Link Banana

Rob Walker has an interesting, if sometimes shallow-feeling, exploration of the increasingly common practice of reviving old brand names that people remember faintly. It an interesting look at psychology and the logic of branding.

Too many such deals, or the wrong kinds, can boomerang: this happens with some regularity in the fashion world, when a famous designer name gets spread over so many products, with so little regard to quality, that the entire image of the brand sinks. Still, if you see a ladder made by Stanley, you may well think, Well, there’s a name I can trust. What you’re trusting, though, isn’t Stanley workers in Stanley factories upholding Stanley traditions and values under the watchful eye of Stanley managers. What you’re trusting is Stanley’s recognition that a badly made ladder with the Stanley name on it could be highly damaging to the Stanley brand. You are trusting Stanley’s recognition of the value of its brand and its competence in defending that value.

Sue Halpern wrote a long but rather good exploration of the use of virtual reality as a way to treat American soldiers with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. This paragraph caught my eye (and made my think about the paralyzing cult of manliness):

When Travis Boyd was first asked to consider enrolling in the Virtual Iraq clinical trial, he was hesitant. He had already decided not to talk to his division therapist, because “I didn’t want to have it on my military record that I was crazy,” he said. And he was a marine. “Infantry is supposed to be the toughest of the tough. Even though there was no punishment for going to therapy, it was looked down upon and seen as weak. But V.R. sounded pretty cool. They hook you up to a machine and you play around like a video game.” Telling his buddies that he was going off to do V.R. was a lot easier than telling them he was seeing a shrink.

That title’s silly, but Arthur Shapiro’s Illusion Sciences blog is has some very cool stuff.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

It’s Science Saturday on Bloggingheads and today’s discussion is especially interesting. Yale psychologist Paul Bloom and UNC (experimental) philosopher Joshua Knobe discuss how morality comes about and persists. Fascinating stuff.

Stefan Klein penned a pretty neat Op-Ed about time in today’s New York Times. I can say I’ve experienced this exact thing before:

Believing time is money to lose, we perceive our shortage of time as stressful. Thus, our fight-or-flight instinct is engaged, and the regions of the brain we use to calmly and sensibly plan our time get switched off. We become fidgety, erratic and rash.

Tasks take longer. We make mistakes — which take still more time to iron out. Who among us has not been locked out of an apartment or lost a wallet when in a great hurry? The perceived lack of time becomes real: We are not stressed because we have no time, but rather, we have no time because we are stressed.

Elizabeth Kolbert offers a solid review of two recent books in the fascinating field of behavioral economics. I thought this anectdote, among others, was interesting:

This effect is called “anchoring,” and, as Ariely points out, it punches a pretty big hole in microeconomics. When you walk into Starbucks, the prices on the board are supposed to have been determined by the supply of, say, Double Chocolaty Frappuccinos, on the one hand, and the demand for them, on the other. But what if the numbers on the board are influencing your sense of what a Double Chocolaty Frappuccino is worth? In that case, price is not being determined by the interplay of supply and demand; price is, in a sense, determining itself.

Robin Henning has a great story about the study and science supporting the usefulness (or uselessness) of play. She comes to a positive but reserved conclusion:

It’s a pretty idea, the notion that play gives you hope for a better tomorrow, but science demands something a little less squishy. Science demands that if there are important long-term benefits to play, they must be demonstrated. That is why studies of play-deprived rats are so fascinating; they offer objective evidence that in at least some animals, insufficient play can have serious consequences.

Judith Warner makes the case that we may not be as drug-obsessed as people (like myself) tend to think.

Just because it feels like, just because it sounds like, just because soaring drug company profits and obnoxious direct to consumer advertising seem to indicate that everyone around us is popping pills like mad doesn’t mean that they are doing so. Nor does it mean that we’re in the grip of some new, previously unheard-of, and uniquely epoch-defining social phenomenon. […]

All of which suggests that what social critics now identify as the signature event of our time (the urge to manage psychic pain through substance use) may, in fact, almost always have been a facet of the human condition. It may just be that we’re better at it than ever before – with cleaner, safer, less addictive and debilitating tools at our disposal.

I finally got around to watching the most recent Frontline, “The Medicated Child.” It’s a very informative — and perhaps troubling, depending on your feelings — journey into the disorganized world of child psychiatry. You can, as with all episode of Frontline (and most other PBS shows), watch the whole thing online — the link’s around the middle of the page.

Alison Buckholtz has a interesting look into the world of a synesthete — herself. Synthesia, which has always fascinated me, it essentially the mixing of senses. Like, as Buckholtz describes, numbers having innate colors.

I didn’t worry about colors for many years, and though I retained all of my lifelong synesthetic associations, I only rarely generated new ones. Occasionally, I met a person whose color was obvious and unmistakable, and I couldn’t shake the connection. In fact, I named my daughter Esther, in part, because her color matched her name, which to me is pink. Even now it brings me deep aesthetic and emotional satisfaction to know that she and her name are so well-paired.

Finally, in my early 30s, I read a short piece on synesthesia in a scientific journal. Decades of tension I never knew I’d carried instantly lifted. My freakishness had a name. And actually, I wasn’t a freak at all. I wasn’t the only one perceiving my surroundings in technicolor. I recognized myself in sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph.

Psychology Today reports on the theory that dreams are primarily ways that people act out potentially dangerous situations that they’ll encounter or have encountered.

If the threat-simulation theory is correct, dreams should focus on the self, and when confronted with a threat, the dream self should react realistically to ensure its own survival and that of its loved ones. And so it is. We are the heroes of our own dreams. We don’t dream about other people’s adventures or about fictional superheroes battling monsters. We dream about ourselves.

If dreams evolved to simulate the threats in our environment, then being exposed to more dangers in real life should activate the nightmare function, overstuffing our dreams with threats. This is precisely what happens. Even a single exposure to a life-threatening situation can plunge a person into an inferno of post-traumatic nightmares, dreams in which the threatening event—the attack, the rape, the war—is repeated over and over in every possible variation.

(via donklephant)