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What ballet is to football players, mathematics is to writers, a discipline so beguiling and foreign, so close to a taboo, that it actually attracts a few intrepid souls by virtue of its impregnability. The few writers who have ventured headlong into high-level mathematics—Lewis Carroll, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace—have been among our most inventive in both the sentences they construct and the stories they create.

Presently, we have become too enthralled by the notion of literature as Jackson Pollock action painting, the id flung with violence upon the canvas. The most lasting fiction has both the supremely balanced palette of Rothko and the grandeur of his themes. All this may seem like I am urging for a literature that is cold and scientific, subjecting itself to the rigors of an alien discipline. That isn’t so. I am pleading, instead, that fiction think more deeply and determinedly about how it is to be composed and what it is to say—that is the best gift mathematics could give us.

It’s an odd thought. Why would anyone make their work more difficult than it already is? Yet we know that difficulty can pay unexpected dividends.

Sometimes it’s only when a difficulty is removed that we realise what it was doing for us.

Our brains respond better to difficulty than we imagine. In schools, teachers and pupils alike often assume that if a concept has been easy to learn, then the lesson has been successful. But numerous studies have now found that when classroom material is made harder to absorb, pupils retain more of it over the long term, and understand it on a deeper level. Robert Bjork, of the University of California, coined the phrase “desirable difficulties” to describe the counter-intuitive notion that learning should be made harder by, for instance, spacing sessions further apart so that students have to make more effort to recall what they learnt last time. Psychologists at Princeton found that students remembered reading material better when it was printed in an ugly font.

Take another common obstacle: lack of money. People often assume that more money will make them happier. But economists who study the relationship between money and happiness have consistently found that, above a certain income, the two do not reliably correlate. Despite the ease with which the rich can acquire almost anything they desire, they are just as likely to be unhappy as the middle classes. In this regard at least, F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong.

Today’s world offers more opportunity than ever to follow the advice of the Walker Brothers and make it easy on ourselves. Compared with a hundred years ago, our lives are less tightly bound by social mores and physical constraints. Technology has cut out much of life’s drudgery, and we have more freedoms than ever: we can wear what we like, sleep with whom we want (if they’ll sleep with us), and communicate with hundreds of friends at once at the click of a mouse. Obstacles are everywhere disappearing. Few of us wish to turn the clock back, but perhaps we need to remind ourselves how useful the right obstacles can be. Sometimes, the best route to fulfilment is the path of more resistance.

I’ve experienced this myself. Satisfaction is often greater when hard work is required, providing the task appears doable. Easy achievements and victories don’t bring long lasting happiness.

Unfortunately, we seem to want everything to be easy, without having to work too hard for anything. The short term mindset, the desire for instant gratification, and diminishing attention spans don’t help.

While you might not be able to major in Star Wars quite yet, you can take a course on it.

George Backen, 41, has seen the Star Wars films hundreds of times. An associate professor of philosophy at Adams State University in Alamosa, Colo., he’s finally got a chance to study them critically. In 2011, he taught a “Star Wars & Philosophy” workshop, examining the six iconic films with 15 undergraduate students.

“You can either address the issues within Star Wars, or use it as a springboard for issues in our world,” Backen said. “… [We dealt with] broad, metaphysical issues.”

Backen tackled a variety of concepts in his course, ranging from the ethics of cloning to the relationship between religion and the Force. He’ll soon have more subject matter as well — three more films were announced this week, the first to be released in 2015. The films are tentatively being called Episodes VII, VIII and IX.

A major contributor to our ability to analyze music and recognize instruments is the concept known as ‘timbre’. Timbre is a hard-to-quantify concept loosely defined as everything in music that isn’t duration, loudness or pitch. For instance, timbre comes into play when we are able to instantly decide whether a sound is coming from a violin or a piano.

The researchers at The John Hopkins University set out to develop a mathematical model that would simulate how the brain works when it receives auditory signals, how it looks for specific features and whether something is there that allows the brain to discern these different qualities.

The researchers asked 20 people to listen to two sounds played by different musical instruments. The listeners were then asked to rate how similar the sounds seemed. A violin and a cello are perceived as closer to each other than a violin and a flute. The researchers also found that wind and percussive instruments tend to overall be the most different from each other, followed by strings and percussions, then strings and winds. These subtle judgments of timbre quality were also reproduced by the computer model.

“… the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you.”

History is laced with cat-loving creators, from Hemingway’s profound affection for his felines to Edison’s pre-YouTube boxing cats to the traditions of Indian folk art. But hardly anyone has made a greater case for the cat as a creative stimulant and a mystical muse of writing than Muriel Spark in this wonderful passage from A Far Cry from Kensington (public library):

If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat. Alone with the cat in the room where you work … the cat will invariably get up on your desk and settle placidly under the desk lamp. The light from a desk lamp … gives a cat great satisfaction. The cat will settle down and be serene, with a serenity that passes all understanding. And the tranquility of the cat will gradually come to affect you, sitting there at your desk, so that all the excitable qualities that impede your concentration compose themselves and give your mind back the self-command it has lost. You need not watch the cat all the time. Its presence alone is enough. The effect of a cat on your concentration is remarkable, very mysterious.

When looking at full brain scans they saw that lonely individuals have less grey matter in the left posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS)—an area implicated in basic social perception, confirming that loneliness was associated with difficulty in processing social cues.

“From the study we can’t tell if loneliness is something hardwired or environmental,” said co-author Dr Bahador Bahrami (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience). “But one possibility is that people who are poor at reading social cues may experience difficulty in developing social relationships, leading to social isolation and loneliness.”