Marina Abramović’s Method for Overcoming Trauma: Go to a Park, Hug a Tree Tight, and Tell It Your Complaints for 15 Minutes

in Art, Life, Nature, Psychology | December 8th, 2020

One of the most renowned of Chi­nese poets, Du Fu, sur­vived the dev­as­tat­ing An Lushan rebel­lion that near­ly brought down the Tang Dynasty and result­ed in an incred­i­ble loss of life around the coun­try. His poems are full of grief, as trans­la­tor David Hin­ton notes. The open­ing of “Spring Land­scape” con­tains “pos­si­bly the most famous line in Chi­nese poet­ry,” and a painful com­ment on human­i­ty’s place in the nat­ur­al world.

The coun­try in ruins, rivers and moun­tains
con­tin­ue. The city grows lush with spring.

Blos­soms scat­ter tears for us, and all these
sep­a­ra­tions in a bird’s cry star­tle the heart.

The poem presents a trag­ic irony. Nature invites us in, seems to promise com­fort and refuge. “Du Fu tells us that birds seem to cry for us, and blos­soms weep,” writes Madeleine Thien at The New York Review of Books. But “of course, this is a fairy-tale view, and ‘in the knowl­edge of its fal­si­ty, heart­break­ing.’”

Is nature indif­fer­ent to human suf­fer­ing? It would seem so to the bro­ken-heart­ed Con­fu­cian poet. But nature is not devoid of fel­low feel­ing. Trees talk to each oth­er, cre­ate social worlds and fam­i­lies, and com­mu­ni­cate with the oth­er plants and ani­mals around them. Japan­ese researchers have shown that the oils trees secrete can mea­sur­ably low­er stress lev­els, reduce hos­til­i­ty and depres­sion, and boost immu­ni­ty. Trees may not weep, but they care.

Trees are also, says per­for­mance artist Mari­na Abramović in the short video above, “per­fect­ly silent listeners”—a rare and valu­able qual­i­ty in times of stress. “They have intel­li­gence. They have feel­ings.” And for this rea­son, a tree is the ide­al com­pan­ion when we need an ear.

You can com­plain to them. And I start­ed this a long time ago when I was in the Ama­zon with the native Indi­ans. You know, they will go to the Sequoia tree, which is one of the old­est on the plan­et. And they will make a dance for the tree. These dances for the tree are so incred­i­bly mov­ing an emo­tion­al. So I thought, Wow! Why don’t I cre­ate an exer­cise that real­ly works for me?

Abramović’s tree ther­a­py is one part of her “Abramović Method,” notes Paper, “a set of tech­niques that enables artists to get to high­er states of con­scious­ness.” She rec­om­mends it for any­one who’s reel­ing from the trau­mas of this year. In our own age of dev­as­ta­tion and iso­la­tion, it cer­tain­ly couldn’t hurt, and per­haps we know more than Du Fu did about how nature sup­ports our emo­tion­al lives.

So “please, go to the park near you,” the artist implores. “Pick the tree you like. Hold the tree tight. Real­ly tight. And just pour your heart into it. Com­plain to the tree for a min­i­mum of 15 min­utes. It’s the best heal­ing that you can do.” Includ­ed in the video is a tes­ti­mo­ni­al from an ex-rug­by play­er, who found the Com­plain­ing to Trees method trans­for­ma­tive. “There is some­thing in it,” he says. “It’s almost like you become part of the tree as well.” Trees are not peo­ple. They don’t dis­pense advice. They lis­ten and con­sole in their own mys­te­ri­ous­ly ancient, silent way.

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

The Secret Lan­guage of Trees: A Charm­ing Ani­mat­ed Les­son Explains How Trees Share Infor­ma­tion with Each Oth­er

The Social Lives of Trees: Sci­ence Reveals How Trees Mys­te­ri­ous­ly Talk to Each Oth­er, Work Togeth­er & Form Nur­tur­ing Fam­i­lies

How the Japan­ese Prac­tice of “For­est Bathing”—Or Just Hang­ing Out in the Woods—Can Low­er Stress Lev­els and Fight Dis­ease

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Power of Empathy: A Quick Animated Lesson from Brené Brown

in Psychology | December 3rd, 2020

Sev­er­al years back, the RSA (Roy­al Soci­ety of the Arts) cre­at­ed a series of dis­tinc­tive ani­mat­ed shorts where well-known intel­lec­tu­als pre­sent­ed big ideas, and a tal­ent­ed artist rapid­ly illus­trat­ed them on a white­board. Some of those talks fea­tured the likes of Slavoj Zizek, Car­ol Dweck, Steven Pinker and Bar­bara Ehren­re­ich. Now RSA presents a video series cre­at­ed in an entire­ly dif­fer­ent aes­thet­ic. Above, you can watch the first of many “espres­so shots for the mind.” This clip fea­tures Dr. Brené Brown, a well-known research pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Hous­ton Grad­u­ate Col­lege of Social Work, pro­vid­ing some quick insights into the dif­fer­ence between sym­pa­thy and empa­thy, and explain­ing why empa­thy is much more mean­ing­ful. To learn more about The Pow­er of Empa­thy, you can watch Brown’s com­plete RSA lec­ture below . You can also watch her very pop­u­lar TED Talk on The Pow­er of Vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty here.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Decem­ber, 2013.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy Cours­es (Part of our list of Free Online Cours­es)

Med­i­ta­tion 101: A Short, Ani­mat­ed Beginner’s Guide

The Psy­chol­o­gy of Blame: Anoth­er Ani­mat­ed Les­son That Can Make You a Bet­ter Per­son

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A Dictionary of Symbols: Juan Eduardo Cirlot’s Classic Study of Symbols Gets Republished in a Beautiful, Expanded Edition

in Art, History, Psychology | November 5th, 2020

How, exact­ly, does one go about mak­ing a glob­al dic­tio­nary of sym­bols? It is a Her­culean task, one few schol­ars would take on today, not only because of its scope but because the philo­log­i­cal approach that gath­ers and com­pares arti­facts from every cul­ture under­went a cor­rec­tion: No one per­son can have the exper­tise to cov­er every­thing. Yet the attempts to do so have had tremen­dous cre­ative val­ue. Such explo­rations bring us clos­er to what makes humans the same the world over: our pro­duc­tive imag­i­na­tions and the arche­typ­al well­spring of images that guide us through the unknown.

When Span­ish poet, crit­ic, trans­la­tor, and musi­col­o­gist Juan Eduar­do Cir­lot began his 1958 Dic­tio­nary of Sym­bols, he did so with Carl Jung in mind, writ­ing against a cur­rent of pos­i­tivism that deval­ued the sym­bol­ic.

Cir­lot quotes Jung in his intro­duc­tion: “For the mod­ern mind, analo­gies… are noth­ing but self-evi­dent absur­di­ties. This wor­thy judge­ment does not, how­ev­er, in any way alter the fact that such affini­ties of thought do exist and that they have been play­ing an impor­tant role for cen­turies.” Like it or not, we inter­act through the sym­bol­ic realm all the time. Those inter­ac­tions are freight­ed with his­tor­i­cal and cul­tur­al mean­ing we would do well to under­stand if we are to under­stand our­selves.

 

In his method, Cir­lot writes in a Pref­ace:

I want­ed to embrace the broad­est pos­si­ble range of objects and cul­tures, to com­pare the sym­bols of the post-Roman West with sym­bols from India, the Far East, Chaldea, Egypt, Israel and Greece. Images, essen­tial myths, alle­gories, for my pur­pos­es, all these need­ed to be con­sult­ed, not, self-evi­dent­ly, with the inten­tion of mak­ing an exhaus­tive reck­on­ing, but rather to comb out pat­terns in mean­ing, in what counts as essen­tial, in fields both near and far.

Cir­lot draws his inspi­ra­tion from Dada and Sur­re­al­ism and the com­par­a­tive method in reli­gious stud­ies pop­u­lar­ized by schol­ars like Mircea Eli­ade, who influ­enced promi­nent stu­dents of myth like Joseph Camp­bell (and through Camp­bell, the pop­u­lar cul­ture of film, tele­vi­sion, and the inter­net). “Thus I drew near the lumi­nous labyrinth of sym­bols,” Cir­lot writes, “con­cerned less with inter­pre­ta­tion than with com­pre­hen­sion and con­cerned most of all, real­ly, with the con­tem­pla­tion of how sym­bols dwell across time and cul­ture.” And “dwell” they do, as we know, in ele­men­tal fig­ures like drag­ons and ser­pents, destruc­tive gods and evil eyes. (In 1954, Cir­lot pub­lished The Eye in Mythol­o­gy, a pre­cur­sor to A Dic­tio­nary of Sym­bols.)

 

In times of trou­ble and uncer­tain­ty like ours, sym­bols become impor­tant ways of orga­niz­ing chaos in our col­lec­tive imag­i­na­tion, and are inte­gral to what Sind­ing Bentzen, pro­fes­sor of eco­nom­ics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Copen­hagen, calls “reli­gious cop­ing” in the face of COVID-19. Ripped from their his­toric con­text, as hap­pened with the swasti­ka, sym­bols can be used to inten­tion­al­ly manip­u­late and mis­lead, to turn col­lec­tive anx­i­ety into acqui­es­cence to tyran­ny and total­i­tar­i­an­ism. Cir­lot was acute­ly aware of this as an artist work­ing under the rule of Fran­cis­co Fran­co. As a lead­ing mem­ber of a group of painters and poets who called them­selves Dau al Set (“the sev­en-spot­ted dice”), Cir­lot and his con­tem­po­raries “cham­pi­oned cre­ative lib­er­ty and resis­tance to the dom­i­nant Fas­cist regime.”

In the 21st cen­tu­ry, we can just as well read Cirlot’s dic­tio­nary with this same mis­sion. It is not an arti­fact of anoth­er time but as an ever-rel­e­vant, eru­dite, and fas­ci­nat­ing resource for our own. Through the study of sym­bols we learn to see, Cir­lot wrote, that “noth­ing is mean­ing­less or neu­tral: every­thing is sig­nif­i­cant,” every idea con­nect­ed to oth­ers across time and space. “It is only by read­ing through the vol­ume steadi­ly that one can become aware of the intri­cate inter­re­la­tions of sym­bol­ic mean­ings,” wrote Cather­ine Rau in a 1962 review of the book. We can “devel­op such aware­ness by start­ing off with any ran­dom entry,” Angel­i­ca Frey observes at Hyper­al­ler­gic.

Do so in the “orig­i­nal, sig­nif­i­cant­ly enlarged” new edi­tion of the Cirlot’s Dic­tio­nary of Sym­bols, just pub­lished by the New York Review of Books in an Eng­lish trans­la­tion by Valerie Miles. We can read the book for ref­er­ence or for plea­sure, Her­bert Read writes in an intro­duc­tion to the new edi­tion, “but in gen­er­al the great­est use of the vol­ume will be for the elu­ci­da­tion of those many sym­bols which we encounter in the arts and in the his­to­ry of ideas. Man, it has been said, is a sym­bol­iz­ing ani­mal; it is evi­dent that at no stage in the devel­op­ment of civ­i­liza­tion has man been able to dis­pense with sym­bols.”

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

40,000-Year-Old Sym­bols Found in Caves World­wide May Be the Ear­li­est Writ­ten Lan­guage

18 Clas­sic Myths Explained with Ani­ma­tion: Pandora’s Box, Sisy­phus & More

48 Hours of Joseph Camp­bell Lec­tures Free Online: The Pow­er of Myth & Sto­ry­telling

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness

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The Gruesome Dollhouse Death Scenes That Reinvented Murder Investigations

in Art, Education, Life, Psychology, Science | October 30th, 2020

Who can resist minia­tures?

Wee food, painstak­ing­ly ren­dered in felt­ed wool…

Match­book-sized books you can actu­al­ly read…

Clas­sic record albums shrunk down for mice…

The late Frances Gless­ner Lee (1878–1962) def­i­nite­ly loved minia­tures, and excelled at their cre­ation, knit­ting socks on pins, hand rolling real tobac­co into tiny cig­a­rettes, and mak­ing sure the vic­tims in her real­is­tic mur­der scene dio­ra­mas exhib­it­ed the prop­er degree of rig­or mor­tis and livid­i­ty.

Lee began work on her Nut­shell Stud­ies of Unex­plained Death at the age of 65, as part of a life­long inter­est in homi­cide inves­ti­ga­tion.

Her pre­oc­cu­pa­tion began with the Sher­lock Holmes sto­ries she read as a girl.

In the 1930s, the wealthy divorcee used part of a siz­able inher­i­tance to endow Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty with enough mon­ey for the cre­ation of its Depart­ment of Legal Med­i­cine.

Its first chair­man was her friend, George Burgess Magrath, a med­ical exam­in­er who had shared his dis­tress that crim­i­nals were lit­er­al­ly get­ting away with mur­der because coro­ners and police inves­ti­ga­tors lacked appro­pri­ate train­ing for foren­sic analy­sis.

The library to which Lee donat­ed a thou­sand books on the top­ic was named in his hon­or.

The home­made dio­ra­mas offered a more vivid expe­ri­ence than could be found in any book.

Each Nut­shell Study required almost half a year’s work, and cost about the same as a house would have at the time. ($6000 in the 1940s.)

“Luck­i­ly, I was born with a sil­ver spoon in my mouth,” Lee remarked. “It gives me the time and mon­ey to fol­low my hob­by of sci­en­tif­ic crime detec­tion.”

Although Lee had been brought up in a lux­u­ri­ous 13 bed­room home (8 were for ser­vants’ use), the domes­tic set­tings of the Nut­shell Stud­ies are more mod­est, reflec­tive of the vic­tims’ cir­cum­stances.

She drew inspi­ra­tion from actu­al crimes, but had no inter­est in repli­cat­ing their actu­al scenes. The crimes she authored for her lit­tle rooms were com­pos­ites of the ones she had stud­ied, with invent­ed vic­tims and in rooms dec­o­rat­ed accord­ing to her imag­i­na­tion.

Her intent was to pro­vide inves­ti­ga­tors with vir­gin crime scenes to metic­u­lous­ly exam­ine, culling indi­rect evi­dence from the painstak­ing­ly detailed props she was a stick­ler for get­ting right.

Stu­dents were pro­vid­ed with a flash­light, a mag­ni­fy­ing glass, and wit­ness state­ments. Her atten­tion to detail ensured that they would use the full nine­ty min­utes they had been allot­ted ana­lyz­ing the scene. Their goal was not to crack the case but to care­ful­ly doc­u­ment obser­va­tions on which a case could be built.

The flaw­less­ness of her 1:12 scale ren­der­ings also speaks to her deter­mi­na­tion to be tak­en seri­ous­ly in what was then an exclu­sive­ly male world. (Women now dom­i­nate the field of foren­sic sci­ence.)

Noth­ing was over­looked.

As she wrote to Dr. Alan Moritz, the Depart­ment of Legal Medicine’s sec­ond chair, in a let­ter review­ing pro­posed changes to some ear­ly scenes:

I found myself con­stant­ly tempt­ed to add more clues and details and am afraid I may get them “gad­gety” in the process. I hope you will watch over this and stop me when I go too far. Since you and I have per­pe­trat­ed these crimes our­selves we are in the unique posi­tion of being able to give com­plete descrip­tions of them even if there were no witnesses—very much in the man­ner of the nov­el­ist who is able to tell the inmost thoughts of his char­ac­ters.

It’s no acci­dent that many of the Nut­shell Stud­ies’ lit­tle corpses are female.

Lee did not want offi­cers to treat vic­tims dis­mis­sive­ly because of gen­der-relat­ed assump­tions, whether the sce­nario involved a pros­ti­tute whose throat has been cut, or a house­wife dead on the floor of her kitchen, the burn­ers of her stove all switched to the on posi­tion.

Would you like to test your pow­ers of obser­va­tion?

Above are the remains of Mag­gie Wil­son, dis­cov­ered in the Dark Bath­room’s tub by a fel­low board­er, Lizzie Miller, who gave the fol­low­ing state­ment:

I roomed in the same house as Mag­gie Wil­son, but knew her only from we met in the hall. I think she had ‘fits’ [seizures]. A cou­ple of male friends came to see her fair­ly reg­u­lar­ly. On Sun­day night, the men were there and there was a lot of drink­ing going on. Some time after the men left, I heard the water run­ning in the bath­room. I opened the door and found her as you see her.

Grim, eh?

Not near­ly as grim as what you’ll find in the Par­son­age or the Three-Room Dwelling belong­ing to shoe fac­to­ry fore­man Robert Jud­son, his wife, Kate, and their baby, Lin­da Mae.

The peri­od-accu­rate mini fur­nish­ings and fash­ions may cre­ate a false impres­sion that the Moth­er of Foren­sic Sci­ence’s Nut­shell Stud­ies should be rel­e­gat­ed to a muse­um.

In truth, their abun­dance of detail remains so effec­tive that the Office of the Chief Med­ical Exam­in­er in Bal­ti­more con­tin­ues to use 18 of them in train­ing sem­i­nars to help homi­cide inves­ti­ga­tors “con­vict the guilty, clear the inno­cent, and find the truth in a nut­shell.”

Explore 5 Nut­shell Studies—Woodman’s Shack, Attic, Liv­ing Room, Garage, and Par­son­age Parlor—in 360º com­pli­ments of The Smith­son­ian Amer­i­can Art Muse­um Ren­wick Gallery’s exhib­it Mur­der Is Her Hob­by: Frances Gless­ner Lee and The Nut­shell Stud­ies of Unex­plained Death.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

A Record Store Designed for Mice in Swe­den, Fea­tur­ing Albums by Mouse Davis, Destiny’s Cheese, Dol­ly Pars­ley & More

“20 Rules For Writ­ing Detec­tive Sto­ries” By S.S. Van Dine, One of T.S. Eliot’s Favorite Genre Authors (1928)

Lucy Law­less Joins Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast #5 on True Crime

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Secret to High Performance and Fulfilment: Psychologist Daniel Goleman Explains the Power of Focus

in Neuroscience, Psychology | October 29th, 2020

“Con­cen­tra­tion is one of the hap­pi­est things in my life,” says nov­el­ist Haru­ki Muraka­mi in a 2011 New York Times Mag­a­zine pro­file. “If you can­not con­cen­trate, you are not so hap­py.” In this, the author of A Wild Sheep Chase sure­ly has the agree­ment of the author of Emo­tion­al Intel­li­gence, the psy­chol­o­gist and writer Daniel Gole­man. But Gole­man express­es it a bit dif­fer­ent­ly, as you can hear — in detail and at length — in “Focus: The Secret to High Per­for­mance and Ful­fill­ment,” an Intel­li­gence Squared talk based on the book he pub­lished eigh­teen years after the best­selling Emo­tion­al Intel­li­gence, Focus: The Hid­den Dri­ver of Excel­lence.

Atten­tion, Gole­man tells us, is under siege, not least by devices “devised to inter­rupt us, to seduce us, to draw our atten­tion from this to that.” He quotes the famed econ­o­mist, polit­i­cal sci­en­tist, and cog­ni­tive psy­chol­o­gist Her­bert Simon’s obser­va­tion that “infor­ma­tion con­sumes atten­tion. Hence a wealth of infor­ma­tion cre­ates a pover­ty of atten­tion” — but he does­n’t men­tion that Simon made it near­ly fifty years ago, long before the inven­tion of most of what besieges our atten­tion today. (Then again, even medieval monks com­plained of con­stant dis­trac­tion.) Most of us can feel, on some lev­el, that to the extent we have trou­ble focus­ing, we also have trou­ble per­form­ing at the lev­el we’d like to in our pro­fes­sion­al and social life.

What can we do about it? After offer­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal expla­na­tions of what’s going on with our abil­i­ty to focus (or lack there­of), Gole­man sug­gests strate­gies we can use to mas­ter our “emo­tion­al dis­trac­tors” and work out the “men­tal mus­cle” that is our atten­tion. (This anal­o­gy with phys­i­cal exer­cise would get no argu­ment from Muraka­mi, who runs as rig­or­ous­ly as he writes.) Though “mind-wan­der­ing is absolute­ly essen­tial for cre­ative insight,” as we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly dis­cussed here on Open Cul­ture, the crit­i­cal skill is to bring our mind back from its wan­der­ing at will. This we can prac­tice through Bud­dhist-style breath­ing med­i­ta­tion, a sub­ject to which Gole­man has since devot­ed a good deal of research, and just one of the prac­tices that can help us live our lives to the fullest by allow­ing us to see, hear, con­sid­er, and engage with what’s right in front of us.

As Gole­man lays out a suite of atten­tion-build­ing tech­niques and their ben­e­fits, he touch­es on the­o­ries and find­ings from cog­ni­tive psy­chol­o­gy that have by now been pop­u­lar­ized into famil­iar­i­ty: the Stan­ford “marsh­mal­low test,” for exam­ple, which appears to show that chil­dren who can delay grat­i­fi­ca­tion have bet­ter life out­comes than those who can­not. Such out­comes can be ours as well, he argues, if we make a habit of “length­en­ing the gap between impulse and action” in our own habits. “I’m not a fast thinker, but once I am inter­est­ed in some­thing, I am doing it for many years,” as Muraka­mi says. “I’m kind of a big ket­tle. It takes time to get boiled, but then I’m always hot.” As for the rest of us, could­n’t we all stand to become big­ger ket­tles than we are?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Focus: Five Talks Reveal the Secrets of Con­cen­tra­tion

How Infor­ma­tion Over­load Robs Us of Our Cre­ativ­i­ty: What the Sci­en­tif­ic Research Shows

The Case for Delet­ing Your Social Media Accounts & Doing Valu­able “Deep Work” Instead, Accord­ing to Prof. Cal New­port

How to Take Advan­tage of Bore­dom, the Secret Ingre­di­ent of Cre­ativ­i­ty

How Med­i­ta­tion Can Change Your Brain: The Neu­ro­science of Bud­dhist Prac­tice

Medieval Monks Com­plained About Con­stant Dis­trac­tions: Learn How They Worked to Over­come Them

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” & Bach’s “Prelude in C Major” Get Turned into Dazzling Musical Animations by an Artist with Synesthesia

in Film, Music, Neuroscience, Psychology | October 28th, 2020

Colour is the key­board, the eyes are the har­monies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touch­ing one key or anoth­er, to cause vibra­tions in the soul.

—Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky

We may owe the his­to­ry of mod­ern art to the con­di­tion of synes­the­sia, which caus­es those who have it to hear col­ors, see sounds, taste smells, etc. Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky, who pio­neered abstract expres­sion­ism in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, did so “after hav­ing an unusu­al­ly visu­al response to a per­for­mance of Wagner’s com­po­si­tion Lohen­grin at the Bol­shoi The­atre,” the Den­ver Muse­um of Art notes. He was so moved by the moment that he “aban­doned his law career to study paint­ing at the pres­ti­gious Munich Acad­e­my of Fine Arts. He lat­er described the life-chang­ing expe­ri­ence: ‘I saw all my col­ors in spir­it, before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me.’”

Kandin­sky nev­er heard Coltrane, but if he had, and had access to 3D ren­der­ing soft­ware, he might have made some­thing very much like the short ani­ma­tion above from Israeli artist Michal Levy. “Rough­ly 3 per cent of peo­ple expe­ri­ence synaes­the­sia,” writes Aeon, “a neu­ro­log­i­cal con­di­tion in which peo­ple have a recur­ring sen­so­ry over­lap, such as … envi­sion­ing let­ters and num­bers each with their own inher­ent colour.”

Levy’s con­di­tion is one of the most com­mon forms, like Kandinsky’s: “chro­maes­the­sia, in which sounds and music pro­voke visu­als.” Where the Russ­ian painter saw Wag­n­er in “wild, almost crazy lines,” Levy sees the “rol­lick­ing notes” of Coltrane’s Giant Steps as a “kinet­ic, cas­cad­ing cityscape built from colour­ful blocks of sound.”

After visu­al­iz­ing her expe­ri­ence of Coltrane, Levy cre­at­ed the ani­ma­tion above, Dance of Har­mo­ny, to illus­trate what hap­pens when she hears Bach. Dur­ing a mater­ni­ty leave, work­ing with her friend, ani­ma­tor Hagai Azaz, she set her­self the chal­lenge of show­ing, as she describes it, “the cas­cad­ing flow of emo­tion, to make the feel­ing con­ta­gious, by using only col­or, the basic shape of cir­cles, and min­i­mal­ist motion, assign­ing to each musi­cal chord the visu­al ele­ments that cor­re­spond to it synaes­thet­i­cal­ly.”

It is fas­ci­nat­ing to com­pare Levy’s descrip­tions of her con­di­tion with those of oth­er famous synes­thetes like Vladimir Nabokov and, espe­cial­ly Kandin­sky, who in essence first showed the world what music looks like, there­by giv­ing art a new visu­al lan­guage. Levy calls her synes­the­sia art, an “emo­tion­al voy­age of har­mo­ny,” and includes in her visu­al­iza­tion of Bach’s famous pre­lude an “unex­pect­ed ele­giac side­bar of love and loss,” Maria Popo­va writes. Read Levy’s full descrip­tion of Dance of Har­mo­ny here and learn more about the “extra­or­di­nary sen­so­ry con­di­tion called synes­the­sia” here.

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

An Artist with Synes­the­sia Turns Jazz & Rock Clas­sics Into Col­or­ful Abstract Paint­ings

Jazz Decon­struct­ed: What Makes John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” So Ground­break­ing and Rad­i­cal?

Decon­struct­ing Bach’s Famous Cel­lo Prelude–the One You’ve Heard in Hun­dreds of TV Shows & Films

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagnes

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Why Do People Join Cults? An Animated Primer Explains

in Psychology | October 7th, 2020

As much as we might like to think we make free choic­es as ratio­nal indi­vid­u­als, we are all more or less sug­gestible and sub­ject to social pres­sures. Social media mar­keters aren’t under any illu­sions about this. Guides for how to exploit psy­cho­log­i­cal vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties and influ­ence behav­ior pro­lif­er­ate. (One of the top-sell­ing busi­ness books on Ama­zon is a man­u­al titled Influ­ence: The Psy­chol­o­gy of Per­sua­sion.) Such tech­niques form the basis of a mas­sive, glob­al ad-based indus­try that also hap­pens to traf­fic in polit­i­cal pro­pa­gan­da and dis­in­for­ma­tion. None of this would be as wild­ly prof­itable and effec­tive as it is if human beings could eas­i­ly resist manip­u­la­tion.

But there are degrees of influ­ence and sus­cep­ti­bil­i­ty. Not every­one who makes an easy mark for adver­tis­ers, for exam­ple, is liable to join a cult or an extrem­ist group. What makes peo­ple sub­ject to the induce­ments of a cult leader? What makes them—in the clichéd phrase cal­lous­ly drawn from the mass sui­cide at Jonestown—“drink the Kool-Aid”? The TED-Ed video above, script­ed by cult expert Dr. Jan­ja Lalich, pro­fes­sor emeri­ta of Soci­ol­o­gy at Cal­i­for­nia State Uni­ver­si­ty, Chico, begins with some basic qual­i­fi­ca­tions.

Not all cults are reli­gious: some are polit­i­cal, ther­a­py-based, focused on self-improve­ment, or oth­er­wise.

Not all new reli­gions are cults.

Lalich defines a cult as a “group or move­ment with a usu­al­ly extreme ide­ol­o­gy, typ­i­cal­ly embod­ied in a charis­mat­ic leader…. Most cults share some basic char­ac­ter­is­tics,” such as a “high-lev­el of com­mit­ment from its mem­bers,” a strict hier­ar­chy, and “claims to pro­vide answers to life’s biggest ques­tions.” Cults have lit­tle tol­er­ance for dis­sent from either the inside or out­side.

The dis­tinc­tions between cults and reli­gions can seem slight, but cults sep­a­rate their mem­bers from the larg­er soci­ety and seek direct and total con­trol over their lives, while most main­stream reli­gions (which may have begun as cults) do not. Reli­gions may pros­e­ly­tize, but cults use meth­ods more akin to pyra­mid schemes to pres­sure recruits into per­son­al­ly iden­ti­fy­ing with the ide­ol­o­gy and spread­ing it. By exploit­ing our desires for con­nec­tion, com­fort, mean­ing, and belong­ing, they cre­ate what the DSM‑V terms “iden­ti­ty dis­tur­bance due to pro­longed and intense coer­cive per­sua­sion.”

Cults “dis­cour­age crit­i­cal think­ing, mak­ing it hard to voice doubts when every­one around you is mod­el­ing absolute faith.” New recruits expe­ri­ence painful cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance that, over time, they try to over­come by strength­en­ing their devo­tion. The sense of sunk cost makes it increas­ing­ly hard for them to admit they have been lied to, manip­u­lat­ed, and used. Cults stunt their mem­bers’ “psy­cho­log­i­cal and emo­tion­al growth,” which is “a par­tic­u­lar prob­lem for chil­dren” who are born or indoc­tri­nat­ed into them. Belief, Lalich’s les­son states, should not force a per­son to sac­ri­fice their fam­i­ly, friends, per­son­al moral­i­ty, and mon­ey to an author­i­tar­i­an leader.

Lalich her­self under­stands cults not only as an aca­d­e­m­ic researcher but as a for­mer mem­ber of a polit­i­cal cult in which, she says, “you weren’t allowed to think for your­self at the same time as you were told to think for your­self.” Which brings us to the burn­ing ques­tion that has been asked so many times over the past four years. Does the absolute, unwa­ver­ing devo­tion to the cur­rent pres­i­dent con­sti­tute cult-like behav­ior? Is “Trump­ism” a cult? An open let­ter on Lalich’s Cult Research site, signed by a num­ber of promi­nent psy­chol­o­gists, psy­chi­a­trists, and oth­er experts, advis­es, “We should look to the evi­dence, and there is evi­dence aplen­ty.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan Pre­dicts the Decline of Amer­i­ca: Unable to Know “What’s True,” We Will Slide, “With­out Notic­ing, Back into Super­sti­tion & Dark­ness” (1995)

Christo­pher Hitchens Dis­miss­es the Cult of Ayn Rand: There’s No “Need to Have Essays Advo­cat­ing Self­ish­ness Among Human Beings; It Requires No Rein­force­ment”

Isaac Asi­mov Laments the “Cult of Igno­rance” in the Unit­ed States (1980)

Umber­to Eco Makes a List of the 14 Com­mon Fea­tures of Fas­cism

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Free Courses to Maintain Mental & Physical Health During a Pandemic

in Health, MOOCs, Psychology | August 20th, 2020

As I write this, the smoke from the numer­ous for­est fires across Cal­i­for­nia are mak­ing the air qual­i­ty ter­ri­ble, so we are being told to stay inside. How­ev­er, the heat­wave is mak­ing it insuf­fer­able to *be* inside. And we also have to be wary of COVID-19 and wear a mask. You could say this is a slight­ly stress­ful sit­u­a­tion. And a lot of us are deal­ing with even more than that–job sta­bil­i­ty, rent, and on and on. Just typ­ing this made me anx­ious!

Dur­ing this time we should try not to neglect our men­tal health. For­tu­nate­ly Cours­era offers free online cours­es about Men­tal Health and Well-Being.

The Cours­era video above comes from a Face­book live event that fea­tures Yale University’s Lau­rie San­tos, who teach­es Coursera’s Sci­ence of Well-Being course. This 30 minute Q&A dives right in to our cur­rent sit­u­a­tion, with San­tos out­lin­ing a pro­to­col for men­tal health that should be as much a part of your reg­i­men as wear­ing a mask and wash­ing your hands with soap (while singing Hap­py Birth­day to your­self, don’t for­get.)

Here’s a top ten of Cours­er­a’s most pop­u­lar health & well-being cours­es to check out:

  1. Mind Con­trol: Man­ag­ing Your Men­tal Health Dur­ing COVID-19 from Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to
  2. The Sci­ence of Well-Being from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty
  3. Find­ing Pur­pose and Mean­ing In Life: Liv­ing for What Mat­ters Most from Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan
  4. Stan­ford Intro­duc­tion to Food and Health from Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty
  5. A Life of Hap­pi­ness and Ful­fill­ment from Indi­an School of Busi­ness
  6. Pos­i­tive Psy­chi­a­try and Men­tal Health from The Uni­ver­si­ty of Syd­ney
  7. Hack­ing Exer­cise For Health. The sur­pris­ing new sci­ence of fit­ness. from McMas­ter Uni­ver­si­ty
  8. Intro­duc­tion to Self-Deter­mi­na­tion The­o­ry: An approach to moti­va­tion, devel­op­ment and well­ness from Uni­ver­si­ty of Rochester
  9. Bio­hack­ing Your Brain’s Health from Emory Uni­ver­si­ty
  10. Man­ag­ing Your Health: The Role of Phys­i­cal Ther­a­py and Exer­cise from Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to

San­tos answers ques­tions from view­ers, cov­er­ing top­ics like avoid­ing ten­sion and argu­ments with our loved ones, stay­ing informed on the world with­out cre­at­ing more anx­i­ety, how can frontline/healthcare work­ers com­bat anx­i­ety, how to keep your­self pos­i­tive when liv­ing alone with­out fam­i­ly or friends, how to keep pro­duc­tive and healthy at work with the threat of lay­offs, how to look for a new job after being laid off because of COVID, how to help your child who is miss­ing their school friends, how do we cre­ate good expe­ri­ences to cre­ate good mem­o­ries, what we can do about sleep prob­lems, how to care for fam­i­ly mem­bers with COVID while also work­ing a job, and how to show ran­dom acts of kind­ness dur­ing this time (which is what San­tos cov­ers often in her Hap­pi­ness Lab pod­cast).

Over­all, focus on self-com­pas­sion, San­tos says, which has to be the start­ing point for all of this. When you enroll in these cours­es, Cours­era gives you two options. You can enroll as a paid stu­dent and get a cer­tifi­cate at the end. Or choose to “audit” the course (as shown here) and the course is free. Just like in col­lege! All the learn­ing, none of the blue book essays!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy & Neu­ro­science Cours­es

Cours­era Makes Cours­es & Cer­tifi­cates Free Dur­ing Coro­n­avirus Quar­an­tine: Take Cours­es in Psy­chol­o­gy, Music, Well­ness, Pro­fes­sion­al Devel­op­ment & More Online

1,500 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

Free Cours­es on the Coro­n­avirus: What You Need to Know About the Emerg­ing Pan­dem­ic

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

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