Thursday Things: Chocolate Memory Edition
7 October 2021. Vol 3 No 40 By Dan McGirt. #113
Welcome to Thursday Things! If you enjoy this edition, please click the heart icon in the heading or at the end of the post to let me know. You can also comment by clicking the dialogue bubble next to the heart.
“Note to self - don’t talk to strangers.” Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash
Want to remember something for a long time? Pair it with a highly positive experience or reward. Then get a good night's sleep. That's the conclusion you can draw from a fascinating experiment by a team of researchers at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. You can also use what they learned to help your employees retain the most important information for their jobs.
Blah, blah, blah some science stuff — and here’s the conclusion:
How can we use this knowledge to help us today? Writing on Big Think, Jonny Thomson of Oxford University's entrepreneurial program, Oxford Foundry, suggests pairing information you want to remember with a highly pleasant experience, such as eating a particularly delicious chocolate. Your brain will associate the two and store the information for the long term in the hopes that recalling it might lead to more chocolate.
So when you want to remember something, learn it, eat chocolate, and go to sleep. It’s Science!
Why you should not go to strange people’s motel rooms, especially in Texas. A Texas man invited people into his motel room. Then he sacrificed them and set them on fire, police say.
Thornburg was often seen reading his Bible, talking about God and expressing a desire to help people. He would pass out religious fliers and invite people into his room, denizens of the inn told local news stations.
But now police allege Thornburg's room is where, in a matter of days, he killed three people, dismembered their bodies and stored their remains in plastic containers. Police also said Thornburg, 41, is believed to have transported the remains to a dumpster 25 miles away from the inn where he set them on fire, according to an arrest affidavit. He described the killings to police as "sacrifices," the affidavit states.
Yeah, that’s not good.
Again, don't go to strange people’s motel rooms, no matter how nice they seem. You might want to reread this advice tonight, eat some chocolate, and go to sleep, so that you will remember it.
Do you enjoy conversations with strangers? Are they usually shallow conversations about the weather and what was on TV last night? I’m generally an introvert, and often don’t even want to talk to people I know, much less strangers. But new research suggests we might enjoy having deeper conversations with strangers.
Strangers less awkward, more interested in deep conversation than people think
Conversations with strangers or acquaintances rarely evolve beyond small talk, but psychology researchers suggests it doesn't have to -- and perhaps, shouldn't -- be that way.
According to a new study, published Thursday in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, people overestimate the awkwardness of deeper conversations and underestimate their enjoyment.
"People seemed to imagine that revealing something meaningful or important about themselves in conversation would be met with blank stares and silence, only to find this wasn't true in the actual conversation," Epley said. …
"Human beings are deeply social and tend to reciprocate in conversation. If you share something meaningful and important, you are likely to get something meaningful and important exchanged in return, leading to a considerably better conversation."
Apparently we tend to think what we have to say will be less interesting to others than is actually the case. (Which is not to say you can’t overestimate in the other direction too. We’ve all endured the endless monologue of someone who will not stop talking. Or perhaps even been that person…)
But why do most people — even you gabby extroverts — shy away from deeper conversational engagement with strangers? Science is on it!
Researchers hypothesized that some people might be apprehensive to engage in deep conversation because they doubt their conversation partner, a stranger, will be interested.
That makes sense as far as it goes, sure. However, I’m more apprehensive that my conversation partner, a stranger, wants to lure me to a motel room, kill me, dismember me, and set my remains on fire in a Texas trash dumpster.
I think I’ll have some chocolate now.
As an author, I have many friends who are authors and I sometimes write reviews of their books on Goodreads and elsewhere. Every review helps feed those algorithms! Posting a review on one of the bookselling sites is one of the best ways you can help out your favorite author, by the way. Just as an aside.
I have to admit, however, that no review I have written is as thoughtful and well done as the review C.S. Lewis wrote of his buddy J.R.R. Tolkien’s first book The Hobbit back in 1937:
“To define the world of The Hobbit is, of course, impossible, because it is new. You cannot anticipate it before you go there, as you cannot forget it once you have gone. The author’s admirable illustrations and maps of Mirkwood and Goblingate and Esgaroth give one an inkling—and so do the names of the dwarf and dragon that catch our eyes as we first ruffle the pages. But there are dwarfs and dwarfs, and no common recipe for children’s stories will give you creatures so rooted in their own soil and history as those of Professor Tolkien—who obviously knows much more about them than he needs for this tale. Still less will the common recipe prepare us for the curious shift from the matter-of-fact beginnings of his story (‘hobbits are small people, smaller than dwarfs—and they have no beards—but very much larger than Lilliputians’) to the saga-like tone of the later chapters (‘It is in my mind to ask what share of their inheritance you would have paid to our kindred had you found the hoard unguarded and us slain’).
Read the rest of this delightful review at the link.
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