Gynomite’s Reading Room!
No matter how skeptical you think you are, you still believe in magical thinking. Let Psychology Today prove it.
You wouldn’t want to be at the skeptic end of the spectrum anyway. “To be totally ‘unmagical’ is very unhealthy,” says Peter Brugger, head of neuropsychology at University Hospital Zurich. He has data, for example, strongly linking lack of magical ideation to anhedonia, the inability to experience pleasure. “Students who are ‘not magical’ don’t typically enjoy going to parties and so on,” he says. He’s also found that there’s a key chemical involved in magical thinking. Dopamine, a neurotransmitter that the brain uses to tag experiences as meaningful, floods the brains of schizophrenics, who see significance in everything, but merely trickles in many depressives, who struggle to find value in everyday life.
Here’s Michael Stipe’s penis!
An excellent essay about character-building in education, and how sorely we need it.
Did you know that orange juice is fresh-squeezed, but then put into a vat where all the oxygen is sucked out, so it can stay good for a full year. Yup. Read the creepy truth here.
