Health

Wilhelm Reich’s Orgone Energy Accumulator Was Beloved by William S. Burroughs and Banned by the FDA: Find Plans to Build the Controversial Device Online

Was Austrian Marxist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich a trenchant socio-political thinker or a total crank? A fraud or a prophet? Maybe a little from each column, at different times during the course of his bizarre career. An enthusiastic student of Sigmund Freud, Reich applied his teacher’s theories of repressed libido to the frightening political theater of the 1930s, writing against the spread of Nazism in his prescient 1933 book The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Here, Reich brought Marx and Freud ...
Tags: Psychology, Google, College, Nazis, Fbi, Fda, Jack Kerouac, Wilhelm Reich, Freud, Simon, Marx, Reich, Facebook Twitter, Burroughs, Josh Jones, William S Burroughs

What Can You Do About QAnon?: A Short Take from Documentary Filmmaker Kirby Ferguson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lg6cZmfpeM You know that QAnon supporters figured prominently in the Capitol insurrection. Two QAnon conspiracy theorists now hold seats in Congress. And perhaps you read the disturbing profile this weekend about the QAnon supporter who attended the elite Dalton School in Manhattan and then Harvard. So–you’re maybe thinking–it’s finally worth understanding what QAnon is, and what we can do about it. Above, watch a 10 minute Op-Doc from filmmaker Kirby Fer...
Tags: Psychology, Google, Congress, College, Harvard, Current Affairs, Manhattan, Capitol, Facebook Twitter, Dalton School, Kirby Ferguson

How to Talk with a Conspiracy Theorist: What the Experts Recommend

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpInOs1Fyno Why do people pledge allegiance to views that seem fundamentally hostile to reality? Maybe believers in shadowy, evil forces and secret cabals fall prey to motivated reasoning. Truth for them is what they need to believe in order to get what they want. Their certainty in the justness of a cause can feel as comforting as a warm blanket on a winter’s night. But conspiracy theories go farther than private delusions of grandeur. They have spilled i...
Tags: Psychology, Google, Politics, College, Current Affairs, Reddit, University of Pennsylvania, Vox, Bill Nye, Daniel, Facebook Twitter, Pew Research, Josh Jones, University of California Irvine, Cass Sunstein, MIT Technology Review

How to Talk with a Conspiracy Theorist (and Why People Believe Conspiracy Theories in the First Place): What the Experts Recommend

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpInOs1Fyno Why do people pledge allegiance to views that seem fundamentally hostile to reality? Maybe believers in shadowy, evil forces and secret cabals fall prey to motivated reasoning. Truth for them is what they need to believe in order to get what they want. Their certainty in the justness of a cause can feel as comforting as a warm blanket on a winter’s night. But conspiracy theories go farther than private delusions of grandeur. They have spilled i...
Tags: Psychology, Google, Politics, College, Current Affairs, Reddit, University of Pennsylvania, Vox, Bill Nye, Daniel, Facebook Twitter, Pew Research, Josh Jones, University of California Irvine, Cass Sunstein, MIT Technology Review

Social Psychologist Erich Fromm Diagnoses Why People Wear a Mask of Happiness in Modern Society (1977)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nCzsqKrkhE Modern man still is anxious and tempted to surrender his freedom to dictators of all kinds, or to lose it by transforming himself into a small cog in the machine. —Erich Fromm There are more think pieces published every day than any one person can read about our current moment of social disintegration. But we seem to have lost touch with the insights of social psychology, a field that dominated popular intellectual discourse in the post-war 20t...
Tags: Psychology, Google, College, Current Affairs, Philosophy, Un, Albert Camus, Facebook Twitter, Josh Jones, Erich Fromm, Camus, Durham NC Follow, Maria Popova, Jacobin, Fromm, Frankfurt School

The 16 Best Products to Help You Crush Your Goals in 2021

Achieve all of your 2021 goals with these items!
Tags: Health, Organization, Shopping, College, Mental Health, Skincare, Planners, Hair Products

How Tibetan Monks Use Meditation to Raise Their Peripheral Body Temperature 16-17 Degrees

Tibetan monks in remote regions of the Himalayas have long claimed near miraculous powers through yogic practices that resemble nothing you’ll find offered at your local gym, though they may derive from some similar Indian sources. One such meditative practice, a breathing exercise known as tummo, tum-mo, or g-tummo, supposedly generates body heat and can raise one’s peripheral body temperature 16-17 degrees—a distinctly advantageous ability when sitting outside in the snow-capped mountains...
Tags: Health, Google, College, Boston, Religion, Neuroscience, Harvard, Himalayas, Dalai Lama, Benson, National University Of Singapore, Facebook Twitter, Harvard Medical School, Josh Jones, Robert Wright, Durham NC Follow

How Do Vaccines (Including the COVID-19 Vaccines) Work?: Watch Animated Introductions

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rb7TVW77ZCs The other day, I found myself reading about what life is like in countries that have successfully minimized the pandemic: worry free holidays, meeting friends and family without the danger of infection, a general air of normalcy thanks to a combination of rigorous public health efforts and public cooperation. I live in the U.S., where the political party currently in power (and desperate to keep it) convinced millions of my fellow citizens that...
Tags: Health, Google, Science, College, America, United States, Current Affairs, Who, Philadelphia, Pbs, Bmj, Johns Hopkins, Facebook Twitter, Josh Jones, Durham NC Follow, Katherine O'Brien

Don’t Think Twice: A Poignant Film Documents How Bob Dylan & The Beatles Bring Joy to a Dementia Patient

It’s often said the sense of smell is most closely connected to long-term memory. The news offers little comfort to us forgetful people with a diminished sense of smell. But increasingly, neuroscientists are discovering how sound can also tap directly into our deepest memories. Patients with Alzheimer’s and dementia seem to come alive, becoming their old selves when they hear music they recognize, especially if they were musicians or dancers in a former life. “Sound is evolutionarily ancien...
Tags: Psychology, Health, Google, Music, College, Washington, Neuroscience, Bob Dylan, Npr, John, Dover, Northwestern University, Ac, Facebook Twitter, Jon, Tchaikovsky

A Biostatistician Uses Crochet to Visualize the Frightening Infection Rates of the Coronavirus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lxKUulMxH8 Chances are you’ve looked at more graphs this past year than you did over the previous decade — not just while working at home, but while scrolling through cascades of often-troubling quantitative information during your “off” hours as well. This phenomenon has hardly been limited to the Americans who obsessed over the predictions of and returns from their presidential election last month, an event turned practically into a sideshow by the ongo...
Tags: Health, Google, Facebook, Biology, College, Current Affairs, Seoul, Johns Hopkins, Facebook Twitter, Paul Gauguin, Colin Marshall, 21st Century Los Angeles, Kathrine Frey Frøslie, Frøslie, Coral Crochet Based

Marina Abramović’s Method for Overcoming Trauma: Go to a Park, Hug a Tree Tight, and Tell It Your Complaints for 15 Minutes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQmAHmLy5DA One of the most renowned of Chinese poets, Du Fu, survived the devastating An Lushan rebellion that nearly brought down the Tang Dynasty and resulted in an incredible loss of life around the country. His poems are full of grief, as translator David Hinton notes. The opening of “Spring Landscape” contains “possibly the most famous line in Chinese poetry,” and a painful comment on humanity’s place in the natural world. The country in ruins, river...
Tags: Psychology, Google, Amazon, Art, College, Life, Nature, Marina Abramovic, Facebook Twitter, Josh Jones, David Hinton, Durham NC Follow, The New York Review of Books, Madeleine Thien, Du Fu, Marina Abramovi

Behold the Steampunk Home Exercise Machines from the Victorian Age

The pandemic has resulted in a lot of people reinventing their fitness regimens, investing in pricey items like Mirror and Peloton bikes to turn homes into home gyms. Personally, we’re saving our pennies until some Etsy seller replicates the mechanical therapy systems of Dr. Gustav Zander (1835–1920). From the mid-19th century through WWI, these machines were at the forefront of gym culture. Their function is extremely similar to modern strength training equipment, but their design exudes a d...
Tags: Health, Google, Design, London, Etsy, College, New York City, Physics, New York Times, Philadelphia, Stockholm, Facebook Twitter, Walt Whitman, Franz Kafka, Peloton, Zander

The Power of Empathy: A Quick Animated Lesson from Brené Brown

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Evwgu369Jw Several years back, the RSA (Royal Society of the Arts) created a series of distinctive animated shorts where well-known intellectuals presented big ideas, and a talented artist rapidly illustrated them on a whiteboard. Some of those talks featured the likes of Slavoj Zizek, Carol Dweck, Steven Pinker and Barbara Ehrenreich. Now RSA presents a video series created in an entirely different aesthetic. Above, you can watch the first of many “espre...
Tags: Psychology, Google, Facebook, College, Brene Brown, Brown, Facebook Twitter, Barbara Ehrenreich, RSA Royal Society of the Arts, Slavoj Zizek Carol Dweck Steven Pinker

With the pandemic boosting college stress, the UC system is boosting the course “Life 101”

Life would be easier if it came with instructions. For students throughout the University of California system, it soon will. Starting next month, “Life 101,” a two-unit course taught at UC Irvine since 2013, will be expanded and made available for students at any UC campus. In addition to helping students in everything from nutrition to health management, the course teaches students how to recognize and manage stress. With the pandemic in full swing, stress is ratcheting up. “My goal is for stu...
Tags: Health, News, Education, College, Sport, Soccer, Higher Education, Black Lives Matter, UC Berkeley, University Of California, Centers For Disease Control And Prevention, Ucla, UCI, UC Irvine, UC Riverside, Jafari

A Dictionary of Symbols: Juan Eduardo Cirlot’s Classic Study of Symbols Gets Republished in a Beautiful, Expanded Edition

How, exactly, does one go about making a global dictionary of symbols? It is a Herculean task, one few scholars would take on today, not only because of its scope but because the philological approach that gathers and compares artifacts from every culture underwent a correction: No one person can have the expertise to cover everything. Yet the attempts to do so have had tremendous creative value. Such explorations bring us closer to what makes humans the same the world over: our productive imag...
Tags: Psychology, Google, Art, Greece, College, Washington, India, History, Pandora, Francisco Franco, Campbell, Facebook Twitter, Carl Jung, Dada, University of Copenhagen, Joseph Campbell

The Gruesome Dollhouse Death Scenes That Reinvented Murder Investigations

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hdT8PgT19w Who can resist miniatures? Wee food, painstakingly rendered in felted wool… Matchbook-sized books you can actually read… Classic record albums shrunk down for mice… The late Frances Glessner Lee (1878-1962) definitely loved miniatures, and excelled at their creation, knitting socks on pins, hand rolling real tobacco into tiny cigarettes, and making sure the victims in her realistic murder scene dioramas exhibited the proper degree of rigor mort...
Tags: Psychology, Google, Art, Science, Sweden, Education, College, Life, Harvard University, Sherlock Holmes, Kate, Baltimore, Lee, Facebook Twitter, Woodman, Eliot

The Secret to High Performance and Fulfilment: Psychologist Daniel Goleman Explains the Power of Focus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTfYv3IEOqM “Concentration is one of the happiest things in my life,” says novelist Haruki Murakami in a 2011 New York Times Magazine profile. “If you cannot concentrate, you are not so happy.” In this, the author of A Wild Sheep Chase surely has the agreement of the author of Emotional Intelligence, the psychologist and writer Daniel Goleman. But Goleman expresses it a bit differently, as you can hear — in detail and at length — in “Focus: The Secret to H...
Tags: Psychology, Google, Facebook, College, Stanford, Neuroscience, Haruki Murakami, Seoul, New York Times Magazine, Simon, Facebook Twitter, Herbert Simon, Murakami, Daniel Goleman, Colin Marshall, Power of Focus

John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” & Bach’s “Prelude in C Major” Get Turned into Dazzling Musical Animations by an Artist with Synesthesia

Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul. —Wassily Kandinsky We may owe the history of modern art to the condition of synesthesia, which causes those who have it to hear colors, see sounds, taste smells, etc. Wassily Kandinsky, who pioneered abstract expressionism in the early 20th century, did so “after having an unusually visual response to a...
Tags: Psychology, Google, Music, Film, College, Neuroscience, Munich, Levy, John Coltrane, Wassily Kandinsky, Vladimir Nabokov, Coltrane, Facebook Twitter, Wagner, Bach, Josh Jones

How to De-Stress with Niksen, the Dutch Art of Doing Nothing

Stressed out? Overwhelmed? If you said no, I’d worry whether you have a functioning nervous system. For those of us who don’t get out much now because of the pandemic, even staying home has become a source of stress. We’re isolated or being driven up the wall by beloved family members. We’re grasping at every stress-relief tool we can find. For those who have to leave for work, especially in medicine, reading the headlines before masking up for a shift must make for higher than average b...
Tags: Health, Google, College, New York Times, Ikea, Rotterdam, Facebook Twitter, Marie Kondo, Josh Jones, Hygge, Gottfried, Scientific Research, Durham NC Follow, Erasmus University, Meet Life, Olga Mecking

Why Do People Join Cults? An Animated Primer Explains

As much as we might like to think we make free choices as rational individuals, we are all more or less suggestible and subject to social pressures. Social media marketers aren’t under any illusions about this. Guides for how to exploit psychological vulnerabilities and influence behavior proliferate. (One of the top-selling business books on Amazon is a manual titled Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.) Such techniques form the basis of a massive, global ad-based industry that also...
Tags: Psychology, Google, Amazon, College, America, United States, Carl Sagan, Christopher Hitchens, Facebook Twitter, DSM, Josh Jones, Isaac Asimov, Jonestown, Durham NC Follow, California State University Chico, Janja Lalich

Leonardo da Vinci’s Elegant Studies of the Human Heart Were 500 Years Ahead of Their Time

Leonardo da Vinci didn’t really have hobbies; he had passionate, unpaid obsessions that filled whole notebooks with puzzles scientists are still trying to solve. Many of the problems to which he applied himself were those none of his contemporaries understood, because he was the only person to have noticed them at all. The amateur anatomist was the first, for example, “to sketch trabeculae,” notes Medievalists.net, “and their snowflake-like fractal patterns in the 16th century.” These geometric...
Tags: Health, Google, Art, Biology, College, History, Facebook Twitter, Leonardo, Leonardo da Vinci, Josh Jones, Durham NC Follow

MIT Presents a Free Course on the COVID-19 Pandemic, Featuring Anthony Fauci & Other Experts

Most of us use the terms "coronavirus" and "COVID-19" to refer to the pandemic that has gone around the world this year. We do know, or can figure out, that the former term refers to a virus and the latter to the disease caused by that virus. But do we know the full name "severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2," or "SARS-CoV-2" for short? We will if we take the online course "COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2 and the Pandemic," which MIT is making available to the general public free online....
Tags: Health, Google, Facebook, Biology, College, America, Mit, Harvard, Current Affairs, Online Courses, Seoul, Anthony Fauci, Johns Hopkins, Facebook Twitter, Broad Institute, Richard Young

These Are the Most Important (Positive) Life Lessons I’ve Learned in Quarantine

Quarantine has taught me a lot about being the best version of myself -- here's what I've learned that can help you, too.
Tags: Productivity, College, Happiness, Mental Health, Positivity, College Life, Personal Style

Free Courses to Maintain Mental & Physical Health During a Pandemic

As I write this, the smoke from the numerous forest fires across California are making the air quality terrible, so we are being told to stay inside. However, the heatwave is making it insufferable to *be* inside. And we also have to be wary of COVID-19 and wear a mask. You could say this is a slightly stressful situation. And a lot of us are dealing with even more than that--job stability, rent, and on and on. Just typing this made me anxious! During this time we should try not to negle...
Tags: Psychology, Health, Google, Facebook, California, College, MOOCs, Santos, Coursera, Yale University, Emory University, Facebook Twitter, KCRW, Ted Mills, Laurie Santos, Coursera 's Science of Well Being

Fashion Masks 101: The 4 Types of Face Masks Every Girl Should Own

Stay safe while staying stylish.
Tags: Health, Accessories, Shopping, College

Feel Sad/Start Tearing Up Every time I Think about or See Something to Do with My Sister’s Boyfriend

About 1.5 years ago, my older sister was talking to our parents on the phone going somewhere and then said the person driving her was her boyfriend. This was the first time she had mentioned him to any of us and my initial reaction was running to my room and crying. At the time, I honestly didn’t even know why that reaction came out of me, and still, now I’m not completely sure. Especially since I was in my mid to late teens, I don’t know why I had such a childish reaction. On that day, my paren...
Tags: Psychology, Usa, General, College, Depression, Anxiety, Self-esteem, Teen Issues, Personality, Jealousy, Siblings, Abandonment, Teenager, Adolescence

What Happened When Americans Had to Wear Masks During the 1918 Flu Pandemic

Medical professionals have had a particularly difficult time getting people in the United States to act in unison for the public good during the pandemic. This has been the case with every step that experts urge to curb the spread of COVID-19, from closing schools, churches, and other meeting places, to enforcing social distancing and wearing masks over the nose and mouth in public spaces. The resistance may seem symptomatic of the contemporary political climate, but there is ample precedent fo...
Tags: Health, Google, College, US, Los Angeles, San Francisco, History, United States, Current Affairs, Paris, Manchester, Portland, Oakland, University Of Michigan, Facebook Twitter, Ewing

ICE Backs Down on Inhuman Threat to Strip Visas From International Students in Online Classes

After being sued by dozens of institutions, Donald Trump’s administration has backed off its bullshit plan to deny entry to international students (or require they leave the country) if their institutions switch to online-only instruction during the coronavirus pandemic.Read more...
Tags: Health, School, Science, Education, College, Ice, CBP, Donald Trump, Immigration And Customs Enforcement, Customs And Border Protection, Pandemic, Coronavirus, Covid 19, Sars Cov 2

Bill Nye Shows How Face Masks Actually Protect You–and Why You Should Wear Them

Like many Americans of my generation, I grew up having things explained to me by Bill Nye. Flight, magnets, simple machines, volcanoes: there seemed to be nothing he and his team of young lieutenants couldn't break down in a clear, humorous, and wholly non-boring manner. He didn't ask us to come to him, but met us where we already were: watching television. The zenith of the popularity of his PBS series Bill Nye the Science Guy passed a quarter-century ago, and the world has changed a bi...
Tags: Health, Google, Facebook, Science, Instagram, College, America, Nye, Seoul, Bill Nye, Facebook Twitter, Colin Marshall, Maria Popova, 21st Century Los Angeles

A Chilling Time-Lapse Video Documents Every COVID-19 Death on a Global Map: From January to June 2020

The story of the Coronavirus, at least in the US, has swung between a number of rhetorical tics now common to all of our discourse. Called a “hoax,” then given several racist nicknames and dismissed as a “nothing burger,” the pandemic—currently at around 3 million cases in the country, with a U.S. death toll over 130,000—has now become the “new normal,” a phrase that pops up everywhere you look. “This framing is inviting,” writes Chime Asonye at the World Economic Forum. It conveys “the ...
Tags: Health, Google, Instagram, Youtube, College, China, US, Current Affairs, Facebook Twitter, Beckwith, Durham NC Follow, Asonye, Isao Hashimoto, Chime Asonye, James Beckwith, Johns Hopkins Josh Jones