Photography as a Weapon

NYT article on photography by Errol Morris

Photography as a Weapon

Tough Choices: How Making Decisions Tires Your Brain

Any self-reflective person understands that attention and concentration are limited resources. It's as if some chemical is metabolized when we engage in focused concentration and eventually this chemcial gets used up requiring a break--or sleep--before we can continue. But according to this fascinating Scientific American article, research suggests that making choices also appears to deplete executive resources.

These experimental insights suggest that the brain works like a muscle: when depleted, it becomes less effective. Furthermore, we should take this knowledge into account when making decisions. If we've just spent lots of time focusing on a particular task, exercising self-control or even if we've just made lots of seemingly minor choices, then we probably shouldn't try to make a major decision. These deleterious carryover effects from a tired brain may have a strong shaping effect on our lives.

Helps explain why shopping for clothes can leave you feeling so mentally drained, why longer meetings accomplish less, and what leads us to procrastinate imporatant work by indulging in frivolous entertainment.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=tough-choices-how-making

Interesting article on habit formation

Warning: Habits May Be Good for You
By CHARLES DUHIGG
Published: July 13, 2008
Social scientists have learned that there is power in tying certain behaviors to habitual cues through relentless advertising.

...as much as 45 percent of what we do every day is habitual — that is, performed almost without thinking in the same location or at the same time each day, usually because of subtle cues....

...In another experiment, conducted by researchers studying smokers, those wanting to quit were more than twice as successful if they started kicking the habit while on vacation, when surrounded by unfamiliar people and places.

"Habits are formed when the memory associates specific actions with specific places or moods,” said Dr. Wood, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke. “If you regularly eat chips while sitting on the couch, after a while, seeing the couch will automatically prompt you to reach for the Doritos. These associations are sometimes so strong that you have to replace the couch with a wooden chair for a diet to succeed.”

read the rest here Warning: Habits May Be Good for You

Decoding Body Language

Science Out of the Box
Decoding Body Language
[6 min 2 sec]

All Things Considered, June 28, 2008 · Crossing of the arms, biting of the lower lip, a change in breathing rate — all of these body movements can communicate a wide range of things. But what do they mean? Retired FBI Special Agent Joe Navarro, who made a career out of "reading" the body language of spies and criminals, offers insight on what our bodies say without our permission.

Decoding Body Language

Inconspicuous Consumption - A new theory of the leisure class

Good read!

The less money your peer group as, the more bling you buy—and vice-versa.

Inconspicuous Consumption

(another) pool of blood in Kabukicho

Was beta testing the timing of my Kabukicho tour nagivgation last night--(yeah, in the rain). At around 3 AM I met up with Kabukicho photographer Kwon Choul who just finished shooting a massive pool of blood where some girl hit the ground after apparently jumping from a building. Sad.

Girl I met at an SM bar in Roppongi while shooting Osada Steve killed herself too a couple months ago, by jumping off a building. Too bad that asshole in Akihabara didn't just kill himself instead of stabbing random strangers to death. Does he want to punish society for not bending over backward to help him succeed in life? Try living with a disability or chronic back pain. Try living in parts of Africa or rural China asshole. You had a pretty decent freak'n life wimp.

my response to Massimo Pigliucci's essay "Chess, psychoanalysis, evolutionary psychology and the nature of pseudoscience"

Essay is here: Chess, psychoanalysis, evolutionary psychology and the nature of pseudoscience

my response:

I think it's disingenuous to lump sociobiologists in the same boat with Freudian psychologists. Sociobiology is grounded in the natural sciences--in biology, genetics, chemistry and physics. Freudian psychology is not. Just because you are unable to imagine an easy way to gather experimental evidence for a given scientific theory does not disqualify it as a valid hypothesis. I personally cannot imagine experiments that could be used to validate theories of General Relativity, but that doesn't discredit the fundamental scientific nature of the theory. Scientists are still working on devising new experiements to test Relativity half-a-century after this theory was proposed.

You've used this line of argument before. In your essay, "Do you believe in human nature?", you wrote:

"Our genetic makeup certainly poses limits to what we can and cannot do, but how ample those limits are is currently largely beyond the scope of human biology, partly because we cannot do the right experiments that would settle the matter (it is both impractical and unethical to breed human beings and raise them under controlled environmental conditions, which is what we do with other animals and with plants when we wish to study gene-environment interactions)."

But you inability to imagine ethical experiments only reflects on your own limits of imagination, not on the scientific validity of these lines of inquiry. I have more confidence in mankind's collective resourcefulness in devising fruitful experiments than in one philosopher's doubt.

the effects of expectations

Expectations have long been a topic of psychological research, and it's well known that they affect how we react to events, or how we respond to medication. But in recent years, scientists have been intensively studying how expectations shape our direct experience of the world, what we taste, feel, and hear. The findings have been surprising - did you know that generic drugs can be less effective merely because they cost less? - and it's now becoming clear just how pervasive the effects of expectation are.

The human brain, research suggests, isn't built for objectivity. The brain doesn't passively take in perceptions. Rather, brain regions involved in developing expectations can systematically alter the activity of areas involved in sensation. The cortex is "cooking the books," adjusting its own inputs depending on what it expects.

Although much of this research has been done by scientists interested in marketing and consumer decisions, the work has broad implications. People assume that they perceive reality as it is, that our senses accurately record the outside world. Yet the science suggests that, in important ways, people experience reality not as it is, but as they expect it to be.

Read the article here

The Pursuit Of Happiness

Quite insightful look at the happiest place on earth--no, not Disneyland--Denmark. A bit slow at the start, but really hits it's stride in the second half.

Click the picture to play. Morley Safer reports for 60 minutes. Running time: 12 minutes.