Thursday, May 13, 2010
Thursday, May 6, 2010
this is so cool I have to post it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ne6tB2KiZuk
It'd be fun to teach a music/psychology/anthropology/writing/science class where we could explore some of these dynamics. Octaves and perfect fourths and perfect fifths are the language of birds and cultures everywhere. Plus music is a beautiful demonstration of our humanity.
It'd be fun to teach a music/psychology/anthropology/writing/science class where we could explore some of these dynamics. Octaves and perfect fourths and perfect fifths are the language of birds and cultures everywhere. Plus music is a beautiful demonstration of our humanity.
Novelty
Robert M. Sapolsky, Investigations, “Open Season,” The New Yorker, March 30, 1998, p. 57
ABSTRACT: INVESTIGATIONS about why we reject novelty as we age. The writer, a professor of neuroscience at Stanford University, irritated by his young administrative assistant’s eclectic taste in music, tested whether there any maturational time windows during which we form cultural tastes. He and his research assistants called oldies radio stations, sushi restaurants in the Midwest, and body-piercing parlors and asked the managers when their service was introduced, and how old their average customer was. They found that if you’re more than thirty-five years old when a style of popular music is introduced there’s a greater than ninety-five per cent chance that you will never choose to listen to it. For sushi restaurants, the window of receptivity closed by age thirty-nine; for body-piercing, by twenty-three. The findings were reminiscent of studies that show that creativity declines with age. These studies also indicate that great creative minds not only are less likely to generate something new but are less open to someone else’s novelty. Einstein, in his later years, fought a rear-guard action against quantum mechanics. Psychologist Dean Keith Simonton has shown that the decline in creativity and openness among great minds isn’t predicted by age so much as by how long people have worked in one discipline. Scholars who switch disciplines seem to have their openness rejuvenated. That may be because a new discipline seems fresh and original, or because a high achiever in one discipline is unusually open to novelty in the first place. Or maybe changing disciplines really does stimulate the mind’s youthful openness to novelty. Or it may just be that established generations resist new discoveries because they have the most to lose by them. The explanation is not neurological: in most brain regions there isn’t any dramatic neuron loss as we get older, and there is no such thing as a novelty center in the brain. Given that aging contracts neural networks and makes cognition more repetitive, it would be a humane quirk of evolution if we were reassured by that repetition. There may even be some advantage for social groups if their aging members become protective archivists of their cultural inheritance. But the writer remains dispirited by the impoverishment that comes with this closing of the mind to novelty. If there’s a rich, vibrant world out there, he figures it’s worth putting up a bit of a fight, even it means forgoing Bob Marley’s greatest hits every now and then.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1998/03/30/1998_03_30_057_TNY_LIBRY_000015234#ixzz0nC7mTsgk
ABSTRACT: INVESTIGATIONS about why we reject novelty as we age. The writer, a professor of neuroscience at Stanford University, irritated by his young administrative assistant’s eclectic taste in music, tested whether there any maturational time windows during which we form cultural tastes. He and his research assistants called oldies radio stations, sushi restaurants in the Midwest, and body-piercing parlors and asked the managers when their service was introduced, and how old their average customer was. They found that if you’re more than thirty-five years old when a style of popular music is introduced there’s a greater than ninety-five per cent chance that you will never choose to listen to it. For sushi restaurants, the window of receptivity closed by age thirty-nine; for body-piercing, by twenty-three. The findings were reminiscent of studies that show that creativity declines with age. These studies also indicate that great creative minds not only are less likely to generate something new but are less open to someone else’s novelty. Einstein, in his later years, fought a rear-guard action against quantum mechanics. Psychologist Dean Keith Simonton has shown that the decline in creativity and openness among great minds isn’t predicted by age so much as by how long people have worked in one discipline. Scholars who switch disciplines seem to have their openness rejuvenated. That may be because a new discipline seems fresh and original, or because a high achiever in one discipline is unusually open to novelty in the first place. Or maybe changing disciplines really does stimulate the mind’s youthful openness to novelty. Or it may just be that established generations resist new discoveries because they have the most to lose by them. The explanation is not neurological: in most brain regions there isn’t any dramatic neuron loss as we get older, and there is no such thing as a novelty center in the brain. Given that aging contracts neural networks and makes cognition more repetitive, it would be a humane quirk of evolution if we were reassured by that repetition. There may even be some advantage for social groups if their aging members become protective archivists of their cultural inheritance. But the writer remains dispirited by the impoverishment that comes with this closing of the mind to novelty. If there’s a rich, vibrant world out there, he figures it’s worth putting up a bit of a fight, even it means forgoing Bob Marley’s greatest hits every now and then.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1998/03/30/1998_03_30_057_TNY_LIBRY_000015234#ixzz0nC7mTsgk
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
happiness
a person with a hard-to-pronounce name (cheeks-ahn-me-hi):
http://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow.html...is a nice "flow" redux: figure 1 ties nicely to "abnormal" psych...anxiety/depression/etcetera)
(he talks about hearing Jung talk when he was a teenager)
at 4 minutes-in he shows a graph that shows the general non-correlation of money & happiness.
and another "interesting" talk:
http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory.html
"experiencing self" vs. "memory self" (20 minute video)
many fine resources here:
http://www.pursuit-of-happiness.org/history-of-happiness/
a flow article by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
http://www.psychologytoday.com/print/25074
http://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow.html...is a nice "flow" redux: figure 1 ties nicely to "abnormal" psych...anxiety/depression/etcetera)
(he talks about hearing Jung talk when he was a teenager)
at 4 minutes-in he shows a graph that shows the general non-correlation of money & happiness.
and another "interesting" talk:
http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory.html
"experiencing self" vs. "memory self" (20 minute video)
many fine resources here:
http://www.pursuit-of-happiness.org/history-of-happiness/
a flow article by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
http://www.psychologytoday.com/print/25074
Friday, April 30, 2010
The Americanization of Mental Illness
a fine article that Georgia recommended:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10psyche-t.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10psyche-t.html
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Saturday, April 24, 2010
CDC maps on depression & anxiety...
...plus anxiety & depression connections to Cardiovascular Disease, Diabetes, Asthma, etcetera.
http://www.cdc.gov/Features/dsBRFSSDepressionAnxiety/
http://www.cdc.gov/Features/dsBRFSSDepressionAnxiety/
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