Category: Last Week’s Links

Last Week’s Links

What’s Your Type? The Myers-Briggs Test and the Rise of the Personality Quiz

Myers-Briggs offers a model for self-revelation that has endured for decades, thrilling boomers and delighting millennials even as it has perpetually disgusted frustrated psychologists. It helped spawn a booming industry of personality assessments, one that uses the internet and algorithms to hopscotch far beyond the original, hand-scored tests. It inspires an ardent fandom that borders on spiritual, and yet its primary use is decidedly tethered to the material world, as a way to shuffle workers into places where they won’t complain. Its paradoxical appeal, as a woo-woo tool to know the soul and as a convenient, prefab employee sorter for corporations, is both absurd and a little poetic.

This article looks at the new book The Personality Brokers by Merve Emre, which details the origin and persistence of the Myers-Briggs Test.

What Personality Tests Really Deliver

This article also looks at the new book The Personality Brokers by Merve Emre, with an emphasis on the conclusion that personality tests are more self-help than science.

SOLVING THE HIDDEN DISEASE THAT’S AS BAD AS 15 CIGARETTES A DAY

That disease would be loneliness:

Experts agree that we’re facing a loneliness epidemic, one that has profound consequences for our physical health, our longevity and our overall well-being. But where others emphasize the scale and seriousness of this looming crisis, Murthy offers an encouraging message: Yes, loneliness is a pervasive problem worldwide, but there is a simple and actionable solution.

What We Know About Art and the Mind

There are many studies about how we process tonal music and figurative painting, but philosophers are just beginning to understand how our brains react to more abstract work.

The Best Apps for Every Type of Journaling

Usually, when we think about journaling, the old fashioned method of pen and paper comes to mind. But of course, there’s a digital version of every activity now, and there are a ton of great apps and software out there designed to keep your memories in a single place. There are nearly endless options to choose from, so we’ve rounded up the best that are currently available, depending on how you want to use them and what your goals are.

The recommendations here are good, but several links to articles about journal writing make this article even better.

© 2018 by Mary Daniels Brown

Last Week’s Links

How Your Brain Morphs Stressful Family Vacations Into Pleasant Memories

“We have two ‘selves,’” explained Dr. Omar Sultan Haque, a Harvard University psychiatrist and social scientist. “The experiencing self and the remembered self. In the midst of vacation stresses, we may be stressed and annoyed by family and children and the indignities of bureaucratic travel, but the remembered self easily turns nausea into nostalgia.”

This article puts the specific twist of vacation memories onto the more general concept of how different individuals remember the same events and experiences differently. There are some reasonable suggestions on how to maximize vacation enjoyment with both younger (toddlers who need naps) and older (teenagers who won’t want to put down their phones) children.

The Cognitive Biases Tricking Your Brain

Ben Yagoda discusses

the tendency people have, when considering a trade-off between two future moments, to more heavily weight the one closer to the present. A great many academic studies have shown this bias—also known as hyperbolic discounting—to be robust and persistent.

In this long but interesting article Yagoda examines the research into this phenomenon and how to counteract these cognitive biases in making decisions such as which job candidate to hire or which financial investments to make or avoid.

THINK YOU’RE IMMUNE TO BS? NOPE, WE ALL FALL FOR THE PSEUDO-PROFOUND

I’m not sure which fact is worse: that we’re all more susceptible to BS than me think, or that some academicians have actually made studying BS their life’s work.

This article focuses on one particular kind of BS:

what [Gordon Pennycook, a psychology professor at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan who has been researching BS for years] and other BS researchers call “pseudo-profound bullshit” — those “seemingly impressive assertions that are presented as true and meaningful but are actually vacuous.” Pennycook cites a tweet sent by the popular alternative medicine advocate Deepak Chopra as an example: “Attention and intention are the mechanics of manifestation.”

You’ve probably seen a lot of this. It’s those pithy sayings, often superimposed on a lovely photo, that fill up your Facebook feed.

The author of the article concludes, “Needless to say, as the BS piles up around us, there is more work to be done.” Unfortunately, he offers no explanations of what that work might be or what strategies we might all employ in our everyday lives to avoid being influenced by such BS.

The 2,000-year-old origins of EQ and how it became a crucial job skill

Emotional intelligence (EQ) is one of the most important skills candidates need when they’re looking to land a job. And it’s also a key factor to move up the ranks more quickly. We’ve also heard that EQ is a better predictor of success in the workplace than IQ, and that’s been backed by numerous studies in both academia and through data from companies on their employees.

Lydia Dishman traces the notion of emotional intelligence from its ancient Greek origins through its more recent application to success in life, for example by Daniel Goleman in his 1995 book Emotional Intelligence. “Since then, numerous corporate and academic studies have tested the concept to prove that EQ does indeed surpass IQ when it comes to succeeding in the workplace.”

Cold-Case Cure: Inside New Era of Hunting Serial Killers

law enforcement figured out that they could team with up with forensic genealogists to create DNA profiles from decades’ old suspect DNA and upload those profiles into genealogy databases, following a gnarled family tree until it bears fruit.

This article from Rolling Stone looks at the rise of forensic genealogists and autosomal DNA testing to solve cold-case crimes.

© 2018 by Mary Daniels Brown

Last Week’s Links

Lots of links about how the brain works recently.

How Your Brain Tricks You Into Believing Fake News

Here’s information we can all use.

Wineburg’s [psychologist Sam Wineburg, head of the Stanford History Education Group] team has found that Americans of all ages, from digitally savvy tweens to high-IQ academics, fail to ask important questions about content they encounter on a browser, adding to research on our online gullibility. Other studies have shown that people retweet links without clicking on them and rely too much on search engines. A 2016 Pew poll found that nearly a quarter of Americans said they had shared a made-up news story. In his experiments, MIT cognitive scientist David Rand has found that, on average, people are inclined to believe false news at least 20% of the time.

Although some web sites are obviously biased, this article points how easy it is for organizations to produce sites that look authentic and authoritative. And those of us who grew up way before the internet probably learned how to evaluate only old-fashioned sources found in a library. Add to that the common human tendencies to believe or trust things we’ve been exposed to in the past and to accept material that reinforces what we already believe, and you get a propagandists’ dream.

Therefore, the article says, “we need to retrain our brains.” There’s a description here of some tactics that professional fact-checkers use to determine who is providing the information on a given web site. Another piece of advice is to stop and think before simply accepting web information, particularly that put forward through tweets or other social media: “Another [study] found that false stories travel six times as fast as true ones on Twitter.”

Finally:

many advocates are suggesting that we reach for another powerful tool: shame… . Wineburg invokes the environmental movement, saying we need to cultivate an awareness of “digital pollution” on the Internet. “We have to get people to think that they are littering,” Wineburg says, “by forwarding stuff that isn’t true.” The idea is to make people see the aggregate effect of little actions, that one by one, ill-advised clicks contribute to the web’s being a toxic place. Having a well-informed citizenry may be, in the big picture, as important to survival as having clean air and water.

She made a career out of studying the brain. Then hers veered off course.

Neuroscientist Barbara Lipska has studied mental illness for much of her career. In 2015 she was diagnosed with brain cancer. After an experimental treatment, she began to exhibit bizarre behavior that alarmed loved ones and colleagues. Lipska was not aware of the change at the time. She recently published a book about her experience.

That book, The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind, co-written by Lipska and Elaine McArdle, was published in April 2018. “She’s made a pretty good recovery, as far as the doctors tell her, but there are still lingering problems in her brain, including occasional difficulty with her mental map.”

This is the story of Lipska, originally from Poland and now at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, MD, as she works at understanding her own brain.

The line between sanity and insanity may be perilously thin, but Barbara Lipska’s decision about how to respond to her own experience with insanity was unambiguous: She was determined to understand what had happened to her. The brain that had failed her would save her. As she calmly and clinically retraced for me the damage done to her brain, I couldn’t help but be in awe of its resilience.

How Your Brain Decides Without You

In a world full of ambiguity, we see what we want to see.

Tom Vanderbilt examines the psychology of how focusing on one thing can keep us from seeing another.

These Psychedelic Drugs Show Promise for Treating Mental Health Disorders

“Combined with [talk therapy], some psychedelic drugs like MDMA [or ecstasy], psilocybin [the active ingredient in magic mushrooms] and ayahuasca may improve symptoms of anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD],” Cristina Magalhaes, an associate professor of clinical psychology at Alliant International University in Los Angeles, said in a statement.

What will your life story say about you?

Life is a story that we write and while writing we rediscover our unique selves as well as the opportunity to newly discover the uniqueness and diversity in others.

© 2018 by Mary Daniels Brown

Last Week’s Links

Health Insurers Are Vacuuming Up Details About You — And It Could Raise Your Rates

With little public scrutiny, the health insurance industry has joined forces with data brokers to vacuum up personal details about hundreds of millions of Americans, including, odds are, many readers of this story.

The companies are tracking your race, education level, TV habits, marital status, net worth. They’re collecting what you post on social media, whether you’re behind on your bills, what you order online. Then they feed this information into complicated computer algorithms that spit out predictions about how much your health care could cost them.

How concerned about this should we all be?

Patient advocates warn that using unverified, error-prone “lifestyle” data to make medical assumptions could lead insurers to improperly price plans — for instance, raising rates based on false information — or discriminate against anyone tagged as high cost. And, they say, the use of the data raises thorny questions that should be debated publicly, such as: Should a person’s rates be raised because algorithms say they are more likely to run up medical bills? Such questions would be moot in Europe, where a strict law took effect in May that bans trading in personal data.

Hands off my data! 15 default privacy settings you should change right now

If you’re concerned about all your personal data that’s being collected, here’s some advice on how to minimize exposure on Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple.

Off Your Mental Game? You Could Be Mildly Dehydrated

How severe does dehydration have to be to affect us?

A growing body of evidence finds that being just a little dehydrated is tied to a range of subtle effects — from mood changes to muddled thinking.

Moreover:

As we age, we’re not as good at recognizing thirst. And there’s evidence that older adults are prone to the same dips in mental sharpness as anyone else when mildly dehydrated.

So how much water do we need every day?

A panel of scholars convened several years ago by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine concluded that women should consume, on average, about 91 ounces of total water per day. For men, the suggested level is even higher (125 ounces).

The phrase total water means that water from all sources counts: fruits, vegetables soup, smoothies, and, yes, even your morning cups of coffee or tea.

And remember that by the time you feel thirsty, you’re already beyond the point of mild dehydration. According to the article, an hour of hiking in the heat or a 30-minute run might be enough to cause mild dehydration.

Ask yourself these questions before saying “yes” or “no” to anything

Although this article is aimed at people in business, it can also prove useful for others.

most of us are completely unaware of why we are saying “yes” or “no.” For those who suffer from the disease to please, saying “yes” often comes from the fear of being disliked and the guilt for putting your own agenda ahead of someone else’s desire for your time and attention. Those who may be considered “no” people often say no out of fear of failure. What if I don’t like it? What if I’m not good at it? Others say “no” simply because they have set boundaries and haven’t left any room in their lives for spontaneity and unexpected growth.

The article offers advice for how to decide whether to say “yes” or “no.” Also included are links to several related articles.

The theory of mind myth

Theory of mind is the psychological term for our belief that other people have emotions, beliefs, intentions, logic, and knowledge that may differ from our own.

That we have a folk psychology theory of other minds isn’t surprising. By nature, we are character analysts, behavioural policemen, admirers and haters. We embrace like minds, and go to war against contrarians. Mind-reading is our social glue, guiding virtually all of our daily interpersonal interactions. When trying to decide whether or not a potential gun owner is prone to violence, a mental patient is suicidal, or a presidential candidate is truthful, we are at the mercy of our thoughts about others.

But, argues neurologist Robert Burton, former associate director of the department of neurosciences at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center at Mount Zion, “Even experts can’t predict violence or suicide. Surely we’re kidding ourselves that we can see inside the minds of others.”

© 2018 by Mary Daniels Brown

Last Week’s Links

I’ve come across lots of interesting stuff lately.

When a Stranger Decides to Destroy Your Life

I’m including this article on all my blogs this week because it’s important that everyone with any online presence, no matter how small, read it.

50 MUST-READ CONTEMPORARY ESSAY COLLECTIONS

From Book Riot’s Liberty Hardy:

To prove that there are a zillion amazing essay collections out there, I compiled 50 great contemporary essay collections, just from the last 18 months alone. Ranging in topics from food, nature, politics, sex, celebrity, and more, there is something here for everyone!

How to Get Your Intuition Back (When It’s Hijacked by Life)

I have written before about how I learned to trust my intuition, so this article naturally drew my attention. Judi Ketteler writes:

Suddenly at midlife, the gut instinct I had long relied on to make important life decisions left me. Here’s how I learned to get it back.

Through a combination of research and personal experience, she concludes that intuition depends on context, and she needs to let it catch up with her changed circumstances as she enters a new phase of her life. I find this an encouraging conclusion.

The Bugs in Our Mindware

Because I love baseball, I was drawn to this article that uses the metaphor of three umpires to explain that “Many obstacles lie on the path to rational thought”:

Three baseball umpires are talking about how they play the game. The first says, “I call ’em as they are.” The second, “I call ’em as I see ’em.” And the third says, “They ain’t nothin’ till I call ’em.”

The first “umpire is what philosophers and social psychologists call a ‘naive realist,’” who “believes that the senses provide us with a direct, unmediated understanding of the world.”

But, like the second umpire, “We tend to think, ‘I’m seeing the world as it is, and your different view is due to poor eyesight, muddled thinking, or self-interested motives!’”

Or, like the third umpire, some think “All ‘reality’ is merely an arbitrary construal of the world.”

According to Richard E. Nisbett, author of the article (which is an excerpt from his book MINDWARE: Tools for Smart Thinking), “Among the three umpires, the second is closest to the truth.”

Read Nisbett’s analysis to discover the “unconscious processes [that] allow us to correctly interpret the physical world,” especially how stereotypes can lead us to draw false conclusions about particular people. He also includes suggestions for making fewer errors in judgment.

How a Young Woman Lost Her Identity

Hannah Upp disappears for weeks at a time, forgetting her sense of self. Can she still be found?

A frightening yet fascinating story about a young woman who has periodically experienced what scientists call a dissociative fugue state, a condition about which little is known.

“It’s terrifying to think that we are all vulnerable to a lapse in selfhood.”

This Is Your Brain On Music

An interview with Dr. Assal Habibi, a research scientist at USC’s Brain and Creativity Institute, who studies how studying music affects brain development.

The idea behind the study was to see whether systematic music training has a measurable impact on the brains of children and the subsequent development of their cognitive skills and social skills.

© 2018 by Mary Daniels Brown

Last Week’s Links

The mind-bendy weirdness of the number zero, explained

Why zero is not at all a simple concept.

The computer you’re reading this article on right now runs on a binary — strings of zeros and ones. Without zero, modern electronics wouldn’t exist. Without zero, there’s no calculus, which means no modern engineering or automation. Without zero, much of our modern world literally falls apart.

Humanity’s discovery of zero was “a total game changer … equivalent to us learning language,” says Andreas Nieder, a cognitive scientist at the University of Tübingen in Germany.

How to Ask Great Questions

Much of an executive’s workday is spent asking others for information—requesting status updates from a team leader, for example, or questioning a counterpart in a tense negotiation. Yet unlike professionals such as litigators, journalists, and doctors, who are taught how to ask questions as an essential part of their training, few executives think of questioning as a skill that can be honed—or consider how their own answers to questions could make conversations more productive.

The fallacy of obviousness

A new interpretation of a classic psychology experiment will change your view of perception, judgment – even human nature

The deep roots of writing

Was writing invented for accounting and administration or did it evolve from religious movements, sorcery and dreams?

IS YOUR KID ‘GIFTED’? IT MIGHT DEPEND ON THEIR RACE

when it comes to a teacher’s referral of a student to educational programs, it’s not just learning abilities that play a role in the decision process. Recent research has found that

RACE CAN AFFECT WHO IS REFERRED TO GIFTED PROGRAMS — AND TO SPECIAL EDUCATION.

How to Conquer Writer’s Block

These days, writer’s block is often blamed on depression. Sometimes procrastination and perfectionism are considered the culprits. Whatever the cause, writer’s block has been around for a long time. Samuel Coleridge suffered from it, as did Joseph Conrad, Gustave Flaubert, Ernest Hemingway, Herman Melville, Leo Tolstoy, and Virginia Woolf. The big question is, regardless of where it came from, what can a writer do about it when it strikes?

© 2018 by Mary Daniels Brown

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Last Week’s Links

Lots of good internet stuff last week.

“Find your passion” is bad advice, say Yale and Stanford psychologists

Instead of looking for a magic bullet, that one thing you must be meant to do even though you don’t know what it is yet, it can be more productive to perceive interests flexibly, as potentially endless. A growth mindset, rather than a fixed sense that there’s one interest you should pursue single-mindedly, improves the chances of finding your passion—and having the will to master it.

I Found My Birth Mother. It Didn’t Rock My Life — And That’s OK

NPR’s Ashley Westerman was born in the Philippines but raised by white Americans in rural Kentucky, with no one around who looked like her. This year, she tracked down the woman who gave her up for adoption three decades ago and writes about the hopes, trepidation and even disappointment of the journey and eventual meeting.

When It’s Good to Be Antisocial

Sociality is no pinnacle of evolution. It’s just another result of the process. Reclusive bees and other species are doing just fine—and sometimes, even better. Clearly social behavior has advantages, seeding the survival of species and communities. But being a good neighbor is not the only benefit to the hive. Sometimes everybody wins when you go it alone.

mHealth Brain Games Help Post-ICU Patients Recover Cognitive Skills

Vanderbilt University researchers said computer cognitive rehabilitation training using the BrainHQ online and mobile program helped patients discharged from an ICU improve cognitive function at home. The study, published in the Annals of the American Thoracic Society, involved 33 older patients who had been discharged from an ICU with post-intensive care syndrome.

Study: Sitting linked to increased death risk from 14 diseases

If you sit for six hours a day or more, your risk of dying early jumps 19 percent, compared with people who sit fewer than three hours, an American Cancer Society study suggests.

 

© 2018 by Mary Daniels Brown

Last Week’s Links

The Women Who Write: Michelle Dean’s Sharp

A review of Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion by Michelle Dean (Grove Atlantic).

This critical history is a rogues’ gallery of literary femaleness – even though most of the women in it rightly bristled at being defined as “woman writers.” Dean’s exemplars are, in chapter if not birth order, Dorothy Parker; Rebecca West; Hannah Arendt; Mary McCarthy; Susan Sontag; Pauline Kael; Joan Didion; Nora Ephron; Renata Adler; and Janet Malcolm. Most have at least a few things in common. While some doubled as novelists, all are distinguished for their non-fiction, with fully half reaching eminence via The New Yorker.

The Civility Debate Has Reached Peak Stupidity

The depth to which the level of political and social discourse has sunk in the U.S. has prompted both sides to call for a return to civility. Here’s one writer’s opinion on the topic.

Five Features of Better Arguments

Here are some suggestions on how to deal with the problem of civility in public discourse.

A former Clinton administration official studied how to facilitate more constructive arguments among Americans. These are his conclusions.

The Neuroscience of Pain

For scientists, pain has long presented an intractable problem: it is a physiological process, just like breathing or digestion, and yet it is inherently, stubbornly subjective—only you feel your pain. It is also a notoriously hard experience to convey accurately to others.

A report on scientists’ efforts to find “ways to capture the experience [of pain] in quantifiable, objective data.”

© 2018 by Mary Daniels Brown

Last Week’s Links

Here are the articles from around the internet that piqued my interest last week.

The Lifespan of a Lie

Some new information and new interpretations of one of psychology’s most infamous studies, the 1971 Stanford prison experiment.

When the self slips

A look at the frightening disorder “depersonalisation disorder (DPD) – a condition that typically manifests as a profound and distressing feeling of estrangement from one’s own self and body, including one’s experiences, memories and thoughts.”

CHILDREN WHO KILL: THE MOST UNSETTLING STORY OF ALL

There’s something wrong, on a visceral level, about the very idea of children murderers. It flips all the tropes and common beliefs about the world on their heads. Children are supposed to be innocent and pure, even though everyone who remembers their childhood and teenage years knows they can be anything but.

The Fairytale Language of the Brothers Grimm

How the Brothers Grimm went hunting for fairytales and accidentally changed the course of historical linguistics and kickstarted a new field of scholarship in folklore.

© 2018 by Mary Daniels Brown

Last Week’s Links

Innovative narrative game Dialogue: A Writer’s Story out now

Studio co-founder and designer of Dialogue, Dustin Connor, added: “Conversation can be different depending on the context and participants, and we wanted to craft different visuals and mechanics for different conversations to reflect that. Some are timed and ‘in the moment’, while others are exploratory. Our game is a starting point – we want to see other developers experiment with their own conversation mechanics, and we want to lend our experience as consultants to make that process easier.”

‘The Death of Expertise’ Explores How Ignorance Became a Virtue

The inimitable Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times reviews Tom Nichols’s book on a “wave of anti-rationalism that has been accelerating for years — manifested in the growing ascendance of emotion over reason in public debates, the blurring of lines among fact and opinion and lies, and denialism in the face of scientific findings about climate change and vaccination.”

Mental-health therapists see uptick in patients struggling with post-election anxiety

From The Seattle Times:

With the constant bombardment of information coming out of the Trump administration, local mental-health experts say a hefty number of their existing clients — and as many as 80 percent of potential new clients — are seeking help for postelection distress.

And this has been an equal-opportunity occurrence: “anxiety has been on the rise among people of all political leanings, therapists say.”

The Brief, Confusing History of Foam Packaging

I did not know that everything we think is Styrofoam actually isn’t:

We know that polystyrene is bad for the environment, that it’s frequently mistaken for Styrofoam, and that it’s kind of a crappy way of shipping food to people.

UW professor: The information war is real, and we’re losing it

University of Washington professor Kate Starbird works in the field of crisis informatics. After the Boston Marathon bombing she began looking at social media postings to see how those media might be used for the public good in crises. Unexpectedly, she found clusters of fringe conspiracy theories, what she calls “real tinfoil-hat stuff.”

Read about her findings in an article that seems especially pertinent in light of the current political current in the U.S.

© 2017 by Mary Daniels Brown