Bring Back Boredom

In an experiment at the German Sport University in Cologne in 2007, boys from 12 to 14 spent an hour each night playing video games after they finished homework.

On alternate nights, the boys spent an hour watching an exciting movie, like “Harry Potter” or “Star Trek,” rather than playing video games. That allowed the researchers to compare the effect of video games and TV.

The researchers looked at how the use of these media affected the boys’ brainwave patterns while sleeping and their ability to remember their homework in the subsequent days. They found that playing video games led to markedly lower sleep quality than watching TV, and also led to a “significant decline” in the boys’ ability to remember vocabulary words. The findings were published in the journal Pediatrics.

Markus Dworak, a researcher who led the study and is now a neuroscientist at Harvard, said it was not clear whether the boys’ learning suffered because sleep was disrupted or, as he speculates, also because the intensity of the game experience overrode the brain’s recording of the vocabulary.

“When you look at vocabulary and look at huge stimulus after that, your brain has to decide which information to store,” he said. “Your brain might favor the emotionally stimulating information over the vocabulary.”

At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory.

In that vein, recent imaging studies of people have found that major cross sections of the brain become surprisingly active during downtime. These brain studies suggest to researchers that periods of rest are critical in allowing the brain to synthesize information, make connections between ideas and even develop the sense of self.

Researchers say these studies have particular implications for young people, whose brains have more trouble focusing and setting priorities.

“Downtime is to the brain what sleep is to the body,” said Dr. Rich of Harvard Medical School. “But kids are in a constant mode of stimulation.”

“The headline is: bring back boredom,” added Dr. Rich, who last month gave a speech to the American Academy of Pediatrics entitled, “Finding Huck Finn: Reclaiming Childhood from the River of Electronic Screens.”

Excerpted from "Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction" in the New York Times. 

OkTrends

"People who own iPhones have more sex than people with BlackBerrys. Atheists have the highest writing proficiency of any religious or nonreligious group. Nevada has more self-described geniuses per capita than any other state. Oregonians tend to be more gay-curious than other Americans.

The man behind these recent findings, Christian Rudder, is not a sociologist, nor does he consider himself an academic of any sort. Instead, he works for the dating Web site OkCupid. And his monthly blog, OkTrends, which he launched last year, is suddenly one of the most popular Web destinations—2 million people have visited in the last six weeks—for fans of fascinating data about how we live and love."

Read the rest of the article here.

My Walkscore

The New York Times Magazine for this Sunday was all about "going green," and it listed ideas for helping the environment. Walking more, instead of driving, was one of the main actions it listed that could help reduce your "carbon footprint" (I hate that phrase).

In the article, it listed a site called walkscore.com, which tells you how "walking friendly" (sorry about all of the "quotation marks") your neighborhood is, judging by how close you live to necessary locations like grocery stores, restaurants, parks, etc.

My house gets a 55, which means my neighborhood is very walkable. The site said 50-70 means "Some Walkable Locations: Some stores and amenities are within walking distance, but many everyday trips still require a bike, public transportation, or car."

My old house got a 14. Scores from 0-25 mean "Driving Only: Virtually no neighborhood destinations within walking range. You can walk from your house to your car!?"

You can check your walkscore at walkscore.com

Art Cannot Be Factored Out

I was listening to a podcast discussing Harold Pinter’s plays (none of which I’ve never seen) and the author of an article on Pinter noted that, when Pinter was an actor, he got tired of all the stories where everything “factored out” at the end. The author used this term twice, and the second time he used it, I started thinking about what that meant.

In context, it seemed to be a mathematical statement. For instance, let’s take the algebraic equation 2x + 4=6x. We can solve for x. X equals 1. We have taken a somewhat complex equation and made it simple. No loose ends. No complexity. Simplicity. An answer. I think the author is referring to this type of process when he refers to a story being factored out at the end.

What has occurred in these processes, both dramatical and mathematical, is taking complexity and reducing it to simplicity. This is an apt metaphor for the type of “drama” I am accused of being snobbish about. When people accuse me of being a movie snob, it is because I am not entertained by or interested in films that factor out the complexity of life. Can we truly resolve every dramatic situation with an answer and a lesson?

I love art that highlights complexities. A favorite example is the film “In the Bedroom.” In this movie, in sum, a young man is killed by his girlfriend’s ex-husband, and the parents of the slain man attempt to live with the sorrow, even while the murderer roams free in the town after being released from jail. As the parents’ marriage unravels, the wife convinces the husband to kill the murderer. He does so. In the final scene, as he comes home after the murder in the blue light of dawn, he lays down in bed. His wife, showing a peace she hasn’t shown since before the murder, offers to get him a cup of coffee and gets up to make it. As she leaves, he lays in bed, staring at the ceiling, his life changed forever.

This is complex. The final murder has given the wife peace that it has not given the husband. The story is not over. All we have done is closed one chapter, and we can assume that more problems come in the future. We do not have a happily ever after. We do not have a full resolution. We only have a partial resolution that may lead to greater understanding of real complexities. That is life. And that is what drama should illuminate. All the rest, all that can be factored out to x=1, is fairy tale.

Shameless

My friend Rob and I were talking recently about how many newscasters have included on the news stations' sites links to their personal blogs and MySpace pages. So, in one click, we can go from today's headlines to finding out that "meteoroligist" Kris Crocker likes System of a Down.

This led us to a discussion of how the younger generation is becoming inexplicable to us. What makes them confusing is their predilection for exposure. Sure, I have a blog, as does Rob, but our discussions tend not to be of the personal type--in other words, our entries are about externalities like art and politics...they are not the stuff of psychoanalysts' couches.

Young peoples' lives, ergo their blogs, seem not only to be an open book, but a book they beg us to read. Further, these are not books of accomplishments like a memoir or an autobiography, they are compendia of every innermost thought and desire, of trial personae, of pinup photos...things that our generation is accustomed to keeping to ourselves.

I thought of this as I read a short piece on France's president Nicolas Sarkozy, who, at the time of the writing, had yet to wed his new sweetheart, Carla Bruni. Sarkozy had, right after being elected, divorced his wife and began cavorting with Bruni. What makes Sarkozy's decision so odd is not that a French president has a mistress. Mitterand's mistress was an open secret, and she even attended his funeral, standing next to his wife. However, his emphasis was on "secret." Sarkozy has decided to emphasize the "open" part of the phrase "open secret."

What makes Sarkozy so thoroughly modern, so exquisitely MySpace, is how extrovertedly public he is about his sexcapades. As Adam Gopnick of the New Yorker wrote:

What distinguishes the ballad of Carla and Nicolas from similar tales is that this time the media is not trying to pry into the private life of a public man; this time, a public man is trying desperately to parade his private life in front of the media. Sarkozy not only performed for the press, welcoming photographers along as he and Bruni holidayed in Egypt and walked on the beach in what used to be called bathing costumes; he insists, to everyone’s embarrassment, on talking about their bonheur and their approaching marriage at press conferences. This is not tacit complicity, of the Princess Di-and-the-tabloids kind; it is Presidential leadership. Sarkozy wants people to think about his sex life, in the way that Bill Clinton didn’t want people thinking about his. The Sarkozy moment is more like Tom Cruise pounding Oprah’s sofa; the gentleman is so vehement about his love that something seems weird about it.

I don't think his vehement love is weird. I think it is a harbinger of the times, and we must begin getting used to these unseemly parades of information that used to be kept private. This type of exposure started years ago. Heck, we even know what kind of underwear Bill Clinton wears. (Wouldn't it be interesting if a wag decided to ask Hillary the same question?)

I could lament the fact that, as Rob's friend Derek proclaimed, "there's no shame any more," but I fear that I have finally settled on the adult side of the generational divide, so my complaints just sound like the typical grumblings of an old man.

Read the Gopnick article here.

Reading Really IS Fundamental

A recent article in The New Yorker, "Twilight of the Books" by Caleb Crain, added yet another lamentation concerning the decline of reading in western culture, and America in particular.

Even though I am an English teacher, I get tired of these jeremiads by the chicken littles who say the cultural sky is falling. The statistics (and the above article cites many--too many) seem to be irrefutable: people aren't reading as much as they used to read. But the question I always ask myself is, "Why does that matter?" We know that IQs have been rising pretty much all through the 20th century--the proof has been given the name the Flynn Effect (as outlined eloquently in a recent Malcolm Gladwell article).

So people are getting smarter, right? Well, as Gladwell points out, we have become more abstract in our thinking, and the IQ tests examine this type of abstract thinking. So we may not be getting smarter, we may just be getting better at abstract thinking. But as our culture becomes less literate, the Flynn Effect might reverse as we become less able to recognize patterns. This pattern recognition is what has led us to the IQ gains and to our modern, abstract way of thinking--a way of thinking that seems to be, more and more, the only way of thinking that allows for personal success.

Thus, abstract (modern) thinking seems to derive from literacy, so, to answer my question posed earlier, literacy is very important for the habits of mind it creates--the ability to reason. The Crain article cites a great example of the difference between literate and illiterate thinking:

It’s difficult to prove that oral and literate people think differently[....] But some supporting evidence came to hand in 1974, when Aleksandr R. Luria, a Soviet psychologist, published a study based on interviews conducted in the nineteen-thirties with illiterate and newly literate peasants in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Luria found that illiterates had a “graphic-functional” way of thinking that seemed to vanish as they were schooled. In naming colors, for example, literate people said “dark blue” or “light yellow,” but illiterates used metaphorical names like “liver,” “peach,” “decayed teeth,” and “cotton in bloom.” Literates saw optical illusions; illiterates sometimes didn’t. Experimenters showed peasants drawings of a hammer, a saw, an axe, and a log and then asked them to choose the three items that were similar. Illiterates resisted, saying that all the items were useful. If pressed, they considered throwing out the hammer; the situation of chopping wood seemed more cogent to them than any conceptual category. One peasant, informed that someone had grouped the three tools together, discarding the log, replied, “Whoever told you that must have been crazy,” and another suggested, “Probably he’s got a lot of firewood.” One frustrated experimenter showed a picture of three adults and a child and declared, “Now, clearly the child doesn’t belong in this group,” only to have a peasant answer: "Oh, but the boy must stay with the others! All three of them are working, you see, and if they have to keep running out to fetch things, they’ll never get the job done, but the boy can do the running for them."

Literacy allows people another way of seeing--the ability to be metacognitive, to think about thinking. This ability is not necessarily a better one, not necessarily a smarter one, but it certainly is an increasingly useful one in our modern world.

More importantly for our society, a literate mindset seems to be the only one that would allow for the debate a democracy requires. As a researcher concluded after synthesizing existing research on the "oral mind-set":

Whereas literates can rotate concepts in their minds abstractly, orals embed their thoughts in stories. According to Ong, the best way to preserve ideas in the absence of writing is to “think memorable thoughts,” whose zing insures their transmission. In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There’s no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in “enthusiastic description of physical violence.” Since there’s no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers tend not to correct themselves at all. Words have their present meanings but no older ones, and if the past seems to tell a story with values different from current ones, it is either forgotten or silently adjusted. As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth.

It seems that just the widespread ability to read might have been the catalyst that dragged us hominids out of the dark ages. It now seems that the declining ability to read might be what is plunging us back into them.

Read the entire article here.

Gifts

From an insightful article by Matthew Weiner, executive producer of "The Sopranos":

Getting a gift is like being set up on a blind date. Like it or not, your friend
or family member is sending you a message telling you in a coded way what they
think you want, what you deserve and, on some level, who they think you are.

What does it mean when Weiner gets a Nascar jacket? Find out here.

Thomas Jefferson is Rolling in his Grave

My friend Rob and I have been in a kind of long distance argument with some people over our disdain for popular entertainment. Rob and I have ridiculed such popular entertainments as Transformers, 300 and Dancing With the Stars. I don't have anything against any of these in particular (though 300 might be the stupidest movie I have ever seen), but I do hold a grudge against what passes for art in our society.

I have been accused of being elitist, and I don't necessarily disagree with that appellation. I believe that some art is better than others, the same way that I believe that some baseball players are better than others and that some food is better than others. It's funny, if I said steak is better than Kraft Mac N Chee, I'm not an elitist. If I say A-Rod is a better player than Yuniesky Betancourt, I'm not an elitist. But if I say Children of Men is better than 300, suddenly I'm an elitist. That's not to say that Mac, Yuni and 300 are not worthy of anybody liking them. That IS to say, though, that just because somebody likes something doesn't mean it's good.

I like America's Funniest Home Videos. I would watch it three hours a day if I could, no kidding. But it's not "good". It's entertaining, but it's not "good".

To say that something is good requires the frontal lobe, the thinking part. To say that I like something requires the brain stem, the reptilian brain, the feeling part. So I can't argue, and I won't argue, if people say they like something. However, I can argue, and will argue, if someone argues that something is good just because they like it.

And what America likes is getting, on the whole, stupider and stupider. We are not exercising the frontal lobe, the thinking part of our brain. To wit:

One in four adults read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday. Of those who did read, women and older people were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices.

The survey reveals a nation whose book readers, on the whole, can hardly be called ravenous. The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year — half read more and half read fewer. Excluding those who hadn't read any, the usual number read was seven.

"I just get sleepy when I read," said Richard Bustos of Dallas, a habit with which millions of Americans can doubtless identify. Bustos, a 34-year-old project manager for a telecommunications company, said he had not read any books in the last year and would rather spend time in his backyard pool.

Read the entire article here.

I Guess I'm Quirky

I used to think I didn't like "quirky" things. I thought I went for more substance. Used to, that is, until I read this article in The Atlantic Monthly. It says :

We’re drowning in quirk. It is the ruling sensibility of today’s Gen-X indie culture, defined territorially by the gentle ministrations of public radio’s This American Life; the strenuously odd (and now canceled) TV sitcom Arrested Development; the movies of Wes Anderson; Dave Eggers’s McSweeney’s Web site; the performance art, music, and writing of Miranda July; and the just-too-wacky-to-be-fully-believable memoirs of Augusten Burroughs.

Ouch. I love This American Life, I love love Arrested Development, I love Wes Anderson's "Rushmore," I think Eggers is great, and I really liked July's movie "You, Me, and Everyone You Know." Thankfully for my ego, I read Burroughs' book "Running With Scissors" and I didn't really love it.

However, the damage is done. It doesn't feel very good to be put into a demographic category like that, to have someone say "Look, you fit neatly into this set of criteria." But I do fit. It appears that I'm a quirk lover, but I didn't think I was.

But what is "quirk"? According to the author of the article, Michael Hirschorn, it is:

an embrace of the odd against the blandly mainstream. It features mannered ingenuousness, an embrace of small moments, narrative randomness, situationally amusing but not hilarious character juxtapositions (on HBO’s recent indie-cred comedy Flight of the Conchords , the titular folk-rock duo have one fan), and unexplainable but nonetheless charming character traits. Quirk takes not mattering very seriously. Quirk is odd, but not too odd. That would take us all the way to weird, and there someone might get hurt.

He follows up this definition with two recent film examples of quirk: Napoleon Dynamite and Little Miss Sunshine. I liked Napoleon Dynamite and loved Little Miss Sunshine.

Oh no. I'm a quirkaholic.

As I said before, though, I didn't think I was. I hated the forced quirkiness of movies like Garden State and Waitress.

Ah, who am I kidding. If quirk is done reasonably well, I'm a total sucker. Micheal Hirschorn, you nailed me, and it doesn't feel good. As a final insult, here's a criticism of quirk that stings me.

Quirk, loosed from its moorings, quickly becomes exhausting. It’s easy for David Cross’s character on Arrested Development to cover himself in paint for a Blue Man Group audition, or for the New Zealand duo on Flight of the Conchords to make a spectacularly cheesy sci-fi video about the future while wearing low-rent robot costumes. But the pleasures are passing. Like the proliferation of meta-humor that followed David Letterman and Jerry Seinfeld in the ’90s, quirk is everywhere because quirkiness is so easy to achieve: Just be odd … but endearing. It becomes a kind of psychographic marker, like wearing laceless Chuck Taylors or ironic facial hair—a self-satisfied pose that stands for nothing and doesn’t require you to take creative responsibility. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

Read the entire article here.

Harvard Shmarvard

I have noticed over the years that writers who are Harvard graduates will be sure to let us know early in articles that they went to Harvard. Often they will do so in an offhand, parenthetical fashion, as if it is not really worth mentioning. Looking back, I can't recall if I've ever seen graduates from other universities do the same thing. It is as if, in one simple statement, the writer has earned instant credibility.

This article waits until the third paragraph. Notice how unnecessary it is.

This article can only wait until the third sentence.

Parkour

His name is David Belle. He created a hybrid of skating/running/gymnastics called parkour, and it is slowly moving its way from Belle's home of France to the U.S.

The New Yorker magazine recently did a story about parkour and David Belle. The article opens:

Parkour, a made-up word, cousin to the French parcours, which means “route,” is a quasi commando system of leaps, vaults, rolls, and landings designed to help a person avoid or surmount whatever lies in his path—a vocabulary, that is, to be employed in finding one’s way among obstacles. Parkour goes over walls, not around them; it takes the stair rail, not the stairs. Spread mainly by videos on the Internet, it has been embraced in Europe and the United States by thrill seekers and martial-arts adepts, who regard it as part extreme sport—its founder would like to see it included in the Olympics—and part gruelling meditative pursuit. Movies like its daredevil qualities. A bracing parkour chase begins “Casino Royale,” the recent James Bond movie. It includes jumps from the boom of one tower crane to that of another, but parkour’s customary obstacles are walls, stairwells, fences, railings, and gaps between roofs—it is an urban rather than a pastoral pursuit. The movements are performed at a dead run. The more efficient and fluid the path they define, and the more difficult and harrowing the terrain they cross, the more elegant the performance is considered by the discipline’s practitioners.

Watching parkour reminds me of watching skateboarders. Both disciplines attract young, athletic boys, and they use the available urban environment as the venue for their amazing feats of athleticism--feats that often are not appreciated, and often are repudiated, by the average citizen. Skateboarding is gaining acceptance due to Tony Hawk, which led to the X-Games, which led to video games, which led to mainstream acceptance, but parkour is still in its infancy. I am interested to see where it goes.

There are many grainy amateur videos of parkour on YouTube, but the BBC used David Belle for the following ad, and it is a nice glimpse of what parkour is.

White Trash

The last racist thing you can say in America?

A badge of pride?

A tool of oppression?

White Trash. For many, the name evokes images of trailer parks, homegrown meth labs, and beat up Camaros, rural poor whites with too many kids and not enough government cheese. It’s a putdown for the down and out and white. White trash is the name given to those whites who don’t make it, either because they’re too lazy or too stupid. Or maybe because something’s wrong with their inbred genes. Whatever the reason, it’s their own damn fault they live like that. They’ve got nobody to blame but themselves.

On the other hand, white trash these days sometimes gets used as a badge of honor. Much like the way African American youth turned the despised word nigga into a word expressing pride and solidarity and the way that GLBT activists have turned queer into a source of dignity and respect, some white youth now use the term to signal rebelliousness and cultural difference—their refusal of a bland, mainstream white society that oppresses and stifles.

And there is another popular use of the term as well. It’s sometimes used to name the rich and famous when they act badly or misbehave. So, despite her millions, Paris Hilton can be called white trash for her pornographic lifestyle, and George Clooney can tell us, in a self-mocking kind of way, that he’s really just white trash. This trend, like so much else in the world of white trash, was probably started by Roseanne Barr, who once famously said of her marriage to Tom Arnold, “We’re America’s worst nightmare—white trash with money!”

All of which makes the reality that white trash names pretty complicated and confusing. Is it, as John Waters once said, “the last racist thing you can say and get away with?” Or has it transformed into a symbol of something like ethnic pride? Or is it just a comical phrase used to condemn—or sometimes excuse—bad behavior, like too much drinking, cussing, fighting, and general screwing around?

Click on the title of the post to read the entire article.

It's not the me generation...

According to Christopher Hitchens, it's the YOU generation!

The next time you see an ad, the odds are increasingly high that it will put "you" in the driver's seat. "Ask your doctor if Prozac/Lipitor/Cialis is right for you"—almost as if these medications could be custom made for each individual consumer. A lawyer or real-estate agent will promise you to address "your" concerns. Probably the most famous propaganda effort of the 20th century, a recruiting poster with Lord Kitchener pointing directly outward and stating, "Your Country Needs YOU," was only rushed onto the billboards when it suddenly became plain that the country concerned needed several hundred thousand recruits in a big hurry and couldn't afford to be too choosy about who it was signing up.

We are being infantilized. Everywhere we turn, we are being treated as if the world is customized only for us. It's just like being a baby again. According to Benjamin Barber, in his new book "Consumed," the rise in consumerism has created a dangerous mentality that values personal choice over the public good, thereby infantilizing otherwise mature adults and turning children into permanent shoppers.

Read the entire Hitchens article here.

Read a review of the Barber book here.