the multi-determination of perfectionism in the nyt
“Our research shows that successful perfectionists are successful in spite of it, not because of it,” says Tom Greenspon, a psychologist in Minneapolis and author of “Moving Past Perfect” and other books. “If you worrying more about how you are doing than what you are doing, you’ll stumble.”
addiction to the unpredictable in matters of the heart in the nyt
illustration: jeanne detallante
David Horvitz’s Sad, Depressed, People looks at a set of images circulating within stock photography collections. These photographs, in which actors are photographed holding their heads in their hands, ostensibly depressed, are here shown to contain a bizarre tension between their status as stock images and their supposedly emotional content. It also includes an introduction and glossary of terms by Laurel Ptak.
shifting understandings of the brain and consciousness over time in being human
“Philosophers have wondered for thousands of years how we can be sure whether what we’re experiencing is reality or some shadowy deception. Plato imagined people looking at shadows cast by a fire in a cave. Descartes imagined a satanic genius. Starting in the 1960s, philosophers began to muse about what it would be like to be a brain in a vat, with reality supplied by a computer. ”
andrew solomon on raising a prodigy in the nyt
“Marc sat on a phone book on the piano bench so his hands would be high enough to play comfortably and launched into Chopin’s “Fantasie-Impromptu,” which he imbued with a quality of nuanced yearning that seemed almost inconceivable in someone with a shelf of Cookie Monster videos. “You see?” Chloe said to me. “He’s not a normal child. Why should he have a normal childhood?””
“According to psychologists who explore the complex interplay of color, mood and behavior, blue’s basic emotional valence is calmness and open-endedness, in contrast to the aggressive specificity associated with red. Blue is sea and sky, a pocket-size vacation.”
gender non-conforming children in the nyt magazine
“People rely on gender to help understand the world, to make order out of chaos,” says Jean Malpas, who heads the Gender and Family Project at the Ackerman Institute in Manhattan. “It’s been a way of measuring someone’s well-being: ‘Are you adjusted? Do you fit? Or are you unhinged?’ The social categories of man/woman, boy/girl are fundamental, and when an individual challenges that by blurring the lines, it’s very disorienting at first. It’s as if they’re questioning the laws of gravity.”
obsessive passion vs. harmonious passion in the atlantic
“Those with harmonious passion really love something, but ultimately can leave it, since it’s a "significant but not overwhelming part of their identity.” Harmonious passion doesn’t interfere with other aspects of life, like relationships or education. In contrast, obsessive passion resides in individuals who derive their self-esteem and identity primarily from their performance during the activity itself. Internalizing the activity exacts many costs. A lousy day on the basketball court threatens to undermine an obsessively passionate player’s entire identity.“
psychosis, insight, self-image and reality in the new yorker
“In 1886, the hospital’s superintendent described psychosis as "a waking dream, which, if not broken in upon, works mischief to the brain,” and wrote that the goal of treatment was to “interfere with this world of self – scatter its creations and fancies and people it with objects and thoughts foreign to its own.””
“In her book "Refusing Care,” [Elyn] Saks calls the method “self-paternalism,” and argues that there are few other scenarios in which psychiatrists should forcibly impose treatment that intrudes on the privacy of people’s own minds. A widely cited justification for compulsory treatment is the “thank-you theory,” which assumes that patients will retroactively agree that intervention was in thier best interests. But only about half of patients who have been involuntarily hospitalized subsequently say that they needed treatment. “We should not be in the business of choosing selves,” Saks writes. It’s impossible to determine whether a mental illness has altered someone’s preferences, or whether that person has simply changed.“
“there is nothing either good good or bad but thinking makes it so”: new understandings of regret through the eyes of medal winners in bbc news
“The first is that regret, like imagination generally, exists for a reason – this amazing cognitive ability is what allows us to plan for the future and, with luck, change things based on how we imagine they might turn out… Regret, like so many of the territories of the mind, can hurt. It hurts whether we can change how things have worked out, or not, but the feeling is built into our brains for a good reason (however little comfort that provides).
The second thought that might help us deal with regret is to realise that there are many possible worlds we could compare events to. It’s natural for many silver medallists to feel that they’ve missed out on gold, and to the extent we can choose what we compare ourselves to, we can choose how we feel about our regrets. We can use them to drive us to future success, but also to appreciate what we do have.”
art, darwin and evolutionary psychology in the new republic
“Art, then, can be defined as the calisthenics of pattern-finding…(Boyd) is proposing a direct link between art and fitness: the more art we experience, the more likely we are to survive and to reproduce. Art, in this model, is like a gym in which ‘we incrementally fine-tune our neural wiring through our repeated and focused engagement in each of the arts.’”
Yayoi Kusama, Fireflies on the Water, 2002
know thyself (and still not have a clue) : jonah lehrer in the new yorker
“The problem with this introspective approach is that the driving forces behind biases—the root causes of our irrationality—are largely unconscious, which means they remain invisible to self-analysis and impermeable to intelligence. In fact, introspection can actually compound the error, blinding us to those primal processes responsible for many of our everyday failings. We spin eloquent stories, but these stories miss the point.”
psychology, literature and nabokov in the american scholar
“Literature’s aims differ considerably from those of research psychology. Nevertheless literature draws on human intuitive psychology (itself also a subject in recent psychology) and exercises our psychological capacities. Literature aims to understand human minds only to the degree it seeks to move human minds. It may move readers’ minds, in part, by showing with new accuracy or vividness, or at least with fresh particulars, how fictional minds move, and by showing in new ways how freely readers’ minds can move, given the right prompts. Psychology also wants to understand minds, both simply for the satisfaction of knowing and also to make the most of them, to limit mental damage or to extend mental benefits. It uses the experimental method. We can also see fictions as thought experiments, experiments about how characters feel, think, and behave, and about how readers feel, think, and behave, and how they can learn to think more imaginatively, feel more sympathetically, act more sensitively.”
distortion and feelings in the atlantic
“…an evolutionary biologist who specializes in animal communication, says that jarring rock music shares aural characteristics with the arousing vocalizations of troubled animals and may capture human attention in the same way. Crying animals sound distorted because they force a large amount of air rapidly through their voice box to communicate alarm and fear.”
the spoiling of american children in the new yorker
“Most parents today were brought up in a culture that put a strong emphasis on being special…being special takes hard work and can’t be trusted to children. Hence the exhausting cycle of constantly monitoring their work and performance, which in turn makes children feel less competent and confident, so that they need even more oversight.”
photo: alex brown
the ethics of procreation in the nyt
“The burden of proof — or at least the burden of justification — should therefore rest primarily on those who choose to have children, not on those who choose to be childless. The choice to have children calls for more careful justification and thought than the choice not to have children because procreation creates a dependent, needy, and vulnerable human being whose future may be at risk. The individual who chooses childlessness takes the ethically less risky path. After all, nonexistent people can’t suffer from not being created. They do not have an entitlement to come into existence, and we do not owe it to them to bring them into existence. But once children do exist, we incur serious responsibilities to them.”
“If you perceive a peer as rebellious, ironic, rough, etc., then you perceive him or her as cool (by the old-time definition); and if you perceive him or her as cool (a positively valenced word), then you (by the halo effect) perceive him or her as friendly, competent, generous, etc. Thus, the halo effect might win out over the semantic tension between cachet and contrarian traits when judging the coolness of actual people.”