I listened to a Dan Harris/Happier podcast with Ellen Langer. LINK I so recommend that podcast. Ms. Langer, a professor in the Psychology Department at Harvard University, is very smart and feisty and shares a lot of research that confirms what many of us may already have intuited. Some of the things she says about illness and aging is less surprising and more affirming. Have a listen. I bet you will thank me later. ;-)
Gut microbiome disruptions in infancy increase aggression later in life:
Gut bacteria that have been disrupted in infancy can lead to greater aggression later in life, including causing changes to aggression-related genes, according to a new study. The findings warrant more research into the complex interplay between the gut, brain, and aggression.
When we say that everything is connected we can’t overstate that fact.
Until three days ago, I would consider an idea I had and mull it over but not start writing because I thought I needed to learn more. However, it was only on the second day of writing desperately and furiously that I realized that this was the wrong way of approaching things. You need the writing to do the thinking. Plotting might work for the academic essay and for authors who know how to reach the end. But essays are explorations, not itineraries. You don’t know where you’re supposed to go. The only thing you know is that you must start. Which is what I do, every time I look at a sentence or quote that intrigues me or interests me. I can’t wait for it to inspire something in me–that happens too infrequently to be a reliable technique for an essayist who has very many words to write in order to become an essayist. I have to write that other author’s words with my own fingers and then write what comes to mind. Try to figure out what I think. This is how essays are made.
By Ratika Deshpande and found HERE. Thinking with your fingers. Like the Leuchtturm slogan Denken mit der Hand, which means to think with your hand. To think with one’s hand on paper. For me, making music, especially playing guitar, is thinking with your hands… which is why I understand that quote. Too often I make the mistake described above, where I have a thought or an idea and then wait for inspiration instead of simply starting to write, or play guitar. It’s a devilish Western idea that the brain is separate from the body. When we read the word Mind in an English translation from a Chinese text I am told it is always a character that actually means Heart-Mind. Not one and not the other: both. (((in the above linked podcast Ellen Langer says she doesn’t like the term Body Mind Connection because it implies that they are separate but connected. Instead she refers to Body Mind Unity…))) I learn by doing, whether it’s bread-making, guitar-playing, image-making, or writing. Often it feels like the hardest step is simply to get started… once the process is underway it (almost always) feels good. During Covid my partner and I committed to a daily writing session. We would take turns to come up with a word, then take 25 minutes to write anything about that word. A story, an essay, whatever came to mind. There was no time to think about it too much. Just get started and see where it leads. Then we would read to each other whatever we had written. It was an amazing experience and led to useful insights for me. The most important insight was that I need to show up, to get started, to do the time.
The Web Renaissance takes off – Anil Dash
I’m not a pollyanna about the fact that there are still going to be lots of horrible things on the internet, and that too many of the tycoons who rule the tech industry are trying to make the bad things worse. (After all, look what the last wild era online lead to.) There’s not going to be some new killer app that displaces Google or Facebook or Twitter with a love-powered alternative. But that’s because there shouldn’t be. There should be lots of different, human-scale alternative experiences on the internet that offer up home-cooked, locally-grown, ethically-sourced, code-to-table alternatives to the factory-farmed junk food of the internet. And they should be weird.
>I listened to a Dan Harris/Happier podcast with Ellen Langer. LINK I so recommend that podcast. Ms. Langer, a professor in the Psychology Department at Harvard University, is very smart and feisty and shares a lot of research that confirms what many of us may already have intuited.
Excellent interview, and I absolutely agree with you about our intuition.
( But what amazed me more than anything about this was how similar Ms. Langer’s voice, inflections, and verbal mannerisms sounded nearly identical to those of my mother (RIP, 2020). Thinking I was just hallucinating, I sent the link to my sister with no warning or “heads up” regarding what I was perceiving … she didn’t even comment on the content but just responded with, “this lady sounds like mom.” )