Mindful June 2017

Have you ever dreamed of becoming an artist? What's your creative outlet of choice? In order of popularity: 1 Writing 2 Cooking 3 Photography 4 Drawing 5 Textiles 6 Dancing 7 Painting 8 Music 9 Acting Do you believe creativity is learned or inherent? Learned: 14% Inherent: 46% Not sure: 40% Does your creativity thrive in peace or chaos? In peace: 61% In chaos: 8% Doesn't matter: 31% Do you have a song that pumps you up when you’re doing creative work? • “I prefer quiet.” • “Anything delightfully cheesy.” • “‘Lose Yourself’ by Eminem” • “Random Spotify song. One song. Then silence.” • “‘Dancing On My Own’ by Robyn.” Are you more creative by yourself or with others? BY MYSELF WITH OTHERS Who is the most creative person you…

Barry Boyce Editor-in-Chief barry@mindful.org Our must-read story this issue: In “The Mind Set Free,” Hugh Delehanty learns how to let his creativity run wild. On page 54. Read a short report on the scientific research behind the value of making mistakes at mindful.org/mistakes At this year’s Academy Awards, the night’s big award, best picture, was largely a contest between two movies: La La Land, a bubbly, lighter-than-air musical depicting beautiful people traipsing through the hills, valleys, boulevards, and freeways of LA; and Moonlight, a gritty coming-of-age story about a young African American marginalized not only through racial discrimination but because he is poor, gay, and being raised by a mother addicted to drugs. Despite its grave theme, Moonlight uplifts; it’s about resilience and love in the face of untold odds.…

Putting Emotions on the Map It’s hard to talk about emotions and to get a feel for how they work. To offer some aid, emotion researcher Paul Ekman teamed up with the Dalai Lama and data visualization firm Stamen to create the Atlas of Emotions, a website that allows you to explore the dimensions of your emotions to help “increase choice in what we become emotional about and how we respond.” Universal emotions, clockwise from top: anger, disgust, sadness, enjoyment, and fear. Clicking one at atlasofemotions.org shows an interactive diagram with more detail on that emotion. The New Picture of Health We all know that engaging in healthful habits—and eliminating the unhealthy ones—promotes physical and psychological well-being. But knowing what to do to be healthier and actually doing it isn’t…

EXTRAORDINARY ACTS OF KINDNESS When a man showed up at an airport with his toddler daughter, he was unpleasantly surprised to learn that, having just turned two, she now needed her own ticket, and he couldn’t afford it. A nearby stranger noticed and, without hesitation, she bought the $749 ticket. The city of Indianapolis installed tiny ramps along its downtown canal in order to save ducklings and other small semi-aquatic animals from drowning. The ramps, made of wood and insulation (to help them float), allow the birds to mount the canal’s concrete edge with ease. A Kinder Sesame Street We know Oscar is grouchy, but can he learn to be more kind? The folks behind Sesame Street think so. Responding to parental concerns about the unkind state of today’s world,…

Litknitbits is an Etsy shop that buys and sells high-quality knitted goods made by senior women living in poverty or alone. The page reads: “We pay them generously, visit them and provide an opportunity to still feel needed and participate in the society.” Beth and Dave Cutlip, co-owners of Southside Tattoo parlor in Baltimore, set aside time to cover up harmful tattoos for free. Many of their customers got inked with gang signs, swastikas, and other offensive symbols in their youth, and the Cutlips want to help them put their past in the past. Peaceful Cuisine, a YouTube cooking channel from Japan, abandons the cacophony of your average food show. Each episode walks through a single recipe, often without any soundtrack but the soothing sounds of slicing and dicing. Working…

Whether you are an avid reader of psychology news or just a casual one, you’ve probably run across a plethora of fascinating findings about human behavior, thought, and emotion. This barrage of findings isn’t surprising. Unlike studies in, say, molecular biology, psychology research has a lower barrier to entry: Plan your experiment, get funding and approval, recruit participants (often, handy undergraduates, or even volunteers in cyberspace), and you’re good to go. No complicated cell cultures or care-intensive lab animals required. Unfortunately, consumers of psychology research—all of us who find it captivating, even revelatory, because it tells us about how we are put together—would do well to be as critical as the many Amazon customers who carefully scrutinize their order and send back anything that falls short. Why? Because psychology is…