Recent Feeds + Reads

[April 23 was] World Book Night, an international event wherein devoted volunteers pick a favorite out of 30 books, selected by an independent panel of librarians and booksellers, and hand copies out in their communities, encouraging those who don’t normally read or have access to books to experience something new. In case you missed the boat on volunteering, but are inspired to gift a book to someone who doesn’t read very often, we’ve put together a list of foolproof gift books that (almost) everyone will love. Some of these have been selected as World Book Night books in the past, and some have not, but we think they all will encourage a brand new or rediscovered reading habit — and your reputation as an excellent gift-giver.

[ ] The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

[√] One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez

[√] Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger

[ ] Dune, Frank Herbert

[ ] Tenth of December, George Saunders

[ ] The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster

[ ] Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris

[√] The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz

[ ] The Secret History, Donna Tartt

[√] The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

I’ve read and enjoyed the books indicated by a checkmark [√] .

Hope a lottery win will make you happy forever? Think again, evidence suggests a big payout won’t make that much of a difference. Tom Stafford explains why.

One way of accounting for this is to assume that lottery winners get used to their new level of wealth, and simply adjust back to a baseline level of happiness – something called the “hedonic treadmill”. Another explanation is that our happiness depends on how we feel relative to our peers. If you win the lottery you may feel richer than your neighbours, and think that moving to a mansion in a new neighbourhood would make you happy, but then you look out of the window and realise that all your new friends live in bigger mansions.

Both of these phenomena undoubtedly play a role, but the deeper mystery is why we’re so bad at knowing what will give us true satisfaction in the first place.

Part of the problem is that happiness isn’t a quality like height, weight or income that can be easily measured and given a number (whatever psychologists try and pretend). Happiness is a complex, nebulous state that is fed by transient simple pleasures, as well as the more sustained rewards of activities that only make sense from a perspective of years or decades. So, perhaps it isn’t surprising that we sometimes have trouble acting in a way that will bring us the most happiness. Imperfect memories and imaginations mean that our moment-to-moment choices don’t always reflect our long-term interests.

It even seems like the very act of trying to measuring it can distract us from what might make us most happy. An important study by Christopher Hsee of the Chicago School of Business and colleagues showed how this could happen.

“It’s ironic that people look at this link between kids and video games and decide the games are what’s causing them to act a certain way,” Dichtl told the Daily Dot. “For me, video games were a way to escape the things that were causing my depression.”

Dichtl is one of many young gamers trying to upend the conventional wisdom about gaming and depression. He recently started a blog to chronicle his story, while developers and other gamers around the world are trying to prove that video games can be a healthy vehicle for dealing with despair.

They are running up against an entrenched narrative. Just two years ago, the New York Times made hay out of two separate studies that tracked the social characteristics of young gamers.

One, published in the journal Pediatrics, tracked more than 3,000 school children in Singapore over several years. The study found that heavy gamers, who played more than 31 hours a week, were more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety, or social phobias. That same article cites a Chinese study, published in Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine, which found that teenagers who spent excessive amounts of time on the internet in general were more likely to suffer from depression.

Some of the video game industry’s biggest players want games to grow up and begin reflecting the psychological and emotional complexity of other types of media. […]

In addition to gaining legitimacy as an artform, such a shift in the game development could allow users to reap greater emotional and psychological well being. Because at the end of the day, O’Neil, Dichtl, and others say the link between gaming and depression is all about the player’s individual relationship with the games they play.

E-readers and tablets are becoming more popular as such technologies improve, but research suggests that reading on paper still boasts unique advantages […]

How exactly does the technology we use to read change the way we read? How reading on screens differs from reading on paper is relevant not just to the youngest among us, but to just about everyone who reads—to anyone who routinely switches between working long hours in front of a computer at the office and leisurely reading paper magazines and books at home; to people who have embraced e-readers for their convenience and portability, but admit that for some reason they still prefer reading on paper; and to those who have already vowed to forgo tree pulp entirely. As digital texts and technologies become more prevalent, we gain new and more mobile ways of reading—but are we still reading as attentively and thoroughly? How do our brains respond differently to onscreen text than to words on paper? Should we be worried about dividing our attention between pixels and ink or is the validity of such concerns paper-thin?

Since at least the 1980s researchers in many different fields—including psychology, computer engineering, and library and information science—have investigated such questions in more than one hundred published studies. The matter is by no means settled. Before 1992 most studies concluded that people read slower, less accurately and less comprehensively on screens than on paper. Studies published since the early 1990s, however, have produced more inconsistent results: a slight majority has confirmed earlier conclusions, but almost as many have found few significant differences in reading speed or comprehension between paper and screens. And recent surveys suggest that although most people still prefer paper—especially when reading intensively—attitudes are changing as tablets and e-reading technology improve and reading digital books for facts and fun becomes more common.

“There is physicality in reading,” says developmental psychologist and cognitive scientist Maryanne Wolf of Tufts University, “maybe even more than we want to think about as we lurch into digital reading—as we move forward perhaps with too little reflection. I would like to preserve the absolute best of older forms, but know when to use the new.”

Beyond treating individual letters as physical objects, the human brain may also perceive a text in its entirety as a kind of physical landscape. When we read, we construct a mental representation of the text in which meaning is anchored to structure. The exact nature of such representations remains unclear, but they are likely similar to the mental maps we create of terrain—such as mountains and trails—and of man-made physical spaces, such as apartments and offices.

Because of their easy navigability, paper books and documents may be better suited to absorption in a text. “The ease with which you can find out the beginning, end and everything inbetween and the constant connection to your path, your progress in the text, might be some way of making it less taxing cognitively, so you have more free capacity for comprehension,” Mangen says.

Supporting this research, surveys indicate that screens and e-readers interfere with two other important aspects of navigating texts: serendipity and a sense of control. People report that they enjoy flipping to a previous section of a paper book when a sentence surfaces a memory of something they read earlier, for example, or quickly scanning ahead on a whim. People also like to have as much control over a text as possible—to highlight with chemical ink, easily write notes to themselves in the margins as well as deform the paper however they choose.

Surveys and consumer reports also suggest that the sensory experiences typically associated with reading—especially tactile experiences—matter to people more than one might assume. Text on a computer, an e-reader and—somewhat ironically—on any touch-screen device is far more intangible than text on paper. Whereas a paper book is made from pages of printed letters fixed in a particular arrangement, the text that appears on a screen is not part of the device’s hardware—it is an ephemeral image. When reading a paper book, one can feel the paper and ink and smooth or fold a page with one’s fingers; the pages make a distinctive sound when turned; and underlining or highlighting a sentence with ink permanently alters the paper’s chemistry. So far, digital texts have not satisfyingly replicated this kind of tactility (although some companies are innovating, at least with keyboards).

Generally, remembering is a weaker form of memory that is likely to fade unless it is converted into more stable, long-term memory that is “known” from then on. When taking the quiz, volunteers who had read study material on a monitor relied much more on remembering than on knowing, whereas students who read on paper depended equally on remembering and knowing. Garland and her colleagues think that students who read on paper learned the study material more thoroughly more quickly; they did not have to spend a lot of time searching their minds for information from the text, trying to trigger the right memory—they often just knew the answers.

Other researchers have suggested that people comprehend less when they read on a screen because screen-based reading is more physically and mentally taxing than reading on paper.

An emerging collection of studies emphasizes that in addition to screens possibly taxing people’s attention more than paper, people do not always bring as much mental effort to screens in the first place. Subconsciously, many people may think of reading on a computer or tablet as a less serious affair than reading on paper.

When reading on screens, people seem less inclined to engage in what psychologists call metacognitive learning regulation—strategies such as setting specific goals, rereading difficult sections and checking how much one has understood along the way.

To date, many engineers, designers and user-interface experts have worked hard to make reading on an e-reader or tablet as close to reading on paper as possible. […]

But why, one could ask, are we working so hard to make reading with new technologies like tablets and e-readers so similar to the experience of reading on the very ancient technology that is paper? Why not keep paper and evolve screen-based reading into something else entirely? Screens obviously offer readers experiences that paper cannot. Scrolling may not be the ideal way to navigate a text as long and dense as Moby Dick, but the New York Times, Washington Post, ESPN and other media outlets have created beautiful, highly visual articles that depend entirely on scrolling and could not appear in print in the same way. […] New e-publishing companies like Atavist offer tablet readers long-form journalism with embedded interactive graphics, maps, timelines, animations and sound tracks. And some writers are pairing up with computer programmers to produce ever more sophisticated interactive fiction and nonfiction in which one’s choices determine what one reads, hears and sees next.

When it comes to intensively reading long pieces of plain text, paper and ink may still have the advantage. But text is not the only way to read.

No one knows why music has such a potent effect on our emotions. But thanks to some recent studies we have a few intriguing clues.

We like music because it makes us feel good. Why does it make us feel good? In 2001, neuroscientists Anne Blood and Robert Zatorre at McGill University in Montreal provided an answer. Using magnetic resonance imaging they showed that people listening to pleasurable music had activated brain regions called the limbic and paralimbic areas, which are connected to euphoric reward responses, like those we experience from sex, good food and addictive drugs. Those rewards come from a gush of a neurotransmitter called dopamine. As DJ Lee Haslam told us, music is the drug.

But why would a sequence of sounds with no obvious survival value do the same thing [as sex, food and drugs]? […] It sets up sonic patterns and regularities that tempt us to make unconscious predictions about what’s coming next. If we’re right, the brain gives itself a little reward – as we’d now see it, a surge of dopamine. The constant dance between expectation and outcome thus enlivens the brain with a pleasurable play of emotions.

The idea that musical emotion arises from little violations and manipulations of our expectations seems the most promising candidate theory, but it is very hard to test. One reason for this is that music simply offers so much opportunity for creating and violating expectations that it’s not clear what we should measure and compare. We expect rising melodies to continue to rise – but perhaps not indefinitely, as they never do. We expect pleasing harmonies rather than jarring dissonance – but what sounds pleasing today may have seemed dissonant two hundred years ago. We expect rhythms to be regular, but are surprised if the jumpy syncopation of rock’n’roll suddenly switches to four-square oompah time. Expectation is a complicated, ever-changing interplay of how the piece we’re hearing has gone so far, how it compares with similar pieces and styles, and how it compares with all we’ve ever heard.

So, one corollary of Meyer’s theory is that emotion in music will be primarily culturally specific. In order to have any expectations about where the music will go in the first place, you need to know the rules – to appreciate what is normal. This varies from one culture to another. […]

This picture also implies that music isn’t just about good vibrations – it can provoke other feelings too, such as anxiety, boredom and even anger. Composers and performers walk a delicate tightrope, needing to tweak expectations to just the right degree. Not enough, and the music is dully predictable, as nursery tunes seem to adults. Too much, and we can’t develop any expectations at all – which is why many people struggle with modernist atonal music.

All this can rationalise a great deal about why we feel emotions from particular musical phrases and performances. [A …] brain-scanning study […] showed that the rewards stimulated by music heard for the first time are particularly dependent on communication between “emotion” and “logic” circuits in the brain.

But it’s not the whole story. Our emotional response to music may be conditioned by so many other factors too – if we are hearing it alone or in a crowd, for example, or if we associate a particular piece with a past experience, good or bad (dubbed the “Darling they’re playing our tune” theory).

Underneath all these ideas is the fact that we’re not even sure what kind of emotion we’re talking about. We can recognise sad music without feeling sad. And even if we do feel sad, it’s not like the sadness of bereavement – it can be enjoyable even if it provokes tears. Some music, like some of Bach’s, can create intense emotion even though we can’t quite put into words what the emotion is. So we’ll surely never understand why music stimulates emotions at least until we have a better picture of what our emotional world is really like.

Kids who hate stinky cheese and greens often grow into adults who can’t get enough of them. Why do our tastes seem to transform in our teens? And can we change our tastes deliberately as adults? Here’s what scientists know so far.

The first thing to know about our food preferences is that genetic influences play a surprisingly small role in the matter. We are born with an innate like of sweetness and a dislike of anything sour or bitter.

These taste partialities have evolutionary roots. Sweet foods, such as fruits, are good sources of nutrients and energy, so we are predisposed to like them. “Ripe fruits are generally safe to eat and have a lot of vitamins,” Phillips says. “And ripe fruits are naturally sweet.” Bitter tastes, on the other hand, are common in plant toxins, so we are hardwired to detect and dislike them. This aversion to bitterness partially explains why I — along with most other people — once hated certain vegetables.

We are also built to favor fatty food for their high calorie count, which provides us with necessary energy. So you’re particularly bound to savor anything that hits you with a fat-sweet or fat-salt combo […]

While these innate factors do influence our food choices, the preferences we develop in our lives are mostly learned, Philips says. And they can begin before we are even born.

Inside of the womb, the fetus inhales and exhales amniotic fluid, which is flavored by the mother’s dietary habits.

After birth, your preferences continue shaping for the next two years. “Up until the age of 2 you will eat anything,” Philips says. But then you become neophobic — that is, you don’t like new food. So if you hadn’t already been exposed to a certain flavor by the time you hit your terrible twos — whether through amniotic fluid, breast milk or solid food — chances are you won’t like it. […]

The key, then, is to make the food not new. Basically, you’ll like a new or previously hated flavor if you’re repeatedly exposed to it — studies suggest that it takes 10 to 15 exposures. “So if there’s something you don’t like, just eat it over and over and over again,” Philip says.

Learning to like a new flavor is relatively easy, but switching to a whole new diet takes time […] In these cases, your body is already very used to certain things, so it’s more than just making a psychological adjustment, as it is with learning to like new flavors — you’re taste buds need to adjust, too.

For the most part, our food preferences are learned, though we have a predisposition to like certain tastes. It all seems simple enough, but there’s a lot more the psychology of taste can teach us about what we like to eat.

For example, some people are considered “supertasters.” These individuals, in general, taste bitterness more intensely, so they are more likely to avoid green vegetables […]

Another thing to consider is the role that our other senses play in our food preferences. We all know that the smell of food affects how it tastes, but visual cues also matter. If you change the color of a common food or drink, such as making grape juice green, people will perceive the flavor as being different. Some of us also have biases against certain textures, Philips says, though we can learn to get over those feelings.

People who often say they’re “too busy” or “crazy busy” sound like buzzing busy signals. And when you start sounding like an appliance, it makes it hard to connect with you.

The Meaning Behind “Busy”

When you go on to other people, or to yourself, about being so busy, you’re often engaging in doublespeak. Let’s dig a little deeper to translate what you actually mean when you get in the habit of saying or acting like you’re too busy:

I matter. […]

I am super-important. […]

I’m giving you an easy excuse. […]

I’m afraid. […]

I feel guilty. […]

The worship of busy-ness as such a virtue is where the trouble begins, providing the foundation to its indiscriminate use as a front or an excuse. It’s easy, even enticing, to neglect the importance of filling our time with meaning, thinking instead that we’ll be content with merely filling our time. We self-impose these measures of self-worth by looking at quantity instead of quality of activity.

Break Free

[I]f you find yourself feeling frazzled, habitually explaining away things with a busy status, it’s probably time to slow down and pay attention to the important, difficult stuff. Examine what is keeping you so busy compared to what you really should and want to be doing.

Here are a couple ways to start:

Track yo’ self. In the quest to better connect your attention and action, do an attention audit. Track your time […]

Change your language. Instead of putting things in terms of time and activity, frame them in terms of priority […]

Press pause. Not only do we need to rest and renew, we also have to slow down and pause to acknowledge our feelings, celebrate our accomplishments, and gain some insight.

Do less and feel more joy. […] Pay attention to what’s in front of you, and you’ll gain control and find joy.

In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognised the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to change our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The media feeds us small bites of trivial matter, tidbits that don’t really concern our lives and don’t require thinking. That’s why we experience almost no saturation. Unlike reading books and long magazine articles (which require thinking), we can swallow limitless quantities of news flashes, which are bright-coloured candies for the mind. Today, we have reached the same point in relation to information that we faced 20 years ago in regard to food. We are beginning to recognise how toxic news can be.

News misleads. […] News leads us to walk around with the completely wrong risk map in our heads.

News is irrelevant. Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career or your business. The point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to you. But people find it very difficult to recognise what’s relevant. It’s much easier to recognise what’s new.

News has no explanatory power. News items are bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world. Will accumulating facts help you understand the world? Sadly, no. The relationship is inverted. The important stories are non-stories: slow, powerful movements that develop below journalists’ radar but have a transforming effect.

News is toxic to your body. It constantly triggers the limbic system. Panicky stories spur the release of cascades of glucocorticoid (cortisol). This deregulates your immune system and inhibits the release of growth hormones. In other words, your body finds itself in a state of chronic stress.

News increases cognitive errors. News feeds the mother of all cognitive errors: confirmation bias. In the words of Warren Buffett: “What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.” News exacerbates this flaw. We become prone to overconfidence, take stupid risks and misjudge opportunities. It also exacerbates another cognitive error: the story bias.

News inhibits thinking. Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. News pieces are specifically engineered to interrupt you. They are like viruses that steal attention for their own purposes. News makes us shallow thinkers. But it’s worse than that. News severely affects memory. […] Because news disrupts concentration, it weakens comprehension.

News works like a drug. As stories develop, we want to know how they continue. With hundreds of arbitrary storylines in our heads, this craving is increasingly compelling and hard to ignore. […] The more news we consume, the more we exercise the neural circuits devoted to skimming and multitasking while ignoring those used for reading deeply and thinking with profound focus.

News wastes time. […] Information is no longer a scarce commodity. But attention is. You are not that irresponsible with your money, reputation or health. Why give away your mind?

News makes us passive. News stories are overwhelmingly about things you cannot influence. The daily repetition of news about things we can’t act upon makes us passive. It grinds us down until we adopt a worldview that is pessimistic, desensitised, sarcastic and fatalistic. The scientific term is “learned helplessness”.

News kills creativity. Finally, things we already know limit our creativity. […] If you want to come up with old solutions, read news. If you are looking for new solutions, don’t.

Despite these problems with news as we know it, there is still a place for quality journalism:

Society needs journalism – but in a different way. Investigative journalism is always relevant. We need reporting that polices our institutions and uncovers truth. But important findings don’t have to arrive in the form of news. Long journal articles and in-depth books are good, too.