~openculture | Bookmarks (8)

This past week, the influential psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman passed away at age 90. The winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, Kahneman wrote the bestselling book Thinking, Fast and Slow where he explained the two systems of thinking that shape human decisions. These include “System 1,” which relies on fast, automatic […]

If you suspect that your brain isn’t quite suited for modern life, you’re not alone. In fact, that state of mind has probably been closer to the rule than the exception throughout modernity itself. It’s just that the mix of things we have to think about keeps changing: “The school run. Work calls. Inflation. Remember […]

David Lynch has a variety of notions about what it takes to make art, but suffering is not among them. “This is part of the myth, I think,” he said in one interview. “Van Gogh did suffer. He suffered a lot. But I think he didn’t suffer while he was painting.” That is, “he didn’t […]

For some time now it has been fashionable to diagnose dead famous people with mental illnesses we never knew they had when they were alive. These postmortem clinical interventions can seem accurate or far-fetched, and mostly harmless—unless we let them color our appreciation of an artist’s work, or negatively influence the way we treat eccentric living personalities. Overall, […]

When surveyed, eighty to ninety percent of Americans consider themselves possessed of above-average driving skills. Most of them are, of course, wrong by statistical definition, but the result itself reveals something important about human nature. So does another, lesser-known study that had two groups, one composed of professional comedians and the other composed of average […]

In 1966, Paul McCartney famously sang of “all the lonely people,” wondering aloud where they come from. Nearly six decades later, their numbers seem only to have increased; as for their origin, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and Zen priest Robert Waldinger has made it a longtime professional concern. “Starting in the nineteen fifties, and going all the […]

The concept of propaganda has a great deal of power to fascinate. So does the very word propaganda, which to most of us today sounds faintly exotic, as if it referred mainly to phenomena from distant places and times. But in truth, can any one of us here in the twenty-first century go a day […]

Image via Diego Sevilla Ruiz A certain Zen proverb goes something like this: “A five year old can understand it, but an 80 year old cannot do it.” The subject of this riddle-like saying has been described as “mindfulness”—or being absorbed in the moment, free from routine mental habits. In many Eastern meditative traditions, one can achieve […]