Struggling to live life as an owl

Once again, I'm up late writing (it's almost midnight), but that is a natural thing for me to do, given that I don't actually become wide-awake until about 5 PM. That's the way it's been for me for as long as I can remember. Back in college, my grades started going up once I gave up on those 7:40 AM classes, and tilted my day toward the late morning through mid-afternoon. Quite often, I will get to work at about 10, working until seven or eight at night. This allows me to harness more of my peak time to do the challenging job I do (I am a consumer attorney). Several times a month, I find myself at the office writing a legal brief at one in the morning, working quite effectively. It's not that I don't like to sleep. I love to sleep. It's just that I love to sleep in. That's when it feels natural to me. I know that it's not merely a matter of biology. I stay up late because I want to get one more thing done, and then one more thing. I hate to give up the day, even when it turns into the next day. for me, there's no better time for concentrating than the night. For whatevercombination of nature and nurture, the night is my favorite time. I am an owl. Those other kinds of people, those "larks," often look at owls with suspicion, however. Even when owls spend as much time at work as larks, the larks assume that we owls are goofing off in the morning while they are working hard. What about those evening hours while we owls are still hard at work while the larks are long gone? Larks think that this is our own damned fault and the owls should be getting up earlier. I do think this is part of the Larkian thought process. This perceived tension has often provoked me to think about why it is that my schedule is tilted toward the afternoon and evening. Do I choose for it to be this way or am I biologically geared to be an owl? And why is it that so many owls (me included) end up marrying larks?

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The importance of play for adults

In a recent talk at TED, psychiatrist Stuart Brown talked about the vital importance of play. Brown opened his talk by showing an incredible series of photographs demonstrating that a huge hungry polar bear can be seduced into playing with dogs rather than eating them. Like a polar bear, play induces an "altered state" in humans. Play is a great leveler: great differences in power can be overridden by play. In fact, the absence of play is dangerous, as demonstrated by the case histories of mass murderers. Brown describes various kinds of play, including body play (e.g., jumping), object play (manipulating objects), social play, rough-and-tumble play, ritual play and imaginative play (storytelling). These activities simply make us feel better. They are purposeless. In fact, if the purpose is more important than the act of doing these things, they are not "play." As I listened to this list, I was wondering whether sexual play is of the same importance as the other types of play. The study of play is still in its infancy. Historically, this has not been a well-funded area of scientific investigation. Nonetheless, the evidence we already have suggests that play is important for developing cognitively, emotionally and developmentally. We already know that "nothing lights up the brain like play." In fact, the ability to trust is learned through vocal, facial and gestural play signals. As Brown indicates, humans are perhaps the most neotonous species, suggesting a special need for humans to engage in play, whether they are infants or adults. Various animal studies have shown that preventing an animal from playing causes dysfunction. Thus, it seems that play is important for survival. In fact, life without play seems to lead inexorably to depression. When we look back in our history to determine what sorts of activities energized us when we were youngsters, we might deal with see that we have strayed from those things that gave us the pleasure of play. When we explore our personal history, we might find that we are mismatched in terms of career or other activities. [caption id="attachment_5702" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Image by mildegard at dreamstime.com"]Image by mildegard at dreamstime.com[/caption] Brown encourages the audience that they should not set aside time to play. Rather, they (including adults) should infuse every moment of their lives with play. He argues that play is just important for humans as is asleep and dreaming.

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Why do many people believe that Barack Obama is not a Christian?

Our minds are big bags of tricks, many of them helpful out in the wild, but prone to deceive us in the modern world. Princeton Psychologist Samuel Wang points out that two of our mind's heuristics, "source amnesia" and "bias dissimulation" (confirmation bias) account for the persistent belief of many people that Barack Obama is not a Christian, in the absence of any evidence supporting this claim.

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The value of public anger

Glenn Greenwald finds virtue in public anger:

[The] anti-anger consensus among our political elites is exactly wrong. The public rage we're finally seeing is long, long overdue, and appears to be the only force with both the ability and will to impose meaningful checks on continued kleptocratic pillaging and deep-seated corruption in virtually every branch of our establishment institutions. The worst possible thing that could happen now is for this collective rage to subside and for the public to return to its long-standing state of blissful ignorance over what the establishment is actually doing . . .

It's a universal dynamic that elites want to keep the masses in a state of silent, disengaged submission, all the better if the masses stay convinced that the elites have their best interests at heart and their welfare is therefore advanced by allowing elites -- the Experts -- to work in peace on our pressing problems, undisrupted and "undistracted" by the need to placate primitive public sentiments.

Consider that it is now well established that emotions are not incompatible with rationality.

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All that talk about life after death . . .

Highly religious people should be more willing to say goodbye to the material world, right? It turns out that devout believers cling ferociously to Earthly life. That's the finding of a new study reported by the Center for Inquiry:

[T]erminal cancer patients who reported drawing comfort from religion were significantly more likely to demand heroic care during their final week of life than those less attached to faith. Strong believers were also significantly less likely to engage in advance-care planning activities like making a living will, signing a do-not-resuscitate order, or naming a health-care proxy.

The difference between religious and non-religious was not trivial:

Only 3.6 percent of the least religious received mechanical ventilation during the final week of life, compared to 11.3 percent of the most religious.

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