Why Do We Hate Certain Words?

The curious phenomenon of word aversion.

Jason Riggle, a professor in the department of linguistics at the University of Chicago, says word aversions are similar to phobias. “If there is a single central hallmark to this, it’s probably that it’s a more visceral response,” he says. “The [words] evoke nausea and disgust rather than, say, annoyance or moral outrage. And the disgust response is triggered because the word evokes a highly specific and somewhat unusual association with imagery or a scenario that people would typically find disgusting—but don’t typically associate with the word.” These aversions, Riggle adds, don’t seem to be elicited solely by specific letter combinations or word characteristics. “If we collected enough of [these words], it might be the case that the words that fall in this category have some properties in common,” he says. “But it’s not the case that words with those properties in common always fall in the category.”   

stigiancore:

Muscle knots are tiny automatic splints that form in muscles where you have tears.

Here’s what’s going on. Your muscles (with the exception of your tongue), can only do two things: contract, and stop contracting. When you move your arm, the muscle contracts, when you move it back the muscle that moved it first stops resisting, and lets the other muscle move it back.

When one of your muscles is damaged and gets a tiny tear in it, it tries to keep the tear from getting worse by clenching down around the tear. The muscle stays like that until the tear is healed (usually takes a day or two, muscles heal extremely fast). Well… Now we have a problem…

Remember how your muscles can only contract? Well… now you have that splint clenched as hard as it can, and it’s stopped contracting, but we have become a lazy and indolent species, and while normally our natural movement would cause the splint to be relaxed out, now it stays… and hurts. We call these knots, because they feel like knots tied in a rope.

Knots! Have very little to do with stress…

But there is another kind of nasty muscle pain that is often misrepresented as a “knot”. This is the Fascial Adhesion. If you are under stress, this is probably what you are feeling. Here’s what happens…

All of your body is covered in a thin sheath of material called Fascia, every cell, is covered in it, it’s what gives you your shape. Well muscle fibers covered in the stuff move within it back and forth. In places where your body doesn’t need to move the muscle, so much as have it remain in place and strong, the fibers die out and the fascia bonds together. This happens normally, and it results in a tendon.

This is perfectly normal… up to a point. When you are stressed you have a tendency to bunch up muscles and keep them that way. After a while the muscle fibers throw in the towel, and signal to the body that they are not really a muscle (biologically expensive) and could be replaced by a tendon (biologically inexpensive), and the fascia starts to bond together. This causes “muscle tightness” and frankly, hurts. If you get a massage and it hurts like someone took a hot knife through your muscles? It’s the Fascial Adhesion breaking apart.

Solution: To both knots and fascial adhesions are the same. Get a massage to deal with the knots and adhesions you have now, and move more to keep from getting them again. Seriously. Yoga.

Source: Massage therapist for a number of years.

Like a clever parasite, Tetris takes advantage of the mind’s basic pleasure in getting things done and uses it against us. We can go along with this, enjoying the short-term thrills in tidying up those blocks, even while a wiser, more reflective, part of us knows that the game is basically purposeless. But then all good games are, right?

John and Zoltan are both blind, but they deal with the world in completely different ways — one paints vivid pictures in his mind, while the other refuses to picture anything at all. In this short, they argue about the truth of a world they can’t see.

When John Hull, a theology professor in England, lost his sight he became convinced that the images in his mind — like his memories of his wife’s face when she was younger — no longer matched the reality in which he lived. He didn’t want to live in a world of fantasy, so decided to stop picturing the world altogether. Zoltan Torey, on the other hand, simply couldn’t stand living in a world without images, so he resolved to visualize everything. He constantly creates a world of pictures inside his head that (he says) matches up with the world as it really is.

Because they settled on diametrically opposed ways of living without sight, we wondered what would happen if we got them on the phone together to duke it out. So we patched them through our studio, and recorded their conversation for our live show In the Dark.

While John finds truth in darkness, Zoltan sees an emotional void. And as they argue, they reveal some very powerful truths about how we connect to one another. 

“Coffee and caffeine have been inexorably intertwined in our thinking, but truth is coffee contains a whole lot of other stuff with biological benefits,” said Martin. And most concerns about caffeine’s negative effects on the heart have been dispelled. In June, a meta-analysis of ten years of research went so far as to find an inverse association between habitual, moderate consumption and risk of heart failure. The association peaked at four cups per day, and coffee didn’t stop being beneficial until subjects had increased their daily consumption to beyond ten cups.

Caffeine might also function as a pain reliever. A study from September suggested as much when its authors stumbled across caffeinated coffee as a possible confounding variable in its study of the back, neck, and shoulder pains plaguing office drones: Those who reported drinking coffee before the experiment experienced less intense pain.

The data is even more intriguing — and more convincing — for caffeine’s effects as a salve against more existential pains. While a small study this month found that concentrated amounts of caffeine can increase positivity in the moment, last September the nurses’ cohort demonstrated a neat reduction in depression rates among women that became stronger with increased consumption of caffeinated coffee.

Hearing, for the most part, is a no-brainer. When we listen, that’s when the neurons really fire.

The richness of life doesn’t lie in the loudness and the beat, but in the timbres and the variations that you can discern if you simply pay attention.

A warm wind blew through, like the kind that spring up on the most perfect summer days, tossing the leaves of the trees and flowing past like heavenly water. A divine breeze. It changed everything, shifting the world around me into an even higher octave, a higher vibration.

Although I still had little language function, at least as we think of it on earth, I began wordlessly putting questions to this wind, and to the divine being that I sensed at work behind or within it.

Where is this place?

Who am I?

Why am I here?

Each time I silently put one of these questions out, the answer came instantly in an explosion of light, color, love, and beauty that blew through me like a crashing wave. What was important about these blasts was that they didn’t simply silence my questions by overwhelming them. They answered them, but in a way that bypassed language. Thoughts entered me directly. But it wasn’t thought like we experience on earth. It wasn’t vague, immaterial, or abstract. These thoughts were solid and immediate—hotter than fire and wetter than water—and as I received them I was able to instantly and effortlessly understand concepts that would have taken me years to fully grasp in my earthly life.

[…]

I know full well how extraordinary, how frankly unbelievable, all this sounds. Had someone—even a doctor—told me a story like this in the old days, I would have been quite certain that they were under the spell of some delusion. But what happened to me was, far from being delusional, as real or more real than any event in my life. That includes my wedding day and the birth of my two sons.

An engaging account. 

Pablo Picasso once said, “We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.”

If we didn’t buy in to the “lie” of art, there would obviously be no galleries or exhibitions, no art history textbooks or curators; there would not have been cave paintings or Egyptian statues or Picasso himself. Yet, we seem to agree as a species that it’s possible to recognize familiar things in art and that art can be pleasing.

To explain why, look no further than the brain.

The human brain is wired in such a way that we can make sense of lines, colors and patterns on a flat canvas. Artists throughout human history have figured out ways to create illusions such as depth and brightness that aren’t actually there but make works of art seem somehow more real.

And while individual tastes are varied and have cultural influences, the brain also seems to respond especially strongly to certain artistic conventions that mimic what we see in nature.

What we recognize in art

It goes without saying that most paintings and drawings are, from an objective standpoint, two-dimensional. Yet our minds know immediately if there’s a clear representation of familiar aspects of everyday life, such as people, animals, plants, food or places. And several elements of art that we take for granted trick our brains into interpreting meaning from the arbitrary.

Lines

For instance, when you look around the room in which you’re sitting, there are no black lines outlining all of the objects in your view; yet, if someone were to present you with a line-drawing of your surroundings, you would probably be able to identify it.

This concept of line drawings probably dates back to a human ancestor tracing lines in the sand and realizing that they resembled an animal, said Patrick Cavanagh, professor at Universite Paris Descartes.

“For science, we’re just fascinated by this process: Why things that are not real, like lines, would have that effect,” Cavanagh said. “Artists do the discoveries, and we figure out why those tricks work.”

[…]

Faces

This brings us to modern-day emoticons; everyone can agree that this :-) is a sideways happy face, even though it doesn’t look like any particular person and has only the bare minimum of facial features. Our brains have a special affinity for faces and for finding representations of them (some say they see the man in the moon, for instance). Even infants have been shown in several studies to prefer face-like patterns over patterns that don’t resemble anything.

[…]

Mona Lisa’s Smile

The Mona Lisa is undoubtedly one of the world’s most famous paintings; the face of the woman in the painting is iconic.

Da Vinci gave her facial expression a dynamic quality by playing with a discrepancy that exists in our peripheral and central vision systems, Livingstone says.

The human visual system is organized such that the center of gaze is specialized for small, detailed things, and the peripheral vision has a lower resolution — it’s better at big, blurry things.

That’s why, as your eyes move around the Mona Lisa’s face, her expression appears to change, Livingstone says. The woman was painted such that, looking directly at the mouth, she appears to smile less than when you’re staring into her eyes. When you look away from the mouth, your peripheral visual system picks up shadows from her cheeks that appear to extend the smile.