“Ignoring the idea of willpower will sound absurd to most patients and therapists, but, as a practicing addiction psychiatrist and an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry, I’ve become increasingly skeptical about the very concept of willpower, and concerned by the self-help obsession that surrounds it. Countless books and blogs offer ways to “boost self-control,” or even to “meditate your way to more willpower,” but what’s not widely recognized is that new research has shown some of the ideas underlying these messages to be inaccurate.”
Tag: 02.02.17
Our Human Evolution Has To Be Due To More Than Biology
Daniel Dennett and others argue, genetic evolution is not enough to explain the skills, power and versatility of the human mind. Over the past 10,000 years, human behaviour and our ability to manipulate the planet have changed too quickly for biological evolution to have been the driving force. In Dennett’s view, our brains turned into fully fledged modern minds thanks to cultural memes: ‘ways of behaving’ — pronouncing a word this way, dancing like so — that can be copied, remembered and passed on.
Willpower – A Bad Idea That It’s Time To Get Rid Of
Cark Erik Fisher: “As a practicing addiction psychiatrist and an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry, I’ve become increasingly skeptical about the very concept … More fundamentally, the common, monolithic definition of willpower distracts us from finer-grained dimensions of self-control and runs the danger of magnifying harmful myths.”
Time Is Contagious
The experience of time, that is. “As we converse with and consider one another, we step in and out of one other’s experience, including the other’s perceptions (or what we imagine to be another’s perception, based on our own experience) of time. Not only does duration bend, we are continuously sharing these small flexions among us like a currency or social glue.” Alan Burdick explains how this works.
Small Liberal Arts College Gets $100 Million Worth Of Art For Its Museum
Colby College’s Museum of Art is already the largest in the state of Maine, thanks in large part to previous gifts by Peter and Paula Lunder of a major collection of American art (itself worth $100 million) and of 100 Picasso etchings. Now the Lunders have made another gift of 1,500 works ranging from Rembrandt to van Gogh to Whistler to Ai Weiwei.
English Is The International Language Of Science. There’s A Problem With That
“Monolingual ghettos are bad for science. In 2004, work on the transfer of H5N1 flu from birds to pigs languished unread in Chinese while critical time was lost. In the study’s sample, only half of Spanish-language papers and a third of those in Japanese even had abstracts in English. Those that did, unsurprisingly, were more likely to be published in prestigious, peer-reviewed journals. But the bird-flu case shows that that hardly includes all the science that matters. Some good scientists still can’t write in English. The solution is not to replace English, but to encourage multilingualism wherever practical, and require it when needed.”
Why Do Haruki Murakami’s Books Spend So Much Time On Cooking And Eating?
In a Murakami novel, cooking – and eating – means everything. “Cooking meals is more than a signal of independence though, it’s an introspective behavior that provides order to the chaos of the outside world.”
Is Great Britain Too Depressed For Museums Now?
Financial constraints, educational culture budgets slashed, and people staying away from the money-suck that is London – “the same economic pressures that have uprooted politics around the world are destroying the aspirations we express when we go to galleries. There is nothing more aspirational than visiting a museum or art gallery. It is an expression of hope.”
Next Steps For Middle Eastern Theatre In The U.S.
Though its practitioners say this isn’t a new discussion, the contours of Middle Eastern theatre have taken on sharper focus after the election of Donald Trump. But it’s also very like other theatre for practitioners from communities of color: “The next round is equal parts main stage productions … and expanding to directors and designers of Middle Eastern descent. That would be radical.”
No, British People, European Plays Aren’t ‘Infecting’ Your Precious Theatre
Let’s face it: “In dark times we need each to do what we can from the centre of our individual strength, skill, understanding and experience. Theatre-makers – playwrights, actors, directors and the rest – need to tell the hard, dark, contradictory truths as we see them, as generously and in as grown-up a manner as we can manage.