Living in Our Imaginations

How do Americans spend their leisure time? The answer might surprise you. The most common voluntary activity is not eating, drinking alcohol, or taking drugs. It is not socializing with friends, participating in sports, or relaxing with the family. While people sometimes describe sex as their most pleasurable act, time-management studies find that the average American adult devotes just four minutes per day to sex. ... Our main leisure activity is, by a long shot, participating in experiences that we know are not real. When we are free to do whatever we want, we retreat to the imagination—to worlds created by others, as with books, movies, video games, and television (over four hours a day for the average American), or to worlds we ourselves create, as when daydreaming and fantasizing. While citizens of other countries might watch less television, studies in England and the rest of Europe find a similar obsession with the unreal.

Paul Bloom, professor of psychology at Yale University and the author of the forthcoming book, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like looks at why it is we spend so much time in our imaginations, including reading novels. This fascinating piece is based on one of the chapters of the book.

Hot or Not?

Are looks everything?
Does body size matter?
Is male facial hair hot, or not?
Is there such a thing as the perfect female form?
Are big boobs better?
Is it the same for lesbians?
Why are gay men always at the gym?

Find the answers in this review of The Secrets of Attraction: What Makes a Person Desirable? by Viren Swami and Adrian Furnham from the Independent.

Viren also recently published The Missing Arms of the Venus de Milo: Reflections in the Science of Attractiveness (which I wrote about here.) I'm sad I missed Viren when he was back in Malaysia recently talking about ... socialism. (Is this guy the true renaissance man?)

You can listen to him talking about the science of attraction in this programme on BBC Radio 4.

If We Weren't Here

Here's a book I started reading about when cruising around the internet at the weekend. Scarcely more cheerful reading than Cormac McCarthy's The Road, but this is a book I'm looking forward to tracking down.

Alan Weisman's The World without Us takes for its premise another end-of-the-world scenario. What would happen to our planet if all human beings simply disappeared for some reason? What would become of all the stuff we've manufactured and built as the years and the decades and the centuries pass by?

Steve Mirsky interviews Science writer Weisman in Scientific American and you can try this interactive Did You Know quiz, watch this video and read an extract from the book in Orion Magazine.

Off to the boondocks of Nibong Tebal for the day tomorrow to visit a school, so try not to miss me too much!

An Armless Enough Read

Dropped by Silverfish to see what gossip I could glean, and saw on the counter The Missing Arms of Venus de Milo: Reflections on the Science of Attractiveness.

Now I'm a sucker for books about evolutionary biology especially when difficult subject matter is enjoyably readable for a lay audience, so I was pretty interested. Then I realised that the name of the author seemed familiar ... and then it clicked, Viren Swami's short story The Monkey of the Inkpot was included in Silverfish New Writing 6. How great to have a very interesting popular science book written by a Malaysian author and published in the UK (by independent publisher Book Guild)! I hesitated about buying it because it was RM120 which seems a bit ouchy (although this is in fact a close ringgit equivalent to the £16.99 UK price). I hope that a paperback version is in the pipeline. (Can see I'm rapidly talking myself into going back for a copy ...)

I lifted this blurb from the Silverfish website:

We are constantly told that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. But what if, just as our lives are governed by universal physical laws, the notion of beauty could be reduced to a system of immutable facts? Could there be one universal concept of beauty by which we are all measured? In Viren Swami's intriguing investigation into the science of attractiveness, the author sets out to deconstruct the myths and uncover some of the truths about beauty. Taking the Venus de Milo as his constant companion, Swami embarks on a fascinating journey through historical, cultural, economic and social contexts of this age old debate. On his way he encounters an impressive gallery of advocates and adversaries: from Plato to Michelangelo, from Rubens to Manet, from Darwin to Stephan Jay Gould; Shakespeare to Naomi Wolf. The definitive guide to psychologists, art historians and philosophers of science, this highly accessible and wide ranging exploration is also an indispensable introduction for any of us who has ever wondered what constitutes the body beautiful.

Viren Swami is currently living in London. He is a Research Associate at the University of Liverpool, UK. He received his doctorate from University College London, where he specialized in evolutionary psychology. His current research interests include interpersonal attraction, especially across cultures, and gender studies. He has also written (with Adrian Furnham) The Psychology of Physical Attraction, as well as numerous psychological studies.

He has also translated George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia into Bahasa Malaysia and is currently translating Kafka's Metamorphosis. How nice to see a scientist bridging the literary divide.

If Happiness Bit You On the Nose ...

Do any of us actually know what happiness is? This is the fundamental question asked in Daniel Gilbert's book.

Stumbling on Happiness is not a self-help book, but a psychological study, ... and it's just won this year's Royal Society Prize for Science Books. I liked this review of it by Malcolm Gladwell (author of Blink and The Tipping Point) which I found on Amazon. It does rather sound like a must-read:

Stumbling on Happiness is a book about a very simple but powerful idea. What distinguishes us as human beings from other animals is our ability to predict the future--or rather, our interest in predicting the future. We spend a great deal of our waking life imagining what it would be like to be this way or that way, or to do this or that, or taste or buy or experience some state or feeling or thing. We do that for good reasons: it is what allows us to shape our life. And it is by trying to exert some control over our futures that we attempt to be happy. But by any objective measure, we are really bad at that predictive function. We're terrible at knowing how we will feel a day or a month or year from now, and even worse at knowing what will and will not bring us that cherished happiness. Gilbert sets out to figure what that's so: why we are so terrible at something that would seem to be so extraordinarily important?

In making his case, Gilbert walks us through a series of fascinating--and in some ways troubling--facts about the way our minds work. In particular, Gilbert is interested in delineating the shortcomings of imagination. We're far too accepting of the conclusions of our imaginations. Our imaginations aren't particularly imaginative. Our imaginations are really bad at telling us how we will think when the future finally comes. And our personal experiences aren't nearly as good at correcting these errors as we might think.

The other short-listed books were:

Homo Britannicus: The Incredible Story of Human Life in Britain by Chris Stringer
In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind by Eric R. Kandel
Lonesome George: The Life and Loves of a Conservation Icon by Henry Nicholls
One in Three: A Son's Journey Into the Science and History of Cancer by Adam Wishart
The Rough Guide to Climate Change by Robert Henson

Update:

Grateful I am indeed to Rol who sent me the link to a YouTube video of a talk by Daniel Gilbert. It is very well worth watching to learn the secret of true happiness ... which is not what you think it will be and not what Rhonda Byrne would like you to think it is. Unlike Byrne, Gilbert is actually able to provide you with some evidence beyond the mere anecdotal to support what he's saying.

Darwin Online

Here's an internet miracle: Charles Darwin's complete papers, never physically assembled in any one place, many of them unpublished, are now available online - and for free.

Darwin was responsible for one of the greatest leaps of science of all times, when he formulated his theory of evolution. The collection currently contains more than 50,000 searchable text pages and 40,000 images of both publications and handwritten manuscripts, with much more still to be added. It even includes a missing notebook recording Darwin's five-year voyage to the Amazon, Patagonia and the Pacific aboard HMS Beagle. (Fortunately, the text was micro-filmed before it was stolen.)

More about the collection in the Guardian.