Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction

From the New York Times:

Students have always faced distractions and time-wasters. But computers and cellphones, and the constant stream of stimuli they offer, pose a profound new challenge to focusing and learning.

Researchers say the lure of these technologies, while it affects adults too, is particularly powerful for young people. The risk, they say, is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks — and less able to sustain attention.

"Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing," said Michael Rich, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston. And the effects could linger: "The worry is we're raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently."

Cross-cultural reflections on the mirror self-recognition test

From The British Psychological Society:

The performance of young children on the 'mirror self-recognition test' varies hugely across cultures, a new study has shown. This is the test that involves surreptitiously putting a mark on a child's forehead and then seeing how they react when presented with their mirror image. Attempts by the child to touch or remove the mark are taken as a sign that he or she recognises themselves in the mirror. Studies in the West suggest that around half of all 18-month-olds pass the test, rising to 70 per cent by 24 months. Chimps, orangutans, dolphins and elephants have also been shown to pass the test, and there's recent debate over whether monkeys can too.

Inspired in part by past research conducted in Cameroon, in which children who failed the mirror test tended to be the most compliant and obedient, Broesch and her colleagues speculated that the performance in the non-Western, more interdependent cultures may have been affected by the fact that children in these societies are often discouraged from asking questions (they're expected to learn by watching). 'This is in sharp contrast with the independence and self-initiative that tends to be encouraged and nurtured in the Industrial West,' the researchers said. Another factor could be the non-Western children's relative lack of familiarity with mirrors.

Atheists, agnostics most knowledgeable about religion

From the Los Angeles Times:

American atheists and agnostics tend to be people who grew up in a religious tradition and consciously gave it up, often after a great deal of reflection and study, said Alan Cooperman, associate director for research at the Pew Forum.

"These are people who thought a lot about religion," he said. "They're not indifferent. They care about it."

How becoming a Stoic can make you happy

Via boingboing.net:

The Stoics were interested in leading a life of "tranquility," meaning a life free of "anger, anxiety, fear, grief, and envy." To achieve such a life the Stoics developed, in the words of historian Paul Veyne, a "paradoxical recipe for happiness," that included the practice of "negative visualization." By frequently and vividly imagining worst-case scenarios -- the death of a child, financial catastrophe, ruined health -- the Stoics believed you would learn to appreciate what you have, and curb your insatiable appetite for more material goods, social status, and other objects of desire.

Reading the book, I had no trouble understanding how negative visualization could be an effective antidote against "hedonic adaptation." By imagining ourselves to be homeless, for instance, we can reset our desire for a more luxurious home and once again appreciate the roof over our head that we started taking for granted shortly after moving in.

God did not create the universe... for us

From Reuters:

In his latest book, he [Steven Hawking] said the 1992 discovery of a planet orbiting another star other than the Sun helped deconstruct the view of the father of physics Isaac Newton that the universe could not have arisen out of chaos but was created by God.

"That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions -- the single Sun, the lucky combination of Earth-Sun distance and solar mass, far less remarkable, and far less compelling evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings," he writes.

The fact that God did not create the Earth "just to please us human begins" is not an argument against the existence of God.

God has his own life and he does not exist to please us. Rather, we exist to please him. He cannot be seen through eyes that seek to exploit and control him.

Flawed Reasoning is Incapable of Seeing Its Own Flaws

... phenomenon can be observed by anyone who cares to see it, those who have observed it have always laid blame for it on the limitations and the flaws of the systems, never on the limitations and the flaws of the human ability to think and to reason. For some un-reason, we feel that our ability to reason is limitless and infinitely perfectible. Nobody has voiced the idea that the exercise of our ability to think can reach the point of diminishing, then negative, returns. It is yet to be persuasively argued that the human propensity for abstract reasoning is a defect of breeding that leads to collective insanity. Perhaps the argument would have to be made recursively: The faculty in question is so flawed that it is incapable of seeing its own flaws.

Via Harmonist.

'think of the future as an open question'

From Scientific American:

[Psychologist Ibrahim Senay of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign] measured the volunteers' intentions to start and stick to a fitness regimen. And in this real-world scenario, he got the same basic result: those primed with the interrogative phrase "Will I?" expressed a much greater commitment to exercise regularly than did those primed with the declarative phrase "I will."

...those with questioning minds were more intrinsically motivated to change. They were looking for a positive inspiration from within, rather than attempting to hold themselves to a rigid standard. Those asserting will lacked this internal inspiration, which explains in part their weak commitment to future change.

Happiness Project interview

Happiness Project interview: "Gretchen Rubin, author of the terrific book I reviewed in January, The Happiness Project, interviewed me on her always-interesting Happiness Project blog.

Gretchen: What's something you know now about happiness that you didn't know when you were 18 years old?

Mark: When I was 18 I thought that I had to go out and find things to make me happy. Now I am happiest when I don't venture past my property line. There is a world of adventure in my house and yard -- books, my family, drawing and painting, making yogurt, sauerkraut, and kombucha, beekeeping, raising chickens, making things. I still enjoy going out and seeing the rest of the world, but I also am at the point where I am never bored by staying home. Life gets more interesting as I grow older.

General Theory of Individuality

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education

One of the unspoken secrets in basic scientific research, from anthropology to zoology ... is that, nearly always, individuals turn out to be different from one another, and that—to an extent rarely admitted and virtually never pursued—scientific generalizations tend to hush up those differences. It can be argued that that is what generalizations are: statements that apply to a larger class of phenomena and must, by definition, do violence to individuality. But since science seeks to explain observed phenomena, it should also be able to explain the granular particularity of such phenomena. In fact, generalities lose potency if they occur at the cost of artificially leveling otherwise significant features of reality.

The problem with the simplicity movement

The problem with the simplicity movement is that its proponents mistake simplicity, which is an aesthetic lifestyle choice, for humility, which is a genuine virtue. Humility is an honest acknowledgment of one's limitations and lowliness in the great scheme of things and a realization that power over other human beings is a dangerous thing, always to be exercised with utmost caution. The Amish, as well as monks, Eastern and Western, cultivate humility because they know they have a duty toward what is larger than themselves.

Original: Not Really Simple by Charlotte Allen, April 19, 2010.

Family Gets in the Way of Work for Materialistic Individuals, Study Finds

Via ScienceDaily:

"Highly materialistic people pour their efforts into work as this produces tangible materialistic rewards -- money and possessions. They therefore see any obstacle to work -including their family, as disruptive. This finding adds 'work-family conflict' to the already long list of the negative effects of materialistic values on personal well-being."

The Futility of Possession

A recent study by Cornell University concludes:

... people get more enduring happiness from their experiences than their possessions ...

Possessions have value only to the degree that we consider them "ours" but nothing belongs to us forever. Possessions will deteriorate, loosing their novelty and value over time. Still, we work so hard to acquire, retain and protect them. Those efforts are ultimately futile, hence the inherent dissatisfaction with possessions.

I'd like to emphasize the experience of letting go as exemplified by the chorus of The Streets' Everything Is Borrowed:

I came to this world with nothing
And I leave with nothing but love
Everything else is just borrowed

Why Ask Why?

In The Real Secret of Thoroughly Excellent Companies, Peter Bregman writes about the process of asking questions:

During his meeting with the front desk staff, [Michael Newcombe] learned they were slower than usual in checking in guests because rooms weren't available. Then, in his meeting with housekeeping staff, someone asked if the hotel was running low on king size sheets. Most CEOs wouldn't be interested in that question, but Michael asked why. Well, the maid answered, it's taking us longer to turn over rooms because we have to wait for the sheets. So he kept asking questions to different employee groups until he discovered that one of the dryers was broken and waiting for a custom part. That reduced the number of available sheets. Which slowed down housekeeping. Which reduced room availability. Which delayed guests from checking in.

He fixed the problem in 24 hours. A problem he never would have known about without open communication with all his employees.

The process of inquiry (vicara) driven by desire for truth and communal benefit is very powerful. We often become content with superficial explanations and avoid deeper reasoning. The example above demonstrates the effectiveness of such a process. It is comparable, if not identical to, the dialectical (Socratic) methods in philosophy.

Consciousness is to Nuerons as Water is to H2O

Ray Tallis makes some interesting statements in his article, You won't find consciousness in the brain:

... my argument is not about technical ... limitations. It is about the deep philosophical confusion embedded in the assumption that if you can correlate neural activity with consciousness, then you have demonstrated they are one and the same thing, and that a physical science such as neurophysiology is able to show what consciousness truly is.

Many neurosceptics have argued that neural activity is nothing like experience, and that the least one might expect if A and B are the same is that they be indistinguishable from each other. Countering that objection by claiming that, say, activity in the occipital cortex and the sensation of light are two aspects of the same thing does not hold up because the existence of "aspects" depends on the prior existence of consciousness and cannot be used to explain the relationship between neural activity and consciousness.

This disposes of the famous claim by John Searle, Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley: that neural activity and conscious experience stand in the same relationship as molecules of H2O to water, with its properties of wetness, coldness, shininess and so on. The analogy fails as the level at which water can be seen as molecules, on the one hand, and as wet, shiny, cold stuff on the other, are intended to correspond to different "levels" at which we are conscious of it. But the existence of levels of experience or of description presupposes consciousness. Water does not intrinsically have these levels.

Via Harmonist.