Moralities of Everyday Life: A Free Online Course from Yale University

How can we explain kind­ness and cru­el­ty? Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Why do peo­ple so often dis­agree about moral issues? This course from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty, Moral­i­ties of Every­day Life, explores the psy­cho­log­i­cal foun­da­tions of our moral lives. Taught by psy­chol­o­gy & cog­ni­tive sci­ence pro­fes­sor Paul Bloom, the course focus­es on the ori­gins of moral­i­ty, com­pas­sion, how culture/religion influ­ence moral thought and moral action, and beyond. If you select the “Audit” option, you can take the course for free.

Moral­i­ties of Every­day Life will be added to our col­lec­tion of Free Psy­chol­o­gy Cours­es, a sub­set of our larg­er 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. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Intro­duc­tion to Psy­chol­o­gy: A Free Course from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­o­gy: A Free Online Course from Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty

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

The Rashomon Effect: The Phenomenon, Named After Akira Kurosawa’s Classic Film, Where Each of Us Remembers the Same Event Differently

Toward the end of The Simp­sons’ gold­en age, one episode sent the tit­u­lar fam­i­ly off to Japan, not with­out resis­tance from its famous­ly lazy patri­arch. “Come on, Homer,” Marge insists, “Japan will be fun! You liked Rashomon.” To which Homer nat­u­ral­ly replies, “That’s not how I remem­ber it!” This joke must have writ­ten itself, not as a high-mid­dle­brow cul­tur­al ref­er­ence (as, say, Frasi­er would lat­er name-check Tam­popo) but as a play on a uni­ver­sal­ly under­stood byword for the nature of human mem­o­ry. Even those of us who’ve nev­er seen Rashomon, the peri­od crime dra­ma that made its direc­tor Aki­ra Kuro­sawa a house­hold name in the West, know what its title rep­re­sents: the ten­den­cy of each human being to remem­ber the same event in his own way.

“A samu­rai is found dead in a qui­et bam­boo grove,” says the nar­ra­tor of the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed les­son above. “One by one, the crime’s only known wit­ness­es recount their ver­sion of the events that tran­spired. But as they each tell their tale, it becomes clear that every tes­ti­mo­ny is plau­si­ble, yet dif­fer­ent, and each wit­ness impli­cates them­selves.”

So goes “In a Grove,” a sto­ry by cel­e­brat­ed ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry writer Ryūno­suke Aku­ta­gawa. An avid read­er, Kuro­sawa com­bined that lit­er­ary work with anoth­er of Aku­ta­gawa’s to cre­ate the script for Rashomon. Both Aku­ta­gawa and Kuro­sawa “use the tools of their media to give each char­ac­ter’s tes­ti­mo­ny equal weight, trans­form­ing each wit­ness into an unre­li­able nar­ra­tor.” Nei­ther read­er nor view­er can trust any­one — nor, ulti­mate­ly, can they arrive at a defen­si­ble con­clu­sion as to the iden­ti­ty of the killer.

Such con­flicts of mem­o­ry and per­cep­tion occur every­where in human affairs: this TED-Ed les­son finds exam­ples in biol­o­gy, anthro­pol­o­gy, pol­i­tics, and media. Suf­fi­cient­ly many psy­cho­log­i­cal phe­nom­e­na con­verge to give rise to the Rashomon effect that it seems almost overde­ter­mined; it may be more illu­mi­nat­ing to ask under what con­di­tions does­n’t it occur. But it also makes us ask even tougher ques­tions: “What is truth, any­way? Are there sit­u­a­tions when an objec­tive truth does­n’t exist? What can dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the same event tell us about the time, place, and peo­ple involved? And how can we make group deci­sions if we’re all work­ing with dif­fer­ent infor­ma­tion, back­grounds, and bias­es?” We seem to be no clos­er to defin­i­tive answers than we were when Rashomon came out more than 70 years ago — only one of the rea­sons the film holds up so well still today.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why Time Seems to Fly By As You Get Old­er, and How to Slow It Down: A Sci­en­tif­ic Expla­na­tion by Neu­ro­sci­en­tist David Eagle­man

How to Improve Your Mem­o­ry: Four TED Talks Explain the Tech­niques to Remem­ber Any­thing

How Did Aki­ra Kuro­sawa Make Such Pow­er­ful & Endur­ing Films? A Wealth of Video Essays Break Down His Cin­e­mat­ic Genius

What Is Déjà Vu? Michio Kaku Won­ders If It’s Trig­gered by Par­al­lel Uni­vers­es

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

Why Most Ancient Civilizations Had No Word for the Color Blue

In an old Zen sto­ry, two monks argue over whether a flag is wav­ing or whether it’s the wind that waves. Their teacher strikes them both dumb, say­ing, “It is your mind that moves.” The cen­turies-old koan illus­trates a point Zen mas­ters — and lat­er philoso­phers, psy­chol­o­gists, and neu­ro­sci­en­tists — have all empha­sized at one time or anoth­er: human expe­ri­ence hap­pens in the mind, but we share real­i­ty through lan­guage and cul­ture, and these in turn set the terms for how we per­ceive what we expe­ri­ence.

Such obser­va­tions bring us to anoth­er koan-like ques­tion: if a lan­guage lacks a word for some­thing like the col­or blue, can the thing be said to exist in the speaker’s mind? We can dis­pense with the idea that there’s a col­or blue “out there” in the world. Col­or is a col­lab­o­ra­tion between light, the eye, the optic nerve, and the visu­al cor­tex. And yet, claims Maria Michela Sas­si, pro­fes­sor of ancient phi­los­o­phy at Pisa Uni­ver­si­ty, “every cul­ture has its own way of nam­ing and cat­e­go­riz­ing colours.”

The most famous exam­ple comes from the ancient Greeks. Since the 18th cen­tu­ry, schol­ars have point­ed out that in the thou­sands of words in the Ili­ad and Odyssey, Homer nev­er once describes any­thing — sea, sky, you name it — as blue. It wasn’t only the Greeks who didn’t see blue, or didn’t see it as we do, Sas­si writes:

There is a spe­cif­ic Greek chro­mat­ic cul­ture, just as there is an Egypt­ian one, an Indi­an one, a Euro­pean one, and the like, each of them being reflect­ed in a vocab­u­lary that has its own pecu­liar­i­ty, and not to be mea­sured only by the sci­en­tif­ic meter of the New­ton­ian par­a­digm.

It was once thought cul­tur­al col­or dif­fer­ences had to do with stages of evo­lu­tion­ary devel­op­ment — that more “prim­i­tive” peo­ples had a less devel­oped bio­log­i­cal visu­al sense. But dif­fer­ences in col­or per­cep­tion are “not due to vary­ing anatom­i­cal struc­tures of the human eye,” writes Sas­si, “but to the fact that dif­fer­ent ocu­lar areas are stim­u­lat­ed, which trig­gers dif­fer­ent emo­tion­al respons­es, all accord­ing to dif­fer­ent cul­tur­al con­texts.”

As the Asap­SCIENCE video above explains, the evi­dence of ancient Greek lit­er­a­ture and phi­los­o­phy shows that since blue was not part of Homer and his read­ers’ shared vocab­u­lary (yel­low and green do not appear either), it may not have been part of their per­cep­tu­al expe­ri­ence, either. The spread of blue ink across the world as a rel­a­tive­ly recent phe­nom­e­non has to do with its avail­abil­i­ty. “If you think about it,” writes Busi­ness Insider’s Kevin Loria, “blue doesn’t appear much in nature — there aren’t blue ani­mals, blue eyes are rare, and blue flow­ers are most­ly human cre­ations.”

The col­or blue took hold in mod­ern times with the devel­op­ment of sub­stances that could act as blue pig­ment, like Pruss­ian Blue, invent­ed in Berlin, man­u­fac­tured in Chi­na and export­ed to Japan in the 19th cen­tu­ry. “The only ancient cul­ture to devel­op a word for blue was the Egyp­tians — and as it hap­pens, they were also the only cul­ture that had a way to pro­duce a blue dye.” Col­or is not only cul­tur­al, it is also tech­no­log­i­cal. But first, per­haps, it could be a lin­guis­tic phe­nom­e­non.

One mod­ern researcher, Jules David­off, found this to be true in exper­i­ments with a Namib­ian peo­ple whose lan­guage makes no dis­tinc­tion between blue and green (but names many fin­er shades of green than Eng­lish does). “David­off says that with­out a word for a colour,” Loria writes, “with­out a way of iden­ti­fy­ing it as dif­fer­ent, it’s much hard­er for us to notice what’s unique about it.” Unless we’re col­or blind, we all “see” the same things when we look at the world because of the basic biol­o­gy of human eyes and brains. But whether cer­tain col­ors appear, it seems, has to do less with what we see than with what we’re already primed to expect.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Dis­cov­er the Cyanome­ter, the Device Invent­ed in 1789 Just to Mea­sure the Blue­ness of the Sky

YIn­Mn Blue, the First Shade of Blue Dis­cov­ered in 200 Years, Is Now Avail­able for Artists

The Great Wave Off Kana­gawa by Hoku­sai: An Intro­duc­tion to the Icon­ic Japan­ese Wood­block Print in 17 Min­utes

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

The Psychology of Video Game Engagement — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #94 with Jamie Madigan

Why do peo­ple play video games, and what keeps them play­ing? Do we want to have to think through inno­v­a­tive puz­zles or just lose our­selves in mind­less reac­tiv­i­ty? Your hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt are joined by Dr. Jamie Madi­gan, an orga­ni­za­tion­al psy­chol­o­gist who runs the Psy­chol­o­gy of Video Games pod­cast, to dis­cuss what sort of a thing this is to research, the evo­lu­tion of games, play­er types, moti­va­tion vs. engage­ment, incen­tives and feed­back, as well as the gam­i­fi­ca­tion of work or school envi­ron­ments. Some games we touch on include Don­key Kong, Dark Souls, It Takes Two, Retur­nal, Hades, Sub­nau­ti­ca, Fort­nite, and Age of Z.

Some of the episodes of Jamie’s pod­cast rel­e­vant for our dis­cus­sion are:

Check out his books and arti­cles too. Here are a cou­ple of addi­tion­al sources about engage­ment:

The site Eri­ca men­tions about dis­abled modes in gam­ing is caniplaythat.com.

Hear more of this pod­cast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion that you can access by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

Ray Dalio & Adam Grant Launch Free Online Personality Assessment to Help You Understand Yourself (and Others Understand You)

Back in 2017, Ray Dalio pub­lished Prin­ci­ples: Life and Work, a best­selling book where the cre­ator of the world’s largest hedge fund shared “the uncon­ven­tion­al prin­ci­ples that he’s devel­oped, refined, and used over the past forty years to cre­ate unique results in both life and busi­ness.” You can find a dis­tilled ver­sion of those uncon­ven­tion­al prin­ci­ples in a 30-minute ani­ma­tion video pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured on our site.

To accom­pa­ny his book, Dalio has now released, along with Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia orga­ni­za­tion­al psy­chol­o­gist Adam Grant, a free per­son­al­i­ty assess­ment tool called Prin­ci­plesY­ou. The assess­ment takes about 30 to 40 min­utes to com­plete, and we would strong­ly encour­age you to sign up for an account before you get start­ed, so that you can save the results of the assess­ment after­wards. Oth­er­wise you will lose the results.

Accord­ing to psy­chol­o­gist Bri­an Lit­tle, “Prin­ci­plesY­ou was devel­oped over a two-year inten­sive and cre­ative R&D process with two goals in mind. First, it mea­sures traits that Ray Dalio and his team have observed and stud­ied for many years as crit­i­cal for per­son­al and orga­ni­za­tion­al suc­cess. Sec­ond, it is based on the lat­est research in per­son­al­i­ty sci­ence. The assess­ment pro­vides a person’s score on a com­pre­hen­sive set of traits, their under­ly­ing facets and inter­ac­tive pat­terns, and it has high reli­a­bil­i­ty, inter­nal struc­ture, re-test reli­a­bil­i­ty and valid­i­ty of these traits and facets. A dis­tinc­tive strength is its abil­i­ty to pre­dict an extra­or­di­nary array of actu­al behav­iors observed by the Bridge­wa­ter staff over many years.”

Adam Grant adds: “To achieve suc­cess, you need to know your­self and the peo­ple around you. Although your car comes with an owner’s man­u­al, your mind doesn’t—and nei­ther do your col­leagues. We designed Prin­ci­plesY­ou to help you gain the self-aware­ness and oth­er-aware­ness that are crit­i­cal to mak­ing good deci­sions, get­ting things done, and turn­ing a group of cowork­ers into a great team.”

You can watch Grant and Dalio dis­cuss Prin­ci­plesY­ou above. You can lis­ten to Grant fea­ture Dalio’s insights on his Work Life pod­cast here. And final­ly you can start the free per­son­al­i­ty assess­ment here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy & Neu­ro­science Cours­es

The Prin­ci­ples for Suc­cess by Entre­pre­neur & Investor Ray Dalio: A 30-Minute Ani­mat­ed Primer

Eco­nom­ics 101: Hedge Fund Investor Ray Dalio Explains How the Econ­o­my Works in a 30-Minute Ani­mat­ed Video

How to Raise Cre­ative Chil­dren Who Can Change the World: 3 Lessons from Whar­ton Pro­fes­sor Adam Grant

 

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What Are the Real Causes of Zoom Fatigue? And What Are the Possible Solutions?: New Research from Stanford Offers Answers

The tech­nol­o­gy we put between our­selves and oth­ers tends to always cre­ate addi­tion­al strains on com­mu­ni­ca­tion, even as it enables near-con­stant, instant con­tact. When it comes to our now-pri­ma­ry mode of inter­act­ing — star­ing at each oth­er as talk­ing heads or Brady Bunch-style gal­leries — those stress­es have been iden­ti­fied by com­mu­ni­ca­tion experts as “Zoom fatigue,” now a sub­ject of study among psy­chol­o­gists who want to under­stand our always-con­nect­ed-but-most­ly-iso­lat­ed lives in the pan­dem­ic, and a top­ic for Today show seg­ments like the one above.

As Stan­ford researcher Jere­my Bailen­son vivid­ly explains to Today, Zoom fatigue refers to the burnout we expe­ri­ence from inter­act­ing with dozens of peo­ple for hours a day, months on end, through pret­ty much any video con­fer­enc­ing plat­form. (But, let’s face it, most­ly Zoom.) We may be famil­iar with the symp­toms already if we spend some part of our day on video calls or lessons. Zoom fatigue com­bines the prob­lems of over­work and tech­no­log­i­cal over­stim­u­la­tion with unique forms of social exhaus­tion that do not plague us in the office or the class­room.

Bailen­son, direc­tor of Stan­ford University’s Vir­tu­al Human Inter­ac­tion Lab, refers to this kind of burnout as “Non­ver­bal Over­load,” a col­lec­tion of “psy­cho­log­i­cal con­se­quences” from pro­longed peri­ods of dis­em­bod­ied con­ver­sa­tion. He has been study­ing vir­tu­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion for two decades and began writ­ing about the cur­rent prob­lem in April of 2020 in a Wall Street Jour­nal op-ed that warned, “soft­ware like Zoom was designed to do online work, and the tools that increase pro­duc­tiv­i­ty weren’t meant to mim­ic nor­mal social inter­ac­tion.”

Now, in a new schol­ar­ly arti­cle pub­lished in the APA jour­nal Tech­nol­o­gy, Mind, and Behav­ior, Bailen­son elab­o­rates on the argu­ment with a focus on Zoom, not to “vil­i­fy the com­pa­ny,” he writes, but because “it has become the default plat­form for many in acad­e­mia” (and every­where else, per­haps its own form of exhaus­tion). The con­stituents of non­ver­bal over­load include gaz­ing into each oth­ers’ eyes at close prox­im­i­ty for long peri­ods of time, even when we aren’t speak­ing to each oth­er.

Any­one who speaks for a liv­ing under­stands the inten­si­ty of being stared at for hours at a time. Even when speak­ers see vir­tu­al faces instead of real ones, research has shown that being stared at while speak­ing caus­es phys­i­o­log­i­cal arousal (Takac et al., 2019). But Zoom’s inter­face design con­stant­ly beams faces to every­one, regard­less of who is speak­ing. From a per­cep­tu­al stand­point, Zoom effec­tive­ly trans­forms lis­ten­ers into speak­ers and smoth­ers every­one with eye gaze.

On Zoom, we also have to expend much more ener­gy to send and inter­pret non­ver­bal cues, and with­out the con­text of the room out­side the screen, we are more apt to mis­in­ter­pret them. Depend­ing on the size of our screen, we may be star­ing at each oth­er as larg­er-than-life talk­ing heads, a dis­ori­ent­ing expe­ri­ence for the brain and one that lends more impact to facial expres­sions than may be war­rant­ed, cre­at­ing a false sense of inti­ma­cy and urgency. “When someone’s face is that close to ours in real life,” writes Vig­nesh Ramachan­dran at Stan­ford News, “our brains inter­pret it as an intense sit­u­a­tion that is either going to lead to mat­ing or to con­flict.”

Unless we turn off the view of our­selves on the screen — which we gen­er­al­ly don’t do because we’re con­scious of being stared at — we are also essen­tial­ly sit­ting in front of a mir­ror while try­ing to focus on oth­ers. The con­stant self-eval­u­a­tion adds an addi­tion­al lay­er of stress and tax­es the brain’s resources. In face-to-face inter­ac­tions, we can let our eyes wan­der, even move around the room and do oth­er things while we talk to peo­ple. “There’s a grow­ing research now that says when peo­ple are mov­ing, they’re per­form­ing bet­ter cog­ni­tive­ly,” says Bailen­son. Zoom inter­ac­tions, con­verse­ly, can inhib­it move­ment for long peri­ods of time.

“Zoom fatigue” may not be as dire as it sounds, but rather the inevitable tri­als of a tran­si­tion­al peri­od, Bailen­son sug­gests. He offers solu­tions we can imple­ment now: using the “hide self-view” but­ton, mut­ing our video reg­u­lar­ly, set­ting up the tech­nol­o­gy so that we can fid­get, doo­dle, and get up and move around.… Not all of these are going to work for every­one — we are, after all, social­ized to sit and stare at each oth­er on Zoom; refus­ing to par­tic­i­pate might send unin­tend­ed mes­sages we would have to expend more ener­gy to cor­rect. Bailen­son fur­ther describes the phe­nom­e­non in the BBC Busi­ness Dai­ly pod­cast inter­view above.

“Video­con­fer­enc­ing is here to stay,” Bailen­son admits, and we’ll have to adapt. “As media psy­chol­o­gists it is our job,” he writes to his col­leagues in the new arti­cle, to help “users devel­op bet­ter use prac­tices” and help “tech­nol­o­gists build bet­ter inter­faces.” He most­ly leaves it to the tech­nol­o­gists to imag­ine what those are, though we our­selves have more con­trol over the plat­form than we col­lec­tive­ly acknowl­edge. Could we maybe admit, Bailen­son writes, that “per­haps a dri­ver of Zoom fatigue is sim­ply that we are tak­ing more meet­ings than we would be doing face-to-face”?

Read about the “Zoom Exhaus­tion & Fatigue Scale (ZEF Scale)” devel­oped by Bailen­son and his col­leagues at Stan­ford and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Gothen­burg here. Then take the sur­vey your­self, and see where you rank in the ZEF cat­e­gories of gen­er­al fatigue, visu­al fatigue, social fatigue, moti­va­tion­al fatigue, and emo­tion­al fatigue.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

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

In 1896, a French Car­toon­ist Pre­dict­ed Our Social­ly-Dis­tanced Zoom Hol­i­day Gath­er­ings

Hayao Miyazaki’s Stu­dio Ghi­b­li Releas­es Free Back­grounds for Vir­tu­al Meet­ings: Princess Mononoke, Spir­it­ed Away & More

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

De-Stress with 30 Minutes of Relaxing Visuals from Director Hayao Miyazaki

What does it mean to describe some­thing as relax­ing?

Most of us would agree that a relax­ing thing is one that qui­ets both mind and body.

There’s sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence to sup­port the stress-reliev­ing, restora­tive effects of spend­ing time in nature.

Even go-go-go city slick­ers with a han­ker­ing for excite­ment and adven­ture tend to under­stand the con­cept of “relax­ing” as some­thing slow-paced and sur­prise-free.

HBO Max is tout­ing its col­lec­tion of ani­ma­tion mas­ter Hayao Miyaza­ki’s films with 30 Min­utes of Relax­ing Visu­als from Stu­dio Ghi­b­li, above.

Will all of us expe­ri­ence those 30 min­utes as “relax­ing”?

Maybe not.

Stu­dio Ghi­b­li fans may find them­selves gripped by a sort of triv­ia con­test com­pet­i­tive­ness, shout­ing the names of the films that sup­ply these pas­toral visions—PonyoGrave of the Fire­flies!! Howl’s Mov­ing Cas­tle!!! 

Fledg­ling ani­ma­tors may feel as if they’ve swal­lowed a stone—no mat­ter how hard I try, noth­ing I make will approach the beau­ty on dis­play here.

Sticklers—and there are plen­ty leav­ing com­ments on YouTube—may be irri­tat­ed to real­ize that it’s actu­al­ly not 30 but 6 min­utes of visu­als, looped 5 times.

Insom­ni­acs (such as this reporter) may wish there was more loop­ing and less con­tent. The select­ed scenery is tran­quil enough, but the clips them­selves are brief, lead­ing to some jar­ring tran­si­tions.

(One pos­si­ble workaround for those hop­ing to lull them­selves to sleep: fid­dle with the speed set­tings. Played at .25 and mut­ed, this com­pi­la­tion becomes very relax­ing, much like artist Dou­glas Gordon’s video instal­la­tion, 24 Hour Psy­cho. Leave the sound up and the lap­ping waves, gen­tle winds, and chuff­ing trains turn into some­thing wor­thy of a slash­er flick.

Final­ly, with so much atten­tion focussed on Mars these days, we can’t help imag­in­ing what alien life forms might make of these earth­ly visions—ahh, this green, sheep-dot­ted pas­ture does low­er my stress lev­el… waitWTF was THAT!? Noth­ing on my home plan­et pre­pared me for the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a mon­strous winged house com­prised of over­grown bag­pipes and chick­en legs lum­ber­ing through the coun­try­side!

We con­cede that 30 Min­utes of Relax­ing Visu­als from Stu­dio Ghi­b­li is a pleas­ant thing to have play­ing in the back­ground as we wait for COVID restric­tions to be lift­ed… but ulti­mate­ly, you may find these 36 min­utes of music from Stu­dio Ghi­b­li films more gen­uine­ly relax­ing.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Stu­dio Ghi­b­li Makes 1,178 Images Free to Down­load from My Neigh­bor Totoro, Spir­it­ed Away & Oth­er Beloved Ani­mat­ed Films

A Mag­i­cal Look Inside the Paint­ing Process of Stu­dio Ghi­b­li Artist Kazuo Oga

Stu­dio Ghi­b­li Puts Online 400 Images from Eight Clas­sic Films, and Lets You Down­load Them for Free

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

Algerian Cave Paintings Suggest Humans Did Magic Mushrooms 9,000 Years Ago

We mod­erns might won­der what ancient peo­ples did when not hunt­ing, gath­er­ing, and repro­duc­ing. The answer is that they did mush­rooms, at least accord­ing to one inter­pre­ta­tion of cave paint­ings at Tas­sili n’A­j­jer in Alge­ria, some of which go back 9,000 years. “Here are the ear­li­est known depic­tions of shamans with large num­bers of graz­ing cat­tle,” writes ethnobotanist/mystic Ter­ence McKen­na in his book Food of the Gods: The Search for the Orig­i­nal Tree of Knowl­edge. “The shamans are danc­ing with fists full of mush­rooms and also have mush­rooms sprout­ing out of their bod­ies. In one instance they are shown run­ning joy­ful­ly, sur­round­ed by the geo­met­ric struc­tures of their hal­lu­ci­na­tions. The pic­to­r­i­al evi­dence seems incon­tro­vert­ible.”

McKen­na was­n’t the only schol­ar of the psy­che­del­ic expe­ri­ence to take an inter­est in Tas­sili. Gior­gio Samor­i­ni had writ­ten about its ancient paint­ings a few years before, focus­ing on one that depicts “a series of masked fig­ures in line and hier­at­i­cal­ly dressed or dressed as dancers sur­round­ed by long and live­ly fes­toons of geo­met­ri­cal designs of dif­fer­ent kinds.” Each dancer “holds a mush­room-like object in the right hand,” but the key visu­al ele­ment is the par­al­lel lines that “come out of this object to reach the cen­tral part of the head of the dancer.” These “could sig­ni­fy an indi­rect asso­ci­a­tion or non-mate­r­i­al flu­id pass­ing from the object held in the right hand and the mind,” an inter­pre­ta­tion in line with the idea of “the uni­ver­sal men­tal val­ue induced by hal­lu­cino­genic mush­rooms and veg­e­tals, which is often of a mys­ti­cal and spir­i­tu­al nature.”

The U.S. For­est Ser­vice acknowl­edges Tas­sili as “the old­est known pet­ro­glyph depict­ing the use of psy­choac­tive mush­rooms,” adding the pos­tu­late that “the mush­rooms depict­ed on the ‘mush­room shaman’ are Psilo­cybe mush­rooms.” That name will sound famil­iar to 21st-cen­tu­ry con­scious­ness-alter­ation enthu­si­asts, some of whom advo­cate for the use of psilo­cy­bin, the psy­che­del­ic com­pound that occurs in such mush­rooms, as not just a recre­ation­al drug but a treat­ment for con­di­tions like depres­sion. Cave art like Tas­sil­i’s sug­gests that such instru­men­tal uses of hal­lu­cino­genic plants — as vital parts of rit­u­als, for exam­ple — may stretch all the way back to the Neolith­ic era, when last the Sahara desert was a rel­a­tive­ly ver­dant savan­na rather than the vast expanse of sand we know today.

A sense of con­ti­nu­ity with the prac­tices of these long-ago pre­de­ces­sors — ancient Egyp­tians to the ancient Egyp­tians, as one Red­di­tor frames it — must enrich mush­room use for many psy­cho­nauts today. And indeed, the “bee-head­ed shaman” and his com­pa­tri­ots have had a robust cul­tur­al after­life: “A pop­u­lar­ly pub­lished draw­ing based on one of the Tas­sili fig­ures has become an icon of post-1990’s psy­che­delia,” says Bri­an Akers of Mush­room: The Jour­nal of Wild Mush­room­ing. The “abstract-bizarre” style of its images have also put it “among the sites favored by ancient ET the­o­riz­ing.” How­ev­er rich the visions expe­ri­enced by the cave-painters who once lived there, sure­ly none could have been as mind-blow­ing as the idea that their work would still fire up imag­i­na­tions nine mil­len­nia lat­er.

via Red­dit

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Gold­en Guide to Hal­lu­cino­genic Plants: Dis­cov­er the 1977 Illus­trat­ed Guide Cre­at­ed by Harvard’s Ground­break­ing Eth­nob­otanist Richard Evan Schultes

Psilo­cy­bin Could Soon Be a Legal Treat­ment for Depres­sion: Johns Hop­kins Pro­fes­sor, Roland Grif­fiths, Explains How Psilo­cy­bin Can Relieve Suf­fer­ing

Was a 32,000-Year-Old Cave Paint­ing the Ear­li­est Form of Cin­e­ma?

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

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