Sunny past, dark future. Or something like that.

Earlier, I wrote about the rosy, sunny image of “the good old days” and the sad reality that those days just never existed. A body of psychological evidence explains in part why we cling to this fantasy: we have a tendency to blanket our old memories with simplicity and inaccuracy.

First, memory tests conducted on the elderly suggest that as we age, we become more likely to remember warm, pleasant experiences and steer clear of recalling negative stimuli. Though most of us associate old age with grouchiness and malcontentment, older people actually tend to filter their memories in favor of the enjoyable.

In a 2004 study at Stanford, professor of psychology Linda Cartensen asked young adults and elderly adults to view a variety of slides and then complete a memory exam on the scenes they had witnessed. Though young adults beat out the elderly on overall short-term memory, elderly adults demonstrated a remarkable ability to recall pleasing scenes, such as those of happy infants and puppies, and performed even better than their young counterparts in this regard.

Surprised at these results, Cartensen also monitored the moods and memories of adults aged 18 to 94, and found that older adults reported greater happiness and spent less time “wallowing in bad moods” that brought younger respondents down. In a review of Cartensen’s study, Psychology Today wrote that seniors tend to “revise history” to make the overall image of their life appear more appealing. The article continues:

“Pleasant memories are always invading [seniors’]

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Red State, Blue State, My State? You State!

How red is the country, and how blue are we? Well, even in 2000, I wanted to see the colors of the states mixed, so we could see how purple each one was. Go here to see a variety of ways of looking at the red-blue situation from the 2004…

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Moral Bias

I’ve been thinking about this since the initial post on our biases and all the responses.  In the course of trying to come up with an “appropriate” response to the world, we often find ourselves caught up in endless exception-making, fudging, attempts to shoehorn certain proclivities and habits into convenient moulds so we don’t go through our days constantly flinching at our inadvertant insensitivities. 

Does it do any good?  The flinching?  I mean, after the Sixties, one had to have been living on Mars for half a century not to be aware that there had been a Big Shift away from what might be called Gross Cultural Reliance to a more nuanced approach which has been (often derisively) termed Political Correctness.  The former is a condition wherein one “borrows” wholesale from the culture to make associational choices.  It doesn’t occur in this instance to question the wisdom of the culture–it’s what it is, and we are part of it, ergo…

But we realized that the Culture At Large was in many ways an Idiot.  It stepped on people.  It made too little room for variation.  It tried to be all things to all people, but it was necessary that all people somehow be The Same in order for that to work.  Those with a vested interest in keeping everything the same mightily resisted movement to change the rules.

We never did come up with a solid formulation that allows for prejudice.

You have to, you know.  What we ended up …

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My First Post: An Initial Blog or a Horse Anchor

Post: The word by itself evokes for me a thick, square cedar pole standing up from, and presumably sunk down into the ground, waiting for the laundry line. Suppose you post a letter to the officer who posthumously posted your father to his army post in the post-war era. Words…

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Apes wearing pants

Christians who declare their belief in Biblical creationism leave all sorts of unanswered questions in their wake.  Here are a few.

Question 1:  Why are there so many near-human animals?

Let’s say Darwinian evolution is “just a theory” and that one of the Bible’s two creation stories (yes, there are two in Genesis) correctly explains the origin of life on earth.  Why, then, do apes and monkeys exist?  Why did God create animals — especially chimps and bonobos — that are almost genetically identical to humans?  If God created us in his image, wouldn’t it have made a lot more sense for no other animal on earth to be even remotely similar to us?  Why would God create so many other primates — ANIMALS — that share over 95% of our DNA?  Moreover, why would God give them social behaviors nearly the same as ours; language skills nearly the same as ours; emotions, the ability to use tools, even bipedalism, compassion and self-awareness all nearly the same as ours?  Indeed, if we look at virtually any metric of mental ability, the average rhesus monkey behaves more human-like than did the brain damaged Terri Schiavo, whom President Bush and many Republican Members of Congress rushed to “save” because they believed she displayed human consciousness.  Assuming that no species on our planet arose from evolution, but from instantaneous creation by God, why are there so many near-human animals?  Why would God do this?

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