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Gifts in the desert: the psychology of Burning Man
The Guardian: What happens to groups of people in harsh physical environments, away from all of the trappings of modern civilization? Tales of shipwrecks, adventurers and post-apocalyptic worlds explore this question, and usually these stories do not end well (recall the descent into anarchy and violence in Lord of the Flies). The political philosopher Thomas Hobbes warned that outside of civilized society, humans are nasty brutes who would sooner step on another’s face than share scarce resources. Burning Man is a massive weeklong public arts festival held every August in Black Rock City, Nevada.
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Focusing on the Past or Future Shapes Spatial Perception of Time
We often think about the future as being in front of us and the past as being at our back – as we walk, places we pass are behind us, and places we have yet to reach lie ahead. But not every culture views time the same way. For instance, although the Arabic dialect spoken in Morocco refers to time in the same way that English does, previous research suggests that Moroccans have a tendency to see the past as being in front of them and the future as being behind them.
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Can Video Games Fend Off Mental Decline?
The New York Times: “You just crashed a little bit,” Adam Gazzaley said. It was true: I’d slammed my rocket-powered surfboard into an icy riverbank. This was at Gazzaley’s San Francisco lab, in a nook cluttered with multicolored skullcaps and wires that hooked up to an E.E.G. machine. The video game I was playing wasn’t the sort typically pitched at kids or even middle-aged, Gen X gamers. Indeed, its intended users include people over 60 — because the game might just help fend off the mental decline that accompanies aging. It was awfully hard to play, even for my Call of Duty-toughened brain. Project: Evo, as the game is called, was designed to tax several mental abilities at once.
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Buy Experiences, Not Things
The Atlantic: Forty-seven percent of the time, the average mind is wandering. It wanders about a third of the time while a person is reading, talking with other people, or taking care of children. It wanders 10 percent of the time, even, during sex. And that wandering, according to psychologist Matthew Killingsworth, is not good for well-being. A mind belongs in one place. During his training at Harvard, Killingsworth compiled those numbers and built a scientific case for every cliché about living in the moment.
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Scientific Proof That No One Cares About Your Awesome Vacation
New York Magazine: If you’ve even traveled a little bit, you know this is true: People who can’t relate to your trip hiking the Inca Trail, or wine tasting in Tuscany, or Zorbing in New Zealand, don’t really want to hear about it. Sure, they may listen politely for a minute, but apart from asking questions, there isn’t really much they can say in reply. This is the basic premise at the heart of a new paper in Psychological Science: the idea that although extraordinary life experiences are exhilarating at the time, they may carry a social cost.
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New Online Media, Old Human Behavior
The Wall Street Journal: “I’m open to new things, but I’m worried for my children’s generation. They’re consumed. They don’t play outdoors or spend time with friends anymore. The nuances of face-to-face communication have been lost. They ‘write’ a ‘letter’ and then—what do the children call it?—‘mail’ it, and someone far away finds out what they’re thinking. Weird.” Some ancient Egyptian parent must have had such worries. For millennia, new technologies have outpaced traditional human interactions. Consider giving directions over the phone: “When you’re off the freeway, there are two streets to the right.
