­ent­ly had its author had access to a machine that would have allowed him to self-pub­lish, com­mu­ni­cate face­less­ly, and dis­pense entire­ly with typ­ists, pens and paper? 

Had Kaf­ka had his way, his friend and fel­low writer, Max Brod, would have car­ried out instruc­tions to burn his unpub­lished work—including let­ters and jour­nal entries—upon his death. 

Instead Brod pub­lished them.

How hor­ri­fied would their author be to read The New Yorker’s opin­ion that his jour­nals should be regard­ed as one of his major lit­er­ary achieve­ments? A Kaf­ka-esque response might be the mildest reac­tion war­rant­ed by the sit­u­a­tion:

His life and per­son­al­i­ty were per­fect­ly suit­ed to the diary form, and in these pages he reveals what he cus­tom­ar­i­ly hid from the world.

These once-pri­vate pages (avail­able in book for­mat here) reveal a not-unfa­mil­iar writer­ly ten­den­cy to ago­nize over a per­ceived lack of out­put:

JANUARY 20, 1915: The end of writ­ing. When will it take me up again?

JANUARY 29, 1915: Again tried to write, vir­tu­al­ly use­less.

JANUARY 30, 1915: The old inca­pac­i­ty. Inter­rupt­ed my writ­ing for bare­ly ten days and already cast out. Once again prodi­gious efforts stand before me. You have to dive down, as it were, and sink more rapid­ly than that which sinks in advance of you.

FEBRUARY 7, 1915: Com­plete stand­still. Unend­ing tor­ments.

MARCH 11, 1915: How time flies; anoth­er ten days and I have achieved noth­ing. It doesn’t come off. A page now and then is suc­cess­ful, but I can’t keep it up, the next day I am pow­er­less.

MARCH 13, 1915: Lack of appetite, fear of get­ting back late in the evening; but above all the thought that I wrote noth­ing yes­ter­day, that I keep get­ting far­ther and far­ther from it, and am in dan­ger of los­ing every­thing I have labo­ri­ous­ly achieved these past six months. Pro­vid­ed proof of this by writ­ing one and a half wretched pages of a new sto­ry that I have already decid­ed to dis­card…. Occa­sion­al­ly I feel an unhap­pi­ness that almost dis­mem­bers me, and at the same time am con­vinced of its neces­si­ty and of the exis­tence of a goal to which one makes one’s way by under­go­ing every kind of unhap­pi­ness.

Psy­chol­o­gy Today iden­ti­fies five pos­si­ble under­ly­ing caus­es for such inac­tiv­i­ty, and tips for sur­mount­ing them. It seems like­ly the fas­tid­i­ous, self-absorbed Kaf­ka would have reject­ed them on their breezy tone alone, but per­haps oth­er less per­snick­ety indi­vid­u­als will find some­thing of use: 

1. You’ve Lost Your Way

If you’re stalled because you lost your way, try the oppo­site of what you usu­al­ly do—if you’re a plot­ter, give your imag­i­na­tion free rein for a day; if you’re a freewriter or a pantser, spend a day cre­at­ing a list of the next 10 scenes that need to hap­pen. This gives your brain a chal­lenge, and for this rea­son you can take heart, because your bil­lions of neu­rons love a chal­lenge and are in search of synaps­es they can form.

2. Your Pas­sion Has Waned

Remem­ber, your writ­ing brain looks for and responds to pat­terns, so be care­ful that you don’t make suc­cumb­ing to bore­dom or sur­ren­der­ing projects with­out a fight into a habit. Do your best to work through the rea­sons you got stalled and to fin­ish what you start­ed. This will lay down a neu­ronal path­way that your writ­ing brain will mer­ri­ly trav­el along in future work.

3. Your Expec­ta­tions Are Too High

Instead of set­ting your sights too high, give your­self per­mis­sion to write any­thing, on top­ic or off top­ic, mean­ing­ful or trite, use­ful or fol­ly. The point is that by attach­ing so much impor­tance to the work you’re about to do, you make it hard­er to get into the flow. Also, if your inner crit­ic sticks her nose in (which often hap­pens), tell her that her role is very impor­tant to you (and it is!) and that you will sum­mon her when you have some­thing wor­thy of her atten­tion.

4. You Are Burned Out

You aren’t blocked; you’re exhaust­ed. Give your­self a few days to real­ly rest. Lie on a sofa and watch movies, take long walks in the hour just before dusk, go out to din­ner with friends, or take a mini-vaca­tion some­where rest­ful. Do so with the inten­tion to give yourself—and your brain—a rest. No think­ing about your nov­el for a week! In fact, no heavy think­ing for a week. Lie back, have a mar­gari­ta, and chill.

5. You’re Too Dis­tract­ed

Take note that, unless you’re just one of those rare birds who always write no mat­ter what, you will expe­ri­ence times in your life when it’s impos­si­ble to keep to a writ­ing sched­ule. Peo­ple get sick, peo­ple have to take a sec­ond job, chil­dren need extra atten­tion, par­ents need extra atten­tion, and so on. If you’re in one of those emer­gency sit­u­a­tions (rais­ing small chil­dren counts), by all means, don’t berate your­self. Some­times it’s sim­ply nec­es­sary to put the actu­al writ­ing on hold. It is good, how­ev­er, to keep your hands in the water. For instance, in lieu of writ­ing your nov­el:

Read works sim­i­lar to what you hope to write.

Read books relat­ed to the sub­ject you’re writ­ing about.

Keep a des­ig­nat­ed jour­nal where you jot down ideas for the book (and oth­er works).

Write small vignettes or sketch­es relat­ed to the book

When­ev­er you find time to med­i­tate, envi­sion your­self writ­ing the book, bring­ing it to full com­ple­tion.

Make writ­ing the book a pri­or­i­ty.

Addi­tion­al­ly, you may find some mer­it in enlist­ing a friend to pub­lish, I mean, burn the above-men­tioned jour­nals posthu­mous­ly. Just don’t write any­thing you would­n’t want the pub­lic to see.

Read author Susan Reynolds’ com­plete Psy­chol­o­gy Today advice for blocked writ­ers here.

Have a peek at Kafka’s Diaries: 1910–1923 here.

via Austin Kleon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Franz Kafka’s Kafkaesque Love Let­ters

Franz Kaf­ka: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to His Lit­er­ary Genius

Meta­mor­fo­s­is: Franz Kafka’s Best-Known Short Sto­ry Gets Adapt­ed Into a Tim Bur­tonesque Span­ish Short Film

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine, cur­rent­ly appear­ing onstage in New York City in Paul David Young’s Faust 3. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Going to Concerts and Experiencing Live Music Can Make Us Healthier & Happier, a New Psychology Study Confirms

in Music, Psychology | June 26th, 2017

Image by Niels Ept­ing, via Flickr Com­mons

It can some­times seem like so much qual­i­ta­tive sci­ence con­firms what we already know through expe­ri­ence and folk wis­dom. But that does not make such research redun­dant. Instead, it sets the stage for more detailed inves­ti­ga­tions into spe­cif­ic caus­es and effects, and can lead to more refined under­stand­ing of gen­er­al phe­nom­e­na. For exam­ple, “a new study out of Aus­tralia,” reports CNN, “con­firms what we prob­a­bly already knew,” by con­clud­ing that if you want to be hap­pi­er, you should get out more.

Specif­i­cal­ly, you should get out to con­certs and music fes­ti­vals and dance your you-know-what off. The Aus­tralian researchers found that “peo­ple who active­ly engaged with music through danc­ing and attend­ing events like con­certs and musi­cals report­ed a high­er lev­el of sub­jec­tive well­be­ing.” The March, 2017 study, cheek­i­ly titled “If You’re Hap­py and You Know It: Music Engage­ment and Sub­jec­tive Well­be­ing,” defines the lat­ter phrase as “the sci­en­tif­ic psy­cho­log­i­cal term for gen­er­al mood ‘hap­pi­ness,’ which is pos­i­tive, sta­ble, and con­sis­tent over time.”

Sub­jec­tive well­be­ing (SWB), although a self-report­ed mea­sure, helps psy­chol­o­gists iden­ti­fy effec­tive ther­a­pies for depres­sion and mood dis­or­ders. Engag­ing mean­ing­ful­ly with music is one of them, and one needn’t be a musi­cian to reap the ben­e­fits. While “pro­duc­ing music and per­form­ing encour­age self-explo­ration, emo­tion­al expres­sion, self-esteem and con­fi­dence,” the study’s authors write, inter­act­ing with music as a fan is also “asso­ci­at­ed with high­er mood when con­sid­ered in terms of acti­va­tion and valence.”

Sim­ply con­sum­ing record­ed music, how­ev­er, will not have the same ben­e­fits. While “recent tech­no­log­i­cal advances” and stream­ing ser­vices have “increased the avail­abil­i­ty of and acces­si­bil­i­ty to music… engag­ing with music extends beyond just pas­sive lis­ten­ing.” In large part, the active par­tic­i­pa­tion in a music scene—as part of a fan com­mu­ni­ty or fes­ti­val audi­ence, for example—shows pos­i­tive out­comes because of the “social com­po­nent of music engage­ment.” Lis­ten­ing by one­self “may improve phys­i­cal health and emo­tion­al well­be­ing.” Lis­ten­ing “in the com­pa­ny of oth­ers is asso­ci­at­ed with stronger pos­i­tive expe­ri­ences.”

As the site Live for Live Music puts it, “live music uni­ver­sal­ly low­ers stress lev­els, increas­es social bonds while decreas­ing lev­els of pain, and can even phys­i­o­log­i­cal­ly cause peo­ple to get “skin-gasms.” And if that’s not rea­son enough to get tick­ets to see your favs, I don’t know what is. One would also hope the study makes a con­vinc­ing case for fund­ing live music as a men­tal health ini­tia­tive. Unless you live in a city with lots of free con­certs, the expense of such events can be pro­hib­i­tive. At least in Aus­tralia, the researchers note, “attend­ing musi­cal events is cost­ly, and may be a priv­i­lege afford­ed to those who earn a high­er income.”

Susan Per­ry at Min­npost sums up a few oth­er lim­i­ta­tions of the study, such as its lack of data on fre­quen­cy of atten­dance, and that it does not “dif­fer­en­ti­ate between peo­ple who are musi­cal­ly tal­ent­ed and those who aren’t.” Nonethe­less, one par­tic­u­lar find­ing should have you shed­ding inhi­bi­tions to increase your SWB. “Dancers,” Per­ry sum­ma­rizes, were “more like­ly than non-dancers to be hap­py,” as were those who sing along.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Punk & Heavy Met­al Music Makes Lis­ten­ers Hap­py and Calm, Not Aggres­sive, Accord­ing to New Aus­tralian Study

Play­ing an Instru­ment Is a Great Work­out For Your Brain: New Ani­ma­tion Explains Why

Music in the Brain: Sci­en­tists Final­ly Reveal the Parts of Our Brain That Are Ded­i­cat­ed to Music

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

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