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Sharing Makes Both Good and Bad Experiences More Intense
Sharing an experience, such as tasting chocolate, with another person — even if we do it in silence, with someone we met just moments ago — seems to intensify that experience.
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How Environment Can Boost Creativity
The Atlantic: It took F. Scott Fitzgerald nearly a decade to finish Tender is the Night, his semi-autobiographical novel about the physical, financial, and moral decline of a man with nearly limitless potential. While working on the novel, Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, moved between France, Switzerland, and the United States, eventually spending eighteen months at La Paix, an old country house north of Baltimore that he rented while Zelda was treated for schizophrenia at a nearby clinic. The Turnbull family owned the estate, and Andrew Turnbull, who was 11 at the time, later recounted Fitzgerald’s stay in his biography, Scott Fitzgerald. ... Kathleen D.
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Religious or not, we all misbehave
Science: Benjamin Franklin tracked his prideful, sloppy, and gluttonous acts in a daily journal, marking each moral failing with a black ink dot. Now, scientists have devised a modern update to Franklin’s little book, using smart phones to track the sins and good deeds of more than 1200 people. The new data—among the first to be gathered on moral behavior outside of the lab—confirm what psychologists have long suspected: Religious and nonreligious people are equally prone to immoral acts.
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Beware of Joy
The New York Times: If you’re a defensive pessimist (or even just a regular pessimist), you may already be familiar with the phenomenon known as “fear of happiness.” If you’re not, Bettina Chang of Pacific Standard offers a baseball-related example: “Give me a game where my team is winning in the final seconds, and I’ll enumerate the ways to lose the lead before it’s over. It’s come to the point where I get more anxious when my team is winning than when it is losing.
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Park Speaks on Cultural Neuroscience at NIH Seminar Series
Research in the emerging field of cultural neuroscience aims to illuminate how cultural values shape the neurobiology of behavior and neurological processes. APS Fellow Denise C. Park spoke about her research in this arena at a recent seminar series hosted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), in Washington, D.C. The seminar series, “Addressing Health Disparities through Neuroscience,” aims to increase awareness of the impact of neuroscience research in addressing health disparities. It’s well understood that environmental factors can tap into the neuroplasticity of the human brain and lead to subtle shaping of neural structure and function.
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Morning person, or night owl? It matters
Marketplace: It can be hard to do the right thing, the ethical thing — especially if you’re tired. That's something Chuck Collins, a 38-year-old bouncer, knows all about. By day — or by afternoon, really, if you've got an eye on the clock — he's a comic book artist. But come night, he's standing post at the Bleecker Street Bar in Soho. “I've gone to people and told them, 'Look — listen, I’m too tired to deal with it right now,' because at this point this is gone," he says, pointing to his head. "You need to leave or something bad is going to happen to you.” ...
