Coronavirus - Mindfulness is useless in a pandemic | 1843 magazine | The Economist - 1 views
www.economist.com/...lness-is-useless-in-a-pandemic
mindfulness pandemic anticipation future present
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hese days there are mindful guides to everything from anger to recruitment. There are even mindfulness advent calendars (who needs chocolate when you can feed your soul?). Like selling sand to the Sahara, these all pitch to us the ability to live in the “now”
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It may be profitable but it flies in the face of thousands of years of evolution. Animals are hardwired to react to the future
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You can see similar responses throughout the animal kingdom. Give a chimp a raisin and its reward neurons fire. Teach a chimp that pressing a button will bring a raisin, and the chimp’s brain starts to react to the button as if that were the reward. “The process of getting the reward itself becomes rewarding,”
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Daydreaming, or mind-wandering, as the wonks call it, is part of universal human experience. In 2008 one Harvard study found that people spent nearly half of their waking hours mind-wandering – often about good things.
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Imagining a positive outcome is a popular technique to build resilience and confidence in everything from sport to job interviews. Teachers may tell pupils off for daydreaming in lessons but studies show a link between daydreaming and creative thought.
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. That’s not the point. It’s our dreams that feed us. We are hardwired to anticipate the future and, with all due respect to the philosophers, to thrill to it.
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When the present is crushing – when lives and economies are being ruined – our imagination offers us a welcome escape. The mind, as Milton put it, is its own place: it can make a hell of heaven, or a heaven of hell. Perhaps we should let it