I possess a device in my pocket that is capable of accessing the entirety of information known to man.
I use it to look at pictures of cats and get in arguments with strangers.
Literary Graffiti From All Over the World
Those literary types sure are rebels. Or at least, that’s what we gather from the amount of bookish graffiti that peppers public walls from New York City to London to Yerevan. We published our first collection of literary graffiti around this time last year, but since it just keeps popping up, we figured we’d kick this year off with another sweep — after the jump, find 20 great examples of bookish branding, from the impossibly skillful to the sweetly childish.
Pictured above: Kurt Vonnegut, with quote from Slaughterhouse-Five.
Many of us feel that our thoughts are out of our control. We think about work long after we have left, we worry about the future and keep going over things that have gone wrong in the past. Meanwhile, life seems to be slipping by.
Modern psychology also recognises that compulsive thinking can lead us into stress, anxiety and depression. Worrying about our problems seems important, but it leaves us feeling worse and believing we have less power to change things.
Mindfulness helps by giving us the mental space to stand back, recognise what’s happening and explore alternatives. Here are some helpful approaches associated with mindfulness and meditation.
1. Learning to let go of thoughts
Even a short period of meditation shows that focusing the mind on the body and the breath leaves you feeling calmer and more settled. Everyone finds that thoughts arise in their minds and the practice involves gently guiding our attention back to the breath. In doing this again and again we are learning to let go of thoughts and regain control of what our minds are doing.
2. Noticing that thoughts are just thoughts, not facts
Troubling thoughts reinforce a powerful belief about our situation: I must keep going; only I can do this; if this fails it will be a disaster. Thoughts like this are associated with stress. There is something wrong with me; it has all gone wrong; here I go again. Thoughts like this tend to foster depression.
When we think like this, we believe that the thought is telling us the truth: I really must keep going; there really is something wrong with me. The practice of letting go of thoughts allows us to stand back from them. Then we see that they are just thoughts and we can explore them without necessarily believing them. For many people this is a revelation. It’s liberating to see that thoughts are not facts, just things that happen in the mind. Seeing thoughts in this way makes them less powerful. Then you can explore them, asking if they are true and discovering what you really believe.
3. Accepting difficult thoughts
Often we know it’s unhelpful to keep thinking in certain ways and tell ourselves I wish I could switch off, or I must stop worrying. But we end up like the person who tries not to think about pink elephants. The more we try to control our thoughts by force, the stronger they grow. Our whole life can seem like a fight and battling with thoughts is part of this.
Mindfulness training encourages us to accept that troubling thoughts are a part of our experience, rather than fighting them. We learn to notice these thoughts when they come up without pursuing them or believing that they are true. We can even befriend them.
People with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) experience this especially strongly and mindfulness can be very helpful in working with these conditions. It also helps in avoiding slipping back into depression, which is why medical practitioners recommend Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy to avoid relapsing into depression.
4. Thinking Clearly and Creatively
Of course, thinking isn’t always unhelpful. Reflection, analysis and clarity are all very important. Mindfulness can help us to think more clearly because we are less prone to distractions and more able to notice when feelings are colouring our thoughts. It also fosters creativity because it opens up the connections between thinking, feeling and intuition.
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: ‘A man should learn to detect and watch the glimmer of light that flashes across his mind from within.’ Those glimmers are there in all of us: messages from the part of us that truly understands and sees connections and possibilities. That is the basis of creativity. The faculty that lets us detect and watch those glimmers is mindfulness.
It’s rare that scientific journals explicitly engage philosophical conundrums, but a paper in this week’s Science magazine begins with the question “Why do people so often make decisions that their future selves regret?”
An obvious answer to the question is that people mature—that “change is inevitable,” as Disraeli said, that “change is constant.” But after examining the responses of more than 19,000 people gathered over four months in 2011 and 2012, the researchers—Gilbert, Jordi Quoidbach, of the National Fund for Scientific Research in Belgium, and University of Virginia psychologist Timothy Wilson—discovered that even though most people acknowledge that their lives have changed over the past decade, they don’t believe change is constant. Against all evidence, most people seem to believe that who they are now is pretty much who they will be forever.
Proving an illusion is a giant epistemological problem, which is one reason the authors recruited so many participants for their study (although many of the thousands were recruited from a website sponsored by a French reality show, “Leurs Secrets du Bonheur” (“The Secrets of Happiness”)). Analyzing the answers that the volunteers provided to questions about their favorite music, food, hobbies, as well as about choices concerning friends and vacations, Quoidbach, Gilbert, and Wilson compared people at different stages of life and came to a couple of conclusions:
The older you get, the less you believe you have changed or will change. This finding isn’t surprising: for years, researchers have confirmed the common-sense idea that one’s personality and preferences become more stable with age. […] As the Science research explains, even young people feel their current qualities are good qualities. They find it hard to imagine their beliefs and values could significantly change—even though most of us actually change our views often as time progresses.
In a similar vein, people have a tendency to recognize that their personalities and preferences have changed in the past but misunderstand that personalities and preferences often change in the future.
The paper shows other data: older people are less willing to pay for the same concerts and meals than younger people anticipate they would, and they are less likely to remember the name of their best friend. But that could be because older people are simply bored by familiar pleasures and have worse memories.
Whether people change—can change, do change, actually change—is surely one of the most important questions in psychobiology. The Science paper advances our understanding of the answer incrementally: we understand that we have changed, but we are uncomfortable with the idea that we will change any further. The need to change implies another question: do we need to correct a flaw? It’s not likely that any amount of science can answer that question.
“Paris, City of Light doesn’t mean “the city with a lot of beautiful lights” but, rather, “the city where, during the eighteenth century, the lights of science (with the biologists like Buffon or Jussieu and with the encyclopedy writers like Diderot or d’Alembert) and the lights of philosophy (Voltaire, Rousseau, Condorcet, Montesquieu, …) have been lit.
There is only one way in this world to achieve true happiness, and that is to express yourself with all your skill and enthusiasm in a career that appeals to you more than any other. In such a career, you feel a sense of purpose, a sense of achievement. You feel you are making a contribution. It is not work.
William J. Reilly in How To Avoid Work
The science we cover here on Greater Good—aka, “the science of a meaningful life”—has exploded over the past 10 years, with many more studies published each year on gratitude, mindfulness, and our other core themes than we saw a decade ago.
2012 was no exception. In fact, in the year just past, new findings added nuance, depth, and even some caveats to our understanding of the science of a meaningful life. Here are 10 of the scientific insights that made the biggest impression on us in 2012—the findings most likely to resonate in scientific journals and the public consciousness in the years to come, listed in roughly the order in which they were published.
There’s a personal cost to callousness […]
High status brings low ethics […]
Happiness is about respect, not riches […]
Kindness is its own reward—even to toddlers […]
We can train ourselves to be more compassionate […]
Gratitude sustains relationships through tough times […]
Humans are quicker to cooperate than compete […]
There’s a dark side to pursuing happiness […]
Parenthood actually does make most—but not all—people happier […]
Kindness makes kids popular […]
Read the article for the details.
Synopsis : Tapping into our ability to turn attention inward empowers and heals.
What’s the difference between noticing the rapid beat of a popular song on the radio and noticing the rapid rate of your heart when you see your crush? Between noticing the smell of fresh baked bread and noticing that you’re out of breath? Both require attention. However, the direction of that attention differs: it is either turned outward, as in the case of noticing a stop sign or a tap on your shoulder, or turned inward, as in the case of feeling full or feeling love.
Scientists have long held that attention – regardless to what – involves mostly the prefrontal cortex, that frontal region of the brain responsible for complex thought and unique to humans and advanced mammals. A study by Norman Farb from the University of Toronto published in Cerebral Cortex, however, suggests a radically new view: there are different ways of paying attention.
Most of us prioritize externally oriented attention. When we think of attention, we often think of focusing on something outside of ourselves. We “pay attention” to work, the TV, our partner, traffic, or anything that engages our senses. However, a whole other world exists that most of us are far less aware of: an internal world, with its varied landscape of emotions, feelings, and sensations. Yet it is often the internal world that determines whether we are having a good day or not, whether we are happy or unhappy. That’s why we can feel angry despite beautiful surroundings or feel perfectly happy despite being stuck in traffics. For this reason perhaps, this newly discovered pathway of attention may hold the key to greater well-being.
These findings have important implications for emotional well-being. States of mind such as anxiety, depression, and anger often engage the prefrontal cortex. “I can’t shut my mind off” – a statement most of us can relate to in times of stress. Have you ever tried to talk yourself out of such a state of high stress and failed? Trying to talk ourselves out of being less anxious or angry is often a futile exercise. The mind quite simply has a hard time telling itself what to do.
Dan Wagner of Harvard University describes this as an “ironic process”. When we attempt to resist a certain thought or action (e.g. trying not to eat junk food when you’re on a diet, or trying not to think of someone you just broke up with) the effort can easily backfire under stress. In the realm of the mind, what we resist persists. Sadly, some people end up turning to alcohol and drugs as a last resort to quiet their mind.
Farb’s findings, however, suggest that the neural networks of interoceptive attention may provide an inbuilt system separate from the thinking mind to help ourselves find calm. We can’t control our mind with our mind (or our pre-frontal cortex with the pre-frontal cortex), but with interoceptive awareness, we may be able to escape our racing thoughts. The expression “take a deep breath” in a moment of anger or fear is a common saying that directly taps into our ability to use our interoceptive awareness. Many clinicians include some kind of breathing instructions into a therapy setting for anxiety.
How can we train our interoceptive awareness? Yoga, breathing and meditation practices are designed to increase our interoceptive awareness. A study by Jocelyn Sze at the University of California Berkeley showed that people who meditate have greater interoceptive awareness than dancers who, though they also have trained awareness of their bodies’ movements, are perhaps less in tune with their emotional states.
For some, turning attention inward can be distressing, because it may tune us into emotions that are not comfortable. However, constantly distracting ourselves through attention turned outwards will not remove those underlying emotions. By learning to engage with them through our dedicated interoceptive awareness, we may experience the first signs of healing.
Learning to tune into our bodies could have other beneficial consequences as well. We are so used to directing our attention outward that we often don’t even really taste food because we are too busy watching TV or distracting ourselves in other ways. However, research suggests that our greatest moments of happiness are times we spend fully involved and engaged in a situation: be it a physical activity, a sensory experience, or intimacy with another person. If we are distracted, we are depriving ourselves of some of the greatest sources of happiness.
Next time you find your thoughts racing and emotions blaring out of control, instead of trying to talk yourself out of the situation or turning to a glass of wine, have a seat, take some deep breaths and tune into your body, or go to a gentle and awareness-based yoga or meditation class. Farb’s research suggests that we have an inbuilt ability to calm ourselves down. We just need to take a deep breath.
It’s easy to imagine these photos of Earth hanging in a modern art exhibition. Taken via satellite, these images are part of a series called Earth As Art from the U.S. Geological Survey and offer “fresh and inspiring glimpses of different parts of our planet’s complex surface.” They are deserts, islands, vineyards, and river deltas, rich with vibrant and unexpected colors that bring to light the weird shapes and uncanny patterns that make up Earth’s landscapes.
Pictured above:
The mix of sand dunes and salt lakes at the edge of the Bogda Mountains in China creates this hyper-surreal landscape in the Turpan Depression, one of the few inland places in the world that lie below sea level.
Our perception of time changes with age, but it also depends on our emotional state. Research is steadily improving our understanding of the brain circuits that control this sense, opening the way for new forms of treatment, particularly for Parkinson’s disease.
Time is an integral part of our daily life, regardless of whether we are in a hurry, relaxed, gripped by an emotion or bored stiff. We may be walking, driving, listening to music, hearing the phone ring, taking part in a conversation or doing a sport, but time is always there, omnipresent and immaterial. Whereas all our senses – sight, touch, hearing, smell and taste – bring into play specialised sensory receptors, there is no specific receptor for time. Yet it is present in us, our brain being a real timing machine.
Very young children “live in time” before gaining an awareness of its passing. They are only able to estimate time correctly if they are made to pay attention to it, experiencing time in terms of how long it takes to do something.
The awareness of time improves during childhood as children’s attention and short-term memory capacities develop, a process dependent on the slow maturation of the prefrontal cortex. To gauge the time required for a task they must pay attention to it. But they must also memorise a stream of time-data without losing concentration. So children suffering from attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder find it hard to gauge time correctly.
On the basis of our early ability to estimate passing time, researchers suggested in 1963 that time as perceived by our brains (subjective time) was synchronised with the ticking of an internal clock, in much the same way as our daily life is governed by the ticking of our watch (objective time). They modelled a mechanism for measuring time, a sort of internal clock. It consists of a pacemaker, continuously emitting pulses (ticking), which are stored in an accumulator. The subjective duration of time depends on the number of pulses that have accumulated (since the beginning of the stimulus). When the internal clock speeds up, the number of pulses increases, creating the impression that time is passing more slowly.
At the beginning of the century, Professor Warren Meck, at the Duke Institute for Brain Science, North Carolina, developed a more physiologically realistic model. According to the striatal beat-frequency model of interval timing, the representation of time is underpinned by the oscillatory activity of brain cells in the upper cortex. The activity of each oscillator cell is characterised by a specific rhythm. The frequency of oscillations is detected by certain cells in the dorsal striatum, a substructure of the basal ganglia, located at the base of the forebrain.
Alongside this model, in which estimates of time intervals originate in neuronal activity, the brain structures involved in processing time-related data differ depending on whether they are estimating the duration of a stimulus (explicit timing) or gauging the lapse of time, or interval, separating us from an event expected to occur in a few seconds or minutes (implicit timing).
“For durations ranging from a few milliseconds to several minutes, the processing of explicit and implicit timing does not bring into play the same neuroanatomical regions,” says Jennifer Coull, a senior research fellow at the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, at Provence University in Marseille. These differences are due to the fact that “implicit-time processing is almost always used to achieve a motor-task goal – ‘Do I have time for a coffee before my meeting?’ – whereas explicit-time processing aims to estimate a duration as such”, Coull explains. Studies of explicit timing show that two cortical structures, the supplementary motor area, which co-ordinates complex movements, and the right prefrontal cortex, are constantly activated.
Above all, the brain’s perception of time involves processes linked to memory and attention: witness the impression that time is passing more quickly when we are busy, or doing something amusing or exciting. Time flies even when we are in love. In contrast, a watched pot never boils. Minutes drag by when we are bored.
Recent research by neuro-physiologists and chemists working on time processing is beginning to show how emotions may speed up or slow down our perception of time. In 2011 Professor Droit-Volet and Sandrine Gil, a lecturer on cognition and learning at Poitiers University, France, published a study of how changes in the emotional state of subjects caused by watching films affected their sense of time.
“Fear distorted time, the stimulus being perceived as longer than it really was,” says Droit-Volet. Fear prompted a state of arousal that speeded up the rate of the internal clock.
But, “quite unexpectedly, sadness does not affect our perception of time, no doubt because the emotion felt when watching a sad film is not strong enough to slow down physiological functions,” Droit-Volet explains. However, she adds, work is needed on the profound sadness associated with periods of severe depression.
The theory of embodied mind (or cognition) helps explain how the perception of other people’s emotions changes our sense of time. Embodied cognition hinges on an internal process that mimics or simulates another’s emotional state, enabling us to tune in and understand their feeling. Accordingly, when a teenager spends time with a senior who speaks and walks more slowly, the young person’s internal clock slows down. There is also a subjective slowing of time, which enhances social interaction between the two people.
“Our perception of time is very revealing of our emotional state,” says Droit-Volet, pointing out that temporal distortion caused by emotion is not the result of a malfunction in the internal clock, but on the contrary an illustration of its remarkable ability to adapt to events around us. She adds: “There is no single, uniform time, but rather multiple times which we experience. Our temporal distortions are a direct translation of the way in which our brain and body adapt to these multiple times, the times of life.”
In Durée et Simultanéité, A propos de la théorie d’Einstein (Duration and simultaneity, with reference to Einstein’s theory) the French philosopher Henri Bergson explained that “we must put aside the idea of a single time; all that counts are the multiple times that make up experience”. In other words our perception of time is always relative.
