How Mindfulness Makes Us Happier & Better Able to Meet Life’s Challenges: Two Animated Primers Explain

in Life, Psychology, Religion | March 6th, 2017

The West has very rich con­tem­pla­tive tra­di­tion. Monas­tics of the ear­ly Chris­t­ian church prac­ticed forms of med­i­ta­tion that have been adopt­ed by many peo­ple seek­ing a deep­er, more serene expe­ri­ence of life. Giv­en the wealth of con­tem­pla­tive lit­er­a­ture and prac­tice in Euro­pean his­to­ry, why have so many West­ern peo­ple turned to the East, and toward Bud­dhist con­tem­pla­tive forms in par­tic­u­lar?

The answer is com­pli­cat­ed and involves many strains of philo­soph­i­cal and coun­ter­cul­tur­al his­to­ry. Some of the great­est influ­ence in the U.S. has come from Tibetan monks like the Dalai Lama and Chö­gyam Trung­pa Rin­poche, one­time teacher of Allen Gins­berg, and founder of Naropa Uni­ver­si­ty and the ecu­meni­cal Shamb­ha­la school of Bud­dhism. Trung­pa Rin­poche con­trast­ed the­is­tic forms of med­i­ta­tion, both Hin­du and Chris­t­ian, with the mind­ful­ness and con­cen­tra­tion prac­tices of Bud­dhism, writ­ing that the first one, focused on a “high­er being” or beings, is “inward or intro­vert­ed” and dual­is­tic.

Bud­dhist mind­ful­ness med­i­ta­tion, on the oth­er hand, is “what one might call ‘work­ing med­i­ta­tion’ or extro­vert­ed med­i­ta­tion. This is not a ques­tion of try­ing to retreat from the world.” Mind­ful­ness  “is con­cerned with try­ing to see what is,” he writes, and to do so with­out prej­u­dice: “there is no belief in high­er and low­er; the idea of dif­fer­ent lev­els, or of being in an under­de­vel­oped state, does not arise.” In oth­er words, all of the import­ed con­cepts that push us one way or anoth­er, dri­ve our rigid opin­ions about our­selves and oth­ers, and make us feel supe­ri­or or infe­ri­or, become irrel­e­vant. We take own­er­ship of the con­tents of our own minds.

How is this rel­e­vant for the mod­ern per­son? Con­sid­er the videos here. These explain­ers,  like many oth­er con­tem­po­rary uses of the word “mind­ful­ness,” peel the con­cept away from its Bud­dhist ori­gins. But sec­u­lar and Bud­dhist ideas of mind­ful­ness are not as dif­fer­ent as some might think. “Mind­ful­ness,” says Dan Har­ris in the video at the top, “is the abil­i­ty to know what’s hap­pen­ing in your head at any giv­en moment with­out get­ting car­ried away by it.” (Some might pre­fer the more suc­cinct Vipas­sana def­i­n­i­tion “non­judg­men­tal aware­ness.”) With­out mind­ful­ness, “there’s no buffer between the stim­u­lus and your reac­tion.” With it, how­ev­er, we “learn to respond wise­ly” to what hap­pens to us instead of being pushed and pulled around by habit­u­al reac­tiv­i­ty.

As the video above has it—using the Chero­kee para­ble of the two wolves—mind­ful­ness pro­vides us with the space we need to observe our sen­sa­tions, emo­tions, and ideas. From a crit­i­cal dis­tance, we can see caus­es and effects, and cre­ate dif­fer­ent con­di­tions. We can learn, in short, to be hap­py, even in dif­fi­cult cir­cum­stances, with­out deny­ing or fight­ing with real­i­ty. The Dalai Lama refers to this as observ­ing “the prin­ci­ple of causal­i­ty… a nat­ur­al law.” “In deal­ing with real­i­ty,” he says, “you have to take that law into account…. If you desire hap­pi­ness, you should seek the caus­es that give rise to it.” Like­wise, we must under­stand the men­tal caus­es of our suf­fer­ing if we want to pre­vent it.

How do we do that? Is there an app for it? Well, yes, and no. One app is Hap­pi­fy—who pro­duced these videos with ani­ma­tor Katy Davis, med­i­ta­tion instruc­tor Sharon Salzberg, and Har­ris, cre­ator of the mind­ful­ness course (and app) 10% Hap­pi­er. Hap­pi­fy offers “Sci­ence-based Activ­i­ties and Games, and “a high­ly sec­u­lar­ized, some might say decon­tex­tu­al­ized, form of mind­ful­ness training—including the “Med­i­ta­tion 101” primer video above. For those who reject every­thing that smacks of reli­gion, sec­u­lar mind­ful­ness prac­tices have been rig­or­ous­ly put to many a peer-reviewed test. They are wide­ly accept­ed as evi­dence-based ways to reduce anx­i­ety and depres­sion, improve focus and con­cen­tra­tion, and man­age pain. These prac­tices have been used in hos­pi­tals, med­ical schools, and even pub­lic ele­men­tary schools for many years.

But whether we are Bud­dhists or oth­er reli­gious peo­ple prac­tic­ing mind­ful­ness med­i­ta­tion, or sec­u­lar human­ists and athe­ists using mod­i­fied, “science-based”—or app-based—techniques, the fact remains that we have to build the dis­ci­pline into our dai­ly life in order for it to work. No app will do that for us, any more than a fit­ness app will make us toned and healthy. Nor will read­ing books or arti­cles about med­i­ta­tion make us med­i­ta­tors. (To para­phrase Augus­tine, we might say that end­less read­ing or star­ing at screens amounts to an atti­tude of “give me mind­ful­ness, but not yet.”)

Har­ris, in char­ac­ter as a mouse in a V‑neck sweater, says in the video above that med­i­ta­tion is “exer­cise for your brain.” And like exer­cise, Trung­pa Rin­poche writes, med­i­ta­tion can be “painful in the begin­ning.” We may not always like what we find knock­ing around in our heads. And yet with­out acknowl­edg­ing, and even befriend­ing, the feel­ings and thoughts that make us feel ter­ri­ble, we can’t learn to nur­ture and “feed” those that make us feel good. If you’re inspired to get start­ed, you’ll find sev­er­al free online guid­ed med­i­ta­tions at the links below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Philoso­pher Sam Har­ris Leads You Through a 26-Minute Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tion

Free Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tions From UCLA: Boost Your Aware­ness & Ease Your Stress

Stream 18 Hours of Free Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tions

Dai­ly Med­i­ta­tion Boosts & Revi­tal­izes the Brain and Reduces Stress, Har­vard Study Finds

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

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Walt Disney Creates a Frank Animation That Teaches High School Kids All About VD (1973)

in Animation, Education, Health, Life, Psychology | February 24th, 2017

The com­i­cal­ly plain­spo­ken, tough-guy sergeant is a heav­en sent assign­ment for char­ac­ter actors.

Think R. Lee Ermey in Full Met­al Jack­et…

Louis Gos­set Jr. in An Offi­cer and a Gen­tle­man…

Even Stripes’  War­ren Oates.

Keenan Wynn, who strove to keep Amer­i­ca safe from “devi­at­ed pre­verts” in 1964’s Dr. Strangelove, was award­ed the role of a life­time nine years lat­er, when Dis­ney Stu­dios was seek­ing vocal tal­ent for VD Attack Plan, above, a 16-minute ani­ma­tion intend­ed to teach high school­ers about the scourge of vene­re­al dis­ease.

Wynn (son of Ed) threw him­self into the part with gus­to, imbu­ing his bad­ly-com­plect­ed, Kaiser-hel­met­ed germ com­man­der with the sort of straight-talk­ing charis­ma rarely seen in high school Health class.

A risky maneu­ver, giv­en that Viet­nam-era teens did not share their parent’s generation’s respect for mil­i­tary author­i­ty and VD Attack Plan was the first edu­ca­tion­al short specif­i­cal­ly aimed at the high school audi­ence. Pri­or to that, such films were geared toward sol­diers. (Dis­ney wad­ed into those waters in 1944, with the train­ing film, A Few Quick Facts No. 7—Venereal Dis­ease, the same year Mick­ey Mouse appeared in LOOK mag­a­zine, wag­ing war on gon­or­rhea with sul­fa drugs.

Gon­or­rhea was well rep­re­sent­ed in the Wynn’s Con­ta­gion Corps. The ranks were fur­ther swelled by Syphilis. Both pla­toons were out­fit­ted with para­mil­i­tary style berets.

The Sarge pumped them up for the com­ing sneak attack by urg­ing them to maim or bet­ter yet, kill their human ene­my. Shaky recruits were reas­sured that Igno­rance, Fear, and Shame would have their backs.

Scriptwriter Bill Bosche had quite the knack for iden­ti­fy­ing what sort of sug­ar would make the med­i­cine go down. The Sarge inti­mates that only a few of the afflict­ed are “man enough” to inform their part­ners, and while Igno­rance and Shame cause the major­i­ty to put their faith in inef­fec­tu­al folk reme­dies, the “smart ones” seek treat­ment.

Ele­men­tary psy­chol­o­gy, but effec­tu­al nonethe­less.

Today’s view­ers can’t help but note that HIV and AIDS had yet to assert their fear­some hold.

On the oth­er hand, the Sarge’s mat­ter of fact deliv­ery regard­ing the poten­tial for same sex trans­mis­sion comes as a pleas­ant sur­prise. His pri­ma­ry objec­tive is to set the record straight. No, birth con­trol pills won’t pro­tect you from con­tract­ing the clap. But don’t waste time wor­ry­ing about pick­ing it up from pub­lic toi­let seats, either.

A word of cau­tion to those plan­ning to watch the film over break­fast, there are some tru­ly gnarly graph­ic pho­tos of rash­es, sores, and skin erup­tions. Help­ful to teens seek­ing straight dope on their wor­ri­some symp­toms. Less so for any­one try­ing to enjoy their break­fast links sans the specter of burn­ing uri­na­tion.

So here’s to the sergeants of the sil­ver screen, and the hard­work­ing actors who embod­ied them, even those whose cre­ations resem­bled Pillsbury’s Fun­ny Face drink mix mas­cots. Let’s do as the Sarge says, and make every day V‑D Day!

VD Attack Plan will be added to the ani­ma­tion sec­tion of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Fam­i­ly Plan­ning, Walt Disney’s 1967 Sex Ed Pro­duc­tion, Star­ring Don­ald Duck

The Sto­ry Of Men­stru­a­tion: Watch Walt Disney’s Sex Ed Film from 1946

Sal­vador Dalí Cre­ates a Chill­ing Anti-Vene­re­al Dis­ease Poster Dur­ing World War II

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her play Zam­boni Godot is open­ing in New York City next week. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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20,000 Letters, Manuscripts & Artifacts From Sigmund Freud Get Digitized and Made Available Online

in Archives, Psychology | February 2nd, 2017

In his intro­duc­tion to the 2010 essay col­lec­tion Freud and Fun­da­men­tal­ism, Stathis Gour­gouris defines fun­da­men­tal­ism as “thought that dis­avows mul­ti­plic­i­ties of mean­ing, abhors alle­gor­i­cal ele­ments, and strives toward an exclu­sion­ary ortho­doxy.” While there may be both reli­gious and sec­u­lar ver­sions of such ide­olo­gies world­wide, we can trace the word itself to an Evan­gel­i­cal move­ment in the U.S., and to a set of beliefs that endures today among around a third of all Amer­i­cans and has “ani­mat­ed America’s cul­ture wars for over eighty years,” writes David Adams. The fun­da­men­tal­ist move­ment first took shape in 1920, just as Sig­mund Freud wrote and pub­lished his Beyond the Plea­sure Prin­ci­ple.

It was in that book that Freud intro­duced the con­cept of the “death dri­ve.” Adams argues that “the ‘fun­da­men­tal­ist’ and the ‘death dri­ve,’ are twins: they came into being simul­ta­ne­ous­ly,” and “their simul­tane­ity is not mere­ly an acci­dent. Both of these con­cepts are respond­ing to the pro­found cul­tur­al and psy­cho­log­i­cal cri­sis result­ing from the First World War.” Every calami­ty since World War I has seemed to rean­i­mate that ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry strug­gle between modernism—with its plu­ral­ist val­ues and empha­sis on cre­ativ­i­ty and experiment—and fun­da­men­tal­ism, with its com­pul­sion for rigid hier­ar­chy and destruc­tion. And we might see, as Adams does, such cul­tur­al con­flicts as anal­o­gous to those Freud wrote of between Eros—the plea­sure principle—and the dri­ve toward death.

The Great War turned Freud’s thoughts in this direc­tion, as did the racism and anti-Semi­tism tak­ing hold in both Europe and the U.S. His the­o­ry of an instinc­tu­al dri­ve toward the destruc­tion of self and oth­ers seemed to antic­i­pate the hor­ror of the World War yet to come. Freud inte­grat­ed the con­cept into his social the­o­ry ten years lat­er in Civ­i­liza­tion and its Dis­con­tents, in which he wrote that “the incli­na­tion to aggres­sion” was “the great­est imped­i­ment to civ­i­liza­tion.” While med­i­tat­ing on the death instinct as a psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic and social con­cept, Freud also pon­dered his own mor­tal­i­ty. Just above, you can see the draft of a death notice that he wrote for him­self dur­ing the 1920s. This comes to us from the Library of Congress’s new col­lec­tion of Sig­mund Freud papers, which con­tains arti­facts and man­u­scripts dat­ing from the 6th cen­tu­ry B.C.E. (a Greek stat­ue) to cor­re­spon­dence dis­cov­ered in the late 90s.

The “bulk of the mate­r­i­al,” writes the LoC, dates “from 1891 to 1939,” and the “dig­i­tized col­lec­tion doc­u­ments Freud’s found­ing of psy­cho­analy­sis, the mat­u­ra­tion of psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic the­o­ry, the refine­ment of its clin­i­cal tech­nique, and the pro­lif­er­a­tion of its adher­ents and crit­ics.” Much of this archive may be of inter­est only to the spe­cial­ist schol­ar of Freud’s life and work, with “legal doc­u­ments, estate records… school records” of the Freud chil­dren, and oth­er mun­dane bureau­crat­ic paper­work. But there are also let­ters rep­re­sent­ing “near­ly six hun­dred cor­re­spon­dents,” such as Freud’s one­time pro­tégé Carl Jung and Albert Ein­stein, with whom Freud cor­re­spond­ed in 1932 on the sub­ject of “Why war?” (See Freud’s let­ter to Ein­stein above.)

The doc­u­ments are near­ly all in Ger­man and the hand­writ­ten let­ters, notes, and drafts will be dif­fi­cult to read even for speak­ers of the lan­guage. Yet, there are also arti­facts like the 1936 por­trait of Freud at the top, by Vic­tor Krausz, the pock­et note­book Freud car­ried between 1907 and 1908, just above, and—below—a pic­ture of a pock­et watch giv­en to Freud by physi­cian Max Schur, whose fam­i­ly left Aus­tria with Freud’s in 1938. You can browse the online col­lec­tion of over 20,000 items by date, name, loca­tion, and oth­er indices, and all images are down­load­able in high res­o­lu­tion scans. 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sig­mund Freud Speaks: The Only Known Record­ing of His Voice, 1938

The Famous Let­ter Where Freud Breaks His Rela­tion­ship with Jung (1913)

Albert Einstein​ & Sig­mund Freud​ Exchange Let­ters and Debate How to Make the World Free from War (1932)

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

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

in Psychology, Science | January 26th, 2017

Image by NASA, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

There have been many the­o­ries of how human his­to­ry works. Some, like Ger­man thinker G.W.F. Hegel, have thought of progress as inevitable. Oth­ers have embraced a more sta­t­ic view, full of “Great Men” and an immutable nat­ur­al order. Then we have the counter-Enlight­en­ment thinker Giambat­tista Vico. The 18th cen­tu­ry Neapoli­tan philoso­pher took human irra­tional­ism seri­ous­ly, and wrote about our ten­den­cy to rely on myth and metaphor rather than rea­son or nature. Vico’s most “rev­o­lu­tion­ary move,” wrote Isa­iah Berlin, “is to have denied the doc­trine of a time­less nat­ur­al law” that could be “known in prin­ci­ple to any man, at any time, any­where.”

Vico’s the­o­ry of his­to­ry includ­ed inevitable peri­ods of decline (and heav­i­ly influ­enced the his­tor­i­cal think­ing of James Joyce and Friedrich Niet­zsche). He describes his con­cept “most col­or­ful­ly,” writes Alexan­der Bert­land at the Inter­net Ency­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy, “when he gives this axiom”:

Men first felt neces­si­ty then look for util­i­ty, next attend to com­fort, still lat­er amuse them­selves with plea­sure, thence grow dis­solute in lux­u­ry, and final­ly go mad and waste their sub­stance.

The descrip­tion may remind us of Shakespeare’s “Sev­en Ages of Man.” But for Vico, Bert­land notes, every decline her­alds a new begin­ning. His­to­ry is “pre­sent­ed clear­ly as a cir­cu­lar motion in which nations rise and fall… over and over again.”

Two-hun­dred and twen­ty years after Vico’s 1774 death, Carl Sagan—another thinker who took human irra­tional­ism seriously—published his book The Demon Haunt­ed World, show­ing how much our every­day think­ing derives from metaphor, mythol­o­gy, and super­sti­tion. He also fore­saw a future in which his nation, the U.S., would fall into a peri­od of ter­ri­ble decline:

I have a fore­bod­ing of an Amer­i­ca in my chil­dren’s or grand­chil­dren’s time — when the Unit­ed States is a ser­vice and infor­ma­tion econ­o­my; when near­ly all the man­u­fac­tur­ing indus­tries have slipped away to oth­er coun­tries; when awe­some tech­no­log­i­cal pow­ers are in the hands of a very few, and no one rep­re­sent­ing the pub­lic inter­est can even grasp the issues; when the peo­ple have lost the abil­i­ty to set their own agen­das or knowl­edge­ably ques­tion those in author­i­ty; when, clutch­ing our crys­tals and ner­vous­ly con­sult­ing our horo­scopes, our crit­i­cal fac­ul­ties in decline, unable to dis­tin­guish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost with­out notic­ing, back into super­sti­tion and dark­ness…

Sagan believed in progress and, unlike Vico, thought that “time­less nat­ur­al law” is dis­cov­er­able with the tools of sci­ence. And yet, he feared “the can­dle in the dark” of sci­ence would be snuffed out by “the dumb­ing down of Amer­i­ca…”

…most evi­dent in the slow decay of sub­stan­tive con­tent in the enor­mous­ly influ­en­tial media, the 30 sec­ond sound bites (now down to 10 sec­onds or less), low­est com­mon denom­i­na­tor pro­gram­ming, cred­u­lous pre­sen­ta­tions on pseu­do­science and super­sti­tion, but espe­cial­ly a kind of cel­e­bra­tion of igno­rance…

Sagan died in 1996, a year after he wrote these words. No doubt he would have seen the fine art of dis­tract­ing and mis­in­form­ing peo­ple through social media as a late, per­haps ter­mi­nal, sign of the demise of sci­en­tif­ic think­ing. His pas­sion­ate advo­ca­cy for sci­ence edu­ca­tion stemmed from his con­vic­tion that we must and can reverse the down­ward trend.

As he says in the poet­ic excerpt from Cos­mos above, “I believe our future depends pow­er­ful­ly on how well we under­stand this cos­mos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morn­ing sky.”

When Sagan refers to “our” under­stand­ing of sci­ence, he does not mean, as he says above, a “very few” tech­nocrats, aca­d­e­mics, and research sci­en­tists. Sagan invest­ed so much effort in pop­u­lar books and tele­vi­sion because he believed that all of us need­ed to use the tools of sci­ence: “a way of think­ing,” not just “a body of knowl­edge.” With­out sci­en­tif­ic think­ing, we can­not grasp the most impor­tant issues we all joint­ly face.

We’ve arranged a civ­i­liza­tion in which most cru­cial ele­ments pro­found­ly depend on sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy. We have also arranged things so that almost no one under­stands sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy. This is a pre­scrip­tion for dis­as­ter. We might get away with it for a while, but soon­er or lat­er this com­bustible mix­ture of igno­rance and pow­er is going to blow up in our faces.

Sagan’s 1995 pre­dic­tions are now being her­ald­ed as prophet­ic. As Direc­tor of Pub­lic Radio International’s Sci­ence Fri­day, Charles Bergquist recent­ly tweet­ed, “Carl Sagan had either a time machine or a crys­tal ball.” Matt Novak cau­tions against falling back into super­sti­tious think­ing in our praise of Demon Haunt­ed World. After all, he says, “the ‘accu­ra­cy’ of pre­dic­tions is often a Rorschach test” and “some of Sagan’s con­cerns” in oth­er parts of the book “sound rather quaint.”

Of course Sagan could­n’t pre­dict the future, but he did have a very informed, rig­or­ous under­stand­ing of the issues of twen­ty years ago, and his pre­dic­tion extrap­o­lates from trends that have only con­tin­ued to deep­en. If the tools of sci­ence education—like most of the coun­try’s wealth—end up the sole prop­er­ty of an elite, the rest of us will fall back into a state of gross igno­rance, “super­sti­tion and dark­ness.” Whether we might come back around again to progress, as Giambat­tista Vico thought, is a mat­ter of sheer con­jec­ture. But per­haps there’s still time to reverse the trend before the worst arrives. As Novak writes, “here’s hop­ing Sagan, one of the smartest peo­ple of the 20th cen­tu­ry, was wrong.”

via Charles Bergquist

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan Presents His “Baloney Detec­tion Kit”: 8 Tools for Skep­ti­cal Think­ing

Carl Sagan & the Dalai Lama Meet in 1991 and Dis­cuss When Sci­ence Can Answer Big Ques­tions Bet­ter Than Reli­gion

An Intro­duc­tion to Hegel’s Phi­los­o­phy of His­to­ry: The Road to Progress Runs First Through Dark Times

Philoso­pher Richard Rorty Chill­ing­ly Pre­dicts the Results of the 2016 Elec­tion … Back in 1998

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

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Why Time Seems to Speed Up as We Get Older: What the Research Says

in Psychology | January 26th, 2017

No mat­ter what age we’ve attained, we can think back to child­hood and feel just how ago­niz­ing­ly long it then took for Christ­mas to come, for the school day to end, for a tray of cook­ies to come out of the oven. Mys­te­ri­ous as this appar­ent change in the speed of time may at first seem, it actu­al­ly makes a kind of intu­itive sense: one day rep­re­sents, at the age of fifty, a tenth of the pro­por­tion of the time we’ve expe­ri­enced so far than it does at the age of five. As our time­line length­ens, our per­cep­tion of cer­tain fixed units on that time­line — a minute, a year, a decade — short­ens.

But there are oth­er fac­tors in play as well. “Indi­vid­ual per­cep­tions of time are strong­ly influ­enced by our lev­el of focus, phys­i­cal state and mood,” write The Inde­pen­dent’s Muire­ann Irish and Claire O’Callaghan. “Just as ‘a watched pot nev­er boils,’ when we are con­cen­trat­ing on an event, time occa­sion­al­ly appears to pass more slow­ly than usu­al. This is also the case when we’re bored; time can seem to drag end­less­ly.” This might well con­tribute to the child­hood per­cep­tion of slow time, since kids have to spend so many of their days in the class­room, an envi­ron­ment that strikes most of them as express­ly designed to induce bore­dom.

In addi­tion, accord­ing to Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can, “our brain encodes new expe­ri­ences, but not famil­iar ones, into mem­o­ry, and our ret­ro­spec­tive judg­ment of time is based on how many new mem­o­ries we cre­ate over a cer­tain peri­od. In oth­er words, the more new mem­o­ries we build on a week­end get­away, the longer that trip will seem in hind­sight.” The rel­a­tive­ly high fre­quen­cy of dis­tinc­tive mem­o­ries cre­at­ed ear­li­er in life and low fre­quen­cy of dis­tinc­tive mem­o­ries cre­at­ed lat­er in life means that “our ear­ly years tend to be rel­a­tive­ly over­rep­re­sent­ed in our auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal mem­o­ry and, on reflec­tion, seem to have last­ed longer.”

You can see some of the ideas and the­o­ries behind this almost uni­ver­sal­ly agreed-on sense that time speeds up as we grow old­er in the video from the Nation­al Geo­graph­ic Chan­nel show Brain Games above. It also intro­duces a few new ones into the mix, con­nect­ing them all with how much ener­gy the brain uses to record which kinds of expe­ri­ences, sug­gest­ing that even a sense as fun­da­men­tal as the one we use to mark time has a great deal more com­plex­i­ty to it than we under­stand. Ulti­mate­ly, though, it all comes back to the words of no less a thinker on rel­a­tiv­i­ty than Albert Ein­stein: “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pret­ty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Clocks Changed Human­i­ty For­ev­er, Mak­ing Us Mas­ters and Slaves of Time

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

The Secret Pow­ers of Time

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy & Neu­ro­science Cours­es

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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A Unified Theory of Mental Illness: How Everything from Addiction to Depression Can Be Explained by the Concept of “Capture”

in Psychology | January 4th, 2017

David Kessler–once the Com­mis­sion­er of the F.D.A., lat­er the Dean of Yale’s School of Med­i­cine, and even­tu­al­ly Dean and Vice-Chan­cel­lor at UCS­F’s pres­ti­gious Med­ical School–pub­lished a book called Cap­ture: Unrav­el­ing the Mys­tery of Men­tal Suf­fer­ing. A best­seller, the book makes the case that all men­tal illness–everything from addic­tion to depres­sion to artis­tic obsessions–can be explained by an under­ly­ing mech­a­nism. That mech­a­nism, the key to treat­ing men­tal ill­ness, is known as “Cap­ture.”

To get a brief intro­duc­tion to Kessler’s uni­fied the­o­ry of men­tal ill­ness, watch the ani­mat­ed primer above. It comes cour­tesy of The Atlantic. Get more back­ground on Kessler’s book by read­ing this review in The New York Times.

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:

Stanford’s Robert Sapol­sky Demys­ti­fies Depres­sion, Which, Like Dia­betes, Is Root­ed in Biol­o­gy

Stephen Fry on Cop­ing with Depres­sion: It’s Rain­ing, But the Sun Will Come Out Again

Intro­duc­tion to Psy­chol­o­gy: A Free Course from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy & Neu­ro­science Cours­es

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The Science of Willpower: 15 Tips for Making Your New Year’s Resolutions Last from Dr. Kelly McGonigal

in Psychology | December 30th, 2016

This week­end, mil­lions of New Year’s res­o­lu­tions will go into effect, with the most com­mon ones being lose weight, get fit, quit drink­ing and smok­ing, save mon­ey, and learn some­thing new. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, 33% of these res­o­lu­tions will be aban­doned by Jan­u­ary’s end. And 80% will even­tu­al­ly fall by the way­side. Mak­ing res­o­lu­tions stick is tricky busi­ness. But it’s pos­si­ble, and psy­chol­o­gist Kel­ly McGo­ni­gal has a few sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly-proven sug­ges­tions for you.

For years, McGo­ni­gal has taught a very pop­u­lar course called The Sci­ence of Willpow­er in Stan­ford’s Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies pro­gram, where she intro­duces stu­dents to the idea that willpow­er is not an innate trait. Rather it’s a “com­plex mind-body response that can be com­pro­mised by stress, sleep depri­va­tion and nutri­tion and that can be strength­ened through cer­tain prac­tices.”

For those of you who don’t live in the San Fran­cis­co Bay Area, you can find McGo­ni­gal’s ideas pre­sent­ed in a recent book, The Willpow­er Instinct: How Self-Con­trol Works, Why It Mat­ters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It. Below, we have high­light­ed 15 of Dr. McGo­ni­gal’s strate­gies for increas­ing your willpow­er reserves and mak­ing your New Year’s res­o­lu­tion endure.

  1. Will pow­er is like a mus­cle. The more you work on devel­op­ing it, the more you can incor­po­rate it into your life. It helps, McGo­ni­gal says in this pod­cast, to start with small feats of willpow­er before try­ing to tack­le more dif­fi­cult feats. Ide­al­ly, find the small­est change that’s con­sis­tent with your larg­er goal, and start there.
  2. Choose a goal or res­o­lu­tion that you real­ly want, not a goal that some­one else desires for you, or a goal that you think you should want. Choose a pos­i­tive goal that tru­ly comes from with­in and that con­tributes to some­thing impor­tant in life.
  3. Willpow­er is con­ta­gious. Find a willpow­er role mod­el — some­one who has accom­plished what you want to do. Also try to sur­round your­self with fam­i­ly mem­bers, friends or groups who can sup­port you. Change is often not made alone.
  4. Know that peo­ple have more willpow­er when they wake up, and then willpow­er steadi­ly declines through­out the day as peo­ple fatigue. So try to accom­plish what you need to — for exam­ple, exer­cise — ear­li­er in the day. Then watch out for the evenings, when bad habits can return.
  5. Under­stand that stress and willpow­er are incom­pat­i­ble. Any time we’re under stress it’s hard­er to find our willpow­er. Accord­ing to McGo­ni­gal, “the fight-or-flight response floods the body with ener­gy to act instinc­tive­ly and steals it from the areas of the brain need­ed for wise deci­sion-mak­ing. Stress also encour­ages you to focus on imme­di­ate, short-term goals and out­comes, but self-con­trol requires keep­ing the big pic­ture in mind.” The upshot? “Learn­ing how to bet­ter man­age your stress is one of the most impor­tant things you can do to improve your willpow­er.” When you get stressed out, go for a walk. Even a five minute walk out­side can reduce your stress lev­els, boost your mood, and help you replen­ish your willpow­er reserves.
  6. Sleep depri­va­tion (less than six hours a night) makes it so that the pre­frontal cor­tex los­es con­trol over the regions of the brain that cre­ate crav­ings. Sci­ence shows that get­ting just one more hour of sleep each night (eight hours is ide­al) helps recov­er­ing drug addicts avoid a relapse. So it can cer­tain­ly help you resist a dough­nut or a cig­a­rette.
  7. Also remem­ber that nutri­tion plays a key role. “Eat­ing a more plant-based, less-processed diet makes ener­gy more avail­able to the brain and can improve every aspect of willpow­er from over­com­ing pro­cras­ti­na­tion to stick­ing to a New Year’s res­o­lu­tion,” McGo­ni­gal says.
  8. Don’t think it will be dif­fer­ent tomor­row. McGo­ni­gal notes that we have a ten­den­cy to think that we will have more willpow­er, ener­gy, time, and moti­va­tion tomor­row. The prob­lem is that “if we think we have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to make a dif­fer­ent choice tomor­row, we almost always ‘give in’ to temp­ta­tion or habit today.”
  9. Acknowl­edge and under­stand your crav­ings rather than deny­ing them. That will take you fur­ther in the end. The video above has more on that.
  10. Imag­ine the things that could get in the way of achiev­ing your goal. Under­stand the ten­den­cies you have that could lead you to break your res­o­lu­tion. Don’t be over­ly opti­mistic and assume the road will be easy.
  11. Know your lim­its, and plan for them. Says McGo­ni­gal, “Peo­ple who think they have the most self-con­trol are the most like­ly to fail at their res­o­lu­tions; they put them­selves in tempt­ing sit­u­a­tions, don’t get help, give up at set­backs. You need to know how you fail; how you are tempt­ed; how you pro­cras­ti­nate.”
  12. Pay atten­tion to small choic­es that add up. “One study found that the aver­age per­son thinks they make 14 food choic­es a day; they actu­al­ly make over 200. When you aren’t aware that you’re mak­ing a choice, you’ll almost always default to habit/temptation.” It’s impor­tant to fig­ure out when you have oppor­tu­ni­ties to make a choice con­sis­tent with your goals.
  13. Be spe­cif­ic but flex­i­ble. It’s good to know your goal and how you’ll get there. But, she cau­tions, “you should leave room to revise these steps if they turn out to be unsus­tain­able or don’t lead to the ben­e­fits you expect­ed.”
  14. Give your­self small, healthy rewards along the way. Research shows that the mind responds well to it. (If you’re try­ing to quite smok­ing, the reward should­n’t be a cig­a­rette, by the way.)
  15. Final­ly, if you expe­ri­ence a set­back, don’t be hard on your­self. Although it seems counter-intu­itive, stud­ies show that peo­ple who expe­ri­ence shame/guilt are much more like­ly to break their res­o­lu­tions than ones who cut them­selves some slack. In a nut­shell, you should “Give up guilt.”

To put all of these tips into a big­ger frame­work, you can get a copy of Kel­ly McGo­ni­gal’s book, The Willpow­er Instinct: How Self-Con­trol Works, Why It Mat­ters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It. And now you can take The Sci­ence of Willpow­er as an online course that begins on Jan­u­ary 23.

Final­ly you might also want to peruse How to Think Like a Psy­chol­o­gist (iTunes Video), a free online course led by Kel­ly McGo­ni­gal. It appears in our col­lec­tion of 1200 Free Cours­es Online.

A ver­sion of this post first appeared on Open Cul­ture in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Pow­er of Empa­thy: A Quick Ani­mat­ed Les­son That Can Make You a Bet­ter Per­son

Carl Gus­tav Jung Explains His Ground­break­ing The­o­ries About Psy­chol­o­gy in Rare Inter­view (1957)

Jacques Lacan’s Con­fronta­tion with a Young Rebel: Clas­sic Moment, 1972

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

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

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Stephen King Explains the Key to His Creativity: Not Losing the Dream-State Thinking All Children Are Born With

in Psychology, Writing | December 27th, 2016

While noth­ing could make me per­son­al­ly want to return to child­hood, chil­dren do, for bet­ter or for worse, per­ceive the world more vivid­ly than adults. The best writ­ing for kids makes rich nar­ra­tive use of that fact, as do sto­ries about but not for kids by writ­ers who haven’t for­got­ten their pre-grown-up selves’ expe­ri­ence of real­i­ty. Stephen King, for instance, hard­ly writes chil­dren’s lit­er­a­ture, but his nov­els about the fear that seeps into every cor­ner of work­ing-class Amer­i­ca often include very young char­ac­ters. Not only does King write plau­si­bly from their psy­cho­log­i­cal point of view, he uses that point of view as an engine of his entire project.

King, in a 1989 inter­view on WAM­C’s Pub­lic Radio Book Show, elab­o­rat­ed on “the two things that inter­est me about child­hood,” the first being that “it’s a secret world that exists by its own rules and lives in its own cul­ture, and the sec­ond that “we for­get what it is to be a child and we for­get that life, which is kind of exot­ic and strange.” Though read­ers often ask him what ago­nies his child­hood must have vis­it­ed upon him that spurred him to write such vivid­ly hor­rif­ic fic­tion, King does­n’t remem­ber any­thing wrong with his for­ma­tive years. But he does remem­ber “that we think in a dif­fer­ent way as chil­dren. We tend to think around cor­ners instead of in straight lines.”

We see these dif­fer­ences ani­mat­ed in the Blank on Blank video at the top of the post, which envi­sions the adult King in the world of imag­i­na­tion that kids instinc­tive­ly inhab­it and out of which they even­tu­al­ly grow, but to which he reg­u­lar­ly returns to write his sto­ries. “Some­times for a kid, the short­est dis­tance between two points is not a straight line and that’s the way that we think and dream,” he says. “As chil­dren we tend to live in this kind of dream state [ … ] and because I equate that sort of dream state with a height­ened sort of men­tal state, I make this easy cross-con­nec­tion between child­hood and strange pow­ers, para­nor­mal pow­ers or what­ev­er, and it has been suc­cess­ful as a fic­tion­al device.”

As the source of such best­sellers as Car­rie, The Stand, Chris­tine, It, the Dark Tow­er series, and count­less oth­er works, it’s been suc­cess­ful to say the least. If con­nect­ing one thing to anoth­er in new ways — be those things peo­ple, places, events, ideas, feel­ings, or what­ev­er else — con­sti­tutes the cen­tral act of cre­ation, then it makes sense that the nat­u­ral­ly asso­cia­tive nature of a child’s imag­i­na­tion, har­nessed to an adult’s expe­ri­ence and dis­ci­pline, can pro­duce such abun­dant and wide­ly res­o­nant results. No coin­ci­dence, sure­ly, that young­sters unable to pay atten­tion to the lin­ear pro­gres­sion of the class­room get labeled “dream­ers,” a ten­den­cy that King has used to his advan­tage — though he seems to have got most of his tex­tu­al mileage out of the night­mares.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stephen King’s Top 20 Rules for Writ­ers

Stephen King Writes A Let­ter to His 16-Year-Old Self: “Stay Away from Recre­ation­al Drugs”

Stephen King on the Mag­ic Moment When a Young Writer Reads a Pub­lished Book and Says: “This Sucks. I Can Do Bet­ter.”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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