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20 November 2006
Mon, 20 Nov 2006 14:29:45 GMTYou have noted the calming effect that the experience of cute things has on you. Beauty has the same effect, perhaps even more so, since too much cuteness can be grating, whereas the beautiful seems never to tire us. This calming aspect is key, many think, to the importance of beauty. Friedrich Schiller said that “the inevitable effect of the beautiful is freedom from passions.” Some things make us happy by satisfying our desires (a chocolate bar, the Leafs scoring), but beauty doesn’t work this way. This makes the experience of beauty special in a consumer-oriented culture. It isn’t only that negative images stress us; even the things that make us happy involve stress, since we spend so much time and energy trying to (a) figure out exactly what we desire and (b) obtain that. Beautiful things, in contrast, make us happy in and of themselves. Beauty can actually remove us from our desires, taking us beyond our personal wants and calming the spirit.
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05 January 2006
Thu, 05 Jan 2006 22:47:52 GMT HOWTO: Be more productive (Aaron Swartz: The Weblog)via Kjell Olsen2224 days agoAssigned problems are problems you’re told to work on. Numerous psychology experiments have found that when you try to “incentivize” people to do something, they’re less likely to do it and do a worse job. External incentives, like rewards and punishments, kills what psychologists call your “intrinsic motivation”—your natural interest in the problem. (This is one of the most thoroughly replicated findings of social psychology—over 70 studies have found that rewards undermine interest in the task.)[^kohn] People’s heads seem to have a deep avoidance of being told what to do.[^avo]
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17 November 2005
Thu, 17 Nov 2005 17:21:00 GMT NPR's "My Lobotomy" on MP3Kjell Olsen2274 days ago12yo has his brain raked with an ice pick stuck up through his eye socket, gets to the bottom of it 40 years later.
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01 November 2005
Tue, 01 Nov 2005 23:45:06 GMT The Looming Attention Crisisvia Kjell Olsen2289 days agoWhat information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. Herbert Simon
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10 February 2005
Thu, 10 Feb 2005 13:15:35 GMT Smart People Choke Under Pressurevia Kjell Olsen2554 days agoA study proves it: a math test was administered under little pressure to a group of college students, who were then divided into two groups according to their scores (high vs low). The same test was then re-administered under a high pressure situation – they were told that their team depended on each of its members to score well and the team which scored higher would win a prize.
On the second time around the score of the higher group dropped significantly to the same level of the lower group, which didn’t change at all.
Since working memory is known to predict many higher-level brain functions, the research calls into question the ability of high-pressure tests such as the SAT, GRE, LSAT, and MCAT to accurately gauge who will succeed in future academic endeavors.
I’ve never been good at handling pressure, but interestingly, I’ve had most of my problems under pressure while playing tennis. I just can’t win matches – I can take a 5-2 lead then blow it like that. Maybe that’s why the best jocks are dumb!
But what I want to know it: were is the research that helps you not worry yourself sick?
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