Category: ideas

“Research in embodied cognition has revealed that the body takes language to heart and can be awfully literal-minded. … The body embodies abstractions the best way it knows how: physically. “

“This seems to be true across cultures, across time, all over the world. No one is sure where this feeling comes from. Scientists have theories, of course, and one of them is that when you experience something for the very first time, more details, more information gets stored in your memory.”

One of the hottest topics in psychology today is something called “cognitive fluency.” Cognitive fluency is simply a measure of how easy it is to think about something, and it turns out that people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard.

Chris Anderson: “The Internet democratized publishing, broadcasting, and communications, and the consequence was a massive increase in the range of both participation and participants in everything digital – the long tail of bits. Now the same is happening to manufacturing – the long tail of things.”

What the National Grocers Association’s Best Bagger Championship “illustrates most is how the recognition for doing something well, and the desire to do it even better that that recognition prompts, enriches [the competitors’] lives on an everyday basis.” And a “country cannot be great without great grocery store baggers – their speed, courtesy, and ability to keep our spaghetti sauce from crushing our hot dog buns is crucial to maintaining public morale.”

“Adaptive perfectionism” (the good kind) correlates with “striving for excellence, organizational skills, tendency to plan ahead and holding others to high standards”; “maladaptive perfectionism” with “concern over mistakes, need for approval, tendency to ruminate over past performances and perceived [external] pressure.”

“Perhaps the stage theory of grief caught on so quickly because it made loss sound controllable. The trouble is that it turns out largely to be a fiction, based more on anecdotal observation than empirical evidence. … In On Grief and Grieving, [Elisabeth Kübler-Ross] insisted that the stages were ‘never meant to help tuck messy emotions into neat packages.’ If her injunction went unheeded, perhaps it is because the messiness of grief is what makes us uncomfortable.”

“In a study published in the January 18 issue of PLoS One, subjects were able to accurately identify candidates from the 2004 and 2006 U.S. Senate elections as either Democrats or Republicans based on black-and-white photos of their faces. And subjects were even able to correctly identify college students as belonging to Democratic or Republican clubs based on their yearbook photos.”

“India has become to American yoga what France is to American cuisine: an ancient source of wisdom to be reinterpreted, democratized and repackaged by its acolytes here.” Much of that reinterpretation is now happening around food: “yogier-than-thou” vegans; the use of bacon as “a yogic teaching tool”; a coach telling her class, “Ssssmell the squassshhhh waaaafting through the air.”