Experts say mental illness does not necessarily cause creativity, nor does creativity necessarily contribute to mental illness, but a certain ruminating personality type may contribute to both mental health issues and art.
.. “It’s pretty clear if you read [Wallace’s] books that he was a very obsessive, kind of ruminating guy,” said Paul Verhaeghen, associate professor of psychology at Georgia Institute of Technology.“You can see it in his sentences. … They’re breathless and they need to be annotated, and the annotations need to be annotated again.”.. They found that people with bipolar disorder scored better — up to about 50 percent higher — on creativity tests than the healthy control group. The creative control group had about the same increase in score relative to the healthy control group.
John Nash, ‘A Beautiful Mind’ Subject and Nobel Winner, Dies at 86
Dr. Nash was widely regarded as one of the great mathematicians of the 20th century, known for the originality of his thinking and for his fearlessness in wrestling down problems so difficult few others dared tackle them. A one-sentence letter written in support of his application to Princeton’s doctoral program in math said simply, “This man is a genius.”
.. A University of Chicago economist, Roger Myerson, went further, comparing the impact of Nash equilibrium on economics “to that of the discovery of the DNA double helix in the biological sciences.”
.. Dr. Nash’s solution, contained in a 27-page doctoral thesis he wrote when he was 21, provided a way of analyzing how each player could maximize his benefits
.. The Nobel, the publicity that attended it, and the making of the film were “a watershed in his life,” Dr. Kuhn said of Dr. Nash. “It changed him from a homeless unknown person who was wandering around Princeton to a celebrity, and financially, it put him on a much better basis.”
What are some cool psychological tricks to manipulate people?
- To know if someone is interested in your conversation look at their feet, if their feet are pointing towards you, they are interested. If their feet are pointing in another direction (other than you), they aren’t.
- Ask someone to trace an uppercase E on their forehead using their finger. If they draw it so you can read it, they’re doing what’s best for you and are generally empathetic. If they draw it facing themself, they are generally thinking of him or her self and aren’t generally empathetic.
Egocentric Connectivity: How friendship became a tool of the powerful
One of the key insights of behavioural economics is that, if one wants to control other human beings, it is often far more effective to appeal to their sense of morality and social identity than to their self-interest.
.. This is symptomatic of a more general shift in policy and business practices today. Across various fields of expertise, from healthcare to marketing, from military training to finance, there is rising hope that strategic goals can be achieved through harnessing the power of the “social”. But what exactly does this mean? As the era of social democracy recedes further into the past, the meaning of the term is undergoing a profound transformation. Where once the term implied something concerning society or the common good, increasingly it refers to a technique of psychological intervention on the individual. Informal social connections and friendships are being rendered more visible and measurable. In the process, they are being turned into possible instruments of power.
..Giving things away for free becomes a means of holding an audience captive or building a reputation, which can then be exploited with future sales or advertising. Michael O’Leary, boss of Ryanair, has even suggested that airline tickets might one day be priced at zero, with all costs recovered through additional charges for luggage, using the bathroom, skipping queues, and so on.
.. Marketing specialists now analyse the optimal way of saying the words “thank you” to a customer, so as to deepen the social relationship with them.
.. People will take more pleasure in buying things if the experience can be blended with something that feels like friendship and gift-exchange. The role of money must be airbrushed out of the picture wherever possible. As marketers see it, payment is one of the unfortunate “pain points” in any relationship with a customer, which requires anaesthetising with some form of more social experience. The market must be represented as something else entirely.
.. What has changed is that each one of us is now viewed as an instrument through which to alter the attitudes and behaviours of our friends and contacts. Behaviours and ideas can be released like “contagions”, in the hope of infecting much larger networks.
.. what has changed is not the role of the social in capitalism, but the capacity to subject it to a detailed, quantitative, economic analysis, thanks primarily to the digitisation of social relationships.
.. Problems such as obesity, poverty and depression, which so often coincide, locking people into chronic conditions of inactivity, are contagious. They move around like viruses in social networks, creating risks to individuals purely by virtue of the people they happen to hang out with.
.. Cacioppo’s research suggests that loneliness is an even greater health risk than smoking. Practices such as “social prescribing”, in which doctors recommend that individuals join a choir or voluntary organisation, are aimed at combating isolation and its tendency to lead to depression and chronic illness.
.. In reducing the social world to a set of mechanisms and resources, the question repeatedly arises as to whether social networks might be redesigned in ways to suit the already privileged. Networks have a tendency towards what are called power laws, whereby those with influence are able to harness that power to win even greater influence.
.. Different moods, including anger and depression, are now recognised to be more socially contagious than others.
.. The fabric of social life is now a problem that is addressed within the rubric of health policy, and there is something a little sad aboutthat. Loneliness now appears as an objective problem, but only because it shows up in the physical brain and body, with calculable costs for governments and health insurers.
.. The irony is that, for all the talk of giving and sharing, this is potentially an even more egocentric worldview than that associated with the market.
..What we witness, in the case of a social media addict, is only the more pathological element of a society that cannot conceive of relationships except in terms of the psychological pleasures that they produce. The person whose fingers twitch to check their Facebook page when they are supposed to be listening to their friend over a meal is a victim of a philosophy in which other people are only there to please, satisfy and affirm an individual ego from one moment to the next.
.. Viewing other people as instruments for one’s own pleasure represents a denial of the core ethical and emotional truths of friendship, love and generosity.
.. this inability to listen or empathise is a significant contributor to depression.
.. Unless we can recover the values associated with friendship and altruism, we will descend into a state of ennui.
..What we encounter in the current business, media and policy euphoria for being social is what might be called “neoliberal socialism”. Sharing is preferable to selling, so long as it does not interfere with the financial interests of dominant corporations. Appealing to people’s moral and altruistic sense becomes the best way of nudging them into line with agendas that they had no say over. Brands and behaviours can be unleashed as social contagions, without money ever changing hands.
.. we should remember that it was only a few years ago that Rupert Murdoch’s media empire was completely defeated in its efforts to turn Myspace into a profitable entity.