"It’s the kind of film Freud, or more likely Jung, would have delighted in deconstructing."

It's really not shocking that the man who brought us Memento and The Dark Knight would make another critically acclaimed film. Memento focused on the problems of memory and loss, while The Dark Knight reveled in nihilism and fate. From what I've seen of the trailer, Inception appears to focus on perception, dreams, and reality. It's always a treat to watch a movie that engages the senses and the mind.

the cult of celebrity

Stop and think: what magazines do you pick up when you're shopping at the grocery store? Do you grab a People or an Us Weekly? Perhaps an OK or a Hello!? Do you subscribe to these types of magazines, sifting through them as soon as they arrive in the mail?

Maybe you're only a casual reader, looking for a diversion while pushing your shopping cart through the check-out counter. Perhaps you peruse them when you're resting from working out at the gym. Maybe you watch Entertainment Tonight or Extra! now and then. Or perhaps, there's something more going on...

The American historian and educator Daniel Boorstin once wrote, “Time makes heroes but dissolves celebrities.”

We have just experienced an historic presidential campaign of unprecedented proportions, our economy is in peril, our military struggles to fight two wars, and our health care system is facing impending collapse. With all of these pressing issues weighing on the hearts and minds of America’s families, what seems to be on the covers of every magazine and tabloid these days? Celebrity nonsense. Does anyone really care which teen-aged pop star will give birth next? Do we need to know every happening inside the birthday party of a power-couple’s toddler? Is the diet that worked for the soap opera star really going to work for anyone else?

As long as there have been people who pulled away from the proverbial pack, there have been people to follow them and idolize them. However, scientists have only recently defined the psychological phenomenon of “celebrity worship” as a type of parasocial relationship that can have unhealthy and addictive elements.

Read the rest.

does height make a difference when it comes to the presidency?

This chart shows that America tends to vote for the man who is taller and/or heavier. The more there is of a man, the more America likes him for the presidency. I guess it's better for us to have a president who has enough weight to make a difference when he throws it around.

You do realize who the taller man is in this election cycle, don't you?

Apparently, thousands of women are experiencing hysteria because Sarah Palin could be the next Veep

Senator McCain's selection of Governor Palin of Alaska as his running mate, which was hailed in some quarters and met with skepticism in others, is sparking intense reactions from some New Yorkers, who report being driven to fits of rage and even all-consuming panic.

All of my women friends, a week ago Monday, were on the verge of throwing themselves out windows," an author and political activist, Nancy Kricorian of Manhattan, said yesterday. "People were flipping out. ... Every woman I know was in high hysteria over this. Everyone was just beside themselves with terror that this woman could be our president — our potential next president."

Thanks, Josh Gerstein, for bring to mind an old psychological term. You know what I immediately think of when I hear the word hysteria?

This:

Albert Ellis, 1913-2007

Albert Ellis, the recognized father of Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT), has died at age 93.

“The trouble with most therapy is that it helps you to feel better,” he said in a 2004 article in The New York Times. “But you don’t get better. You have to back it up with action, action, action.”

Very true, Dr. Ellis.

"I am cut"

Cindy Swanson's talking about something that many teen girls - and even adults - are doing today: releasing emotional tension by physically mutilating themselves, or in other words, cutting. She has some links as well.

like the corners of my mind...

Barbra sang about memories and how "what's too painful to remember we simply choose to forget." It seems that she wasn't too far off from how our memory works. Sometimes forgetting something can be a useful thing.

Whether drawing a mental blank on a new A.T.M. password, a favorite recipe or an old boyfriend, people have ample opportunity every day to curse their own forgetfulness. But forgetting is also a blessing, and researchers reported on Sunday that the ability to block certain memories reduces the demands on the brain when it is trying to recall something important.

The study, appearing in the journal Nature Neuroscience, is the first to record visual images of people’s brains as they suppress distracting memories. The more efficiently that study participants were tuning out irrelevant words during a word-memorization test, the sharper the drop in activity in areas of their brains involved in recollection. Accurate remembering became easier, in terms of the energy required.

Blocking out a distracting memory is something like ignoring an old (and perhaps distracting) acquaintance, experts say: it makes it that much harder to reconnect the next time around. But recent studies suggest that the brain plays favorites with memories in exactly this way, snubbing some to better capture others. A lightning memory, in short, is not so much a matter of capacity as it is of ruthless pruning — and the new study catches the trace of this process at it happens.

“We’ve argued for some time that forgetting is adaptive, that people actively inhibit some memories to facilitate mental focus,” as when they are trying to recall a friend’s new phone number or the location of a parking space, said Michael Anderson, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Oregon.

Dr. Anderson, who was not involved in the new research, said it was "important new work because it maps out how this is happening neurobiologically.”

But what about when you get older, and you can't remember where the keys are?

The findings should also reduce some of the anxiety surrounding “senior moments,” researchers say. Some names, numbers and details are hard to retrieve not because memory is faltering, but because it is functioning just as it should.

Ah, good to know. Of course, those senior moments are sometimes an indication of something more insidious at work.

time at work

American workers, on average, spend 45 hours a week at work, but describe 16 of those hours as “unproductive,” according to a study by Microsoft. America Online and Salary.com, in turn, determined that workers actually work a total of three days a week, wasting the other two. And Steve Pavlina, whose Web site (stevepavlina.com) describes him as a “personal development expert” and who keeps incremental logs of how he spends each working day, urging others to do the same, finds that we actually work only about 1.5 hours a day. “The average full-time worker doesn’t even start doing real work until 11:00 a.m.,” he writes, “and begins to wind down around 3:30 p.m.” (NY Times)

Well, if you're like many people at work, you spend at least part of your time in nonwork-related activites, like reading, playing games on the internet, or... blogging.

A few companies are taking the concept of “watch what I produce, not how I produce it” even further. At the headquarters of Best Buy in Minneapolis, for instance, the hot policy of the moment is called ROWE, short for Results Only Work Environment.

There workers can come in at four or leave at noon, or head for the movies in the middle of the day, or not even show up at all. It’s the work that matters, not the method. And, not incidentally, both output and job satisfaction have jumped wherever ROWE is tried.

In other words, what looks like wasting time from where you sit, could be a whirl of creative thought from where I sit. And, with due respect to Mr. Gilbreth, all the energy that’s been poured into trying to force everyone to work at the same pace and in the same way — it seems that’s the real waste of time.

Of course, not everyone can do this. It's nigh impossible to slough off at work in a hospital setting, especially if you're a doctor or nurse. My work is entirely client-driven: if there aren't clients to see, I have no work to do. Of course, many people in the Indianapolis area have been in crisis mode lately, so I haven't had too much downtime.