Showing posts with label psychology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label psychology. Show all posts

Sunday, December 29, 2013

Days Gone By

My favorite new book, Richard Wilbur's Anterooms, was a gift from my niece, who works at the Yankee Book Shop in Woodstock, Vermont. In the title poem, this stanza nicely captures the feeling I have right now:

Still, it strains belief
How an instant can dilate,
Or long years be brief.

Camping on Mongolia's Delger River, August 2013

Friday, May 25, 2007

Why Stories Matter

A few weeks back I mentioned environmental psychology but a recent article in the The New York Times introduced me to another, even more interesting subgenre of the field: narrative psychology.

According to the author, Benedict Carey, "Every American may be working on a screenplay, but we are also continually updating a treatment of our own life — and the way in which we visualize each scene not only shapes how we think about ourselves, but how we behave, new studies find. By better understanding how life stories are built, this work suggests, people may be able to alter their own narrative, in small ways and perhaps large ones."

I find this a lot easier to believe than the so-called Secret, although I think it also explains part of the Secret's appeal, along with its individual stories of success.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Clarification

I don’t necessarily endorse Csikszentmihalyi’s theories, although I think I understand what he means by flow. Intense absorption in a task is a real pleasure. And, thankfully, that pleasure seems to have little relation to one’s level of skill or ability.

For instance, I am middle-aged and of middling height; I can’t jump, or drive to my left. I also have one bad knee. And yet I have enjoyed (brief) states of flow on the basketball court, moments in which I do only what is absolutely right and beautiful in the game.

Can people be taught to enter this state of happy absorption at will? Or any of the other myriad happy states of which humans are capable?

In January 2007, D.T. Max published Happiness 101 in the New York Times. In this article, Mark Linkins, curriculum coordinator of a school district that mixes positive psychology with ninth grade English classes, says, “it’s preferable to be happy than not, even if that means the potential for creative output is diminished.”

I’m sure I wasn’t the only person who flinched upon reading this statement. This is Orhan Pamuk in his 2006 Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

"I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but – just as in a dream – I can't quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy."

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Elaboration

The "paralysis of the mind" that I enjoy is not a species of stupor. Fishing can do it for me, of course, but so can a long walk or a cold dawn, a well-written novel, an unexpected road trip, a stained-glass window, a cattail marsh.

What I seek is not relief, precisely, although it does feel good to forget that part of your brain which is responsible for fear, doubt, and expectation. Environmental psychologists (they exist!) describe this as "attentional restoration." Which might be related to what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who studies the state of being intensely absorbed in a task, calls flow.

According to the Edge Foundation, the name is pronounced "chick-SENT-me-high."