In Favor of Daydreaming
A look at recent thinking about daydreaming.
“For creativity you need your mind to wander,” Dr. Schooler says, “but you also need to be able to notice that you’re mind wandering and catch the idea when you have it.”
The Look of Love
A pair of studies looks at the look of love:
First: Attitudes Towards Sexual Relationships Can Be Judged From Photos Of Your Face
And in another:
Volunteers looked at faces with exaggerated or reduced male or female features; the faces had been morphed to look either more or less masculine or feminine. As the faces flashed on a computer screen, the volunteer was supposed to hit a key as quickly as possible to indicate whether the face was looking at them or away from them. Both women and men could do that more quickly when the face had exaggerated sexual characteristics.
Near-Immortality
Long for this World, by Jonathan Weiner, looks at the possibility of science conquering disease and people living much longer lives.
[One scientist] predicts that when life expectancy reaches multiple centuries, humans may become extraordinarily risk-averse, unwilling to ride in a car or ski because they’ll have too much time ahead, too much to lose.
“When.”
Dysregulation Nation
Judith Warner coins a phrase and paints a grim portrait of our culture and its consequences:
[I]n the anything-goes atmosphere of our recent past, it wasn’t just external controls that went awry; inwardly, people lost constraint and common sense, too. Now there is a case to be made that problems of self-regulation — of appetite, emotion, impulse and cupidity — may well be the defining social pathology of our time.
Relationships Better with Age
At PsychCentral: Relationships Grow, Improve with Age.
“Older adults report better marriages, more supportive friendships and less conflict with children and siblings.”
So…time to start aging.
Selling “Pink Viagra”
NYT Business article about the efforts to make and market a female sex pill.
Regulators and doctors tend to be less tolerant of side effects in quality-of-life drugs than they are in medicines intended to mitigate life-and-death diseases. Some industry critics, meanwhile, contend that in the quest to find new and treatable quality-of-life problems, drug makers are not so much identifying unmet needs as they are stoking existing social anxieties to weld to their medicines.
“Twilight” Addiction
The L.A. Times looks at the “Twilight” obsession, opening with:
Chrystal Johnson didn’t think there was anything unhealthy about her all-consuming fixation with “The Twilight Saga” — until she discovered it was sucking the life out of her marriage…
Machines on the March
One computer can detect depression in blog posts. Another can win at Jeopardy!
Next: ?
Insomnia Q&A
A Q&A about insomnia is underway on the NYT’s Consults blog. Starter questions:
Does Insomnia Always Have an Underlying ‘Cause’?