l’abris

cool sweat sticky feet fallen colour

[flounderrock]

writing stoned is so loosey goosey i’ll follow any old thought which makes reading it back like chewing through gristle. a sliver of meat your tongue can touch but not reach between layers and knobs of cartilage and tendons. one rubbery lump of fat you hope could be tasty is hard and almost makes you gag. but that touch of the tongue to meat … there’s something in there there’s something in there if only i could reach it. i better log onto tumblr that will certainly help

[nprbooks]

On Nov. 30, 1954, a character named Charlotte Braun debuted in the much-loved, 4-year-old comic strip Peanuts – and people immediately hated her. Above is Charles Schulz’s reply to one reader complaint, and the picture he drew to really drive the point home. It reads:

Dear Miss Swaim,

I am taking your suggestions regarding Charlotte Braun, and will eventually discard her. If she appears anymore it will be in strips that were already completed before I got your letter or because someone writes in saying that they like her. Remember, however, that you and your friends will have the death of an innocent child on your conscience. Are you prepared to accept such responsibility?

Thanks for writing and I hope that future releases will please you.

Sincerely.

Charles M. Schulz

DARK.

-Nicole

(via Letters of Note: An Eclectic Collection of Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience, compiled by Shaun Usher)

[miamaimania]

“A poem, an exercise in omitting letters” ⌇ Thomas Penny · concrete poetry

[bestiolin]

roz chast

[diana-andraste]

Les Hélicoptères, Robert Doisneau, 1972

[aphroditesangel02]

[flounderrock]

the stone was swimming in there

[letmesleeponu4sumtime]

Prelude to summer

[twiststreet]

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

Edited down a long tweet. (x)

[sentimentalbeing2001]

They are so beautiful I wish I could paint them before the petals start to fall

[epellucid]

via

[blue-voids]

Arnulf Rainer - Hand & Finger Paintings, 1981-82

[despazito]

He is once again so right

[susandsnell]

feminist killjoy hours again, what the actual fuck is “weird girl literature” and how often do we acquiesce to the latest degrading gendered advertising campaigns

[susandsnell]

Women did not fucking pioneer horror, thriller, and science fiction as we know it for publishing to infantilize it into a high school phase

[susandsnell]

is Stephen king “weird boy literature”? Or does he get to be an adult horror novelist?

[cephalopodie]

I now pronounce you you

[crawfishcomic]

Marriage

[flounderrock]

great thoughts to explore when you’re on the verge of bettering your life: am i the fakest person alive? will i be able to love someone the way i want to? where is my sixteen year old self now?