What is Love?

I used to think quite a lot about love such as: What is true love? What's the main characteristics of love? Without longing, desire, jealousy, is love still love? How to love appropriately? Why love? Why do we love one particular person rather than someone else? Must love be exclusive? Can we truly love more than one person at a time? All these questions have whirled around fiercely in my head quite a lot time, and I still get no single answer in black and white.

Recently I happened to watch the old informative talk given by an famous anthropologist Helen Fisher, in which she tried to explore the role human brain plays in love.

She mentioned 3 main characteristics of romantic love:

1. craving, an intense craving to be with a particular person, not just sexually, but emotionally.
2. motivation: want this person irrepressible
   
3. obsession: all day, all night, you just can't stop thinking about this person

It was said there are three brain systems:lust, romantic love and attachment. These three brain systems don't always go together, which means you can have a deep attachment to one person while you feel intense romantic love for someone else. In other words, we are capable of loving more than one person at a time.

Today is a really bad day for me. No way to be out of the glum silence, no one to share, I turn to surfing again. (Yes, I know I'm desperated. If it were before, I can call you. You used to have such magic power to change my mood in one second just by chitchat. ) Then one post written by another famous sociologist Li Yinghe is catching my eyes. She is defensing for a trendy lifestyle with multiple intimate relationships among a small group. She refers the exclusivity of love to a way of thinking, an ethic, not to be born with nature.

Well, it also occurs to me that the characters, the plots in some movies like "The Gloomy Sunday", "The End of Affair" are not too eccentric to imagine, not too weird to exist. At least, there are reasonable explanations and evidences both from psychophysiology and sociology.

Though they still can't answer all my questions clearly, to some point, they provide a new angle to see.

头脑迷思之七 —— The Paradox of Choice

Life is a matter of choice.

We all agree that a life without significant choice would be unlivable. But this is only right to some degree. As revealed by recent studies in pshchology the explosion of choice often makes for misery. Barry Schwartz had a talk in TED to share his deep insight of the negative effects coming from abundant choice:

1. It will produce paralysis rather liberation. —— With so many choices to choose from, people find it difficult to choose at all.
2. Even we manage to overcome the paralysis and make a choice, we end up less satisfied with the result of our choice than we would be.

Why the more is not always better than less? Several factors are contributing to this conclusion

• Regret: It's easy to imagine that you could have made a different choice that would have been better. This imagined alternative induces you to regret the decision you made, and this regret subtracts from the satisfication you get out from the decision you made, even it was a good decision. The more options there are, the easier it is to regret anything at all that is disappointing about the option you chose. Kind of a double whammy.
• Opportunity cost: The quality of any given option cannot be assessed in isolation from its alternatives. How much the way in which we value things depends on what we compare them to as indicated by Dan Gilbert in another TED talk. Opportunity cost substract from the satificaton we get out of what we choose, even what we choose is terrific. The more options there to consider, the more attractive features of these options are going to be reflected by us as opportunity cost. The problem of opportunity costs will be worse for a maximizer (the best standard) than for a satisficer (good enough philosophy).
• Esclation of expectations: Adding options to people's life can't help but increase the expectations people have about these options would be, and what that's going to produce is less satification with the fruits of their efforts. On the other hand, people's adaptation will result in good feeling satiate and bad feeling escalate over time.
• Self-blame: when we make decisions, experience the consequences and find that they do not live up to expectations, weblame ourselves.

All these points made by Barry Schwartz support my previous arguement, if you love sb. enough, do not let her choose when facing important and difficult decision-making. You can take her needs into consideration, you can discuss with her thoroughly about pros and cons of different choices, but it should be you to make the tough call. Otherwise, you are shifting your responsibility to her. You are making her more depressed when the choice can't live up to your expectations and aspirations.

Besides, this is also supporting another "theory" in my youth, that is, I prefer the deep relationship with less friends to the shallow relationship with more friends. In general, it gives me a very clear priority list and is not hard to choose when conflict happens.

p.s. Barry Schwartz should take all the credits for this post. If you are interested, go here to watch it and there to read it.

The Essential Reading (5)

Source: Talking about art can alter our appreciation of it

Various studies show that attempting to verbalise our feelings can distort our later choices. Coincidently it is also mentioned in Malcom Gladwell's best selling book 《Blink》 which I just read a few days before.

Source: A cognitive metamorphosis

Do you like the Kafkaesque literature or other existentialist writing? Have you ever thought about how these seemingly nonsense connected to our cognitive need?

Recent studies suggest that Kafkaesque threats on life’s meaning might actually prime our need for (and perception of) order and pattern in the world. A disorienting literary experience appears to have sharpened the volunteers’ yearning for meaning on a fundamental cognitive level. As irrepressible meaning makers, the need for order and predictability may be fundamental to the human condition.

Source: Placebo Effect

A series of articles discussed the effect of placebo. Though I knew it for a while, the following distinction is new for me:

The term 'placebo effect' is used to refer to two things in the medical literature. The first is a statistical concept and it refers to the improvement in patients given an inactive treatment in a drug trial in comparison to those given the actual drug. The second is a psychological concept and it refers to improvement due to expectancy and belief.

The Essential Reading (4) —— 鬼压身

An article today remind me the old discussion about sleep phenomenon "鬼压身" between us.

It seems this kind of experience is remarkably common and has its academic name: Sleep paralysis. It is a period of transient, consciously experienced paralysis either when going to sleep or waking up. During an episode the individual is fully conscious, able to open their eyes but aware that it is not possible to move limbs, head or trunk. There may be also be the perception of respiratory difficulties and, understandably, acute anxiety. In addition, the individual might experience hallucinations including proprioceptive、tactile、auditory hallucinations、visual hallucinations、olfactory or gustatory hallucinations.

It appears that up to 50 per cent of the population will experience sleep paralysis in one form or another at least once in their lifetime, and some people experience it far more often than that.

Throughout the world it has been interpreted with a diverse and colourful range of terms and cultural explanations:

Ghost oppression —— China
‘Old Hag’ —— Newfoundland
attacks from ‘shaman or malevolent spirits’ —— the Inuit of Canada
kanashibari —— Japan
kokma —— St Lucia
ha-wi-nulita —— Korea
‘witch-ridden’ —— Europe, from the 1500s until the 1700s
succubus (attacks by sex-crazed demons in female form)/incubus (in male form)—— Europe, Middle Ages

Sleep paralysis can be considered to be an intrusion of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep characteristics into wakefulness. Shiftwork, jetlag, irregular sleep habits, overtiredness and sleep deprivation are all considered to be predisposing factors to sleep paralysis.

Details please go to here:

The Essential Reading (3)

The Curse of Knowledge:

Encountering with a new concept, so-called the curse of knowledge, which means that once you’ve become an expert in a particular subject, it’s hard to imagine not knowing what you do. As a result, the more you know, the worse you become at communicating that knowledge. This phenomenon comes from that human has the difficulty of getting a thought out of our own heads and into the heads of others. Paradoxically familiarity is one things that gets in the way of clarity.

What you don't know about your friends:

A pretty striking finding reported in The Boston Global: On the whole, we know significantly less about our friends, colleagues, and even spouses than we think we do. Such blind spots might simply be an unavoidable product of the way human beings forge personal bonds. Even in close relationships, there are holes in what we know about each other, and we fill them with our own assumptions.

In situations where there’s any ambiguity, people tend to simply project their feelings and thoughts onto others. The main hurdle is the way we talk to those we’re close to: we do that by focusing on areas of agreement and avoiding topics that might cause friction. Our natural tendency toward comradeship makes us, ironically, leery of learning too much about the people we’re befriending.

However it turns out a certain amount of blindness may help further to cement friendships in a close and strong relationship.

Listener's response can affect speaker's language use:

A positive listening style - smiling, nodding and maintaining an open bodily position - will encourage speaker to provide a more interpretative account, hence the speaker tend to use more abstractions and subjective impressions. By contrast, negative listeners (with frowning and unsmiling facial expression) will provoke in the speaker a more cautious and descriptive thinking style.

头脑迷思之六 —— Doing right things

"Doing right things" has become a slogan prevailing in air recently. As usual, I choose to be a bystander in such hectic movement. Because I don't believe that such a bureaucratic company can do right things in right time. All discussions, meetings and improvments of process are just waste of time. Doing things right is difficult, but compared to the difficulty of "doing right things", it is just a piece of cake.

As an adage saying: "Without coincidences there would be no stories. " Yesterday, I happened to listen to the lecture given by Pro. Dan Gilbert, its subject was "how to do exactly the right thing at all possible times". He mentioned one equation: "Expected value = (odds of gain) * (value of gain)". As he pointed out people mainly make decision based on the expected value, Unfortunately they are horrible in estimating these two factors.

First, the sense of probability is strongly influenced by the quickness which things come into our mind. It leads to errors in odds estimation.

Second, Prospect theory already tell us the odd pattern of decision making. Depending on how the risky situation is presented, people behave in different ways. That is, if a risk is presented in terms of losses, people will be more risk seeking, while if it's expressed in terms of gains, people will be more risk averse.

Third, people make bad judgment in value of gain. People normally compare the value with the past instead of the possible, which can fuddle our decision. Even you compare with the possible instead of the past, you still make certain kinds of mistakes. It mainly because when we value things, the comparsion can shift in different context, mood and over time.

See, how difficult it is to do right things?! Not to mention in a big group, in a fast changing age. Slogan is jus a slogan, vision is just a vision, wish is just a wish, it is hard to put into practice.

A wise man once said: We tend to underestimate the odds of our future pains, and overestimate the value of our present pleasures. Nevertheless, we still need to try our best to do right things right in all possible time.

The Essential Reading (1) —— Psychology of Relationship

I plan to scribble down some excerpts here from what I have read, for 3 reasons:

1. Even we come to cul de sac, I still hope it is a substitute of my old notebook that has already lain silently in my drawer for 3 months, which will give me some illusion we are still sharing with each other. I know I'm pathetic, however......
2. To compensate with my bad memory, to help some learning not dissipate in the course of time.
3. An opportunity to have an introspection on myself.

Here comes the first shot:

PsyBlog has a series of posts about the psychology of relationship, not so good, however, two of them still strike a cord in me:

1. The art of Self-disclosure:

Self-disclosure plays a central role in the development and maintenance of relationships.

• Simply sharing our preferences for music, food or books can play an equally important role in forming relationships as self-disclosure about our deepest hopes and fears.
• Too much self-disclosure too soon can be off-putting. When someone you've just met starts pouring out their heart, it can make you want to run away.
• The way in which you react to the self-disclosure of others is of vital importance. People want to be 'understood' not just 'heard'.

The art of self-disclosing, then, is giving information to others in the right way and at the right time.

I retrospect the self-disclosure pattern between us, from the beginning to the end. The feeling is mixed. I recalled I had start pouring out my heart on the first visit to your colleage,I recalled how I gathered all courage to self-disclose my deepest hopes, fears, happyness and sadness in high school to you, which didn't scare you away. Since then, the pattern hadn't changed a lot, though I wish it had to some extent; Since then, you have gradually rein my heart. I also remembered what we had shared since our reunion, my "protest", your try, the insatiable appetite to know you more, the storm of blog, the anxiety, the longing, the loss, the shame, the jealousy, the pain......

How bittersweet they are! Deep down, I know all kinds of sensation are vivid and will never fade away.

2.Familiarity breeds contempt:

If the mere exposure effect holds for developing social relationships then, as we come to know more about others, we should come to like them more. However, after researches, the counter-intuitive finding is on the vast majority of occasions the less we know about someone the more we are inclined to like them. Of course this wasn't true for everyone - some met other people who they liked more afterwards - for the majority more knowledge led to apparent dissimilarity which led to less liking. It turns out that the connection between knowledge and dislike was a lack of similarity.

This rule is not applicable to ours. Actually the fact is: the more I know about you, the more difference are revealed between us, the more I am enchanted by you, the more I love you.

Anyway, agree or not, these findings confirmed my conclusion about relationship again: 人与人的情感进退，像一场华尔兹，时间、舞伴、步调、配合、节奏、力度，无一不影响舞蹈的美感与结果。

金山词霸Merriam-WebsterLongmanThe Free DictionaryWordNetWikipediaGoogleGoogle images

Philosophy of Success

Alain de Botton, a philosopher, a writer with several bestsellers, a witty guy, I happened to read 2 books written by him, 《How Proust Can change your life》&《The Consollaions of Philosophy》, I like them. So when I saw he had a Talk in TEDGlobal 2009, I took no hestation to watch it despite of the unbearable network speed.

It's amazing to see real person, besides, it is a kinder、gentler philosophy of success as evaluated. He did make quite an eloquent case to re-examine our career anxiety, the idea of success and failure, the job snobbery...... He made you laugh first, then think and contemplate. Go to watch it.

Here are some points from his:

The reason we are sufferring from career anxiety:

1. snobbery: we are surrounded by it.
The definition of snobbery: Someone who takes a small part of you and use that to come to a complete vision of who you are.
What people want from luxury goods, it is the reward of acquisition of it rather than goods itself.

2. envy: link to the spirit of equality
If you can not relate to someone, you will not envy him. In fact, the closer the people are, the stronger and the more danger the envy is.

3. meritocracy socity:
If people get talented, energy, skills, you will go top, nothing should hold you back. Your position in life does not come to be acceditental, everybody deserve what they get to, which makes people take what happened to them extremly personal, in turn to make failure seem much more crunching.

4. failure:
The failure is not loss of money, time etc. What we feel about it is the judgement and ridicule of others.

5. success:
There is very strong force to define what the success is to you, however, you should have your own idea of the success, try to get what you really want.

There is no justice in the world, the life is always unfair. The right attitude is: We should do everything we can to pursuit justice, but at the end of a day, we should always remember whatever facing us, whatever happened in our life has a strong element of haphazard.

头脑迷思之五

This post "Imaginary Friends" perfectly explains why my list of watched movie has been increased dramatically in recent years.

• To ease my loneliness
• To soothe the feeling of lacking of belonging
• To escape from reality
• To dodge the pain
• To be distracted from unbearable missing
• To kill void time
• To have the courage and strength to live reclusively

As it concluded, there is no such thing as "mere" entertainment. The human mind is an attachment machine, forming emotional bonds with characters in movie, which is so called parasocial relationships.

It is sad, however, it is rescue to some degree, keeping us moving on.

头脑迷思之四

Several interesting finding from today's reading:

1. 逝者如斯夫之惑

Source: Time flies faster as we age

Do you have the same feeling that as a youngster a year seems "endless," yet pass in the blink of an eye to adults? Does time speed up in some magical, bizarre way as we age?

It's related to time perception. It's because that time and memory are "tightly linked". It's vivid and detailed memory make us think time has slowed when it hasn't in reality.

Although less certain, scientist are strongly suspect that the same brain process as in traumatic situation is what makes time seem to speed up as we age.

Children are frequently having first-time experiences, encountering novel things. Their brains store that information in all its detail and richness since it is the first time. And in remembering these, just like inserting extra images in a movie reel, it makes the event appear to last longer and slows motion down. On the other hand, as we experience more in life, familiar patterns recur and the memories our brains store get ever more compressed. Our brain can skip or compress a lot of things and add only new details to the general template from the first time. As a result it is much less vivid and detailed, which seemingly speeds time up.

My question: how to explain time speed up when we are happy? Aren't these happy memory more vivid and detailed?

2. 孤夜难好眠

Source: Lonely people have less efficient sleep

Are you lonesome in night? Do you have problem with falling asleep? Are you sleeping well just like an innocent baby? Have you ever think about how loneliness affects your sleep?

A group of researchers conducted a large study of Ohio State University students' sleeping habits in 2002, it has found that lonely people do not sleep as well as non-lonely people. Whether loneliness causes poor sleep is not answered by this study, which can only show a correlation between loneliness and inefficient sleep.

3. 人以群分之弊

Source: The Situation of Homogeneity

We are getting used to the recommendations from our friends, people we admire, people who have the same taste as ours, we are also getting used to the Web2.0 guesses based on our favorite book/movie/music list, which definitely help us to filter the infinite information/choices we face today, help us to save time to find what is useful for us. However, have you ever think about the other side of the same coin?

Here it is the problem with “collaborative filtering”:

What does it mean for society when individuals who read the same articles are, as a result, encouraged to go to the same movies, wear the same clothes, drive the same cars, vacation in the same resorts and eat in the same restaurants?

Creating and reinforcing insular communities is likely to hurt us in the long run. Humans may gravitate toward those most like them, but we should resist the impulse to help the process along. No part can possibly have a monopoly on wisdom. Sometimes it’s good to learn what people unlike us like—and to see whether we might even like that.

头脑迷思之三——吊诡的诱惑

古语有云“常在河边走，哪能不湿鞋。” 相应的，有句类似的西谚： “If you keep going to the barber shop, eventually you’ll get a haircut.” 一言以蔽之，劝我们远离诱惑，否则，我们的自我控制能力总有一天会让我们失望的。但是，且慢，俗语又云：“物以稀为贵”，基于这样的稀缺理论，岂不是越远离诱惑物，我们被诱惑的力量就会越强大吗？那岂不是自找麻烦，为难自己，挑战自我控制能力的极限吗？

如何解决“远离还是面对诱惑”在自控力上出现的吊诡现象？

“The paradox of Temptation"一文介绍了三个心理学家的实验，结果显示：Self-control does in fact operate paradoxically, by devaluing what’s most available and diminishing desire for what’s tempting and accessible. That's the way that our mind protects itself against succumbing to temptation.

如果结果为真，那么解决方法就有点违背我们的直觉。简言之，要抵制诱惑，就让诱惑物触手可及吧。

头脑迷思之二——弯曲的时间之箭

Everything is connected to time, that's why I am particularly interested in topic related to time.

Today's source "Bending Time's Arrow" is coming from "We're Only Human" which hosted by Wray Herbert, a writer for Newsweek and Scientific American, a former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today.

Here's the gist from this post:

When you seeing/drawing a timeline, why do we accept without question that left equals early while right equals late, far off in time? More fundamentally, why do we entwine time and space?

Psychologists suspect that the brain has wired our perceptions of space and time together for some reason.

Psychologist Francesca Frassinetti of the University of Bologna and her colleagues designed an experiment to explore space-time continuum.The results were reported in the June issue of the journal Psychological Science, it shows when shifting the brain’s focus to the right, time is perceived as expanded in their minds, While shifting the brain’s focus to the left compressed time.

Interesting, Hmm?

头脑迷思之一——记忆的七宗罪

记忆是流转在我们脑海中的传说。当我们回首往事，曾经的时光绝不会如初初发生时那样清晰准确，相反，它们以传说现身。不过，无论是否精确，是记忆造就我们，而我们之所以成为今日之我们，是因为记忆。

哈佛心理学教授Daniel L. Schacter 总结出记忆七宗罪，以下则摘译自“PSYBLOG"。

1.transience （短暂）
记忆分两类：长期和短期。短期记忆是你脑海中的现在进行时；长期记忆是你储存在脑海中留待后用的将来时。研究表明这两类记忆在它们各自的时间尺度中都相当脆弱不可靠。
short-term memory: fast forgetting
long-term memory: slow forgetting

2.absent-mindedness （心不在焉）
两个主要因素：注意力和记忆编码。
两个经典实验（Gorillas in our midst和door study）令人吃惊的表明人的注意力存在盲区。
而对信息的处理强度直接影响着记忆的深浅。
一则趣闻轶事：在绝大多数人想方设法增强自己的记忆能力时，俄国新闻记者Solomon Shereshevskii却被他过目不忘的记忆力所折磨，巨细无遗的记忆令他无法抽象思考，他不得不与大多数人背道而驰，寻求一种方法忘却而不是加强记忆。
由此可知：任何事，皆有两面性。积极得看，心不在焉未尝不是一种福分。

3.blocking （阻塞）
你有多少次话到舌尖就是吐不出来？
没错，你对记忆的提取通道被暂时堵塞了。这也是记忆阻塞的典型之一——舌尖现象（Tip-of-the-Tongue）。通感，是解决舌尖现象的方法之一——将字词与味觉联系起来。精心设计的心理学实验证明此法的确可行。

4.misattribution （错误归属）
记忆很容易将真实事件与想像混淆，将事件的源头、人物、情境张冠李戴。
错误归属的另一种可能是无意识剽窃：人们很容易将别人的创作发明无意识得占为己有。
于是，有心理学家William James如是说：记忆是被事实与梦想共同雕琢的。

5.suggestibility （易受暗示）
记忆的这一宗罪与第四宗罪是表兄弟关系，区别在于：错误归属是来自我们自身的混淆；而易受暗示则是来自他人的教唆、引导与影响。
有三个实验表明人的记忆如何易受他人暗示：
错误定罪：积极反馈易导致50%的目击证人错误指证。
虚假记忆植入：实验与Paul Ingram的实例证明诱导和巨大情境压力都会植入虚假记忆。
心理治疗师的影响力：梦境诠释实验表明，心理治疗师可以改变影响人的记忆与信心。

6.bias （偏见）
能想象有多少种偏见存在于我们的记忆系统吗？它们又为什么存在？

记忆的这一宗罪有多种偏见组成：
consistency bias (一致性偏见): 与认知失调类似，我们常常重构过去，使之与我们现在的世界观、人生观更一致。
Beneffectance：我们倾向于认为成就是我们自己行动的结果，而错误常常是他人引发的。
Reminiscence bump（回忆高峰）: 我们对青春期和成人期早期的记忆远胜于人生其他阶段。
Hindsight bias（后见之明）：回顾过去，我们倾向于以为自己其实应该很容易预测发生过的事。
Rose-tinted specs：缅怀过往，我们倾向于涂抹上玫瑰色彩，而其实，事实没有怀旧中得那么美好。
黑格尔曾说过：凡存在的，即合理。我们的记忆系统里存在的这些偏见，有其存在的效用与积极面。它们具有代偿性，能维持我们的理智，减轻我们的焦虑，促使我们努力上进。

7.persistence （持久）
记忆的最后一宗罪在其效应上也最具备两极化趋势。
记忆的持久性是一把双刃剑，一方面，我们常常被无法忘却的伤痛过去纠缠着、折磨着；另一方面，我们所遭遇的精神创伤和沮丧，会提醒我们以史为鉴，避免二次犯错，因此对我们的生存不可或缺。
depressive cycle： 沮丧导致我们很容易沉浸于往事的伤痛中，而沉思默想又很容易唤醒记忆中的负面事件从而愈发沮丧。

头脑迷思之序

不做网虫有一段时间了，似乎你的离开抽走了我所有的生气和动力。这一次，和上一次不一样，完全不一样。

每天早上，躺在床上，我会想："why bother getting up? why bother eating? why bother breathing......" 总是要用尽力气，才能将破碎的自己拼凑起来，才能勉力维持日常事务，空白的时间，空空如也的躯壳，竟不能再如从前一般，用光影、声色、墨香来填补。

不需要再做你的”眼睛“，我也几乎关上了观察世界的窗。想起之前对你的"大言啖啖"，不断告诫自己，即便时移世易，即便了无动力，我也要努力让它不再是又一次的”大言“。于是，逼迫自己再去网上东逛逛西瞧瞧。新闻，是没有任何兴趣了；哲学，搁置也有一段时间了；倒是心理学，可以结合自己的经历，来个对号入座的游戏，或者就当趣闻轶事来看看，如果还能起到答疑解惑之效，也算是意外之获。与数理这些硬科学相异，人的头脑与心理，即便可以用一定的科学理论来分析、解释，它依然是雾中庐山，是迷思，不是吗？当然，这样的结论，并不能成为我放弃去了解、学习的理由。以前是苦于找不到资源，尤其是第一手的，现在有了互联网，苦恼的反而是面对海量信息的无所适从。

今天偶然发现一个不错的网站”Understand your mind"，打算以此为起点，开始我的学习之旅。

Certainty v.s Suspicion

A discussion "Happy Days" is held in "The New York Times" to give the opinions of what matters in troubled times and contemplate how to search the contentment in many forms (economic, emotional, physical, spiritual etc). In brief, if you can't change the circumstance you face, at least you can transform your pursuit of happiness, sanity, or even survival.

Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of “Stumbling on Happiness”, wrote an article to make a point that people prefer to know the worst than to suspect it.

Why?

When we get bad news we weep for a while, and then get busy making the best of it. We change our behavior, we change our attitudes. We raise our consciousness and lower our standards. We find our bootstraps and tug. But we can’t come to terms with circumstances whose terms we don’t yet know. An uncertain future leaves us stranded in an unhappy present with nothing to do but wait.

To some extent, it is right. But one question lingered in my mind is:

If we know the worst for certain——what if the bad news knock down us completely, what if whatever tomorrow is it means nothing at all —— how can we strive to come to terms with the lives we lead?

Shouldn't the uncertain future also mean some hope which is worth us to strive for?

How to choose between the certainty and the suspicion? How to choose between nervous and hope?

选择

又看到关于选择的论述，从当初龙应台评电影《窃听风暴》的《你是有选择的》的铿锵有力，到今日drunkpiano评话剧《Burnt by the sun》的《在不可能与不可能之间》的掷地有声，其间还旁观若干博客喧嚣草根评议，萨特存在主义的浮光掠影，不由我不再一次细思个人的自由、选择、责任和后果。

以前听多了、说多了"不得不"，总觉得世间事常有情非得已之时，如今再想，不得已之后，隐藏的往往是个人选择的真相以及愿意为之付出的代价。有些真相，深究下去，因为会带来比选择得来的后果更深的痛苦，人出于避痛的本能，往往不愿直面，情愿做个鸵鸟，情愿用”不得已“来一笔带过。但其实，究竟又有多少真正的情非得已、不得不为之呢？

越大的自由，意味着越多的选择；越多的选择，意味着越多的可能；越多的可能，意味着越大的责任。于是你会想，这世上，究竟又有多少人真正的渴望自由，并甘心承担由自由而来的选择和责任呢？ —— 未必有我们想像的那么多。


你是有选择的，但，人生中不少时候，你未必愿意自己去选择。

思想偏狭的我，此时难免又兜回情感的圈子，想起站在人生的分岔路口的亲密爱人，面对选择取舍时，更值得敬佩的，往往不是以爱人的意志为依归的那一个，反而是那个勇于做出抉择的那一个。因为前者，以他的牺牲（如果有）、放弃、跟随已立于道德情感的不败之地，而后者，则要为彼此承担自己所做选择的风险和责任，万一选择出错，后者所受到精神情感折磨，要远甚于前者，也因此，需要更大的勇气、担待和更深切的爱意。



明白了这一点，其实就明白了：爱一个人，就不要为难她，不要让她做不得已的选择。

也希望你明白：我因你而伤心，是因为我选择被你伤害的可能；我痛苦煎熬，是因为我选择爱的幸福；我尝试改变，是因为我选择有你存在的可能；我想放弃，是因为我选择继续爱你的美丽......

这一切，都是自己的选择，与人无尤。

Misconceptions of Happiness

An article "Perfectly Happy" in today's The Boston Global shows me an interesting finding from cognitive science study, that is we as people are not very good at predicting how happy or unhappy something will make us. Sometimes our misunderstanding of happiness shortchanges ourselves, which can leave the real causes of unhappiness unaddressed. (It seems misconception is everywhere.)

More recent and rigorous studies have yielded results that getting married or getting a raise or a new house all give a boost to our happiness, but eventually we drop to levels near where we were before. By contrast, happiness dips and then rebounds after people lose a limb, their sight or even - though the data is more conflicting here - a loved one. ( I Can't believe the losing loved one part!)

People tend to overestimate the amount of emotional damage a disable life will bring, regularly underestimate the emotional harm that mental health problems cause. Studies shows people are actually better at adapting to physical disabilities than to mental illness or chronic pain. (For this I can understand, if it is only one-time loss, people has the ability to adpat themselves into new life; But if it is chronic torture, people have to deal with it daily, it is more sufferring. That's why there is an old saying in chinese: 久病床前无孝子)

And healthy people are so bad at predicting how they'll emotionally react to being gravely ill, living wills that they make when healthy often don't reflect their wishes when they actually become sick. ( That means decision should be changed when situation is changed. The inconsistency should be understandable and allowable. Always give others and yourself second chance, give the dicsions second thought. Don't rush, don't push.)

The surprising finding bring changes into the following realms:

• Law
• Ethically fraught issues like end-of-life care
• Policy-making

论引用——《哲学的慰藉》番外篇

阅读时，我喜欢划线作记号；笔记时，我比较喜欢不加修改直接引用原作者深得我心的文字。以前一直惴惴，觉得潜伏其后的根源是自己才疏识浅、语言修养不足、表达能力欠缺，兼且懒散、智力不逮之故，所以抄起书来，总不能尽兴。这两天在读《哲学的慰藉》时，突然发现蒙田和叔本华的观点恰好可以用来稍许justify自己的行为，不禁心喜，有卸下重负，解开镣铐的轻松感。

蒙田著述时常常引用若干，他认为：聪明人应该花时间在引用那些占据知识之树的高枝的权威的作品上。当别的作者以我们达不到的明晰和心理准确性表达了先得我心的思想时，我自然会情不自禁地直接引用他们。我们尚欲言又止、说不清楚的想法，他们已说的那么清晰，遣词那么优美，为何不引用？我们在他们写的书上划的铅笔道和作的眉批，以及借用的话，都标明我们是在何处找到了一小块自己，或是找到用自己思想的原料构成的句子。我们引用，表示对他们的敬意，也提醒自己有自知之明。

叔本华则如是说：

我们在艺术和哲学作品中找到的是我们自己的痛苦和奋斗的客观表述，通过声音、语言和形象予以诠释和再现。艺术家和哲学家不仅向我们展示我们的感受，而且以我们自己做不到的尖锐和智慧表达我们的体验，将我们生活的各个层面勾画出了，我们能认出是自己的，但是凭自己决不能理解得那么清楚。他们向我们解释我们的生存条件，助我们解惑，并减少孤立无援之感。艺术与哲学以其不同的方式把痛苦转化为知识。

世上故事比人少，同样的情节不断地重复，只是人名和背景有所变化。—— 此即叔本华所谓“艺术的真谛就是以一概千千万。”反过来，当我们意识到我们的境遇只不过是千千万之一，就足以感到慰藉。

环境知觉的利与弊

纽约时报一篇旧文"Brave New World of Digital Intimacy"吸引了我的注意，在随手摘录keywords于专用的topic notebook时，突然起意总结一下microblogging的利与弊，以及给人类生活方式带来的颠覆性变化。

所谓环境知觉(ambient awareness)，其实是社会科学家给类似facebook, feed, twitter这种不间断的网络联系起的一个新名字。有点像现实生活中我们与某人近距离接触，通过眼角余光观察他的种种小动作，比如肢体语言、叹气、嘀咕等等，借此了解此人情绪一样。

环境知觉的悖论在于：每条小的更新，每一条单独的信息，本身都是微不足道的，甚至是十分平庸的。但假以时日，当它们汇集起来，这些小片段就渐渐拼凑成一幅细致得惊人的生活画卷，就像一幅点描派画作。

新科技总是双刃剑，它的益处或许在于：

• 这种环境亲密感（ambient intimacy）消弭了现代社会的高度孤独感，让人感觉亲密无间。
• 人们因此有了更大的社交圈，拓展了人际交往中的邓巴数字（Dunbar number：150），但主要是weak ties，而不是亲密关系。
• 对人们的了解更深入。
• “弱连接”的增长能极大地增强你解决问题的能力。
• 使人学会对隐私抱持有既警觉又无所谓的态度（既小心经营网络形象，又坦然面对自己可控范围的极限）。
• 带来一种更趋于自省的文化（The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you're feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It's like the Greek dictum to “know thyself,” or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness）。

弊端也显而易见：

• Parasocial relationships过多会将你的情感精力稀释得很薄，使你在面对真正的亲密关系时反而没有足够的情绪来作出反应，甚至挤掉你现实生活中的友人。
• 让人们再次处于小镇生活的节律中，生活里的每个人都对你知根知底。
• 你很难彻底切断一些不想维持的联系。
• 网络变得实名化，人们很难保有隐私，除非远离键盘。（On the Internet today, everybody knows you're a dog! ）

在这样一个数字新世界，我们又该如何存在？

To Lie or Not to Lie?

本来已经将这则在BBC Magazine上读到的新闻“The little white lie that grew"当作谈资之一收进preparation list，后来一转念，还有两周之久，新闻早成旧闻，而且谁知道这么长时间会有怎样的风起云涌，不如就趁此刻尚有余兴，在此唠叨一番更好。

White Lie, 顾名思义，就是无恶意的小谎言。说谎，是个恶习，却也是人的天性之一，难以避免。人们说谎的理由千差万别，有的是为了保护自己，有的是为了保护自己所爱的人，有的是为了避免真相所带来的可怕后果，至于谎言的后果，更是不一而足，所以英语中才有white lie一词的出现。

但命运的风云诡谲往往在此：你以为无足轻重微不足道的little white lie，没准就会经过a skein of lies & revelation, 最终失控演变成一个悲剧，一个灾难，就像这个倒霉的澳大利亚的声名显赫的大法官Marcus Einfeld一样：为了一张驾照，对一张罚款额仅有36镑的超速罚单撒了一个小白谎，继而不得不用一个又一个谎言来掩盖前一个，最后因为伪证罪，获刑3年。

联想到前不久我的新发现和这一年多来因为blog的几番扰攘，"To lie or not to lie"这句仿莎士比亚的问句，就猛然在脑海中清晰起来。旁观者如我们，是否可以从中吸取点教训，避免这样雪崩式的灾难发生在我们自己身上呢？

有俗语云：“你可以欺骗一个人一辈子，也可以欺骗所有的人一下子，但是，你不可能欺骗所有人一辈子！”在如今这个网络世界、信息时代，有强大的搜索引擎，又有"Six Degree of Seperation"这样的理论屡证不爽，很多匪夷所思的事也开始理所当然起来，为了使我们的生活更简单化，为了节约我们的力气用在更需要的地方，为了不要雪上加霜，我个人认为，还是straightforward、candid、outspoken一点比较好。

仅供参考。