life
As much as I would like to edit materials online, I still do a majority of it on physical paper. And with that comes the risk of paper cuts, which can hurt like hell. Ferris Jabr, an editor from Scientific American, explains in the following video why paper cuts hurt so badly.
Send to Kindle
Women and men react differently when it comes to bad news. According to a study from the University of Montreal at the Centre for Studies on Human Stress of Louis-H. Lafontaine Hospital, women’s sensitivity to stressful situations increases after being subjected to negative news. The same negative news doesn’t affect men. The women, though, were better able to recollect what they had learn more so than the men.
“It’s difficult to avoid the news, considering the multitude of news sources out there,” said lead author Marie-France Marin. “And what if all that news was bad for us? It certainly looks like that could be the case.”
I’ll let the University of Montreal news center tell you the rest of the story:
The researchers asked 60 people divided into four groups to read actual news stories. In order to determine their stress levels, the researchers took samples of the participants’ saliva and analyzed them for a hormone called cortisol. Higher levels of this bodily chemical indicate higher levels of stress. A group of men and a group of women read “neutral” news stories, about subjects such as the opening of a new park or the premiere of a new film, while the another two gender segregated groups read negative stories, about events such as murders or accidents. Saliva samples were taken again in order to determine the effect of these news stories. “When our brain perceives a threatening situation, our bodies begin to produce stress hormones that enter the brain and may modulate memories of stressful or negative events,” explained Sonia Lupien, Director of the Centre for Studies on Human Stress and a professor at the university’s Department of Psychiatry. “This led us to believe that reading a negative news story should provoke the reader’s stress reaction.”
The participants were then confronted with a series of standardized tasks involving memory and intellect that enable researchers to evaluate and compare how people react to stressful situations. A final round of samples was then taken to determine the effects of this experience. Finally, the next day, the participants were called back to talk about what they had read. The researchers were surprised by what they found. “Although the news stories alone did not increase stress levels, they did make the women more reactive, affecting their physiological responses to later stressful situations,” Marin explained. The researchers discovered this when they saw that the level of cortisol in the women who have read the negative news was higher after the “stress” part of the experiment compared to the women who have read the neutral news. “Moreover, the women were able to remember more of the details of the negative stories. It is interesting to note that we did not observe this phenomenon amongst the male participants.”
The researchers believe that evolutionary factors may be at play, noting that other scientists have considered whether an emphasis on the survival of offspring may have influenced the evolution of the female stress system, leading women to be more empathetic. This theory would explain why women could be more susceptible to indirect threats. “More studies should be undertaken to better understand how gender, generational differences and other socio-cultural factors affect our experience, as individuals, of the negative information that perpetually surrounds us,” Marin said.
(Image via Flickr: Phoney Nickle / Creative Commons)
Send to Kindle
Personally, I’m a hugger. However, most of those hugs precede handshakes. One can’t move too fast on the whole getting to know you scale. Plus, shaking hands first eases a stranger’s feelings about you. Don’t believe me? Science says so.
Beckman Institute researcher Florin Dolcos and University of Illinois postdoctoral research associate Sanda Dolcos found that “a handshake preceding social interaction enhanced the positive impact of approach and diminished the negative impact of avoidance behavior on the evaluation of social interaction.”
That makes sense. Their study, published in the December issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, gives scientific proof for the first time about why a handshake is important.
The study showed “increased sensitivity to approach than to avoidance behavior in amygdala and superior temporal sulcus, which were linked to a positive evaluation of approach behavior and a positive impact of handshake.” Also, the “nucleus accumbens, which is a reward processing region, showed greater activity for Handshake than for No-handshake conditions” — proving a link to “the positive effect of handshake on social evaluation.”
“Overall, our study not only replicated previous reports that identify activity in regions of the social cognition network, but also provided insight into the contribution of these regions into evaluating approach and avoidance social interactions, and grant neuroscientific support for the power of a handshake,” Sanda Dolcos said.
Florin Dolcos says that a firm, confident, and friendly handshake leads to positive feelings.
“In a business setting this is what people are expecting, and those who know these things use them,” he said. “Not a very long time ago you could get a loan based on a handshake. So it conveys something very important, very basic. Yet the science underlying this is so far behind. We knew these things intuitively but now we also have the scientific support.”
There you have it. But beware: I’m still giving you a hug when I see you next.
(Story materials and image via the Beckman Institute.)
Send to KindleWhenever people tell me they don’t have time to read, I think of this quote.
Send to KindleI’m going to have to put this up in my cubicle at work and in my study at home.
this isn’t happiness™ (The Economist), Peteski.
Send to KindleThere’s something very calming about this image. I’ll let it lead me into the weekend.
Send to KindleI saw this poster online the other day, and it grabbed my interest. I love the design. More so, I love the message.
this isn’t happiness™ (Foreign lands), Peteski.
Send to Kindle
There’s been a lot of talk at this conference I’m attending about being in service to others. That helping others is the path to happiness and contentment.
I agree with that, and I do try to be of service as much as possible. Lately, though, I feel like I’m being in service just to make others look good. I have a problem with that, because it’s selfish.
Maybe it’s because I’m getting older and gaining experience, but I’ve been noticing this selfish behavior a lot more. It’s especially prevalent in the workplace. I know a lot of folks are trying to get ahead, get that big promotion, cash that big paycheck. I don’t care about any of that, so when I’m asked to do things for someone so he or she can get all those things, I feel disgusted. At the person and with myself for helping.
In the future, I’m going to start asking why a lot more. That way, I can figure out the real reason something is asked of me. Will that be annoying? Yes, but maybe in the end, the person doing the asking may realize how selfish some requests are and stop the behavior.
(Image via Flickr: Bart Everson / Creative Commons)
Send to Kindle
I immediately take out something to read as soon as I’m in my seat on an airplane. Knowing I have a few hours of quiet reading time makes me very happy, and because of this, I rarely talk to the people sitting next to me. For the most part, when they see me pull out a book, they don’t bother chit-chatting with me.
Today, though, on a flight to Las Vegas, a gentleman started to talk to me as I was reading. He was pleasant, and asked an easy intro question: business or pleasure? If you’re going to Vegas, that’s a reasonable question. I told him business, he followed up with other questions about what kind of business I was in, where I was staying, etc. I didn’t want to be rude, so I asked him the same type of questions. The conversation came to its natural conclusion, and I went back to reading.
During the entire trip, however, I could see him out of the corner of my eye acting very antsy, looking around the airplane’s cabin, trying to catch anyone’s eye that would talk with him. I felt bad that I wanted to read instead of conversing with this man. Then I began to wonder why I don’t like to chit-chat like that. Why do I become shy or hesitant to meet new people? Or was it the situation? Would I had been more apt to speak at length with him if we were at a party? Probably so. I think it was the location.
Getting on a plane for a trip to me is like those times when you have the toilet to yourself. It’s your alone time. You have your assigned seat with your assigned overhead light and air nozzle. Sometimes you even get your own window. I know you’re not really alone and that there will be times you have to (or want to) talk to the other passengers. But for me, it’s a time to create an imaginary bubble where I’m all alone, enjoying a good book, and the lull of an engine roaring across the sky.
(Image via Flickr: Phillip Kalantzis-Cope / Creative Commons)
Send to KindleI visited the State Fair of Texas today. I visit every year, primarily to taste the latest fried food creations. Out of the ones I tried, my favorites were the Deep-Fried Divine Chocolate Tres Leches Cake and the Picnic on a Stick. Both were good, though still not as good as fried butter or a fried peanut-butter and jelly sandwich.
There is also a Chinese Lantern Festival at the fair this year. It’s reasonably priced before sunset, but once it gets dark it gets expensive. Still, after dark offers opportunities for some good photos. I took the one below, and I like the Ferris wheel in the background, which everyone should ride once in their lives.
Send to KindleOne of my pet peeves is people saying they don’t have time to do something. Whenever someone says that, I immediately want to reply that it’s not that they don’t have time, it’s that they’re choosing one thing over another. We all have the same amount of time. It’s what we choose to do with that time that determines our lives. That’s why I love the following quote so much. Remember it the next time you want to say you don’t have time for something.
Send to Kindle
I’ll begin by declaring that I make no excuses for Jonah Lehrer’s actions nor justify his behavior. Frankly, I’m disappointed by what has happened. What I’m proposing here, though, is a clue to why things transpired as they did.
As a fan of his writing for many years, I’ve had the opportunity to interview him twice for the publication for which I work. It was me that prodded my organization to hire him to speak at our annual conference. After three years of pushing for him as a keynote speaker, he finally gave a well-received address to our association’s members in July. It was his last major speaking engagement before his fall from grace.
If you’re reading this and you have no idea who Jonah Lehrer is or what he did, then let me recap. He’s a neuroscientist and popular science writer with three books (two of them best sellers) under his belt, a heavy speaking engagement slate, and a New Yorker staff writer. Well, he was. He was all of these things until he admitted to misquoting Bob Dylan in his recent book, Imagine: How Creativity Works. He resigned from the New Yorker, and now all his books are being thoroughly fact-checked for any other misquotes or fabrications.
Fact-checkers will determine in the coming weeks how far Lehrer has to climb out of his hole. In the meantime, I’d like to address the last chapter in Imagine, and the clues it offers as to what may have been going on in Lehrer’s mind as he wrote the book. I’m not a psychologist or doctor or anything of the sort. This is pure speculation, but something to consider when talking about Lehrer’s proposed sins.
In “The Shakespeare Paradox,” Lehrer begins by telling how Shakespeare was a genius at using others’ works and knitting them together to create is own “original” plays.
But Shakespeare didn’t just read these texts and imitate their best parts. He made them his own, seamlessly blending them together in his plays. Sometimes, this literary approach got Shakespeare into trouble. His peers repeatedly accused him of plagiarism, and he was often guilty, at least by contemporary standards. What these allegations failed to take into account, however, was that Shakespeare was pioneering a new creative method in which every conceivable source informed his art. For Shakespeare, the act of creation was inseparable from the act of connection.
Could it be that Lehrer was purposely misquoting Dylan in order to connect his ideas and his ideas to his audience? Four hundred years from now, will we be declaring Lehrer a genius, as we declare Shakespeare is?
It’s argued that the biggest difference is Shakespeare dealt in fiction. Plagiarism, though, doesn’t differentiate. I’m sure some of those playwrights and authors would love a slither of Shakespeare’s fame attached to them.
Lehrer, later in the chapter, discusses how copyrights and their continuous extensions stifle creativity.
The problem with these extensions is that they discourage innovation, preventing people from remixing and remaking old forms…And that his why we should always think of young William Shakespeare stealing from Marlowe and Holinshed and Kyd. (If Shakespeare were writing today, his plays would be the subject of endless lawsuits.) It doesn’t matter if it’s a hip-hop album made up of remixes and music samples or an engineer tweaking a gadget in a San Jose garage: we have to make sure that people can be inspired by the work of others, that the commons remains a rich source of creativity.
Lehrer is a huge Dylan fan. Was Dylan’s creative process of using others’ tunes to craft his own music an inspiration to Lehrer? Is the role of remixing (accomplished with quotes, too) a way of making something more clear, a way of bringing forth a universal truth?
So many questions, I know. As mentioned, I’m a fan of Lehrer, and this situation has me questioning him, his research, and the role of the writer in today’s society. Perhaps Lehrer’s book title inspired him.
…although the imagination is inspired by the everyday world–by its flaws and beauties–we are able to see beyond our sources, to imagine things that exist only in the mind. We notice an incompleteness and we can complete it; the cracks in things become a source of light. (From the “Coda” section)
If Lehrer misquoted/remixed Dylan (or maybe other sources), if he added lines to complete a thought to help us understand our minds a little better, is that a bad thing? Do you care if it’s truth or fiction if it helps you become a better person?
What I’m ultimately asking is: What’s the big deal? I can hear a lot of you gasping and saying, “Oh my, what gall!” Does Michael Moynihan’s discovery of the Dylan misquotes change the overall message of the book? The answer is no. Does knowing Shakespeare stole from others diminish your appreciation of his plays? Once again, the answer is no. Should Lehrer had been more upfront about how he created his work? Personally, I say yes, but as we’ve seen over time, artists and writers rarely acknowledge who or from what they’re cribbing. Before we draw and quarter these creators, perhaps we should all stop for a moment and examine the stories we tell ourselves in order to live a little more fully day after day. By doing so, we’ll soon find that we’re not that much different from Shakespeare, or Jonah Lehrer.
Send to Kindle