On Words

A modern-day Helen Keller moment, or why the currency of communication is more complex than we think.

Words matter. They shape how we relate to one another and the world at large, they frame what matters and why. They can break your heart (“My feelings for you have changed…”), tickle your mind (“The more I learn, the more I learn how little I know…”) and enlighten your soul (“I have a dream…”). They can steer entire ideologies and even spark the extinction of species.

Words, a fantastic new episode of WNYC’s always-excellent Radiolab, examines the importance of words by imagining a world without them. From a look at Shakespeare’s linguistic chemistry to a first-hand account of what it’s like to have the language center of your brain wiped out by a stroke (yep, we’re talking about Jill Bolte Taylor of blockbuster TED Talk fame) to a woman who taught a 27-year-old man the first words of his life and revealed the worldview-changing insight that everything has a name, the hour-long program offers a profound perspective shift in this currency of our day-to-day that we take for granted.

What is it that happens in human beings when we get symbols and we start trading symbols? It changes our thinking, it changes our ideas.” ~ Susan Shaller

The episode is available as a free mp3 download and we highly recommend you subscribe to the full series podcast in iTunes, also free.

For further reading, these four books referenced in Words are absolutely fascinating and paint a rich, comprehensive portrait of the layered significance of language in culture and human psychology.

• A Man Without Words by Susan Shaller
• A Thousand Days of Wonder: A Scientist’s Chronicle of His Daughter’s Developing Mind by Charles Fernyhough
• Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro
• The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature by Jill Bolte Taylor

Also of note and highly recommended, a trio of books by Steven Pinker, whom we consider one of the sharpest thinkers on language today:

• The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
• Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language
• The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

via Open Culture

We’ve got a weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s articles, and features five more tasty bites of web-wide interestingness. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

Tags: books, culture, psychology, science, sociology
Posted in culture, good to know, psychology | 13 Comments »

HAPPY: A Documentary

From swamps to slums and why owning nothing can mean having everything.

What makes people genuinely happy? The nature and origin of happiness is something we’ve been exploring for a while, across a variety of projects and media — from Charles Spearin’s The Happiness Project to Gretchen Rubin’s’s identically titled but radically different yearlong experiment to the neurological underpinnings of happiness.

Now, an ambitious feature documentary is on a quest to probe deeper and go further to find what it is that truly makes people happy. HAPPY, from Oscar-nominated director Roko Belic (Genghis Blues), treks the globe from the swamps of Louisiana to the slums of Kolkata to unearth the sources of the world’s most precious natural resource through ordinary and extraordinary human stories and powerful interviews with the leading neuroscientists and psychologists researching the science of happiness.

HAPPY seeks to share the wisdom of traditional cultures and the cutting edge science that is now, for the first time, exploring human happiness.”

Inspired by Belic’s insight that the United States is among the world’s wealthiest nations yet reports some of the lowest happiness levels, HAPPY aims to examine this disconnect between wealth and well-being, indentifying the true currency of happiness.

I went to Africa when I was 18 and I had a very shocking experience. I met literally hundreds of people over the course of a few weeks who owned absolutely nothing. And yet they genuinely were exuding happiness.” ~ Roko Belic

WGSO has an excellent interview with Belic, revealing much of the inspiration for and insights from the film:

The film, a nonprofit project, was funded entirely through Kickstarter, of which we’ve been longtime proponents as one of the most potent platforms for crowdfunding creative ventures.

HAPPY is currently in post-production and we’re counting down to its inevitable awards sweep at Sundance.

via Swiss Miss

We’ve got a weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s articles, and features five more tasty bites of web-wide interestingness. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

Tags: cool, culture, documentary, film, happiness, psychology
Posted in culture | 24 Comments »