National Poetry Month might be over, but the celebration of book spine poetry doesn’t have to be. The latest installment tackles The Big One — the meaning of life.

The books:

• The Meaning of Life: Reflections in Words and Pictures on Why We Are Here by David Friend, who served as LIFE magazine’s director of photography in the 1990s
• Big Questions by Anders Nilsen
• Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance by Jonathan Fields
• Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, one of 7 essential books on the art and science of happiness
• In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World by Ian Stewart

Catch up on all previous book spine poems: The Future, Get Smarter, This is New York, and Music.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Brain Pickings takes 450+ hours a month to curate and edit across the different platforms, and remains banner-free. If it brings you any joy and inspiration, please consider a modest donation – it lets me know I'm doing something right.

For the past half-century, Joan Didion has been dissecting the complexities of cultural chaos with equal parts elegant anxiety, keen criticism, and moral imagination. From her 1968 anthology of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, comes “On Self Respect” — a magnificent meditation on what it means to live well in one’s soul, touching on previously explored inadequate externalities like prestige, approval, and conventions of success. Didion writes:

The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others — who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is something people with courage can do without.

To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that deals with one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there’s the hurt on X’s face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, the Phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commissions and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice, or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.

[…]

[C]haracter — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.

Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts.

[…]

[S]elf-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth. It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one’s head in a Food Fair bag. There is a similar case for all the small disciplines, unimportant in themselves; imagine maintaining any kind of swoon, commiserative or carnal, in a cold shower.

[…]

To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out — since our self-image is untenable — their false notion of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course I will play Francesca to your Paolo, Helen Keller to anyone’s Annie Sullivan; no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we cannot but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meting the next demand made upon us.

It is the phenomenon sometimes called ‘alienation from self.’ In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves — there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

Thanks, Lexi

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Brain Pickings takes 450+ hours a month to curate and edit across the different platforms, and remains banner-free. If it brings you any joy and inspiration, please consider a modest donation – it lets me know I'm doing something right.

It’s that time of year again, the time when cultural icons and luminaries of various stripes flock to podiums around the world to impart their wisdom on a fresh crop of graduating seniors hungry to take on the world. After last year’s omnibus of timeless commencement addresses by J. K. Rowling (“Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is something on which to pride yourself. But poverty itself is romanticized only by fools.”), Steve Jobs (“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.”), Robert Krulwich (“You will build a body of work, but you will also build a body of affection, with the people you’ve helped who’ve helped you back. This is the era of Friends in Low Places.”), Meryl Streep (“This is your time, and it feels normal to you. But, really, there is no ‘normal.’ There’s only change, and resistance to it, and then more change.”), and Jeff Bezos (“Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice.”), here are five-ish more packets of timeless wisdom.

Across them runs a common thread of what seems to be as much a critical message, the message, for the young as it is an essential lifelong reminder for all: No social convention of success should lure you away from or could be a substitute for finding your purpose and doing what you love.

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE AT KENYON COLLEGE (2005)

In 2005, David Foster Wallace addressed the graduating class at Kenyon College with a remarkable speech that revealed in equal measure his singular, potent, wildly eclectic mind and his wounded spirit, peeling the curtain on the triumphs and tragedies of being David Foster Wallace. When Wallace took his own life in 2008 in a way referenced from the podium, the address took on a whole new layer of meaning for those who revered, mourned, and tried to understand the beloved writer. In 2009, the speech was adapted into a short book titled This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life.

It is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.”

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.

Full transcript here.

ELLEN DEGENERES AT TULANE (2009)

In 2009, the great Ellen DeGeneres — icon, notorious happy-dancer, and one of my big heroes — sent off the graduating “Katrina class” at New Orleans’ Tulane University with a hurricane of a speech that swirls you into a whirlwind of wit and humor, shakes you up with its humility and deeply personal candor, and puts you back down with a new understanding of

As you grow, you’ll realize the definition of success changes. For many of you, today, success is being able to hold down 20 shots of tequila. For me, the most important thing in your life is to live your life with integrity, and not to give into peer pressure. to try to be something that you’re not. To live your life as an honest and compassionate person. to contribute in some way. So to conclude my conclusion: follow your passion, stay true to yourself. Never follow anyone else’s path, unless you’re in the woods and you’re lost and you see a path, and by all means you should follow that.

AARON SORKIN AT SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY (2012)

Earlier this week, Aaron Sorkin took the stage at Syracuse University and addressed the graduating class with equal parts wit, wisdom, and disarming candor. His remarks about how the government failed to address the dawn of the AIDS epidemic because a disease that affected mostly homosexuals didn’t seem worth the trouble, and how misguided that was in retrospect, make one think of the recent momentous strides forward for LGBT rights and wonder with what mix of bewilderment and shame we might look back on the days of government-sanctioned bigotry in a few decades.

Develop your own compass, and trust it. Take risks, dare to fail, remember the first person through the wall always gets hurt. My junior and senior years at Syracuse, I shared a five-bedroom apartment at the top of East Adams with four roommates, one of whom was a fellow theater major named Chris. Chris was a sweet guy with a sly sense of humor and a sunny stage presence. He was born out of his time, and would have felt most at home playing Mickey Rooney’s sidekick in “Babes on Broadway.” I had subscriptions back then to TIME and Newsweek. Chris used to enjoy making fun of what he felt was an odd interest in world events that had nothing to do with the arts. I lost touch with Chris after we graduated and so I’m not quite certain when he died. But I remember about a year and a half after the last time I saw him, I read an article in Newsweek about a virus that was burning its way across the country. The Centers for Disease Control was calling it “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome” or AIDS for short. And they were asking the White House for $35 million for research, care and cure. The White House felt that $35 million was way too much money to spend on a disease that was only affecting homosexuals, and they passed. Which I’m sure they wouldn’t have done if they’d known that $35 million was a steal compared to the $2 billion it would cost only 10 years later.

Am I saying that Chris would be alive today if only he’d read Newsweek? Of course not. But it seems to me that more and more we’ve come to expect less and less of each other, and that’s got to change. Your friends, your family, this school expect more of you than vocational success.

BARACK OBAMA AT WESLEYAN (2008)

Philosopher Daniel Dennett once offered his key to the secret of happiness: “Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it.” In his 2008 address to the graduating class at Wesleyan University, Barack Obama put it just as eloquently: “[O]ur individual salvation depends on collective salvation. Because thinking only about yourself, fulfilling your immediate wants and needs, betrays a poverty of ambition.”

[S]hould you take the path of service, should you choose to take up one of these causes as your own, know that you’ll experience the occasional frustrations and the occasional failures. Even your successes will be marked by imperfections and unintended consequences. I guarantee you, there will be times when friends or family urge you to pursue more sensible endeavors with more tangible rewards. And there will be times where you will be tempted to take their advice.

But I hope you’ll remember, during those times of doubt and frustration, that there is nothing naïve about your impulse to change the world. Because all it takes is one act of service — one blow against injustice — to send forth what Robert Kennedy called that tiny ripple of hope. That’s what changes the world. That one act.

CONAN O’BRIEN AT DARTMOUTH (2011)

Count on Conan to hit on the Big Truths with his signature blend of irreverence, self-derision, and keen cultural observation.

For decades, in show business, the ultimate goal of every comedian was to host The Tonight Show. It was the Holy Grail, and like many people I thought that achieving that goal would define me as successful. But that is not true. No specific job or career goal defines me, and it should not define you. In 2000 — in 2000 — I told graduates to not be afraid to fail, and I still believe that. But today I tell you that whether you fear it or not, disappointment will come. The beauty is that through disappointment you can gain clarity, and with clarity comes conviction and true originality.

BONUS: RAY BRADBURY (2001)

Though not technically a commencement speech, this remarkable keynote address by Ray Bradbury at The Sixth Annual Writer’s Symposium by the Sea is brimming with the kind of invaluable wisdom you wish someone had pinned to your mind in your early twenties, so you could laminate it for the rest of your life.

I want your loves to be multiple. I don’t want you to be a snob about anything. Anything you love, you do it. It’s got to be with a great sense of fun. Writing is not a serious business. It’s a joy and a celebration. You should be having fun with it. Ignore the authors who say “Oh, my God, what word? Oh, Jesus Christ…”, you know. Now, to hell with that. It’s not work. If it’s work, stop and do something else.

Now, what I’m thinking of it, people always saying “Well, what do we do about a sudden blockage in your writing? What if you have a blockage and you don’t know what to do about it?” Well, it’s obvious you’re doing the wrong thing, don’t you? In the middle of writing something you go blank and your mind says: “No, that’s it”. Ok. You’re being warned, don’t you? Your subconscious is saying “I don’t like you anymore. You’re writing about things I don’t give a damn for”. You’re being political, or you’re being socially aware. You’re writing things that will benefit the world. To hell with that! I don’t write things to benefit the world. If it happens that they do, swell. I didn’t set out to do that. I set out to have a hell of a lot of fun.

I’ve never worked a day in my life. I’ve never worked a day in my life. The joy of writing has propelled me from day to day and year to year. I want you to envy me, my joy. Get out of here tonight and say: “Am I being joyful?” And if you’ve got a writer’s block, you can cure it this evening by stopping whatever you’re writing and doing something else. You picked the wrong subject.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Brain Pickings takes 450+ hours a month to curate and edit across the different platforms, and remains banner-free. If it brings you any joy and inspiration, please consider a modest donation – it lets me know I'm doing something right.

“Six hours’ sleep for a man, seven for a woman, and eight for a fool,” Napoleon famously prescribed. (He would have scoffed at Einstein, then, who was known to require ten hours of sleep for optimal performance.) This perceived superiority of those who can get by on less sleep isn’t just something Napoleon shared with dictators like Hitler and Stalin, it’s an enduring attitude woven into our social norms and expectations, from proverbs about early birds to the basic scheduling structure of education and the workplace. But in Internal Time: Chronotypes, Social Jet Lag, and Why You’re So Tired, a fine addition to these 7 essential books on time, German chronobiologist Till Roenneberg demonstrates through a wealth of research that our sleep patterns have little to do with laziness and other such scorned character flaws, and everything to do with biology.

In fact, each of us possesses a different chronotype — an internal timing type best defined by your midpoint of sleep, or midsleep, which you can calculate by dividing your average sleep duration by two and adding the resulting number to your average bedtime on free days, meaning days when your sleep and waking times are not dictated by the demands of your work or school schedule. For instance, if you go to bed at 11 P.M. and wake up at 7 A.M., add four hours to 11pm and you get 3 A.M. as your midsleep.

The distribution of midsleep in Central Europe. The midsleep times (on free days) of over 60 percent of the population fall between 3:30 and 5:30 A.M.

Roenneberg traces the evolutionary roots of different sleep cycles and argues that while earlier chronotypes might have had a social advantage in agrarian and industrial societies, today’s world of time-shift work and constant connectivity has invalidated such advantages but left behind the social stigma around later chronotypes.

This myth that early risers are good people and that late risers are lazy has its reasons and merits in rural societies but becomes questionable in a modern 24/7 society. The old moral is so prevalent, however, that it still dominates our beliefs, even in modern times. The postman doesn’t think for a second that the young man might have worked until the early morning hours because he is a night-shift worker or for other reasons. He labels healthy young people who sleep into the day as lazy — as long sleepers. This attitude is reflected in the frequent use of the word-pair early birds and long sleepers [in the media]. Yet this pair is nothing but apples and oranges, because the opposite of early is late and the opposite of long is short.

Roenneberg goes on to explore sleep duration, a measure of sleep types that complements midsleep, demonstrating just as wide a spectrum of short and long sleepers and debunking the notion that people who get up late sleep longer than others — this judgment, after all, is based on the assumption that everyone goes to bed at the same time, which we increasingly do not.

Sleep duration shows a bell-shaped distribution within a population, but there are more short sleepers (on the left) than long sleepers (on the right).

The disconnect between our internal, biological time and social time — defined by our work schedules and social engagements — leads to what Roenneberg calls social jet lag, a kind of chronic exhaustion resembling the symptoms of jet lag and comparable to having to work for a company a few time zones to the east of your home.

Unlike what happens in real jet lag, people who suffer from social jet lag never leave their home base and can therefore never adjust to a new light-dark environment … While real jet lag is acute and transient, social jet lag is chronic. The amount of social jet lag that an individual is exposed to can be quantified as the difference between midsleep on free days and midsleep on work days … Over 40 percent of the Central European population suffers from social jet lag of two hours or more, and the internal time of over 15 percent is three hours or more out of synch with external time. There is no reason to assume that this would be different in other industrialized nations.

The scissors of sleep. Depending on chronotype, sleep duration can be very different between work days and free days.

Chronotypes vary with age:

Young children are relatively early chronotypes (to the distress of many young parents), and then gradually become later. During puberty and adolescence humans become true night owls, and then around twenty years of age reach a turning point and become earlier again for the rest of their lives. On average, women reach this turning point at nineteen and a half while men start to become earlier again at twenty-one … [T]his clear turning point in the developmental changes of chronotype … [is] the first biological marker for the end of adolescence.

Roenneberg points out that in our culture, there is a great disconnect between teenagers’ biological abilities and our social expectations of them, encapsulated in what is known as the disco hypothesis — the notion that if only teens would go to bed earlier, meaning not party until late, they’d be better able to wake up clear-headed and ready for school at the expected time. The data, however, indicate otherwise — adolescents’ internal time is shifted so they don’t find sleep before the small hours of the night, a pattern also found in the life cycle of rodents.

Here, we brush up against a painfully obtrusive cultural obstacle: School starts early — as early as 7 A.M. in some European countries — and teens are expected to perform well on a schedule not designed with their internal time in mind. As a result, studies have shown that many students show the signs of narcolepsy — a severe sleeping disorder that makes one fall asleep at once when given the chance, immediately entering REM sleep. The implications are worrisome:

Teenagers need around eight to ten hours of sleep but get much less during their workweek. A recent study found that when the starting time of high school is delayed by an hour, the percentage of students who get at least eight hours of sleep per night jumps from 35.7 percent to 50 percent. Adolescent students’ attendance rate, their performance, their motivation, even their eating habits all improve significantly if school times are delayed.

(Speaking from experience, this could also be extrapolated about work times and professional event times — conference organizers, are you paying attention?)

Roenneberg cites a Danish project, which eliminated timetables entirely and left the decision about when to arrive at school up to the students, based on a vision that schools should be regarded as service centers that tailor their service to what’s best for their customers — an optimal environment for achieving the best education possible.

Similar detrimental effects of social jet lag are found in shift work, which Roenneberg calls “one of the most blatant assaults on the body clock in modern society.” (And while we may be tempted to equate shift work with the service industry, any journalist, designer, developer, or artist who works well into the night on deadline can relate — hey, it’s well past midnight again as I’m writing this.) In fact, the World Health Organization recently classified “shift work that involves circadian disruption” as a potential cause of cancer, and the consequences of social jet lag and near-narcolepsy extend beyond the usual suspects of car accidents and medical errors:

We are only beginning to understand the potentially detrimental consequences of social jet lag. One of these has already been worked out with frightening certainty: the more severe the social jet lag that people suffer, the more likely it is that they are smokers. Tis is not a question of quantity (number of cigarettes per day) but simple whether they are smokers or not … Statistically, we experience the worst social jet lag as teenagers, when our body clocks are drastically delayed for biological reasons, but we still have to get up at the same traditional times for school. This coincides with the age when most individuals start smoking. Assuredly there are many different reasons people start smoking at that age, but social jet lag certainly contributes to the risk.

If young people’s psychological and emotional well-being isn’t incentive enough for policy makers — who, by the way, Roenneberg’s research indicates tend to be early chronotypes themselves — to consider later school times, one would think their health should be.

The correlation between social jet lag and smoking continues later in life as well, particularly when it comes to quitting:

[T]he less stress smokers have, the easier it is for them to quit. Social jet lag is stress, so the chances of successfully quitting smoking are higher when the mismatch of internal and external time is smaller. The numbers connecting smoking with social jet lag are striking: Among those who suffer less than an hour of social jet lag per day, we find 15 to 20 percent are smokers. This percentage systematically rises to over 60 percent when internal and external time are more than five hours out of sync.

Another factor contributing to our social jet lag is Daylight Savings Time. Even though DST’s proponents argue that it’s just one small hour, the data suggest that between October and March, DST throws off our body clocks by up to four weeks, depending on our latitude, not allowing our bodies to properly adjust to the time change, especially if we happen to be later chronotypes. The result is increased social jet lag and decreased sleep duration.

But what actually regulates our internal time? Though the temporal structures of sun time — tide, day, month, and year — play a significant role in the lives of all organisms, our biological clocks evolved in a “time-free” world and are somewhat independent of such external stimuli as light and dark. For instance, early botanical studies showed that a mimosa plant kept in a pitch-dark closet would still open and close its leaves the way it does in the day-night cycle, and subsequent studies of human subjects confined to dark bunkers showed similar preservation of their sleep and waking patterns, which followed, albeit imperfectly, the 24-hour cycle of day and night.

Our internal clocks, in fact, can be traced down to the genetic level, with individual “clock genes” and, most prominently, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or SCN — a small region in the brain’s midline that acts as a kind of “master clock” for mammals, regulating neuronal and hormonal activity around our circadian rhythms. Roenneberg explains how our internal clocks work on the DNA level:

In the nucleus, the DNA sequence of a clock gene is transcribed to mRNA; the resulting message is exported from the nucleus, translated into a clock protein, and is then modified. This clock protein is itself part of the molecular machinery that controls the transcription of its ‘own’ gene. When enough clock proteins have been made, they are imported back into the nucleus, where they start to inhibit the transcription of their own mRNA. Once this inhibition is strong enough, no more mRNA molecules are transcribed, and the existing ones are gradually destroyed. As a consequence, no more proteins can be produced and the existing ones will also gradually be destroyed. When they are all gone, the transcriptional machinery is not suppressed anymore, and a new cycle can begin.

[…]

Despite this complexity, the important take-home message is that daily rhythms are generated by molecular mechanisms that could potentially work in a single cell, for example a single neuron of the SCN.

So, even if philosopher Daniel Dennett’s is right in that “not a single one of the cells that compose you knows who you are, or cares,” a single cell does know when you should be sleeping and cares.

Still, external cues do synchronize our internal clocks, via a process called entrainment to make the internal day fit the external one by either compression or expansion. Light and darkness are the most potent of these cues. For most humans, our internal clocks are slightly longer than 24 hours, so they need compression. To achieve this, a body clock exposes more of its internal “day” to light and hides some of its internal “night” in the dark. This results in internal time being slightly later than external time, which is why people with slow internal clocks end up being later chronotypes.

Light, indeed, is the most important external cue to synchronize our internal body clocks, and the lack of light can have severe negative effects on our sleep patterns. Even a well-lit workplace exposes us to no more than 100 Lux, which translates to 1,200 Lux-hours over the course of a 12-hour workday. Meanwhile, on a cloudy day, the intensity of outside light is about 120,000 Lux, which means even a short 20-minute walk outdoors would expose us to 40,000 Lux-hours, or more than thirty-fold the exposure of that entire indoor workday. (Unless you have one of these lamps, which has been the single most important investment in my circadian sanity and general tolerance of dreary New York winters since my meditation practice.)

The detrimental effects of this light deprivation are most pronounced in the elderly and the mentally ill. Many elderly people rarely get a chance to go outside, and the TV is often their primary source of light. (Which leads one to wonder why elderly homes and assisted living facilities aren’t investing in such artificial daylight lamps rather than the countless flatscreen TVs gracing the common areas and even individual rooms in these institutions.)

Across most ages, men are on average later chronotypes than women. The differences decrease as men and women age. Thus, when the man is older than his female partner, their chronotypes tend to be more similar.

Internal Time goes on to illuminate many other aspects of how chronotypes and social jet lag impact our daily lives, from birth and suicide rates to when we borrow books from the library to why older men marry younger women, and even why innovators and entrepreneurs tend to have later chronotypes. (One hypothesis: because they were more challenged in school than early types, and always had to invent clever strategies to help them perform despite not being on top of things.)

Roenneberg’s daughter put together this wonderful teaser for her father’s research:

(Thanks, Jalees.)

Ultimately, Roenneberg makes a powerful case against many of the social expectations we have around sleep and productivity:

I am often asked whether we cannot get used to given working hours merely through discipline and by confining our sleep habits to certain times. The assumption inherent in this question is that the human body clock can synchronize to social cues. I tend to find that any such questioner, who usually also displays a somewhat disdainful tone towards the weakness of late chronotypes, is an early type — someone who has never experienced the problems associated with the [desynchronized] sleep-wake behavior of late chronotypes.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Brain Pickings takes 450+ hours a month to curate and edit across the different platforms, and remains banner-free. If it brings you any joy and inspiration, please consider a modest donation – it lets me know I'm doing something right.

In 1959, C. P. Snow lamented the tragic disconnect between science and the humanities in his famed “two cultures” lecture. Half a century later, Jonah Lehrer called for the creation of a “fourth culture” of knowledge that would bridge the divide. In Graphing Jane Austen: The Evolutionary Basis of Literary Meaning, researchers Joseph Carroll, John Johnson, Daniel Kruger, and Jonathan Gottschall — who gave us the fascinating The Storytelling Animal earlier this week — embody Lehrer’s vision and bridge the gap between science and literary scholarship by borrowing from the evolutionary biology and modern data analytics to construct a model of human nature that explains the evolved psychology of character dynamics in nineteenth-century British novels.

Using the framework of the model, they asked a sample of several hundred readers to give numerical ratings on 2,000 characters from 202 British novels, including all of Jane Austen’s.

This exercise in literary Darwinism produced three key findings: (1) these novels have determinate “agonistic” structures of meaning — centered on protagonists, antagonists, and minor characters — that can be captured using the model’s framework; (2) the perceived differences between protagonists and antagonists are much more structurally pronounced than the differences between male and female characters; and (3) the agonistic structure of these novels fulfills an adaptive social function, wherein literature articulates and cultivates specific social values.

A few of the findings (PDF) follow, in unnecessarily ugly academic graphics. (Please, oh, please, would some talented literature-loving information designer care to spruce them up?)

The researchers examined the positive and negative emotional responses readers have to characters based on a number of character qualities, including sex, age, attractiveness, personality, motives, and mate selection criteria. Five key motive factors emerged — dominance, constructive effort, romance, subsistence, and nurture — which varied greatly across the male and female protagonists and antagonists, and which played a key role in readers’ emotional responses.

Personality was also broken down to five factors: extraversion (assertiveness and sociability), agreeableness (warmth and affiliative behavior), conscientiousness (organization and reliability), emotional stability (calmness and evenness of temper), and openness to experience (curiosity or mental life).

The authors sum up the findings in a conclusion that seems as true of literature as it is of real life:

Standing as a protagonist — a good major character — typically depends on a combination of prosociality and an active mental life.

Also found were normative differences in personality based on gender:

In personality factors and mate-selection criteria, female protagonists most fully exemplify the normative tendencies of good major characters. The norms of the novels are thus gynocentric or feminized.

Though some may argue that bringing the rigorous lens of scientific research to world of literature is a barbaric way to rob the latter of its whimsy, if we subscribe to the view that fiction illuminates reality, Graphing Jane Austen shines a spotlight that not only would make C. P. Snow proud but also helps better understand our culture’s relationship with constructs like personality, gender, and introversion.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Brain Pickings takes 450+ hours a month to curate and edit across the different platforms, and remains banner-free. If it brings you any joy and inspiration, please consider a modest donation – it lets me know I'm doing something right.

“The universe is made of stories, not atoms,” poet Muriel Rukeyser memorably asserted, and Harvard sociobiologist E. O. Wilson recently pointed to the similarity between innovators in art and science, both of whom he called “dreamers and storytellers.” Stories aren’t merely essential to how we understand the world — they are how we understand the world. We weave and seek stories everywhere, from data visualization to children’s illustration to cultural hegemony. In The Storytelling Animal, educator and science writer Jonathan Gottschall traces the roots, both evolutionary and sociocultural, of the transfixing grip storytelling has on our hearts and minds, individually and collectively. What emerges is a kind of “unified theory of storytelling,” revealing not only our gift for manufacturing truthiness in the narratives we tell ourselves and others, but also the remarkable capacity of stories — the right kinds of them — to change our shared experience for the better.

Gottschall articulates a familiar mesmerism:

Human minds yield helplessly to the suction of story. No matter how hard we concentrate, no matter how deep we dig in our heels, we just can’t resist the gravity of alternate worlds.

Joining these favorite book trailers is a wonderful short black-and-white teaser animation:

One particularly important aspect of storytelling Gottschall touches on is the osmotic balance between the writer’s intention and the reader’s interpretation, something Mortimer Adler argued for decades ago in his eloquent case for marginalia. Gottschall writes:

The writer is not…an all-powerful architect of our reading experience. The writer guides the way we imagine but does not determine it. A film begins with a writer producing a screenplay. But it is the director who brings the screenplay to life, filling in most of the details. So it is with any story. A writer lays down words, but they are inert. They need a catalyst to come to life. The catalyst is the reader’s imagination.

In discussing the extent to which we live in stories, Gottschall puts in concrete terms something most of us suspect — fear, perhaps — on an abstract, intuitive level: the astounding amount of time we spend daydreaming.

Clever scientific studies involving beepers and diaries suggest that an average daydream is about fourteen seconds long and that we have about two thousand of them per day. In other words, we spend about half of our waking hours — one-third of our lives on earth — spinning fantasies. We daydream about the past: things we should have said or done, working through our victories and failures. We daydream about mundane stuff such as imagining different ways of handling conflict at work. But we also daydream in a much more intense, storylike way. We screen films with happy endings in our minds, where all our wishes — vain, aggressive, dirty — come true. And we screen little horror films, too, in which our worst fears are realized.

From War and Peace to pro wrestling, from REM sleep to the “fictional screen media” of commercials, from our small serialized personal stories on Facebook and Twitter to the large cultural stories of religious traditions, The Storytelling Animal dives into what science knows — and what it’s still trying to find out — about our propensity for storytelling to reveal not only the science of story but also its seemingly mystical yet palpably present power.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Brain Pickings takes 450+ hours a month to curate and edit across the different platforms, and remains banner-free. If it brings you any joy and inspiration, please consider a modest donation – it lets me know I'm doing something right.

Understanding what it means to be human and, more specifically, the nature of consciousness, has long occupied scientists and philosophers alike. We’ve seen consciousness explained as a connectome, a rainbow, and a kind of meaningful whole composed of meaningless parts. In this short video, philosopher John Searle defines consciousness by its four features — it’s real and irreducible, caused by brain processes, exists in the brain, and functions causably — and argues for a biological understanding that counters many of the philosophical conceptions. Perhaps a reductionist take — does the whole of our existence and purpose really amount to a set of biological processes? — but a fascinating one nonetheless.

We have to think of consciousness as a biological phenomenon. It’s as much a part of human and animal biology as digestion, or photosynthesis, or the secretion of bile, or mitosis… The main difference, at least in our present state of knowledge, is that we have a better understanding of digestion than we do of consciousness. The brain is a tough nut to crack.

For a deeper dive, see Searle’s fascinating Mind: A Brief Introduction.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Brain Pickings takes 450+ hours a month to curate and edit across the different platforms, and remains banner-free. If it brings you any joy and inspiration, please consider a modest donation – it lets me know I'm doing something right.

In 1916, Freud took the stage in Vienna in front of an audience that had gathered to hear the eighteenth of his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, and proceeded to canonize himself by staking his place in the history of humanity alongside Copernicus and Darwin, the former having solved geocentrism, the latter anthropocentrism, and Freud himself, allegedly, egocentrism. He likened the criticism psychoanalysis, “his” “science,” was receiving to that Copernicus and Darwin faced when their theories first confronted the status quo. Over the century that followed, Freud’s legacy penetrated society and went on to underpin the making of consumer culture. But understanding the story, the complete story, of how Freud became Freud hinges on understanding the story’s very storiness. That’s the premise of The Freud Files: An Inquiry into the History of Psychoanalysis (library link) from Cambridge University Press, in which prominent contemporary Freud critics Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and Sonu Shamdasani set out to reopen the files of Freud’s early critics, reexamining old controversies and restaging defining debates to argue that without the legend Freud himself engineered, the scientific status of psychoanalysis would never have achieved the credibility it actually did.

From how Freud manipulated his patient case histories to conform to his theories to how, even after his death, his daughter Anna worked arduously to maintain the myth, the authors open up previously unpublished documents and letters guarded by the Freud estate for decades, exploring how Freud rewrote his own history as a kind of propagandist storyteller.

‘Scientific’ psychology didn’t emerge as the fruit of a lucky discovery, a fortuitous invention, or by some ill-defined process of natural development. It was desired by its various promoters, and imagined on the model of the natural sciences.

For Freud, however, securing his place in history alongside history’s most seminal scientists was not without resistance. At the dawn of this “new psychology,” pioneering American psychologist and philosopher William James wrote to English psychologist James Sully in 1890:

This is no science, it is only the hope of science… But at present psychology is in the condition of physics before Galileo and the laws of motion, of chemistry before Lavoisier and the notion that mass is preserved in all reactions. The Galileo and Lavoisier of psychology will be famous men indeed when they come, as come they some day surely will.

So how, exactly, did Freud rewrite his own history? Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani distill it to five elements of alchemy:

…the peremptory declaration of the revolutionary and epochal character of psychoanalysis, the description of the ferocious hostility and irrational ‘resistances’ which it gave rise to, the insistence on the ‘moral courage’ which was required to overcome them, the obliteration of rival theories, relegated to a prehistory of psychoanalytic science, and a lack of acknowledgement of debts and borrowings.

The latter part strikes a particular nerve around here. In fact, there was nothing original about the method of introspective self-observation, which Freud allegedly invented and which shaped the course of psychoanalysis. From Thomas Hobbes:

Whosoever looketh into himself, and considereth what he doth, and when he does think, opine, reason, hope, feare, &c, and upon what grounds; he shall thereby read and know, what are the thoughts, and Passions of all men, upon like occasions.

And from Immanuel Kant:

The wish to play the spy upon one’s self… is to reverse the natural order of cognitive powers… The desire for self-investigation is either already a disease of the mind (hypochondria) or will lead to such a disease and ultimately to the madhouse.

But it wasn’t until the preface to the second edition of The Interpretation of Dreams that Freud publicly articulated his psychoanalysis of himself:

For this book has a further subjective significance for me personally — a significance which I only grasped after I had completed it. It was, I found, a portion of my own self-analysis, my reaction to my father’s death — that is to say, to the most important event, the most poignant loss, of a man’s life.

This erected a kind of “secret ‘science’ of Freud” behind the published public science, which made psychoanalysis into “a riddle, with only Freud possessing the key.” The loop of the riddle solidified when, in 1912, Carl Jung proposed that every prospective analyst be trained by being analyzed by another analyst, raising an obvious question: Who would train Freud, the analyst at the top of the food chain?

When Freud subjected himself to analysis by Jung, the dynamic quickly unraveled into a kind of feud, beginning with Freud’s admission to Jung that he “could not submit to analysis without losing [his] authority.” This triggered what’s easily the juiciest piece of correspondence in the volume, and possibly among the most acrimonious intellectual assaults in history, a scathing letter Jung sent Freud on December 18, 1912:

You go around sniffing out all the symptomatic actions in your vicinity, thus reducing everyone to the level of sons and daughters who blushingly admit the existence of their faults. Meanwhile you remain on top as the father, sitting pretty. For sheer obsequiousness nobody dares to pluck the prophet by the beard and inquire for once what you would say to a patient with a tendency to analyze the analyst instead of himself. You would certainly ask him: ‘Who’s got the neurosis?’… I am namely not in the least neurotic — touch wood! I have namely lege artis et tout humblement let myself be analyzed, which has been very good for me. You know, of course, how far a patient gets with self-analysis: not out of his neurosis — just like you.

The weaving of the Freud legend, the authors argue, was a deliberate architecting of a monoculture, a powerful story that can integrate new elements and theories, but its underlying structure remains unchanged. Freud engineered a kind of filter bubble of and for his followers. In 1908, for instance, he orchestrated the “First Congress of Freudian Psychology” in Salzburg, which was designed as a secret invitation-only event with no criticism allowed. When a critic of Freud’s requested admission to a similar event in 1910, he was denied permission to attend. In a letter to Freud whilst planning the conference, Jung admonished that this “splendid isolation must come to an end one day,” but Freud retorted that “that day is still far off.”

Freud was indeed so adamant about pushing that day as far into the future as possible that when rival Wilhelm Fleiss sold his correspondence with Freud to Marie Bonaparte in 1937 on the express condition that Freud never regain possession of them, Freud pleaded with Bonaparte to destroy them, saying he didn’t want “any of them to become known to the so-called posterity.” She wrote in her diary on November 24, 1937:

But when later, at the end of February or the beginning of March 1937, I saw [Freud] in Vienna and he told me he wanted the letters to be burned, I refused… One day he told me: ‘I hope to convince you to destroy them.’

The formidable filter bubble thickened when Freud formed the International Psychiatric Association, which gave him the perfect vehicle for propagating his ideas. Broch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani write:

Protected from the world by his disciples, Freud could recreate his own reality and his own history, without fear of being contradicted. From this perspective, the legend of the isolated and persecuted scientist is less the expression of Freud’s megalomania or mythomania, than the reflection of the institutional isolation of psychoanalysis. Conversely, the legend maintained the identity of the movement, portraying its mythic independence from and superiority over all other psychological and psychiatric theories. To view the legend simply as a means to satisfy Freud’s ambition and narcissism or simply as a means to promote psychoanalysis in the competing psychological marketplace misses the intimate connections between the legend and psychoanalysis itself.

Ultimately, though The Freud Files may itself bear the ideological biases of its authors, it offers a fascinating look at deliberate construction of one of contemporary culture’s most enduring lenses on the human condition, challenging its most fundamental assumptions and frameworks. Broch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani put it even more forcefully:

Without this excessive dehistoricization, psychoanalysis would never have succeeded in establishing itself as the Holy Scripture of psychotherapy, nor Freud as the Solitary Hero of the unconscious… Psychoanalysis is vulnerable to its history.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Brain Pickings takes 450+ hours a month to curate and edit across the different platforms, and remains banner-free. If it brings you any joy and inspiration, please consider a modest donation – it lets me know I'm doing something right.

Though a slim collection, C. S. Lewis: Letters to Children shines with the enormity of Lewis’s compassion and wisdom in responding to fan mail from his young readers, often imbuing his correspondence with a kind of subtle but profound advice on life, delivered unassumingly but full of wholehearted conviction.

Adding to his insight on duty and “the three things anyone need ever do” is this beautiful response to a boy named Hugh, who asked for a definition of “gaiety,” in a letter dated April 5, 1961.

A creature can never be a perfect being, but may be a perfect creature — e.g. a good angel or a good apple-tree. Gaiety at its highest may be an (intellectual) creature’s delighted recognition that its imperfection as a being may constitute part of its perfection as an element in the whole hierarchical order of creation. I mean, while it is a pity there sh[oul]d be bad men or bad dogs, part of the excellence of a good man is that he is not an angel, and of a good dog that it is not a man. This is the extension of what St. Paul ways about the body & the members. A good toe-nail is not an unsuccessful attempt at a hair; and if it were conscious it w[oul]d delight in being simply a good toe-nail.

Half a century later, researcher-storyteller Brené Brown articulated a similar sentiment, making an eloquent case for the gifts of imperfection, and Alain de Botton cautioned us that these ideals we contort so hard to conform to may not even be our own. Perhaps at the end of the day “gaiety” is simply the ability to be our own imperfect being and fully inhabit its beingness.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Brain Pickings takes 450+ hours a month to curate and edit across the different platforms, and remains banner-free. If it brings you any joy and inspiration, please consider a modest donation – it lets me know I'm doing something right.

The question of what makes us human has long occupied scientists and philosophers alike, and holding the promise of an answer is an understanding of consciousness.

Over at The New York Review of Books, Tim Parks talks to Riccardo Manzotti, who holds degrees in engineering and philosophy and teaches in the psychology department at Milan’s IULM University. Manzotti, a “radical externalist,” offers a model of consciousness he calls Spread Mind, proposing that consciousness is an intermediary between various distinct processes. The rainbow, he says, is the perfect example. Parks explains:

For the rainbow experience to happen we need sunshine, raindrops, and a spectator. It is not that the sun and the raindrops cease to exist if there is no one there to see them… But unless someone is present at a particular point no colored arch can appear. The rainbow is hence a process requiring various elements, one of which happens to be an instrument of sense perception. It doesn’t exist whole and separate in the world nor does it exist as an acquired image in the head separated from what is perceived (the view held by the ‘internalists’ who account for the majority of neuroscientists); rather, consciousness is spread between sunlight, raindrops, and visual cortex, creating a unique, transitory new whole, the rainbow experience. Or again: the viewer doesn’t see the world; he is part of a world process.

(So even though Brian Cox’s explanation of why everything is connected to everything else may have been proven less than scientifically wholesome as it applies to quantum mechanics, the message at its heart might just be true of human consciousness.)

Manzotti is the author of Situated Aesthetics: Art Beyond the Skin, which synthesizes the results of a workshop taking an externalist approach to art and examines the intersection of cognitive science and art.

The Dish

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Brain Pickings takes 450+ hours a month to curate and edit across the different platforms, and remains banner-free. If it brings you any joy and inspiration, please consider a modest donation – it lets me know I'm doing something right.