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Javier E

What's Wrong With the Teenage Mind? - WSJ.com - 1 views

online.wsj.com/...3806504577181351486558984.html

adolescence teenage brain research development learning experience brain science psychology

shared by Javier E on 05 Feb 12 - Cached
  • What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness. Fortunately, developmental psychologists and neuroscientists are starting to explain the foundations of that weirdness.
  • The crucial new idea is that there are two different neural and psychological systems that interact to turn children into adults. Over the past two centuries, and even more over the past generation, the developmental timing of these two systems has changed. That, in turn, has profoundly changed adolescence and produced new kinds of adolescent woe. The big question for anyone who deals with young people today is how we can go about bringing these cogs of the teenage mind into sync once again
  • The first of these systems has to do with emotion and motivation. It is very closely linked to the biological and chemical changes of puberty and involves the areas of the brain that respond to rewards. This is the system that turns placid 10-year-olds into restless, exuberant, emotionally intense teenagers, desperate to attain every goal, fulfill every desire and experience every sensation. Later, it turns them back into relatively placid adults.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • adolescents aren't reckless because they underestimate risks, but because they overestimate rewards—or, rather, find rewards more rewarding than adults do. The reward centers of the adolescent brain are much more active than those of either children or adults.
  • What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers
  • Becoming an adult means leaving the world of your parents and starting to make your way toward the future that you will share with your peers. Puberty not only turns on the motivational and emotional system with new force, it also turns it away from the family and toward the world of equals.
  • The second crucial system in our brains has to do with control; it channels and harnesses all that seething energy. In particular, the prefrontal cortex reaches out to guide other parts of the brain, including the parts that govern motivation and emotion. This is the system that inhibits impulses and guides decision-making, that encourages long-term planning and delays gratification.
  • Today's adolescents develop an accelerator a long time before they can steer and brake.
  • Expertise comes with experience.
  • In gatherer-hunter and farming societies, childhood education involves formal and informal apprenticeship. Children have lots of chances to practice the skills that they need to accomplish their goals as adults, and so to become expert planners and actors.
  • In the past, to become a good gatherer or hunter, cook or caregiver, you would actually practice gathering, hunting, cooking and taking care of children all through middle childhood and early adolescence—tuning up just the prefrontal wiring you'd need as an adult. But you'd do all that under expert adult supervision and in the protected world of childhood
  • In contemporary life, the relationship between these two systems has changed dramatically. Puberty arrives earlier, and the motivational system kicks in earlier too. At the same time, contemporary children have very little experience with the kinds of tasks that they'll have to perform as grown-ups.
  • The experience of trying to achieve a real goal in real time in the real world is increasingly delayed, and the growth of the control system depends on just those experiences.
  • This control system depends much more on learning. It becomes increasingly effective throughout childhood and continues to develop during adolescence and adulthood, as we gain more experience.
  • An ever longer protected period of immaturity and dependence—a childhood that extends through college—means that young humans can learn more than ever before. There is strong evidence that IQ has increased dramatically as more children spend more time in school
  • children know more about more different subjects than they ever did in the days of apprenticeships.
  • Wide-ranging, flexible and broad learning, the kind we encourage in high-school and college, may actually be in tension with the ability to develop finely-honed, controlled, focused expertise in a particular skill, the kind of learning that once routinely took place in human societies.
  • this new explanation based on developmental timing elegantly accounts for the paradoxes of our particular crop of adolescents.
  • First, experience shapes the brain.
  • the brain is so powerful precisely because it is so sensitive to experience. It's as true to say that our experience of controlling our impulses make the prefrontal cortex develop as it is to say that prefrontal development makes us better at controlling our impulses
  • Second, development plays a crucial role in explaining human nature
  • there is more and more evidence that genes are just the first step in complex developmental sequences, cascades of interactions between organism and environment, and that those developmental processes shape the adult brain. Even small changes in developmental timing can lead to big changes in who we become.
  • Brain research is often taken to mean that adolescents are really just defective adults—grown-ups with a missing part.
  • But the new view of the adolescent brain isn't that the prefrontal lobes just fail to show up; it's that they aren't properly instructed and exercised
  • Instead of simply giving adolescents more and more school experiences—those extra hours of after-school classes and homework—we could try to arrange more opportunities for apprenticeship
  • Summer enrichment activities like camp and travel, now so common for children whose parents have means, might be usefully alternated with summer jobs, with real responsibilities.
  • Javier E on 05 Feb 12
     
    The two brain systems, the increasing gap between them, and the implications for adolescent education.
Javier E

The American Scholar: The Disadvantages of an Elite Education - William Deresiewicz - 1 views

theamericanscholar.org/vantages-of-an-elite-education

elite education values limits disadvantages

shared by Javier E on 14 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy
  • I’m talking about the whole system in which these skirmishes play out. Not just the Ivy League and its peer institutions, but also the mechanisms that get you there in the first place: the private and affluent public “feeder” schools, the ever-growing parastructure of tutors and test-prep courses and enrichment programs, the whole admissions frenzy and everything that leads up to and away from it. The message, as always, is the medium. Before, after, and around the elite college classroom, a constellation of values is ceaselessly inculcated.
  • The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous. Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals.
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  • My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me.
  • The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic.
  • Students at places like Cleveland State, unlike those at places like Yale, don’t have a platoon of advisers and tutors and deans to write out excuses for late work, give them extra help when they need it, pick them up when they fall down.
  • When people say that students at elite schools have a strong sense of entitlement, they mean that those students think they deserve more than other people because their SAT scores are higher.
  • The political implications should be clear. As John Ruskin told an older elite, grabbing what you can get isn’t any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the power of your fists.
  • students at places like Yale get an endless string of second chances. Not so at places like Cleveland State.
  • The second disadvantage, implicit in what I’ve been saying, is that an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth. Getting to an elite college, being at an elite college, and going on from an elite college—all involve numerical rankings: SAT, GPA, GRE. You learn to think of yourself in terms of those numbers. They come to signify not only your fate, but your identity; not only your identity, but your value.
  • An elite education gives you the chance to be rich—which is, after all, what we’re talking about—but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist
  • In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out. At schools like Cleveland State, they’re being trained for positions somewhere in the middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or another. They’re being conditioned for lives with few second chances, no extensions, little support, narrow opportunity—lives of subordination, supervision, and control, lives of deadlines, not guidelines. At places like Yale, of course, it’s the reverse.
  • Elite schools nurture excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I know calls “entitled mediocrity.”
  • For the elite, there’s always another extension—a bailout, a pardon, a stint in rehab—always plenty of contacts and special stipends—the country club, the conference, the year-end bonus, the dividend.
  • The liberal arts university is becoming the corporate university, its center of gravity shifting to technical fields where scholarly expertise can be parlayed into lucrative business opportunities.
  • You have to live in an ordinary house instead of an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in L.A.; you have to drive a Honda instead of a BMW or a Hummer; you have to vacation in Florida instead of Barbados or Paris, but what are such losses when set against the opportunity to do work you believe in, work you’re suited for, work you love, every day of your life? Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education?
  • Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes, and you miss your true calling.
  • This is not to say that students from elite colleges never pursue a riskier or less lucrative course after graduation, but even when they do, they tend to give up more quickly than others.
  • At a school like Yale, students who come to class and work hard expect nothing less than an A-. And most of the time, they get it.
  • being an intellectual is not the same as being smart. Being an intellectual means more than doing your homework.
  • The system forgot to teach them, along the way to the prestige admissions and the lucrative jobs, that the most important achievements can’t be measured by a letter or a number or a name. It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.
  • Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas—and not just for the duration of a semester, for the sake of pleasing the teacher, or for getting a good grade.
  • Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul. These few have tended to feel like freaks, not least because they get so little support from the university itself. Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers. GA_googleFillSlot('Rectangle_InArticle_Right'); GA_googleCreateDomIframe("google_ads_div_Rectangle_InArticle_Right_ad_container" ,"Rectangle_InArticle_Right"); Places like Yale are simply not set up to help students ask the big questions
  • Professors at top research institutions are valued exclusively for the quality of their scholarly work; time spent on teaching is time lost. If students want a conversion experience, they’re better off at a liberal arts college.
  • When elite universities boast that they teach their students how to think, they mean that they teach them the analytic and rhetorical skills necessary for success in law or medicine or science or business.
  • Although the notion of breadth is implicit in the very idea of a liberal arts education, the admissions process increasingly selects for kids who have already begun to think of themselves in specialized terms—the junior journalist, the budding astronomer, the language prodigy. We are slouching, even at elite schools, toward a glorified form of vocational training.
  • There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers—holders of power, not its critics. An independent mind is independent of all allegiances, and elite schools, which get a large percentage of their budget from alumni giving, are strongly invested in fostering institutional loyalty.
  • But if you’re afraid to fail, you’re afraid to take risks, which begins to explain the final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual.
  • Yet there is a dimension of the intellectual life that lies above the passion for ideas, though so thoroughly has our culture been sanitized of it that it is hardly surprising if it was beyond the reach of even my most alert students. Since the idea of the intellectual emerged in the 18th century, it has had, at its core, a commitment to social transformation. Being an intellectual means thinking your way toward a vision of the good society and then trying to realize that vision by speaking truth to power.
  • It takes more than just intellect; it takes imagination and courage.
  • Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them. But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system, so it’s almost impossible for them to see outside it, to see that it’s even there.
  • Paradoxically, the situation may be better at second-tier schools and, in particular, again, at liberal arts colleges than at the most prestigious universities. Some students end up at second-tier schools because they’re exactly like students at Harvard or Yale, only less gifted or driven. But others end up there because they have a more independent spirit. They didn’t get straight A’s because they couldn’t be bothered to give everything in every class. They concentrated on the ones that meant the most to them or on a single strong extracurricular passion or on projects that had nothing to do with school
  • I’ve been struck, during my time at Yale, by how similar everyone looks. You hardly see any hippies or punks or art-school types, and at a college that was known in the ’80s as the Gay Ivy, few out lesbians and no gender queers. The geeks don’t look all that geeky; the fashionable kids go in for understated elegance. Thirty-two flavors, all of them vanilla.
  • The most elite schools have become places of a narrow and suffocating normalcy. Everyone feels pressure to maintain the kind of appearance—and affect—that go with achievement
  • Now that students are in constant electronic contact, they never have trouble finding each other. But it’s not as if their compulsive sociability is enabling them to develop deep friendships.
  • What happens when busyness and sociability leave no room for solitude? The ability to engage in introspection, I put it to my students that day, is the essential precondition for living an intellectual life, and the essential precondition for introspection is solitude
  • the life of the mind is lived one mind at a time: one solitary, skeptical, resistant mind at a time. The best place to cultivate it is not within an educational system whose real purpose is to reproduce the class system.
Maria Delzi

How Life Began: New Clues | TIME.com - 0 views

science.time.com/...egan-new-clues-from-new-worlds

shared by Maria Delzi on 17 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Astronomers recently announced that there could be an astonishing 20 billion Earthlike planets in the Milky Way
  • How abundant life actually is, however, hinges on one crucial factor: given the right conditions and the right raw materials,
  • what is the mathematical likelihood that life will actually would arise?
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • biology would have to be popping up all over the place.
  • Andrew Ellington, of the Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology at the University of Texas, Austin, “I can’t tell you what the probability is. It’s a chapter of the story that’s pretty much blank.”
  • Given that rather bleak-sounding assessment, it may be surprising to learn that Ellington is actually pretty upbeat. But that’s how he and two colleagues come across in a paper in the latest Science. The crucial step from nonliving stuff to a live cell is still a mystery, they acknowledge, but the number of pathways a mix of inanimate chemicals could have taken to reach the threshold of the living turns out to be many and varied. “It’s difficult to say exactly how things did occur,” says Ellington. “But there are many ways it could have occurred.
  • The first stab at answering the question came all the way back in the 1950s, when chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey passed an electrical spark through a beaker containing methane, ammonia, water vapor and hydrogen, thought at the time to represent Earth’s primordial atmosphere.
  • Scientists have learned so much, in fact, that the number of places life might have begun has grown to include such disparate locations as the hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the ocean; beds of clay; the billowing clouds of gas emerging from volcanoes; and the spaces in between ice crystals.
  • The number of ideas about how the key step from organic chemicals to living organisms might have been taken has multiplied as well: there’s the “RNA world hypothesis” and the “lipid world hypothesis” and the “iron-sulfur world hypothesis” and more, all of them dependent on a particular set of chemical circumstances and a particular set of dynamics and all highly speculative.
  • “Maybe when they do,” says Ellington, “we’ll all do a face-plant because it turns out to be so obvious in retrospect.” But even if they succeed, it will only prove that a manufactured cell could represent the earliest life forms, not that it actually does. “It will be a story about what we think might have happened, but it will still be a story.”
  • The story Ellington and his colleagues have been able to tell already, however, is a reason for optimism. We still don’t know the odds that life will arise under the right conditions. But the underlying biochemistry is abundantly, ubiquitously available—and it would take an awfully perverse universe to take things so far only to shut them down at the last moment.
Javier E

Addicted to Distraction - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...addicted-to-distraction.html

distraction internet social context addiction focus psychology

shared by Javier E on 29 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • ONE evening early this summer, I opened a book and found myself reading the same paragraph over and over, a half dozen times before concluding that it was hopeless to continue. I simply couldn’t marshal the necessary focus.
  • All my life, reading books has been a deep and consistent source of pleasure, learning and solace. Now the books I regularly purchased were piling up ever higher on my bedside table, staring at me in silent rebuke.
  • Instead of reading them, I was spending too many hours online,
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  • “The net is designed to be an interruption system, a machine geared to dividing attention,” Nicholas Carr explains in his book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.” “We willingly accept the loss of concentration and focus, the division of our attention and the fragmentation of our thoughts, in return for the wealth of compelling or at least diverting information we receive.”
  • Addiction is the relentless pull to a substance or an activity that becomes so compulsive it ultimately interferes with everyday life
  • Denial is any addict’s first defense. No obstacle to recovery is greater than the infinite capacity to rationalize our compulsive behaviors
  • According to one recent survey, the average white-collar worker spends about six hours a day on email.
  • The brain’s craving for novelty, constant stimulation and immediate gratification creates something called a “compulsion loop.” Like lab rats and drug addicts, we need more and more to get the same effect.
  • Endless access to new information also easily overloads our working memory. When we reach cognitive overload, our ability to transfer learning to long-term memory significantly deteriorates.
  • By that definition, nearly everyone I know is addicted in some measure to the Internet. It has arguably replaced work itself as our most socially sanctioned addictio
  • t we humans have a very limited reservoir of will and discipline. We’re far more likely to succeed by trying to change one behavior at a time, ideally at the same time each day, so that it becomes a habit, requiring less and less energy to sustain.
  • Now it was time to detox. I interpreted the traditional second step — belief that a higher power could help restore my sanity — in a more secular way. The higher power became my 30-year-old daughter, who disconnected my phone and laptop from both my email and the Web.
  • During those first few days, I did suffer withdrawal pangs, most of all the hunger to call up Google and search for an answer to some question that arose. But with each passing day offline, I felt more relaxed, less anxious, more able to focus and less hungry for the next shot of instant but short-lived stimulation. What happened to my brain is exactly what I hoped would happen: It began to quiet down.
  • I had brought more than a dozen books of varying difficulty and length on my vacation. I started with short nonfiction, and then moved to longer nonfiction as I began to feel calmer and my focus got stronger. I eventually worked my way up to “The Emperor of All Maladies
  • I am back at work now, and of course I am back online. The Internet isn’t going away, and it will continue to consume a lot of my attention. My aim now is to find the best possible balance between time online and time off
  • I also make it my business now to take on more fully absorbing activities as part of my days. Above all, I’ve kept up reading books, not just because I love them, but also as a continuing attention-building practice.
  • I’ve retained my longtime ritual of deciding the night before on the most important thing I can accomplish the next morning. That’s my first work activity most days, for 60 to 90 minutes without interruption. Afterward, I take a 10- to 15-minute break to quiet my mind and renew my energy.
  • If I have other work during the day that requires sustained focus, I go completely offline for designated periods, repeating my morning ritual. In the evening, when I go up to my bedroom, I nearly always leave my digital devices downstairs.
Javier E

Opinion | How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of 'Race' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...genetics-race.html

genetics race science research human origins

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • In 1942, the anthropologist Ashley Montagu published “Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race,” an influential book that argued that race is a social concept with no genetic basis.
  • eginning in 1972, genetic findings began to be incorporated into this argument. That year, the geneticist Richard Lewontin published an important study of variation in protein types in blood. He grouped the human populations he analyzed into seven “races” — West Eurasians, Africans, East Asians, South Asians, Native Americans, Oceanians and Australians — and found that around 85 percent of variation in the protein types could be accounted for by variation within populations and “races,” and only 15 percent by variation across them. To the extent that there was variation among humans, he concluded, most of it was because of “differences between individuals.”
  • In this way, a consensus was established that among human populations there are no differences large enough to support the concept of “biological race.” Instead, it was argued, race is a “social construct,” a way of categorizing people that changes over time and across countries.
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  • t is true that race is a social construct. It is also true, as Dr. Lewontin wrote, that human populations “are remarkably similar to each other” from a genetic point of view.
  • this consensus has morphed, seemingly without questioning, into an orthodoxy. The orthodoxy maintains that the average genetic differences among people grouped according to today’s racial terms are so trivial when it comes to any meaningful biological traits that those differences can be ignored.
  • With the help of these tools, we are learning that while race may be a social construct, differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real.
  • I have deep sympathy for the concern that genetic discoveries could be misused to justify racism. But as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among “races.”
  • Groundbreaking advances in DNA sequencing technology have been made over the last two decades
  • Care.
  • The orthodoxy goes further, holding that we should be anxious about any research into genetic differences among populations
  • You will sometimes hear that any biological differences among populations are likely to be small, because humans have diverged too recently from common ancestors for substantial differences to have arisen under the pressure of natural selection. This is not true. The ancestors of East Asians, Europeans, West Africans and Australians were, until recently, almost completely isolated from one another for 40,000 years or longer, which is more than sufficient time for the forces of evolution to work
  • I am worried that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science.
  • I am also worried that whatever discoveries are made — and we truly have no idea yet what they will be — will be cited as “scientific proof” that racist prejudices and agendas have been correct all along, and that those well-meaning people will not understand the science well enough to push back against these claims.
  • This is why it is important, even urgent, that we develop a candid and scientifically up-to-date way of discussing any such difference
  • While most people will agree that finding a genetic explanation for an elevated rate of disease is important, they often draw the line there. Finding genetic influences on a propensity for disease is one thing, they argue, but looking for such influences on behavior and cognition is another
  • Is performance on an intelligence test or the number of years of school a person attends shaped by the way a person is brought up? Of course. But does it measure something having to do with some aspect of behavior or cognition? Almost certainly.
  • Recent genetic studies have demonstrated differences across populations not just in the genetic determinants of simple traits such as skin color, but also in more complex traits like bodily dimensions and susceptibility to diseases.
  • in Iceland, there has been measurable genetic selection against the genetic variations that predict more years of education in that population just within the last century.
  • consider what kinds of voices are filling the void that our silence is creating
  • Nicholas Wade, a longtime science journalist for The New York Times, rightly notes in his 2014 book, “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History,” that modern research is challenging our thinking about the nature of human population differences. But he goes on to make the unfounded and irresponsible claim that this research is suggesting that genetic factors explain traditional stereotypes.
  • 139 geneticists (including myself) pointed out in a letter to The New York Times about Mr. Wade’s book, there is no genetic evidence to back up any of the racist stereotypes he promotes.
  • Another high-profile example is James Watson, the scientist who in 1953 co-discovered the structure of DNA, and who was forced to retire as head of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories in 2007 after he stated in an interview — without any scientific evidence — that research has suggested that genetic factors contribute to lower intelligence in Africans than in Europeans.
  • What makes Dr. Watson’s and Mr. Wade’s statements so insidious is that they start with the accurate observation that many academics are implausibly denying the possibility of average genetic differences among human populations, and then end with a claim — backed by no evidence — that they know what those differences are and that they correspond to racist stereotypes
  • They use the reluctance of the academic community to openly discuss these fraught issues to provide rhetorical cover for hateful ideas and old racist canards.
  • This is why knowledgeable scientists must speak out. If we abstain from laying out a rational framework for discussing differences among populations, we risk losing the trust of the public and we actively contribute to the distrust of expertise that is now so prevalent.
  • If scientists can be confident of anything, it is that whatever we currently believe about the genetic nature of differences among populations is most likely wrong.
  • For example, my laboratory discovered in 2016, based on our sequencing of ancient human genomes, that “whites” are not derived from a population that existed from time immemorial, as some people believe. Instead, “whites” represent a mixture of four ancient populations that lived 10,000 years ago and were each as different from one another as Europeans and East Asians are today.
  • For me, a natural response to the challenge is to learn from the example of the biological differences that exist between males and females
  • The differences between the sexes are far more profound than those that exist among human populations, reflecting more than 100 million years of evolution and adaptation. Males and females differ by huge tracts of genetic material
  • How do we accommodate the biological differences between men and women? I think the answer is obvious: We should both recognize that genetic differences between males and females exist and we should accord each sex the same freedoms and opportunities regardless of those differences
  • fulfilling these aspirations in practice is a challenge. Yet conceptually it is straightforward.
  • Compared with the enormous differences that exist among individuals, differences among populations are on average many times smaller, so it should be only a modest challenge to accommodate a reality in which the average genetic contributions to human traits differ.
Javier E

Parents' Dilemma: When to Give Children Smartphones - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...r-americas-children-1515772695

smartphone children addiction psychology brain science technology

shared by Javier E on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Experience has already shown parents that ceding control over the devices has reshaped their children’s lives, allowing an outside influence on school work, friendships, recreation, sleep, romance, sex and free time.
  • Nearly 75% of teenagers had access to smartphones, concluded a 2015 study by Pew Research Center—unlocking the devices about 95 times a day on average,
  • They spent, on average, close to nine hours a day tethered to screens large
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • The more screen time, the more revenue.
  • The goal of Facebook Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Snap Inc. and their peers is to create or host captivating experiences that keep users glued to their screens, whether for Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat or Facebook
  • Snapchat users 25 and younger, for example, were spending 40 minutes a day on the app, Chief Executive Evan Spiegel said in August. Alphabet boasted to investors recently that YouTube’s 1.5 billion users were spending an average 60 minutes a day on mobile.
  • Facebook’s stock slid 4.5% to close at $179 Friday after CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced plans Thursday to overhaul the Facebook news feed in a way that could reduce the time users spend.
  • Tech companies are working to instill viewing habits earlier than ever. The number of users of YouTube Kids is soaring. Facebook recently launched Messenger Kids, a messaging app for children as young as 6.
  • Ms. Ho’s 16-year-old son, Brian is an Eagle Scout and chorister, who at times finds it hard to break away from online videogames, even at 3 a.m. The teen recently told his mother he thinks he is addicted. Ms. Ho’s daughter, Samantha, 14, also is glued to her device, in conversations with friends.
  • “You think you’re buying a piece of technology,” Ms. Shepardson said. “Now it’s like oxygen to her.”
  • Psychologists say social media creates anxiety among children when they are away from their phones—what they call “fear of missing out,” whether on social plans, conversations or damaging gossip teens worry could be about themselves.
  • About half the teens in a survey of 620 families in 2016 said they felt addicted to their smartphones. Nearly 80% said they checked the phones more than hourly and felt the need to respond instantly to messages
  • Children set up Instagram accounts under pseudonyms that friends but not parents recognize. Some teens keep several of these so-called Finsta accounts without their parents knowing.
  • An app called Secret Calculator looks and works like an iPhone calculator but doubles as a private vault to hide files, photos and videos.
  • Mr. Zuckerberg told investors late last year that Facebook planned to boost video offerings, noting that live video generates 10 times as many user interactions. Netflix Inc. chief executive Reed Hastings, said in April about the addictiveness of its shows that the company was “competing with sleep on the margins.”
  • Keeping children away from disturbing content, though, is easier than keeping them off their phones.
  • About 16% of the nation’s high-school students were bullied online in 2015, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Children who are cyberbullied are three times more likely to contemplate suicide
  • Smartphones “bring the outside in,” said Ms. Ahn, whose husband works for a major tech company. “We want the family to be the center of gravity.”
sissij

The Australian Greens Party Proposes a Shorter Workweek to Prepare for Job Automation | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...d-against-the-reduced-workweek

social media education research

shared by sissij on 03 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • How long was your work day today? Eight hours? Seven hours? Nine? How long is your working week? If you live in the United States you probably answered somewhere near 40 hours.
  • While the effect of mandating a 40-ish hour week across the Western world over the last century didn’t end up causing the disaster predicted by many in the leisure class, the effects of reducing working time further have not been studied well enough to make an absolute judgement on the matter. The data is simply too limited. 
  • So, one example showed employees being less stressed and working better when given reduced hours, at the price of higher costs overall to hire more people to work.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Leisure is essential to civilization… and with modern technique it would be possible to distribute leisure justly without injury to civilization.
  • The question of the proper number of working hours is one that has bothered economic and ethical thinkers for 2,000 years.
  • sissij on 03 Apr 17
     
    When my talked to me about her time when she was young, she said that they had to work for six day a week, which I consider unbearable and unimaginable. And now, I think in the future, maybe when when I tell my kids that I have to go to school five days a week, they would probably feel unbearable and unimaginable. I think as time precedes, the working hour for human would decrease. I remembered in Ming Dynasty of China, "government employees" had to work seven days a week for the whole year and had only 5 holidays off. The evolution of the society and development of the technology is definitely one the reasons that we can work for less time compared to the past. --Sissi (4/2/2017)
sissij

A Homebody President Sits Out His Honeymoon Period - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...travel-trump-obama-bush.html

new york times bias

shared by sissij on 17 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • Mr. Trump, who dislikes spending the night away from home and has been adapting to life at the White House, has rarely ventured far from the Executive Mansion or his Mar-a-Lago retreat in Florida during his first 85 days in office. He has not strayed west of the Mississippi River, appearing at public events in only seven states and eschewing trips overseas.
  • “Trump is going to his own drummer, as usual. It’s a risky strategy.”
  • “When you’re president, you don’t travel to get frequent flier miles — you travel to make a point,”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • focus on an ambitious domestic agenda, including the signing of executive orders and legislation to roll back Obama-era regulations.
  • his time is his most valuable asset.
  • What’s striking with President Trump is not only how contained his travel has been, but how much of it is around campaign rallies, rather than something he wants to get done
  • sissij on 17 Apr 17
     
    I think this comparison of Mr. Trump with other presidents might be a little biased. Every president has their own policies so I think it is not appropriate to compare the time they spend traveling. Since Mr. Trump's focus is on domestic policy so it is sort of reasonable for him to spend more time with in the United States. However, in the latter half of the article, the author talked about the quality of Mr. Trump's staying. Indeed, I agree with author that Mr. Trump's staying is not very efficient. I think the frequency of traveling shouldn't be the measure of their presidency, but the quality and efficiency of their action and decision should be weighted. --Sissi (4/17/2017)
clairemann

Why Are People Afraid of Clowns? | Time - 0 views

time.com/...hy-are-people-afraid-of-clowns

psychology brain science research

shared by clairemann on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • It’s been a rough few years for people who have a fear of clowns. In the wake of the ‘clown attack’ craze that reached a fever pitch in 2016, movies about creepy clowns have taken over the entertainment landscape.
  • A local legend, Wrinkles is a 69-year-old retiree who will show up in a terrifying clown suit to scare the pants off anyone you ask him to — even your misbehaving child. In 2015, he told the Washington Post that he gets hundreds of phone calls a day requesting his services. “We know that there’s a human underneath and yet, you don’t know their identity,” a voiceover says of Wrinkles in the trailer for the doc. “That creeps people out.” Indeed.
  • “Clowns’ faces are disguised and they have these large artificial displays of emotion. So you have a clown with a painted face and a big smile, but you don’t really know what they’re actually feeling,” he tells TIME. “There’s this inherent mistrust that what they’re presenting to you isn’t what they’re actually feeling.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • “When people hear ‘clown,’ the first associations that pop into their head are the killer clowns in the movies — It, the Joker— and then John Wayne Gacy, the real-life mass murderer,” McAndrew says of the 1970s serial killer who became known as the “Killer Clown” for his volunteer clown work. “It’s kind of hard to get past all of that.”
  • “[Some of the] very first clowns were the court jesters who poked fun at kings and made people in high places uncomfortable. That’s why they exist,” he tells TIME of the history of clowns in medieval Europe. “They’re designed to make people afraid. If you go all the way back to the beginning of clownhood, they’ve always been bad. They’re pranksters, they play tricks.”
  • However, while many people are apprehensive or fearful of clowns, both Nader and McAndrew agree that someone having an actual phobia of clowns, a.k.a. coulrophobia, is rare.
  • “Fortunately, we live in a society where clowns aren’t just wandering around, so it’s pretty easy to avoid them or at least not come into contact with them very regularly. Rarely does this fear ever cause a person to experience a disruption in their lifestyle or ability to do things.”
  • “We like to learn about dangers in a safe way so that we’re prepared in some unknown future time to deal with them if they ever come our way. So by going to see IT and watching this evil clown lure children in and kill them, we learn strategies for avoiding that kind of fate ourselves,” he says. “We’re not consciously sitting there, watching the movie and thinking these things, but that impulse to like to scare ourselves is there.”
Javier E

Why Study History? (1985) | AHA - 0 views

www.historians.org/...why-study-history-(1985)

history study historiography learning teaching education

shared by Javier E on 17 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Isn't there quite enough to learn about the world today? Why add to the burden by looking at the past
  • Historical knowledge is no more and no less than carefully and critically constructed collective memory. As such it can both make us wiser in our public choices and more richly human in our private lives.
  • Without individual memory, a person literally loses his or her identity, and would not know how to act in encounters with others. Imagine waking up one morning unable to tell total strangers from family and friends!
  • ...37 more annotations...
  • Collective memory is similar, though its loss does not immediately paralyze everyday private activity. But ignorance of history-that is, absent or defective collective memory-does deprive us of the best available guide for public action, especially in encounters with outsider
  • Often it is enough for experts to know about outsiders, if their advice is listened to. But democratic citizenship and effective participation in the determination of public policy require citizens to share a collective memory, organized into historical knowledge and belief
  • This value of historical knowledge obviously justifies teaching and learning about what happened in recent times, for the way things are descends from the way they were yesterday and the day before that
  • in fact, institutions that govern a great deal of our everyday behavior took shape hundreds or even thousands of years ago
  • Only an acquaintance with the entire human adventure on earth allows us to understand these dimensions of contemporary reality.
  • it follows that study of history is essential for every young person.
  • Collective memory is quite the same. Historians are always at work reinterpreting the past, asking new questions, searching new sources and finding new meanings in old documents in order to bring the perspective of new knowledge and experience to bear on the task of understanding the past.
  • what we know and believe about history is always changing. In other words, our collective, codified memory alters with time just as personal memories do, and for the same reasons.
  • skeptics are likely to conclude that history has no right to take student time from other subjects. If what is taught today is not really true, how can it claim space in a crowded school curriculum?
  • what if the world is more complicated and diverse than words can ever tell? What if human minds are incapable of finding' neat pigeon holes into which everything that happens will fit?
  • What if we have to learn to live with uncertainty and probabilities, and act on the basis of the best guesswork we are capable of?
  • Then, surely, the changing perspectives of historical understanding are the very best introduction we can have to the practical problems of real life. Then, surely, a serious effort to understand the interplay of change and continuity in human affairs is the only adequate introduction human beings can have to the confusing flow of events that constitutes the actual, adult world.
  • Memory is not something fixed and forever. As time passes, remembered personal experiences take on new meanings.
  • Early in this century, teachers and academic administrators pretty well agreed that two sorts of history courses were needed: a survey of the national history of the United States and a survey of European history.
  • Memory, indeed, makes us human. History, our collective memory, carefully codified and critically revised, makes us social, sharing ideas and ideals with others so as to form all sorts of different human groups
  • The varieties of history are enormous; facts and probabilities about the past are far too numerous for anyone to comprehend them all. Every sort of human group has its own histor
  • Where to start? How bring some sort of order to the enormous variety of things known and believed about the past?
  • Systematic sciences are not enough. They discount time, and therefore oversimplify reality, especially human reality.
  • This second course was often broadened into a survey of Western civilization in the 1930s and 1940s
  • But by the 1960s and 1970s these courses were becoming outdated, left behind by the rise of new kinds social and quantitative history, especially the history of women, of Blacks, and of other formerly overlooked groups within the borders of the United States, and of peoples emerging from colonial status in the world beyond our borders.
  • much harder to combine old with new to make an inclusive, judiciously balanced (and far less novel) introductory course for high school or college students.
  • But abandoning the effort to present a meaningful portrait of the entire national and civilizational past destroyed the original justification for requiring students to study history
  • Competing subjects abounded, and no one could or would decide what mattered most and should take precedence. As this happened, studying history became only one among many possible ways of spending time in school.
  • The costs of this change are now becoming apparent, and many concerned persons agree that returning to a more structured curriculum, in which history ought to play a prominent part, is imperative.
  • three levels of generality seem likely to have the greatest importance for ordinary people.
  • First is family, local, neighborhood history
  • Second is national history, because that is where political power is concentrated in our time.
  • Last is global history, because intensified communications make encounters with all the other peoples of the earth increasingly important.
  • Other pasts are certainly worth attention, but are better studied in the context of a prior acquaintance with personal-local, national, and global history. That is because these three levels are the ones that affect most powerfully what all other groups and segments of society actually do.
  • National history that leaves out Blacks and women and other minorities is no longer acceptable; but American history that leaves out the Founding Fathers and the Constitution is not acceptable either. What is needed is a vision of the whole, warts and all.
  • the study of history does not lead to exact prediction of future events. Though it fosters practical wisdom, knowledge of the past does not permit anyone to know exactly what is going to happen
  • Consequently, the lessons of history, though supremely valuable when wisely formulated, become grossly misleading when oversimplifiers try to transfer them mechanically from one age to another, or from one place to another.
  • Predictable fixity is simply not the human way of behaving. Probabilities and possibilities-together with a few complete surprises-are what we live with and must learn to expect.
  • Second, as acquaintance with the past expands, delight in knowing more and more can and often does become an end in itself.
  • On the other hand, studying alien religious beliefs, strange customs, diverse family patterns and vanished social structures shows how differently various human groups have tried to cop
  • Broadening our humanity and extending our sensibilities by recognizing sameness and difference throughout the recorded past is therefore an important reason for studying history, and especially the history of peoples far away and long ago
  • For we can only know ourselves by knowing how we resemble and how we differ from others. Acquaintance with the human past is the only way to such self knowledge.
adonahue011

Children's Screen Time Has Soared in the Pandemic, Alarming Parents and Researchers - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-kids-tech-use.html

psychology research social media technology education bias brain science new york times pandemic

shared by adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • overlooked the vastly increasing time that his son was spending on video games and social media
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      Very important and notable to all of our lives
  • calling his phone his “whole life.”
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      This seems extreme and unreasonable, but technology is very important to our generation.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • I’m not losing my son to this.”
  • are watching their children slide down an increasingly slippery path into an all-consuming digital life.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      Very important note because some want this all-virtual to be a future but forget the toll it takes on us as humans.
  • There
  • “There will be a period of epic withdrawal,”
  • that children’s brains, well through adolescence, are considered “plastic,” meaning they can adapt and shift to changing circumstances.
  • elling parents not to feel guilty about allowing more screen time, given the stark challenges of lockdowns. Now, she said, she’d have given different advice if she had known how long children would end up stuck at home.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      I think that her advice was good for the beginning of quarantine because anything to allow our brains to be stimulated during that period helped.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      I think that her advice was good for the beginning of quarantine because anything to allow our brains to be stimulated during that period helped.
  • I probably would have encouraged families to turn off Wi-Fi except during school hours so kids don’t feel tempted every moment, night and day,”
  • nine months of 2020, an increase of 82 percent over the year before.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      I wonder how this effects younger kids mental progression
  • In the United States, for instance, children spent, on average, 97
  • minutes a day on YouTube in March and April, up from 57 minutes in February, and nearly double the use a year prior
  • “The Covid Effect.”
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      Have never heard of "the covid effect" makes perfect sense though.
  • What concerns researchers, at a minimum, is that the use of devices is a poor substitute for activities known to be central to health, social and physical development, including physical play and other interactions that help children learn how to confront challenging social situations.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      Similar to TOK and how our brains learn to interact with others
  • Dr. Briasouli said. Some days, she said, she watches her son sit with three devices, alternating play among them.
  • These are the tools of their lives,” he said. “Everything they will do, they will do through one of these electronic devices, socialization included.”
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      Seems to be the clear counter argument
  • “he laughs and has some social interaction with his buddies,”
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      The social aspect is also very important
  • said he believed that adults and children alike could, with disciplined time away from devices, learn to disconnect. But doing so has become complicated by the fact that the devices now are at once vessels for school, social life, gaming and other activities central to life.
  • Dr. Radesky said that the mingling of all of these functions not only gives children a chance to multitask, it also allows young people to “escape” from any uncomfortable moment they may face.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      This is so true and I think almost everyone I know does this all the time.
  • Instead, he hangs out online with his old frie
  • I’ve failed you as a father,”
Javier E

Pew research: Teens worried they spend too much time on phones - Quartz - 0 views

qz.com/...-spend-too-much-time-on-phones

smartphone teens adolescent addiction psychology Research

shared by Javier E on 27 May 19 - No Cached
  • Even teens are worried they spend too much time on their phonesBy Jenny AndersonAugust 23, 2018
  • even teens think they have a problem.
  • According to the study, 60% of teens—those between the ages of 13 to 17—say that spending too much time online is a “major” problem facing their age group, with about nine in 10 teens dubbing it a problem. More than half of teens (54%) say they spend too much time on their cellphones, and 41% say they overdo it on social media.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • According to Common Sense Media, teens spend an average of nine hours a day online (paywall), compared to about six hours for those aged eight to 12 and 50 minutes for kids between 0 and eight
  • “It’s not a drug, but it might as well be. It works the same way… it has the same results,
  • A startling 44% of teens tell Pew that they often check their phones for messages or notifications as soon as they wake up; 28% say they check at least sometimes.
pier-paolo

The Year of Blur - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-year-of-blur.html

shared by pier-paolo on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • “The days are long, but the years are short.” Except in the pandemic, she said, “the days are long, and the year is also long.”
  • You’re not alone if you feel that 2020, perhaps the most dramatic and memorable year of our lifetimes — and that’s before Election Day — seems shuffled and disordered, like a giant blur. A dream state, or perhaps a nightmare.
  • That’s the paradox of 2020, or one of them: A year so momentous also feels, in a way, as if nothing happened at all.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Without the usual work mixers, festive holiday celebrations, far-flung vacations or casual dinners that typically mark and divide the calendar, the brain has a harder time processing and cataloging memories,
  • the stress of the year itself can shift how our brains experience time
  • there is a medical explanation for the feeling of mental haziness: Covid brain fog, a lingering combination of dementia-like symptoms including memory loss, confusion and difficulty focusing
  • For some who have recovered from Covid-19
  • Sheer monotony has the ability to warp time and tangle our memories, psychologists say, with quarantines and lockdowns robbing us of the “boundary events” that normally divide the days, like chapters in a book.
  • Without breaks in a repetitive routine, the mind has difficulty differentiating between memories, which psychologists call pattern separation,
  • t doesn’t help that so much of our lives are virtual now, happening only on screens. Instead of stimulating our senses in real life — going to shops, meeting friends for coffee, chatting with colleagues in the office — we FaceTime when the mood strikes, we binge Netflix shows from three years ago and we browse Amazon perpetually
  • If one problem is that there is too little going on in our lives, another problem, it seems, is that there is also too much.
  • The unending sense of crisis is an “ongoing, chronic stressor” that can lead to a collapse of the reassuring sense that our lives move in orderly fashion: past, present, future, which is key to mental stability.
  • In researching the psychological repercussions of devastating Southern California wildfires in the 1990s, Dr. Holman said that victims felt like “time slowed down" and “the days blurred together.” “Their sense of reality changes,” she said. “They’re not sure what’s real anymore. They feel a sense of a blur, like time is just a blur.”
  • But even people in solitary confinement will tell you that the essence of that experience is something we’re all experiencing now — the deprivation of normal social contact. And human beings really do depend on each other to structure our lives and tell us who we are.”
  • “We’ve all had basically enough of wearing our masks and having our lives disrupted,” Ms. Spinney said, “which is what we’re seeing now with Covid fatigue.”
  • Or perhaps we just need to remember that time is a human construct.
ilanaprincilus06

Why the Brain is Resistant to Truth | Time.com - 1 views

time.com/...brain-resilient-truth

social media amygdala brain truth

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • the agricultural age gave us easier access to nutrition, and the industrial age dramatically increased our quality of life, no other era has provided so much stimulation for our brains as the information age.
  • every day we produce approximately 2.5 billion gigabytes of data and perform 4 billion Google searches. In the short time it took you to read the last sentence, approximately 530,243 new ones were executed.
  • As information about the world became readily accessible, people were still inclined to argue about the facts
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • in the face of a publicly available birth certificate of the 44th President of the United States, there are diverse opinions regarding his birthplace.
  • But what actually determines whether someone will be persuaded by our argument or whether we will be ignored?
  • In one study, for example, my colleague Micha Edelson and I, together with others, recorded people’s brain activity while we exposed them to misinformation. A week later we invited everyone back to our lab and told them that the information we gave them before was randomly generated. About half the time our volunteers were able to correct the false beliefs we induced in them, but about half the time they continued believing misinformation.
    • ilanaprincilus06
      ilanaprincilus06 on 02 Nov 20
       
      This manipulation has a great affect on our long term memory recollection which we will carry with us until we are able to be persuaded.
  • This structure is called the amygdala and it is important for producing emotional arousal. We found that if the amygdala was activated when people were first exposed to misinformation, it was less likely we would be able to correct their judgments later.
  • good news was more likely to impact people’s beliefs than bad news. But that under stress, negative information, such as learning about unexpectedly high rates of disease and violent acts, is more likely to alter people’s beliefs.
    • ilanaprincilus06
      ilanaprincilus06 on 02 Nov 20
       
      When we are in a good mood, we don't want anything to ruin it. However, when we are in a bad mood, we surround ourselves with negative energy because we feel that our bad moods could not possible get worse.
  • Twitter is perfectly designed to engage our emotions because its features naturally call on our affective system; messages are fast, short and transferred within a social context.
  • information on Twitter (and other social platforms that use short and fast messages) is particularly likely to be evaluated based on emotional responses with little input from higher cognitive functions.
  • Science has shown that waiting just a couple of minutes before making judgments reduces the likelihood that they will be based solely on instinct.
  • people’s feelings, hopes and fears that play a central role in whether a piece of evidence will influence their beliefs.
kaylynfreeman

Why Lack of Human Touch Can Be Difficult Amid Coronavirus | Time - 1 views

time.com/...coronavirus-human-touch

psychology brain science

shared by kaylynfreeman on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • With people around the world practicing social distancing and self-isolation to curb the further spread of coronavirus, some are starting to feel the effects of a lack of human touch.
  • “Touch is the fundamental language of connection,” says Keltner. “When you think about a parent-child bond or two friends or romantic partners, a lot of the ways in which we connect and trust and collaborate are founded in touch.”
  • It’s not just about how we feel emotionally. Keltner adds that “touch deprivation” can impact people on a psychological and even physical level
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • “Big parts of our brains are devoted to making sense of touch and our skin has billions of cells that process information about it,”
  • “The right type of friendly touch—like hugging your partner or linking arms with a dear friend—calms your stress response down. [Positive] touch activates a big bundle of nerves in your body that improves your immune system, regulates digestion and helps you sleep well. It also activates parts of your brain that help you empathize.”
  • Psychologist Sheldon Cohen and other researchers at Carnegie Mellon University cited hugging specifically as a form of touch that can strengthen the immune system in a 2014 study investigating whether receiving hugs—and more broadly, social support that gives the perception that one is cared for—could make people less susceptible to one of the viruses that causes the common cold.
  • Broadly speaking, the participants who had reported having more social support were less likely to get sick—and those who got more hugs were far more likely to report feeling socially supported.
  • Everybody should be open to people being a little more socially distant and not touching as much. Some of it will return and some of it won’t.”
  • Although there’s no exact substitute for human touch, if you’re struggling with this aspect of self-isolating in particular, there are a few alternatives that can offer similar health benefits for people who are social distancing
  • “In-person interactions have a big effect on the brain releasing oxytocin, but interacting via video is actually not that [different],” he explains. “It’s maybe 80% as effective. Video conferencing is a great way to see and be seen.”
  • Keltner adds that dancing, singing or doing yoga with others via an online platform can also be highly effective substitutes for physical contact
  • “Not only would it be good to prevent coronavirus disease; it probably would decrease instances of influenza dramatically in this country,”
  • Zak says U.S. customs like shaking hands and hugging may be changed forever and suggests that non-tactile greetings like a nod, bow or wave may come to replace them. However, he says it will still be important to find ways to reintroduce the humanity of positive touch into in-person interactions without putting anyone’s physical or mental health in jeopardy.
  • “When we’re touched [in a positive way], a cascade of events happens in the brain and one of the important ones is the release of a neurochemical called oxytocin,”
  • But for those who are quarantining alone or with people with whom they don’t have physical contact, loneliness and social isolation are growing health concerns.
  • this process reduces stress and improves immunity. “That’s super valuable in a time of pandemic.”
  • If you’re using a video chat service for work or school, Zak recommends that you take five minutes at the beginning of the call to focus on interpersonal connection.
  • to illustrate how dance parties like Daybreaker can be beneficial for people’s physical and mental health. “When you create a dance experience driven by music, community and participation, that’s how you’re able to release all four happy brain chemicals,” Agrawal says.
  • anonymous on 04 Nov 20
     
    Touch has a great impact on our brains and our reactions amid coronavirus separation. There are a few substitutes for human touch, like yoga and facetime, that we can all try.
sanderk

How your phone affects your health - Insider - 0 views

www.insider.com/one-affects-your-health-2018-6

phone affects health knowledge education social media Technology

shared by sanderk on 23 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • When was the last time you disinfected your phone? According to a 2017 study, high levels of bacterial contamination can be found on the surface of cell phones.
  • Time magazine suggests that your phone could be 10 times dirtier than your toilet seat.
  • Frequently looking down at your phone for extended periods of time puts a strain on your neck
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • All of your devices emit short wavelength light, known as blue light. A Harvard study claimed that exposure to blue light before bed decreases natural melatonin production, a hormone that regulates sleep. The brightness from your phone screen can interrupt your natural circadian rhythm, and cause for shorter REM cycles and overall restless sleep.
  • With a constant influx of information grabbing your attention, it can put pressure on you to have your phone on you at all times to stay informed. Researchers agreed, telling The Chicago Tribune that the possibility of missing something if you don’t keep your phone nearby can induce a feeling of stress and anxiety. 
  • Remember the blue light? The cornea and lens can’t filter it, so the light goes to the back of the eye, which can weaken vision over time.
  • Though social media can be fun entertainment, it can also open up the door for harmful comparison. Being able to keep up to date with someone else’s success (or pitfalls) invites the opportunity for you to compare your life to theirs. That can invoke a feeling of inadequacy and unhappiness, according to Psychology Today
Javier E

On the Shortness of Life 2.0 - by Peter Juul - The Liberal Patriot - 0 views

theliberalpatriot.substack.com/...on-the-shortness-of-life-20

time management organization life planning mission balance ethics personal virtue good life

shared by Javier E on 01 Oct 21 - No Cached
  • It’s a deft and eclectic synthesis of ancient and modern thinking about how humanity can come to terms with our limited time on Earth – the title derives from the length of the average human lifespan – ranging intellectually from ancient Greek and Roman philosophers like Seneca to modern-day Buddhist and existentialist thinkers. Stuffed with valuable and practical insights on life and how we use – or misuse – it, Four Thousand Weeks is an impressive and compact volume well worth the time and attention of even the most casual readers.
  • As Burkeman notes, our preoccupation with productivity allows us to evade “the anxiety that might arise if we were to ask ourselves whether we’re on the right path.” The end result is a lot of dedicated and talented people in politics and policy burning themselves out for no discernable or meaningful purpose.
  • Then there’s social media, defined by Burkeman as “a machine for misusing your life.” Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook don’t just distract us from more important matters, he argues, “they change how we’re defining ‘important matters’ in the first place.”
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Social media also amounts to “a machine for getting you to care about too many things, even if they’re each indisputably worthwhile.” Hence the urge to depict every policy problem as an urgent if not existential crisis
  • social media has turned all of us into “angrier, less empathetic, more anxious or more numbed out” versions of ourselves.
  • Finally, our political and policy debates tend towards what Burkeman calls “paralyzing grandiosity” – the false notion that in the face of problems like climate change, economic inequality, and ongoing threats to democracy “only the most revolutionary, world-transforming causes are worth fighting for.” It’s a sentiment that derives from and reinforces catastrophism and absolutism as ways of thinking about politics and policy
  • That sentiment also often results in impotent impatience, which in turn leads to frustration, anger, and cynicism when things don’t turn out exactly as we’ve hoped. But it also allows us to avoid hard choices required in order to pull together the political coalitions necessary to effect actual change.
  • Four Thousand Weeks is filled to the brim with practical advice
  • Embrace “radical incrementalism.”
  • Burkeman suggests we find some hobby we enjoy for its own sake, not because there’s some benefit we think we can derive from it
  • Take a break
  • rest for rest’s sake, “to spend some of our time, that is, on activities in which the only thing we’re trying to get from them is the doing itself.”
  • we should cultivate the patience to see our goals through step-by-step over the long term. We’ve got to resist the need for speed and desire for rapid resolution of problems, letting them instead take the time they take.
  • “To make a difference,” Burkeman argues, “you must focus your finite capacity for care.”
  • “Consolidate your caring” and think small.
  • it’s perfectly fine to dedicate your time to a limited subset of issues that you care deeply about. We’re only mortal, and as Burkeman points out it’s important to “consciously pick your battles in charity, activism, and politics.”
  • our lives are just as meaningful and worthwhile if we spend our time “on, say caring for an elderly relative with dementia or volunteering at the local community garden” as they are if we’re up to our eyeballs in the minutiae of politics and policy. What matters is that we make things slightly better with our contributions and actions
  • once we give up on the illusion of perfection, Burkeman observes, we “get to roll up [our] sleeves and start work on what’s gloriously possible instead.”
Javier E

TikTok Brain Explained: Why Some Kids Seem Hooked on Social Video Feeds - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...social-video-feeds-11648866192

video social media children inattention attention gratification psychology brain science technology

shared by Javier E on 03 Apr 22 - No Cached
  • Remember the good old days when kids just watched YouTube all day? Now that they binge on 15-second TikToks, those YouTube clips seem like PBS documentaries.
  • Many parents tell me their kids can’t sit through feature-length films anymore because to them the movies feel painfully slow. Others have observed their kids struggling to focus on homework. And reading a book? Forget about it.
  • What is happening to kids’ brains?
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  • “It is hard to look at increasing trends in media consumption of all types, media multitasking and rates of ADHD in young people and not conclude that there is a decrease in their attention span,
  • Emerging research suggests that watching short, fast-paced videos makes it harder for kids to sustain activities that don’t offer instant—and constant—gratification.
  • One of the few studies specifically examining TikTok-related effects on the brain focused on Douyin, the TikTok equivalent in China, made by the same Chinese parent company, ByteDance Ltd. It found that the personalized videos the app’s recommendation engine shows users activate the reward centers of the brain, as compared with the general-interest videos shown to new users.
  • Brain scans of Chinese college students showed that areas involved in addiction were highly activated in those who watched personalized videos.
  • It also found some people have trouble controlling when to stop watching.
  • attention. “If kids’ brains become accustomed to constant changes, the brain finds it difficult to adapt to a nondigital activity where things don’t move quite as fast,”
  • A TikTok spokeswoman said the company wants younger teens to develop positive digital habits early on, and that it recently made some changes aimed at curbing extensive app usage. For example, TikTok won’t allow users ages 13 to 15 to receive push notifications after 9 p.m. TikTok also periodically reminds users to take a break to go outside or grab a snack.
  • Kids have a hard time pulling away from videos on YouTube, too, and Google has made several changes to help limit its use, including turning off autoplay by default on accounts of people under 18.
  • When kids do things that require prolonged focus, such as reading or solving math problems, they’re using directed attention
  • This function starts in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for decision making and impulse control.
  • “Directed attention is the ability to inhibit distractions and sustain attention and to shift attention appropriately. It requires higher-order skills like planning and prioritizing,”
  • Kids generally have a harder time doing this—and putting down their videogame controllers—because the prefrontal cortex isn’t fully developed until age 25.
  • “We speculate that individuals with lower self-control ability have more difficulty shifting attention away from favorite video stimulation,
  • “In the short-form snackable world, you’re getting quick hit after quick hit, and as soon as it’s over, you have to make a choice,” said Mass General’s Dr. Marci, who wrote the new book “Rewired: Protecting Your Brain in the Digital Age.” The more developed the prefrontal cortex, the better the choices.
  • Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that gets released in the brain when it’s expecting a reward. A flood of dopamine reinforces cravings for something enjoyable, whether it’s a tasty meal, a drug or a funny TikTok video.
  • “TikTok is a dopamine machine,” said John Hutton, a pediatrician and director of the Reading & Literacy Discovery Center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. “If you want kids to pay attention, they need to practice paying attention.”
  • Researchers are just beginning to conduct long-term studies on digital media’s effects on kids’ brains. The National Institutes of Health is funding a study of nearly 12,000 adolescents as they grow into adulthood to examine the impact that many childhood experiences—from social media to smoking—have on cognitive development.
  • she predicts they will find that when brains repeatedly process rapid, rewarding content, their ability to process less-rapid, less-rewarding things “may change or be harmed.”
  • “It’s like we’ve made kids live in a candy store and then we tell them to ignore all that candy and eat a plate of vegetables,”
  • “We have an endless flow of immediate pleasures that’s unprecedented in human history.”
  • Parents and kids can take steps to boost attention, but it takes effort
  • Swap screen time for real time. Exercise and free play are among the best ways to build attention during childhood,
  • “Depriving kids of tech doesn’t work, but simultaneously reducing it and building up other things, like playing outside, does,”
  • Practice restraint.
  • “When you practice stopping, it strengthens those connections in the brain to allow you to stop again next time.”
  • Use tech’s own tools. TikTok has a screen-time management setting that allows users to cap their app usage.
  • Ensure good sleep. Teens are suffering from a sleep deficit.
Javier E

Opinion | What College Students Need Is a Taste of the Monk's Life - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ental-health-smart-phones.html

ultimate question cognitive resilience courses technology dependence purpose mission monastery distraction education learning knowledge

shared by Javier E on 26 May 23 - No Cached
  • When she registered last fall for the seminar known around campus as the monk class, she wasn’t sure what to expect.
  • “You give up technology, and you can’t talk for a month,” Ms. Rodriguez told me. “That’s all I’d heard. I didn’t know why.” What she found was a course that challenges students to rethink the purpose of education, especially at a time when machine learning is getting way more press than the human kind.
  • Each week, students would read about a different monastic tradition and adopt some of its practices. Later in the semester, they would observe a one-month vow of silence (except for discussions during Living Deliberately) and fast from technology, handing over their phones to him.
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  • Yes, he knew they had other classes, jobs and extracurriculars; they could make arrangements to do that work silently and without a computer.
  • The class eased into the vow of silence, first restricting speech to 100 words a day. Other rules began on Day 1: no jewelry or makeup in class. Men and women sat separately and wore different “habits”: white shirts for the men, women in black. (Nonbinary and transgender students sat with the gender of their choice.)
  • Dr. McDaniel discouraged them from sharing personal information; they should get to know one another only through ideas. “He gave us new names, based on our birth time and day, using a Thai birth chart,”
  • “We were practicing living a monastic life. We had to wake up at 5 a.m. and journal every 30 minutes.”
  • If you tried to cruise to a C, you missed the point: “I realized the only way for me to get the most out of this class was to experience it all,” she said. (She got Dr. McDaniel’s permission to break her vow of silence in order to talk to patients during her clinical rotation.)
  • Dr. McDaniel also teaches a course called Existential Despair. Students meet once a week from 5 p.m. to midnight in a building with comfy couches, turn over their phones and curl up to read an assigned novel (cover to cover) in one sitting — books like James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” and José Saramago’s “Blindness.” Then they stay up late discussing it.
  • The course is not about hope, overcoming things, heroic stories,” Dr. McDaniel said. Many of the books “start sad. In the middle they’re sad. They stay sad. I’m not concerned with their 20-year-old self. I’m worried about them at my age, dealing with breast cancer, their dad dying, their child being an addict, a career that never worked out — so when they’re dealing with the bigger things in life, they know they’re not alone.”
  • Both courses have long wait lists. Students are hungry for a low-tech, introspective experience —
  • Research suggests that underprivileged young people have far fewer opportunities to think for unbroken stretches of time, so they may need even more space in college to develop what social scientists call cognitive endurance.
  • Yet the most visible higher ed trends are moving in the other direction
  • Rather than ban phones and laptops from class, some professors are brainstorming ways to embrace students’ tech addictions with class Facebook and Instagram accounts, audience response apps — and perhaps even including the friends and relatives whom students text during class as virtual participants in class discussion.
  • Then there’s that other unwelcome classroom visitor: artificial intelligence.
  • stop worrying and love the bot by designing assignments that “help students develop their prompting skills” or “use ChatGPT to generate a first draft,” according to a tip sheet produced by the Center for Teaching and Learning at Washington University in St. Louis.
  • It’s not at all clear that we want a future dominated by A.I.’s amoral, Cheez Whiz version of human thought
  • It is abundantly clear that texting, tagging and chatbotting are making students miserable right now.
  • One recent national survey found that 60 percent of American college students reported the symptoms of at least one mental health problem and that 15 percent said they were considering suicide
  • A recent meta-analysis of 36 studies of college students’ mental health found a significant correlation between longer screen time and higher risk of anxiety and depression
  • And while social media can sometimes help suffering students connect with peers, research on teenagers and college students suggests that overall, the support of a virtual community cannot compensate for the vortex of gossip, bullying and Instagram posturing that is bound to rot any normal person’s self-esteem.
  • We need an intervention: maybe not a vow of silence but a bold move to put the screens, the pinging notifications and creepy humanoid A.I. chatbots in their proper place
  • it does mean selectively returning to the university’s roots in the monastic schools of medieval Europe and rekindling the old-fashioned quest for meaning.
  • Colleges should offer a radically low-tech first-year program for students who want to apply: a secular monastery within the modern university, with a curated set of courses that ban glowing rectangles of any kind from the classroom
  • Students could opt to live in dorms that restrict technology, too
  • I prophesy that universities that do this will be surprised by how much demand there is. I frequently talk to students who resent the distracting laptops all around them during class. They feel the tug of the “imaginary string attaching me to my phone, where I have to constantly check it,”
  • Many, if not most, students want the elusive experience of uninterrupted thought, the kind where a hash of half-baked notions slowly becomes an idea about the world.
  • Even if your goal is effective use of the latest chatbot, it behooves you to read books in hard copies and read enough of them to learn what an elegant paragraph sounds like. How else will students recognize when ChatGPT churns out decent prose instead of bureaucratic drivel?
  • Most important, students need head space to think about their ultimate values.
  • His course offers a chance to temporarily exchange those unconscious structures for a set of deliberate, countercultural ones.
  • here are the student learning outcomes universities should focus on: cognitive endurance and existential clarity.
  • Contemplation and marathon reading are not ends in themselves or mere vacations from real life but are among the best ways to figure out your own answer to the question of what a human being is for
  • When students finish, they can move right into their area of specialization and wire up their skulls with all the technology they want, armed with the habits and perspective to do so responsibly
  • it’s worth learning from the radicals. Dr. McDaniel, the religious studies professor at Penn, has a long history with different monastic traditions. He grew up in Philadelphia, educated by Hungarian Catholic monks. After college, he volunteered in Thailand and Laos and lived as a Buddhist monk.
  • e found that no amount of academic reading could help undergraduates truly understand why “people voluntarily take on celibacy, give up drinking and put themselves under authorities they don’t need to,” he told me. So for 20 years, he has helped students try it out — and question some of their assumptions about what it means to find themselves.
  • “On college campuses, these students think they’re all being individuals, going out and being wild,” he said. “But they’re in a playpen. I tell them, ‘You know you’ll be protected by campus police and lawyers. You have this entire apparatus set up for you. You think you’re being an individual, but look at your four friends: They all look exactly like you and sound like you. We exist in these very strict structures we like to pretend don’t exist.’”
  • Colleges could do all this in classes integrated with general education requirements: ideally, a sequence of great books seminars focused on classic texts from across different civilizations.
  • “For the last 1,500 years, Benedictines have had to deal with technology,” Placid Solari, the abbot there, told me. “For us, the question is: How do you use the tool so it supports and enhances your purpose or mission and you don’t get owned by it?”
  • for novices at his monastery, “part of the formation is discipline to learn how to control technology use.” After this initial time of limited phone and TV “to wean them away from overdependence on technology and its stimulation,” they get more access and mostly make their own choices.
  • Evan Lutz graduated this May from Belmont Abbey with a major in theology. He stressed the special Catholic context of Belmont’s resident monks; if you experiment with monastic practices without investigating the whole worldview, it can become a shallow kind of mindfulness tourism.
  • The monks at Belmont Abbey do more than model contemplation and focus. Their presence compels even non-Christians on campus to think seriously about vocation and the meaning of life. “Either what the monks are doing is valuable and based on something true, or it’s completely ridiculous,” Mr. Lutz said. “In both cases, there’s something striking there, and it asks people a question.”
  • Pondering ultimate questions and cultivating cognitive endurance should not be luxury goods.
  • David Peña-Guzmán, who teaches philosophy at San Francisco State University, read about Dr. McDaniel’s Existential Despair course and decided he wanted to create a similar one. He called it the Reading Experiment. A small group of humanities majors gathered once every two weeks for five and a half hours in a seminar room equipped with couches and a big round table. They read authors ranging from Jean-Paul Sartre to Frantz Fanon
  • “At the beginning of every class I’d ask students to turn off their phones and put them in ‘the Basket of Despair,’ which was a plastic bag,” he told me. “I had an extended chat with them about accessibility. The point is not to take away the phone for its own sake but to take away our primary sources of distraction. Students could keep the phone if they needed it. But all of them chose to part with their phones.”
  • Dr. Peña-Guzmán’s students are mostly working-class, first-generation college students. He encouraged them to be honest about their anxieties by sharing his own: “I said, ‘I’m a very slow reader, and it’s likely some or most of you will get further in the text than me because I’m E.S.L. and read quite slowly in English.’
  • For his students, the struggle to read long texts is “tied up with the assumption that reading can happen while multitasking and constantly interacting with technologies that are making demands on their attention, even at the level of a second,”
  • “These draw you out of the flow of reading. You get back to the reading, but you have to restart the sentence or even the paragraph. Often, because of these technological interventions into the reading experience, students almost experience reading backward — as constant regress, without any sense of progress. The more time they spend, the less progress they make.”
  • Dr. Peña-Guzmán dismissed the idea that a course like his is suitable only for students who don’t have to worry about holding down jobs or paying off student debt. “I’m worried by this assumption that certain experiences that are important for the development of personality, for a certain kind of humanistic and spiritual growth, should be reserved for the elite, especially when we know those experiences are also sources of cultural capital,
  • Courses like the Reading Experiment are practical, too, he added. “I can’t imagine a field that wouldn’t require some version of the skill of focused attention.”
  • The point is not to reject new technology but to help students retain the upper hand in their relationship with i
  • Ms. Rodriguez said that before she took Living Deliberately and Existential Despair, she didn’t distinguish technology from education. “I didn’t think education ever went without technology. I think that’s really weird now. You don’t need to adapt every piece of technology to be able to learn better or more,” she said. “It can form this dependency.”
  • The point of college is to help students become independent humans who can choose the gods they serve and the rules they follow rather than allow someone else to choose for them
  • The first step is dethroning the small silicon idol in their pocket — and making space for the uncomfortable silence and questions that follow
Javier E

Opinion | How to be Human - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...social-skills-connection.html

listening conversation morality illuminator wisdom witness curiosity respect question company attention social skills community education psychology

shared by Javier E on 21 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • I have learned something profound along the way. Being openhearted is a prerequisite for being a full, kind and wise human being. But it is not enough. People need social skills
  • The real process of, say, building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete actions well: being curious about other people; disagreeing without poisoning relationships; revealing vulnerability at an appropriate pace; being a good listener; knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness; knowing how to host a gathering where everyone feels embraced; knowing how to see things from another’s point of view.
  • People want to connect. Above almost any other need, human beings long to have another person look into their faces with love and acceptance
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  • we lack practical knowledge about how to give one another the attention we crave
  • Some days it seems like we have intentionally built a society that gives people little guidance on how to perform the most important activities of life.
  • If I can shine positive attention on others, I can help them to blossom. If I see potential in others, they may come to see potential in themselves. True understanding is one of the most generous gifts any of us can give to another.
  • I see the results, too, in the epidemic of invisibility I encounter as a journalist. I often find myself interviewing people who tell me they feel unseen and disrespected
  • I’ve been working on a book called “How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.” I wanted it to be a practical book — so that I would learn these skills myself, and also, I hope, teach people how to understand others, how to make them feel respected, valued and understood.
  • I wanted to learn these skills for utilitarian reasons
  • If I’m going to work with someone, I don’t just want to see his superficial technical abilities. I want to understand him more deeply — to know whether he is calm in a crisis, comfortable with uncertainty or generous to colleagues.
  • I wanted to learn these skills for moral reasons
  • Many of the most productive researchers were in the habit of having breakfast or lunch with an electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist. Nyquist really listened to their challenges, got inside their heads, brought out the best in them. Nyquist, too, was an illuminator.
  • Finally, I wanted to learn these skills for reasons of national survival
  • We evolved to live with small bands of people like ourselves. Now we live in wonderfully diverse societies, but our social skills are inadequate for the divisions that exist. We live in a brutalizing time.
  • In any collection of humans, there are diminishers and there are illuminators. Diminishers are so into themselves, they make others feel insignificant
  • They stereotype and label. If they learn one thing about you, they proceed to make a series of assumptions about who you must be.
  • Illuminators, on the other hand, have a persistent curiosity about other people.
  • hey have been trained or have trained themselves in the craft of understanding others. They know how to ask the right questions at the right times — so that they can see things, at least a bit, from another’s point of view. They shine the brightness of their care on people and make them feel bigger, respected, lit up.
  • A biographer of the novelist E.M. Forster wrote, “To speak with him was to be seduced by an inverse charisma, a sense of being listened to with such intensity that you had to be your most honest, sharpest, and best self.” Imagine how good it would be to offer people that kind of hospitality.
  • social clumsiness I encounter too frequently. I’ll be leaving a party or some gathering and I’ll realize: That whole time, nobody asked me a single question. I estimate that only 30 percent of the people in the world are good question askers. The rest are nice people, but they just don’t ask. I think it’s because they haven’t been taught to and so don’t display basic curiosity about others.
  • Many years ago, patent lawyers at Bell Labs were trying to figure out why some employees were much more productive than others.
  • Illuminators are a joy to be around
  • The gift of attention.
  • Each of us has a characteristic way of showing up in the world. A person who radiates warmth will bring out the glowing sides of the people he meets, while a person who conveys formality can meet the same people and find them stiff and detached. “Attention,” the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist writes, “is a moral act: It creates, brings aspects of things into being.”
  • When Jimmy sees a person — any person — he is seeing a creature with infinite value and dignity, made in the image of God. He is seeing someone so important that Jesus was willing to die for that person.
  • Accompaniment.
  • Accompaniment is an other-centered way of being with people during the normal routines of life.
  • If we are going to accompany someone well, we need to abandon the efficiency mind-set. We need to take our time and simply delight in another person’s way of being
  • I know a couple who treasure friends who are what they call “lingerable.” These are the sorts of people who are just great company, who turn conversation into a form of play and encourage you to be yourself. It’s a great talent, to be lingerable.
  • Other times, a good accompanist does nothing more than practice the art of presence, just being there.
  • The art of conversation.
  • If you tell me something important and then I paraphrase it back to you, what psychologists call “looping,” we can correct any misimpressions that may exist between us.
  • Be a loud listener. When another person is talking, you want to be listening so actively you’re burning calories.
  • He’s continually responding to my comments with encouraging affirmations, with “amen,” “aha” and “yes!” I love talking to that guy.
  • I no longer ask people: What do you think about that? Instead, I ask: How did you come to believe that? That gets them talking about the people and experiences that shaped their values.
  • Storify whenever possible
  • People are much more revealing and personal when they are telling stories.
  • Do the looping, especially with adolescents
  • If you want to know how the people around you see the world, you have to ask them. Here are a few tips I’ve collected from experts on how to become a better conversationalist:
  • Turn your partner into a narrator
  • People don’t go into enough detail when they tell you a story. If you ask specific follow-up questions — Was your boss screaming or irritated when she said that to you? What was her tone of voice? — then they will revisit the moment in a more concrete way and tell a richer story
  • If somebody tells you he is having trouble with his teenager, don’t turn around and say: “I know exactly what you mean. I’m having incredible problems with my own Susan.” You may think you’re trying to build a shared connection, but what you are really doing is shifting attention back to yourself.
  • Don’t be a topper
  • Big questions.
  • The quality of your conversations will depend on the quality of your questions
  • As adults, we get more inhibited with our questions, if we even ask them at all. I’ve learned we’re generally too cautious. People are dying to tell you their stories. Very often, no one has ever asked about them.
  • So when I first meet people, I tend to ask them where they grew up. People are at their best when talking about their childhoods. Or I ask where they got their names. That gets them talking about their families and ethnic backgrounds.
  • After you’ve established trust with a person, it’s great to ask 30,000-foot questions, ones that lift people out of their daily vantage points and help them see themselves from above.
  • These are questions like: What crossroads are you at? Most people are in the middle of some life transition; this question encourages them to step back and describe theirs
  • I’ve learned it’s best to resist this temptation. My first job in any conversation across difference or inequality is to stand in other people’s standpoint and fully understand how the world looks to them. I’ve found it’s best to ask other people three separate times and in three different ways about what they have just said. “I want to understand as much as possible. What am I missing here?”
  • Can you be yourself where you are and still fit in? And: What would you do if you weren’t afraid? Or: If you died today, what would you regret not doing?
  • “What have you said yes to that you no longer really believe in?
  • “What is the no, or refusal, you keep postponing?”
  • “What is the gift you currently hold in exile?,” meaning, what talent are you not using
  • “Why you?” Why was it you who started that business? Why was it you who ran for school board? She wants to understand why a person felt the call of responsibility. She wants to understand motivation.
  • “How do your ancestors show up in your life?” But it led to a great conversation in which each of us talked about how we’d been formed by our family heritages and cultures. I’ve come to think of questioning as a moral practice. When you’re asking good questions, you’re adopting a posture of humility, and you’re honoring the other person.
  • Stand in their standpoint
  • I used to feel the temptation to get defensive, to say: “You don’t know everything I’m dealing with. You don’t know that I’m one of the good guys here.”
  • If the next five years is a chapter in your life, what is the chapter about?
  • every conversation takes place on two levels
  • The official conversation is represented by the words we are saying on whatever topic we are talking about. The actual conversations occur amid the ebb and flow of emotions that get transmitted as we talk. With every comment I am showing you respect or disrespect, making you feel a little safer or a little more threatened.
  • If we let fear and a sense of threat build our conversation, then very quickly our motivations will deteriorate
  • If, on the other hand, I show persistent curiosity about your viewpoint, I show respect. And as the authors of “Crucial Conversations” observe, in any conversation, respect is like air. When it’s present nobody notices it, and when it’s absent it’s all anybody can think about.
  • the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch argued that the essential moral skill is being considerate to others in the complex circumstances of everyday life. Morality is about how we interact with each other minute by minute.
  • I used to think the wise person was a lofty sage who doled out life-altering advice in the manner of Yoda or Dumbledore or Solomon. But now I think the wise person’s essential gift is tender receptivity.
  • The illuminators offer the privilege of witness. They take the anecdotes, rationalizations and episodes we tell and see us in a noble struggle. They see the way we’re navigating the dialectics of life — intimacy versus independence, control versus freedom — and understand that our current selves are just where we are right now on our long continuum of growth.
  • The really good confidants — the people we go to when we are troubled — are more like coaches than philosopher kings.
  • They take in your story, accept it, but prod you to clarify what it is you really want, or to name the baggage you left out of your clean tale.
  • They’re not here to fix you; they are here simply to help you edit your story so that it’s more honest and accurate. They’re here to call you by name, as beloved
  • They see who you are becoming before you do and provide you with a reputation you can then go live into.
  • there has been a comprehensive shift in my posture. I think I’m more approachable, vulnerable. I know more about human psychology than I used to. I have a long way to go, but I’m evidence that people can change, sometimes dramatically, even in middle and older age.
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