Category: Brain and storming

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Aging Politicians

The process of aging is usually a process which is progressing slowly. For politicians this process seems to run in fast forward. The churning of people through careers as politicians is quite unpredictable despite the fact that a career track through youth organizations of political parties or non-governmental organizations is a fairly good predictor of prospects of a career within this party. As the political culture has become even more rough through the comments and criticism of official media and social media, the expectations to be available for comment and debate are almost instantaneous.
Burn-out and frustration are a more frequent occurrence. As such this is not surprising, but the young age of these occurrences are real concern. The profession of politicians bears many risks and even threats to their lives. Democracies rely heavily on politicians who master complex subjects and can communicate effectively about these topics.
Aging societies can no longer just claim that politicians should reflect the age structure of society. It remains a challenge to train and support young people for jobs in politics. It is also an issue to prepare for a sustainable career in politics and keep motivation high to go the extra mile in the interest of society as a whole.
(Image: Extract of Adolphe Menzel, Das Ballsouper, 1878, SPK Berlin)

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Book Performance

Some texts are written in view of a performance, a theatre performance or an opera in mind. We have had dance performances and choreographers emancipate themselves from the music to claim dance is an art in its own right. Books are books in their own right. However, the hybrid forms of performance of a book was on display in the 2024 edition of the Wiels Art Book Fair in Brussels. It is common practice to invite speakers and authors for a book launch event. It is more rare to invite a choreographer and dancer to perform a book. This is exactly the what the publishers of A.R.D.V.L. did. Garance Debert put the editorial work and conceptual work on a book into a moving performance. There is much more to a book than just the letters and paper. The „mise en page“ turns into a „mise en scèene“ by an artist. The Wiels Art Book Fair has raised our attention to the larger creative potential of books, certainly art books, but also beyond books on art. Performative readings and book performances will enrich our repertoire of interacting with printed materials. Just before we might believe this is the next big hype, remember the bible is probably the book with the most theatrical performances linked to it.

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Of or about

There exists a fundamental difference between taking a picture of something or someone as opposed to taking a picture about someone or something. With the term about we denote or refer to a more abstract category of trees, animals or human beings. The use of of, however, refers to a specific realization within a specific category. Painters or photographers have applied this distinction for a long time. It is similar to social scientists who consider persons or relationships as belonging to more general categories. Gender is such a category which has preoccupied us for years before concluding that just 2 gender categories are not enough to come up with reasonable descriptions and predictions of behavior. The realizations of gender are manifold and not necessarily or only binary in nature as well appearances. Eventually social categories are enlarged to fit empirical patterns in more adequate ways. The image of someone/something therefore is something very different from an image about someone/something. (Image of: Children’s corner at Musée Rodin Paris. Image about: Pedagogic approaches to art, here sculptures « Le penseur », Rodin 19th century)

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Smart Cars

Technology of cars and in cars has evolved rapidly with the move towards the smart cars. Smart cars are characterized by many additional sensors, almost permanent connectivity to the producer’s software platform, the internet, autonomous driving capability or, potentially, remote control. We might still curse some nostalgic feelings of being in driving seat, but the supervision of our capability to drive and monitoring of behavior has reached impressive levels of perfection beyond the fasten your seatbelt sign and alarm. The software that is driving our cars has become the challenge of the coming years and with this the concern for data privacy and cyber security. Smart cars have multiple cameras to guide driving and parking effectively. These cameras are also a perfect spy even around or in your home. From our smartphones we all know the scanning of connectable Bluetooth devices or wlan nearby. Smart cars are powerful assistants in data collection sometimes even beyond your control, for example who these data are sent to. June Yoon (2024-10-2 Financial Times) has developed this rationale even further to stir up additional fears: “A hacked self-driving car might even be turned into a weapon”. The weaponization of beepers, talky-walkies is certainly not the last step in this process of potential dangers of technology. Smart cars come with additional risks, not only additional comfort. Better choose your rollercoaster wisely.

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Happy Time

“The times are a changing”, so is happiness. This is the spice of life we might add as well. Trajectories of happy life run not as flat lines simply on different, but largely parallel levels. Curves of different persons intersect. Even the focus of what determines personal happiness is different from one person to other. A job-focused person deviates substantially from a person deriving happiness mainly from her/his private life. The time dimension of happiness is yet another puzzle. Some persons have a focus on now and today, others consider a future time perspective for a happy life as less, equally or more important. Even the retrospective experience of happiness or unhappy childhood experiecences can override current emotions and oveall satisfaction with life. Economists apply a so-called discount rate to benfits or costs that accrue in future, which means that 1000 € in future, usually are estimated to have a lower value than 1000 € now. Happiness at some point in time in the future is likely to “suffer” from the same rationale. Satisfaction now is valued higher than even the same satisfaction at a later point in time. This probably explains a large deal why fewer people are concerned with their retirement benefits early on in their professional career and their job satisfaction trajectory. Many artists, apparently have a deviating time horizon. They endure economic hardship now for some recognition in future, but still have a happy time now.
(Image: Jorge Carrasco, Church Painting, France)

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Happy Runner

The happy runner is a nice example of how hard it maybe to experience happiness through running. The so-called runner’s high is available to everybody, if you manage to run long enough already. Most predictions put the threshold distance at about a 1 hour run. The reward for this effort is a special feeling that exceeds the pain or it makes you forget or supress the pain at least temporarily. Special reinforcements can be achieved through the big city runs in exciting places with thousands of people cheering you on. This has become a big business as well. Training for such an event might raise your feeling of happiness substantially. The chemistry of the endogenous production of stimulants of happiness in our body has been enlightened substantially in recent years (partly as doping control). Most of the brain active drugs our body can produce itself, although this involves a lot of physical and mental effort. The rewards are pretty healthy for most runners contributing to their basic level of happiness. Running outside, has contributed more to happiness for me more than the same exercise on a treadmil. Maybe, the environment is part of the happy runner’s high effect.

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Happy Biology

At first glance happiness from a biological perspective is easy to understand. Its hormones, stupid, that regulates it all. Only problem, there are many of them that interact and, apparently, a lot depends on the right dosis and duration of exposure or deficiency. Oxytocin deficiency seems to be a corollary of anxiety and lack of pro-social behavior, potentially making people less happy – to put it bluntly. There are other complex interactions between hormones not only in the circadian circle of humans like for cortisol, but also related to differential reactions to stress. Genetics and epigenetics are involved as well stress regulation and early exposition to stress during the life course has longer lasting consequences later on. How much stress is good for you? Climbing Mountains induces physical stress, but most people report lasting happiness referring back to such singular events. Hormones seem to play tricks with us as well.
Some time after the novel “Klara and the Sun“, endocrinologists have documented the positive effect of a robot on oxytocin levels in humans. Improvements to mental health and well-being are apparently easy considering that oxytocin is a driver of feeling happy as well. Maybe we should take our depressors and drivers of oxytocin more seriously to be “biologically” happy.
(Image: Extrait Frans Hals 1660, Catharina Hooft and her nurse. Exhibition Gemäldegalerie Berlin 2024)

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Happy Employee

The research on happiness, subjective well-being or overall satisfaction with your life is also an empirical question. Analyses of being happy donot only focus of overall happiness, but look much more into the details of happiness. Beyond the tricky longitudinal observations of happiness it is common scientific practice to deal with subdomains of happiness like satisfaction of employees with their job, satisfaction with one’s job beyond the honeymoon and hangover effect, best known from family studies.
Each of those subdomains has a significant effect on overall happiness. The novel “Happy Life” by David Foenkinos is an interesting example which focuses mainly on the subdomains of job satisfaction, satisfaction with private and romantic partners as the major domains of a happy life. As developed in the novel, people make job changes to re-orientate professional careers or reset their private life. A low point on the happiness scale in one domain might be compensated by higher levels in another domain. These impact from one domaine to another might have substantial time lags involved as well. More drastic resets (à la Foenkinos) can be avoided through focus on other subdomains of overall happiness as well.
How happy are you with your housing situation, neighborhood, your pet, your physical health? There a multiple +/-spill-over effects to overall happiness. Reading a novel might be one as well, just take time reserved to yourself.(Image BnF expo “women in sport”, 20024)

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Happy Maths

The link of maths and happiness is not straightforward. Individual accounts of a happy (euphoric) or unhappy (dismal) life are mostly referred to psychologists for treatment. The biografies (documentaries) or fictional biografies told in novels or cinema allow to trace the changing moods of the personalities over time. This resembles life course research. In happiness research social scientist ask questions like “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life“. Measured over time or coded from biografies this allows to reconstruct happiness trajectories. At this point the maths of happiness enter the stage. Long periods of observations yield interesting patterns of curved lines, rarely simple linear trajectories. Social scientist speak of within person variability in contrast to between persons variability. After all, the (short-term superior) happiness of your neighbor might simply be due to the fact that they are doing drugs.
Whatever, try to remember a bit of your high school maths and the bore to deal with “curve discussions or sketching” beyond the manifold shapes of your classmates. Lots of interesting information derives from growth or decline rates, tangent lines, stationary or inflection points. Different starting points or so-called intercepts vary between individuals as well as he potential  to cross the Zero-line on one of the axes. Additionally, in geometry you would compare syncronicity of curved lines as well as forms of symmetry for the curve(s). This will simplify or comlexify your perspective on the happiness trajectories of people or characters in a novel.
We are so used to narratives or videoss with a happy end, yet we appreciate the complex trajectories and (multiple) troughs main characters have to pass. Novels teach us about tricky inflection points and subsequent trajectories as well. The maths of happiness, however, is rather simple in comparison.
(Image from Toronto District Christian High School -pdf p.207).

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Happy Life

There are countries in this world that want to prescribe to their citizens what constitutes a happy life. Religious beliefs are another powerful instigation of what may be called a happy life now or in the future. Most people on earth, however, have their very own idea about happiness and how to get closer to this moment, phases or destiny of their lives.

Happy life is also the title of the novel or „une fable optimiste“ by David Foenkinos with the almost programmatic title „La vie heureuse“. It has been qualified as a bit absurd, but at the time of celebrating 100 years of surrealism, this fits into the surreal world episodes and narratives that surround us. The novel is full of ups and downs for the major characters, which reflects the inevitable links of happy relative to unhappy moments in life. The pseudo experience of death allows to press a kind of reset button in life after which love and life can start afresh. This might not work for all us as Foenkinos seems to tell us with the choice of the dedication and citation of Charlotte Salomon „On devait même, pour aimer plus encore la vie, être mort une fois“. Charlotte Salomon, however, lives on through her formidable artistic work accomplished in her short life.