Randomly Posting Stuff Cause You Feel Like It

[Orema]

I Have Face Blindness. This Is How I Recognize You.

When you can’t rely on facial recognition, you look beyond the obvious.

By James Robinsonm, Filmmaker



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-MzNPcEh6M

We’ve all been there: You run into people on the street, and you suspect you’ve met them before — they certainly seem to know you. But you can’t locate them in the complicated tapestry of memory. Frustration and embarrassment well up inside you, putting recall farther out of reach. So you fake it and beat a hasty retreat.

Now multiply that experience many times over, and you might start to get an idea of what it feels like to be Paul Kram. He has a condition called prosopagnosia, also known as face blindness, a neurological disorder that inhibits the recognition of faces.

In the Opinion video above, the filmmaker James Robinson shows us how Mr. Kram experiences social interactions, his techniques for managing prosopagnosia and the ways the rest of society can better respond to the needs of those who have the condition.

The video is the last in a series of three films by Mr. Robinson, each of which explores what it’s like to live with a specific disability. The first is about retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye condition, and the second is about stuttering. Disability is a very personal subject for Mr. Robinson, who also made the Emmy-nominated Opinion video “Whale Eyes,” about his own struggles to manage and live with several disabling eye conditions.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/30/o...opagnosia.html

[nhplowboi]

Poor Donnie. Don't look behind you because it's all catching up to you and your clan now. You better start booking your flight to Russia.

[nhplowboi]

I searched and could not find the RIP thread so I will put this here. RIP Nurse Ratchet! Not only were you an actor but you also became a well known descriptor of the current mental health system. God speed.

[Orema]

Boredom is a warning sign. Here’s what it’s telling you.

It’s our brain’s way of alerting us that things aren’t going well and to do something more meaningful

By Richard Sima
September 22, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EDT


(George Wylesol for The Washington Post)

In one famous experiment, people were asked to sit quietly for 15 minutes in a room with nothing but their own thoughts. They also had the option to hit a button and give themselves an electric shock.

Getting physically shocked is unpleasant, but many people preferred it to the emotional discomfort of boredom. Out of 42 participants, nearly half opted to press the button at least once, even though they had experienced the shock earlier in the study and reported they would pay money to avoid experiencing it again. (One male outlier opted to shock himself 190 times.)

Boredom is a universally dreaded feeling. Being bored means wanting to be engaged when you can’t. It’s our brain telling us to take action, much like pain is an important signal for danger or harm.

Boredom is also how our brains alert us that things aren’t going well. Scientists who study the emotion note that every episode of boredom creates an opportunity for making a positive change instead of reactively looking for the fastest, easiest escape. We just need to pay attention.

“Boredom is sort of an emotional dashboard light that goes off saying, like, ‘Hey, you’re not on track,’ ” said Erin Westgate, a social psychologist at the University of Florida who studies boredom and co-authored the shock experiment. “It is this signal that whatever it is we’re doing either isn’t meaningful to us, or we’re not able to successfully engage with this.”

Boredom is a warning sign, she says, and it’s “really necessary.”

Can boredom make you mean?

In a 2021 study, Westgate and her colleagues found boredom led participants toward more sadistic behaviors. In one experiment, bored participants watching a mundane 20-minute video were even more likely to do something presumably none of them had considered doing before: shred maggots named Toto, Tifi and Kiki in a coffee grinder. (The researchers named the maggots to humanize them.)

Among 67 participants who watched the boring video, 12 of them (18 percent) dropped a maggot into the coffee grinder. By comparison, in another group watching an interesting documentary, just one out of 62 study subjects tried to shred a maggot.

(It’s worth noting that the maggot-mangling machine was fake. No maggots were actually harmed during the experiments.)

Other experiments have shown a link between boredom and different kinds of bad behavior, from online trolling to bullying in the classroom to verbal and physical abuse by members of the military toward one another.

The good news is that boredom doesn’t always make us meaner — it just calls us to take action, good or bad. When better alternatives are available, boredom can also make us do good deeds.

In another set of experiments involving nearly 2,000 people, Westgate and her team asked study subjects to watch either a five-minute video of a rock or a more interesting video. Everyone in the study had the option to reduce the pay of the other study participants, with no benefit to themselves. In their boredom, the rock watchers were far more likely to cut pay than those who watched a more interesting video.

But when the bored participants had two options — to either cut a stranger’s pay or increase it, the overwhelming majority of people decided to give money, and fewer people took it away.

Boredom appears to motivate the search for novelty, not evil.

In short, the quality of the options matter: If you have a distraction such as a book you’ve been wanting to read or a hobby you’ve always wanted to try, you might be more inclined to turn to those when bored instead of shocking yourself and eviscerating larvae.

Boredom in the brain

Boredom is a different experience from the idleness of downtime or relaxation. Being bored means wanting to be engaged when you can’t, which is an uncomfortable feeling.

James Danckert, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo, and his colleagues sat 10 adults in an fMRI brain scanner and measured their brain activity as they watched either a clip from the nature documentary Planet Earth, a video of two men hanging laundry or a static image.

Sitting quietly inside the fMRI machine or watching the boring laundry video both activated the brain’s default mode network, a constellation of brain regions that are active during internal thought, like when our minds are wandering. At the same time, the boring video shut down the anterior insular cortex, a brain region believed to signal something important is happening in the outside world.

What does all this mean? Through an fMRI scan, the bored brain looks like an unengaged, unhappy brain.

“It feels bad to be bored,” said Danckert, co-author of “Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom.”

How to be better at boredom

We are most likely to be bored at work or in school — situations where we are afforded less autonomy and fewer options to do something about it. In a sample of nearly 4,000 American adults, 63 percent reported experiencing boredom at least once over the course of 10 days.

The problem with boredom is that while it tells us something is wrong, it does not tell us what to do about it. Finding healthy ways through boredom is up to us.

When the unsettling feeling of boredom hits us, it’s easy to be reactive and reflexively reach for the closest thing at hand: our smartphones.
But such a reaction can set off a “vicious cycle,” Danckert told me. Time on your phone is not particularly meaningful, which means that you’ll likely get bored again.

Instead of being reactive to boredom, try to be more mindful about the signal it is sending you. Take the opportunity boredom is giving you to reset, reflect on or reframe your priorities.

What other options are more meaningful? What are your goals, big and small? And why does what you’re doing matter even if it does not appear that way?

And take heart that boredom, and our search to find relief, is essential to our human experience.

“I think boredom gets a bad rap that’s not deserved,” Westgate said. Boredom is “linked to a lot of what most of us want out of life, like living a rich, fulfilling, interesting, meaningful life. Boredom is just one sort of helpful signal — maybe unwanted signal — that helps us get there.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/welln...dom-happiness/

[Orema]

How to Make, and Keep, Friends in Adulthood

A friendship expert shares strategies for finding connection in a lonely, disconnected world.

By Catherine Pearson

In July, Marisa Franco went on a solo vacation to Mexico. But by the time she flew back to Washington, D.C., 10 days later, she’d formed an entirely new group of friends.

As a psychologist who studies friendship, Dr. Franco has a leg up on most of us when it comes to forging connections, and she leaned heavily on the strategies she learned researching her new book, “Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make — and Keep — Friends.”

Dr. Franco assumed, for instance, that people would like her. And she reminded herself that people in transition — like those who’ve recently moved, gone through a breakup or who are traveling — tend to be more open to making new friends.

Buoyed by that knowledge, she struck up a conversation with a fellow traveler at a cafe whom she overheard speaking English. Dr. Franco invited him to a get-together for people looking to practice speaking Spanish that she had heard about on Meetup.com.

At the language event, I met someone else, made the same assumptions, and we exchanged numbers,” she recalled. “I invited them to a lucha libre wrestling match, and they came. This is to say: People are actually really open to friendship.”

Even so, Dr. Franco knows that making friends in adulthood does not always feel so simple or easy, and that may be one reason why friendship is in decline. In 1990, only 3 percent of Americans said they had no close friends; in 2021, nearly 12 percent said the same. The United States is in the grips of a loneliness crisis that predates the Covid pandemic.

Dr. Franco’s book acknowledges those headwinds, while also offering practical advice for making new friends and deepening existing relationships. She spoke to The New York Times about some simple best practices to keep in mind.

Questions and answers have been edited and condensed for clarity.

Much of your work centers on changing our scripts around friendship. What are some misconceptions you’d like to see disappear?

One is that platonic love is somehow less important or meaningful than romantic love. We have this idea that people who have friendship at the center of their relationships are unhappy or unfulfilled. It’s something I used to believe myself: I thought romantic love was the only love that would make me whole. I wrote “Platonic” because I wanted to level that hierarchy a little bit.

Another misconception is that friendship happens organically. But research has shown that people who think friendship happens organically — based on luck — are lonelier. You really have to try and put yourself out there.

Is that why you believe that assuming people like you is so important?

According to the “risk regulation theory,” we decide how much to invest in a relationship based on how likely we think we are to get rejected. So one of the big tips I share is that if you try to connect with someone, you are much less likely to be rejected than you think.

And, yes, you should assume people like you. That is based on research into the “liking gap” — the idea that when strangers interact, they’re more liked by the other person than they assume.

There is also something called the “acceptance prophecy.” When people assume that others like them, they become warmer, friendlier and more open. So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I never used to be much of a mind-set person until I got into the research. But your mind-set really matters!

Still, putting yourself out there can feel nerve-racking. Any advice?

I suggest joining something that meets regularly over time — so instead of going to a networking event, look for a professional development group, for example. Don’t go to a book lecture; look for a book club. That capitalizes on something called the “mere exposure effect,” or our tendency to like people more when they are familiar to us.

The mere exposure effect also means that you should expect that it is going to feel uncomfortable when you first interact with people. You are going to feel weary. That doesn’t mean you should duck out; it means you are right where you need to be. Stay at it for a little while longer, and things will change.

You also believe that it is critical to show and tell your friends how much you like them. Why is that?

Because we tend to like people who we believe like us. I used to go into groups and try to make friends by being smart — that was my thing. But when I read the research, I realized that the quality people most appreciate in a friend is ego support, which is basically someone who makes them feel like they matter. The more you can show people that you like and value them, the better. Research shows that just texting a friend can be more meaningful than people tend to think.

At the same time, you are very clear that people shouldn’t blame themselves if they feel like they don’t have enough friends. Why does it feel so hard to make those kinds of connections?

I want people to understand that they are much more typical if they don’t have friendship all figured out. The data shows that so many people are lacking for community, and that is nothing to be ashamed about. I am trying to teach people how to swim upstream against a current that is pulling us all in the opposite direction — because loneliness is a societal issue that affects most of us. Our communities used to be built-in, not sought after.

Social media is a good example. It can be a tool for connection, but mostly we use it to just lurk, which is related to increased loneliness and disconnection. That’s not necessarily our fault, though. Social media is designed in a way so that we don’t use it consciously; we tend to just stay on it mindlessly. There are just a lot of societal reasons people feel lonely.

But I also believe we can hold both truths. Yes, this is a systemic issue. But there are things you can do as an individual to increase connection.

For those looking to make a new friend or strengthen their existing friendships, what is one easy tip you suggest they try today?

I’d say to swipe through your contacts, or look at who you were texting this time last year, and reach out. You can say something simple, like: “Hey, we haven’t chatted in a while. I was just thinking about you. How are you?”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/01/w...nds-adult.html

[Kätzchen]

[Bèsame*]

[FireSignFemme]

[Gemme]

Originally Posted by Kätzchen

I'm a big fan of teal and pumpkin (and similar shades) together. My living room can attest to this.

[Kätzchen]

James and I are huge Kevin Kostner fans.
We've been watching "Yellowstone".

It is slow moving (yet scary sometimes), but we think it might get very interesting this season.

[FireSignFemme]

[Kätzchen]

Coconut Lime Smoothie

[Kätzchen]

I like the perspective of Fred Rogers, when it comes to articulating your position concerning Love.

Love is not a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is. Right here, right now. ~Fred Rogers.

[Kätzchen]

[Kätzchen]

[PlatinumPearl]

[Stone-Butch]

Had a nice walk in the rain yesterday in the park. Once the rain stopped the sun came out and so did the squirrels looking for lunch . (I always bring it). Met a nice lady who has started coming to the park on weekends she said . Well this afternoon is cold and sunny . A perfect day for a walk in the park *S

[Stone-Butch]

Dec. 4 2022 Kirstie Alley 71 yr, old actress passed away from cancer.

[Orema]

Love this. Simple and elegant with just a few strokes. And the text tells you about Brazil's love for their hero.

[GeorgiaMa'am]

The following was written by Jessica Walsh. It's lifted from Twitter. It really spoke to me - in fact, it gave me Gen X chills.