The Brilliant Engineering That Made Venice: How a City Was Built on Water

in History, Technology | August 5th, 2024

Many of us have put off a vis­it to Venice for fear of the hordes of tourists who roam its streets and boat down its canals day in and day out. To judge by the most vis­i­ble of its eco­nom­ic activ­i­ty, the once-mighty city-state now exists almost sole­ly as an Insta­gram­ming des­ti­na­tion. It was­n’t always this way. “Despite hav­ing no roads, no land, and no fresh water, the Vene­tians man­aged to turn a mud­dy swamp into the most pow­er­ful and wealth­i­est city of its time,” says the nar­ra­tion of the Pri­mal Space video above. Its “unique lay­out of canals and bridges woven through hun­dreds of islands made Venice incred­i­bly acces­si­ble, and it became the epi­cen­ter of all busi­ness.”

Venice, in oth­er words, was at its height what world cap­i­tals like Lon­don or New York would become in lat­er eras. But on a phys­i­cal lev­el, it faced chal­lenges unknown in those cities, chal­lenges that demand­ed a vari­ety of inge­nious medieval engi­neer­ing solu­tions, most of which still func­tion today. First, the builders of Venice had to bring tim­ber from the forests of Croa­t­ia and dri­ve it into the soft soil, cre­at­ing a plat­form stur­dy enough to bear the weight of an entire urban built envi­ron­ment. Con­struc­tion of the build­ings on top proved to be a tri­al-and-error affair, which came around to using bricks with lime mor­tar to ensure flex­i­bil­i­ty on the slow­ly shift­ing ground.

“Instead of expand­ing out­wards like most cities,” Venice’s islands “expand­ed into each oth­er.” Even­tu­al­ly, they had to be con­nect­ed, though “there were no bridges for the first 500 years of Venice’s exis­tence,” not until the Doge offered a prize for the best design that could link the finan­cial cen­ter of Rial­to to the rest of the city. But what real­ly mat­tered was the test of time, one long since passed by the Ponte di Rial­to, which has stood fun­da­men­tal­ly unal­tered since it was rebuilt in stone in 1591. The com­bi­na­tion of bridges and canals, with what we would now call their sep­a­ra­tion of traf­fic, did its part to make Venice “the most pow­er­ful and rich­est city in Europe” by the fif­teenth cen­tu­ry.

Even the rich­est and most pow­er­ful cities need water, and Venice had an abun­dance of only the “extreme­ly salty and undrink­able” kind. To meet the needs of the city’s fast-grow­ing pop­u­la­tion, engi­neers built wells sur­round­ed by sand-and-stone fil­tra­tion sys­tems into Venice’s char­ac­ter­is­tic squares, turn­ing the city into “an enor­mous fun­nel.” The relat­ed prob­lem of waste man­age­ment neces­si­tat­ed the con­struc­tion of “a net­work of under­ground tun­nels” direct­ed into canals, flushed out by the motion of the tides. Venice’s plumb­ing has since been brought up to mod­ern stan­dards, among oth­er ambi­tious engi­neer­ing projects. But on the whole, the city still works as it did in the days of the Doge, and that fact alone makes it a sight worth see­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Venice Explained: Its Archi­tec­ture, Its Streets, Its Canals, and How Best to Expe­ri­ence Them All

How Venice Works: 124 Islands, 183 Canals & 438 Bridges

Watch Venice’s New $7 Bil­lion Flood Defense Sys­tem in Action

A Relax­ing 3‑Hour Tour of Venice’s Canals

Venice’s Canals Have Run Dry Dur­ing a Win­ter Drought, Leav­ing Gon­do­las Stuck in the Mud

Pink Floyd Plays in Venice on a Mas­sive Float­ing Stage in 1989; Forces the May­or & City Coun­cil to Resign

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

Carl Jung Offers an Introduction to His Psychological Thought in a 3‑Hour Interview (1957)

in Psychology | August 1st, 2024

In the 1950s, it was fash­ion­able to drop Freud’s name — often as not in pseu­do-intel­lec­tu­al sex jokes. Freud’s pre­oc­cu­pa­tions had as much to do with his fame as the actu­al prac­tice of psy­chother­a­py, and it was assumed — and still is to a great degree — that Freud had “won” the debate with his for­mer stu­dent and friend Carl Jung, who saw reli­gion, psy­che­del­ic drugs, occult prac­tices, etc. as valid forms of indi­vid­u­al­iz­ing and inte­grat­ing human selves — selves that were after all, he thought, con­nect­ed by far more than bio­log­i­cal dri­ves for sex and death.

Now Jung’s insights per­me­ate the cul­ture, in increas­ing­ly pop­u­lar fields like transper­son­al psy­chol­o­gy, for exam­ple, that see humans as “rad­i­cal­ly inter­con­nect­ed, not just iso­lat­ed indi­vid­u­als,” psy­chol­o­gist Har­ris L. Fried­man argues. Move­ments like these grew out of the “coun­ter­cul­ture move­ments of the 1960s,” psy­chol­o­gy lec­tur­er and author Steve Tay­lor explains, “and the wave of psy­cho-exper­i­men­ta­tion it involved, through psy­che­del­ic sub­stances, med­i­ta­tion and oth­er con­scious­ness-chang­ing prac­tices” — the very prac­tices Jung explored in his work.

Indeed, Jung was the first “to legit­imize a spir­i­tu­al approach to the prac­tice of depth psy­chol­o­gy,” Mark Kasprow and Bruce Scot­ton point out, and “sug­gest­ed that psy­cho­log­i­cal devel­op­ment extends to include high­er states of con­scious­ness and can con­tin­ue through­out life, rather than stop with the attain­ment of adult ego mat­u­ra­tion.” Against Freud, who thought tran­scen­dence was regres­sion, Jung “pro­posed that tran­scen­dent expe­ri­ence lies with­in and is acces­si­ble to every­one, and that the heal­ing and growth stim­u­lat­ed by such expe­ri­ence often make use of the lan­guages of sym­bol­ic imagery and non­ver­bal expe­ri­ence.”

Jung’s work became increas­ing­ly impor­tant after his death in 1961, lead­ing to the pub­li­ca­tion of his col­lect­ed works in 1969. These intro­duced read­ers to all of his  “key con­cepts and ideas, from arche­typ­al sym­bols to ana­lyt­i­cal psy­chol­o­gy to UFOs,” notes a com­pan­ion guide. Near the end of his life, Jung him­self pro­vid­ed a ver­bal sur­vey of his life’s work in the form of four one-hour inter­views con­duct­ed in 1957 by Uni­ver­si­ty of Houston’s Dr. Richard Evans at the Eidgenos­sis­che Tech­nis­che Hoschschule (Fed­er­al Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy) in Zurich.

“The con­ver­sa­tions were filmed as part of an edu­ca­tion­al project designed for stu­dents of the psy­chol­o­gy depart­ment. Evans is a poor inter­view­er, but Jung com­pen­sates well,” the Gnos­tic Soci­ety Library writes. The edit­ed inter­views begin with a ques­tion about Jung’s con­cept of per­sona (also, inci­den­tal­ly, the theme and title of Ing­mar Bergman’s 1966 mas­ter­piece). In response, Jung describes the per­sona in plain terms and with every­day exam­ples as a fic­tion­al self “par­tial­ly dic­tat­ed by soci­ety and par­tial­ly dic­tat­ed by the expec­ta­tions or the wish­es one nurs­es one­self.”

The less we’re con­scious­ly aware of our pub­lic selves as per­for­mances in these terms, the more we’re prone, Jung says, to neu­roses, as the pres­sure of our “shad­ow,” exerts itself. Jung and Evans’ dis­cus­sion of per­sona only grazes the sur­face of their wide-rang­ing con­ver­sa­tion about the uncon­scious and the many ways to access it. Through­out, Jung’s exam­ples are clear and his expla­na­tions lucid. Above, you can see a tran­scribed video of the same inter­views. Read a pub­lished tran­script in the col­lec­tion C.G. Jung Speak­ing, and see more Jung inter­views and doc­u­men­taries at the Gnos­tic Soci­ety Library.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How Carl Jung Inspired the Cre­ation of Alco­holics Anony­mous

Face to Face with Carl Jung: ‘Man Can­not Stand a Mean­ing­less Life’ (1959)

The Vision­ary Mys­ti­cal Art of Carl Jung: See Illus­trat­ed Pages from The Red Book

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

Face to Face with Carl Jung: ‘Man Cannot Stand a Meaningless Life’ (1959)

in Psychology | July 18th, 2024

Carl Gus­tav Jung, founder of ana­lyt­ic psy­chol­o­gy and explor­er of the col­lec­tive uncon­scious, was born on July 26, 1875 in the vil­lage of Kess­wil, in the Thur­gau can­ton of Switzer­land. Above, we present a fas­ci­nat­ing 39-minute inter­view of Jung by John Free­man for the BBC pro­gram Face to Face. It was filmed at Jung’s home at Küs­nacht, on the shore of Lake Zürich, and broad­cast on Octo­ber 22, 1959, when Jung was 84 years old. He speaks on a range of sub­jects, from his child­hood and edu­ca­tion to his asso­ci­a­tion with Sig­mund Freud and his views on death, reli­gion and the future of the human race. At one point Free­man asks Jung whether he believes in God, and Jung seems to hes­i­tate. “It’s dif­fi­cult to answer,” he says. “I know. I don’t need to believe. I know.”

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:

The Famous Break Up of Sig­mund Freud & Carl Jung Explained in a New Ani­mat­ed Video

How Carl Jung Inspired the Cre­ation of Alco­holics Anony­mous

Take Carl Jung’s Word Asso­ci­a­tion Test, a Quick Route Into the Sub­con­scious (1910)

Carl Jung’s Hand-Drawn, Rarely-Seen Man­u­script The Red Book

Simone de Beauvoir Explains “Why I’m a Feminist” in a Rare TV Interview (1975)

in History, Philosophy | July 17th, 2024

In Simone de Beau­voir’s 1945 nov­el The Blood of Oth­ers, the nar­ra­tor, Jean Blo­mart, reports on his child­hood friend Marcel’s reac­tion to the word “rev­o­lu­tion”:

It was sense­less to try to change any­thing in the world or in life; things were bad enough even if one did not med­dle with them. Every­thing that her heart and her mind con­demned she rabid­ly defended—my father, mar­riage, cap­i­tal­ism. Because the wrong lay not in the insti­tu­tions, but in the depths of our being. We must hud­dle in a cor­ner and make our­selves as small as pos­si­ble. Bet­ter to accept every­thing than to make an abortive effort, doomed in advance to fail­ure.

Marcel’s fear­ful fatal­ism rep­re­sents every­thing De Beau­voir con­demned in her writ­ing, most notably her ground­break­ing 1949 study, The Sec­ond Sex, often cred­it­ed as the foun­da­tion­al text of sec­ond-wave fem­i­nism. De Beau­voir reject­ed the idea that women’s his­tor­i­cal sub­jec­tion was in any way natural—“in the depths of our being.” Instead, her analy­sis fault­ed the very insti­tu­tions Mar­cel defends: patri­archy, mar­riage, cap­i­tal­ist exploita­tion.

In the 1975 inter­view above with French jour­nal­ist Jean-Louis Ser­van-Schreiber—“Why I’m a Feminist”—De Beau­voir picks up the ideas of The Sec­ond Sex, which Ser­van-Schreiber calls as impor­tant an “ide­o­log­i­cal ref­er­ence” for fem­i­nists as Marx’s Cap­i­tal is for com­mu­nists. He asks De Beau­voir about one of her most quot­ed lines: “One is not born a woman, one becomes one.” Her reply shows how far in advance she was of post-mod­ern anti-essen­tial­ism, and how much of a debt lat­er fem­i­nist thinkers owe to her ideas:

Yes, that for­mu­la is the basis of all my the­o­ries…. Its mean­ing is very sim­ple, that being a woman is not a nat­ur­al fact. It’s the result of a cer­tain his­to­ry. There is no bio­log­i­cal or psy­cho­log­i­cal des­tiny that defines a woman as such…. Baby girls are man­u­fac­tured to become women.”

With­out deny­ing the fact of bio­log­i­cal dif­fer­ence, De Beau­voir debunks the notion that sex dif­fer­ences are suf­fi­cient to jus­ti­fy gen­der-based hier­ar­chies of sta­tus and social pow­er. Wom­en’s sec­ond-class sta­tus, she argues, results from a long his­tor­i­cal process; even if insti­tu­tions no longer inten­tion­al­ly deprive women of pow­er, they still intend to hold on to the pow­er men have his­tor­i­cal­ly accrued.

Almost 50 years after this interview—and 75 years since The Sec­ond Sex—the debates De Beau­voir helped ini­ti­ate rage on, with no sign of abat­ing any­time soon. Although Ser­van-Schreiber calls fem­i­nism a “ris­ing force” that promis­es “pro­found changes,” one won­ders whether De Beau­voir, who died in 1986, would be dis­mayed by the plight of women in much of the world today. But then again, unlike her char­ac­ter Mar­cel, De Beau­voir was a fight­er, not like­ly to “hud­dle in a cor­ner” and give in. Ser­van-Schreiber states above that De Beau­voir “has always refused, until this year, to appear on TV,” but he is mis­tak­en. In 1967, she appeared with her part­ner Jean-Paul Sartre on a French-Cana­di­an pro­gram called Dossiers.

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:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Fem­i­nist Phi­los­o­phy of Simone de Beau­voir

Simone de Beau­voir Speaks on Amer­i­can TV (in Eng­lish) About Fem­i­nism, Abor­tion & More (1976)

Simone de Beau­voir Tells Studs Terkel How She Became an Intel­lec­tu­al and Fem­i­nist (1960)

Simone de Beauvoir’s Phi­los­o­phy on Find­ing Mean­ing in Old Age

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

You Can Buy Historic Italian Houses for €1 — But What’s the Catch?

in Architecture, Business, Travel | July 12th, 2024

From Abruz­zo to Verge­moli, small Ital­ian towns and vil­lages have recent­ly been mak­ing their his­toric homes avail­able for pur­chase for as low as €1. Giv­en the pic­turesque nature of many of these places, such offers have proven prac­ti­cal­ly irre­sistible to for­eign buy­ers who’ve made their mon­ey and are look­ing to escape the big-city rat race, or even those sim­ply prone to Under the Tus­can Sun-type fan­tasies. But this is, of course, more than just a mat­ter of wiring a sin­gle Euro and jet­ting off to a life of rus­tic beau­ty and sim­plic­i­ty. As shown in these videos from Explained with Dom and Insid­er News, you’ve got to put much more mon­ey into the acqui­si­tion and reha­bil­i­ta­tion of these hous­es, not to men­tion the sweat equi­ty involved.

“As young Ital­ians increas­ing­ly migrate to the city” — if not to oth­er coun­tries entire­ly — “and choose cos­mopoli­tan jobs over rur­al and com­mu­ni­ty voca­tions, many of Italy’s pret­ti­est remote vil­lages are becom­ing aban­doned, with tiny, age­ing pop­u­la­tions that are begin­ning to die off,” write the Inde­pen­dent’s Lucy Thack­ray.

“Some elder­ly Ital­ians have found them­selves with no one to leave their house to, bequeath­ing it instead to the local author­i­ties, who have to decide what to do with it, while some younger cit­i­zens have inher­it­ed prop­er­ties in areas they have no inten­tion of mov­ing to.” And so “around 25 Ital­ian munic­i­pal­i­ties are mak­ing prospec­tive home­own­ers an offer they can’t refuse,” though cer­tain con­di­tions do apply.

Old and less than immac­u­late­ly main­tained on the whole, these hous­es tend to require ren­o­va­tions “in the region of €20,000–50,000 depend­ing on the size of the prop­er­ty.” And the author­i­ties do make sure you’ll actu­al­ly per­form the work: “new own­ers are required to sub­mit details of a ren­o­va­tion project with­in two to 12 months of pur­chase (depend­ing on the loca­tion), start work with­in one year, and com­plete it with­in the next three.” Add on all the addi­tion­al (and often unex­pect­ed) fees, and even a best-case sce­nario starts to look pricey. Still, if you’re total­ly com­mit­ted to reha­bil­i­tat­ing a ven­er­a­ble Ital­ian home — and not just to rent it out to vaca­tion­ers, which some areas explic­it­ly pro­hib­it — it might sound like a fair enough deal.

One thing is cer­tain: any­one look­ing to buy into one of Italy’s cheap-house schemes (at a price of €1 or oth­er­wise) should go in with not just suf­fi­cient knowl­edge of domes­tic archi­tec­ture and remod­el­ing, but also a famil­iar­i­ty with Ital­ian ways of doing busi­ness — which have done their part to con­tribute to the so-called “Ital­ian dis­ease” that has sad­dled the coun­try with decades of eco­nom­ic stag­na­tion, but aren’t like­ly to change any time soon. And above all, it should go with­out say­ing that the first step of act­ing on a desire to play a part in bring­ing one of Italy’s “ghost towns” back to life is learn­ing the Ital­ian lan­guage — a task you can start right here on Open Cul­ture. Buona for­tu­na to you.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Explor­ing the Great­est of Italy’s 6,000 Ghost Towns: Take a Tour of Cra­co, Italy

Dis­cov­er the Ghost Towns of Japan — Where Scare­crows Replace Peo­ple, and a Man Lives in an Aban­doned Ele­men­tary School Gym

Behold 3D Recre­ations of Pompeii’s Lav­ish Homes–As They Exist­ed Before the Erup­tion of Mount Vesu­vius

High-Res­o­lu­tion Walk­ing Tours of Italy’s Most His­toric Places: The Colos­se­um, Pom­peii, St. Peter’s Basil­i­ca & More

Venice Explained: Its Archi­tec­ture, Its Streets, Its Canals, and How Best to Expe­ri­ence Them All

Free Ital­ian Lessons

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

2000-Year-Old Bottle of White Wine Found in a Roman Burial Site

in Food & Drink, History | July 5th, 2024

Image via Jour­nal of Archae­o­log­i­cal Sci­ence: Reports

Back in 2017, we fea­tured the old­est unopened bot­tle of wine in the world here on Open Cul­ture. Found in Spey­er, Ger­many, in 1867, it dates from 350 AD, mak­ing it a ven­er­a­ble vin­tage indeed, but one recent­ly out­done by a bot­tle first dis­cov­ered five years ago in Car­mona, near Seville, Spain. “At the bot­tom of a shaft found dur­ing con­struc­tion work,” an exca­va­tion team “uncov­ered a sealed bur­ial cham­ber from the ear­ly first cen­tu­ry C.E. — untouched for 2,000 years,” writes Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can’s Lars Fis­ch­er. Inside was “a glass urn placed in a lead case was filled to the brim with a red­dish liq­uid,” only recent­ly deter­mined to be wine — and there­fore wine about three cen­turies old­er than the Spey­er bot­tle.

You can read about the rel­e­vant research in this new paper pub­lished in the Jour­nal of Archae­o­log­i­cal Sci­ence: Reports by chemist José Rafael Ruiz Arrebo­la and his team. “The wine from the Car­mona site was no longer suit­able for drink­ing, and it had nev­er been intend­ed for that pur­pose,” writes Fis­ch­er.

“The experts found bone remains and a gold ring at the bot­tom of the glass ves­sel. The bur­ial cham­ber was the final rest­ing place for the remains of the deceased, who were cre­mat­ed accord­ing to Roman cus­tom.” Only through chem­i­cal analy­sis were the researchers final­ly able to deter­mine that the liq­uid was, in fact, wine, and thus to put togeth­er evi­dence of the arrange­men­t’s being an elab­o­rate send­off for a Roman-era oenophile.

Though the funer­ary rit­u­al “involved two men and two women,” says CBS News, the remains in the wine came from only one of the men. This makes sense, as, “accord­ing to the study, women in ancient Rome were pro­hib­it­ed from drink­ing wine.” What a dif­fer­ence a cou­ple of mil­len­nia make: today the cul­tur­al image slants some­what female, espe­cial­ly in the case of white wine, which, despite hav­ing “acquired a red­dish hue,” the liq­uid unearthed in Car­mona was chem­i­cal­ly deter­mined to be. With the sum­mer now get­ting into full swing, this sto­ry might inspire us to beat the heat by putting a bot­tle of our favorite Chardon­nay, Ries­ling, or Pinot Gri­gio in the refrig­er­a­tor — a con­ve­nience unimag­ined by even the wealth­i­est wine-lov­ing cit­i­zens of the Roman Empire.

via Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can

Relat­ed con­tent:

Bars, Beer & Wine in Ancient Rome: An Intro­duc­tion to Roman Nightlife and Spir­its

Archae­ol­o­gists Dis­cov­er a 2,000-Year-Old Roman Glass Bowl in Per­fect Con­di­tion

Archae­ol­o­gists Dis­cov­er an Ancient Roman Snack Bar in the Ruins of Pom­peii

Explore the Roman Cook­book, De Re Coquinar­ia, the Old­est Known Cook­book in Exis­tence

The Wine Win­dows of Renais­sance Flo­rence Dis­pense Wine Safe­ly Again Dur­ing COVID-19

The Old­est Unopened Bot­tle of Wine in the World (Cir­ca 350 AD)

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

Why You Do Your Best Thinking In The Shower: Creativity & the “Incubation Period”

in Creativity, Psychology | July 1st, 2024

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

“The great Tao fades away.”

So begins one trans­la­tion of the Tao Te Ching’s 18th Chap­ter. The sen­tence cap­tures the frus­tra­tion that comes with a lost epiphany. Whether it’s a pro­found real­iza­tion when you just wake up, or moment of clar­i­ty in the show­er, by the time your mind’s gears start turn­ing and you grope for pen and paper, the enlight­en­ment has evap­o­rat­ed, replaced by mud­dle-head­ed, fum­bling “what was that, again?”

“Intel­li­gence comes forth. There is great decep­tion.”

The sud­den flash­es of insight we have in states of med­i­ta­tive distraction—showering, pulling weeds in the gar­den, dri­ving home from work—often elude our con­scious mind pre­cise­ly because they require its dis­en­gage­ment. When we’re too active­ly engaged in con­scious thought—exercising our intel­li­gence, so to speak—our cre­ativ­i­ty and inspi­ra­tion suf­fer. “The great Tao fades away.”

The intu­itive rev­e­la­tions we have while show­er­ing or per­form­ing oth­er mind­less tasks are what psy­chol­o­gists call “incu­ba­tion.” As Men­tal Floss describes the phe­nom­e­non: “Since these rou­tines don’t require much thought, you flip to autopi­lot. This frees up your uncon­scious to work on some­thing else. Your mind goes wan­der­ing, leav­ing your brain to qui­et­ly play a no-holds-barred game of free asso­ci­a­tion.”

Are we always doomed to lose the thread when we get self-con­scious about what we’re doing? Not at all. In fact, some researchers, like Allen Braun and Siyuan Liu, have observed incu­ba­tion at work in very cre­ative­ly engaged indi­vid­u­als, like freestyle rap­pers. Theirs is a skill that must be honed and prac­ticed exhaus­tive­ly, but one that nonethe­less relies on extem­po­ra­ne­ous inspi­ra­tion.

Renowned neu­ro­sci­en­tist Alice Fla­her­ty the­o­rizes that the key bio­log­i­cal ingre­di­ent in incu­ba­tion is dopamine, the neu­ro­trans­mit­ter released when we’re relaxed and com­fort­able. “Peo­ple vary in terms of their lev­el of cre­ative dri­ve,” writes Fla­her­ty, “accord­ing to the activ­i­ty of the dopamine path­ways of the lim­bic sys­tem.” More relax­ation, more dopamine. More dopamine, more cre­ativ­i­ty.

Oth­er researchers, like Ut Na Sio and Thomas C. Ormerod at Lan­cast­er Uni­ver­si­ty, have under­tak­en analy­sis of a more qual­i­ta­tive kind—of “anec­do­tal reports of the intel­lec­tu­al dis­cov­ery process­es of indi­vid­u­als hailed as genius­es.” Here we might think of Samuel Tay­lor Coleridge, whose poem “Kublai Khan”—“a vision in a dream”—he sup­pos­ed­ly com­posed in the midst of a spon­ta­neous rev­e­la­tion (or an opi­um haze)—before that annoy­ing “per­son from Por­lock” broke the spell.

Sio and Ormerod sur­vey the lit­er­a­ture of “incu­ba­tion peri­ods,” hop­ing to “allow us to make use of them effec­tive­ly to pro­mote cre­ativ­i­ty in areas such as indi­vid­ual prob­lem solv­ing, class­room learn­ing, and work envi­ron­ments.” Their dense research sug­gests that we can exer­cise some degree of con­trol over incu­ba­tion, build­ing uncon­scious work into our rou­tines. But why is this nec­es­sary?

Psy­chol­o­gist John Kounios of Drex­el Uni­ver­si­ty offers a straight­for­ward expla­na­tion of the uncon­scious process­es he refers to as “the default mode net­work.” Nick Stock­ton in Wired sums up Kounios’ the­o­ry:

Our brains typ­i­cal­ly cat­a­log things by their con­text: Win­dows are parts of build­ings, and the stars belong in the night sky. Ideas will always min­gle to some degree, but when we’re focused on a spe­cif­ic task our think­ing tends to be lin­ear.

The task of showering—or bathing, in the case of Archimedes (above)—gives the mind a break, lets it mix things up and make the odd, ran­dom jux­ta­po­si­tions that are the essen­tial basis of cre­ativ­i­ty. I’m tempt­ed to think Wal­lace Stevens spent a good deal of time in the show­er. Or maybe, like Stock­ton, he kept a “Poop Jour­nal” (exact­ly what it sounds like).

Famous exam­ples aside, what all of this research sug­gests is that peak cre­ativ­i­ty hap­pens when we’re pleas­ant­ly absent-mind­ed. Or, as psy­chol­o­gist Allen Braun writes, “We think what we see is a relax­ation of ‘exec­u­tive func­tions’ to allow more nat­ur­al de-focused atten­tion and uncen­sored process­es to occur that might be the hall­mark of cre­ativ­i­ty.”

None of this means that you’ll always be able to cap­ture those bril­liant ideas before they fade away. There’s no fool­proof method involved in mak­ing use of cre­ative dis­trac­tion. But as Leo Widrich writes at Buffer, there are some tricks that may help. To increase your cre­ative out­put and max­i­mize the insights in incu­ba­tion peri­ods, he rec­om­mends that you:

1. “Keep a note­book with you at all times, even in the show­er.” (Widrich points us toward a water­proof notepad for that pur­pose.)

2. “Plan dis­en­gage­ment and dis­trac­tion.” Widrich calls this “the out­er-inner tech­nique.” John Cleese artic­u­lates anoth­er ver­sion of planned inspi­ra­tion.

3. “Over­whelm your brain: Make the task real­ly hard.” This seems counterintuitive—the oppo­site of relax­ation. But as Widrich explains, when you strain your brain with real­ly dif­fi­cult prob­lems, oth­ers seem much eas­i­er by com­par­i­son.

It may seem like a lot of work get­ting your mind to relax, pro­duce more dopamine, and get weird, cir­cu­lar, and inspired. But the work lies in mak­ing effec­tive use of what’s already hap­pen­ing in your uncon­scious mind. Rather than grop­ing blind­ly for that flash of bril­liance you just had a moment ago, you can learn, writes Men­tal Floss, to “mind your mind­less tasks.”

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy Cours­es

Where Do Ideas Come From? David Lynch, Robert Krul­wich, Susan Orlean, Chuck Close & Oth­ers Reveal Their Cre­ative Sources

How Walk­ing Fos­ters Cre­ativ­i­ty: Stan­ford Researchers Con­firm What Philoso­phers & Writ­ers Have Always Known

How To Be Cre­ative: PBS’ Off Book Series Explores the Secret Sauce of Great Ideas

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

How the Ancient Greeks & Romans Made Beautiful Purple Dye from Snail Glands

in History | June 20th, 2024

Much has been writ­ten about the loss of col­or in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry. Our envi­ron­ments offered prac­ti­cal­ly every col­or known to man not so very long ago — and in cer­tain eras, grant­ed, it got to be a bit much. But now, every­thing seems to have retreat­ed to a nar­row palette of grays and browns, not to men­tion stark black and white. We should con­sid­er the pos­si­bil­i­ty that this time of “col­or loss” is a kind of ascetic repen­tance after a long feast. That anal­o­gy holds on more than one lev­el: tech­nol­o­gy and indus­tri­al­iza­tion made food abun­dant and thus inex­pen­sive, and it did the very same thing with col­ors.

There was a time when col­ors did­n’t come cheap. Peo­ple had plen­ty of black, reds, and browns in their lives, but pro­duc­ing the pig­ments for hues not often seen in nature entailed going to the ends of the earth (or in the case of ultra­ma­rine blue, the bot­tom of the sea). We all know that, for a long time start­ing around the day of Julius Cae­sar, pur­ple was the col­or of roy­al­ty. The choice was­n’t an acci­dent: Cae­sar’s “Tyr­i­an pur­ple” of choice was extrav­a­gant­ly expen­sive, owing to the fact that it could be extract­ed only from the glands of a par­tic­u­lar Mediter­ranean sea snail. You can learn more about this process from the Busi­ness Insid­er video above.

“Thou­sands of snails were required to pro­duce a sin­gle ounce of pur­ple dye,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Son­ja Ander­son, quot­ing Pliny the Elder. Though well under­stood for a few decades now, the world of ancient pur­ple-dye pro­duc­tion con­tin­ues to yield sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­er­ies. “Archae­ol­o­gists were exca­vat­ing recent­ly in the Bronze Age town of Kolon­na, on the Greek island of Aegi­na, when they dis­cov­ered two Myce­naean build­ings,” Ander­son writes. “As the researchers write in a study pub­lished in the jour­nal PLOS ONE, the build­ings date to the 16th cen­tu­ry B.C.E., and the old­er one con­tained pig­ment­ed ceram­ics, grind­ing tools and heaps of bro­ken mol­lusk shells: all indica­tive of a pur­ple dye fac­to­ry.”

Notably, these well-pre­served 3,600-year-old ruins date from a time long before pur­ple acquired its pres­tige. “There is no indi­ca­tion in the Bronze Age that pur­ple was a sym­bol of pow­er and that pur­ple-col­ored tex­tiles were only reserved for the elite or lead­ers, as in Roman or Byzan­tine times,” says archae­ol­o­gist Lydia Berg­er, co-author of the study. And when the Byzan­tine Empire fell, the knowl­edge of Tyr­i­an pur­ple was lost with it, only to be recov­ered ear­ly in this cen­tu­ry. These days, one does hear occa­sion­al rumors of a col­or come­back, and a rich pur­ple lead­ing the charge would bring with it a cer­tain his­tor­i­cal sat­is­fac­tion. In any case, we all remem­ber one cul­tur­al roy­al in par­tic­u­lar who sure­ly would have approved.

via Smith­son­ian

Relat­ed con­tent:

Ten of the Most Expen­sive Arts & Art Sup­plies in the Worlds: Japan­ese Bon­sai Scis­sors & Cal­lig­ra­phy Brush­es, Tunisian Dye Made from Snails and More

A 3,000-Year-Old Painter’s Palette from Ancient Egypt, with Traces of the Orig­i­nal Col­ors Still In It

Behold Ancient Egypt­ian, Greek & Roman Sculp­tures in Their Orig­i­nal Col­or

Dis­cov­er Harvard’s Col­lec­tion of 2,500 Pig­ments: Pre­serv­ing the World’s Rare, Won­der­ful Col­ors

YIn­Mn Blue, the First Shade of Blue Dis­cov­ered in 200 Years, Is Now Avail­able for Artists

Prince Gets an Offi­cial Pur­ple Pan­tone Col­or

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

Download Issues of “Weird Tales” (1923–1954): The Pioneering Pulp Horror Magazine Features Original Stories by Lovecraft, Bradbury & Many More

in Literature, Magazines | June 11th, 2024

We live in an era of genre. Browse through TV shows of the last decade to see what I mean: Hor­ror, sci-fi, fan­ta­sy, super­heroes, futur­is­tic dystopias…. Take a casu­al glance at the bur­geon­ing glob­al film fran­chis­es or mer­chan­dis­ing empires. Where in ear­li­er decades, hor­ror and fan­ta­sy inhab­it­ed the teenage domain of B‑movies and com­ic books, they’ve now become dom­i­nant forms of pop­u­lar nar­ra­tive for adults. Telling the sto­ry of how this came about might involve the kind of lengthy soci­o­log­i­cal analy­sis on which peo­ple stake aca­d­e­m­ic careers. And find­ing a con­ve­nient begin­ning for that sto­ry wouldn’t be easy.

Do we start with The Cas­tle of Otran­to, the first Goth­ic nov­el, which opened the door for such books as Drac­u­la and Franken­stein? Or do we open with Edgar Allan Poe, whose macabre short sto­ries and poems cap­ti­vat­ed the public’s imag­i­na­tion and inspired a mil­lion imi­ta­tors? Maybe. But if we real­ly want to know when the most pop­ulist, mass-mar­ket hor­ror and fan­ta­sy began—the kind that inspired tele­vi­sion shows from the Twi­light Zone to the X‑Files to Super­nat­ur­al to The Walk­ing Dead—we need to start with H.P. Love­craft, and with the pulpy mag­a­zine that pub­lished his bizarre sto­ries, Weird Tales.

Debut­ing in 1923, Weird Tales, writes The Pulp Mag­a­zines Project, pro­vid­ed “a venue for fic­tion, poet­ry and non-fic­tion on top­ics rang­ing from ghost sto­ries to alien inva­sions to the occult.” The mag­a­zine intro­duced its read­ers to past mas­ters like Poe, Bram Stok­er, and H.G. Wells, and to the lat­est weird­ness from Love­craft and con­tem­po­raries like August Der­leth, Ash­ton Smith, Cather­ine L. Moore, Robert Bloch, and Robert E. Howard (cre­ator of Conan the Bar­bar­ian).

In the magazine’s first few decades, you wouldn’t have thought it very influ­en­tial. Founder Jacob Clark Hen­nen­berg­er strug­gled to turn a prof­it, and the mag­a­zine “nev­er had a large cir­cu­la­tion.” But no mag­a­zine is per­haps bet­ter rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the explo­sion of pulp genre fic­tion that swept through the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry and even­tu­al­ly gave birth to the jug­ger­nauts of Mar­vel and DC.

Weird Tales is wide­ly accept­ed by cul­tur­al his­to­ri­ans as “the first pulp mag­a­zine to spe­cial­ize in super­nat­ur­al and occult fic­tion,” points out The Ency­clo­pe­dia of Sci­ence Fic­tion (though, as we not­ed before, an obscure Ger­man title, Der Orchideen­garten, tech­ni­cal­ly got there ear­li­er). And while the mag­a­zine may not have been wide­ly pop­u­lar, as the Vel­vet Under­ground was to the rapid spread of var­i­ous sub­gen­era of rock in the sev­en­ties, so was Weird Tales to hor­ror and fan­ta­sy fan­dom. Every­one who read it either start­ed their own mag­a­zine or fan­club, or began writ­ing their own “weird fic­tion”—Lovecraft’s term for the kind of super­nat­ur­al hor­ror he churned out for sev­er­al decades.

Fans of Love­craft can read and down­load scans of his sto­ries and let­ters to the edi­tor pub­lished in Weird Tales at the links below, brought to us by The Love­craft eZine (via SFFau­dio).

Let­ter to the edi­tor of Weird Tales, Sep­tem­ber 1923 – Sep­tem­ber 1923

Let­ter to the edi­tor of Weird Tales, Octo­ber 1923 – Octo­ber 1923

Let­ter to the edi­tor of Weird Tales, Jan­u­ary 1924 – Jan­u­ary 1924

Let­ter to the edi­tor of Weird Tales, March 1924 – March 1924

Impris­oned With The Pharaohs – May/June/July 1924

Hyp­nos – May/June/July 1924

The Tomb – Jan­u­ary 1926

The Ter­ri­ble Old Man – August 1926

Yule Hor­ror – Decem­ber 1926

The White Ship – March 1927

Let­ter to the edi­tor of Weird Tales, Feb­ru­ary 1928 – Feb­ru­ary 1928

The Dun­wich Hor­ror – April 1929

The Tree – August 1938

Fun­gi From Yug­goth Part XIII: The Port – Sep­tem­ber 1946

Fun­gi From Yug­goth Part X: The Pigeon-Fly­ers – Jan­u­ary 1947

Fun­gi From Yug­goth Part XXVI: The Famil­iars – Jan­u­ary 1947

The City – July 1950

Hallowe’en In A Sub­urb – Sep­tem­ber 1952

Fans of ear­ly pulp hor­ror and fantasy—–or grad stu­dents writ­ing their the­sis on the evo­lu­tion of genre fiction—can view and down­load dozens of issues of Weird Tales, from the 20s to the 50s, at the links below:

The Inter­net Archive has dig­i­tized copies from the 1920s and 1930s.

The Pulp Mag­a­zine Project hosts HTML, Flip­Book, and PDF ver­sions of Weird Tales issues from 1936 to 1939

This site has PDF scans of indi­vid­ual Weird Tales sto­ries from the 40s and 50s, includ­ing work by Love­craft, Ray Brad­bury, Dorothy Quick, Robert Bloch, and Theodor Stur­geon.

And to learn much more about the his­to­ry of the mag­a­zine, you may wish to beg, bor­row, or steal a copy of the pri­cy col­lec­tion of essays, The Unique Lega­cy of Weird Tales: The Evo­lu­tion of Mod­ern Fan­ta­sy and Hor­ror.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er the First Hor­ror & Fan­ta­sy Mag­a­zine, Der Orchideen­garten, and Its Bizarre Art­work (1919–1921)

Enter a Huge Archive of Amaz­ing Sto­ries, the World’s First Sci­ence Fic­tion Mag­a­zine, Launched in 1926

Down­load 15,000+ Free Gold­en Age Comics from the Dig­i­tal Com­ic Muse­um

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

The Romans Stashed Hallucinogenic Seeds in a Vial Made From an Animal Bone

in History | June 10th, 2024

What’s pop­u­lar in the metrop­o­lis soon­er or lat­er makes its way out into the provinces. This phe­nom­e­non has become more dif­fi­cult to notice in recent years, not because it’s slowed down, but because it’s sped way up, owing to near-instan­ta­neous cul­tur­al dif­fu­sion on the inter­net. Well with­in liv­ing mem­o­ry, how­ev­er, are the days when what­ev­er was cool in, say, New York or Los Ange­les would take time to catch on in the rest of the US. This went for fash­ions, movies, and bands, of course, but also for mind-alter­ing sub­stances: dis­tant-future archae­ol­o­gists are as like­ly to unearth a Vel­vet Under­ground album and the remains of its own­er’s stash in the ruins of Cleve­land as those of Chelsea.

A rough­ly anal­o­gous dis­cov­ery from the ancient world was recent­ly made by Dutch zooar­chae­ol­o­gists Maaike Groot and Mar­ti­jn van Haasteren and archaeob­otanist Lau­ra I. Koois­tra, who this past Feb­ru­ary pub­lished a paper in the jour­nal Antiq­ui­ty on “evi­dence of the inten­tion­al use of black hen­bane (Hyoscya­mus niger) in the Roman Nether­lands.” A mem­ber of the night­shade fam­i­ly, black hen­bane is “an extreme­ly poi­so­nous plant species that can also be used as a med­i­c­i­nal or psy­choac­tive drug,” the researchers write. It may have been the lat­ter pur­pose that encour­aged the cre­ation of a pecu­liar arti­fact: “a sheep/goat bone that had been hol­lowed out, sealed on one side by a plug of a black mate­r­i­al and filled with hun­dreds of black hen­bane seeds.”

“Phys­i­o­log­i­cal reac­tions to black hen­bane were well doc­u­ment­ed through­out the Ancient Mediter­ranean world,” writes Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Elaine Velie. She quotes Greek philoso­pher Plutarch as describ­ing its effects as “not so prop­er­ly called drunk­en­ness” but rather “alien­ation of mind or mad­ness.” Pliny the Elder “dis­cussed the plant’s med­i­c­i­nal, hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry, and poten­tial­ly lethal effects, not­ing that although it could be tak­en to heal ail­ments rang­ing from coughs to fever, the drug could also cause insan­i­ty and derange­ment. The Greek and Roman physi­cian Dioscorides wrote that black hen­bane and its close cousins could alle­vi­ate pain, but cause dis­ori­en­ta­tion when boiled.”

It would be nat­ur­al to assume that this hol­lowed-out, plugged bone func­tioned as some kind of pipe for smok­ing hen­bane. Though Groot, van Haasteren, and Koois­tra don’t find evi­dence for that, nei­ther do they rule out the pos­si­bil­i­ty that it was the stash box, if you like, of some res­i­dent of the Roman Nether­lands two mil­len­nia ago. Groot points out to Velie the espe­cial­ly fas­ci­nat­ing ele­ment of a “poten­tial link between med­i­c­i­nal knowl­edge described by Roman authors in Roman Italy and peo­ple actu­al­ly using the plant in a small vil­lage on the edge of the empire.” Though far from Rome itself, this hen­bane stash’s own­er pre­sum­ably used it how­ev­er the Romans did. If it met with dis­ap­proval, this indi­vid­ual could have resort­ed to a still-famil­iar refrain: “Hey, it’s med­i­c­i­nal.”

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Drugs Used by the Ancient Greeks and Romans

Humans First Start­ed Enjoy­ing Cannabis in Chi­na Cir­ca 2800 BC

1,000-Year-Old Illus­trat­ed Guide to the Med­i­c­i­nal Use of Plants Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

Down­load 100,000+ Images From The His­to­ry of Med­i­cine, All Free Cour­tesy of The Well­come Library

Pipes with Cannabis Traces Found in Shakespeare’s Gar­den, Sug­gest­ing the Bard Enjoyed a “Not­ed Weed”

Carl Sagan on the Virtues of Mar­i­jua­na (1969)

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