Month: January 2018

Do narcissists mean to hurt their partners? – Business Insider

If you are in a relationship with a narcissist, you will have been through a roller-coaster of ups and downs.

At the beginning, everything would have been wonderful. You might have even thought you’d found your soul mate. But after a while, things started to go sour.

This is because after a few weeks, months, or even years, the narcissist will no longer see any value in you. As soon as they realise you are a real human being, and thus flawed, they struggle to see the use of you any more. They’ll start blaming you for things, shouting at you, or even break up with you, leaving you to try and work out what went wrong.

But for many reasons, it is hard to answer the question: “Do narcissists mean to hurt people?”

Do narcissists mean to hurt their partners? – Business Insider

Is everything you think you know about depression wrong? | Society | The Guardian

n the 1970s, a truth was accidentally discovered about depression – one that was quickly swept aside, because its implications were too inconvenient, and too explosive. American psychiatrists had produced a book that would lay out, in detail, all the symptoms of different mental illnesses, so they could be identified and treated in the same way across the United States. It was called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. In the latest edition, they laid out nine symptoms that a patient has to show to be diagnosed with depression – like, for example, decreased interest in pleasure or persistent low mood. For a doctor to conclude you were depressed, you had to show five of these symptoms over several weeks.

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The manual was sent out to doctors across the US and they began to use it to diagnose people. However, after a while they came back to the authors and pointed out something that was bothering them. If they followed this guide, they had to diagnose every grieving person who came to them as depressed and start giving them medical treatment. If you lose someone, it turns out that these symptoms will come to you automatically. So, the doctors wanted to know, are we supposed to start drugging all the bereaved people in America?

The authors conferred, and they decided that there would be a special clause added to the list of symptoms of depression. None of this applies, they said, if you have lost somebody you love in the past year. In that situation, all these symptoms are natural, and not a disorder. It was called “the grief exception”, and it seemed to resolve the problem.

Is everything you think you know about depression wrong? | Society | The Guardian

The six main causes of car crashes.

Car crashes are mysteries. Even though roughly 6 million of them happen each year in the United States alone, we seldom learn much. When we do drive by a crash, we often slow down to have a look. But there’s never much to see. Two crumpled cars. Maybe one upside down. An ambulance closing its doors. I usually feel bad—for those who may have gotten hurt (or worse), of course, but also because my rubbernecking contributes to the logjam of cars behind me.

I want to know what happened because there’s an obvious payoff. I want to make sure that the same thing doesn’t happen to me. Was it some bonehead move that I would never make? Or did someone commit a minor transgression and then pay a major price? Give me an instant replay like I get when I’m watching football. A slow-motion video with expert commentators who draw diagrams and who reveal in explicit detail how it all went down.

The six main causes of car crashes.

Why most of us lean to the right when we kiss

Your brain is an organ of two halves – the left side and the right side. And there are many brain functions, such as language skills or which hand you write with, which are organised mostly in one side of the brain or the other.

Simple behavioural tests have now allowed us to see how this organisation is revealed through biases in how we see and interact with the world – and each other – often without us being aware of it.

Examining how people perceive a diagram of variously orientated lines and angles provided clues that people typically have a subconscious bias for seeing things set out in clockwise orientations.

We then realised that this might also be related to a number of physical instincts that people have, such as which way they turn their heads. After looking at recent research in visual psychophysics and visual neuroscience, we saw various perceptual and behavioral phenomena in which humans can have a directional bias.

Many of these turning behaviours are seen early in life. For example, infants have an initial bias for turning the head to the right (and consequently extending the left arm outward to compensate for that movement).

Some previous research found that such an instinctive turn to the right extends to adulthood – when an adult kisses another on the lips, their heads tend to automatically lean to the right. But is this an extension of the bias that humans are born with, or do people simply learn to kiss that way?

Why most of us lean to the right when we kiss

Social Media Is Making Us Dumber. Here’s Exhibit A. – The New York Times

This week, a video surfaced of a Harvard professor, Steven Pinker, which appeared to show him lauding members of a racist movement. The clip, which was pulled from a November event at Harvard put on by Spiked magazine, showed Mr. Pinker referring to “the often highly literate, highly intelligent people who gravitate to the alt-right” and calling them “internet savvy” and “media savvy.”

The clip went viral. The right celebrated; the left fumed. The neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website ran an article headlined, in part, “Harvard Jew Professor Admits the Alt-Right Is Right About Everything.” A tweet of the video published by the self-described “Right-Wing Rabble-Rouser” Alex Witoslawski got hundreds of retweets, including one from the white-nationalist leader Richard Spencer.

“Steven Pinker has long been a darling of the white supremacist ‘alt-right,’” noted the lefty journalist Ben Norton. “And he returns the favor.” Others reacted to the rumor with simple exasperation: “Christ on a crutch,” said the liberal commentator and biologist PZ Myers, who also wrote a blog post denouncing Mr. Pinker for this supposed alliance.

The idea that Mr. Pinker, a liberal, Jewish psychology professor, is a fan of a racist, anti-Semitic online movement is absurd on its face, so it might be tempting to roll your eyes and dismiss this blowup as just another instance of social media doing what it does best: generating outrage.

But it’s actually a worthwhile episode to unpack, because it highlights a disturbing, worsening tendency in social media in which tribal allegiances are replacing shared empirical understandings of the world. Or maybe “subtribal” is the more precise, fitting term to use here. It’s one thing to say that left and right disagree on simple facts about the world — this sort of informational Balkanization has been going on for a while and long predates Twitter. What social media is doing is slicing the salami thinner and thinner, as it were, making it harder even for people who are otherwise in general ideological agreement to agree on basic facts about news events.

Social Media Is Making Us Dumber. Here’s Exhibit A. – The New York Times

‘We believe you harmed your child’: the war over shaken baby convictions | News | The Guardian

At first, Craig Stillwell and Carla Andrews only vaguely registered the change at the hospital; how the expressions of warm, calm concern in the doctors and nurses who had been helping them look after their sick baby had iced over. It was 15 August 2016, in the early hours of the morning, and their three-month-old daughter, Effie, was fighting for life.

Two hours earlier, Effie had woken up screaming. Her parents, both 23, had no permanent home and were staying at Craig’s father’s place in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. They had all been asleep on the floor in the lounge: Effie in the travel cot that detached from her pram, Craig still in the uniform he wore as a grass cutter. Carla thought the problem was acid reflux. She passed the baby to Craig and went to prepare a bottle of formula in the kitchen. As she worked, Effie screamed and screamed in the other room. Suddenly she fell silent. Carla heard Craig panic: “Effie! Effie!” She rushed in. Craig, terrified, was holding the child. Effie was white-faced, limbs floppy, eyes fixed, gasping weakly for air.

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Paramedics arrived at 3.19am, by which time Effie appeared dead. They reached Stoke Mandeville hospital at 3.50am. She roused a little and was taken for a brain scan. Afterwards, in the resuscitation unit, a doctor told them what they had found. Effie had suffered a bleed on the brain, and it didn’t look like it had been the first. Carla and Craig both started crying.

“But how could this happen?” asked Craig.

“We’re going to look into it,” the doctor replied.

At that moment, Craig realised everyone had started treating them with a cold, professional distance. Apart from one nurse, who remained kindly, all the reassuring faces were now hard.

Later that morning, Effie was moved to the high-dependency unit. As the hours passed, the young parents noticed lots of nurses and doctors peering in through the window, staring at them, before hurrying along. At about 3pm, two officers from Thames Valley Police appeared. Craig and Carla were taken to a small room that was empty but for two sofas.

“We believe you’ve harmed your child,” said a detective sergeant.

‘We believe you harmed your child’: the war over shaken baby convictions | News | The Guardian

What sugar does to your brain – Why sugar could be to blame for your bad memory – and can it get you hooked?

To tell the story of what sugar does to your brain, you have to start with the thought that triggers your need for a hit of sweetness.

It often happens in the afternoon when your brain, which runs on sugar, starts to get hungry.

To satiate the craving your brain activates a string of neurons, often referred to as the reward pathway, which pump the chemical dopamine into your brain.

All of a sudden you need a chocolate bar or that sweet pastry you saw at lunchtime.

If you act on that craving, the reward pathway then switches mode, pumping chemicals such as beta-endorphins into your brain, generating feelings of pleasure.

Your brain thanks you for the sugar hit by making the chocolate bar literally taste sweeter, says Dr Zane Andrews, a scientist at Monash University who studies how our brains regulate control of our diets.

But if you respond to the brain’s need for sugar too often, the reward pathway can develop tolerance to the stimulus.

“That means we need to eat more to get the same feeling. That’s a classic feature of addiction,” says Dr Andrews.

What sugar does to your brain – Why sugar could be to blame for your bad memory – and can it get you hooked?

This 100-Year-Old To-Do List Method Promises Maximum Productivity | Real Simple

It’s called the Ivy Lee Method.

When you’re writing your to-do list, it’s tempting to write down all the tasks you might possibly get done the following day. But where do you even begin when your list seems to be getting longer by the minute? Those out-of-reach tasks might actually be the one thing that’s stopping you from achieving your maximum productivity. The good news? There’s a solution that’s been around for more than 100 years.

The easy trick? Keep your to-do list down to a clutter-free minimum that revolves around your priorities. Your tasks for the next day should hover around six items at most, according to James Clear, a performance improvement writer. Clear recently wrote a post about the method on his website, JamesClear.com. This efficient to-do list is known as the Ivy Lee method. It’s based on the style used by the eponymous public relations executive best known for his work with the Rockefeller family in the early 20th century. Creating your to-do list in this style should only take about 15 minutes each night, but will save you so much more time the following day.

This 100-Year-Old To-Do List Method Promises Maximum Productivity | Real Simple

“Oh My God, This Is So F—ed Up”: Inside Silicon Valley’s Secretive, Orgiastic Dark Side | Vanity Fair

About once a month, on a Friday or Saturday night, the Silicon Valley Technorati gather for a drug-heavy, sex-heavy party. Sometimes the venue is an epic mansion in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights; sometimes it’s a lavish home in the foothills of Atherton or Hillsborough. On special occasions, the guests will travel north to someone’s château in Napa Valley or to a private beachfront property in Malibu or to a boat off the coast of Ibiza, and the bacchanal will last an entire weekend. The places change, but many of the players and the purpose remain the same.

The stories I’ve been told by nearly two dozen people who have attended these events or have intimate knowledge of them are remarkable in a number of ways. Many participants don’t seem the least bit embarrassed, much less ashamed. On the contrary, they speak proudly about how they’re overturning traditions and paradigms in their private lives, just as they do in the technology world they rule. Like Julian Assange denouncing the nation-state, industry hotshots speak of these activities in a tone that is at once self-congratulatory and dismissive of criticism. Their behavior at these high-end parties is an extension of the progressiveness and open-mindedness—the audacity, if you will—that make founders think they can change the world. And they believe that their entitlement to disrupt doesn’t stop at technology; it extends to society as well. Few participants, however, have been willing to describe these scenes to me without a guarantee of anonymity.

“Oh My God, This Is So F—ed Up”: Inside Silicon Valley’s Secretive, Orgiastic Dark Side | Vanity Fair