Fear of: extinction, mutilation, loss of autonomy, separation, ego-death.

"Be a patient listener (it is this, not fast talking, that gets a con-man his coups).
Never look bored.
Wait for the other person to reveal any political opinions, then agree with them.
Let the other person reveal religious views, then have the same ones.
Hint at sex talk, but don’t follow it up unless the other fellow shows a strong interest.
Never discuss illness, unless some special concern is shown.
Never pry into a person’s personal circumstances (they’ll tell you all eventually).
Never boast. Just let your importance be quietly obvious.
Never be untidy.
Never get drunk."

"Keep feeling out, little by little, the inner structures of the emotions that once ruled you. As you explore, start to feel them coalesce into something solid and unmoving. Start to understand that the solid and unmoving thing was there all along, waiting patiently for you to notice it. Realize you have already begun to think of it as home. Wonder if this is what people mean when they talk about emotional stability."

"One common "belief is that alcohol causes self-inflation." It makes us see ourselves through rose-tinted glasses. Oddly, though, it doesn't make us view everything about ourselves through rose-tinted glasses. When the psychologists Claude Steele and Mahzarin Banaji gave a group of people a personality questionnaire while they were sober and then again when they were drunk, they found that the only personality aspects that were inflated by drinking were those where there was a gap between real and ideal states. If you are good-looking and the world agrees that you are good-looking, drinking doesn't make you think you're even better-looking. Drinking only makes you feel you're better-looking if you think you're good-looking and the world doesn't agree.

Alcohol is also commonly believed to reduce anxiety. That's what a disinhibiting agent should do: relax us and make the world go away. Yet this effect also turns out to be selective. Put a stressed-out drinker in front of an exciting football game and he'll forget his troubles. But put him in a quiet bar somewhere, all by himself, and he'll grow more anxious.

Steele and his colleague Robert Josephs's explanation is that we've misread the effects of alcohol on the brain. Its principal effect is to narrow our emotional and mental field of vision. It causes, they write, "a state of shortsightedness in which superficially understood, immediate aspects of experience have a disproportionate influence on behavior and emotion."

Alcohol makes the thing in the foreground even more salient and the thing in the background disappear. (...) Drunkenness is not disinhibition. Drunkenness is myopia.

Myopia theory changes how we understand drunkenness. Disinhibition suggests that the drinker is increasingly insensitive to his environment—that he is in the grip of an autonomous physiological process. Myopia theory, on the contrary, says that the drinker is, in some respects, increasingly sensitive to his environment: he is at the mercy of whatever is in front of him."

"In 1962, a French speleologist named Michel Siffre spent two months living in total isolation in a subterranean cave, without access to clock, calendar, or sun. Sleeping and eating only when his body told him to, his goal was to discover how the natural rhythms of human life would be affected by living “beyond time.” Over the next decade, Siffre organized over a dozen other underground time isolation experiments, before he himself returned to a cave in Texas in 1972 for a six-month spell. His work helped found the field of human chronobiology."

"There was a very large perturbation in my sense of time. I descended into the cave on July 16 and was planning finish the experiment on September 14. When my surface team notified me that the day had finally arrived, I thought that it was only August 20. I believed I still had another month to spend in the cave. My psychological time had compressed by a factor of two."

"We analyzed sleep stages—the rapid eye movement (REM) stage, when dreaming occurs, and slow-wave sleep—and we made another discovery. We showed that there is a correlation between how long a person stays up and how much he dreams the next night. Roughly speaking, for every ten extra minutes of activity each day, a man gets one extra minute of REM sleep. We also found that the more you dream, the shorter your reaction time during your next phase of wakefulness. After we made this discovery, the French army tried to find drugs that artificially increase the amount of time spent dreaming, with the hope of producing very long days of thirty or more hours for soldiers."

"What is it about the underground that both attracts us and scares us? It is dark. You need a light. And if your light goes out, you’re dead. In the Middle Ages, caves were the place where demons lived. But at the same time, caves are a place of hope. We go into them to find minerals and treasures, and it’s one of the last places where it is still possible to have adventures and make new discoveries."

"I owe my livelihood to technology and I love the raw capability it offers us as a tool, but I fear it a bit more than most people do. It's a tool, but it's not quite a hammer, because a hammer doesn't seduce you into sitting around lonely in your underwear for 6 hours at a stretch clicking on youtube videos and refreshing Twitter. I fear technology because I fear that bad feeling I get after a three day XBox binge I go through every year around the holidays. I fear technology not because I think it's evil, but because it's too easy to start clicking and never stop, even if the stream of data starts to go from meaningful to useless after the top 5%."

"In this exclusive excerpt from the forthcoming debut issue of Distance quarterly, we learn about how too many video games treat players like rats in a Skinner Box, lulling them into easy stimulation but requiring little creativity."

"Moody. Impulsive. Maddening. Why do teenagers act the way they do? Viewed through the eyes of evolution, their most exasperating traits may be the key to success as adults."

"As anyone who follows the business of culture is aware, the profits of cultural industries depend disproportionately on the occasional outsize success — a blockbuster movie, a best-selling book or a superstar artist — to offset the many investments that fail dismally. What may be less clear to casual observers is why professional editors, studio executives and talent managers, many of whom have a lifetime of experience in their businesses, are so bad at predicting which of their many potential projects will make it big. (...) It may be true, in other words, that “nobody knows anything,” as the screenwriter William Goldman once said about Hollywood. But why? Of course, the experts may simply not be as smart as they would like us to believe. Recent research, however, suggests that reliable hit prediction is impossible no matter how much you know."

"His philosophy seemed reactionary at the time, but today it’s shared by some researchers who question the value of safety-first playgrounds. Even if children do suffer fewer physical injuries — and the evidence for that is debatable — the critics say that these playgrounds may stunt emotional development, leaving children with anxieties and fears that are ultimately worse than a broken bone."

"It’s kind of dangerous, I know, but if you just think about danger you’re never going to get ahead in life."

"Judiciously applied, though, this mental trickery is too useful a resource to ignore. Our brains are so easy to fool that it's borderline embarrassing; you might as well salvage some self-respect by exploiting that fact."

"Little things people say can get stuck in your brain and become triggers, forcing you to relive moments you’d rather forget. Well, for aspiring linguists, it’s much, much worse." -- David Carkeet on his episodes of involuntary memory.

"In the beginning, my experiences with psilocybin and LSD were so positive that I could not believe a bad trip was possible. Notions of “set and setting,” admittedly vague, seemed sufficient to account for this. My mental set was exactly as it needed to be—I was a spiritually serious investigator of my own mind—and my setting was generally one of either natural beauty or secure solitude.

I cannot account for why my adventures with psychedelics were uniformly pleasant until they weren’t—but when the doors to hell finally opened, they appear to have been left permanently ajar. Thereafter, whether or not a trip was good in the aggregate, it generally entailed some harrowing detour on the path to sublimity. Have you ever traveled, beyond all mere metaphors, to the Mountain of Shame and stayed for a thousand years? I do not recommend it."

"People walk and talk in movies like Mr. Tarr’s “Werckmeister Harmonies” (2000) but not necessarily in ways that many moviegoers may immediately understand; the films don’t conform to familiar type. Classical Hollywood, in the theorist David Bordwell’s wonderful phrase, is “an excessively obvious cinema.” Obvious if complex, as laid out in “The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960,” the landmark 1985 book he wrote with Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson in which that phrase appears. As its title suggests, this tour de force makes the case that classical Hollywood (1917-60) employed specific stylistic techniques (like point of view and “invisible” editing) and arranged narrative logic, time and space in a particular way so we could understand movies."

Fascinating: some languages don't make a distinction between blue and green! / via @bluegod

Looks like this is the only place on the internet where you can read "The Ten Commandments for Menu Success".

William Poundstone's book on the psychology of pricing.

NYTimes article about the trend of menu engineering.

Wikipedia page for menu engineering. Points to whitepapers in the "References" area.

"If, instead, we focus on how far we have left to go (to-go thinking), motivation is not only sustained, it's heightened. Fundamentally, this has to do with the way our brains are wired. To-go thinking helps us tune in to the presence of a discrepancy between where we are now and where we want to be. When the human brain detects a discrepancy, it reacts by throwing resources at it: attention, effort, deeper processing of information, and willpower."

"A small research arm of the U.S. government's intelligence establishment wants to understand how speakers of Farsi, Russian, English, and Spanish see the world by building software that automatically evaluates their use of metaphors."

"if people were given the crime-as-a-virus framing, they were more likely to suggest social reform and less likely to suggest more law enforcement or harsher punishments for criminals. The differences generated by the metaphor alternatives were "were larger than those that exist between Democrats and Republicans, or between men and women," the study authors noted."

"We are prone to think in terms of individual actors whose doings set predictable chains of events in motion. But social systems can acquire properties that don’t easily jibe with this kind of common sense — through processes like self-­reinforcing cascades, in which outcomes feedback upon themselves, or nonlinear dynamics, in which small changes in input can lead to large changes in output."

"If you had asked social scientists even 20 years ago what powers they dreamed of acquiring, they might have cited the capacity to inconspicuously track the behaviors, purchases, movements, interactions and thoughts of whole cities of people, in real time. Of course, this is exactly what is possible now that so many of us — via credit cards, cellphones, online social networks, blogs and so on — leave just such digital breadcrumbs as we move through our lives."

"Usually a 90-minute series of discrete tasks administered by a psychologist, the Torrance Test is not a perfect measure of creativity. But it has proven remarkably accurate in predicting creative accomplishments. We asked a group of ordinary children and adults to try their hands at several drawing tests: everyone was presented with incomplete line drawings and was given five minutes to turn them into pictures."

"What’s shocking is how incredibly well Torrance’s creativity index predicted those kids’ creative accomplishments as adults."

"Overwhelmed by curriculum standards, American teachers warn there’s no room in the day for a creativity class. Kids are fortunate if they get an art class once or twice a week. But to scientists, this is a non sequitur, borne out of what University of Georgia’s Mark Runco calls “art bias.” The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded. When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly."

"New York Times columnist and author (Letters from New Orleans, 2005) Walker makes no pretense at being a master of modern marketing. But he does, through intuitive, savvy observations of human and corporate behaviors, solidify his argument for what brands mean in today’s society. His claim that brands such as Hello Kitty and the iPod, among others, balance our need for both belonging and individuality is not revolutionary. So what’s new here? That Walker is one of the prime analysts dedicated to probing our minds, our behavior, and, specifically, our buying patterns. He addresses the demand for authenticity and the nearly accidental formation of consumer communities, almost in spite of commercial persuasion campaigns, creating a real connection that many Americans are seeking." -- Barbara Jacobs

Malcolm Gladwell reports on Paul Ekman's work on identifying emotion through facial expressions and micro-expressions.

"Test-takers in the red environments, were much better at skills that required accuracy and attention to detail, such as catching spelling mistakes or keeping random numbers in short-term memory.

Though people in the blue group performed worse on short-term memory tasks, they did far better on tasks requiring some imagination, such as coming up with creative uses for a brick or designing a children's toy. In fact, subjects in the blue environment generated twice as many "creative outputs" as subjects in the red one."

"This research illuminates a range of deeper talents, which span reason and emotion and make a hash of both categories:
Attunement: the ability to enter other minds and learn what they have to offer.
Equipoise: the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings.
Metis: the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations.
Sympathy: the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups.
Limerence: This isn’t a talent as much as a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for money and success, but the unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence when the skull line falls away and we are lost in love for another, the challenge of a task or the love of God."

Caterina Fake on FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) as social motivator.

"There is a company that sells radar equipment to the police as well as radar detectors to the public. Clorox is one of the world’s worst polluters of water, and also sells Brita filters to get the bad stuff out of the water again. Lawyers create mazes that you have to hire a lawyer to escape. Similarly social software both creates and cures FOMO. If you didn’t know that party was going on, you’d be home contentedly reading your latest New Yorker. But since you do, you hungrily watch each new tweet."

"Was it possible to survive 10 days of meditating in an Indian retreat without speaking, reading or making eye-contact with fellow guests?"
"I realise how much I rely on external narratives to get me through the day – work, novels, films, gossip, Twitter, news, whatever."
"The purpose of Vipassana is not to experience pleasurable sensations but rather to develop equanimity towards all sensations."
"sensation-seeking is the very antithesis of meditation. It is not about the colours or the bliss; rather it's about strengthening the muscle that helps build resilience. (...) A little more able to face life's vicissitudes with equanimity, as Goenka would say."

"Do you vote?
If not, is it because you think it doesn’t matter because things never change, or politicians are evil on both sides, or one vote in several million doesn’t count?
Yeah, that’s learned helplessness."

“Be careful. People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things…well, new things aren’t what they expect. They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don’t want to know that man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds…Not news but olds, telling people that what they think they already know is true.”
-- Terry Pratchett through the character Lord Vetinari from his novel, “The Truth: a novel of Discworld

"The Misconception: If you stop engaging in a bad habit, the habit will gradually diminish until it disappears from your life.
The Truth: Any time you quit something cold turkey, your brain will make a last-ditch effort to return you to your habit."

“each morning for over eight months I woke up and decided that the next morning would be the day to send the Stiglitz box.” -- George Akerlof

"we often procrastinate not by doing fun tasks but by doing jobs whose only allure is that they aren’t what we should be doing."

Depression may allow you to focus on solving your problems and has been linked to better analytical skills.

"Normally when you think of "bad design", you think of laziness or mistakes. These are known as design anti-patterns. Dark Patterns are different – they are not mistakes, they are carefully crafted with a solid understanding of human psychology, and they do not have the user’s interests in mind."

"Dr. Luke doesn’t know why he hears so many No. 1 songs. But for now, the producer behind “I Kissed a Girl” and “Tik Tok” has more tunes than anyone else vying to claim the “Song of the Summer.”"

In July 2002, Appled filed a patent for a “Breathing Status LED Indicator” (No. US 6,658,577 B2). They described it as a “blinking effect of the sleep-mode indicator in accordance with the present invention mimics the rhythm of breathing which is psychologically appealing.”

"No street signs. No crosswalks. No accidents. Surprise: Making driving seem more dangerous could make it safer."

In his new book, 'Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It)', author William Poundstone dissects the marketing tricks built into menus—for example, how something as simple as typography can drive you toward or away from that $39 steak.

"What created this mountain of stuff? Was it irrational exuberance and cheap money? It was not. This crowded garage springs from cultural motives. These things were not purchased to express vanity or pursue status. They were purchased to help Susan build a life."

"So as the zombie breaks through the door or the murderer leaps from the closet, your amygdala gets juiced (...), unleashing a brain- and body-energizing cocktail of hormones. But while this is happening, information also travels to your prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for consciously evaluating danger. It tells you that the movie is just a movie. Remove that part of the equation, and you likely wouldn't remember '28 Weeks Later' any more fondly than the time you thought you were being followed down a dark alley."

"Last spring (...), Asif Ghazanfar developed a computer model of a macaque monkey designed to interact with real macaques. But the monkeys weren’t fooled. Further testing revealed that, much to Ghazanfar’s surprise, his model was eliciting an uncanny valley response from the monkeys. It was the first time scientists had ever observed such a response in a non-human species."

"Honest psychologists and good spiritual healers often advise patients with overactive minds and squirrel-like attention spans and problems focusing and problems sleeping, they will tell them not to pop some Ritalin or merely take an herbal tincture and eat more leafy greens, but to go home right now and, yes, clean out your closets. Clear out your clutter. Strip it all to the beautiful essentials and then keep it that way."