DOGS AND BONES AND HUMAN MOTIVATION There's an apocryphal story about racing Grayhounds and how when they catch the dog or the bunny, they cease to race. Though there is no confirmation of this story anywhere in actual racing circles. I am a little suspicious of it because, though I'm allergic to anything with fur, when normal dogs catch anything, they seem to be quite happy to repeat the experience all day. But it's a useful metaphor about human behavior, so let's pretend it's true, which is also very common human behavior. Either the dog is completely satisfied by that one bone and never tries to run again, or he's so pissed off that the bone or the bunny is made of cardboard, he also never runs again. This past week, I caught the bunny. Twice. One day this week, I checked off everything on my to do list. Not just the explicit list that has a prayer of occasionally looking realistic, but also the unspoken expectations I hold myself to, that if I ate … [Read more...] about 4 Ways to Make Perfect Days Less Depressing
Friday Dive
Two Competing Uses for Trees and How We Got These so Wrong
“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth.” ― Herman Hesse, Wandering What is the function of a tree? At least, what is the function for one ice age primate that has managed to take over the globe? For almost half of our history, they have been bed, shade, safety, and food. And then that changed. I talked about how we can solve problems by seeing the function of things apart from what they're meant to do. Of course, trees don't need to have a function or be useful to humans to have perfectly worthy lives. In fact, the farther away a tree is from a human, the safer it is. THE OLD STORY: HUMANS TAMED FIRE Even now in our air-conditioned lives, we make sure to tell our children the story: humans tamed fire and dominated the earth. I think this may be one of the oldest stories in our oral tradition, sometimes called an ur-myth, because it's in every single culture. It has reached the level of … [Read more...] about Two Competing Uses for Trees and How We Got These so Wrong
Top 50 Strange & Unexpected Emojis Descriptions
I have a wee bit of vertigo, which means I have my phone read me emails and texts. This can lead to some assertions I don't think the authors are intending. Enjoy! The idea for this newsletter started when I got an author's newsletter that my (marvelous) app Speaking Email read to me as “Out Now: New romance non-binary vampire non-binary vampire” Excited, because that would be an awesome romance, but confused because it wasn’t exactly this author’s wheelhouse, I clicked over to my regular email and saw “Out Now New Romance 🧛🧛” This has happened to me before, though never to such hilarious results. Audio descriptions of emojis often don’t mean what we think they mean. Here are my favorites. (Try to imagine hearing these without the image for reference) 😂 Face with tears of joy 🐥 Standing chick 😒 Unamused face 😞Disappointed face 😔 Sad and pensive face 😟 Worried face 😕 Confused face 😣 Persevering face. (This is exactly how I look when persevering. I … [Read more...] about Top 50 Strange & Unexpected Emojis Descriptions
How Radar Started a War and Condensers Started a New Age
AVALANCHES OF OPINIONS There has been an avalanche of opinions and think pieces about the future. I have written before about the dangers of taking these accounts at face value. But we just can't help ourselves. BRAINS LOVE STORIES That seems like a positive statement. Especially coming from an author who spends all her time writing stories. But it isn't. We make meaning out of anything and everything. This concept is ubiquitous in modern psychology and difficult to trace to a specific source. There are thousands of articles that reference the concept and yet no single origin. Essentially we create a logical chain of cause and effect for everything that happens in our lives (even though the universe is mostly random chaos). Sometimes we know we're doing it and name it, like with superstitions. We know that we didn't get the job because of the tie we wore, but it's better to be safe than sorry at the next interview and wear it. Or astrology where we know that a … [Read more...] about How Radar Started a War and Condensers Started a New Age
The Greatest Social Experiment in History
WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH A BOX OF THUMBTACKS, A MATCH, AND A CANDLE?This isn't the start of a joke, but one of the best experiments ever devised.The Candle Problem shows how we can inadvertently ignore blatantly obvious solutions because we ignore function, made famous by Daniel Pink in his book Drive, from the research in the 40s of Gestalt Psychologist Karl Duncker.Participants are handed a collection of items and asked to affix a candle to a wall without it dripping on the table.Half are given a box of thumbtacks, matches, and a candle. Half are given a box, thumbtacks, matches, and a candle.Do you spot the difference? That one little difference drastically changed the likelihood of solving the problem.People who were given the thumbtacks separately from the box almost always solved the problem. Take a thumbtack and affix the box to the wall and put the candle in the box. It's on the wall and will not drip on the table.The people who were given the tacks in the box solved it far less … [Read more...] about The Greatest Social Experiment in History
Placebo Effect is Responsible for World Domination??
Photo: Anders Sandberg Do you remember learning about the placebo effect? I remember a few references to it in high school biology, and a few jokes about it in various TV shows, but it just seems to be one of those concepts you learn by osmosis and never question. But it is insane! IT'S GETTING STRONGER We have powerful drugs to change our brain chemistry, how our guts work, and how our immune systems heal, and we must very carefully design studies to account for the fact that none of them measure up to the power of eating a sugar pill that you’re told might make you better. And even then, sometimes the effect that you think is the drug turns out to also be placebo. Sedatives are less effective if the pill is red or yellow and more effective if they’re green or blue. Was it the drug or the color? Not only that, but the placebo effect is getting stronger. The more time goes on, the harder it is to get an efficacious drug passed because every … [Read more...] about Placebo Effect is Responsible for World Domination??
Tragedy and Triumph are group delusions
Photo Behzad No We decide this together: what is healthy or not, stressful or not? I owe a lot to Elizabeth Stanley and her book Widen the Window for her discussion of the connection between stress and trauma and how we think of them as worlds apart when they really are a spectrum. Though I've extrapolated into the healthy side of things for my work. Yes, we have to live in reality, but we shape reality with a lot of story. What doesn't kill you... The fact that some things are good for us and some kill us is not a controversial statement. I think everybody knows that some things make us happy and some things make us miserable, and some things traumatize us and blight the rest of our lives so we end up eating a pint of ice cream made of avocado because that would be healthier at 3 am when we’re convinced we’re going to be fired, our chosen political party will never win again, and humanity will be extinct in a century... No? Just me? One note: trauma is a … [Read more...] about Tragedy and Triumph are group delusions
Could You Be Addicted to Outrage??
I'm Kyler and I'm an outrage addict. It's been fifteen minutes since my last hit of cortisol. This is the story of how I thought I had a totally normal, healthy relationship with the internet, but learned I was actually completely screwed. It took a sixty-day migraine with vertigo to get me offline. Did you know vertigo was a symptom of migraine? Or that one of the primary triggers is screens? One day last year, I started to feel like a cork bobbing on the ocean while someone hammered on the back of my head. Fun times. And then it went on for months. Even after I figured out what was going on and that screens were my primary trigger, I just kept looking at them. All the time. As spikes were driven into eyeballs. I was that addicted to terror and outrage, and I was a pretty casual user. You know this. This is not news. But do you truly, madly, deeply know this? Because I was completely fooled. I thought I understood. I did not get into flame wars. I had the … [Read more...] about Could You Be Addicted to Outrage??