The Most Intimate Relationship in Your Life: Your Smartphone

Tom Chatfield for 99u:

Above all, it seems to me, we face two entwined questions every time we reach towards a screen. What does the computer want us to do—and what do we ourselves want? If we’re not careful, we will only ever answer the first. Ours is a world in which we are nudged, cajoled, bribed, and enticed ceaselessly; in which we are locked in an embrace with tirelessly fascinating tools. More than ever, we must be prepared to admit how messily personal this relationship is; how toxic habit and excessive ease can be; and that, as in all relationships, the easiest and the best option are rarely the same thing.

As the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman once put it, “when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.” If we’re not careful, our days will become a sequence of answers to questions that aren’t worth asking: what do you like, dislike, think in 140 characters; how can a friend most efficiently be acknowledged or dismissed; what distraction might help you forget the life you forgot to lead?

The Science Of Why You Should Spend Your Money On Experiences, Not Things

"You don't have infinite money. Spend it on stuff that research says makes you happy." Fast Company takes a look at research on happiness:

There's a very logical assumption that most people make when spending their money: that because a physical object will last longer, it will make us happier for a longer time than a one-off experience like a concert or vacation. According to recent research, it turns out that assumption is completely wrong.

"One of the enemies of happiness is adaptation," says Dr. Thomas Gilovich, a psychology professor at Cornell University who has been studying the question of money and happiness for over two decades. "We buy things to make us happy, and we succeed. But only for a while. New things are exciting to us at first, but then we adapt to them."

So rather than buying the latest iPhone or a new BMW, Gilovich suggests you'll get more happiness spending money on experiences like going to art exhibits, doing outdoor activities, learning a new skill, or traveling.

On Stress and Inner Voices

The School of Life on Work: 

Where do inner voices come from? An inner voice always used to be an outer voice. We’ve absorbed the tone of a harassed or angry parent; the menacing threats of an elder sibling keen to put us down; the words of a schoolyard bully or a teacher who seemed impossible to please. We internalised the unhelpful voices because at certain key moments in the past they sounded compelling. The authority figures repeated their messages over and over until they got lodged in our own way of thinking.

To change our inner voices we need to encounter equally convincing and confident, but also helpful and constructive varieties of voices over long periods. We need to hear them often enough and around tricky enough issues that they come to feel normal and natural responses – so that, eventually, they come to feel like things we are saying to ourselves; they become our own thoughts.

Why Think When You Can Google Instead?

Melissa Dahl writing for The Science of Us:

And so the question a team of psychologists at the University of Waterloo recently asked will likely be of interest: What does it say about our thinking skills when we habitually outsource problem-solving to our phones? 

Their results, published online this week in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, suggest that people who admit to relying more heavily on their smartphones for information — for instance, Googling something they could’ve figured out by with a few minutes of thinking about it — are also less likely to be analytical thinkers, judging from their answers to problems designed to assess cognitive style and ability. The smartphone-dependent were likelier to be intuitive thinkers, which means that they relied on their gut instincts rather than careful analysis. 

The Good, The Bad & The Hangry

Nicola Twilley in The New Yorker: 

Hunger seems like a simple phenomenon: the stomach rumbles until it’s fed, then it’s quiet until it rumbles again. Why, then, does it shape so much behavior that, at least on the surface, has so little to do with food? Part of the answer can be gathered from observations of other animals. For some of them, a little starvation seems to confer a survival advantage. In rodents, hunger appears to heighten sensory perception and speed up mental processing. Last year, researchers in Bordeaux, France, showed that the brains of food-deprived lab mice released endocannabinoids, which act on the same receptors as the psychoactive chemical in marijuana, stimulating the animals’ olfactory cortexes and sharpening their sense of smell. Yale University mice showed similarly enhanced environmental awareness: when injected with ghrelin, the so-called hunger hormone, the mice navigated mazes more quickly than their satiated peers. (The hungry rats of Harvard University, meanwhile, ran further on their in-cage treadmills.) At the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, ghrelin was found to reduce depression and anxiety in mice, inuring them to tests for both “social defeat” (bullying by larger mice) and “behavioral despair” (swimming in an inescapable acrylic cylinder).