Posts tagged: mind
Psychologists hypothesise why the return trip ‘home’ seems to go by a lot faster than the outbound journey. It has all to with our expectation of the end of the journey. Here’s what van de Ven thinks is going on: “Often we see that people are too optimistic when they start to travel,” he says. So when they finish the outbound trip, they feel like it took longer than they expected. That feeling of pessimism carries over to when they’re ready to return home. “So you start the return journey, and you think, ‘Wow, this is going to take a long time.’” But just as initial optimism made the trip out feel longer than expected, this pessimism starting back makes the trip home feel shorter. “It’s really all about your expectations — what you think coming in,” says Michael Roy, a psychologist at Elizabethtown College and a co-author with van de Ven on the article describing this effect in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.
Using Darwin’s idea and other branches of science, we’re seeing researchers describing works of fiction in a new light.
Carroll and his colleagues then drew on anthropological research to argue why this behavior appeals. In our fraught hunter-gatherer days, when humans roamed about in small bands, people had to sacrifice selfish interests and work together, or they’d perish. In contrast, self-aggrandizing or dominant behavior threatened group survival. Victorian novels, in this view, merely dress up these ancient, evolved preferences in crinolines and top hats.
Interpretation of Hamlet through neuroscience of depression or how the wars in The Illiad and The Odyssey were fundamentally wars for marriages and evolutionary legacy. All these texts can be described using modern science, but scientists who are championing this form of research seem to finding hostility from the field of humanity:
Gottschall says the resistance to Darwinian lit crit among literary scholars reminds him of resistance among religious groups to evolution itself. “There’s the fear that if you were able to explain the arts and their power scientifically, you’d explain them away,” he says. “Humanities are the last bastion of magic.”
Pdf of the article here for non-subscribers.
