Geekissues

My general blog consumption consists of loads of tech and loads of creative inspiration stuff. This suits me quite down to the ground as it’s what I do & what makes me tick.

But there’s 1 single blog I subscribe to that isn’t either of these by a long shot. A little while ago I saw a really interesting video interview Jonah Lehrer and just couldn’t help myself in following him. Unfortunately I don’t often take the time to read his articles as they’re intense and because they’re so different from everything else I digest it can be a rather taxing task, but this one in particular caught my attention: The Stress Spiral.

Some excerpts:

…experiments in which chronically stressed rats lost their elastic rat cunning and instead fell back on familiar routines and rote responses, like compulsively pressing a bar for food pellets they had no intention of eating….

…In other words, the rodents were now cognitively predisposed to keep doing the same things over and over, to run laps in the same dead-ended rat race rather than seek a pipeline to greener sewers…

…an experimental exercise known as the “suppression task”. Subjects are given four random words, two of which are printed in blue and two in green. After reading the words, they’re told to forget all the blue words and remember all the green words. Then, the scientists provide a steady stream of “probe words” and ask the subjects whether or not each probe is one of the words they were asked to remember. Interestingly, Jonides has found differences between clinically depressed and control subjects on the suppression task. While people suffering from depression perform normally when trying to forget words with a positive association (“smile,” “sunny,” etc.), they’re much worse at forgetting words with a negative association, such as “hurtful” or “lonely”. This suggests that being depressed primes us to fixate on problems, on all the things that are wrong with us and the world. The end result is a recursive loop of miserable thoughts, which leads to more stress, and more misery….

There you have it, just snap out if it and you’ll be fine.

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