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Pursue Happiness, But in Moderation
The New York Times: // // Legend has it that Icarus, on his famous ersatz feathered wings, refused to heed his father’s injunction to “fly the middle course” and not too near to the sun, and consequently saw his wings melt before he fell into the sea. Avoiding extremes — both surfeit and deficiency — is a wisdom preached by Aristotle, Confucius, Aquinas and many other thinkers and writers. The prescription applies to working too hard versus too little, parenting by decree versus neglect and pursuing happiness too earnestly versus not at all.
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The Walking Dead
The New Yorker: id you get enough sleep last night? Are you feeling fully awake, like your brightest, smartest, and most capable self? This, unfortunately, is a pipe dream for the majority of Americans. “Most of us are operating at suboptimal levels basically always,” the Harvard neurologist and sleep medicine physician Josna Adusumilli told me. Fifty to seventy million Americans, Adusumilli says, have chronic sleep disorders. In a series of conversations with sleep scientists this May, facilitated by a Harvard Medical School Media Fellowship, I learned that the consequences of lack of sleep are severe.
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A Conversation With the Psychologist Behind ‘Inside Out’
Pacific Standard: Pixar has a proud tradition of taking things that are incapable of expressing human emotion—robots, toys, rats, cars—and imagining a world where they can, in fact, feel. The studio's most recent effort, the box-office topping and critically acclaimed Inside Out, takes viewers inside the head of a young girl named Riley, imagining what it would be like if her feelings could feel. While Inside Out is ultimately an animated children's movie, the perfectionists at Pixar (which is owned by the Walt Disney Company) still took the task of personifying emotions very seriously.
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How Tetris may reduce traumatic memories
Science Magazine: Playing the computer game Tetris may help reduce the frequency of traumatic flashbacks like the ones that plague sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder, Pacific Standard reports. In the study, participants viewed a 12-minute film of disturbing sequences and had their memories of the film “reactivated” the next day when they looked at stills that showed people in danger, injured, or dying. Those that played Tetris—a highly visuospatial game that may use the same memory resources that scenic, sensory, and traumatic memories use—soon after reported significantly fewer flashbacks to the disturbing images over the next week, the researchers report in Psychological Science.
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New Research From Psychological Science
Read about the latest research published in Psychological Science: How You Get There From Here: Interaction of Visual Landmarks and Path Integration in Human Navigation Mintao Zhao and William H. Warren Humans use both a landmark-guidance system and a path-integration system to help navigate the world; however, it is not known whether people integrate cues detected by these systems during navigation or rely on cues from one system at a time. Participants performed a homing task in a virtual environment in which they had to walk a triangular path and return to a home location.
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For Couples, Time Can Upend the Laws of Attraction
The New York Times: After decades of studying the concept of “mate value,” social scientists finally have the data necessary to explain the romantic choices in “Knocked Up” and “Pride and Prejudice.” The flabby, unkempt Seth Rogen is no one’s dream date, especially when he’s playing the unemployed guy in “Knocked Up” who spends his days smoking pot and ogling naked celebrities. He has none of the obvious qualities that make a mate valuable: good looks, money, social status. Yet somehow this slacker eventually winds up with a successful television journalist, played by the gorgeous Katherine Heigl.
