In February, Oliver Sacks announced that he was suffering from terminal cancer. And, by August, he was gone — but not before showing us (if you read his op-eds in the Times) how to die with dignity and grace. All of this I was reminded of again today when I stumbled upon a recent animation inspired by Sacks’ work. Called The Lost Mariner, the short film offers an animated interpretation of a chapter in Sacks’ 1985 book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. The chapter (also called “The Lost Mariner”) presents a curious case study of a patient known as Jimmie G. who, suffering from Korsakoff’s syndrome, loses the ability to form new memories. To see how Tess Martin made this award-winning short, you can watch the making-of video below.
In My Day, so much of the music we listened to seemed angrier, more raucous and unruly—more aggressive and plainly evil—than music today. Not that I have any hard evidence for these assertions; customarily none is required for an In My Day rant. But I submit to you this: all that musical rage, in my opinion, was a good thing.
And it seems at least in this case, I can substantiate my opinion with science. This past summer, we reported on a study done by researchers at Humboldt State, Ohio State, UC Riverside, and UT Austin showing that kids who listened to heavy metal in the 80s were “significantly happier in their youth and better adjusted currently than either middle-aged or current college-age youth comparison groups.” Despite heated debates in the 80s and 90s over objectionable lyrical content in both popular and alternative music (remember the “Cop Killer” controversy?), researchers concluded that angry rock didn’t turn people into alienated maniacs. Instead, they found, “participation in fringe style cultures may enhance identity development in troubled youth.”
Now, even more recent research into the effects of angry hardcore punk and metal on the psyches of young people seems to confirm these results and further suggest that aggressive music has a paradoxically calming effect. In a study titled “Extreme metal music and anger processing,” University of Queensland psychologists Leah Sharman and Genevieve Dingle describe how they subjected “39 extreme music listeners aged 18–34 years of age” to “anger induction,” during which time, writes Consequence of Sound, “they talked about such irritating things as relationships, money, and work.” Once the test subjects were good and stressed, Sharman and Dingle had them listen either to a “random assignment” of “extreme music from their own playlist” for ten minutes or to ten minutes of silence.
As university publication UQ News summarizes, “In contrast to previous studies linking loud and chaotic music to aggression and delinquency,” this study “showed listeners mostly became inspired and calmed” by their metal. “The music helped them explore the full gamut of emotion they felt,” says Sharman, “but also left them feeling more active and inspired.” The researchers also provide a brief history of what they call “extreme music” and define it in terms of several genres and subgenres:
Following the rise of punk and heavy metal, a range of new genres and subgenres surfaced. Hardcore, death metal, emotional/emotional-hardcore (emo), and screamo appeared throughout the 1980s, gradually becoming more a part of mainstream culture. Each of these genres and their subgenres are socio-politically charged and, as mentioned earlier, are characterized by heavy and powerful sounds with expressive vocals.
“At the forefront of [the] controversy surrounding extreme music,” they write, “is the prominence of aggressive lyrics and titles.” In additional experiments, Sharman and Dingle found that “violent lyrics” did increase “participants’ state hostility,” but the effect was fleeting. Against prevailing assumptions that angry-sounding, aggressive music causes or correlates with depression, violence, self-harm, substance abuse, or suicide, the Queensland researchers found exactly the opposite—that “extreme music” alleviated listeners’ “angst and aggression,” made them happier, calmer, and better able to cope with the anger-inducing stressors that surround us all.
These days, you don’t really hear many people making the case for pessimism. Quite the contrary, positive psychology is now en vogue. And its founder, University of Pennsylvania psychology professor Martin Seligman, has written bestsellers with titles like Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life. But maybe, as Alain de Botton suggests above, there’s an argument to be made for pessimism– for having a sober, if not negative, outlook on life. And maybe there’s science that validates that point of view.
This second video, created by New York Magazine, summarizes the research of NYU professor Gabriele Oettingen, attributing to her the belief that “pessimism can be a better motivator for achieving goals than optimism,” seeing that optimism tends to lull us into complacency and slacken our desire to achieve important personal goals, like losing weight.
Couple that with this: a 2013 study released in Psychology and Aging, a journal published by the American Psychological Association (APA), concluded that “Older people who have low expectations for a satisfying future may be more likely to live longer, healthier lives than those who see brighter days ahead.” The lead author of the study Frieder R. Lang, PhD, added: “Our findings revealed that being overly optimistic in predicting a better future was associated with a greater risk of disability and death within the following decade.” “Pessimism about the future,” it seems, “may encourage people to live more carefully, taking health and safety precautions” that sunny optimists might not otherwise take.
I should add this caveat: scientists don’t necessarily find virtue in pure, unadulterated pessimism. Rather, they find benefits in what they call “defensive pessimism.” This is a strategy, as summarized by The Wall Street Journal, where people “lower their expectations and think through all the possible negatives that could happen in order to avoid them.” Frieder R. Lang, author of the Psychology & Aging study mentioned above, told WSJ, “Those who are defensively pessimistic about their future may be more likely to invest in preparatory or precautionary measures, whereas we expect that optimists will not be thinking about those things.” Similar virtues might be attributed to “defensive optimism,” but we’ll have to wait and see what the inevitable scientific studies have to say about that.
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I’ve spent the past week on a road trip across America, and, during it, experienced perhaps my most intense case of déjà vu ever. Rolling into Memphis for the first time in my life, I walked into the lobby of the hotel at which I’d reserved a room for the night and immediately felt, in every fiber of my being, that I’d walked into that lobby before. But I then realized exactly why: it followed the same floor plan, to the last detail — the same front desk, the same business center computers, the same café with the same chalkboard asking me to “Try Our Classic Oatmeal” — of the one I’d visited the previous day in Oklahoma City.
Should we chalk this up to generic American placemaking at its most efficient, or can we find a more interesting psychological phenomenon at work? Michio Kaku, though best known for his work with physics, has some ideas of his own about what we experience when we experience déjà vu. “There is a theory,” says Kaku in the Big Think video above,“that déjà vu simply elicits fragments of memories that we have stored in our brain, memories that can be elicited by moving into an environment that resembles something that we’ve already experienced.”
But wait! “Is it ever possible on any scale,” he then tantalizingly asks, “to perhaps flip between different universes?” And does déjà vu tell us anything about our position in those universes, giving us signs of the others even as we reside in just one? Kaku quotes an analogy first made by physicist Steven Weinberg which frames the notion of a “multiverse” in terms of our vibrating atoms and the frequency of a radio’s signal: “If you’re inside your living room listening to BBC radio, that radio is tuned to one frequency. But in your living room there are all frequencies: radio Cuba, radio Moscow, the Top 40 rock stations. All these radio frequencies are vibrating inside your living room, but your radio is only tuned to one frequency.” And sometimes, for whatever reason, we hear two signals on our radio at once.
Given that, then, maybe we feel déjà vu when the atoms of which we consist “no longer vibrate in unison with these other universes,” when “we have decoupled from them, we have decohered from them.” It may relieve you to know there won’t be an exam on all this. While Kaku ultimately grants that “déjà vu is probably simply a fragment of our brain eliciting memories and fragments of previous situations,” you may get a kick out of putting his multiverse idea in context with some more traditional explanations, such as the ones written about in venues no less dependable than Scientific American and Smithsonian. But in any case, I beg you, Marriott Courtyard hotels: change up your designs once in a while.
From Andreas Hykade, the Director of the Animation and Visual Effects program at Germany’s Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg, comes a short animated film called Nuggets. Things start off innocuously, with a kiwi taking a casual stroll down a road, eventually encountering and tasting some golden nuggets. The nuggets are delicious, it turns out, too delicious to resist. Then [spoiler alert!] things take a dark turn, as we watch our friendly kiwi sink into addiction and despair. In an interview conducted by the Animation World Network, Hykade says that he created the film for young teenagers who might be tempted one day (presumably by drugs). And when that day comes, he hopes they’ll think about Nuggets and its striking, stripped-down message about addiction and the life it brings.
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In 1973, the book Sybil - about a young woman struggling with 16 distinct personalities — became a cultural sensation, spawning a hugely successful made-for-TV movie in 1976 and an utterly unnecessary remake in 2007.
The condition of multiple personality disorder (MPD) was so exotic and strange that it soon became fodder for daytime talk shows like Jerry Springer and campy storylines in soap operas. But the case and the controversial treatment prescribed by Sybil’s doctor Cornelia Wilbur had long-term and serious implications for healthcare in this country. Above, you can watch a video by the New York Times that lays out much of the controversy.
MPD was first diagnosed in the early 1950s with a patient named Eve White (above) who seemed to have three personalities. When Wilbur found that one of her own patients, a troubled graduate student named Shirley Mason (later known to the world as “Sybil”) exhibited some of the same symptoms as Eve, she started an aggressive therapy that included hypnosis and the use of sodium thiopental, truth serum. Wilbur suspected that Mason’s problems were the result of some childhood trauma and her therapy aimed at uncovering them.
Under Wilbur’s care, Mason revealed a host of different personalities from the assertive Peggy, to the emotional Marcia, to Mike, who was not only male but also a carpenter. Through the voice of each personality, Wilbur also uncovered what she believed to be terrifying accounts of childhood rape and abuse.
But as Mason wrote in a 1958 letter to Wilbur, the abuse and the multiple disorders were lies. “I am not going to tell you there isn’t anything wrong,” Mason writes. “But it is not what I have led you to believe.… I do not have any multiple personalities .… I do not even have a ‘double.’ … I am all of them. I have been essentially lying.”
Wilbur dismissed Mason’s claims as an excuse to avoid going deeper in her treatment.
The popularity of Sybil’s story soon turned what was previously a very rare condition into a trendy psychological disorder. The video details the case of Jeanette Bartha who states, “I came in for depression and I left with multiple personalities.” Under treatment with hypnotic drugs, Bartha started to believe not only that she had MPD but also her parents abused her as a part of a satanic cult. Years later, Bartha realized to her grief and horror that these memories were false.
Subsequent research has thoroughly debunked the validity of Wilbur’s methods and even her diagnosis. MPD has been replaced with the broader, and less pulpy sounding, dissociative-identity disorder.
“The problem is fragmentation of identity, not that you really are 12 people,” says Dr. David Siegel, a critic of Wilbur. “You have not more than one but less than one personality.”
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
The problem of violence, perhaps the true root of all social ills, seems irresolvable. Yet, as most thoughtful people have realized after the wars of the twentieth century, the dangers human aggression pose have only increased exponentially along with globalization and technological development. And as Albert Einstein recognized after the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—which he partly helped to engineer with the Manhattan Project—the aggressive potential of nations in war had reached mass suicidal levels.
After Einstein’s involvement in the creation of the atomic bomb, he spent his life “working for disarmament and global government,” writes psychologist Mark Leith, “anguished by his impossible, Faustian decision.” Yet, as we discover in letters Einstein wrote to Sigmund Freud in 1932, he had been advocating for a global solution to war long before the start of World War II. Einstein and Freud’s correspondence took place under the auspices of the League of Nation’s newly-formed International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, created to foster discussion between prominent public thinkers. Einstein enthusiastically chose Freud as his interlocutor.
In his first letter to the psychologist, he writes, “This is the problem: Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?” Well before the atomic age, Einstein alleges the urgency of the question is a matter of “common knowledge”—that “with the advance of modern science, this issue has come to mean a matter of life and death for Civilization as we know it.”
Einstein reveals himself as a sort of Platonist in politics, endorsing The Republic’s vision of rule by elite philosopher-kings. But unlike Socrates in that work, the physicist proposes not city-states, but an entire world government of intellectual elites, who hold sway over both religious leaders and the League of Nations. The consequence of such a polity, he writes, would be world peace—the price, likely, far too high for any world leader to pay:
The quest of international security involves the unconditional surrender by every nation, in a certain measure, of its liberty of action—its sovereignty that is to say—and it is clear beyond all doubt that no other road can lead to such security.
Einstein expresses his proposal in some sinister-sounding terms, asking how it might be possible for a “small clique to bend the will of the majority.” His final question to Freud: “Is it possible to control man’s mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychosis of hate and destructiveness?”
Freud’s response to Einstein, dated September, 1932, sets up a fascinating dialectic between the physicist’s perhaps dangerously naïve optimism and the psychologist’s unsentimental appraisal of the human situation. Freud’s mode of analysis tends toward what we would now call evolutionary psychology, or what he calls a “’mythology’ of the instincts.” He gives a mostly speculative account of the prehistory of human conflict, in which “a path was traced that led away from violence to law”—itself maintained by organized violence.
Freud makes explicit reference to ancient sources, writing of the “Panhellenic conception, the Greeks’ awareness of superiority over their barbarian neighbors.” This kind of proto-nationalism “was strong enough to humanize the methods of warfare.” Like the Hellenistic model, Freud proposes for individuals a course of humanization through education and what he calls “identification” with “whatever leads men to share important interests,” thus creating a “community of feeling.” These means, he grants, may lead to peace. “From our ‘mythology’ of the instincts,” he writes, “we may easily deduce a formula for an indirect method of eliminating war.”
And yet, Freud concludes with ambivalence and a great deal of skepticism about the elimination of violent instincts and war. He contrasts ancient Greek politics with “the Bolshevist conceptions” that propose a future end of war and which are likely “under present conditions, doomed to fail.” Referring to his theory of the competing binary instincts he calls Eros and Thanatos—roughly love (or lust) and death drives—Freud arrives at what he calls a plausible “mythology” of human existence:
The upshot of these observations, as bearing on the subject in hand, is that there is no likelihood of our being able to suppress humanity’s aggressive tendencies. In some happy corners of the earth, they say, where nature brings forth abundantly whatever man desires, there flourish races whose lives go gently by; unknowing of aggression or constraint. This I can hardly credit; I would like further details about these happy folk.
Nonetheless, he says wearily and with more than a hint of resignation, “perhaps our hope” that war will end in the near future, “is not chimerical.” Freud’s letter offers no easy answers, and shies away from the kinds of idealistic political certainties of Einstein. For this, the physicist expressed gratitude, calling Freud’s lengthy response “a truly classic reply…. We cannot know what may grow from such seed.”
This exchange of letters, contends Humboldt State University philosophy professor John Powell, “has never been given the attention it deserves.… By the time the exchange between Einstein and Freud was published in 1933 under the title Why War?, Hitler, who was to drive both men into exile, was already in power, and the letters never achieved the wide circulation intended for them.” Their correspondence is now no less relevant, and the questions they address no less urgent and vexing. You can read the complete exchange at professor Powell’s site here.
Jared Diamond is a true polymath. He got his start researching how the gall bladder absorbed salt and then moved on to other fields of study – ornithology, anthropology, linguistics. His wildly diverse interests have given him a unique perspective of how and why our species evolved. His Pulitzer Prize-winning book Germs, Guns and Steel makes a pretty convincing argument about why Europe — and not China or South America — ended up dominating the world. The answer, it turns not, has everything to do with geography and little to do with any kind of cultural superiority.
Back in 2013, Diamond spoke at The Royal Institution about how we think of risk in the first world versus those who live in remote New Guinea. The RI has taken a portion of that hour and a half talk and set it to some glorious animation. You can watch it above.
Early in Diamond’s career, he was in the jungle with his New Guinean guides. He found what he thought was a perfect spot to pitch camp – under a massive dead tree. His guides refused to sleep there, fearing that the tree might fall in the middle of the night. He thought that they were being overly paranoid until he started seeing things from their perspective.
Every night you’re in New Guinea sleeping in a forest, you hear a tree fall somewhere and then you go do the numbers. Suppose the risk of that tree falling on me tonight is 1 in 1000. If I sleep under dead trees for 1000 nights, in three years I’m going to be dead. … The New Guinea attitude is sensitive to the risks of things you are going to do regularly. Each time they carry a low risk but if you are not cautious it will catch up with you.
Diamond then extrapolated this realization to modern life. He notes that he is 76 years old and will statistically speaking probably live another 15 or so years. Yet if the risk of taking a fall in the shower is roughly the same as getting brained by a dead tree in the jungles of New Guinea (1 in 1000), then Diamond figures he could kill himself 5 ½ times over his the course of those 15 years.
“And so I’m careful about showers,” he says in the full video of the talk. “I’m careful about sidewalks. I’m careful about stepladders. It drives many of my American friends crazy but I will survive and they won’t.”
People in the first world are terrified by the wrong things, Diamond argues. The real danger isn’t terrorism, serial killers or sharks, which kill a very, very small percentage of people annually. The real risks are those things that we do daily that carry a low risk but that eventually catch up with you – driving, taking stairs, using step ladders.
You can watch the full interview, which is fascinating, below.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
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makes a pretty convincing argument about why Europe — and not China or South America — ended up dominating the world. The answer, it turns not, has everything to do with geography and little to do with any kind of cultural superiority.
