#27. The Best Thing For Being Sad
I'm sad. Like, heartbreakingly sad. Because, well, I’m a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and you've seen the news.
And I just wrote a big thing about dealing with and processing sadness, but it wasn't very good. And I think the reason it wasn't very good is because I don't have good answers. So, I won't be trying to solve anyone's problems today, with the exception of fulfilling this:
In The Once and Future King, T.H. White wrote,
“The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”
So we’re going to put the hard stuff behind us, and just talk about some interesting studies I’ve read this week.
#1. Let's Start With Handwriting
When I was in the 7th grade, my mom made my brother and I take a penmanship class during the summer, and I learned how to write perfect cursive--like, painfully perfect cursive. I got really good at it. And then I stopped taking the class and stopped using it.
But, I love handwriting. I have my own script, which is partially cursive and partially block lettering, and even I can't read it, but I find it so incredibly useful.
My current process when I'm doing a writing project is to fill a notebook (blank, unlined 5.5" x 8" sketchbook) with notes, always written in a 08 Micron pen. I have MANY of these notebooks, and I buy the pens in bulk. And so I get to work, writing outlines, and writing lists, and writing ideas, and writing problems, and the process of just writing everything down in this 100 page notebook, until I fill it all the way up, is what gets me ready to write the book.
But here's the thing: I never refer back to the notebook once I've written in it. The writing process--handwriting--is what gets my brain working through a problem. There's a great quote from Joan Didion that says "I never know what I think until I write it down," and that's absolutely true with me. Imagining a book without a pen in my hand is useless, because the ideas will go in one neuron and out the other. But writing it down: that works.
And there's science to back this up: one notable study by Professor Audrey van der Meer, from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) put electrodes on kids heads and did an EEG while they were handwriting, and then while they were typing. And handwriting was remarkably better and creating neural pathways.
“We show that when writing by hand, brain connectivity patterns are far more elaborate than when typewriting on a keyboard. Such widespread brain connectivity is known to be crucial for memory formation and for encoding new information and, therefore, is beneficial for learning.”
But that's old news. That's from 2005. The newer handwriting study came out just a couple years ago, this one from Frontiers in Psychology shows that marginalia--writing in the margins of the books you're reading, is extremely helpful to remembering and, more importantly, synthesizing the information you're reading.
(It's a BookTok trend to write in your books right now, so good for BookTok. They do it more cutesy that I do it.)
Anyway, if you want to understand something: write it down!
#2. We Need To Be More Like Ants
Organizational behavior research has shown that when people work together in groups, all of them--even the one person who ends up doing the most--all work less than if they were working individually. The analogy used in Scientific American is that if ten people are pulling on a rope, they will each pull with less strength than if they were pulling on it as an individual. And, to some extent, this is a good thing, right? There's the old adage of "Many hands make light work." It's easier if we do it together.
But you know who disagrees? Weaver ants from Asia. These ants, getting together, can do so much more than one lone ant (and ants are pretty tough anyway, as depicted by this weaver ant WHO HELD AN ENTIRE DEAD BIRD WITH HIS TINY LITTLE ANT LEGS.)
Anyway, the way they did the science is they hooked a pressure gauge up to a leaf, and then had ants try to pull that leaf away. When one ant tried to drag the leaf, it could pull 59 times their own weight. But when a whole bunch of ants (15 ants is a bunch) tried to pull the leaf, they pulled with 103 times their body weight! Working together, these little guys all got individually better.
(The way they do it is really cool, too, because it's not just like 15 ants all tugging on a leaf, but it's 15 ants making a formation that has what they refer to as "active pullers" in the front and "passive resistors" in the back. And, when they get organized, there ain't nuthin an ant can't do.) (Except, perhaps, move a rubbertree plant.)
#3. It's Fall: Time For Pumpkin Spice--LIKE OUR ANCIENT ANCESTORS USED TO DO IT
So, we know that we love our pumpkin spice, and it's in our coffees and caramels and candles and candy corns. BUT did you know that humans have been loving pumpkin spice for thousands of years??
We are by no means the biggest lovers of it. For starters, westerners started falling in love with pumpkin spice (most notably nutmeg) in the 1300s. James Munro, an economist from the University of Toronto, wrote “At one point in the 1300s, when tariffs were at their highest, a pound of nutmeg in Europe cost seven fattened oxen and was a more valuable commodity than gold." So, Starbucks doesn't have anything on the 1300s.
BUT: new findings in the Bandu Islands (which have long been referred to as the "Spice Islands" shows nutmeg residue on a pottery shard that dates back 3500 years! Yes, humans have been enjoying sweaters and bobbing for apples (presumably) for a long, long time.
Diversions and Distractions
Robert Redford passed away this last week, and I have been rewatching some of my favorite movies of his. Here are clips of the four I've watched this week:
