[Most Recent Entries] [Calendar View]
Tuesday, November 14th, 2017
| Time | Event |
| 9:00a | Atheist Stanford Biologist Robert Sapolsky Explains How Religious Beliefs Reduce Stress
Let’s put aside for a moment the question of whether, or which, religion is “true.” If you think this question is answerable, you are likely already a partisan and have taken certain claims on faith. Say we ask whether religion is good for you? What say the scientists? As always, it depends. For one thing, the kind of religion matters. A 2013 study in the Journal of Religion and Health, for example, found that “belief in a punitive God was positively associated with four psychiatric symptoms,” including general anxiety and paranoia, while “belief in a benevolent God was negatively associated with four psychiatric symptoms.” So, a certain kind of religion may not be particularly good for us—psychologically and socially—but other kinds of faith can have very beneficial mental health effects. Author Robert Wright, visiting professor of religion and psychology at Princeton, has argued in his lectures and his bestselling book Why Buddhism is True that the 2500-year-old Eastern religion can lead to enlightenment, of a sort. (He also argues that Buddhism and science mostly agree.) And famed Stanford neuroendocrinologist and atheist Robert Sapolsky, author of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, makes an interesting case in the Big Think video above that “this religion business” humans have come up with—this form of “metamagical thinking”—has provided a distinct evolutionary advantage.
Religion seems to be an almost universal phenomenon, as Sapolsky—who is himself an atheist—freely admits. “90 to 95% of people,” he says, “believe in some sort of omnipotent something or other, every culture out there has it.” Rarely do two cultures agree on any of the specifics, but religions in general, he claims, “are wonderful mechanisms for reducing stress."
Furthermore, says Sapolsky, a benevolent deity offers yet another level of stress reduction due to feelings of “control and predictability.” But benevolence can be partial to specific in-groups. If you think you belong to one of them, you’ll feel even safer and more reassured. For its ability to create social groups and explain reality in tidy ways, Religion has “undeniable health benefits.” This is borne out by the research—a fact Sapolsky admits he finds “infuriating.” He understands why religion exists, and cannot deny its benefits. He also cannot believe any of it. Sapolsky grudgingly admits in the short clip above that he is awed by the faith of people like Sister Helen Prejean of Dead Man Walking fame, despite and because of her “irrational, nutty,” and stubborn insistence on the impossible. He has also previously argued that many forms of religiosity can be indistinguishable from mental illness, but they are, paradoxically, highly adaptive in a chaotic, world we know very little about. In his interview at the top, he pursues another line of thought. If 95% of the human population believes in some kind form of supernatural agency, “a much more biologically interesting question to me is, ‘what’s up with the 5% of atheists who don’t do that?’”
It’s a question he doesn’t answer, and one that may assume too much about that 95%—a significant number of whom may simply be riding the bandwagon or keeping their heads down in highly religious environments rather than truly believing religious truth claims. In any case, on balance, the answer to our question of whether religion is good for us, may be a qualified yes. Believers in benevolence can rejoice in the stress-reducing properties of their faith. It might just save their lives, if not their souls. Stress, as Sapolsky explains in the documentary above, is exponentially harder on the human organism than belief in invisible all-powerful beings. Whether or not such beings exist is another question entirely. Related Content: Stanford’s Robert Sapolsky Demystifies Depression, Which, Like Diabetes, Is Rooted in Biology Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Atheist Stanford Biologist Robert Sapolsky Explains How Religious Beliefs Reduce Stress is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.  |
| 12:00p | Meet the World’s Worst Orchestra, the Portsmouth Sinfonia, Featuring Brian Eno
What is it about objectively terrible works of art that so captivates? Cults form around Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, the “Citizen Kane of bad movies,” or amateur girl-group The Shaggs, “the best—or worst—band of all time.” Such utter artlessness cannot be faked, but it can, composer Gavin Bryars found, be deliberately orchestrated, to quite enjoyably terrible effect. In 1970, Bryars staged a three-day talent show at the Portsmouth School of Art, with comedians, ventriloquists, musicians, etc. His own entry was the Portsmouth Sinfonia, now rightly known as the “world’s worst orchestra.” The Sinfonia, writes Dangerous Minds, “welcomed musicians and non-musicians alike, though people of talent were expected to play instruments on which they were not proficient.” The first iteration of the group consisted of 13 students who could hardly play at all. Later ensembles featured more dramatic disparities in talent. But no matter their level of ability, “all members were expected to play the repertoire to the best of their abilities. The result was a special kind of cacophony: every familiar theme (Also sprach Zarathustra, the William Tell Overture, Beethoven’s Fifth), though played as ineptly as possible, was approached with respect and even care. You will instantly recognize every tune they attempt, and you will probably bust a gut,” adds Dangerous Minds. Maybe it's the earnestness that gets us, the best of intentions producing the most ridiculous of results. Though formed as a “one-off joke,” Atlas Obscura notes, the Sinfonia continued after an “outpouring of enthusiasm,” and even attracted Brian Eno, who joined on clarinet, an instrument he’d never played, and produced and recorded with the group on their debut 1974 album, Portsmouth Sinfonia Plays the Popular Classics.
The group’s numbers swelled by the mid-seventies to include, Eno wrote in the album’s liner notes, “a membership of about fifty.” He lets us know in his deadpan introduction that the Sinfonia took its work seriously. The orchestra “tends to generate an extra-ordinary and unique musical situation where the inevitable errors must be considered as a crucial, if inadvertent, element of the music.”
This is difficult to read with a straight face, but Bryars "was adamant," the blog Classical Music Reimagined explains, "that the musicians shouldn’t play for laughs – they honestly had to play to the best of their ability, and attendance at rehearsal was mandatory. Footage of the orchestra in action shows an incredible level of concentration and focus (if not results)." A few members do seem be having fun with Handel's Messiah in the short clip of a live performance below, featuring a serious Eno. But most of them are genuinely giving it their all.
Experimental theater, conceptual art, or practical joke, it makes no difference. There is truly something “extra-ordinary and unique” about this “musical situation,” you must agree. The so-bad-it’s-goodness of the Sinfonia comes not only from their lack of talent, but also from the enormous gap between intentions and results—a universally recognizable condition of the human comedy. We celebrate the exceptions, those whose great efforts truly produce greatness. But in the Sinfonia, we may encounter the less-great parts of ourselves, ennobled in their ineptitude by the foolhardiness of this tragicomic daring.
via Atlas Obscura + Dangerous Minds Related Content: Hear the Experimental Piano Jazz Album by Comedian H. Jon Benjamin — Who Can’t Play Piano Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space: “The Worst Movie Ever Made,” “The Ultimate Cult Flick,” or Both? Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Meet the World’s Worst Orchestra, the Portsmouth Sinfonia, Featuring Brian Eno is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 3:00p | What Makes a David Lynch Film Lynchian: A Video Essay
As soon as it began airing on ABC in the early 1990s, Twin Peaks got us wondering where its distinctively resonant oddness, never before felt on the airwaves of prime-time television, could have come from. Some viewers had already seen co-creator David Lynch's films Eraserhead and Blue Velvet and may thus have had a more developed feel for it, but for everyone else the nature and origin of the "Lynchian" — as critics soon began labeling it — remained utterly mysterious. Now, with the long-awaited Twin Peaks: The Return having completed its own run, we've started thinking about it once again. What does the Lynchian look like from the vantage of the 21st century? David Foster Wallace, in an essay on Lynch's Lost Highway twenty years ago, defined the term "Lynchian" as referring to "a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter." Lewis Bond, the video essayist who runs the Youtube channel Channel Criswell, goes a bit deeper in "David Lynch - The Elusive Subconscious." What is it, he asks, that denotes the style of Lynch? "The same way a hallway sinking into darkness is Lynchian, so is a white picket fence in a slice of Americana." These and the enormous variety of other things Lynchian must "exude elusiveness, and the enigma of what signifies Lynchian sensibilities lies in producing unfamiliarity in that which was once familiar."At first glance, that statement may seem as obscure as some of Lynch's creative choices do when you first witness them. But spend a few minutes with Bond's wide-ranging video essay, taking in Lynch's images at the same time as the analysis, and you'll get a clearer sense of what both of them are going for. After examining Lynch's use of the subconscious in his films from several different angles, Bond arrives at Pauline Kael's description of the filmmaker as "the first populist surrealist." "Although his work is puzzling, and more often than not intended to be so," says Bond, Lynch "still manages to strike a chord with the way we feel." Lynch, in other words, puts dreams on the screen, but instead of simply relating the inventions of his own subconscious — hearing someone retell their dreams being, after all, a byword for an agonizingly boring experience — he somehow gets all of us to dream them ourselves. What haunts us when we wake up after a particularly harrowing night also haunts us when we come out of a Lynch movie, but the artistry of the latter has a way of making us want to plunge right back into the nightmare again. Related Content: Watch an Epic, 4-Hour Video Essay on the Making & Mythology of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks An Animated David Lynch Explains Where He Gets His Ideas What Does “Kafkaesque” Really Mean? A Short Animated Video Explains What “Orwellian” Really Means: An Animated Lesson About the Use & Abuse of the Term Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
What Makes a David Lynch Film Lynchian: A Video Essay is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 6:20p | China’s New Luminous White Library: A Striking Visual Introduction
MVRDV, a Dutch architecture and urban design firm, teamed up with Chinese architects to create the Tianjin Binhai Library, a massive cultural center featuring "a luminous spherical auditorium around which floor-to-ceiling bookcases cascade." Located not far from Beijing, the library was built quickly by any standards. It took only three years to move from "the first sketch to the [grand] opening" on October 1. Elaborating on the library, which can house 1.2 million books, MVRDV notes:
The video above gives you a visual introduction to the building. And, on the MRDV website, you can view a gallery of photos that let you see the library's shapely design. Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. If you'd like to support Open Culture and our mission, please consider making a donation to our site. It's hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us provide the best free cultural and educational materials. Related Content: Watch 50+ Documentaries on Famous Architects & Buildings: Bauhaus, Le Corbusier, Hadid & Many More A is for Architecture: 1960 Documentary on Why We Build, from the Ancient Greeks to Modern Times A Virtual Tour of Japan’s Inflatable Concert Hall China’s New Luminous White Library: A Striking Visual Introduction is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| << Previous Day |
2017/11/14 [Calendar] |
Next Day >> |