What Are the Most Effective Strategies for Learning a Foreign Language?: Six TED Talks Provide the Answers

Ear­li­er this week we fea­tured the For­eign Ser­vice Insti­tute’s list of lan­guages ranked by how long they take to learn. Now that you have a sense of the rel­a­tive life invest­ment required to learn the tongue or tongues of your choice, how about a few words of advice on how to start? Or per­haps we’d do bet­ter, before the how, to con­sid­er the why. “A lot of us start with the wrong moti­va­tion to learn a lan­guage,” says Ben­ny Lewis in his TED Talk “Hack­ing Lan­guage Learn­ing.” Those moti­va­tions include “just to pass an exam, to improve our career prospects, or in my case for super­fi­cial rea­sons, to impress peo­ple.”

Real lan­guage learn­ing, on the oth­er hand, comes from pas­sion for a lan­guage, for “the lit­er­a­ture and the movies and being able to read in the lan­guage, and of course, to use it with peo­ple.” But Lewis, who now brands him­self as “The Irish Poly­glot,” says he got a late start on lan­guage-learn­ing, con­vinced up until his ear­ly twen­ties that he sim­ply could­n’t do it.

He cites five flim­sy defens­es he once used, and so many oth­ers still do, for their mono­lin­gual­ism: lack of a “lan­guage gene or tal­ent,” being “too old to learn a sec­ond lan­guage,” not hav­ing the resources to “trav­el to the coun­try right now,” and not want­i­ng to “frus­trate native speak­ers” by using the lan­guage before attain­ing flu­en­cy.

None of these, how­ev­er, seem to have occurred to Tim Don­er, who went viral at six­teen years with a video where­in he spoke twen­ty lan­guages that he taught him­self. He dis­cuss­es that expe­ri­ence, and the fas­ci­na­tions and tech­niques that got him to that point and now well past it, in his talk “Break­ing the Lan­guage Bar­ri­er.” At first put off by the drudgery of French class­es in school, he only began to grasp the nature of lan­guage itself, as a kind of sys­tem break­able into mas­ter­able rules, when he began study­ing Latin.

Want­i­ng to under­stand more about the con­flict between Israel and Pales­tine, Don­er decid­ed to find his way into the sub­ject through Hebrew, and specif­i­cal­ly through rap music record­ed in it. Using lan­guage study as a means of deal­ing with his insom­nia, he dis­cov­ered tech­niques to expand into oth­er lin­guis­tic realms, such as the method of loci (i.e., remem­ber­ing words by asso­ci­at­ing them with places), learn­ing vocab­u­lary in batch­es of sim­i­lar sounds rather than sim­i­lar mean­ings, and seek­ing out the for­eign-lan­guage learn­ers and speak­ers all around him — a rel­a­tive­ly easy task for a New York­er like Don­er, but applic­a­ble near­ly every­where.

In “How to Learn Any Lan­guage in Six Months,” Chris Lons­dale deliv­ers, and with a pas­sion bor­der­ing on fury, a set of use­ful prin­ci­ples like “Focus on lan­guage con­tent that is rel­e­vant to you,” “Use your new lan­guage as a tool to com­mu­ni­cate from day one,” “When you first under­stand the mes­sage, you will uncon­scious­ly acquire the lan­guage.” This res­onates with the advice offered by the much more laid-back Sid Efro­movich in “Five Tech­niques to Speak any Lan­guage,” includ­ing an encour­age­ment to “get things wrong and make mis­takes,” a sug­ges­tion to “find a stick­ler” to help you iden­ti­fy and cor­rect those mis­takes, and a strat­e­gy for over­com­ing the pro­nun­ci­a­tion-hin­der­ing lim­i­ta­tions of the “data­base” of sounds long estab­lished in your brain by your native lan­guage.

Your native lan­guage, in fact, will play the role of your most aggres­sive and per­sis­tent ene­my in the strug­gle to learn a for­eign one — espe­cial­ly if your native lan­guage is as wide­ly used, to one degree or anoth­er, as Eng­lish. And so Scott Young and Vat Jaisw­al, in their talk “One Sim­ple Method to Learn Any Lan­guage,” pro­pose an absolute “no-Eng­lish rule.” You can get results using it with a con­ver­sa­tion part­ner in your home­land, while trav­el­ing for the pur­pose of lan­guage-learn­ing, and espe­cial­ly if you’ve relo­cat­ed to anoth­er coun­try per­ma­nent­ly.

With the rule in place, you’ll avoid the sor­ry fate of one fel­low Young and Jaisw­al know, “an Amer­i­can busi­ness­man who went to Korea, mar­ried a Kore­an women, had chil­dren in Korea, lived in Korea for twen­ty years, and still could­n’t have a decent con­ver­sa­tion in Kore­an.” As an Amer­i­can liv­ing in Korea myself, I had to laugh at that: I could name at least three dozen long-term West­ern expa­tri­ates I’ve met in that very same sit­u­a­tion. In my case, I spent a few years devel­op­ing self-study habits for Kore­an and a cou­ple oth­er lan­guages while still in Amer­i­ca, and so did­n’t have to imple­ment them on the fly after mov­ing here.

Even so, I still must con­stant­ly refine my lan­guage-learn­ing strat­e­gy, incor­po­rat­ing rou­tines like those laid out by Eng­lish poly­glot Matthew Youlden in “How to Speak any Lan­guage Eas­i­ly”: seek­ing out exploitable sim­i­lar­i­ties between the lan­guages I know and the ones I want to know bet­ter, say, or find­ing sources of con­stant “pas­sive” lin­guis­tic input. Per­son­al­ly, I like to lis­ten to pod­casts not just in for­eign lan­guages, but that teach one for­eign lan­guage through anoth­er. And just as Eng­lish-learn­ers get good lis­ten­ing prac­tice out of TED Talks like these, I seek them out in oth­er lan­guages: Kore­an, Japan­ese, Span­ish, or wher­ev­er good old lin­guis­tic pas­sion leads me next.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Map Show­ing How Much Time It Takes to Learn For­eign Lan­guages: From Eas­i­est to Hard­est

Learn 48 Lan­guages Online for Free: Span­ish, Chi­nese, Eng­lish & More

215 Hours of Free For­eign Lan­guage Lessons on Spo­ti­fy: French, Chi­nese, Ger­man, Russ­ian & More

The Tree of Lan­guages Illus­trat­ed in a Big, Beau­ti­ful Info­graph­ic

Where Did the Eng­lish Lan­guage Come From?: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include 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.

The Power of Introverts: Author Susan Cain Explains Why We Need to Appreciate the Talents & Abilities of the Quiet Ones

Ours is a loud cul­ture of non­stop per­son­al shar­ing, end­less chat­ter, and 24-hour news, opin­ion, and enter­tain­ment. Even those peo­ple who pre­fer read­ing alone to the over­stim­u­lat­ing car­ni­val of social media feel pres­sured to par­tic­i­pate. How else can you keep up with your family—whose Face­book posts you’d rather see die than have to read? How else to build a pro­file for employers—whom you des­per­ate­ly hope won’t check your Twit­ter feed?

For the intro­vert, main­tain­ing an always-on façade can be pro­found­ly enervating—and the prob­lem goes far beyond the per­son­al, argues author Susan Cain, reach­ing into every area of our lives.

“If you take a group of peo­ple and put them into a meet­ing,” says Cain in the short RSA video above, “the opin­ions of the loud­est per­son, or the most charis­mat­ic per­son, or the most assertive person—those are the opin­ions that the group tends to fol­low.” This despite the fact that research shows “zero cor­re­la­tion” between being the loud­est voice in the room and hav­ing the best ideas. Don’t we know this all too well.

Cain is the author of Qui­et: The Pow­er of Intro­verts in a World That Can’t Stop Talk­ing, a book about lead­er­ship for intro­verts, the group least like­ly to want the social demands lead­er­ship requires. And yet, she argues, we nonethe­less need intro­verts as lead­ers. “We’re liv­ing in a soci­ety now that is so over­ly extro­vert­ed,” she says. Cain iden­ti­fies the phe­nom­e­non as a symp­tom of cor­po­rate cap­i­tal­ism over­com­ing pre­dom­i­nant­ly agri­cul­tur­al ways of life. Aside from the sig­nif­i­cant ques­tion of whether we can change the cul­ture with­out chang­ing the econ­o­my, Cain makes a time­ly and com­pelling argu­ment for a soci­ety that val­ues dif­fer­ent per­son­al­i­ty types equal­ly.

But can there be a “world where it’s yin and yang” between intro­verts and extro­verts? That depends, per­haps on how much cre­dence we lend these well-worn Jun­gian cat­e­gories, or whether we think of them as exist­ing in bina­ry oppo­si­tion rather than on a spec­trum, a cir­cle, a hexa­gram, or what­ev­er. Cain is not a psy­chol­o­gist but a for­mer cor­po­rate lawyer who at least seems to believe the bal­anc­ing act between extro­vert­ed and intro­vert­ed can be achieved in the cor­po­rate world. She has giv­en talks on “Net­work­ing for Intro­verts,” addressed the engi­neers at Google, and tak­en to the TED stage, the thought leader are­na that accom­mo­dates all kinds of per­son­al­i­ties, for bet­ter or worse.

Cain’s TED talk above may be one of the bet­ter ones. Open­ing with a mov­ing and fun­ny per­son­al nar­ra­tive, she walks us through the bar­rage of mes­sages intro­verts receive con­demn­ing their desire for qui­etude as some­how per­verse and self­ish. Nat­u­ral­ly soli­tary peo­ple are taught to think of their intro­ver­sion as “a sec­ond-class per­son­al­i­ty trait,” Cain writes in her book, “some­where between a dis­ap­point­ment and a pathol­o­gy.” Intro­verts must swim against the tide to be them­selves. “Our most impor­tant insti­tu­tions,” she says above, “our schools and our work­places, they are designed most­ly for extro­verts, and for extro­verts’ need for stim­u­la­tion.”

The bias is deep, reach­ing into the class­rooms of young chil­dren, who are now forced to do most of their work by com­mit­tee. But when intro­verts give in to the social pres­sure that forces them into awk­ward extro­vert­ed roles, the loss affects every­one. “At the risk of sound­ing grandiose,” Cain says, “when it comes to cre­ativ­i­ty and to lead­er­ship, we need intro­verts doing what they do best.” Para­dox­i­cal­ly, that can look like intro­verts tak­ing the helm, but out of a gen­uine sense of duty rather than a desire for the spot­light.

Intro­vert­ed lead­ers are more like­ly to share pow­er and give oth­ers space to express ideas, Cain argues. Gand­hi, Eleanor Roo­sevelt, and Rosa Parks exem­pli­fy such intro­vert­ed lead­er­ship, and a qui­eter, more bal­anced and thought­ful cul­ture would pro­duce more lead­ers like them. Maybe this is a propo­si­tion any­one can endorse, whether they pre­fer Fri­day nights with hot tea and a nov­el or in the crush and bus­tle of the crowds.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

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

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

Kintsugi: The Centuries-Old Japanese Craft of Repairing Pottery with Gold & Finding Beauty in Broken Things

We all grow up believ­ing we should empha­size the inher­ent pos­i­tives about our­selves. But what if we also empha­sized the neg­a­tives, the parts we’ve had to work to fix or improve? If we did it just right, would the neg­a­tives still look so neg­a­tive after all? These kinds of ques­tions come to mind when one pon­ders the tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese craft of kintsu­gi, a means of repair­ing bro­ken pot­tery that aims not for per­fec­tion, a return to “as good as new,” but for a kind of post-break­age rein­ven­tion that dares not to hide the cracks.

“Trans­lat­ed to ‘gold­en join­ery,’ Kintsu­gi (or Kintsukuroi, which means ‘gold­en repair’) is the cen­turies-old Japan­ese art of fix­ing bro­ken pot­tery with a spe­cial lac­quer dust­ed with pow­dered gold, sil­ver, or plat­inum” says My Mod­ern Met.

“Beau­ti­ful seams of gold glint in the cracks of ceram­ic ware, giv­ing a unique appear­ance to the piece. This repair method cel­e­brates each arti­fac­t’s unique his­to­ry by empha­siz­ing its frac­tures and breaks instead of hid­ing or dis­guis­ing them. Kintsu­gi often makes the repaired piece even more beau­ti­ful than the orig­i­nal, revi­tal­iz­ing it with new life.”

Kintsu­gi orig­i­nates, so one the­o­ry has it, in the late 15th cen­tu­ry under the cul­tur­al­ly inclined shogun Ashik­a­ga Yoshi­masa, dur­ing whose reign the sen­si­bil­i­ties of tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese art as we known them emerged. When Ashik­a­ga sent one of his dam­aged Chi­nese tea bowls back to his moth­er­land for repairs, it came back reassem­bled with ungain­ly met­al sta­ples. This prompt­ed his crafts­men to find a bet­ter way: why not use that gild­ed lac­quer to empha­size the cracks instead of hid­ing them? The tech­nique was said to have won the admi­ra­tion of famed (and not eas­i­ly impressed) tea mas­ter Sen no Rikyū, major pro­po­nent of the imper­fec­tion-appre­ci­at­ing aes­thet­ic wabi sabi.

You can hear and see these sto­ries of kintsug­i’s ori­gins in the videos from Nerd­writer and Alain de Bot­ton’s School of Life at the top of the post. The clip just above offers a clos­er look at the painstak­ing tech­niques of mod­ern kintsu­gi, which not only sur­vives but thrives today, hav­ing expand­ed to include oth­er mate­ri­als, repair­ing glass­ware as well as ceram­ics, for exam­ple, or fill­ing the cracks with sil­ver instead of gold. And what could under­score the cur­rent glob­al rel­e­vance of kintsu­gi more than the fact that the craft has inspired not one but two TEDTalks, the first by Audrey Har­ris in Kyoto in 2015 and the sec­ond by Mad­die Kel­ly in Ade­laide last year. We all, it seems, want to repair our cracks; kintsu­gi shows the way to do it not just hon­est­ly but art­ful­ly.

h/t the nugget

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wabi-Sabi: A Short Film on the Beau­ty of Tra­di­tion­al Japan

20 Mes­mer­iz­ing Videos of Japan­ese Arti­sans Cre­at­ing Tra­di­tion­al Hand­i­crafts

The Mak­ing of Japan­ese Hand­made Paper: A Short Film Doc­u­ments an 800-Year-Old Tra­di­tion

Watch a Japan­ese Crafts­man Lov­ing­ly Bring a Tat­tered Old Book Back to Near Mint Con­di­tion

The Art of Col­lo­type: See a Near Extinct Print­ing Tech­nique, as Lov­ing­ly Prac­ticed by a Japan­ese Mas­ter Crafts­man

Watch Japan­ese Wood­work­ing Mas­ters Cre­ate Ele­gant & Elab­o­rate Geo­met­ric Pat­terns with Wood

Japan­ese Crafts­man Spends His Life Try­ing to Recre­ate a Thou­sand-Year-Old Sword

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include 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.

How Stress Can Change Your Brain: An Animated Introduction

We hear the mantra of “self-care” in ever-widen­ing cir­cles, a con­cept both derid­ed and cel­e­brat­ed as a “mil­len­ni­al obses­sion,” with the acknowledgment—at least in this NPR think piece— that self-care was cen­tral to the philoso­phies of antiq­ui­ty, from Aris­to­tle to the Sto­ics.

In phi­los­o­phy, self-care exists as a set of ethics. The rea­sons for this may often be couched in high-mind­ed dis­cus­sions of civics, sex­u­al pol­i­tics, and exis­ten­tial self-actu­al­iza­tion. These days, doc­tors and researchers are mak­ing urgent appeals for our men­tal and phys­i­cal health, and the sci­ence of stress is an unsur­pris­ing­ly rich field of inves­ti­ga­tion at the moment.

It’s hard to over­state the neg­a­tive effects of stress on the body over time. Increased stress hor­mones have been linked in study after study to overeat­ing and obe­si­ty, low­ered immune response, drug use and addic­tion, mem­o­ry impair­ment, heart dis­ease, and many oth­er debil­i­tat­ing and life-threat­en­ing con­di­tions. “The long-term acti­va­tion of the stress-response sys­tem,” writes the Mayo Clin­ic, “and the sub­se­quent over­ex­po­sure to cor­ti­sol and oth­er stress hormones—can dis­rupt almost all your body’s process­es.” (The video below makes this har­row­ing point with some help­ful, ani­mat­ed com­ic relief.)

When we expe­ri­ence chron­ic stress, it rais­es our blood pres­sure and affects our car­dio­vas­cu­lar sys­tem, increas­ing the chances of heart attack or stroke. The even worse news—reports the TED-Ed video at the top of the post—is that chron­ic stress weak­ens our abil­i­ty to make sound deci­sions about our well-being, by chang­ing the size, struc­ture, and func­tion of our brain.

We’re famil­iar with the symp­toms of chron­ic stress: “sleep­ing rest­less­ly,” becom­ing “irri­ta­ble or moody,” “for­get­ting lit­tle things,” and “feel­ing over­whelmed and iso­lat­ed.” Con­tin­u­ous stress, from our work lives, home lives, social and polit­i­cal lives, can cause shrink­ing in parts of the brain respon­si­ble for mem­o­ry, spa­tial recog­ni­tion… and stress reg­u­la­tion.

Research shows that high lev­els of cor­ti­sol and oth­er stress hor­mones can cause shrink­ing of the pre­frontal cor­tex, the part of the brain respon­si­ble for rea­son­ing and deci­sion-mak­ing. Stress can inhib­it neuroplasticity—the abil­i­ty of the brain to adapt to new circumstances—and neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis: the abil­i­ty to pro­duce new brain cells.

Con­verse­ly, stress increas­es the size of the amyg­dala, which acti­vates fight-or-flight respons­es, which in turn increase the strain on our heart and blood ves­sels.

All of these effects can set the stage in lat­er life for major depres­sion, forms of cog­ni­tive decline and demen­tia, and Alzheimer’s dis­ease.

Most unset­tling­ly, as the video notes, these effects can be passed down to the next gen­er­a­tion, fur­ther­ing the cycle of chron­ic stress in our chil­dren and theirs. Per­sis­tent stress “fil­ters down” to DNA, mak­ing it genet­i­cal­ly inher­i­ta­ble.

Giv­en the incred­i­ble amount of stress most peo­ple seem to be under, this sci­ence can seem like a diag­no­sis of doom. We all know that chron­ic stres­sors assail us all day long, with­out ask­ing whether we want them in our lives or not. An increas­ing amount of our dai­ly stress, I’d hypoth­e­size, may indeed come from the grow­ing real­iza­tion of how lit­tle con­trol we have over many stress­ful sit­u­a­tions.

But the TED explain­er ends with good news, and it’s been there all along—we can find it in the ancient Greeks, in Bud­dhist prac­tices, and many oth­er tra­di­tions, both active and con­tem­pla­tive. We can con­trol our respons­es to stress, and thus reverse and mod­u­late the effects of cor­ti­sol on our sys­tem. The best, proven, ways to do so are through exer­cise and med­i­ta­tion (and, I’d add, good nutri­tion).

These activ­i­ties will not erad­i­cate the con­di­tions of inequal­i­ty, injus­tice, or insta­bil­i­ty that stress us all out—a great many of us more than oth­ers. But prac­tic­ing “self-care” inas­much as we are able with stress-reliev­ing dis­ci­plines and prac­tices will bet­ter equip us to respond to the state of the world and the state of our lives by inter­rupt­ing the bio­log­i­cal mech­a­nisms that, over time, make things much worse. Find some help­ful resources below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stream 18 Hours of Free Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tions

Med­i­ta­tion 101: A Short, Ani­mat­ed Beginner’s Guide

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

How to Get Start­ed with Yoga: Free Yoga Lessons on YouTube

Do Your­self a Favor and Watch Stress: Por­trait of a Killer (with Stan­ford Biol­o­gist Robert Sapol­sky)

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

How Bak­ing, Cook­ing & Oth­er Dai­ly Activ­i­ties Help Pro­mote Hap­pi­ness and Alle­vi­ate Depres­sion and Anx­i­ety

Allen Gins­berg Teach­es You How to Med­i­tate with a Rock Song Fea­tur­ing Bob Dylan on Bass

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

Reality Is Nothing But a Hallucination: A Mind-Bending Crash Course on the Neuroscience of Consciousness

If you’ve been accused of liv­ing in “a world of your own,” get ready for some val­i­da­tion. As cog­ni­tive sci­en­tist Anil Seth argues in “Your Brain Hal­lu­ci­nates Your Con­scious Real­i­ty,” the TED Talk above, every­one lives in a world of their own — at least if by “every­one” you mean “every brain,” by “world” you mean “entire real­i­ty,” and by “of their own” you mean “that it has cre­at­ed for itself.” With all the sig­nals it receives from our sens­es and all the pri­or expe­ri­ences it has orga­nized into expec­ta­tions, each of our brains con­structs a coher­ent image of real­i­ty — a “mul­ti­sen­so­ry, panoram­ic 3D, ful­ly, immer­sive inner movie” — for us to per­ceive.

“Per­cep­tion has to be a process of ‘informed guess­work,’ ” says the TED Blog’s accom­pa­ny­ing notes, “in which sen­so­ry sig­nals are com­bined with pri­or expec­ta­tions about the way the world is, to form the brain’s best guess of the caus­es of these sig­nals.”

Seth uses opti­cal illu­sions and clas­sic exper­i­ments to under­score the point that “we don’t just pas­sive­ly per­ceive the world; we active­ly gen­er­ate it. The world we expe­ri­ence comes as much from the inside-out as the out­side-in,” in a process hard­ly dif­fer­ent from that which we casu­al­ly call hal­lu­ci­na­tion. Indeed, in a way, we’re always hal­lu­ci­nat­ing. “It’s just that when we agree about our hal­lu­ci­na­tions, that’s what we call ‘real­i­ty.’” And as for what, exact­ly, con­sti­tutes the “we,” our brains do a good deal of work to con­struct that too.

Sev­en­teen min­utes only allows Dash to go so far down the rab­bit hole of the neu­ro­science of con­scious­ness, but he’ll gal­va­nize the curios­i­ty of any­one with even a mild inter­est in this mind-mend­ing sub­ject. He leaves us with a few impli­ca­tions of his and oth­ers’ research to con­sid­er: first, “just as we can mis­per­ceive the world, we can mis­per­ceive our­selves”; sec­ond, “what it means to be me can­not be reduced to — or uploaded to — a soft­ware pro­gram run­ning on an advanced robot, how­ev­er sophis­ti­cat­ed”; third, “our indi­vid­ual inner uni­verse is just one way of being con­scious, and even human con­scious­ness gen­er­al­ly is a tiny region in a vast space of pos­si­ble con­scious­ness­es.” As we’ve learned, in a sense, from every TED Talk, no mat­ter how busy a brain may be con­struct­ing both real­i­ty and the self, it can always come up with a few big take­aways for the audi­ence.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy & Neu­ro­science Cours­es

John Sear­le Makes A Force­ful Case for Study­ing Con­scious­ness, Where Every­thing Else Begins

Robert Sapol­sky Explains the Bio­log­i­cal Basis of Reli­gios­i­ty, and What It Shares in Com­mon with OCD, Schiz­o­phre­nia & Epilep­sy

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

Alan Watts On Why Our Minds And Tech­nol­o­gy Can’t Grasp Real­i­ty

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

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

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

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

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

Evelyn Glennie (a Musician Who Happens to Be Deaf) Shows How We Can Listen to Music with Our Entire Bodies

Com­pos­er and per­cus­sion­ist Dame Eve­lyn Glen­nie, above, feels music pro­found­ly. For her, there is no ques­tion that lis­ten­ing should be a whole body expe­ri­ence:

Hear­ing is basi­cal­ly a spe­cial­ized form of touch. Sound is sim­ply vibrat­ing air which the ear picks up and con­verts to elec­tri­cal sig­nals, which are then inter­pret­ed by the brain. The sense of hear­ing is not the only sense that can do this, touch can do this too. If you are stand­ing by the road and a large truck goes by, do you hear or feel the vibra­tion? The answer is both. With very low fre­quen­cy vibra­tion the ear starts becom­ing inef­fi­cient and the rest of the body’s sense of touch starts to take over. For some rea­son we tend to make a dis­tinc­tion between hear­ing a sound and feel­ing a vibra­tion, in real­i­ty they are the same thing. It is inter­est­ing to note that in the Ital­ian lan­guage this dis­tinc­tion does not exist. The verb ‘sen­tire’ means to hear and the same verb in the reflex­ive form ‘sen­tir­si’ means to feel.

It’s a phi­los­o­phy born of necessity—her hear­ing began to dete­ri­o­rate when she was 8, and by the age of 12, she was pro­found­ly deaf. Music lessons at that time includ­ed touch­ing the wall of the prac­tice room to feel the vibra­tions as her teacher played.

While she acknowl­edges that her dis­abil­i­ty is a pub­lic­i­ty hook, it’s not her pre­ferred lede, a conun­drum she explores in her “Hear­ing Essay.” Rather than be cel­e­brat­ed as a deaf musi­cian, she’d like to be known as the musi­cian who is teach­ing the world to lis­ten.

In her TED Talk, How To Tru­ly Lis­ten, she dif­fer­en­ti­ates between the abil­i­ty to trans­late nota­tions on a musi­cal score and the sub­tler, more soul­ful skill of inter­pre­ta­tion. This involves con­nect­ing to the instru­ment with every part of her phys­i­cal being. Oth­ers may lis­ten with ears alone. Dame Eve­lyn encour­ages every­one to lis­ten with fin­gers, arms, stom­ach, heart, cheek­bones… a phe­nom­e­non many teenagers expe­ri­ence organ­i­cal­ly, no mat­ter what their ear­buds are plug­ging.

And while the vibra­tions may be sub­tler, her phi­los­o­phy could cause us to lis­ten more atten­tive­ly to both our loved ones and our adver­saries, by stay­ing attuned to visu­al and emo­tion­al pitch­es, as well as slight vari­a­tions in vol­ume and tone.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Did Beethoven Com­pose His 9th Sym­pho­ny After He Went Com­plete­ly Deaf?

Hear a 20 Hour Playlist Fea­tur­ing Record­ings by Elec­tron­ic Music Pio­neer Pauline Oliv­eros (RIP)

How Inge­nious Sign Lan­guage Inter­preters Are Bring­ing Music to Life for the Deaf: Visu­al­iz­ing the Sound of Rhythm, Har­mo­ny & Melody

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

Why We Love Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”: An Animated Music Lesson

Remem­ber lis­ten­ing to Peter and the Wolf as a child, how the nar­ra­tor would explain that cer­tain instru­ments cor­re­spond to par­tic­u­lar char­ac­ters:  the duck — an oboe, the wolf — three horns, and so on?

In the above TED-Ed les­son (mem­o­rably ani­mat­ed by Com­pote Col­lec­tive), music his­to­ri­an Bet­sy Schwarm ful­fills much the same role for The Four Sea­sons by Anto­nio Vival­di. (Stream it here.)

Why are we so drawn to this Baroque con­cer­to? Is it because we asso­ciate it with brunch?

The hun­dreds of movies and com­mer­cials that have fea­tured it?

(Direc­tor Robert Ben­ton chose Vival­di rather than an orig­i­nal com­pos­er for the score of Kramer vs. Kramer, argu­ing that “Con­cer­to in C Major for Man­dolin & Strings” cap­tured the trou­bled Man­hat­tan couple’s refined lifestyle far bet­ter than the John Williams-esque bom­bast the ear asso­ciates with some many oth­er cin­e­mat­ic hits of the peri­od. The 1979 film’s suc­cess sent “The Four Sea­sons” to the top of the charts.)

These pleas­ant asso­ci­a­tions no doubt account for some of our fond­ness, but Pro­fes­sor Schwarm posits that the sto­ries con­tained in the melodies are what real­ly reel us in.

Basi­cal­ly, we’re in the thrall of a musi­cal weath­er report, rev­el­ing in the way Vival­di man­ages to bring to life both the birdies’ sun­ny spring song and the sud­den thun­der­storm that dis­rupts it.

Sum­mer rolls out the mete­o­ro­log­i­cal big guns with a hail­storm.

Autumn’s cool­er night­time tem­per­a­tures keep the wine-flushed peas­ants from turn­ing their har­vest cel­e­bra­tions into a full-on bac­cha­nal.

Win­ter? Well per­haps you’re tucked up con­tent­ed­ly in front of the fire­place right now, grat­i­fied to be hear­ing your own com­fort echoed in the largo sec­tion.

Inspired by the land­scape paint­ings of artist, Mar­co Ric­ci, Vival­di penned four poems that dri­ve the move­ments of his most famous work. Their trans­la­tions, below, are nowhere near as elo­quent to the mod­ern listener’s ear, but you’ll find that read­ing them along with your favorite record­ing of the Four Sea­sons will cor­rob­o­rate Pro­fes­sor Schwarm’s the­sis.

Spring – Con­cer­to in E Major

Alle­gro

Spring­time is upon us.

The birds cel­e­brate her return with fes­tive song,

and mur­mur­ing streams are soft­ly caressed by the breezes.

Thun­der­storms, those her­alds of Spring, roar, cast­ing their dark man­tle over heav­en,

Then they die away to silence, and the birds take up their charm­ing songs once more.

Largo

On the flower-strewn mead­ow, with leafy branch­es rustling over­head, the goat-herd sleeps, his faith­ful dog beside him.

Alle­gro

Led by the fes­tive sound of rus­tic bag­pipes, nymphs and shep­herds light­ly dance beneath the bril­liant canopy of spring.

Sum­mer – Con­cer­to in g‑minor

Alle­gro non molto

Beneath the blaz­ing sun’s relent­less heat

men and flocks are swel­ter­ing,

pines are scorched.

We hear the cuck­oo’s voice; then sweet songs of the tur­tle dove and finch are heard.

Soft breezes stir the air….but threat­en­ing north wind sweeps them sud­den­ly aside. The shep­herd trem­bles, fear­ful of vio­lent storm and what may lie ahead.

Ada­gio e piano — Presto e forte

His limbs are now awak­ened from their repose by fear of light­ning’s flash and thun­der’s roar, as gnats and flies buzz furi­ous­ly around.

Presto

Alas, his worst fears were jus­ti­fied, as the heav­ens roar and great hail­stones beat down upon the proud­ly stand­ing corn.

Autumn – Con­cer­to in F Major

Alle­gro

The peas­ant cel­e­brates with song and dance the har­vest safe­ly gath­ered in.

The cup of Bac­chus flows freely, and many find their relief in deep slum­ber.

Ada­gio molto

The singing and the danc­ing die away

as cool­ing breezes fan the pleas­ant air,

invit­ing all to sleep

with­out a care.

Alle­gro

The hunters emerge at dawn,

ready for the chase,

with horns and dogs and cries.

Their quar­ry flees while they give chase.

Ter­ri­fied and wound­ed, the prey strug­gles on,

but, har­ried, dies

Win­ter – Con­cer­to in F‑minor

Alle­gro non molto

Shiv­er­ing, frozen mid the frosty snow in bit­ing, sting­ing winds;

run­ning to and fro to stamp one’s icy feet, teeth chat­ter­ing in the bit­ter chill.

Largo

To rest con­tent­ed­ly beside the hearth, while those out­side are drenched by pour­ing rain.

Alle­gro

We tread the icy path slow­ly and cau­tious­ly, for fear of trip­ping and falling.

Then turn abrupt­ly, slip, crash on the ground and, ris­ing, has­ten on across the ice lest it cracks up.

We feel the chill north winds coarse through the home despite the locked and bolt­ed doors…

this is win­ter, which nonethe­less brings its own delights.

 


You can down­load the Wichi­ta State Uni­ver­si­ty Cham­ber Play­ers’ record­ing of Vivaldi’s “Four Sea­sons” for free here.

See how well you retained your TED-ED les­son with a mul­ti­ple choice quiz, then read more here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why We Love Rep­e­ti­tion in Music: Explained in a New TED-Ed Ani­ma­tion

Stream 58 Hours of Free Clas­si­cal Music Select­ed to Help You Study, Work, or Sim­ply Relax

The World Con­cert Hall: Lis­ten To The Best Live Clas­si­cal Music Con­certs for Free

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 in less than three weeks. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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