WATCH: The Great Unexpected Utility of the Arts

by DSN Editors

Art is often dismissed as being purely subjective, but Bard College President Leon Botstein, who also conducts the National Symphony Orchestra, argues that there are some commonalities among the diverse products that different people call art.

He argues that the most important thing about art is every person's capacity to make it, and that the body/mind discipline of cultivating your artistic abilities has collateral utility for every aspect of life. By the end of the lecture you will understand why you should actively make art part of your life-long education.

This video is part of DSN's Floating University video playlist, featuring some of the most mind-changing ideas delivered by America's leading thinkers. There are eleven other discussions waiting to feed your mind and spark your imagination. Check out the entire Floating University. Enjoy!

If It Scares It Airs. How Alarmist News Coverage Does Real Harm

by David Ropeik

     Did you hear about that Florida mother who is facing five years in jail for child neglect, for letting her 7 year-old walk home from a neighborhood park? Or those Maryland parents who let their kids walk home from a park, only to have county authorities grab the kids from the street – in the name of protecting them - and not tell the parents for hours where their children were? Child abduction by the state, in the name of fear of child abduction.

     It has been widely reported that the likelihood of an American child being abducted and harmed by a stranger is tiny, about one in 100,000. So where did our excessive fear of child abduction come from, a sweeping and now deeply imprinted fear that has prompted the passage of all sorts of laws, spawned the growth of whole industries, and perhaps most profoundly, radically changed how children in the United States are raised, all in response to a threat that essentially exists nowhere but in our heads. The answer is a cautionary observation about a lot of risks that we learn about from the news media.   

     6 year-old Etan Patz in New York City in 1979. 6 year-old Adam Walsh in Florida in 1981. 9 year-old Sarah Pryor in Boston in 1985. They were a few of a spate of child abductions in the late 70s and early 80s that got extensive media attention for for weeks, coverage understandably soaked with with high drama and heart wrenching emotion. (Mea culpa. I covered the Sarah Pryor story that way.) All of a sudden, it seemed, we were hearing about a growing risk that we somehow hadn’t paid attention to. Except there was no broader risk, just the same threat that children have always faced. Tragically, a few kids – the best estimate is about 115 a year in the U.S., most often in their early teens – are abducted and harmed or killed by strangers, a number which has held steady for as long as records have been kept.

     But rare as such cases may be, there were enough of them that, once a few nationally prominent instances had put the threat on the news media radar screen in a short period of time, newspapers and TV and radio stations in cities and towns everywhere jumped on every local case (the metaphor of sharks smelling blood in the water is overused but apt), and the national media joined in the coverage of many of those local cases. The result was seemingly non-stop front-page/top-of-the-newscast coverage of the missing-kid-of-the-month that made the risk seem WAY more common than it was, and effectively institutionalized child abduction as The New American Bogeyman.

     As evidence of how precipitously this occurred and the dramatic role the news media played, consider what Google Ngram finds about the frequency of the phrase ‘child abduction’ in books, always a reasonable approximation of the zeitgeist. Remember as you scan this chart that If you superimposed the actual threat, it would essentially be that flat line at the bottom. 

    (Image Courtesy Google NGram)

To be fair, though the likelihood of child abduction by a stranger is low the consequence is tragically high, and the media certainly should help us be alert to risks that are low probability but high consequence. And to be fair, the news media are in the business of dramatic story telling to draw our attention to whatever might grab our interest, and we are innately far more sensitive to risks to kids than the same risk to adults (how many stories about adult abduction do you hear about in the news?).   

     But that does not excuse a major failure by the news media in how it reported on child abduction, a persistent failure that shows up in coverage of most risks. There is an excess of alarmism, and far too little information that helps the news consumer put the danger in context. Any report about even the most dramatic of those early cases could have included half a line about how rare the risk actually is. Entire separate stories could have been done making clear that, tragic as those cases were, the likelihood of child abduction by a stranger is tiny. I actually did one of those ‘sidebar’ pieces, reporting how rare child abduction by a stranger really is... but not until years after reporting on the Sarah Pryor disappearance, and several others, in my best emotional dramatic TV news story telling way, without any context in those early pieces about how unlikely this was to happen.   

     Child abduction is just one example of fears the media have helped burn into the public psyche as truths, though the fears fly in the face of the facts. More than 90% of parents in the U.S vaccinate their kids according to medically recommended schedules, but as many as half of Americans say they are worried about the safety of vaccines in general, 27% VERY concerned, and influenza vaccine uptake averages less than 50%. The news media are significantly to blame for these excessive fears, after years of frightening stories about vaccine risks and sick kids that made for great copy but failed to prominently note that these fears were not born by the evidence. No, one study from Andrew Wakefield was NOT principally responsible for this. Widespread persistent and alarmist news coverage of the entire issue was far more culpable. (See Curtis Brainard’s terrific piece Sticking to the Truth in the Columbia Journalism Review.)   

      Nuclear radiation is nowhere near as harmful as alarmist stories report. Neither is the assumed environmental bogeyman mercury, or pesticides. Just like child abduction, they are all risky, just not nearly as dangerous as most news coverage makes them sound. And just like child abduction, the excess fear of these hyped bogeymen drive choices and behaviors that have real and harmful consequences; vaccine fears reduce the number of people vaccinating themselves or their kids, fear of radiation leads some to oppose nuclear energy, excessive fear of mercury causes some to stop eating healthy seafood, and knee jerk fear of pesticides causes some to oppose their use, even to kill disease carrying bugs.   

     Child abduction by strangers is a real risk. So are vaccines (in a TINY number of cases) and exposure to high levels of radiation or mercury or pesticides. But so is overly alarmist and incomplete (which means basically inaccurate) news coverage that does not put risks in perspective. We have been frightened by an “If it Scares It Airs” news media into a number of fears that are now completely accepted as truth but which are unwarranted by the evidence, and public and environmental health are suffering as a result.

How to Overcome the "Curse of Knowledge" to Become a Better Presenter

by Victoria Rachel Montgomery Brown

Why is it so hard to give an effective presentation? How can you improve? According to TED curator Chris Anderson, the reason so many of us struggle with teaching, training, and spreading ideas is because we're afflicted with what Harvard psycholinguist (and DSN expert) Steven Pinker calls "the curse of knowledge." In the following DSN Edge preview, Anderson explains how rethinking presentations as small journeys will help you better convey messages to an audience:

Pinker's curse to which Anderson refers is based on an idea simultaneously simple and complex: Once you learn something, you lose the ability to remember what it was like to not know it. It's simple because it makes sense; you can't just willingly unknow something. It's complex because its consequences are far-reaching. Like its logical cousin hindsight bias, the curse of knowledge is characterized by memory distortion. And it's due to memory distortion that you fail to empathize with those who don't yet know what you know.

Learning is an organic process. Any big ideas you possess have grown over time from intellectual sprouts. Yet too often when we try to communicate our ideas we disregard how they came about in the first place. In this way, giving a good presentation is like telling a good joke. You can't just open with the punchline without providing a setup. You don't want to divulge all information at once because your audience won't know what to do with it.

As Anderson explains, ideas are inherently complex and must be transferred step-by-step. A presentation must therefore take its audience on a journey of idea cultivation. Below are Anderson's three keys to building a strong presentation:

1. Begin the journey at your audience's level.

2. Give the audience a reason to want to go on your journey. Make them curious; make them care.

3. Take them step-by-step with each little contribution to the idea adding up a little bit so the audience doesn't get lost.

Keep these three items in mind and you'll be on your way to overcoming the curse of knowledge. This is the key to effective teaching, better communication, and the transfer of big ideas. If you want to cultivate knowledge in an audience, it's best to understand how these things grow.

Present Your Ideas: Overcome the "Curse of Knowledge" is available exclusively at DSN Edge.

Esports Injuries Are on the Rise

by Natalie Shoemaker

Hand and wrist injuries are perhaps the most common in esports, the required speed and movement of the mouse can exhaust a player's dominate hand to the point of crippling pain after just one game session. No matter how ergonomic the mice and keyboards may be, players are starting to drop out of esports, which begs the question if esports needs to reform.

As with any sport, players on the professional scene have a limited lifetime. Joints eventually give out, but esports is a particularly young sport, with no statistics or health information for how much you can (or should) push a player's body in practice or during a tournament. For a time, it seemed these young men and women could run forever, but veterans are starting to be bested by rookies.Legendary League of Legends pro StarCraft II tournament player, Hai “Hai” Lam, recently announced his retirement.

He said in a recent post:

“I can play xbox games on a controller, or even a little of other games like League or Dota or whatever, but whenever I play even 2-3 games of SC2 my hands end up killing me that entire week.”

His post goes on to talk about being depressed by the fact that he's separated from the sport he loves—from his friends. Suddenly, adrift from something that consumed his entire life. I think it's fair to say that none of these players expect this outcome going into it. Though, even if they do know this could be a potential outcome, look at how many youngsters go into football, knowing full-well about the risks of brain injury they could suffer later on in life. Sometimes the allure of a moment in the sun outweighs the long-term repercussions.

Indeed, David Wiers from Techgraphs writes, “The world of esports is in an awkward position.”He continues on in his article, writing:“Without any sort of players union or dedicated medical staff, the players lack protection from injuries that have already ended or shortened multiple careers.”

While esports have been gaining ground for recognition, there needs to be more steps in place to protect the interest of the players. With more and more of these players dropping out from wrist injuries, it's time for organizations within the esports community take the recognition it has earned and use it to help protect the players that helped it get there. 

Read more at the Techgraphs.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

The Incredible Shrinking Argument Against Gay Marriage

by Steven Mazie

Sitting cheek-by-jowl in the packed press gallery at the Supreme Court on Tuesday and listening to 150 minutes of oral arguments in the historic same-sex marriage cases, I marveled at how radically the defense of “traditional marriage” has shifted in just a few short years. There was a motley crew of devout bible wranglers on the courthouse steps preaching fire and brimstone (see a couple of shots I snapped, below), and one brave soul who stood up in the courtroom yelling at the top of his lungs that the justices will “burn in Hell” if they approve the “abomination” of a right to same-sex marriage. He was quickly removed from the courtroom but continued to make himself heard from the outside for a good ten minutes while the Solicitor General of the United States, Donald Verrilli, made a soaring case for treating gays and lesbians equally under the Constitution.

     

      

But no shred of these religious arguments—a passage from Leviticus, for example, which condemns “a man who lies with a man”—made its way into the briefs or the oral arguments. Nor did a moral argument plucked out of its religious context dominate the proceedings. There weren’t even strong intimations that gay couples make bad parents—an idea that has been thoroughly rebuked by numerous studies. This, I mused in the courtroom, seemed like progress. By the time the anti-gay-marriage argument had reached the highest court in the land, it had become more reasonable, less parochial, more amenable to reasoned exchange.

But that daisies-and-gumdrops vision quickly gave way, in my mind, to a new reality. The newest version of the argument against gay marriage might be pleasingly secular and (at least superficially) unmotivated by hatred of gays and lesbians, but it is remarkably, irredeemably, thoroughly weak.

John Bursch, the earnest-to-a-fault lawyer from Michigan who was defending the same-sex marriage bans, advanced one lonely substantive argument. As I note in my coverage of the case for The Economist this week, his point was that altering the norm of heterosexual marriage will have untold pernicious effects on society. By making marriage all about the couple’s relationship, rather than the children they intend to bear and bond with, the link between marriage and procreation will be dangerously severed. So although gay parents may be just as loving and attentive as straight ones, the new institution of marriage that will accompany a change in the law will, in the medium and long term, threaten to undermine the bonds between parents and children, gay and straight alike.

The argument is odd. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out, it is a “feeling,” entirely and absolutely speculative. One can grant that “consequences” flow from changes in societal norms without accepting the contention that allowing gays to marry would eventually ruin the relationships between parents and their kids. There have been plenty of other changes in marital relations in the past century—women working outside the home and gaining a more equal footing vis-a-vis their husbands, for example, trends Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted in the hearing—and the effects have been mostly positive. Mr. Bursch could not explain any “empirical connection,” in Justice Stephen Breyer’s words, between gay marriage and an eventual loss of intimacy between parents and children.

The Michigan lawyer backed himself into an uncomfortable corner in this response to Justice Breyer: “If you de-link marriage from creating children, you would expect to have more children created outside the bonds of marriage.” So much weight falls on the “you would expect” construction here. But Mr. Bursch gave no justification for why anyone should expect this result. And he inadvertently provided an excellent refutation of his own claim in the next few minutes during a masterful Socratic take-down by Justice Elena Kagan. The idea is rather obvious: one of the very best ways to have more “children created outside the bounds marriage” is to prevent gay and lesbian parents of adopted children from marrying. This irony of his self-defeating position seems to be lost on Mr. Bursch in this exchange:

MR. BURSCH: We love adoption.  Adopted parents are heroic….

JUSTICE KAGAN:  If you think about…­ who are the potential adoptive parents, many of them are same­-sex parents who can't have their own children, and truly want to experience exactly the kind of bond that you're talking about.  So how does it make those children better off by preventing that from happening?

MR. BURSCH:  Well, we allow someone regardless of their sexual orientation to adopt.

JUSTICE KAGAN:  Yes.  But you, yourself, are saying that …the recognition of marriage helps the children, aren't you?  I mean…the whole basis of your argument is that you want children in marital households.

MR. BURSCH:  Correct.  We ­­ we want it to be the glue. That's correct.

JUSTICE KAGAN:  More adopted children and more marital households, whether same sex or other sex seems to be a good thing.

Justice Kagan concluded that “it just seems to me inexplicable given what you've said are your policy interests” to want to rope gay and lesbian couples out of the state’s marriage laws.

So near the end of sleepy, anticlimactic second hour of the hearing, my mind wandered to an idea developed by John Rawls, the great 20th-century political theorist, in the 1990s. Rawls wrote that constitutional democracies are fueled by robust public discussion among free and equal citizens. The concept of “public reason” is a mode of discourse wherein people speak candidly and respectfully with each other about how their polity should be organized and about the policies it ought to adopt. One feature of public reason is the willingness, as T.M. Scanlon puts it, to give reasons that other reasonable people can’t reasonably reject. You may have religious motives for your views, and that’s fine, but in staking a public claim to a position requires you to give reasons that people with different metaphysical commitments can relate to.

That’s just what we saw in Tuesday’s hearing: a case for withholding a right from gays and lesbians that is completely unmoored from its religious origins. In one sense, it’s a remarkable advance in the legal debate: a triumph of public reason. In 1986, when I was a high school sophomore, Chief Justice Warren Burger justified upholding laws criminalizing homosexual sodomy by pointing out that gay sex has been seen as an " 'infamous crime against nature,' as an offense of 'deeper malignity' than rape, a heinous act 'the very mention of which is a disgrace to human nature,' and 'a crime not fit to be named.' " And 29 years later, after a two-foot high stack of briefs has been written and hours of argument aired in the latest case concerning gay rights, it is clear that the old moralism no longer flies. The claim has shrunk to its speculative, illogical vanishing point. A full public hearing has exposed the case against gay marriage as an empty shell. 

Image credit: Shutterstock

Follow @stevenmazie

 

The Shock of the New (and Old): The Whitney Museum’s New Home

by Bob Duggan

With the May 1^st grand opening to the public of its new building in the Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, the Whitney Museum launches a new era not only in the New York City art scene, but, possibly, the very world of museums. Thanks to a Renzo Piano-designed new building built, as Whitney Director Adam D. Weinberg put it, “from the inside out” to serve the interests of the art and the patrons first, the new Whitney and its classic collection of American art stretching back to 1900 has drawn excited raves and exasperated rants from critics. Their inaugural exhibition, America Is Hard to See, gathers together long-loved classic works with rarely seen newcomers to create a paradox of old and new to mirror the many paradoxes of the American history the art embodies and critiques by turns. This shock of the new (and old) is the must-see art event of the year.

The range of critical opinions over the past few weeks tried to pass final judgment before the doors even opened. No sooner did the Whitney release the list of 400 artists who created the 600 plus works in America Is Hard to See than people began to crunch the demographics numbers and condemn them for gender and racial bias.  The LA Times’ art critic Christopher Knight huffed and puffed over what he perceived as the NYC-centric, “shrouded in parochialism” nature of the show. “Not that I expected much more,” Knight wrote in prejudgment. “America is a big country. Naturally, vast swaths of its often marvelous art history have always been missing in action in New York.” (Funny enough, Knight’s colleague Carolina A. Miranda, aside from some minor quibbles, sees a “significant Southern California representation.”)

Conversely, Hyperallergic’s Benjamin Sutton raved over everything from the exhibition, to the comfy couches (as shown above), to the open air terrace galleries, to even the all-gender bathrooms. Sutton also hoped that the museum’s placing of conservation facilities and office space adjacent to galleries, whose “proximity to and visibility from the gallery spaces contribute to a pervasive sense of transparency… will become the new norm in museum design.” Like Sutton, many other commentators took the museum’s attempt at forward thinking as a promise of things to come in the museum world, for good or ill. Thus, the Whitney as experiment era begins.

But to all these somethings new, the Whitney marries the something old—their core collection of American art’s heavy hitters—Edward Hopper, Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, and the other usual suspects. What makes the new Whitney and America Is Hard to See so fascinating is how they are able to hold the paradoxes of old and new art set physically together in visual dialogue while at the same time telling the schizophrenic story of America—a land of the free founded on slavery, a land of opportunity split by breathtaking economic inequality, a post-racial place led by an African-American president yet beset by racial violence. Such multitasking storytelling fulfills the original mission of the Whitney while updating the tale for a contemporary audience.

“The title America Is Hard to See points to the impossibility of offering a tidy picture of this country, its culture and, by extension, its art,” curator Donna De Salvo explains. “The exhibition takes up this challenge through the lens of the Whitney’s collection, re-examining well-known art historical tropes, proposing new narratives, and even expanding the definition of who counts as an American artist. We did not conceive of this exhibition as a comprehensive survey, but rather as a sequence of provocative thematic chapters that taken together reflect on American art history from the vantage point of today.” Those (such as Knight) looking for comprehensiveness need to look elsewhere. Those looking for an honest representation of the messily uncomfortable history of America and its art need look no further.

Several of these 23 “chapters” stand out for their interesting paradoxes of old and new, good and bad in American art and culture. “Forms Abstracted,” which takes its title from Marsden Hartley’s 1913 Forms Extracted, examines the American art debt to European modernism that resulted in such happy collisions as James Daugherty’s 1914 Three Base Hit, where American baseball meets Italian Futurism. “Breaking the Prairie” may take its name from the well-known Grant Wood’s work, but it breaks new canonical ground by including “outsider” artists James Castle and Bill Traylor inside the big tent. Similarly, “Fighting with All Our Might” alludes specifically to Hugo Gellert’s 1943 prints about America in World War II, but ripples out beautifully to all the social conflicts of the 1930s and 1940s involving labor and class (epitomized by Ben Shahn’s 1931 The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti) and racism (epitomized by Harry Sternberg’s harrowing 1935 anti-lynching print Southern Holiday).

If those combinations of well and lesser known names intrigue you, the choice of Hedda Sterne and her New York, N.Y., 1955 to highlight the Abstract Expressionist gallery seems an unusual choice until, as Jerry Salz pointed out, Sterne’s use of spray paint makes her seem more contemporary than any of the AbEx boys’ club. The curators’ choice to literally dwarf Jackson Pollock’s Number 27 with his wife Lee Krasner’s mammoth The Seasons visually flips the standard art history narrative on its head and serves notice that America Is Hard to See isn’t like what you’ve seen before.

It’s a shame that many looked at the list of artists and drew preliminary conclusions about the exhibition. The chapter “Racing Thoughts” may come from Jasper Johns, but it focuses more on Johns-esque critiques from minority and female artists such as Nam June Paik, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Sherrie Levine, and Barbara Kruger. The chapter “Guarded View” (after a work by Fred Wilson) focuses entirely on identity, race, and gender. Critics can argue that the numbers haven’t changed, but, given the choice and the realities of most museum collections, I’ll take this qualitative shift over a quantitative one. The final chapter, titled after Ed Ruscha’s “Course of Empire,” delves fearlessly into the problems and paradoxes of the post-9/11 world with works by Mark Bradford, Glenn Ligon, Aleksandra Mir, and others. When I read that the new Whitney had already been the subject of a protest by Occupy Museums and Occupy the Pipeline over a natural gas pipeline connected to the controversial fracking procedure, I thought of no better christening.

Of all the distinctive, engaging, user-friendly touches of the new Whitney, one of the most interesting and indicative are the four Artschwager Elevators, which each contain immersive art interiors created by the late Richard Artschwager. Even before you see the galleries, you’re surrounded by the art experience.  Jerry Salz hit the issue on the head in bemoaning how most museums today are “at all times intensely in pursuit of new work, new crowds, and new money,” but the new Whitney provides a (perhaps imperfect) template for the new museum model: “Make enough space to show your permanent collections, and make them work with and for new acquisitions (and vice versa).” In other words, make contemporary art look classic and classic art look contemporary by setting up a dialogue for patrons to not just view but actively engage in. The Whitney’s Director Adam D. Weinstein acknowledges the influence of his time spent at the smaller, more contemporary-focused Walker Arts Center, so maybe the new Whitney is the best of both worlds—a small institution feel but with a big institution collection. That such little things pay off in big ways is just one more powerful paradox of the new Whitney’s shockingly good pairing of new and old.

[Image: Whitney Museum’s 5^th floor West Ambulatory adjacent to “Threat and Sanctuary” galleries of America Is Hard to See exhibition. Painting on wall is Jonathan Borofsky’s Running People at 2,616,216 (1978-1979). Photograph © Nic Lehoux.]

[Many thanks to the Whitney Museum for providing me with the image above and other press materials related to their reopening and the exhibition America Is Hard to See, which runs through September 27, 2015.]

[Please follow me on Twitter (@BobDPictureThis) and Facebook (Art Blog By Bob) for more art news and views.]

"That’s Not Fair!" An Increasingly Endangered Persuasive Appeal

by Kathleen Kelley Reardon

 

Research indicates that persuasive appeals are more or less effective according to the types of relationship in which they’re used.  For example, different strategies work better for intimate than for nonintimate relationships and for long-term versus short-term ones.  Essentially, persuasion strategies are context dependent.

A few months ago, a colleague of mine lost a good friend – not to death, but to promotion.  Power went immediately to his head, she told me.  He now grants favors only to people he considers of benefit to him.  Moreover, he dismisses her appeals to fairness – once one of his most cherished principles.

What happened?  Fairness, it seems, from this story and many like it, has become almost irrelevant in business.  We might ask whether this should be surprising.  After all, we’ve come to learn that even the harshest of decisions in business can be explained away by one simple phrase:  “It’s not personal; it’s business.”  Over time, that perspective has taken hold.  It has fostered a climate in which what's right, good or fair matters far less than getting jobs done efficiently and effectively. Sure, if you can have it all, that's fine.  When there is conflict among these goals, however, principles like fairness usually lose.

We have elevated the impersonal to a place where previously valued modes of human conduct, like fairness, are only retained to the extent that they foster productivity and profit.  If fairness were a powerful motivator, the gender pay gap would disappear. Wouldn't the minimum wage be higher?  If fairness counted, the most qualified people would be consistently promoted over the politically manipulative and obsequious.

I’m not at all suggesting that anyone should give up on fairness.  And I share the chagrin of those who read this and nearly weep at the extinction of another form of moral persuasion. 

When a strategy has lost its persuasive appeal, however, there is a way forward -- argue for its importance via another route.  In short, seek fairness by developing for it an appreciated alter ego.

The next time you confront a situation that is unfair, consider whether that condition matters to the people able to change it for the better.  Are there too many other pressures on them to consider what’s fair?   If so, what does matters to them at this time and in this situation? 

One promising avenue is to appeal to professionalism.  Most business managers and leaders care about this.  At the very least, they know they should care.  Fortunately, under the definitional umbrella of this term are characteristics that come close to fairness.  Among them are integrity, honesty, reliability, responsibility and even humility.  To the extent that a course of action can be associated with these characteristics, fairness may be achieved via a back door.

To some this may seem a slight of hand.  Indeed, it is.  Yet, if the person you hope to persuade cares little about what is fair but is very concerned about what is professional, you’d be remiss to not help him see your way by taking his preferred road to get there.

 

Kathleen also blogs here.

 

Photo:  Sergey Nivens/Shutterstock.com

Twitter As You Know It Is Not Long For This World

by Robert Montenegro

Twitter is awesome for many reasons but foremost because it's a simple idea done well.

It's built on values like conversation, choice, and brevity. It's democratic in all the good ways and it's the best source of breaking news currently on the Internet. A lot of smart and funny people have mastered the form and regularly create many moments of happiness for their followers. Overall, the site is a powerhouse combination of news and entertainment.

And for all those reasons, Twitter is in big trouble. 

Take a look at this piece by Slate's David Auerbach that covers the fallout from Twitter's disastrous Tuesday on Wall Street. Auerbach is much smarter than I am on the topic of tech stocks so I'd recommend sifting through his excellent article for intricate details, but the basic gist is that there are two sides to the coin when considering Twitter's fantastic user experience. While all those things I mentioned above make for great browsing, they're kryptonite to those who want Twitter to make Scrooge McDuckian piles of money. Tuesday was another low point in that pursuit; the company's stock nosedived after first quarter revenue turned out to be $20 million less than expected.

Auerbach doesn't think Twitter is sustainable and he doesn't sugar-coat his assessment of its current situation:

"Twitter is acquiring users more slowly, particularly on mobile. It is failing to monetize these users as well as expected. And it is tapping other companies like Google, with whom it will partner to take advantage of its DoubleClick ad-serving platform, for lifelines. As a consequence, the ultimate value of the social network’s nearly 300 million users is looking significantly lower than previously thought. Twitter is well aware of these factors. Its recent actions signal that it is trying to redefine its business, not as a service that monetizes its users, but as a crowdsourced media platform and advertising agency—a dangerous bet that is unlikely to pay off... Twitter is making an exceptionally dangerous bet, situating it not as the next YouTube but somewhere between BuzzFeed and Reddit—but lacking the depth of content of either."

As mentioned, the problem is that Twitter's strengths double as its greatest weaknesses. People like it because it's a public, unfiltered, no-algorithm feed of information. Unlike Facebook, Twitter isn't able to effectively monetize its users because it doesn't collect a ton of data based on what you like, and installing a Facebook-like system to prioritize paid tweets could scuttle the whole enterprise. Twitter doesn't offer its users much aside from a channel for communication. Mess with that channel and users will probably take their conversations elsewhere. It's only a matter of time until a newer and better service threatens Twitter's very existence.

This is a classic "between a rock and a hard place" scenario. If Twitter keeps things the way they are, revenues will continue to flatten and stockholders will flee. If they tinker with their product too much, users will flee and revenues will suffer. The company is forced to aim for a sweet spot in the middle, says Auerbach, though he doubts it can pull it off.

And that's a shame because Twitter, in its current incarnation, is important and amusing and ton of fun. Unfortunately, those things don't automatically translate into dollar signs, which means the Twitter we know and love isn't long for this world.

In recognition of what we soon may be losing, Auerbach offers a very Shakespearean epitaph:  

"Whatever happens, the future of Twitter is being something other than what it is right now. The company isn’t dead but walking wounded, like the Earl of Gloucester, blind and lost, heading for the Dover cliffs."

Read more at Slate

Below, author Charlene Li analyzes the tweeting habits of the Pope Francis and explains how a format like Twitter can be used to win over the public.

Photo credit Ivelin Radkov & LovArt / Shutterstock

The Age Old Secret Of Behavior Change

by Jason Hreha

Earlier today, I was speaking with a friend of mine about habit formation. In the middle of our conversation, he paused and told me: “The trick is to keep on going. You’ll make steps forward. Then you’ll fall back. But the trick is to keep on going – keep doing what you need to do.” Truer words could not be spoken. Sometimes in the midst of a hype and complexity, you need to re-state old truths. This is one of them.

Outside of the medical world, where an intervention can instantly solve your problem, things are much messier. Things take time. A headache can be solved in 10 minutes by an aspirin. An infection can be quickly conquered with some antibiotics. But gambling addictions, or an inability to stick with an exercise plan, cannot be solved so readily. Behavior change is unpredictable. People are infinitely complex. The environments people live in are infinitely complex. Trying to predict how two complex things will interact is a daunting task.

This is one of the reasons that diets, exercise plans, and addiction programs fail so often. When they do succeed it’s often due to a committed and intelligent coach or therapist who can adapt to the complex situations of their clients in real time. Not everyone, however, has this luxury.

This is one of the reasons why simple instructions and principles work so well. No matter what environments people are in, they can use simple principles or instructions as their guides. For example, if you want to become healthier, you can vow to always stand over sitting. Instead of sitting on the bus, you stand. Instead of slumping back in a chair at work, you use a standing desk. This instruction, stand over sitting, is so simple that it can be applied in almost every context. 

For every goal, there are sets of these simple principles or instructions that can get you there. If you want to learn more about psychology, you could decide to read on the topic for 15 minutes each day. You could also create and review five new flashcards each day. If you want to go to bed earlier, you could decide to get in bed 15 minutes earlier each day. You could also vow to stop drinking coffee before noon. Simple. In due time, both instruction sets would likely get you where you would need to be.

This approach is very similar to BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits program, where he has students determine the smallest behavior they can do towards their goals. Since the behaviors are so small, his students quickly form strong habits around them. But the changes don’t stop there. Once someone is consistently exercising each day, they’re much more likely to then do other exercises and related activities. For example, let’s say someone chooses “Do 10 pushups each morning” as their Tiny Habit. After a couple weeks, they might decide to up the number of pushups they’re doing, since doing 10 is now incredibly easy. They get up to 100 pushups each morning. Witnessing their new muscle definition and increased stamina, they decide that it’s time to sign up for a gym after all. As you can see, the small pushup habit can balloon into a larger set of fitness habits and behaviors.

This is why, in the world of human affairs, sticking to simple principles and prescriptions is usually the best path forward. When you’re taking small steps forward, it takes awhile to get to the end of the road. You might fall one step, two steps back, but if you keep on walking along, you’ll still get there. It’s the old fable of the tortoise and the hare. This time, the tortoise still wins.

Image: Charly W. Karl

Our Faith in Optimism Vastly Overestimates its Power

by Orion Jones

When confronting a challenge, people with an optimistic outlook persist at trying to overcome that challenge about 20 percent longer than those with less optimism. Unfortunately, the extra time devoted to solving the problem — that exemplary work ethic and stick-to-itiveness — doesn't really translate into a greater performance.

What's more, the inability of an optimistic mindset to bend the physical world to our happy will contrasts with a belief that most of us seem to hold: that one's attitude is a primary predictor of how well we'll perform on a given task. These are the results of a clever scientific study run at the UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and recently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 

The experiment examined people's expectations about the strength of a positive attitude and what such an attitude changed in the real world. In a "Where's Waldo" game, for example, people not searching for Waldo expected an optimistic outlook to result in a 33 percent bump in an ability to find him. And while optimistic people did spend 20 percent more time searching for Waldo, this extra effort only yielded a 5 percent improvement in success — a far cry from the 33 percent predicted. 

Author Alex Fradera, who wrote about the study for the British Psychological Society, gives some sobering advice to all of us who are drunk on optimism:

If you do badly at a test, rather than fretting that the cause was your negative mental attitude, it might be better to simply focus on your knowledge and approach.

Still, a belief in magical thinking, i.e. that our thoughts change the physical reality around us by the mere act of having the thoughts, has proven to be a powerful evolutionary tool. As science journalist Matthew Hutson explained to DSN, magical thinking may underlie the very notion of cause and effect, and it can help us set goals and overcome roadblocks, seeing them as merely bumps in our inevitable road to success.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

Emotional Intelligence is Great, Until it's Misused

by Orion Jones

Emotional intelligence, i.e. the balancing of raw intelligence with emotional awareness, is a double-edged sword: it helps us empathize with others and avoid common misunderstandings that result in hurt feelings, but in the wrong hands, it can become a tool of manipulation.

Popularized by psychologist Daniel Goldberg in his 1995 book "Emotional Intelligence", the idea took popular psychology by storm. The concept of a non-quantifiable, emotionally intuitive intelligence retooled our vision of what it meant to be smart, helping to explain why some extremely bright people just can't get along. 

Emotional intelligence also signaled that people who understood uniquely human desires, such as the need to feel respected, listened to, and understood, could benefit organizations by harnessing social capital. But just as human resource departments cultivated emotional intelligence, narcissistic and Machiavellian coworkers did the same.

A brief overview of recent studies at The Atlantic cites evidence that developing emotional intelligence can result in more narcissistic behavior, and if one has the proclivity toward deceit, having emotional intelligence can make such subterfuge more insidious still:

"A 2010 journal article [published in Research in Organizational Behavior] reviewed 'self-serving' uses of EI in office settings, such as 'focusing on strategically important targets' (subordinates, rivals, supervisors) and working to 'distort, block or amplify rumors, gossip, and other types of emotion-laden information'."

What's perhaps worst of all is that individuals with strategically deceitful attitudes may be blissfully unaware of their own behavior. Neuroscientist James Fallon is famously one of those people. Blind to his own manipulative tendencies his whole life, it was only in his sixties that he realized he habitually badgered and manipulated people without concern for his own actions. His DSN interview is a fascinating look at what it's like to discover one's darker side and come out the other end.

Read more at The Atlantic.

Researchers Examine How the Brain Reacts to the Placebo Effect

by Natalie Shoemaker

Here's an interesting thought: Could preconceived beliefs create a placebo effect that changes the chemistry of the brain?

Hilke Plassmann and Bernd Weber have published and interesting piece in the Journal of Marketing Research that tests if prejudices related to the price or wine, or the words used to label a milkshake, could change how our our brains react before the first sip. They write:

"Studies have shown that people enjoy identical products such as wine or chocolate more if they have a higher price tag. However, almost no research has examined the neural and psychological processes required for such marketing placebo effects to occur."

The researchers tested this idea by gathering a group of participants, and telling them they were going to taste five wines with price tags of $90, $45, $35, $10, and $5. While they consumed these wines, they were but through an MRI machine to examine their brain patterns. What the researchers kept from the subjects was that they were actually consuming three wines with only two different prices. In another experiment, participants were asked to consume two different milkshakes labeled “Organic” or “Light.” These labels were used to generate a positive or negative perception with the drink before it was even tasted. Of course, the researchers fibbed and actually gave the participants identical milkshakes when they thought they would be organic or regular, or light or regular.

Based on these two experiments, the team of researchers found that prejudices did indeed exist when participants thought they were consuming a product of high or low quality—whether that was based on a high price tag or organic manufacturing label. What's more, the authors noted unique brain activity based on those prejudices. EurekAlert writes that the authors were also able to “determine that people who were strong reward-seekers or who were low in physical self-awareness were also more susceptible to having their experience shaped by prejudices about the product.”

The authors concluded:

"Understanding the underlying mechanisms of this placebo effect provides marketers with powerful tools. Marketing actions can change the very biological processes underlying a purchasing decision, making the effect very powerful indeed."

Many other studies have looked into the placebo effect. But one study recently found that the mood of a person, the weather, and other outside factors can influence how good or bad something may taste to someone, which is why location-based information and personalized websites are a marketer's dream. Christopher Vollmer, in his DSN interview, talks about the biggest digital trends out there right now that companies need to utilize (one of them being personalization):

Read more at EurekAlert!

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

 

WATCH: Social Capital — If You Want to Succeed, Start Making Friends

by DSN Editors

We're more than halfway through our rollout of DSN's Floating University video playlist, featuring some of the most mind-changing ideas delivered by America's leading thinkers. In this discussion, Harvard medical doctor and sociologist Nicholas Christakis looks at our world through the lens of the society we all belong to.

No man is an island entire of itself; every man

is a piece of the continent, a part of the main,

said the poet John Donne. And that is essentially where sociology picks up. Our experience of the world, which we feel personally, is inextricably shaped by other human beings. Our successes and failures are similarly linked to others, though we may feel their effects only personally.

Every choice you make, every behavior you exhibit, and even every desire you have finds its roots in the social universe. Whether you’re absorbing altruism performed by someone you’ll never meet or deciding to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, collective phenomena affect every aspect of your life.

 

Check out our entire Floating University Playlist.

How Peer Pressure Can Encourage More Sustainable Travel

by Natalie Shoemaker

Recent study reveals how we can use peer pressure for good. Christine Kormos took the lead on a research paper where her team found that when framing the benefits of sustainable commuting as a social norm, people tended to make more of an effort.

For example: Eric Jaffe from City Lab writes that psychologists found in a separate experiment that hotel guests would sometimes reuse their towels when they were told it helps the environment. But telling those guests that most of their guests reuse their towels, increased the likelihood they would do so. Psychologists found the same approach works with recycling and energy use.

Kormos and her team note that when they introduced a social norm into the argument for why we should carpool it “[encourages] commuters to consciously evaluate their travel mode choices and to subsequently establish new, more sustainable, habits.”

The research behind their study included 78 people with an average age of 31. They all commuted regularly to a college campus or nearby city. Researchers asked them to keep a journal for a week, recording their commuting habits, such as total time and mode of transport taken for the journey. The participants were then given a pamphlet about more sustainable transportation options and asked if they could reduce their driving trips by 25 percent in the coming three weeks. However, unknown to the 78 participants, how they were asked to reduce their habits was framed in one of three ways.

One group, acted as a control and was given a list of alternative modes of transport, and nothing more. Another group was given a “low” peer-pressure message saying that only 4 percent of people had given up on commuting alone. The last group receive a much bigger nudge, told that one in four commuters had switched from solo travel to a more sustainable, group method. Kormos and her team found that the high-pressure group was most successful in reducing their daily drive.

This has led the researchers to conclude in their paper:

“Car-use message campaigns can reduce private vehicle use by highlighting descriptive norms about others’ sustainable transportation efforts, but these messages appear to be most effective for commuting behavior.”

Read more about the study at CityLab.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

The Seductive Allure of The Seductive Allure of The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations

by Simon Oxenham

As regular readers will be well aware, much of what I've covered on this blog has been about the use and abuse of the prefix "neuro" to mislead. You don't have to look far to see that most people seem to be pretty disconnected from the science of the brain. This becomes a problem once you realise how this allows us to be misled. Take for example the adverts for "brain training" games that stalk you on the internet with claims that don't even remotely hold water; or the fact that a laughable technique called "Brain Gym" that involves making children perform pointless exercises and is based on no evidence whatsoever continues to be widespread in schools across the world at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and has been used by as many as 39% of teachers in the UK. Drop a few brain related words and it seems even teachers can lose the capacity for critical thought en masse.

In 2008 a paper titled "The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations ", struck a chord with me when it made the case that we can be suckered into judging bad psychological explanations as better than they really are if they are served with a side order of irrelevant neuroscience. Another paper published the same year suggested that just showing an image of the brain alongside articles describing fictious neuroscience research (for example claiming that watching TV improves mathematical ability) resulted in people rating the standard of reasoning in the articles as higher.

In 2013 however, a paper was published that remains a strong contender for the award of best named paper of all time: The Seductive Allure of Seductive Allure. The paper pointed out flaws in both of the 2008 papers: The neuroscience explanations were longer and arguably added to the psychological explanations. It could be the case that more complicated sounding, or seemingly better explained explanations are simply more persuasive. If this were the case, this would be a rather less ground breaking conclusion. This suggestion was posed way back in 2009 by the blogger Neuroskeptic. Furthermore, a systematic replication of the 2008 brain scan paper involving ten experiments and a whopping two thousand participants failed to find any evidence that the addition of a brain scan alone had any real impact on people, it seemed the "seductive allure of neuroscience explanations" was in tatters.

Soon the "Seductive Allure of Seductive Allure" debate was everywhere, even Vice got involved. The realisation that simply adding pretty pictures of brains to an argument isn't enough to fool most people probably shouldn't have been so surprising. What seems to have been largely ignored however, is that the huge 2013 systematic replication which was the centrepiece of the "Seductive Allure of Seductive Allure" case in fact did replicate the original " Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations" finding: that bad neuroscience explanations (as opposed to images) are more convincing than psychological explanations alone. The authors of the replication offered up a plausible explanation for the failure of the brain images to persuade: "Why the disparity, then, between the trivial effects of a brain image and the more marked effects of neuroscience language? ... Perhaps, then, the persuasive influence of the brain image is small when people have already been swayed by the neuroscience language in the article."

Fast forward to today and anew group of researchers have entered the fray, publishing a paper in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, in which the Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations is tested a little more rigorously. The researchers gave students descriptions of psychological phenomena which were either good explanations or circular explanations. The circular explanations simply restated the claim in a different way rather than providing any actual explanation. The researchers tested to see what happened if superfluous neuroscience information or images of brain scans were added into the mix. Crucially, to control for the neuroscience explanations being more seemingly complex, the researchers also added a "hard science" condition in which superfluous physics or genetics information (for example) was added to the psychological explanation. A superfluous social science condition was also added for good measure.

Like the earlier replication, the brain images alone had little effect, but the superfluous neuroscience explanations were once again found to be more convincing to the students. Crucially they were also found to be more convincing than the superfluous social science and the superfluous hard science explanations. The results also make clear that people are really very bad at spotting circular arguments in science in general - they are just particularly bad at it when the circular argument is glossed under a veneer of neuroscience:

This is a conclusion that I don't find surprising. I'm a firm believer that in some quarters of academia, in the words of Steven Pinker, some scholars "spout obscure verbiage to hide the fact that they have nothing to say. They dress up the trivial and obvious with the trappings of scientific sophistication, hoping to bamboozle their audiences with highfalutin gobbledygook ". That superfluous neuroscience seems to be more alluring than other superfluous science makes perfect sense, when it is a subject that is seen as a black box by so many.

This is the point where you are probably expecting me to advocate more and better neuroscience education. But that's absolutely not what I think we need to solve this problem. The key problem here isn't people's knowledge of neuroscience, it's their failure to identify irrational arguments. You certainly could spot the flaws in the arguments made in these studies by becoming an expert on all things brain related. It would be a far more efficient and likely a far more practical use of your time to develop the critical thinking skills and skeptical mindset necessary to simply spot the errors of logic. A great starting point in this area is Stuart Sunderland's Irrationality, for a more extensive account see Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow.

As I so enjoy discussing at length on this blog, the evidence that people seem to fail to apply basic critical thinking to claims made about the brain is all around us. What I find equally concerning and somewhat closely related is the causes and consequences of a culture of "academic bullshitting" in which academics can feel coerced into speaking in a language of pseudoacademia, a language that only differs from everyday English in that it is impenetrable to the naive observer - enclosing an argument in a black box where it cannot be dismantled without great effort. This problem affects all disciplines to some degree, psychology perhaps more than others - as I suggested in a feature I wrote recently with Jon Sutton for The Psychologist. Taking advantage of terminology from neuroscience is just one trick in the toolbox.

 

Follow Neurobonkers on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, RSS, or join the mailing list. Image Credit: Shutterstock, Fernandez-Duque et al

Reference:

Fernandez-Duque D., Evans J., Christian C. & Hodges S.D. (2014). Superfluous neuroscience information makes explanations of psychological phenomena more appealing., Journal of cognitive neuroscience, PMID: http://ift.tt/1J8MbUM

Postmortem Perfume May Help Bereaved Recover Something That Was Lost

by Natalie Shoemaker

Smell can be a powerful thing. The scent of a loved one can move through those olfactory senses and bring memories or emotions to the surface. I remember a significant other that used to wear his sweater to bed every night, just so it would be washed in his scent when I took it home after a weekend visit. That sweater, with his smell on it, would comfort me once I was away. In those days, if I could buy a bottle of his scent, I would. Interestingly enough, a French perfumer is claiming to be able to do just that. However, she's aiming her personalized scents at bereaved customers.

Erin Blakemore from The Smithsonian reports that Katia Apalategui alongside Chemist Geraldine Savary say that they have been able to successfully extract a hundred odor molecules from a subject's clothing to create a bottled scent.

Apalategui came up with the idea after seeing her mother's attempts to preserve the scent on her dead husband's pillowcase. So, she began her quest to find a sent-chemist to help her manufacture and bottle these personalized smells of dead loved-ones.

Blakemore reports that Apalategui plans on plans on marketing her perfume line in funeral homes by September. She plans on charging around $600 to bottle the scent of a deceased loved-one.

The venture seems a bit morbid, especially when the prime customers are people who have been devastated by grief. But when you've lost someone, you'd pay anything to regain even the tiniest piece of that person. Smell is a powerful sense—one that can trigger deep memories and emotions, like my significant-other's sweater.

What do you think? Shady business plan, taking advantage of damage people or a product that helps bereaved people recover something they've lost?

Read more about the power of smell and postmortem perfumes at The Smithsonian.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

Future Events Seem Closer When Time Is Framed In Days, Rather Than Years

by Natalie Shoemaker

When given the choice, we often choose our present needs over the needs of our future selves. In fact, a recent study indicates that we see our future selves as a stranger—we don't care what happens to them down the line. Even though we probably should.

Lead researcher Daphna Oyserman of the University of Southern California thinks there's a solution—a way to hack our brains to create a connection to the future and push our present selves to action. All you have to do is frame time in days instead of years.

As part of Oyserman's study, published in Psychological Science, she found that if people framed time in days instead of years, people perceived future events to be closer and thought of them as more urgent.

Oyserman explained in a press release:

"This is a new way to think about reaching goals that does not require willpower and is not about having character or caring.”

Alongside her team of researchers, Oyserman devised a series of seven studies to examine people's perception to time and perusing goals. For one of the experiments, researchers asked a series of online participants how soon would they start saving for one of two scenarios: college or retirement—both very important future investments. But framed the question in units of either days or years. For example, when would they start saving for college that started in either 18 years or in 6,570 days? How about for retirement starting in either 30 years or in 10,950 days?

The participants stated that they would start saving four times sooner when given the “days” condition over the “years” condition.

What's more, in another experiment where participants were asked to think about planning for events in units of days, months, or years, researchers found that the smaller the unit, the closer the event seemed to participants.Oyserman thinks that this could be a handy trick to help people, so “investing in the future does not seem like a sacrifice."

Oyserman hopes that this mind-hack "may be useful to anyone needing to save for retirement or their children's college, to start working on a term paper or dissertation, pretty much anyone with long-term goals or wanting to support someone who has such goals."

Read more at EurekAlert!

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

Self-Promoters Should Avoid Humblebragging—It's Insincere

by Natalie Shoemaker

Humblebragging is an annoying form of self-promotion--it's obnoxious and comes off as insincere. In case you're not familiar, it's a thinly disguised form of boasting that's framed as a complaint. Example: I'm so tired of people telling me how good I look in these shorts. Melissa Dahl from NYMag writes that "hubblebraggarts" aren't fooling anyone by sounding tired of getting compliments, and according to a recent study by Ovul Sezer, Francesca Gino, and Michael I. Norton, you're better off just regular-bragging in order to get ahead.

That's right, these researchers tested humblebragging and it's effectiveness across five experiments, writing that “humblebragging is less effective than simply complaining, because complainers are at least seen as sincere. Despite people’s belief that combining bragging and complaining confers the benefits of both self-promotion strategies, humblebragging fails to pay off.”

In one experiment, researchers sought to find out if humblebragging proved to be a more or less effective way to get one's point across compared to straight-forward bragging. The researchers had 201 participants read either a brag stating “I get hit on all the time” or a humblebrag “Just rolled out of bed and still get hit on all the time, so annoying.”

The participants were then asked to rate how attractive they thought the person behind the statement was. The humblebraggers were rated as less-attractive than the braggers, though, not by much. The humblebraggers received a 4.34 out of a possible 7, while the braggers received a 4.91.

In another experiment, the researchers wanted to test likability of the humblebragger. So, they asked a group of 302 participants imagine a person saying either one of three statements: a complaint (“I am so bored”), a brag (“People mistake me for a model”), or a humblebrag (“I am so bored of people mistaking me for a model”). Based on this one statement, participants were asked to rate how much they liked this person and how sincere they thought they were.

From most liked to least, participants rated the complainer as the most likable, then the bragger, and lastly, the humblebragger. The participants rated the statements the same order for sincerity, as well. It shouldn't be a big surprise to hear that humblebragging comes off as inauthentic--it's just now we have the research to prove it.

People may resort to humblebragging as a way to get ahead in business--after all, studies show modesty won't help move your personal brand forward. So, self-promotion is key to getting noticed in the office, but researchers write that “would-be self-promoters should choose [bragging]—and at least reap the rewards of seeming sincere.”

Take Barbara Corcoran, in her DSN interview she talks about how she was able to get more money out of her company by making sure she worked at building her brand. Hard work helps pay the bills, but it's your personal brand that sends you above and beyond:

Read more at NYMag.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

Loneliness May Cause Healthy Women to Eat More

by Natalie Shoemaker

Loneliness has been describe as a disease. Some scientists say that it's becoming an epidemic among younger adults and others have linked social isolation with heart risks. Why the latter in particular may be the case, scientists aren't certain. Some researchers have pointed to increase stress and depression as the cause, but BPS has written on interesting study that links loneliness to an increase eating habits in healthy women.

Lisa Jaremka headed up a new study that links loneliness with an increased food intake. She and her colleagues gathered 42 women, with an average age of 53, asking them to fast for 12 hours before visiting the lab. Upon their arrival, the women were asked to eat a 930 calorie meal, consisting of eggs, turkey, sausage, biscuits, and gravy—quite a hearty meal. Before and after the meal, the women were asked to rate their hunger levels. Researchers also took their blood before eating, as well as two and seven hours after consuming the meal. The main purpose was to measure their ghrelin levels—an appetite-regulation hormone.

Researchers found that those who felt lonelier exhibited higher levels of ghrelin and reported feeling hungry, “but only among participants with a lower BMI.” Curious, as researchers wrote:

“Loneliness and postprandial ghrelin and hunger were unrelated among participants with a higher BMI.”

This finding would indicate that “hunger may link loneliness to weight gain and its corresponding negative health effects among non-obese people.” As to why these cravings for food plague us during our loneliest hours, the researchers suggest in their paper that this need to eat stems from our earlier days on earth: 

"Eating was a highly social activity throughout human evolution, and today meals are often eaten with other people."

But a consequence of this instinct in modern times is that "people may feel hungrier when they feel socially disconnected because they have either implicitly or explicitly learned that eating helps them feel socially connected and/or provides them with an opportunity for social connection."

It's an interesting study to say the least, but more research and a larger, more diverse pool of participants (e.g. including men) would have helped add more support to the results. Needless to say, more research is necessary.

Read more about the study at BPS.

Photo Credit: Martin Cooper/Flickr

The Kindergarten You'd Want to Send Your Kids To

by Teodora Zareva

In the past few years, the changing role of formal education has finally become a mainstream topic of discussion. While we talk about the need to shift its focus to nurturing autonomy, creativity, cooperation, and other life skills in our kids through changes in curriculum, we need to also look at the physical spaces that our children occupy and how they aid or hinder this change. 

The Fuji Kindergarten, located in Tokyo, Japan is a wonderful example of blending new educational principles with innovative forms of architecture. Designed by husband and wife duo Takahura and Yui Tezuka of Tezuka Architects, it is a spacious, open building that covers 1304 square meters. The building was designed for a Montessori Kindergarten that teaches more than 500 children and is the biggest in Japan.  

The kindergraten is in the shape of an oval with a perimeter of 183 meters. Along this perimeter are located classrooms with sliding doors and no fixed walls, trees that grow through the building, and a wide, flat roof, where kids can run around the entire day. The space has no front or back, beginning or end, and wonderfully blends the inside with the outside, maximizing the space available for secure but unconstrained play. Movable wall partitions, as well as the climate, allow for the space to be open 8 months in the year. 

 

The space allows for free movement and increases the feeling of community. There is no hierarchy in the classrooms, no one sitting at the back or the front. If a kid doesn’t like a certain class, she can just move to another class group. The open space is designed in such a way that it lets in just the right amount or background noise. As the architects say, contrary to what most people think, children actually lose concentration when it is too quiet. 

The roof is one of the most remarkable features of the building. It was the main inspiration for the design.

“We found out children love to keep making circles. If we bring two children under 6, they keep making circles and don't stop. It's a kind of nature instinct, just like the instinct of a small puppy trying to reach its own tail. So, we made it a circle that they can keep running around,” says Takahura Tezuka.

Indeed, they do. The architects tracked the movements of the children, and found out that without any structured activity, the kids run an average of 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) every morning. The roof is inclined toward the inside and only 2.5 meters high. It can easily become a large viewing deck, where 600 kids can sit in the front row to watch a performance or other event taking place in the enclosed central courtyard. 

Watch the inspiring and amusing TEDх talk of Takahura Tezuka, where he talks more about the design of the kindergarten and its functions. 

Photos: Tezuka Arhictects

 

 

Your Search Results Have Turned Google Into an Authority on Fashion Trends

by Robert Montenegro

I'd love to take a look sometime at a Google company directory. I'm sure one of you has a copy laying around somewhere. Does it resemble a phone book? I bet it's like a phone book. Printed out it'd be the size of the yellow pages.

What fascinates me by this prospect is that Google likely boasts the most amusing and myriad array of job titles out of any company in the world. Think of a random job title and there's a chance Google employs someone in that position. Like Senior Cookie Specialist. I'd like to be Google's Senior Cookie Specialist. I should keep an eye out in case it opens up...

The impetus for this very thoughtful introduction was an article from yesterday by PC World's Chandra Steele. It's all about how search results have turned a team of Google data scientists into the world's foremost authority on fashion trends. Steele explains:

"Google has amassed quite the database on all things fashion (6 billion queries, to be exact), which it has used to produce its Spring 2015 U.S. Fashion Trends Report.

From a fashion industry perspective, the trends of spring 2015 are denim-on-denim, culottes, and fringe, fringe, fringe.

But this is at odds with what Google has found people are searching for, according to Google's fashion data scientist Olivier Zimmer and fashion brand strategist Yarden Horwitz."

"Fashion Data Scientist." That totally could have been one of those made-up job titles from above. I imagine the Fashion Data Scientist has lunch in the commissary with the Senior Cookie Specialist. The Rubber Ducky Trends Analyst takes her lunch at her desk, naturally.

You can explore the report (linked again down below) and learn all about the neat research methods the fashion team used to track trends via the aforementioned 6 billion search queries. The report identifies several trends categorized by whether they're "slowly rising though here to stay" or "spiking now and bound to disappear in a flash." On the other side of the coin, you can see which trends are plummeting in popularity versus those on a slow and steady decline. Spoiler alert: If you're heavily invested in palazzo pants you can breathe a sigh of relief. If your closet is full of vintage clothing, it may be time to visit the consignment store while you still can.

The report goes in-depth in many other different categories -- trends are tracked for skirts, shorts, denim, dresses, etc. It's all the fascinating result of heavy data crunching to offer an analytic alternative to the conjecture offered by other outlets. Whether it's all that useful to someone looking for fashion advice, well, I'll leave that to someone who isn't wearing the same clothes he wore in high school.

Then again, I'm not going to hesitate to scan this report for business attire advice as soon as I land my big interview for the open Senior Cookie Specialist job.

Read more at PC Mag and check out Google's Spring 2015 U.S. Fashion Trends Report.

Below, Okcupid co-founder Christian Rudder offers a frank stance on data ownership: 

Photo credit: Devin_Pavel / Shutterstock

A Philosopher's Approach to Getting Organized

by Robert Montenegro

Eric Barker, purveyor of the Barking Up The Wrong Tree blog, does a terrific job writing insightful pieces which examine mundane topics through a scientific lens. Recently, for example, he tackled the topic of disorganization, an issue he explains causes a whole lot of problems for a whole lot of people. Clutter, he writes, will often lead to wasted time and wasted money. And as we've explored here, messy spaces tend to sap productivity and the ability to persevere through difficult tasks.

Ever-creative (perhaps he writes at a cluttered desk), Barker proposes a philosophical approach to tidying up by evoking the questioning attitudes of Marcus Aurelius:

"What is this, fundamentally? What is its nature and substance, its reason for being?"

If you've got a messy space that needs organizing, Barker suggests thinking about what purpose the space serves for you personally:

"The reason you’re so disorganized is because most of us don’t answer this question specifically. And I mean specific to you...

Why does this matter? Your theme becomes the filter by which you determine what belongs and what doesn’t. What takes priority. What should be placed next to what. Because now everything has to serve a purpose.

This is why most organization methods never stick: they’re arbitrary. And underneath it all, you know that. So you fall into the same old bad habits of throwing things here or there."

This is a pragmatic approach to organization that stresses the importance of context. If you can understand that your home office needs to serve you and your specific needs, it'll be easier to adopt a plan for maintaining it in the necessary fashion. As Barker urges, don't allow the organization of your space to become arbitrary in your mind because your needs are anything but arbitrary. Everyone has their ideal image for what a space needs to look and feel like. You should strive for it.

Barker's piece expands much farther than this mini foray into odd applications of ancient philosophy, so if you're really in need for some tips on how to tidy up, I suggest clicking through via the link below.

Read more at Barking Up The Wrong Tree

Below, psychologist Sam Gosling explains that how you arrange your personal spaces will reveal a lot about who you are.

Photos credit: Anticiclo / Shutterstock & GoodMood Photo / Shutterstock

In Countries Like Nepal, Worst-Case Scenarios Remain All Too Likely

by Robert Montenegro

I'm sure in many seismology labs there exist deep files of in-depth disaster projections for the world's most earthquake-prone regions. Something like: "Tokyo - If an 8.0 earthquake were to hit the city the estimated loss of life would be between X and Y." That range between X and Y, of course, represents the difference between the best-case and worst-case scenario in the event of such a quake. Thankfully Tokyo is a good example of a wealthy, first-world city that has taken many precautions to keep that 'Y' figure as low as possible. All things equal, the citizens of Tokyo should expect that as long as all precautionary protocols are followed the actual loss of life during an 8.0 earthquake should be closer to X than Y. It doesn't always play out like that, but we're talking theoretical here.

So what about when a disaster hits a city like Addis Ababa or Dhaka or -- as we've seen this week -- Kathmandu? Meteorologist Eric Holthaus makes an astute point on this subject in a piece from earlier this week over at Slate. The basic gist is this: As the world improves at preventing deaths from natural disasters, poor countries are getting left behind. In places like Nepal, the 'X' figure is way too high and you're much likelier to see Y-level destruction:

"The tragic situation in Nepal is one that developing nations are especially vulnerable to. As a whole, the world is getting much better at preventing large earthquakes from causing deaths in great numbers, but poorer countries like Nepal are getting left behind. The nonprofit GeoHazards International says that over the past few decades, rich countries have reduced mortality from earthquakes at a rate 10 times faster than poor countries."

The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami is a good example of this. Nearly a quarter-million people lost their lives in the aftermath of a 9.2 magnitude quake. Many of those deaths were attributed to poor infrastructure and emergency response systems in underdeveloped countries like Indonesia and Sri Lanka.

We're seeing the same thing now in Nepal. Over 4,400 people are dead and many more displaced because we're watching a worst-case scenario play out. ( I should note: Some outlets are reporting the death toll could surpass 10,000). We're going to continue seeing things like this happen as long as poor countries remain unprepared to deal with major disasters. 

What's most unfortunate is that this isn't a problem you can just toss money at and hope it goes away. There are structural and logistical elements which preclude that sort of action, so any attempt to make things better requires a degree of time and effort not often attractive to investors. For now, until better solutions are put forth by major charities and international organizations, the 'Y' will remain much more probable in places like Kathmandu. 

Read more at Slate

Below, an explanation of how the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation excels in operations innovation, with CEO Sue Desmond-Hellman:

Photo credit: Crystal Eye Studio / Shutterstock