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Young in mind: Saying no to caricatures of aging
I recently became a grandfather. This was a joyous event in our family, and my first emotion was indeed joy -- for the new parents, for the healthy baby boy. But I confess that my second reaction -- and not far behind -- was much more conflicted: I'm too young to be a grandfather, I found myself thinking. Don't grandparents sit on park benches and drive slowly? Within weeks I found myself upping my cardio routine and modifying my diet a bit, with the idea of shedding a couple of pounds. I should do more sit-ups, too. Who knows, maybe I'll even train for a triathlon. There are two schools of thought regarding aging.
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The logic of a psychopath
Before his execution in the Florida electric chair in 1989, Ted Bundy confessed to murdering 30 young women, typically by bludgeoning them to death and often raping them as well. He almost certainly had many more victims than that, perhaps more than 100. But he avoided suspicion for much of his five-year killing spree, in part because he was good-looking and clean-cut, a college grad and a law student. Despite this outward appearance, Bundy was socially clueless. He was introverted and by his own description had no sense of how to get along with people. Near the end of his life he described himself this way: "I didn't know what made things tick.
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Border Bias: Mapping Risk and Safety
I once lived within a short walking distance of a state line, and I had a friend who lived right on the avenue that was the dividing line. That meant she could be cutting her lawn while watching her neighbor cut his lawn in a different state. Living on a border loses its novelty after a while, but visitors always find it intriguing. They seem to expect the Berlin Wall or some other concrete demarcation of an abstract political division. This curiosity arises because of cognitive mapmaking, which is different from regular mapmaking. Cartographers measure and plot distances over land and water, but when we make a mental map, we rely on categories to help us keep things straight.
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Colorblind? Or blind to injustice?
In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a devastating blow to the cause of racial equality, ruling 7-1 in Plessy v. Ferguson that "separate but equal" was the law of the land. The lone dissenter in that landmark case was Justice John Marshall Harlan, a former slave owner, who bitterly predicted an era of inequality and racial intolerance in America. History proved Harlan right, and we now know what followed as the Jim Crow era. Indeed it took almost 60 more years for the court to begin setting things right by discarding the "separate but equal" doctrine.
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Poignancy and loyalty: The ‘midnight ride’ effect
With the country on the verge of civil war, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a patriotic poem about Paul Revere, a little-known Massachusetts silversmith and minor hero of the Revolutionary War. “Paul Revere’s Ride” played fast and loose with the facts of the now famous 1775 events, but the narrative had the psychological effect the author intended. It got Americans wondering how history might have turned out differently without that heroic act—and how the country might never have come to exist. By focusing on the nation’s precarious origins, the poem bolstered nationalism at a time when it was sorely needed. “What if” thinking is always a bit tricky.
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How schooling leads to good health
People who go to school lead healthier, longer lives. That connection is well documented and unsurprising. But as obvious as this link is to us, the fact is we don't really know why that's the case. What is it about formal education that translates -- sometimes way down the road -- into better health choices? What's going on in the mind, at the basic cognitive level, that gives rise to lasting life skills? One possibility is that schooling simply conveys knowledge about illness and disease prevention, and that better informed people make sounder judgments. But there is good reason to doubt this explanation.
