Mindful October 2016

Was Harvey Danger right when the band sang “If you’re bored, then you’re boring”? 68% say no What’s your go-to fidgeting method when you’re bored: 38% say they don’t fidget, as they’re perfectly comfortable to just sit and stare. Another 27% rearrange things arbitrarily, and 27% doodle. 8% bite their fingernails. Is boredom a good thing or a bad thing? 42% SAY IT’S NEITHER GOOD NOR BAD, and 24% say it’s both good and bad. 15% consider boredom entirely a bad thing, and 12% are ambivalent. Only 9% think boredom is good. Read our feature (on page 52) for a deeper look at boredom. What form of entertainment do you find most boring? WELL, THERE AREN’T MANY GAMERS AROUND HERE! At 46%, video games are considered by far the most…

Our must-read story this issue: “Building a City that Lives on Love” tells us how the mayor of Louisville is helping the city he loves become a place that is centered on human caring. On page 60. If you’re going to take something up—learning a language or taking a course in managing difficult people or, say, meditating—you’d probably like to know whether it’s going to work, why you’re doing it, and what you might get out of it. Increasingly, we like those answers to come, if at all possible, in the form of some kind of data. We want evidence. Which is probably why mindfulness has grown in popularity in the 30 years since researchers started studying its effects in earnest. The marriage of science and mindfulness has been a…

Meditation, so we have heard, allows us to connect with the world, and with ourselves, in a powerful way. With the help of a new app, you can now meditate to connect with the virtual world as well. Guided Meditation VR is the first virtual reality meditation app to hit the scene. Developed by Cubicle Ninjas, it allows you to “expand your mind,” by placing a headset over your eyes and ears and immersing yourself in a serene illustrated environment like a lush, sandy beach or a burnt orange and rusty red-hued treescape, while listening to a guided meditation of your choosing (the nine options include “Zen” and “Relaxation”). It’s just you and the raw, unfiltered world of virtual—that is, almost real—reality. It might be hard to get on side…

This year the California State Assembly passed a bill to ban orca captivity, and prohibit the use of orcas for entertainment, breeding, or exportation. Students and faculty from Greece's University of the Aegean built a giant chess board from lifejackets and lifeboats that helped refugees cross the sea, to symbolize the environmental and refugee crises. It turns out manners still matter. Believing a human being replied to every Google query, 86-year-old May Ashworth typed "please" and "thank you" with her searches. Google replied, "In a world of billions of Searches, yours made us smile." What to do with the world's ugliest color? Save lives! According to research, the color Pantone 448C makes people think of words like "death" and "tar," so in 2012 Australia started using it on cigarette packs.…

THE POWER OF OFF The Mindful Way to Stay Sane in a Virtual World Nancy Colier • Sounds True Having a universal communicator, satellite-driven locator, and encyclopedia of all knowledge everpresent at our fingertips is making us a little bit crazy, and—according Nancy Colier, one of the newest entrants in the tech-survival guide game—a little bit unkind. As a therapist she has a window onto how a “teched-out mind” can make you unhappy. Her stories are warm, sad, funny at times, and they start to make you think too much “convenience” can actually be very unconvivial. DRAWING YOUR OWN PATH 33 Practices at the Crossroads of Art and Meditation John F. Simon Jr. • Parallax If you like the idea of mindfulness coloring books but you’re more of a draw-outside-the-lines…

In the 1933 Marx Brothers classic Duck Soup, Chico Marx asks, “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?” The late great comedian Richard Pryor changed it to “lyin’ eyes” in one of his classic bits, using humor to underline a very serious point: At the very level of perception, our eyes are already lying to us, because of how our brains have been conditioned to see. A growing body of research is showing that what we see when we see a face is so strongly shaped by stereotypes, beliefs, and attitudes that we literally see features, expressions, and emotions that aren’t there and can actually—at least at first—misperceive sex, race, and expressions. We instantly classify a face by sex, race, age, social status, and emotion, the strongest…