New Culture Library

Mistakes in judging what we know — in metacognition, as it’s known — are partly rooted in simple biases. For instance, most people assume when studying that newly learned facts will long be remembered and that further practice won’t make much difference. These beliefs are subconscious and automatic, studies find, even though people know better when they stop to think about it. Yet overconfidence also develops as a result of the brain’s natural tendency to find shortcuts — and to quickly forget that it used them. In a recent report in the journal PNAS, researchers at Harvard and Duke had college students take what they thought was an I.Q. test. Some got an answer key with the test “to check their answers afterward,” and others did not.

Like many marketers, General Mills and other food companies are rewriting the rules for reaching children in the Internet age. These companies, often selling sugar cereals and junk food, are using multimedia games, online quizzes and cellphone apps to build deep ties with young consumers. And children like Lesly are sharing their messages through e-mail and social networks, effectively acting as marketers.

When these tactics revolve around food, and blur the line between advertising and entertainment, they are a source of intensifying concern for nutrition experts and children’s advocates — and are attracting scrutiny from regulators. The Federal Trade Commission has undertaken a study of food marketing to children, due out this summer, while the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity has said one reason so many children are overweight is the way junk food is marketed.

Critics say the ads, from major companies like Unilever and Post Foods, let marketers engage children in a way they cannot on television, where rules limit commercial time during children’s programming. With hundreds of thousands of visits monthly to many of these sites, the ads are becoming part of children’s daily digital journeys, often flying under the radar of parents and policy makers, the critics argue.

Apart from Chopin, we are in wordless harmony on pretty much everything. It’s a very agreeable relationship.

a natural morality, yet EP assumes that humans are natural cheaters. In the HGSB context, everyone would have to be reliable or the group might perish from predation. HGSB members don't trust anything but eyewitness testimony. There w

6. There was virtue and good citizenship, a natural morality, yet EP assumes that humans are natural cheaters. In the HGSB context, everyone would have to be reliable or the group might perish from predation. HGSB members don't trust anything but eyewitness testimony. There would not have been intentional lying about resources and if there was the individual would be shunned or expelled.

7. There was more sexual freedom and mating behavior for all ages, yet EP assumes a scenario like today's of restriction and competition, and an emphasis on the timing of first sexual behavior. There was cooperative breeding and childrearing, yet EP assumes mate competition and male desire to control female reproduction to ensure genetic dominance.

The Simplicity Institute’s current multi-national research project is to provide the most extensive sociological examination of those individuals and communities around the world who are voluntarily embracing ‘post-consumerist’ lifestyles of reduced or restrained income and consumption.

Directed toward the affluent societies of the developed world, it is our governing hypothesis that such post-consumerist lifestyles will be a necessary part of any transition to a sustainable, just, and flourishing human society. Accordingly, gaining some insight into who these individuals and communities are, how they are living, and what prospects they have for bringing about significant cultural and structural change, is a matter of the utmost importance.

When I was younger, like many, I dreamed of flying.  In my mind, I would start to run.  As my legs stretched, more ground started passing beneath my leaps until I was running upon nothing at all, just sweeping my legs back and forth, tiptoeing over the treetops at the speed of sound.  In waking life, the sensation is replicated as I turn my bicycle onto Bay Street every day during my morning commute.

I have ridden a bicycle through the streets of Manhattan for three years, commuting from Staten Island to Midtown since 2009 (and previously, from Brooklyn).  I began my two-wheeled ways in Kirksville, a rural community in northeast Missouri, where some back roads were not even gravel but dirt.  It wasn't always necessary to look both ways for traffic; traffic was almost too sparse for precaution.  I found my chipped, rusty yellow Schwinn abandoned in the backyard of a deserted house, overgrown with brush and wildflowers, and pedaled it to class to avoid an astronomically pricey campus parking pass. 

Orthorexia: An Obsession With Healthy Food “Orthorexia is an obsession with eating healthy food — to such an extent that the person may restrict their diet very severely and limit their functioning, such as not socializing in situations where there is ‘unhealthy’ food,” says Sheela Raja, PhD, an assistant professor and clinical psychologist in the Colleges of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Illinois at Chicago. There has been no research into eating disorder statistics to know how widespread orthorexia is, but in general the idea of “good” and “bad” foods is relatively common in people with eating disorders. The advent of so many fad diets hasn’t helped matters either. No carbs, only raw food, macrobiotics — diets with such strict food rules can certainly lead to confusion about what really is healthy and what isn’t, and in turn can contribute to orthorexia. Warning signs can range from negative feelings about “impure” foods to trouble dealing with stress. Avoiding social situations or bringing your own food to restaurants or get-togethers can be another red flag, as can insisting that good health is totally dependent on the quality of the food you eat. It can also be more common in people who have obsessive or black-and-white thinking that a food is either all good or all bad. Orthorexia is not an official psychiatric diagnosis, given that the symptoms overlap significantly with diagnoses of other eating disorders. “No classic treatment plan is available, but I work with people to normalize food and take away magical thinking about the ‘right/perfect’ foods,” says Esther Kane, MSW, a registered clinical counselor in private practice in Courtenay, British Columbia, Canada, and author of It’s Not About the Food: A Woman’s Guide to Making Peace with Food and Our Bodies. Nutritional education and finding other ways to deal with stress and negative moods are important steps. Raja, for example, suggests participating in an activity unrelated to eating, such as going for a walk or taking a bath, when feeling stressed. Focusing on moderation is also key, as is emphasizing the idea that no food should be excluded from the diet.

guess the reason you think that is that for you, despite what certain secularists might say, religion involves making factual claims about the nature of reality.Yeah - I just think that's indisputable, apart from the fact that you can get many people who claim to be religious, but when you push, they are then loath to make any claims about what they actually believe. So there are many believers who are attached to the culture; they're attached to the buildings; they're attached to the art, they want to meet with that particular group - and yet they spend almost no time at all thinking about what, if anything, is true, in the doctrine. That, I would argue is just not really religion. Every religion contains propositional claims about certain events that happen in history, certain events that will happen in the future.

One reply to that might be to say that that's simply a stipulative definition.Well, there's no other honest reading of the books. Religion may be too broad a category, but if you take what religion means in the West - Judaism, Christianity or Islam - we're talking about some books. The only reason anyone can wake up in the morning thinking that Jesus even existed is because we have the New Testament, right? So you look at the New Testament. It makes a variety of claims that are by definition at odds with what we know to be scientifically plausible. And if you're going to make the move of saying "well, none of these are really claims, this is just a story, this is just literature," then you're reading the New Testament the way we read the Iliad and the Odyssey, and then you have no religion of Christianity; you have, at best, mythology. You have art - which is what I think you should have; this is how we should read these books. And certainly some parts of the Bible should qualify as great literature.

The Klontz study asked 422 people about 72 money-related beliefs and then analyzed correlations among the answers. This produced four broad categories that Mr. Klontz called “money scripts”: money avoidance, money worship, money status and money vigilance. How does he define them?

Those who are in the money avoidance camp share beliefs that make them distance themselves from money. Mr. Klontz said this group may be worried about abusing credit cards. They may believe that they do not deserve to have money and may sabotage their own financial well-being. People in this group tend to have low incomes and net worth. They also tend to be younger. People who fall into the money worship camp would seem to be the opposite, but their behaviors are equally destructive. They believe that an increase in income or a windfall will make everything better and love the status derived from the things that money can buy. This belief also lands people in debt because they use whatever credit they have to buy things that will impress others.

“They believe money will solve all of your problems,” Mr. Klontz said. “This is the money belief pattern that afflicts the majority of Americans.” Anxiety about money status occurs when people’s self-worth is linked to their net worth. These people often take bigger financial risks because they want to have the stories of big gains to impress their friends. (Don’t expect them to tell you when those big bets do not pay off.) The only affliction that did not have an overwhelmingly negative impact on people’s financial future was money vigilance. People with this disorder do not like to share information about their income or wealth, but they also do not spend foolishly. Still, excessive wariness about spending can keep these people from enjoying the benefits of what money can buy. On the other hand, while they did not necessarily have higher incomes, they paid off their credit card bills each month. “Maybe some anxiety and vigilance around money is good for your bottom line,” Mr. Klontz said. Not surprisingly, the four money scripts illustrate problems that have less to do with money than with what money represents. But what may be surprising is that the study found few links between who held what belief and their family background, race, gender, education level or income.

Sitting down, which most of us do for at least eight hours each day, might be the worst thing we do for our health all day.We’ve been preaching the benefits of stand-up desks for a while around here — and no one needs this good news more than social media-obsessed web geeks. A recent medical journal study showed that people who sit for most of their day are 54% more likely to die of a heart attack.And our readers are receptive to the idea, too. In fact, in a recent poll, three-fourths of you said you already used a stand-up desk or you’d like to try one.So if you need more convincing, check out these graphically organized stats from Medical Billing and Coding. We like it for the information it contains, but we love it for the Saul Bass, Vertigo-esque graphics.

Seemingly trivial things have a huge influence on the way that we make decisions, research shows. Bill Ridgers reports ...

The reason, Ackerman believes, is that touch is the first sense that we develop after birth. “People learn how to make decisions about the world by understanding what they’ve already experienced, and that means the physical world.” The ability to think in the abstract, of course, comes much later.

If true, Tuk’s findings are interesting because they challenge an established psychological theory called “ego depletion”. This states that we only have a finite well of self-control. Each time we deny ourselves something—whether going to the bathroom or choosing a salad for lunch, rather than the sausage sandwich we really wanted—we use up some of our reserves. The theory of ego depletion was developed by Roy Baumeister, a psychologist at Florida State University. In practical terms, he says, this means that if you have an important decision to make, you shouldn’t draw from your well of self-control beforehand. Reserves, he says, can be depleted in all sorts of ways: “Even things like trying to look interested at a boring meeting, trying to pretend your boss’s jokes are funny or not saying something unkind to your spouse when you are angry.”

“I don’t believe in marriage. No I really don’t. Let me be clear about that. I think at worst it’s a hostile political act; a way for small minded men to keep women in the house and out of the way wrapped in the guise of tradition and conservative religious nonsense. At best it’s a happy delusion. It’s two people who truly love each other and have no idea how truly miserable they’re about to make each other. But…but when two people know that and they decide with eyes wide open to face each other and get married anyway then I don’t think its conservative or delusional, I think its radical and courageous and very romantic.” Spoken by Ashley Judd playing the character of Tina Modotti in the film Frida (2002)

It’s no wonder, then, that the young cheerleaders found the increasingly prevalent condition of gluten sensitivities the perfect cover for what turned out to be very real cases of anorexia. By the end of the school year, two out of the three girls were in treatment for eating disorders and the third was taken out of school by her parents.

Julie Dorfman, director of Nutrition at Philadelphia’s Renfrew Center, the country’s first residential facility for the treatment of women with eating disorders, is not surprised. “With the eating disordered population, I’d say that 110% of them are using intolerances or food ‘problems’ as a means to avoid eating these foods in a socially acceptable way. Gluten just happens to be the fad right now.”

Stacey Rosenfeld, Ph.D, a psychologist who specializes in eating disorders is in the camp of those who believe that using medical or pseudo-medical reasons for restrictive diets is often a cover-up for disordered eating.  “Nobody wants to be called out on an eating disorder or obsessive eating,” she says, “so anything they can do to hide it, they will.”

In our wildest madness we dream of an equilibrium we have lost.-Albert Camus

The other day at the doctor's office, I picked up a typical fashion magazine left opened on the coffee table for something to do.  The cover highlighted a young actress half-naked and doing her best to look sexy, which is not unusual in a commercial society that promotes women as sex objects. 

It is also considered normal by today's standards for an eleven-year-old girl to believe that the sexier she is-the more valued and appreciated she will be in our society. As for the boys, they're occupied for hours playing violent video games that give them the thrill of exploding humans with powerful weapons in the pursuit of joyful killing.

WHY is nearsightedness so common in the modern world? In the early 1970s, 25 percent of Americans were nearsighted; three decades later, the rate had risen to 42 percent, and similar increases have occurred around the world.

There is significant evidence that the trait is inherited, so you might wonder why our myopic ancestors weren’t just removed from the gene pool long ago, when they blundered into a hungry lion or off a cliff. But although genes do influence our fates, they are not the only factors at play. In this case, the rapid increase in nearsightedness appears to be due to a characteristic of modern life: more and more time spent indoors under artificial lights.

Our genes were originally selected to succeed in a very different world from the one we live in today. Humans’ brains and eyes originated long ago, when we spent most of our waking hours in the sun. The process of development takes advantage of such reliable features of the environment, which then may become necessary for normal growth. Researchers suspect that bright outdoor light helps children’s developing eyes maintain the correct distance between the lens and the retina — which keeps vision in focus. Dim indoor lighting doesn’t seem to provide the same kind of feedback. As a result, when children spend too many hours inside, their eyes fail to grow correctly and the distance between the lens and retina becomes too long, causing far-away objects to look blurry.

It’s summertime, and hammock season is here. Time to lay back, sway under a shade tree, let the breeze kiss the soles of your bare feet, and drift off. Certainly a hammock can help you relax, but new research suggests it can also alter brain activity to improve sleep. In a study published in the June 2011 issue of Current Biology, neuroscientists at the University of Geneva claim that gentle rocking makes people fall asleep faster and experience deeper sleep by synchronizing brain waves.

The researchers enlisted 12 men to take two afternoon naps in a quiet, dark room on a bed that could simulate the gentle rocking motion of a hammock. (Chances are, they didn't have a hard time rounding up volunteers.) For one nap, the bed rocked; for the other, the bed was stationary. Cynthia Graber of Scientific American reports the findings:

All the men fell asleep faster when they swayed. And the scientists monitored the men’s brain activity during all the naps. They found that rocking increased the duration of what’s called N2, a non-REM stage that accounts for about half of a good night’s sleep. Rocking also increased deep-sleep-associated brain activity—so-called slow oscillations as well as bursts of action called sleep spindles. Though the conclusions drawn from this naptime study are encouraging, the jury is still out on whether hammocks can alleviate insomnia at night. But, why wait for proven results? Put down the Ambien and try a hammock.

The United States Supreme Court now sees its central task as comforting the already comfortable and afflicting those already afflicted. If you are a large corporation or a political candidate backed by lots of private money, be assured that the court’s conservative majority will be there for you, solicitous of your needs and ready to swat away those pesky little people who dare to contest your power.

This court has created rules that will have the effect of declaring some corporations too big to be challenged through class actions, as AT&T customers and female employees at Wal-Mart discovered.

In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt warned that the courts had “grown to occupy a position unknown in any other country, a position of superiority over both the legislature and the executive.” Worse, “privilege has entrenched itself in many courts just as it formerly entrenched itself in many legislative bodies and in many executive offices.”What happens to a democracy when its highest court dedicates itself to defending privilege? That’s the unfortunate experiment on which we are now embarked. ejdionne@washpost.com

They say that winners get to write history. Three years after the meltdown of our financial markets, it’s clear who is winning and who is losing. Wall Street — arms outstretched in triumph — is racing toward the finish-line tape while millions of American families are struggling to stay on their feet. With victory seemingly in hand, the historical rewrite is in full swing. The contrast in fortunes between those on top of the economic heap and those buried in the rubble couldn’t be starker. The 10 biggest banks now control more than three-quarters of the country’s banking assets. Profits have bounced back, while compensation at publicly traded Wall Street firms hit a record $135 billion in 2010.

Meanwhile, more than 24 million Americans are out of work or can’t find full-time work, and nearly $9 trillion in household wealth has vanished. There seems to be no correlation between who drove the crisis and who is paying the price.The report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission detailed the recklessness of the financial industry and the abject failures of policymakers and regulators that brought our economy to its knees in late 2008. The accuracy and facts of the commission’s investigative report have gone unchallenged since its release in January.So, how do you revise the historical narrative when the evidence of what led to economic catastrophe is so overwhelming and the events at issue so recent? You and your political allies just do it. And you bet on the old axiom that a lie is halfway around the world before the truth can tie its shoes.

If  you are Rep. Paul Ryan, you ignore the fact that our federal budget deficit has ballooned more than $1 trillion annually since the financial collapse. You disregard the reality that two-thirds of the deficit increase is directly attributable to the economic downturn and bipartisan fiscal measures adopted to bolster the economy. Instead of focusing on the real cause of the deficit, you conflate today’s budgetary disaster with the long-term challenges of Medicare so you can shred the social safety net.

“They wanted to win for its own sake, even if it brought no positive emotion,” says Dr. Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. “They were like hedge fund managers who just want to accumulate money and toys for their own sake. Watching them play, seeing them cheat, it kept hitting me that accomplishment is a human desiderata in itself.”

This feeling of accomplishment contributes to what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia, which roughly translates to “well-being” or “flourishing,” a concept that Dr. Seligman has borrowed for the title of his new book, “Flourish.” He has also created his own acronym, Perma, for what he defines as the five crucial elements of well-being, each pursued for its own sake: positive emotion, engagement (the feeling of being lost in a task), relationships, meaning and accomplishment.

“Well-being cannot exist just in your own head,” he writes. “Well-being is a combination of feeling good as well as actually having meaning, good relationships and accomplishment.”

Conscious/unconscious motivation First, we have to understand the difference between conscious and unconscious motivation. In every aspect of life, most people are acting consciously from one set of motivations but unconsciously are acting from very different motivations. For a century, behavioral science has been familiar with the phenomenon of people with poor self-image and self-expectations who, when faced with imminent "success" (however defined), drastically change what they were doing — for all kinds of rationalized reasons — to ward off that success and to self-sabotage themselves back to the familiar grounds of failure. Likewise, some of those who appear to be the very highest-minded people are frequently observed to be involved with arguments which serve their own stakes and beliefs and interests, despite clear commitment in other topical areas to objectivity and even to intellectual rigor. The people of whom one would expect the highest degree of objectivity and integrity, "above question," are often so far also above self-question as to be especially vulnerable to this effect. The more convinced, many times on many valid grounds, one is of one's own rectitude, the easier it is to not notice niggling contrary evidence or that one's own positions and actions are flowing from a different, less high-minded set of motives.

Behaviorally, it has become popular in recent decades to refer to everyone's having, beneath their human and cortical mind, a "reptilian" or "limbic" brain whose first concern is survival and whose next, second, concern is to keeping things much the way they already are. This "lower" brain pushes most of our buttons even when we think we are consciously making "high-minded" or objective, "rational" choices. Those among our readers here who are into the self-help literature have seen a lot of such discussion, and there is a fair amount of truth to it. Behavioral science has known for more than a century that the brain circuitry for every conscious act and decision and even stimulus, however much it may involve the "highest" regions of our cortex, also passes through such "limbic" organs and structures as the amygdala, thalamus and hypothalamus — the parts of our brain most concerned with emotion and patterned-reflex responses.

There is no act of intellect or high logic in human functioning which does not also involve, and which is not also affected, consciously or unconsciously and mostly unconsciously, by these organs for emotion and patterned-reflex response. The less we are conscious of this, the less we suspect the emotional biases of our own reasoning, the less we factor this dimension into account, and the more subject we are to acts and decisions whose outcome stems not from our "high" conscious minds but from our emotional reflexes.