Should you believe in a God? Not according to most academic philosophers. A comprehensive survey revealed that only about 14 percent of English speaking professional philosophers are theists. As for what little religious belief remains among their colleagues, most professional philosophers regard it as a strange aberration among otherwise intelligent people. Among scientists the situation is much the same. Surveys of the members of the National Academy of Sciences, composed of the most prestigious scientists in the world, show that religious belief among them is practically nonexistent, about 7 percent.
Now nothing definitely follows about the truth of a belief from what the majority of philosophers or scientists think. But such facts might cause believers discomfort. There has been a dramatic change in the last few centuries in the proportion of believers among the highly educated in the Western world. In the European Middle Ages belief in a God was ubiquitous, while today it is rare among the intelligentsia. This change occurred primarily because of the rise of modern science and a consensus among philosophers that arguments for the existence of gods, souls, afterlife and the like were unconvincing. Still, despite the view of professional philosophers and world-class scientists, religious beliefs have a universal appeal. What explains this?
EVERY TRUE WAR STORY is a story of trauma and recovery. A boy goes to war, his head full of romantic visions of glory, courage, and sacrifice, his heart yearning to achieve heroic deeds, but on the field of battle he finds only death and horror. He sees, suffers, and causes brutal and brutalizing violence. Such violence wounds the soldier’s very soul.
After the war the boy, now a veteran and a man, returns to the world of peace haunted by his experience, wracked by the central compulsion of trauma and atrocity: the struggle between the need to bear witness to his shattering encounter with violence, and the compulsion to repress it. The veteran tries to make sense of his memory but finds it all but impossible. Most people don’t want to hear the awful truths that war has taught him, the political powers that be want to cover up the shocking reality of war, and anybody who wasn’t there simply can’t understand what it was like.
The truth of war, the veteran comes to learn, is a truth beyond words, a truth that can only be known by having been there, an unspeakable truth he must bear for society.
So goes the myth of the trauma hero.
This myth informs our politics, shapes our news reports, and underwrites our history. It dominates critical and scholarly interpretation of war literature, war movies, and the visual culture of war. It shapes how we understand Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and World War II, and it affects whom we vote for. Like all myths, this story frames and filters our perceptions of reality through a set of recognizable and comforting conventions. It works to convince us that war is a special kind of experience that offers a special kind of truth, a truth that gives those who have been there a special kind of authority.
Paul Morley talks to Brian Eno in The Guardian (photo Harry Borden):
On talking: 1
“I heard a recording that had been made of me 35 years ago chatting with some friends and I thought the tape must have sped up because I sounded so fast. When others spoke, they were at a normal speed. It was me, I was speaking so fast. What I find both disappointing and reassuring is that I was saying exactly those things I will be saying today. I don't know what to make of that. A few different references, but the basic ideas haven't changed at all. No difference whatsoever! I suppose it's good to see I've been consistent as sometimes over the years it seems as though it's all been a bit incoherent, a bit of this, a bit of that, a while doing this, then one of those, followed by three of those. It seems all over the place when I'm doing it. Listening to me now talking then suggests there has been a pattern.”
On the intensity of ideas
“If you grow up in a very strong religion like Catholicism you certainly cultivate in yourself a certain taste for the intensity of ideas. You expect to be engaged with ideas strongly whether you are for or against them. If you are part of a religion that very strongly insists that you believe then to decide not to do that is quite a big hurdle to jump over. You never forget the thought process you went through. It becomes part of your whole intellectual picture.”
On listening
“If you think of the mid- to late-50swhen all of this started to happen for me, the experience of listening to sound was so different from now. Stereo didn't exist. If you listened to music outside of church, apart from live music, which was very rare, it was through tiny speakers. It was a nice experience but a very small experience. So to go into a church, which is a specially designed and echoey space, and it has an organ, and my grandfather built the organ in the church where we went, suddenly to hear music and singing was amazing. It was like hearing someone's album on a tiny transistor radio and then you go and see them in a 60,000-seater. It's huge by comparison.
Richard A. Epstein over at the Hoover Institution (Image credit: Sanofi Pasteur):
The resurgence of measles is largely attributable to the confluence of two separate factors. On the one side there is a strong, if unacknowledged, effort on the part of some people to free ride off the vaccination of others. The self-interested calculations of many conscientious parents can run as follow: Of course, measles is a contagious disease, but it only spreads if there is a sufficiently large population of unvaccinated people in any given community. Taking any vaccine, including the measles vaccine, necessarily carries with it some risk of adverse outcomes. Vaccines could be impure or improperly administered, and even in the best of times, there is always a residual risk that the vaccine itself will transmit the very disease that it is supposed to prevent. So long as other individuals are vaccinated, the rational free rider decides that it pays not to vaccinate his or her own children. They receive the protection afforded by herd immunity, without subjecting their loved ones to the risks, however small, that vaccinations always present.
The second factor that reduces vaccination levels is the spread, sometimes deliberate, of misinformation that overstates vaccination risks. This sentiment is often fueled by powerful suspicions that drug companies are greedy and governments corrupt. This entire episode was fueled by fraudulent studies published by Dr. Andrew Wakefield in 1998 in Lancet magazine, which twelve years later the journal eventually retracted, but only after much of the damage was done. Those studies, which had been funded in part by plaintiffs’ lawyers suing vaccine manufacturers, purported to find a (nonexistent) link between vaccines that were manufactured using a mercury-based compound, Thimerosal, and autism. Unfortunately, Lancet’s forthright retraction of the article did not quell the uneasiness about vaccines in either Britain or the United States. Indeed, it may well have fueled populist concerns of an ever-wider conspiracy among establishment figures.
This combination of free-riding and misinformation may now be exacting a high toll, as the increased spread of measles puts a large population of unvaccinated persons at risk for the disease, no matter what their overall health. It is not surprising, therefore, that the anti-vaccine groups have now been put on the defensive in part by a recent lawsuit brought in California by Carl Krawitt on behalf of his six-year old son Rhett, who suffers from leukemia and therefore cannot safely take the vaccine.
Krawitt’s suit demands that his local school board require all students who can, but have not, been vaccinated to stay at home, so that Rhett can more safely attend the school. Legally, his suit is likely to flounder on the shoals of modern administrative law, which vests a large and virtually unreviewable discretion in local health officials to decide whether this action is required. Yet by the same token, if the school board should deem the risk sufficient to call for those suspensions, it is equally unlikely that any parent who refuses to vaccinate their children for either religious or medical reasons could have any success in keeping them in school.
One day in the summer of 1896, Maxim Gorky’s mind was blown. Gorky was attending a Russian fair and had gone to visit an exhibit by a couple of Frenchmen known as the Lumiére Brothers. Sitting in a darkened room, Gorky saw what seemed to him a photograph of the streets of Paris projected onto a large screen. It was a nice photograph, but Gorky was not particularly impressed. He’d seen plenty of photographs before. Then the damn thing began to flicker and come to life. This was something new.
Gorky watched what was happening on the screen in deepening amazement. He wrote about the experience a couple of days later:
Carriages coming from somewhere in the perspective of the picture are moving straight at you, into the darkness in which you sit; somewhere from afar people appear and loom larger as they come closer to you; in the foreground children are playing with a dog, bicyclists tear along, and pedestrians cross the street picking their way among the carriages.
Gorky was watching reality unfolding in front of his very eyes, in real time. Yet, this reality was also not reality. These were images, moving images projected onto a screen. As Gorky watched, he was struck more and more by the dichotomy between the striking realism of the scenes and his distance from that reality. This effect was heightened by the fact that the Lumiére Brothers shot their films in black and white and without sound (sound and color being technological developments that would only come decades later).
“Noiselessly,” Gorky wrote, “the ashen-grey foliage of the trees sways in the wind, and the grey silhouettes of the people, as though condemned to eternal silence and cruelly punished by being deprived of all the colors of life, glide noiselessly along the grey ground.” For Gorky, there was something inherently unnerving and melancholy in the act of watching other people’s lives pass by on a screen.
Raul Roa has been a general-assignment photographer in Los Angeles for 20 years. He covers everything. The overturned tractor-trailer on I-5. The water polo meet at Glendale High. The protests in downtown Los Angeles after Ferguson. He does it all.
But the geography of his beat — north of Los Angeles — and where it is in relation to his home in Whittier, south of there, has unexpectedly birthed a hobby. Every day as he drives home, he sees planes swooping down to land at Los Angeles International Airport.
He lives right under the airport’s flight path.
It would not be a stretch to say that some people might find this irksome — the noise alone — but Mr. Roa, 49, has an eye, of course, and his eye, one commute home 18 months ago, turned to a ripe full moon perched in the sky, plump as could be. He noticed how perfectly silhouetted the planes were as they flew past the moon. He was driving along the Pomona Freeway. He took the next exit, which led him to the parking lot of the Montebello mall.
“I waited for another plane to go by,” Mr. Roa said. “It was nighttime. Clear. Two or three planes went by and I snapped a couple of shots. And there it was. I had it.”
A multimillion-dollar biopic about the childhood of the prophet Muhammad – Iran’s most expensive and lavish film to date – is set to premiere on Sunday.
Tehran’s Fajr international film festival, which coincides with the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic revolution, is scheduled to show the country’s own version of how Islam’s most revered figure lived. To protect the prophet’s dignity, the film will be shown out of competition.
Iran has been a vocal critic of the prophet’s portrayal in the west, recentlyexpressing strong condemnation of the Charlie Hebdo cover cartoon in the aftermath of the deadly attacks in Paris, which depicted Muhammad weeping and holding up a sign reading Je Suis Charlie.
The film, to be released as Muhammad, Messenger of God” in the festival’s opening ceremony, is made by Majid Majidi, a leading pro-establishment Iranian director who has worked for more than five years – with a great deal of secrecy – to produce what is only the second big-budget feature made about the prophet. The first was Moustapha Akkad’s 1976 The Message, starring Anthony Quinn, which sparked controversy despite not showing the prophet on screen to avoid hurting Muslim sensitivities.
Majidi has had his own doubts about Akkad’s biopic, which he said failed to do justice to Muhammad’s life by showing “only Jihad and war” and also because “the image of Islam in that film is the image of a sword”.
Majidi’s state-sponsored film, which is the first part of an ambitious trilogy about the prophet’s life, tells the story of Muhammad from his birth to the age of 12, ending with his first visit to Sham (Syria) where Bahira, a Christian monk, is believed to have predicted he would one day become a prophet.
Law Professor Lea Vandervelde (University of Iowa) explains the U.S. Supreme Court's 1857 decision, based in-part on the Scott's time in Minnesota, and how the decision split the nation in two prior to the outbreak of war in 1861. Richard Josey (Minnesota Historical Society) focuses on Dred and Harriet Scott's time at Fort Snelling from 1836 to 1840.
More here. (Note: One post throughout February will be dedicated to Black History Month.)
Adolescence – the period extending from puberty to the point of independent stability – is often portrayed as a very dramatic time with a new emphasis placed on the importance of friendships and social input. Researchers have even found during this period that many adolescents value the input of their peers even over the input of their family. The current generation of teens are faced with the addition of social media and digital content to their lives, additions which seem to have pushed many age-driven differences in behavior into a new arena. There are even notable differences in the way the current generation of teens consumes media. While older adults watch ~47 hours per week of television on average, current teens are only watching about 19 hours. Instead, they are consuming vast amounts of online video – like Youtube, Vine, and vlogs. In traditional television or movies the stars and the plots are often mysterious people and ideas that cannot be touched by the outside world. In contrast, young vloggers and stars of Youtube and Vine often host Q&A sessions with their fans; integrate feedback into future content; and express their gratitude not to their fans, but to their “6 million friends.”
Move up just a few years to young adults and there is already a shift, with this group watching five times as much television as online video. At least some part of that difference can perhaps be accounted for with changes that occur in this period to the brain itself. One of the areas going through important structural changes in this period – with additions of gray matter and changes in shape – is the area that deals with “social emotions.” Social emotions are those that require you to consider what others might be thinking – like guilt or embarrassment – rather than your own emotional experience – like fear. When researchers ask adolescents and adults to explain certain emotions, both groups feel and describe them in the same way. But the activity that is happening in the brain, and the way that information is being processed, differs between the two groups.
My father’s tinnitus is like the hiss off a water cooler, only louder. And it doesn’t just stop like, say, a hand-dryer— the worst is it comes and goes. Or you shine a light on it and it looks permanent as the sea,
a tideless sea that won’t go away. The masker he’s been prescribed is a tiny machine, an arc of white noise that blacks out a lot but can’t absorb the interference totally
any more than you or I — taking the air, stirring milk into coffee, daydreaming through the six o’clock news, trying to sleep on a wet night — can simply switch off what’s always there, a particular memory
nagging away, the erosive splash off a little river wearing down the road, say, on the Connor Pass, a day out, through which he’d accelerate in the flash, orange Capri.
by John McAuliffe from Next Door publisher: Gallery Press, Oldcastle, 2007
Penelope Maddy is the candy-store kid of metaphilosophical logic and maths. She’s stocked up with groovy thoughts about the axioms of mathematics, about what might count as a good reason to adopt one, about mathematical realism, about Gödel’s intuitions, naturalism, second philosophy, Hume and Quine, world-word connections, about where mathematical objectivity comes from, about the limitations of drawing analogies, about depth, about Wittgenstein and the logical must, about the Kantianism of the Tractatus and about the relationship between science and philosophy. Suck it and see, this one has a fizz …
3:AM: What made you become a philosopher? Are you a lone brooder or prefer to think and argue aloud with others?
Penelope Maddy: I started out in mathematics and was moved from there to philosophy by others, oddly enough, without really understanding what was going on. Foundational questions captured my interest early on: one of my most cherished memories is the sudden realization that the number 1 could be defined in naive set theory! Poking around in my great high school math teacher’s secret book closet, I soon came to understand that 2+2=4 and the rest of classical mathematics could be proved from the standard assumptions of axiomatic set theory, but that one of the first and most natural questions about infinite sets, the Continuum Hypothesis (CH), couldn’t be settled one way or the other on the basis of those same axioms. What could a solution to such an open question even look like?!
At the time, UC Berkeley was the place to go to study set theory: forcing was new, and larger and larger large cardinal axioms were being proposed in turn. Another vivid memory is watching in awe as one of my professors showed us the proof that if there’s a measurable cardinal, then one of the open questions (not CH, alas) has an answer (there are sets outside Gödel’s minimal universe). This was just the answer one would want and expect, but why in the world would one think that this candidate for a new axiom — ‘there are measurable cardinals’ — is true?! Perhaps there could be new axioms even to settle CH, but what counts as a proper argument for or against a proposed axiom?
Without realizing it, I’d slipped into philosophy. When I applied to the Princeton math department for graduate school, they admitted me instead into the program in history and philosophy of science on the basis of my statement of interests. Being from Berkeley, I figured this must be a program like their Logic and Methodology, but when I arrived, it turned out I was pretty much just in the philosophy department. The transition took some fierce adjustments and teetered on disaster at times, but I eventually came to see the wisdom of those admissions officers.
Each year, billions of people get infected with viruses–with common ones like influenza and cold viruses, and rarer ones like polio and Ebola. The viruses don’t stay all that long inside of us. In most cases, our immune systems wipe them out, except for a few refugees that manage to escape to a new host and keep their species alive. In some cases, the viruses kill their unfortunate hosts, and end their own existence as well. But in some exquisitely rare cases, viruses meld with the genome of their hosts and become part of the genetic legacy their hosts pass down to future generations.
Scientists know this melding has happened because viruses have distinctive genes. When scientists scan the human genome, they sometimes come across a stretch of DNA that bears the hallmarks of viruses. The easiest type of virus to recognize are retroviruses, a group that includes HIV. Retroviruses make copies of themselves by infecting cells and then using an enzyme to insert their genes into their host cell’s DNA. The cell then reads the inserted DNA and makes new molecules that assemble into new viruses.
Most of the time, retroviruses behave like other viruses, jumping from host to host. But sometimes a retrovirus will end up in the genome of an egg or sperm. If it then ends up in a new embryo, the embryo will carry a copy of the virus in every single cell–including its own egg or sperm. And on and on, from parents to children to grandchildren.
If the virus DNA remains intact, it still has the capacity to multiply. It may produce new viruses that break out of a cell, and even leap into a new host. But over the generations, the virus DNA may mutate and degrade. It may no longer be able to escape its own cell. But the virus may still have a bit of life left to it: it can make new viruses that insert their genes back into the genome at a new location.
At the end of World War II, nearly 10 percent of the entire U.S. population was on active military duty—which meant most able-bodied men of a certain age (plus the small number of women allowed to serve). Through the decade after World War II, when so many American families had at least one member in uniform, political and journalistic references were admiring but not awestruck. Most Americans were familiar enough with the military to respect it while being sharply aware of its shortcomings, as they were with the school system, their religion, and other important and fallible institutions.
Now the American military is exotic territory to most of the American public. As a comparison: A handful of Americans live on farms, but there are many more of them than serve in all branches of the military. (Well over 4 million people live on the country’s 2.1 million farms. The U.S. military has about 1.4 million people on active duty and another 850,000 in the reserves.) The other 310 million–plus Americans “honor” their stalwart farmers, but generally don’t know them. So too with the military. Many more young Americans will study abroad this year than will enlist in the military—nearly 300,000 students overseas, versus well under 200,000 new recruits. As a country, America has been at war nonstop for the past 13 years. As a public, it has not. A total of about 2.5 million Americans, roughly three-quarters of 1 percent, served in Iraq or Afghanistan at any point in the post-9/11 years, many of them more than once.
The difference between the earlier America that knew its military and the modern America that gazes admiringly at its heroes shows up sharply in changes in popular and media culture.
Let me first of all address the question of transcendence. The irony, it seems to me, is that although self-styled atheists say they reject “transcendence,” they are in fact subject (often willingly subject) to transcendent forces. Such as the transcendence of the market, which is a crucial part of modern capitalist society. And the transcendence of the state–the political form in which everyone lives in our world and makes absolute demands on our loyalty as citizens. And then of course there is the transcendence of “free speech.” In liberal society we claim that it is sacred and therefore has an absolute character. But we know (or should know) that “free speech” inhabits a structured space: not only is “hate speech” legally forbidden in liberal societies, but there are also laws protecting the circulation of copyrighted material, and the reproduction of trademarks and patents without explicit permission. And of course government secrets and commercial secrets cannot be breached without incurring severe penalties, which is an aspect of the transcendence of the modern sovereign state. I have discussed this point elsewhere and argued that there is a crucial distinction in liberal societies between the circulation of representations that are regarded as property and those that are not. Claims to the absoluteness of “free speech” are not very persuasive in this context.
Another, problematic example of “non-religious” transcendence is of course “humanity” and the worship it requires. And very closely connected with it is the modern notion of (cultural and moral) progress, which is assumed to be an open-ended movement that transcends all particularities, and stands over and above particular improvements of some particular state of affairs, the righting of something that is evidently wrong. To reject the transcendent progress of humanity is not necessarily to accept the status quo for what it is. So I think the different forms of transcendence need to be critically examined.
The notion of “humanity” as a form of transcendence derives, I think, from the conviction that intellectuality possesses an absolute power, from the demand that our best behavior depends on our ability to think abstractly, in terms of a universal rule, about something called humanity, that we need to understand humanity abstractly so that we can act responsibly towards those who represent it. But it seems to me perfectly possible to act humanely towards other beings, whether humans or animals or plants. One simply has to learn how to behave. To behave “humanely” it is perfectly possible to do without the notion of “humanity.” Language has multiple uses, and is embedded, as Wittgenstein pointed out, in different forms of life. It is not necessary to have this grand concept of “humanity” in order to behave decently.
I recall, incidentally, a striking expression from al-Ghazali: “Ah, to have the faith of the old women of Nishapur!” which, as I understand it, is really a recognition of the importance of deep everyday faith, of apprehending transcendence not primarily with one’s intellect but in the way one lives one’s daily life.
During Eliot’s lifetime he was hailed for the Modernist fragmentation he introduced into poetry, but fifty years on, his concurrent revolution of what we understand as biography has yet to be recognised. For in the course of his search for perfection, Eliot points to unseen events and to a narrative that can’t be seamless if it claims to be true. The shadows of different narratives haunt the gaps in lives, the apparently vacant spaces where purpose, in the routine sense, may be withdrawn, and past and future, in the purposeful sense, don’t exist.
Since Eliot was an expatriate, like his ancestor, it’s not surprising to find images of travel and migration: the pilgrimage (in “Journey of the Magi”), the train journey and the ocean crossing. As the furrow narrows behind the ship, a traveller is neither the person he was nor the person he will be on the farther shore. In the biographic structures of Eliot’s verse, this hiatus in a life span, this non-being, is his central focus. It’s potentially fertile, yet, because it lies inchoate in shadow—mostly unrecorded—it’s not the focus for traditional biography. Yet Eliot would have it that this is the fulcrum for a life in the making—a model that could transform the future of life writing.
Gabriel Winslow-Yost at the New York Review of Books:
“The Renaissance didn’t happen here,” the voice-over declares, in the opening minutes of Alexei German’s Hard to Be a God. In this final film of his career—now receiving a belated American release at Anthology Film Archives in New York—the late Russian filmmaker immerses us, without respite, for nearly three hours, in his reimagined Middle Ages. I don’t think any film has ever depicted a world so awful with such conviction.
Hard to Be a God was apparently six years in the shooting and another six in post-production. German did not actually quite manage to finish that before he died in 2013; his wife and his son, also a director, did the last of the sound mixing. But the wonder about this exhausting, astonishing film is not that it took so long to make, it’s that it got made at all.
It is, ostensibly, a work of science fiction, adapted from the novel of the same name by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (whose books were also the sometimes tenuous bases for Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Alexander Sokurov’s Days of Eclipse, among many other Russian films).
Three or four years ago, something happened. I found myself rising before dawn every day in February and March, since that was the only way to work through the essays and thesis chapters that students were submitting: undergraduate scholarship based on untranslated manuscripts and rare books in Latin (and English, and French, and German, and Ottoman Turkish). Their technical virtuosity impressed me deeply. But so, even more, did the energy that powered it: the engagement, the passion, the deep love of and feeling for very distant realms of the past. In a long and happy career of undergraduate teaching, I hadn’t experienced anything quite like this outbreak—or epidemic?—of inspired work.
An infestation of undergraduate genius doesn’t have a single cause. To be a humanist nowadays, you have to be a refusenik. The students who have remained with us on the burning deck are not only intelligent but also independent-minded. The resources available to them are far richer than they were a generation ago. They can call the rarest of sources from the vasty deep of the Internet, or go to the library or archive that houses them and make their own digital copies. Even in the hours between midnight and 4 am, when the world quiets down and students do their most intensive work, they have access to a library without walls, bigger and richer than any that has ever existed. Other factors must also play a role. But it turns out that for a surprising number of students, Latin—and Latin study of a special kind—has been the fuse that sparked this explosion.
James dropped out of high school in 1919 and left Bentonia to work and live at a road construction camp near Ruleville. During the next two years he worked in various levee and lumber camps around the Delta. While working in a lumber camp James composed his first song, “Illinois Blues.” On weekends, he would pick his guitar for tips in the nearby towns of Drew, Louise, and Belzoni. In 1921, James moved to Weona, Arkansas, to work as a lumber grader at a sawmill camp. There he met pianist/pimp Will Crabtree. By James's account, Crabtree was a huge man from nearby Marked Tree, Arkansas, who influenced his piano playing and lifestyle. James remained in Weona until 1923, hustling women and working as a pianist. After a dispute with one of the women, James moved to Memphis, where he worked as a pianist at a brothel on North Nichols Street.
Hard time's is here An ev'rywhere you go Times are harder Than th'ever been befo'
Um, hm-hm Um-hm Um, hm-hm Um, hm-hm-hm
You know that people They are driftin' from do' to do' But they can't find no heaven I don't care where they go
Um, hm-hm Um-uh-hm Mm-hm-hm Um, hm-hm-hm
Well, you hear me singing this old lonesome song People, you know these hard times can last us so very long
Hm, hm-hm Hmm, hmm Hm, hm-hm Hm, hm-hm-hm
People, if I ever can get up Off of this old hard killing floor Lord, I'll never get down this low no more
Um, hm-hm-hm Hm, um-hm Hm, hm-hm Hm, hm-hm-hm
You know, you'll say you had money you better be sure But these hard times gonna kill you just drive a lonely soul
More here. (Note: One post throughout February will be dedicated to Black History Month.)
Taking in such spine-tingling wonders as the Grand Canyon, Sistine Chapel ceiling or Schubert's “Ave Maria” may give a boost to the body's defense system, according to new research from UC Berkeley. Researchers have linked positive emotions — especially the awe we feel when touched by the beauty of nature, art and spirituality — with lower levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines, which are proteins that signal the immune system to work harder. “Our findings demonstrate that positive emotions are associated with the markers of good health,” said Jennifer Stellar, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto and lead author of the study, which she conducted while at UC Berkeley.
While cytokines are necessary for herding cells to the body's battlegrounds to fight infection, disease and trauma, sustained high levels of cytokines are associated with poorer health and such disorders as type-2 diabetes, heart disease, arthritis and even Alzheimer's disease and clinical depression. It has long been established that a healthy diet and lots of sleep and exercise bolster the body's defenses against physical and mental illnesses. But the Berkeley study, whose findings were just published in the journal Emotion, is one of the first to look at the role of positive emotions in that arsenal. “That awe, wonder and beauty promote healthier levels of cytokines suggests that the things we do to experience these emotions — a walk in nature, losing oneself in music, beholding art — has a direct influence upon health and life expectancy,” said UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner, a co-author of the study.
