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The (Pretty Much Totally) Complete Health Case for Urban Nature
CityLab: I’m not a doctor, but I do sit near one in The Atlantic’s New York office. So you can trust me to know that MD-in-residence James Hamblin is on to something when he writes in the magazine’s October issue about the rising appreciation among physicians for the health benefits of parks and green space. Hamblin writes of “a small but growing group of health-care professionals who are essentially medicalizing nature” ... On the flipside of the emotional spectrum, other work has linked proximity to urban parks with higher well-being.
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The Funny Thing About Adversity
The New York Times: DOES adversity harden hearts or warm them? Does experiencing deprivation, disaster or illness make a person more — or less — sympathetic to the travails of others? You’ve probably encountered examples of each: survivors of hard knocks who lend a compassionate ear to beleaguered souls, and those who offer only a disdainful “suck it up.” As a result, it may seem that adversity’s effect on kindness is unpredictable. Read the whole story: The New York Times
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You’re not as virtuous as you think
The Washington Post: I’ve been teaching Stanley Milgram’s electric-shock experiment to business school students for more than a decade, but “Experimenter,” a movie out this week about the man behind the famous social science research, illuminates something I never really considered. In one scene, Milgram (played by Peter Sarsgaard) explains his experiment to a class at Harvard: A subject, assigned to be the “teacher,” is ordered to administer increasingly intense shocks to another study participant in the role of “learner,” allegedly to illustrate how punishment affects learning and memory.
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Children Want Factual Stories, Versus Fantasy, More Often Than Adults
NPR: Childhood is a time for pretend play, imaginary friends and fantastical creatures. Flying ponies reliably beat documentaries with the preschool set. Yet adults are no strangers to fiction. We love movies and novels, poems and plays. We also love television, even when it isn't preceded by "reality. So, what happens as we make our way from childhood to adulthood? Do we ever reallyoutgrow a childlike predilection for make-believe? Or does our fascination with fiction and fantasy simply find new forms of expression?
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The Science Behind ‘They All Look Alike to Me’
The New York Times: The outcry was immediate and ferocious when a white New York City police officer tackled James Blake, the retired biracial tennis star, while arresting him this month in a case of mistaken identity. The officer mistook Mr. Blake for a black man suspected of credit card fraud, according to the police. Racism, pure and simple, some said. But was it? Scientists, pointing to decades of research, believe something else was at work. They call it the “other-race effect,” a cognitive phenomenon that makes it harder for people of one race to readily recognize or identify individuals of another.
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Weight and mortality
The Boston Globe: BEING OVERWEIGHT HAS been found to confer a survival advantage with age. But that’s assuming you don’t think others are treating you unfairly because of your weight. A new study suggests that individuals who think they’ve been treated unfairly because of their weight are likely to die sooner, even controlling for age, gender, race, education, body mass index, subjective health, diseases, depression, smoking, and physical activity. Read the whole story: The Boston Globe
