Two experiments revealed that (i) people can more accurately predict their affective reactions to a future event when they know how a neighbor in their social network reacted to the event than when they know about the event itself and (ii) people do not believe this. Undergraduates made more accurate predictions about their affective reactions to a 5-minute speed date (n = 25) and to a peer evaluation (n = 88) when they knew only how another undergraduate had reacted to these events than when they had information about the events themselves. Both participants and independent judges mistakenly believed that predictions based on information about the event would be more accurate than predictions based on information about how another person had reacted to it.

The “I am doing” mind hack: Being present is important, but I find it hard to be mindful when I’m busy or stuck in my head. To get yourself back into the moment while doing something common, such as drinking your morning coffee, try this re-centering technique: Simply tell yourself what you’re doing right now in very simple language, such as “I am drinking chocolate” or “I am playing with my daughter.”


The latest memoir we've been reading is Betty MacDonald's "The Plague and I," the 1948 follow-up to her wildly successful 1945 humorous memoir about being a chicken-farmer, "The Egg and I." (The latter book also introducing Ma and Pa Kettle into popular culture, so please appreciate the research that goes into these posts.)

"The Plague and I" is a most unusual follow-up, in that it documents the nine months MacDonald spent in a tuberculosis sanatorium in Seattle in 1938, when she was 30 years old. This was, remember, a time before antibiotics so the treatments and the martial discipline imposed on the patients to cure them seem draconian and almost inhumane today. Yet, despite the harshness and coldness of the regimen -- and, often, the nurses -- she tells the story with warmth, humor, and jaw-dropping details, and credits the sanatorium with saving her life. In the last chapter, she finds that adjusting to "normal" life proves just as difficult as her entry into the sanatorium.

One of the episodes she writes about is the institution's inane "occupational therapy" -- here, "occupational" meaning "to busy one's hands to take your mind off your troubles" rather than, as Betty hoped, "to prepare for a job when we finally make it out of here." Instead, the OT leader has her charges make what Betty calls "toecovers." Her description of toecovers had Liz in stitches so I thought it would be worth preserving here. It's a nice homely word for something this world still needs a name for.

Toecover is a family name for a useless gift. A crocheted napkin ring is a toecover. So are embroidered book marks, large figurines of a near-together-eyed shepherdess, pin-cushion covers done in French knots, a satin case for snapfasteners (with a card of snapfasteners tactfully enclosed so you won't make a mistake and think it a satin case for hooks-and-eyes or old pieces of embroidery thread), embroidered coat hangars, hand-painted shoe trees (always painted with a special paint that never dries), home-made three-legged footstools with the legs spaced unevenly so the footstool always lies on one side, cross-stitched pictures of lumpy brown houses with "The houfe by the fide of the road" worked in Olde Englishe underneath, hand-decorated celluloid soap cases for traveling with tops that once off will never fit back on the bottom, crocheted paper knife handle covers complete with tassel, bud vases made out of catsup bottles, taffeta bed pillows heavily shirred and apparently stuffed with iron filings, poorly executed dolls whose voluminous skirt are supposed to cover telephones.

A toecover is not a thing that follows economic cycles. During the depression when everyone was making her own Christmas presents, toecovers abounded. In good times toecovers are not made at home but are bought in the back of Gifte Shoppes whose main income is from the lending library in the front.


Kindle for Mac

In late August, I had bought Timothy Pychyl's e-book The Procrastinator's Digest via Xlibris for use with Adobe Digital Editions. (I subscribe to Pychyl's iProcrastinate podcast.) However, trying to get Adobe Digital Editions set up and registered on my MacBook was a pain, and then my credit card number was stolen suspiciously close to the Xlibris purchase. Then, over the weekend (as I was procrastinating on my research project and, thus, decided that reading his e-book would be nourishing for me) I could not for the life of me find the file that I had downloaded.

I saw that Pychyl's e-book was available on Kindle and also happened to see in the margin of the book's Amazon page that Amazon is releasing Kindle software (free!) for other platforms -- including the Mac. The install went great and I was able to quickly download Pychyl's book into the Kindle software. Whilst there, I also downloaded a few of the free e-books, just to play. Everything went very smoothly.
And no, I did not start reading the procrastination book. I had spent so much time looking for my original download and playing with the Kindle software, that time demanded I move on to other chores. Maybe later.



Alex Lickerman is a physician and practices Nichiren Buddhism, and he writes a weekly blog titled Happiness in this World. Each post is calm, sane, sensible, well-reasoned, and usually includes those boldface steps on things to do or remember that us blog-readers love to bookmark yet never follow up on.

His post on How to Thwart Panic struck very close to home for me as I experienced that feeling quite a bit this past spring. As he says, the mind cannot always be trusted. It has picked up habits of thought that do not serve us anymore and that we would do well to challenge.

Alex provides good basic info, but a few details to some of his points may help.

  • When you feel yourself starting to panic or feel anxious, examine the thought and try to classify it based on this list of cognitive distortions. These distortions, and the idea of mentally challenging these thoughts, was popularized by David Burns' book Feeling Good. I would say that book, and a later book by Burns, When Panic Attacks, offer terrific advice and dozens of techniques to employ that will help you get over panic, procrastination, and other mental maladies.
  • When in the throes of panic, stopping to rate the discomfort on a 1-10 or 1-100 scale is a good way to take a step back and look at yourself objectively. Moving from an all-or-nothing mindset to more of a continuum mindset has been very helpful for me.
  • Burns has a very good and easy technique where you draw a line down the middle of a sheet of paper, write the anxiety-producing thought on the left side, and then on the right, identify the type of cognitive distortion you're using, and then write a logical refutation of the bad thought. The trick to this is that your refutation has to be something your brain will believe. It can't be a cliché; it needs to make sense. So if the bad thought is, "I'll never get this project done," I would identify that as a magnification error (or awfullizing as Albert Ellis would call it), and then write this refutation, "I have gotten many other projects done in the past, and I will certainly get *this* project done. I may not get it done in the next 5 minutes, but I can certainly work on a piece of it right now. I've found that in the past, when I start working on a project, and taking action, the anxiety tends to dissipate very quickly."

The Suck Fairy

From Jo Walton at comes the idea of The Suck Fairy, that scourge of re-reading that somehow curdles fondly remembered books upon second reading. Working alongside the Suck Fairy are her siblings the Racism Fairy, the Sexism Fairy, and the Homophobia Fairy, according to Walton.

One might add the Bad Writing Fairy; sometimes re-reading fondly remembered pulp adventures from my junior high school years (I'm looking at you, Doc Savage) highlights the sheer awfulness of the prose.

My nephew's philosophy

My brother's oldest son, Stuart, was asked by his teacher what he liked about school. He answered, "It's not about what I like, it's what I have to get used to."