Tuesday, November 16, 2010

great Times

Today's NY Times was particularly interesting. There are three articles that caught my attention for three different reasons.

Where Cinema and Biology Meet was very visually captivating. I was going to steal the pictures from the newspaper but Drew cut it out before I could haha so I had to get another one.




GORGEOUS. I LOVE this. I thought it was just because of the forms but the ideas attract me. The idea that these things are miniature, microscopic, indiscernible... things... and we've translated them into something much more tangible. I guess I'm more interested in the aesthetics of this than the science... I'm an art major; so shoot me.

Keeping this one in the books for future influences?

As for When the Mind Wanders, Happiness Also Strays, this hits home for me. My mind is always wandering. They calculated some way to figure that people were thinking aimlessly 47% of the time. And something about people being happiest during sex but ehhhh whatevs hahah. They had this app that allowed the Harvard researches to randomly prompt people to rate how happy they were.



“We see evidence for mind-wandering causing unhappiness, but no evidence for unhappiness causing mind-wandering,” Mr. Killingsworth says.

The best thing to do is to be fully engaged in what you are doing. Unless I have music on loud or unless there are other people around, my mind wanders a lot. Even when I have music and people, I'll wander but not for long at all because I get snapped back into being engaged. I guess mind wandering does kind of make me unhappy. Not to the sad crying depressive point but I'm not as satisfied because I'm thinking about all the things that I wished I could fix or things I'm stressed out about... that being school.

The unhappiness produced by mind-wandering was largely a result of the episodes involving “unpleasant” topics. Such stray thoughts made people more miserable than commuting or working or any other activity.

"But the people having stray thoughts on “neutral” topics ranked only a little below the overall average in happiness. And the ones daydreaming about “pleasant” topics were actually a bit above the average, although not quite as happy as the people whose minds were not wandering."

I'd like an iPod app that goes off every so often saying "Don't worry, be happy" (danke Bobby McFerrin).

Quality of Life Questions.... this illuminates an issue different from the actual topic of this article. They begin to talk about how if physicians/doctors don't inquire past the "how are you" "okay", they are not doing their job. And yes, their time has become more and more limited but with peoples lives in their hands, its one of those things that should have the time made for.

I've also heard a lot about shitty bedside manner. I've heard so many stories about doctors dismissing peoples' complaints... I'm sure they get a lot of complaints about pain that aren't really that bad or are just plain lies but at the same time, you can't let the rest who really are in pain suffer. And then I get to thinking about elderly abuse... How did we get those people into the care field??? WHyyyyy would you even do it?

Apparently I'm very apathetic today.

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