The Neuroscience of Drumming: Researchers Discover the Secrets of Drumming & The Human Brain

in Health, Music, Neuroscience, Psychology | August 11th, 2015

An old musician’s joke goes “there are three kinds of drum­mers in the world—those who can count and those who can’t.” But per­haps there is an even more glob­al divide. Per­haps there are three kinds of peo­ple in the world—those who can drum and those who can’t. Per­haps, as the pro­mo­tion­al video above from GE sug­gests, drum­mers have fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent brains than the rest of us. Today we high­light the sci­en­tif­ic research into drum­mers’ brains, an expand­ing area of neu­ro­science and psy­chol­o­gy that dis­proves a host of dumb drum­mer jokes.

“Drum­mers,” writes Jor­dan Tay­lor Sloan at Mic, “can actu­al­ly be smarter than their less rhyth­mi­cal­ly-focused band­mates.” This accord­ing to the find­ings of a Swedish study (Karolin­s­ka Insti­tutet in Stock­holm) which shows “a link between intel­li­gence, good tim­ing and the part of the brain used for prob­lem-solv­ing.” As Gary Cle­land puts it in The Tele­graph, drum­mers “might actu­al­ly be nat­ur­al intel­lec­tu­als.”

Neu­ro­sci­en­tist David Eagle­man, a renais­sance researcher The New York­er calls “a man obsessed with time,” found this out in an exper­i­ment he con­duct­ed with var­i­ous pro­fes­sion­al drum­mers at Bri­an Eno’s stu­dio. It was Eno who the­o­rized that drum­mers have a unique men­tal make­up, and it turns out “Eno was right: drum­mers do have dif­fer­ent brains from the rest.” Eagle­man’s test showed “a huge sta­tis­ti­cal dif­fer­ence between the drum­mers’ tim­ing and that of test sub­jects.” Says Eagle­man, “Now we know that there is some­thing anatom­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent about them.” Their abil­i­ty to keep time gives them an intu­itive under­stand­ing of the rhyth­mic pat­terns they per­ceive all around them.

That dif­fer­ence can be annoying—like the pain of hav­ing per­fect pitch in a per­pet­u­al­ly off-key world. But drum­ming ulti­mate­ly has ther­a­peu­tic val­ue, pro­vid­ing the emo­tion­al and phys­i­cal ben­e­fits col­lec­tive­ly known as “drum­mer’s high,” an endor­phin rush that can only be stim­u­lat­ed by play­ing music, not sim­ply lis­ten­ing to it. In addi­tion to increas­ing peo­ple’s pain thresh­olds, Oxford psy­chol­o­gists found, the endor­phin-filled act of drum­ming increas­es pos­i­tive emo­tions and leads peo­ple to work togeth­er in a more coop­er­a­tive fash­ion.

Clash drum­mer Top­per Head­on dis­cuss­es the ther­a­peu­tic aspect of drum­ming in a short BBC inter­view above. He also calls drum­ming a “primeval” and dis­tinct­ly, uni­ver­sal­ly human activ­i­ty. For­mer Grate­ful Dead drum­mer Mick­ey Hart and neu­ro­sci­en­tist Adam Gaz­za­ley have high hopes for the sci­ence of rhythm. Hart, who has pow­ered a light show with his brain­waves in con­certs with his own band, dis­cuss­es the “pow­er” of rhythm to move crowds and bring Alzheimer’s patients back into the present moment.

Whether we can train our­selves to think and feel like drum­mers may be debat­able. But as for whether drum­mers real­ly do think in ways non-drum­mers can’t, con­sid­er the neu­ro­science of Stew­art Copeland’s polyrhyth­mic beats, and the work of Ter­ry Bozzio (below) play­ing the largest drumk­it you’ve ever seen.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Iso­lat­ed Drum Tracks From Six of Rock’s Great­est: Bon­ham, Moon, Peart, Copeland, Grohl & Starr

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

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New Study: Immersing Yourself in Art, Music & Nature Might Reduce Inflammation & Increase Life Expectancy

in Art, Health, Life, Philosophy, Psychology | August 7th, 2015

caspar-david-friedrich-wanderer

Of all the philo­soph­i­cal con­cepts Immanuel Kant is known for, the one I’ve had to strug­gle the least to grasp is his descrip­tion of the sub­lime, a state in which we are over­awed by the scale of some great work of man or nature. It’s an expe­ri­ence, in typ­i­cal Kant­ian fash­ion, that he explains as being not about the thing itself, but rather the idea of the thing. Yet the con­cept of the sub­lime isn’t his. Philoso­phers from the Greek teacher Long­i­nus in the 1st cen­tu­ry to Edmund Burke and oth­er Eng­lish Enlight­en­ment thinkers in Kan­t’s own 18th cen­tu­ry have had their take on it. For the clas­si­cal writ­ers, the sub­lime was rhetor­i­cal, for the Brits, it was empir­i­cal. But above all, the sub­lime is peak aesthetics—a supra-ratio­nal expe­ri­ence of art or nature one can­not get one’s head around. To be so ful­ly absorbed, so strick­en with awe, won­der, and, yes, even fear—all of these philoso­phers believed in some fashion—is to have an expe­ri­ence crit­i­cal to tran­scend­ing our lim­i­ta­tions.

We may not, in either com­mon speech or aca­d­e­m­ic phi­los­o­phy, talk much about the sub­lime these days, but what­ev­er we call the feel­ing of being absorbed in art, music, or nature, it turns out to have phys­i­cal ben­e­fits as well as men­tal and emo­tion­al. “There seems to be some­thing about awe,” says pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­o­gy Dacher Kelt­ner. “It seems to have pro­nounced impact on mark­ers relat­ed to inflam­ma­tion.”

In oth­er words, immers­ing your­self in art or nature is good for the joints, and it could pos­si­bly pre­empt var­i­ous dis­eases trig­gered by inflam­ma­tion. Kelt­ner and his fel­low researchers at UC Berke­ley con­duct­ed a study which found that “awe, won­der and beau­ty pro­mote [low­er and over­all] health­i­er lev­els of cytokines”—pro­teins that “sig­nal the immune sys­tem to work hard­er.” He goes on to say that “the things we do to expe­ri­ence these emotions—a walk in nature, los­ing one­self in music, behold­ing art—has [sic] a direct influ­ence upon health and life expectan­cy.”

Nev­er mind that Kant and Burke thought of the sub­lime and the beau­ti­ful as two very dif­fer­ent things. Whether we become total­ly over­whelmed by, or just find deep appre­ci­a­tion in an aes­thet­ic expe­ri­ence, the emo­tions pro­duced “might be just as salu­bri­ous as hit­ting the gym,” writes Hyper­al­ler­gic. That may seem a crude way of think­ing about the spir­i­tu­al and emo­tion­al grandeur of the sub­lime, but it brings our phys­i­cal being into the dis­cus­sion in ways many philoso­phers have neglect­ed. Grant­ed, the researchers them­selves admit the causal link is uncer­tain: it might be bet­ter health that leads to more expe­ri­ences of awe, and not the oth­er way around. But cer­tain­ly no harm—and a great deal of good—can come from con­duct­ing the exper­i­ment on your­self. Read an abstract (or pur­chase a copy) of the Berke­ley team’s arti­cle here, and learn more about their work with the Uni­ver­si­ty’s Greater Good Sci­ence Cen­ter, which aims to “spon­sor ground­break­ing sci­en­tif­ic research into social and emo­tion­al well-being.”

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

This Is Your Brain on Jane Austen: The Neu­ro­science of Read­ing Great Lit­er­a­ture

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

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

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

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1980s Metalhead Kids Are All Right: New Study Suggests They Became Well-Adjusted Adults

in Music, Psychology | July 14th, 2015

In the 1980s, The Par­ents Music Resource Cen­ter (PMRC), an orga­ni­za­tion co-found­ed by Tip­per Gore and the wives of sev­er­al oth­er Wash­ing­ton pow­er bro­kers, launched a polit­i­cal cam­paign against pop music, hop­ing to put warn­ing labels on records that pro­mot­ed Sex, Vio­lence, Drug and Alco­hol Use. Along the way, the PMRC issued “the Filthy Fif­teen,” a list of 15 par­tic­u­lar­ly objec­tion­able songs. Hits by Madon­na, Prince and Cyn­di Lau­per made the list. But the list real­ly took aim at heavy met­al bands from the 80s — name­ly, Judas Priest, Möt­ley Crüe, Twist­ed Sis­ter, W.A.S.P., Def Lep­pard, Black Sab­bath, and Ven­om. (Inter­est­ing foot­note: the Sovi­ets sep­a­rate­ly cre­at­ed a list of black­balled rock bands, and it looked pret­ty much the same.)

Above, you can watch Twist­ed Sis­ter’s Dee Snider appear before Con­gress in 1985 and accuse the PMRC of mis­in­ter­pret­ing his band’s lyrics and wag­ing a false war against met­al music. The evi­dence 30 years lat­er sug­gests that Snider maybe had a point.

A new study by psy­chol­o­gy researchers at Hum­boldt State, Ohio State, UC River­side and UT Austin “exam­ined 1980s heavy met­al groupies, musi­cians, and fans at mid­dle age” — 377 par­tic­i­pants in total — and found that, although met­al enthu­si­asts cer­tain­ly lived riski­er lives as kids, they were nonethe­less “sig­nif­i­cant­ly hap­pi­er in their youth and bet­ter adjust­ed cur­rent­ly than either mid­dle-aged or cur­rent col­lege-age youth com­par­i­son groups.” This left the researchers to con­tem­plate one pos­si­ble con­clu­sion: “par­tic­i­pa­tion in fringe style cul­tures may enhance iden­ti­ty devel­op­ment in trou­bled youth.” Not to men­tion that heavy met­al lyrics don’t eas­i­ly turn kids into dam­aged goods.

You can read the report, Three Decades Lat­er: The Life Expe­ri­ences and Mid-Life Func­tion­ing of 1980s Heavy Met­al Groupies here. And, right above, lis­ten to an inter­view with one of the researchers, Tasha Howe, a for­mer head­banger her­self, who spoke yes­ter­day with Michael Kras­ny on KQED radio in San Fran­cis­co.

Fol­low us on Face­book, Twit­ter, Google Plus and LinkedIn and share intel­li­gent media with your friends. And if you want to make sure that you always see Open Cul­ture in your news­feed, give this a read.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sovi­et Union Cre­ates a List of 38 Dan­ger­ous Rock Bands: Kiss, Pink Floyd, Talk­ing Heads, Vil­lage Peo­ple & More (1985)

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy Cours­es

Heavy Met­al: Doc­u­men­tary Explores the Music, Per­son­al­i­ties & Great Cloth­ing That Hit the Stage in the 1980s

Orson Welles Records Two Songs with the 1980s Heavy-Met­al Band Manowar

A Blue­grass Ver­sion of Metallica’s Heavy Met­al Hit, “Enter Sand­man”

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Meditation 101: A Short, Animated Beginner’s Guide

in Health, Psychology | July 9th, 2015

Katy Davis (AKA Gob­blynne) cre­at­ed an immense­ly pop­u­lar video ani­mat­ing Dr. Brené Brown’s insights on The Pow­er of Empa­thy. Now, she returns with anoth­er ani­mal-filled ani­ma­tion that could also put you on the right men­tal track. Nar­rat­ed by Dan Har­ris, this one lays out the basics of med­i­ta­tion and deals with some com­mon mis­con­cep­tions and points of frus­tra­tion. Give it a quick watch, and if you want to give med­i­ta­tion a first, sec­ond or third try, check out these Free Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tions From UCLA. If you know of oth­er help­ful med­i­ta­tion resources, feel free to let us know in the com­ments.

Fol­low us on Face­book, Twit­ter, Google Plus and LinkedIn and  share intel­li­gent media with your friends. Or bet­ter yet, sign up for our dai­ly email and get a dai­ly dose of Open Cul­ture in your inbox.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Son­ny Rollins Describes How 50 Years of Prac­tic­ing Yoga Made Him a Bet­ter Musi­cian

David Lynch Explains How Med­i­ta­tion Enhances Our Cre­ativ­i­ty

Alan Watts Intro­duces Amer­i­ca to Med­i­ta­tion & East­ern Phi­los­o­phy (1960)

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

in Creativity, Life, Literature, Psychology | July 8th, 2015

Walking

Image via Diego Sevil­la Ruiz

A cer­tain Zen proverb goes some­thing like this: “A five year old can under­stand it, but an 80 year old can­not do it.” The sub­ject of this rid­dle-like say­ing has been described as “mindfulness”—or being absorbed in the moment, free from rou­tine men­tal habits. In many East­ern med­i­ta­tive tra­di­tions, one can achieve such a state by walk­ing just as well as by sit­ting still—and many a poet and teacher has pre­ferred the ambu­la­to­ry method.

This is equal­ly so in the West, where we have an entire school of ancient philosophy—the “peri­patet­ic”—that derives from Aris­to­tle and his con­tem­po­raries’ pen­chant for doing their best work while in leisure­ly motion. Friedrich Niet­zsche, an almost fanat­i­cal walk­er, once wrote, “all tru­ly great thoughts are con­ceived by walk­ing.” Niet­zsche’s moun­tain walks were ath­let­ic, but walk­ing—Frédéric Gros main­tains in his A Phi­los­o­phy of Walk­ing—is not a sport; it is “the best way to go more slow­ly than any oth­er method that has ever been found.”

Gros dis­cuss­es the cen­tral­i­ty of walk­ing in the lives of Niet­zsche, Rim­baud, Kant, Rousseau, and Thore­au. Like­wise, Rebec­ca Sol­nit has pro­filed the essen­tial walks of lit­er­ary fig­ures such as William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, and Gary Sny­der in her book Wan­der­lust, which argues for the neces­si­ty of walk­ing in our own age, when doing so is almost entire­ly unnec­es­sary most of the time. As great walk­ers of the past and present have made abun­dant­ly clear—anecdotally at least—we see a sig­nif­i­cant link between walk­ing and cre­ative think­ing.

More gen­er­al­ly, writes Fer­ris Jabr in The New York­er, “the way we move our bod­ies fur­ther changes the nature of our thoughts, and vice ver­sa.” Apply­ing mod­ern research meth­ods to ancient wis­dom has allowed psy­chol­o­gists to quan­ti­fy the ways in which this hap­pens, and to begin to explain why. Jabr sum­ma­rizes the exper­i­ments of two Stan­ford walk­ing researchers, Mar­i­ly Oppez­zo and her men­tor Daniel Schwartz, who found that almost two hun­dred stu­dents test­ed showed marked­ly height­ened cre­ative abil­i­ties while walk­ing. Walk­ing, Jabr writes in poet­ic terms, works by “set­ting the mind adrift on a froth­ing sea of thought.” (Hear Dr. Oppez­zo dis­cuss her study in a Min­neso­ta pub­lic radio inter­view above.)

Oppez­zo and Schwartz spec­u­late, “future stud­ies would like­ly deter­mine a com­plex path­way that extends from the phys­i­cal act of walk­ing to phys­i­o­log­i­cal changes to the cog­ni­tive con­trol of imag­i­na­tion.” They rec­og­nize that this dis­cov­ery must also account for such vari­ables as when one walks, and—as so many notable walk­ers have stressed—where. Researchers at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan have tack­led the where ques­tion in a paper titled “The Cog­ni­tive Ben­e­fits of Inter­act­ing with Nature.” Their study, writes Jabr, showed that “stu­dents who ambled through an arbore­tum improved their per­for­mance on a mem­o­ry test more than stu­dents who walked along city streets.”

One won­ders what James Joyce—whose Ulysses is built almost entire­ly on a scaf­fold­ing of walks around Dublin—would make of this. Or Wal­ter Ben­jamin, whose con­cept of the flâneur, an arche­typ­al urban wan­der­er, derives direct­ly from the insights of that most imag­i­na­tive deca­dent poet, Charles Baude­laire. Clas­si­cal walk­ers, Roman­tic walk­ers, Mod­ernist walkers—all rec­og­nized the cre­ative impor­tance of this sim­ple move­ment in time and space, one we work so hard to mas­ter in our first years, and some­times lose in lat­er life if we acquire it. Going for a walk, con­tem­po­rary research confirms—a mun­dane activ­i­ty far too eas­i­ly tak­en for granted—may be one of the most salu­tary means of achiev­ing states of enlight­en­ment, lit­er­ary, philo­soph­i­cal, or oth­er­wise, whether we roam through ancient forests, over the Alps, or to the cor­ner store.

via The New York­er/Stan­ford News

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

The Psy­chol­o­gy of Messi­ness & Cre­ativ­i­ty: Research Shows How a Messy Desk and Cre­ative Work Go Hand in Hand

John Cleese’s Phi­los­o­phy of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Cre­at­ing Oases for Child­like Play

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy Cours­es

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

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Animated Introductions to Three Sociologists: Durkheim, Weber & Adorno

in Economics, Education, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology | June 24th, 2015

Is soci­ol­o­gy an art or a sci­ence? Is it phi­los­o­phy? Social psy­chol­o­gy? Eco­nom­ics and polit­i­cal the­o­ry? Sur­vey­ing the great soci­ol­o­gists since the mid-19th cen­tu­ry, one would have to answer “yes” to all of these ques­tions. Soci­ol­o­gists like Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Theodor Adorno con­duct­ed seri­ous schol­ar­ly and social-sci­en­tif­ic analy­ses, and wrote high­ly spec­u­la­tive the­o­ry. Though it may seem like we’re all soci­ol­o­gists now, mak­ing crit­i­cal judg­ments about large groups of peo­ple, the soci­ol­o­gists who cre­at­ed and car­ried on the dis­ci­pline gen­er­al­ly did so with sound evi­dence and well-rea­soned argu­ment. Unlike so much cur­rent knee-jerk com­men­tary, even when they’re wrong they’re still well worth read­ing.

Hav­ing already sur­veyed Marx in his series on Euro-Amer­i­can polit­i­cal philoso­phers, School of Life founder Alain de Bot­ton now tack­les the oth­er three illus­tri­ous names on the list above, start­ing with Durkheim at the top, then Weber above, and Adorno below. The first two fig­ures were con­tem­po­raries of Marx, the third a lat­er inter­preter. Like that beard­ed Ger­man scourge of cap­i­tal­ism, these three—in more mea­sured or pes­simistic ways—levied cri­tiques against the dom­i­nant eco­nom­ic sys­tem. Durkheim took on the prob­lem of sui­cide, Weber the anx­ious reli­gious under­pin­nings of cap­i­tal­ist ide­ol­o­gy, and Adorno the con­sumer cul­ture of instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion.

That’s so far, at least, as de Bot­ton’s very cur­so­ry intro­duc­tions get us. As with his oth­er series, this one more or less ropes the thinkers rep­re­sent­ed here into the School of Life’s pro­gram of pro­mot­ing a very par­tic­u­lar, mid­dle class view of hap­pi­ness. And, as with the oth­er series, the thinkers sur­veyed here all seem to more or less agree with de Bot­ton’s own views. Per­haps oth­ers who most cer­tain­ly could have been includ­ed, like W.E.B. Dubois, Jane Addams, or Han­nah Arendt, would offer some very dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives.

De Bot­ton again makes his points with pithy gen­er­al­iza­tions, num­bered lists, and quirky, cut-out ani­ma­tions, breezi­ly reduc­ing life­times of work to a few obser­va­tions and moral lessons. I doubt Adorno would approach these less-than-rig­or­ous meth­ods char­i­ta­bly, but those new to the field of soci­ol­o­gy or the work of its prac­ti­tion­ers will find here some tan­ta­liz­ing ideas that will hope­ful­ly inspire them to dig deep­er, and to per­haps improve their own soci­o­log­i­cal diag­noses.

Note: For those inter­est­ed, Yale has a free open course on Soci­ol­o­gy called “Foun­da­tions of Mod­ern Social The­o­ry,” which cov­ers most of the fig­ures list­ed above. You can always find it in our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

6 Polit­i­cal The­o­rists Intro­duced in Ani­mat­ed “School of Life” Videos: Marx, Smith, Rawls & More

Niet­zsche, Wittgen­stein & Sartre Explained with Mon­ty Python-Style Ani­ma­tions by The School of Life

Theodor Adorno’s Rad­i­cal Cri­tique of Joan Baez and the Music of the Viet­nam War Protest Move­ment

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

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Watch the New Trailer for the Stanford Prison Experiment Film, Soon in Theaters Near You

in Psychology | June 17th, 2015

In 1971, Stan­ford psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor Philip Zim­bar­do under­took a study to deter­mine whether sit­u­a­tions deter­mine behav­ior or whether a person’s dis­po­si­tion leads to behav­ior regard­less of their sit­u­a­tion. As seen in the above trail­er for the Stan­ford Prison Exper­i­ment, a new film adap­ta­tion of Zimbardo’s con­tro­ver­sial study, it was explained thus­ly: peo­ple act­ed like prisoners–lashing out at author­i­ty, angry, maladjusted–purely by dint of being put in pris­ons. And peo­ple abused their author­i­ty when put in the posi­tion of author­i­ty. The hypoth­e­sis had its basis in the past: the action of Nazi guards at the con­cen­tra­tion camps. The results have ram­i­fi­ca­tions through to the present: wit­ness the con­fes­sions of the guards who tor­tured inmates in Abu Ghraib.

The trail­er plays like a psy­cho­log­i­cal thriller, but so far it looks true to the record. Prof. Zim­bar­do–hav­ing just earned tenure at Stan­ford (and played in the film by Bil­ly Crudup)–chose 24 healthy stu­dent sub­jects and ran­dom­ly assigned them either the role of guard or of pris­on­er. The Psy­chol­o­gy Depart­ment’s base­ment was turned into a mock prison, with hold­ing cells, guard rooms, soli­tary con­fine­ment, and an exer­cise yard. Cam­eras record­ed all that went on, observed by Zim­bar­do and his crew. The “guards” could come and go accord­ing to shifts, but the “pris­on­ers” could not. While the “guards” could not use phys­i­cal force on the “pris­on­ers,” they could use as many psy­cho­log­i­cal tac­tics as pos­si­ble to break the will of their fel­low stu­dents. How­ev­er, the “pris­on­ers” were not told exact­ly what would hap­pen to them. When, on the first day, the “pris­on­ers” were “arrest­ed” in the morn­ing, stripped, searched, shaved and deloused, they were already in a state of shock. An ear­ly doc­u­men­tary exists on the exper­i­ment and its results here:

Suf­fice it to say (and you may have seen this com­ing) the stu­dent guards real­ly got into their roles, and the “pris­on­ers” rebelled. All the while Prof. Zim­bar­do want­ed to keep going for the planned one to two weeks. Only because of the objec­tions of Christi­na Maslach, a grad­u­ate stu­dent and Prof. Zimbardo’s girl­friend, did the group aban­don the study after six increas­ing­ly fright­en­ing days. (Prov­ing as well that Prof. Zim­bar­do was affect­ed by the exper­i­ment in ways sim­i­lar to his sub­jects, as he was unable to ini­tial­ly stop some­thing out of con­trol.)

The study was fund­ed by the U.S. Office of Naval Research to “study anti­so­cial behav­ior.” The stu­dent sub­jects were paid $15 a day for their help and half quit the exper­i­ment before it was fin­ished. All of the guards stayed on. As detailed in the offi­cial FAQ on the study, none of the stu­dents showed any last­ing trau­ma, though Prof. Zim­bar­do said:

“I was guilty of the sin of omis­sion — the evil of inac­tion — of not pro­vid­ing ade­quate over­sight and sur­veil­lance when it was required… the find­ings came at the expense of human suf­fer­ing. I am sor­ry for that and to this day apol­o­gize for con­tribut­ing to this inhu­man­i­ty.”

The exper­i­ment is now used in psy­chol­o­gy text­books as an exam­ple of the “psy­chol­o­gy of impris­on­ment.” Prof. Zim­bar­do turned his sci­ence to help­ing peo­ple, look­ing at pro­mot­ing hero­ism in dai­ly life, help­ing vet­er­ans nor­mal­ize into social life, work­ing with shy peo­ple, and, com­ing full cir­cle, tes­ti­fy­ing dur­ing the court mar­tial of Sgt. Ivan “Chip” Fred­er­ick, who was charged with crimes dur­ing his time at Abu Ghraib. Zim­bar­do has since retired and recent­ly advised on the upcom­ing film. Christi­na Maslach lat­er mar­ried Prof. Zim­bar­do and is cur­rent­ly Vice Provost for Under­grad­u­ate Edu­ca­tion at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley.

And if Prof. Zimbardo’s exper­i­ment sounds a bit like Stan­ley Mil­gram’s 1961 exper­i­ment in obe­di­ence to author­i­ty, well, it’s no coin­ci­dence. Stan­ley Mil­gram and Philip Zim­bar­do were high school friends.

How­ev­er, there’s some inter­est­ing dif­fer­ences. For one, the “vic­tims” of Mil­gram’s exper­i­ment were act­ing the elec­tric shocks they sup­pos­ed­ly received. Despite that lev­el of fak­ery, Mil­gram was denied tenure at Har­vard. The City Uni­ver­si­ty of New York Grad­u­ate Cen­ter, on the oth­er hand, knew a psy­chol­o­gy super­star when they saw one and gave him tenure.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch Footage from the Psy­chol­o­gy Exper­i­ment That Shocked the World: Milgram’s Obe­di­ence Study (1961)

The Lit­tle Albert Exper­i­ment: The Per­verse 1920 Study That Made a Baby Afraid of San­ta Claus & Bun­nies

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy Cours­es

How To Think Like a Psy­chol­o­gist: A Free Online Course from Stan­ford

Her­mann Rorschach’s Orig­i­nal Rorschach Test: What Do You See? (1921)

 

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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John Cleese Explores the Health Benefits of Laughter

in Comedy, Health, Psychology | April 29th, 2015

If you live in a big city like Los Ange­les or San Fran­cis­co, you’ll dis­cov­er that there are just a bewil­der­ing vari­ety of yoga styles out there — there’s Ash­tan­ga Yoga if you want a real work out, there’s Yin Yoga if you want to chill out and there’s Bikram Hot Yoga if you want heat stroke. Add to this list Laugh­ter Yoga. Yes, Laugh­ter Yoga.

For a seg­ment of the 2001 BBC series The Human Face, John Cleese, a man who knows some­thing about laugh­ter, ven­tured to Mum­bai, India to see what Laugh­ter Yoga is all about. He inter­views the man behind it all, Dr. Madan Kataria, who argues that laugh­ter is bril­liant at low­er­ing stress and improv­ing the immune sys­tem. And best of all, you don’t even need mats or unflat­ter­ing pants to do it. You just need a group of like-mind­ed peo­ple and a will­ing­ness to look sil­ly. In the video, which you can see above, Cleese yuks it up with a group of Mum­bai locals.

“We all know what a good laugh feels like,” he tells the cam­era. “But what struck me was how easy it was to get start­ed. When you have a lot of warm, friend­ly, fun­ny faces com­ing at you, you respond very naturally…I’m struck by how laugh­ter con­nects you to peo­ple. It’s almost impos­si­ble to main­tain any kind of dis­tance or any sense of social hier­ar­chy when you’re just howl­ing with laugh­ter. Laugh­ter is a force for democ­ra­cy”

Appar­ent­ly, you don’t even have to be in an espe­cial­ly jol­ly mood to reap the health ben­e­fits of Laugh­ter Yoga. Forced laugh­ter tricks the body into releas­ing endor­phins too. In Laugh­ter Yoga, as with life, the mot­to is “fake it til you make it.”

So if you are inter­est­ed in laugh­ing like a mad­man in the pri­va­cy of your own home, Dr. Kataria has an instruc­tion­al video for you, which you can see right above. There are a sur­pris­ing num­ber of laugh­ing exer­cis­es avail­able — from the milk­shake move, where you pan­tomime guz­zling a drink, to the argu­ment laugh­ter, where you wag a fin­ger, to the Visa laugh­ter where you pre­tend to laugh through the tears as you open your cred­it card state­ment. So go ahead and try it. You’ll feel bet­ter.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Yoga in an X‑Ray Machine

John Cleese’s Phi­los­o­phy of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Cre­at­ing Oases for Child­like Play

Son­ny Rollins Describes How 50 Years of Prac­tic­ing Yoga Made Him a Bet­ter Musi­cian

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

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

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