Miranda July Teaches You How to Avoid Procrastination

in Film, Life, Psychology | October 8th, 2012

I’ve always thought of writer, actor and film­mak­er Miran­da July as some­one who cre­ates her own oppor­tu­ni­ties. Long before her sto­ries in The New York­er, and before Me and You and Every­one We Know, the award-win­ning first fea­ture that cement­ed her indie dar­ling sta­tus, she was cir­cu­lat­ing video chain let­ters fea­tur­ing her own work and that of oth­er young, female film­mak­ers. She record­ed LPs and toured orig­i­nal per­for­mance art pieces.

What a relief to find out she’s a pro­cras­ti­na­tor, too.

July insists that her chat­ter­ing mon­key mind near­ly deprived her of the con­cen­tra­tion nec­es­sary to fin­ish writ­ing The Future, her sec­ond full-length film. One of its most com­pelling parts actu­al­ly wound up on the cut­ting room floor. In it (above), we see Sophie, the under-employed would-be dancer played by July, com­ing to grips with her own self-sab­o­tag­ing ten­den­cy toward pro­cras­ti­na­tion.

Of course, the rea­son we’re able to see it at all is that July, whose indus­tri­ous­ness sure­ly has earned her the right to spend a decade or so doing noth­ing but watch­ing YouTube and Googling her own name, repur­posed it as a short, instruc­tion­al film (A Handy Tip for the Eas­i­ly Dis­tract­ed), which offers an anti­dote for those of us who share her afflic­tion.

(Admit it. You’re pro­cras­ti­nat­ing now, aren’t you?)

In addi­tion to the sound­ness of her advice, her method­ol­o­gy is endear­ing­ly low-tech. As one who’s been known to attribute a lack of cre­ative out­put to a less than ide­al work­space, I found the clut­tered, shab­by apart­ment set both famil­iar and gal­va­niz­ing. If we’re going to make excus­es, we may as well own them. July takes yet anoth­er step by har­ness­ing them and forc­ing them to work for her.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Life-Affirm­ing Talks by Cul­tur­al Mav­er­icks (Includ­ing Miran­da July) Pre­sent­ed at The School of Life

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the author of any num­ber of books includ­ing The Zinester’s Guide to NYC and No Touch Mon­key! And Oth­er Trav­el Lessons Learned Too Late.

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How to Make Better Decisions, a Thought-Provoking Documentary by the BBC

in Life, Psychology, Television | September 28th, 2012

“In this pro­gram,” says nar­ra­tor Peter Capal­di at the out­set, “we’re going to show you how to be more ratio­nal, and deal with some of life’s biggest deci­sions.” It’s a pret­ty big claim, and you may doubt that it’s true (espe­cial­ly dur­ing the sil­ly open­ing scene involv­ing a group of nerds try­ing to score a date) but give this 2008 BBC Hori­zon pro­gram a lit­tle time and you might come away with a few things to think about. How to Make Bet­ter Deci­sions takes us inside cog­ni­tive sci­ence lab­o­ra­to­ries and out on the streets to demon­strate how the emo­tion­al part of our brain gets the bet­ter of the ratio­nal part. The film intro­duces a num­ber of intrigu­ing con­cepts, includ­ing Prospect The­o­ry,  “the fram­ing effect,” and “prim­ing.” More con­tro­ver­sial­ly, it high­lights some research that sug­gests the pos­si­bil­i­ty that our intu­ition may have some­thing to do with an abil­i­ty to sense future events. How to Make Bet­ter Deci­sions is 49 min­utes long, and we’ve decid­ed to add it to our grow­ing col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Neu­ro­science and Free Will

Dan Ariely’s Ani­mat­ed Talk on How and Why We’re Dis­hon­est

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Dan Ariely’s Animated Talk Reveals How and Why We’re All Dishonest

in Psychology | September 21st, 2012

If it is the bulk of the world’s cheat­ing, steal­ing, and decep­tion you seek, says Duke pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­o­gy and behav­ioral eco­nom­ics Dan Ariely, look not to the heinous acts of indi­vid­ual vil­lains; look to the count­less dis­hon­est acts com­mit­ted dai­ly by the rest of human­i­ty. “The mag­ni­tude of dis­hon­esty we see in soci­ety is by good peo­ple who think they’re being good but are in fact cheat­ing just a lit­tle bit,” so we learn in the lec­ture above (find the com­plete lec­ture here). Ariely speaks these words, but they also appear writ­ten onscreen by a pen-wield­ing hand that rapid­ly sum­ma­rizes and (lit­er­al­ly) illus­trates Ariely’s points as he makes them. This unusu­al style of ani­ma­tion appears in a whole series of videos from the Roy­al Soci­ety for the Encour­age­ment of Arts, Man­u­fac­tures and Com­merce called RSA Ani­mate. These have, the RSA claims, “rev­o­lu­tionised the field of knowl­edge visu­al­i­sa­tion whilst spread­ing the most impor­tant ideas of our time.” Rev­o­lu­tion­ary or not, The Truth About Dis­hon­esty makes, in under twelve min­utes, the kind of obser­va­tions that let you see real­i­ty just a lit­tle more clear­ly.

“Human beings basi­cal­ly try to do two things at the same time,” Ariely says and the hand writes. “On one hand, we want to be able to look in the mir­ror and feel good about our­selves. On the oth­er hand, we want to ben­e­fit from dis­hon­esty.” This dilem­ma would seem to allow no com­pro­mise — you’re either hon­est or you’re dis­hon­est, right? — but Ariely finds that most of us instinc­tive­ly strive for the gray area between: “Thanks to our flex­i­ble cog­ni­tive psy­chol­o­gy and our abil­i­ty to ratio­nal­ize our actions, we could do both.” We then hear and see how, if the prop­er ratio­nal­iza­tion hap­pens and the instances of cheat­ing remain minor and dis­tanced from their effects, every­body acts with a mix­ture of hon­esty and dis­hon­esty. (But some­times the “what the hell effect” — the lec­ture’s finest coinage — kicks in, where peo­ple tem­porar­i­ly stop con­sid­er­ing them­selves good and pro­ceed to act freely.) Ariely brings up the exam­ple, ripped from the head­lines, of bankers and hedge fund man­agers who, dis­tanced by vast cor­po­rate struc­tures and elab­o­rate math­e­mat­ics from those whom their actions con­cret­ly affect. The hand draws a car­i­ca­ture of Oscar Wilde, then writes the most appro­pri­ate quote beside it: “Moral­i­ty, like art, means draw­ing a line some­place.”

via Brain Pick­ings

More RSA Talks:

Rena­ta Sale­cl: The Para­dox of Choice

Sir Ken Robin­son: A Cre­ative Edu­ca­tion

Good Cap­i­tal­ist Kar­ma: Zizek Ani­mat­ed

Smile or Die: The Per­ils of Pos­i­tive Psy­chol­o­gy

Steven Pinker: How Innu­en­do Makes Things Work

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Steven Pinker Presents His Big Gallery of Cape Cod Photography

in Photography, Psychology | September 4th, 2012

Har­vard pro­fes­sor of psy­chol­o­gy Steven Pinker gar­nered a sig­nif­i­cant amount of atten­tion in the past year for his mas­sive, 800-page book Bet­ter Angels of Our Nature, which argues the con­tro­ver­sial the­sis that, despite the atroc­i­ties of the 20th and 21st cen­turies, vio­lence has declined world­wide and we live in the most peace­ful era in human his­to­ry. (A much short­er ver­sion of his the­sis is an essay enti­tled A His­to­ry of Vio­lence). You might expect some­one steeped in research on bru­tal inhu­man­i­ty and war to be a lit­tle on edge, but Pinker has a side­line as a pho­tog­ra­ph­er of the tran­quil and serene.

His most recent series of pic­tures builds on a fif­teen-year his­to­ry of pho­tograph­ing scenes of Cape Cod. In a tweet announc­ing the most recent col­lec­tion, Pinker claims his inspi­ra­tion for this series is the pho­tog­ra­ph­er Joel Meyerowitz, whose book Cape Light ren­ders the Mass­a­chu­setts Cape in the soft sub­tle tones of Renoir’s land­scapes. Pinker’s lens takes in a deep­er, rich­er light, and col­or pops from his images in unex­pect­ed ways—more Manet than Mon­et. His pho­tog­ra­phy, I would imag­ine, pro­vides a much-need­ed diver­sion from the heady inten­si­ty of his aca­d­e­m­ic work, and the images are strik­ing and beau­ti­ful. Look through Pinker’s lat­est Cape Cod series here.

For more of Pinker’s pho­tog­ra­phy see the full archive at his web­site.

And vis­it this link for an exten­sive archive of video and audio inter­views and talks from Pinker.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.

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Steven Pinker Explains the Neuroscience of Swearing (NSFW)

in English Language, Psychology | August 23rd, 2012

Steven Pinker is an exper­i­men­tal psy­chol­o­gist and one of the world’s fore­most writ­ers on lan­guage, mind, and human nature. Cur­rent­ly at Har­vard, Pinker has also taught at Stan­ford and MIT, and his research on visu­al cog­ni­tion and the psy­chol­o­gy of lan­guage has won prizes from the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences, the Roy­al Insti­tu­tion of Great Britain, the Cog­ni­tive Neu­ro­science Soci­ety, and the Amer­i­can Psy­cho­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion.

This video (find part 1 above, part 2 below, and the tran­script here) is tak­en from a talk giv­en on Sep­tem­ber 10, 2008 at War­wick­’s Book­store in La Jol­la, Cal­i­for­nia. Here, we find Pinker talk­ing about his then new book, The Stuff of Thought: Lan­guage as a Win­dow into Human Nature, and doing what he does best: com­bin­ing psy­chol­o­gy and neu­ro­science with lin­guis­tics. The result is as enter­tain­ing (and not safe for work) as it is insight­ful.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Stephen Fry, Lan­guage Enthu­si­ast, Defends The “Unnec­es­sary” Art Of Swear­ing

George Car­lin Per­forms His “Sev­en Dirty Words” Rou­tine: His­toric and Com­plete­ly NSFW

By pro­fes­sion, Matthias Rasch­er teach­es Eng­lish and His­to­ry at a High School in north­ern Bavaria, Ger­many. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twit­ter.

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This is What Oliver Sacks Learned on LSD and Amphetamines

in Psychology, Science | August 23rd, 2012

In this week’s issue of the New York­er, neu­rol­o­gist and writer Oliv­er Sacks has an arti­cle titled “Altered States.” Sub­ti­tled “Self-exper­i­ments in chem­istry,” it cov­ers, to be blunter, what Sacks expe­ri­enced and learned — or failed to learn, sub­stance depend­ing — when he began doing drugs.

His desire to con­duct these self-exper­i­ments flared up in his thir­ties, when, among oth­er sud­den jolts of curios­i­ty, he felt a sus­pi­cion that he had nev­er real­ly seen the col­or indi­go. “One sun­ny Sat­ur­day in 1964, I devel­oped a phar­ma­co­log­ic launch­pad con­sist­ing of a base of amphet­a­mine (for gen­er­al arousal), LSD (for hal­lu­cino­genic inten­si­ty), and a touch of cannabis (for a lit­tle added delir­i­um). About twen­ty min­utes after tak­ing this, I faced a white wall and exclaimed, ‘I want to see indi­go now — now!’ ” The result­ing expe­ri­ence, and sure­ly many oth­ers besides, should appear in detail in Sacks’ upcom­ing book Hal­lu­ci­na­tions. While you need to sub­scribe to the mag­a­zine to read the New York­er piece, any­one can watch the video above, which spends a few min­utes with Sacks talk­ing about what drugs taught him about the brain.

Every sub­ject Sacks writes about seems to start with his inter­est in our unusu­al sen­so­ry expe­ri­ences and end in the organ­ic work­ings of our brains. His body of work com­pris­es books on migraine, encephali­tis, visu­al agnosia, deaf­ness, autism, col­or blind­ness, and var­i­ous oth­er per­cep­tu­al impair­ments. Think­ing back to his self-induced hal­lu­ci­na­tions, he remem­bers feel­ing that “the drugs might sen­si­tize me to expe­ri­ences of a sort my patients could have,” mak­ing him more empa­thet­ic to what they were going through. On the oth­er hand, he says, some drugs “gave me some very direct knowl­edge of what phys­i­ol­o­gists would call the reward sys­tems of the brain,” pro­duc­ing “intense plea­sure, some­times plea­sure of an almost orgas­mic degree, with no par­tic­u­lar con­tent,” the kind that made him fear he would become one of those famous lab rats with an elec­trode con­nect­ed to its brain’s plea­sure cen­ter, push­ing and push­ing the lever to stim­u­late that cen­ter to the very end. But he stepped back, observed, wrote, and avoid­ed that fate, or at least its equiv­a­lent in the human domain, liv­ing to tell the tale more elo­quent­ly than most any writer around.

(See also: more from Oliv­er Sacks on the New York­er’s Out Loud pod­cast.)

Relat­ed con­tent:

Oliv­er Sacks Talks Music with Jon Stew­art

Oliv­er Sacks on the iPod

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Do Yourself a Favor and Watch Stress: Portrait of a Killer (with Stanford Biologist Robert Sapolsky)

in Psychology, Science, Stanford, Television | August 22nd, 2012

Intel­li­gence comes at a price. The human species, despite its tal­ent for solv­ing prob­lems, has man­aged over the mil­len­nia to turn one of its most basic sur­vival mechanisms–the stress response–against itself. “Essen­tial­ly,” says Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty neu­ro­bi­ol­o­gist Robert Sapol­sky, “we’ve evolved to be smart enough to make our­selves sick.”

In the 2008 Nation­al Geo­graph­ic doc­u­men­tary Stress: Por­trait of a Killer (above), Sapol­sky and fel­low sci­en­tists explain the dead­ly con­se­quences of pro­longed stress. “If you’re a nor­mal mam­mal,” Sapol­sky says, “what stress is about is three min­utes of scream­ing ter­ror on the savan­nah, after which either it’s over with or you’re over with.” Dur­ing those three min­utes of ter­ror the body responds to immi­nent dan­ger by deploy­ing stress hor­mones that stim­u­late the heart rate and blood pres­sure while inhibit­ing oth­er func­tions, like diges­tion, growth and repro­duc­tion.

The prob­lem is, human beings tend to secrete these hor­mones con­stant­ly in response to the pres­sures of every­day life. “If you turn on the stress response chron­i­cal­ly for pure­ly psy­cho­log­i­cal rea­sons,” Sapol­sky told Mark Shwartz in a 2007 inter­view for the Stan­ford News Ser­vice, “you increase your risk of adult onset dia­betes and high blood pres­sure. If you’re chron­i­cal­ly shut­ting down the diges­tive sys­tem, there’s a bunch of gas­troin­testi­nal dis­or­ders you’re more at risk for as well.”

Chron­ic stress has also been shown in sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies to dimin­ish brain cells need­ed for mem­o­ry and learn­ing, and to adverse­ly affect the way fat is dis­trib­uted in the body. It has even been shown to mea­sur­ably accel­er­ate the aging process in chro­mo­somes, a result that con­firms our intu­itive sense that peo­ple who live stress­ful lives grow old faster.

By study­ing baboon pop­u­la­tions in East Africa, Sapol­sky has found that indi­vid­u­als low­er down in the social hier­ar­chy suf­fer more stress, and con­se­quent­ly more stress-relat­ed health prob­lems, than dom­i­nant indi­vid­u­als. The same trend in human pop­u­la­tions was dis­cov­ered in the British White­hall Study. Peo­ple with more con­trol in work envi­ron­ments have low­er stress, and bet­ter health, than sub­or­di­nates.

Stress: Por­trait of a Killer is a fas­ci­nat­ing and impor­tant documentary–well worth the 52 min­utes it takes to watch.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Sapol­sky Breaks Down Depres­sion

Dopamine Jack­pot! Robert Sapol­sky on the Sci­ence of Plea­sure

Biol­o­gy That Makes Us Tick: Free Stan­ford Course by Robert Sapol­sky

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Take the ‘Happiness Experiment’

in Philosophy, Psychology | August 1st, 2012

Hap­pi­ness is a state of mind. We all know that. But when it comes to decid­ing whether anoth­er per­son is tru­ly hap­py, our per­cep­tions are col­ored by our own states of mind–in par­tic­u­lar, by our  val­ue judg­ments. A per­son can have all the men­tal char­ac­ter­is­tics of a hap­py per­son, but if he or she is liv­ing what we con­sid­er a “bad life,” we are far less like­ly to judge that they are hap­py. Sur­pris­ing­ly, the same moral eval­u­a­tions do not seem to enter into our con­cept of unhap­pi­ness.

These are the find­ings of a trio of researchers at Yale Uni­ver­si­ty: Jonathan Phillips, Luke Mis­en­heimer and Joshua Knobe. You can read about the study in their paper, “The Ordi­nary Con­cept of Hap­pi­ness (And Oth­ers Like It),” pub­lished in the July, 2011 Emo­tion Review. The study is part of a new move­ment called Exper­i­men­tal Phi­los­o­phy (or “x‑phi”), which goes beyond the philoso­pher’s tra­di­tion­al method of test­ing intuitions–a pri­ori con­cep­tu­al analysis–to use of the tools of cog­ni­tive sci­ence. You can learn more at the Yale Exper­i­men­tal Phi­los­o­phy Web site, and take the enter­tain­ing video test above to get a taste of some of the coun­ter­in­tu­itive find­ings of x‑phi.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Yale Intro­duces Anoth­er Sev­en Free Online Cours­es, Bring­ing Total to 42

Yale’s Open Cours­es Inspire a New Series of Old-Fash­ioned Books

Psy­chol­o­gy: Free Cours­es

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