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In Praise of Spacing Out
New York Magazine: The only time I’ve ever missed a flight, I was physically at the airport. But my mind was … not. I was wandering through the bookstore, lost in thought, my daydreams apparently intense enough to drown out both the final boarding call and my own name over the paging system. This kind of stuff happens to me with disheartening regularity, and it’s something I feel especially bad about these days, now that mindfulness — the ability to tether your thoughts to the present moment — has become such a huge part of the cultural conversation.
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A Musical Fix for American Schools
The Wall Street Journal: American education is in perpetual crisis. Our students are falling ever farther behind their peers in the rest of the world. Learning disabilities have reached epidemic proportions, affecting as many as one in five of our children. Illiteracy costs American businesses $80 billion a year. Many solutions have been tried, but few have succeeded. So I propose a different approach: music training. A growing body of evidence suggests that music could trump many of the much more expensive “fixes” that we have thrown at the education system. Plenty of outstanding achievers have attributed at least some of their success to music study.
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Amazing, once-in-a-lifetime experiences make us social misfits
The Boston Globe: As anyone who has signed on to Facebook recently can see, social media takes the propensity for sharing extraordinary experiences to the maximum. A Facebook feed can read like a list of epic moments from friends near and far: a gnarly mountain bike ride; an exquisite meal in Italy; a celebrity sighting. But a new study led by a Harvard researcher suggests that the human desire to share out-of-the-ordinary experiences with others may amount to a fundamental miscalculation of what brings people together — and could even be a social liability.
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Geteilter Schmerz verbindet sogar Wildfremde (Shared pain even connects strangers)
Die Welt: Geteilter Schmerz, so unangenehm er auch sein mag, kann positive soziale Folgen haben. Das berichten Brock Bastian und seine Kollegen von der University of New South Wales in dem Fachmagazin in "Psychological Science". Geteilter Schmerz stärke den Zusammenhalt und die Solidarität unter den Gruppenmitgliedern, so die Forscher – und zwar selbst dann, wenn diese sich zuvor gänzlich fremd gewesen waren. Für diese Erkenntnis musste eine ganze Reihe von Versuchspersonen mehr oder weniger stark leiden.
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Grumpy People Get the Details Right
New York Magazine: Think back to the last time you had to navigate a customer-service situation. Perhaps you were trying to make a doctor's appointment when few convenient times were available, or you may have been speaking with a credit-card rep in an effort to get a onetime waiver on a late payment charge. Maybe you were speaking with an airline representative in hopes of finagling priority seating. Did you adopt a warm tone and play nice? Or did you raise your voice and speak aggressively? You are a nice person, so you probably chose the kind route. The tough pill for most of us to swallow is that those overbearing screamers often get their way.
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Younger Leaders Seen as More Innovative, Older Leaders More Reliable
You’re more likely to see gray hair among the CEOs of the top 500 American companies (where the average age is about 53) than you are among Silicon Valley’s tech entrepreneurs, many of whom started billion dollar companies fresh out of college or even high school. New research suggests there may be a reason for the age disparities between leaders in different fields: A team of psychological scientists led by Brian R. Spisak of VU University Amsterdam provides evidence that people have unconscious biases based on age when it comes to choosing a leader.
