Wednesday, April 30, 2008
pril 29, 2008, 7:02 pm
Don’t Fact-Check the Soul
By Rosanne Cash
Apart from “which comes first, the music or the lyrics,” the question I am most often asked (mostly by music journalists) is whether it isn’t “hard” to “reveal so much” of myself through my lyrics.
This question annoys me to no end. I always sputter that the songs aren’t a diary, a blog or a therapy session. I’ve never had a fact-checker come in to go over my lyrics. I haven’t worked through all my childhood issues and achieved enlightenment through songwriting. I can write whatever I want, and I’m the only one who knows what is indeed fact (or at least my version of fact…you see the problem?) and what is poetic license.
Conversely, where am I supposed to get inspiration, if not from my own life? Television? (Yes, I can have it both ways: “Consistency is the last resort of the unimaginative.” — Oscar Wilde).
I used to teach a summer songwriting workshop, and sometimes I would suggest a change of a line or phrase in a song a fledgling writer brought to class and the writer would say, “But it didn’t happen that way.” I would remind him or her that these were songs, not news reports, and if they were bound to just the facts, they should consider science rather than art. (I said this in a very nice way, of course. Songwriters are notoriously insecure. The palpable fear that always hung in the workshop classroom like a toxic mist made me want to take several showers a day and seriously consider changing professions. I’m speaking of my own fear, of course.)
Having said all this about poetic license and the difference between truth and facts, I cannot deny that my life is entirely contained in my songs, even the songs I wrote in another character (“Last Stop Before Home,” “The Good Intent,” “Second to No One”), or wrote to try (unsuccessfully) to get Vince Gill to record and turn into a big hit (“Closer Than I Appear”) so I could pay my taxes and my American Express bill. [Audio clip above.]
Sometimes songs are postcards from the future. Often I have found that a song reveals something subtle but important about my own life that I was only vaguely aware of while writing, but that became clear as time went on. I wrote “Black Cadillac” six weeks before a rash of deaths began in my family. The day I finished writing it, I played the completed song to myself, as a kind of last run-through to check for rhyme scheme errors and syllable scanning, and a tidal wave of anxiety started rising in my gut. I knew I had given myself a message.
I don’t consider these postcard songs prescient as much as just coming from a source of creativity outside linear time. (I am certainly not the first to notice this phenomenon in creative work. Thornton Wilder, for one, wrote, “It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves.”)
But with or without prescience, considering only the hard-earned craftsmanship of songwriting, as I get older I have found the quality of my attention to be more important, and more rewarding, than the initial inspiration. I’ve found that the melody is already inherent in the language, and if I pay close enough attention to the roundness of the vowels and the cadence of the words, I can tease the melody out of the words it is already woven into. I have found that continual referral back to the original “feeling tone” of the inspiration, the constant re-touching of that hum and cry, more important than the fireworks of its origin. I have learned to be steady in my course of love, or fear, or loneliness, rather than impulsive in its wasting, either lyrically or emotionally.
This maturation in songwriting has proven surprisingly satisfying. Twenty-five years ago, I would have said that the bursts of inspiration, and the transcendent quality that came with them, were an emotionally superior experience, preferable to the watchmaker concentration required for the detail work of refining, editing and polishing. But the reverse is proving to be true. Like everything else, given enough time and the long perspective, the opposite of those things that we think define us slowly becomes equally valid, and sometimes more potent.
And speaking of Truth, and its relative experience, those niggling questions about the specifics of writing — the order of creation, the source of inspiration, the parsing of individual truth and the wrestling of facts and the divergence of the two, are better left alone and in the realm of mystery, where all creative work forms. I am of the same mind about these things as Martha Graham, who told a young dancer who asked if she should be a dancer, “If you have to ask, the answer is no.” Perversely, if you have to ask which came first, the lyrics or the music, the answer is… No. Or Yes. Depending on your maturity and how slow the opposites are to reveal themselves.
Back to “So It Goes,” the raison d’etre for this blog: Joe Henry came to New York, and quickly arranged for us to meet at a studio in the East Village in the two hours he had free before beginning a new project with Allen Toussaint. He wanted me to sing the lead on the song, but after tinkering with different keys and trying to fit my voice around the unusual (for me) cadences of his melody and syllabic structure, I talked him into letting me record a duet vocal, part harmony and part lead. [Audio clip above.]
The demo we did together retained the simplicity of his original version, and I think it’s a great second step toward a full-fledged recording. I don’t know where the song will exist, on whose record, in what form, but I feel proud of this long-delayed experiment with Joe, and look at it as a great beginning. A little mystery becomes tangible, the friends I lost are respectfully acknowledged, and Joe and I, after a combined half-century of songwriting between us, become beginners again. And so it goes.
Don’t Fact-Check the Soul
By Rosanne Cash
Apart from “which comes first, the music or the lyrics,” the question I am most often asked (mostly by music journalists) is whether it isn’t “hard” to “reveal so much” of myself through my lyrics.
This question annoys me to no end. I always sputter that the songs aren’t a diary, a blog or a therapy session. I’ve never had a fact-checker come in to go over my lyrics. I haven’t worked through all my childhood issues and achieved enlightenment through songwriting. I can write whatever I want, and I’m the only one who knows what is indeed fact (or at least my version of fact…you see the problem?) and what is poetic license.
Conversely, where am I supposed to get inspiration, if not from my own life? Television? (Yes, I can have it both ways: “Consistency is the last resort of the unimaginative.” — Oscar Wilde).
I used to teach a summer songwriting workshop, and sometimes I would suggest a change of a line or phrase in a song a fledgling writer brought to class and the writer would say, “But it didn’t happen that way.” I would remind him or her that these were songs, not news reports, and if they were bound to just the facts, they should consider science rather than art. (I said this in a very nice way, of course. Songwriters are notoriously insecure. The palpable fear that always hung in the workshop classroom like a toxic mist made me want to take several showers a day and seriously consider changing professions. I’m speaking of my own fear, of course.)
Having said all this about poetic license and the difference between truth and facts, I cannot deny that my life is entirely contained in my songs, even the songs I wrote in another character (“Last Stop Before Home,” “The Good Intent,” “Second to No One”), or wrote to try (unsuccessfully) to get Vince Gill to record and turn into a big hit (“Closer Than I Appear”) so I could pay my taxes and my American Express bill. [Audio clip above.]
Sometimes songs are postcards from the future. Often I have found that a song reveals something subtle but important about my own life that I was only vaguely aware of while writing, but that became clear as time went on. I wrote “Black Cadillac” six weeks before a rash of deaths began in my family. The day I finished writing it, I played the completed song to myself, as a kind of last run-through to check for rhyme scheme errors and syllable scanning, and a tidal wave of anxiety started rising in my gut. I knew I had given myself a message.
I don’t consider these postcard songs prescient as much as just coming from a source of creativity outside linear time. (I am certainly not the first to notice this phenomenon in creative work. Thornton Wilder, for one, wrote, “It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves.”)
But with or without prescience, considering only the hard-earned craftsmanship of songwriting, as I get older I have found the quality of my attention to be more important, and more rewarding, than the initial inspiration. I’ve found that the melody is already inherent in the language, and if I pay close enough attention to the roundness of the vowels and the cadence of the words, I can tease the melody out of the words it is already woven into. I have found that continual referral back to the original “feeling tone” of the inspiration, the constant re-touching of that hum and cry, more important than the fireworks of its origin. I have learned to be steady in my course of love, or fear, or loneliness, rather than impulsive in its wasting, either lyrically or emotionally.
This maturation in songwriting has proven surprisingly satisfying. Twenty-five years ago, I would have said that the bursts of inspiration, and the transcendent quality that came with them, were an emotionally superior experience, preferable to the watchmaker concentration required for the detail work of refining, editing and polishing. But the reverse is proving to be true. Like everything else, given enough time and the long perspective, the opposite of those things that we think define us slowly becomes equally valid, and sometimes more potent.
And speaking of Truth, and its relative experience, those niggling questions about the specifics of writing — the order of creation, the source of inspiration, the parsing of individual truth and the wrestling of facts and the divergence of the two, are better left alone and in the realm of mystery, where all creative work forms. I am of the same mind about these things as Martha Graham, who told a young dancer who asked if she should be a dancer, “If you have to ask, the answer is no.” Perversely, if you have to ask which came first, the lyrics or the music, the answer is… No. Or Yes. Depending on your maturity and how slow the opposites are to reveal themselves.
Back to “So It Goes,” the raison d’etre for this blog: Joe Henry came to New York, and quickly arranged for us to meet at a studio in the East Village in the two hours he had free before beginning a new project with Allen Toussaint. He wanted me to sing the lead on the song, but after tinkering with different keys and trying to fit my voice around the unusual (for me) cadences of his melody and syllabic structure, I talked him into letting me record a duet vocal, part harmony and part lead. [Audio clip above.]
The demo we did together retained the simplicity of his original version, and I think it’s a great second step toward a full-fledged recording. I don’t know where the song will exist, on whose record, in what form, but I feel proud of this long-delayed experiment with Joe, and look at it as a great beginning. A little mystery becomes tangible, the friends I lost are respectfully acknowledged, and Joe and I, after a combined half-century of songwriting between us, become beginners again. And so it goes.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
December 6, 2007, 11:52 am
How to Boost Your Willpower
Every day, we are tested. Whether it’s a cookie tempting us from our diets or a warm bed coaxing us to sleep late, we are forced to decide between what we want to do and what we ought to do.
The ability to resist our impulses is commonly described as self-control or willpower. The elusive forces behind a person’s willpower have been the subject of increasing scrutiny by the scientific community trying to understand why some people overeat or abuse drugs and alcohol. What researchers are finding is that willpower is essentially a mental muscle, and certain physical and mental forces can weaken or strengthen our self-control.
Studies now show that self-control is a limited resource that may be strengthened by the foods we eat. Laughter and conjuring up powerful memories may also help boost a person’s self-control. And, some research suggests, we can improve self-control through practice, testing ourselves on small tasks in order to strengthen our willpower for bigger challenges.
“Learning self-control produces a wide range of positive outcomes,’’ said Roy Baumeister, a psychology professor at Florida State University who wrote about the issue in this month’s Current Directions in Psychological Science. “Kids do better in school, people do better at work. Look at just about any major category of problem that people are suffering from and odds are pretty good that self-control is implicated in some way.’’
Last month, Dr. Baumeister reported on laboratory studies that showed a relationship between self-control and blood glucose levels. In one study, participants watched a video, but some were asked to suppress smiles and other facial reactions. After the film, blood glucose levels had dropped among those who had exerted self-control to stifle their reactions, but stayed the same among the film watchers who were free to react, according to the report in Personality and Social Psychology Review.
The video watchers were later given a concentration test in which they were asked to identify the color in which words were displayed. The word “red,” for instance, might appear in blue ink. The video watchers who had stifled their responses did the worst on the test, suggesting that their self-control had already been depleted by the film challenge.
But the researchers also found that restoring glucose levels appears to replenish self-control. Study subjects who drank sugar-sweetened lemonade, which raises glucose levels quickly, performed better on self-control tests than those who drank artificially-sweetened beverages, which have no effect on glucose.
The findings make sense because it’s long been known that glucose fuels many brain functions. Having a bite to eat appears to help boost a person’s willpower, and may explain why smokers trying to quit or students trying to focus on studying often turn to food to sustain themselves.
Consuming sugary drinks or snacks isn’t practical advice for a dieter struggling with willpower. However, the research does help explain why dieters who eat several small meals a day appear to do better at sticking to a diet than dieters who skip meals. “You need the energy from food to have the willpower to exert self-control in order to succeed on your diet,'’ said Dr. Baumeister.
Kathleen Vohs, professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota, says that in lab studies, self-control is boosted when people conjure up powerful memories of the things they value in life. Laughter and positive thoughts also help people perform better on self-control tasks. Dr. Vohs notes that self-control problems occur because people are caught up “in the moment’’ and are distracted from their long-term goals.
“You want to look good in a bikini next summer but you’re looking at a piece of chocolate cake now,’’ said Dr. Vohs. “When we get people to think about values we move them to the long-term state, and that cools off the tempting stimuli.’’
Finally, some research suggests that people struggling with self-control should start small. A few studies show that people who were instructed for two weeks to make small changes like improving their posture or brushing their teeth with their opposite hand improved their scores on laboratory tests of self-control. The data aren’t conclusive, but they do suggest that the quest for self-improvement should start small. A vow to stop swearing, to make the bed every day or to give up just one food may be a way to strengthen your self-control, giving you more willpower reserves for bigger challenges later.
“Learning to bring your behavior under control even with arbitrary rules does build character in that it makes you better able to achieve the things you want to achieve later on,'’ said Dr. Baumeister. “Self-control is a limited resource. People make all these different New Year’s resolutions, but they are all pulling off from the same pool of your willpower. It’s better to make one resolution and stick to it than make five.'’
How to Boost Your Willpower
Every day, we are tested. Whether it’s a cookie tempting us from our diets or a warm bed coaxing us to sleep late, we are forced to decide between what we want to do and what we ought to do.
The ability to resist our impulses is commonly described as self-control or willpower. The elusive forces behind a person’s willpower have been the subject of increasing scrutiny by the scientific community trying to understand why some people overeat or abuse drugs and alcohol. What researchers are finding is that willpower is essentially a mental muscle, and certain physical and mental forces can weaken or strengthen our self-control.
Studies now show that self-control is a limited resource that may be strengthened by the foods we eat. Laughter and conjuring up powerful memories may also help boost a person’s self-control. And, some research suggests, we can improve self-control through practice, testing ourselves on small tasks in order to strengthen our willpower for bigger challenges.
“Learning self-control produces a wide range of positive outcomes,’’ said Roy Baumeister, a psychology professor at Florida State University who wrote about the issue in this month’s Current Directions in Psychological Science. “Kids do better in school, people do better at work. Look at just about any major category of problem that people are suffering from and odds are pretty good that self-control is implicated in some way.’’
Last month, Dr. Baumeister reported on laboratory studies that showed a relationship between self-control and blood glucose levels. In one study, participants watched a video, but some were asked to suppress smiles and other facial reactions. After the film, blood glucose levels had dropped among those who had exerted self-control to stifle their reactions, but stayed the same among the film watchers who were free to react, according to the report in Personality and Social Psychology Review.
The video watchers were later given a concentration test in which they were asked to identify the color in which words were displayed. The word “red,” for instance, might appear in blue ink. The video watchers who had stifled their responses did the worst on the test, suggesting that their self-control had already been depleted by the film challenge.
But the researchers also found that restoring glucose levels appears to replenish self-control. Study subjects who drank sugar-sweetened lemonade, which raises glucose levels quickly, performed better on self-control tests than those who drank artificially-sweetened beverages, which have no effect on glucose.
The findings make sense because it’s long been known that glucose fuels many brain functions. Having a bite to eat appears to help boost a person’s willpower, and may explain why smokers trying to quit or students trying to focus on studying often turn to food to sustain themselves.
Consuming sugary drinks or snacks isn’t practical advice for a dieter struggling with willpower. However, the research does help explain why dieters who eat several small meals a day appear to do better at sticking to a diet than dieters who skip meals. “You need the energy from food to have the willpower to exert self-control in order to succeed on your diet,'’ said Dr. Baumeister.
Kathleen Vohs, professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota, says that in lab studies, self-control is boosted when people conjure up powerful memories of the things they value in life. Laughter and positive thoughts also help people perform better on self-control tasks. Dr. Vohs notes that self-control problems occur because people are caught up “in the moment’’ and are distracted from their long-term goals.
“You want to look good in a bikini next summer but you’re looking at a piece of chocolate cake now,’’ said Dr. Vohs. “When we get people to think about values we move them to the long-term state, and that cools off the tempting stimuli.’’
Finally, some research suggests that people struggling with self-control should start small. A few studies show that people who were instructed for two weeks to make small changes like improving their posture or brushing their teeth with their opposite hand improved their scores on laboratory tests of self-control. The data aren’t conclusive, but they do suggest that the quest for self-improvement should start small. A vow to stop swearing, to make the bed every day or to give up just one food may be a way to strengthen your self-control, giving you more willpower reserves for bigger challenges later.
“Learning to bring your behavior under control even with arbitrary rules does build character in that it makes you better able to achieve the things you want to achieve later on,'’ said Dr. Baumeister. “Self-control is a limited resource. People make all these different New Year’s resolutions, but they are all pulling off from the same pool of your willpower. It’s better to make one resolution and stick to it than make five.'’
Saturday, April 26, 2008
The New York Times
April 27, 2008
Essay
You’re an Author? Me Too!
By RACHEL DONADIO
It’s well established that Americans are reading fewer books than they used to. A recent report by the National Endowment for the Arts found that 53 percent of Americans surveyed hadn’t read a book in the previous year — a state of affairs that has prompted much soul-searching by anyone with an affection for (or business interest in) turning pages. But even as more people choose the phantasmagoria of the screen over the contemplative pleasures of the page, there’s a parallel phenomenon sweeping the country: collective graphomania.
In 2007, a whopping 400,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from 300,000 in 2006, according to the industry tracker Bowker, which attributed the sharp rise to the number of print-on-demand books and reprints of out-of-print titles. University writing programs are thriving, while writers’ conferences abound, offering aspiring authors a chance to network and “workshop” their work. The blog tracker Technorati estimates that 175,000 new blogs are created worldwide each day (with a lucky few bloggers getting book deals). And the same N.E.A. study found that 7 percent of adults polled, or 15 million people, did creative writing, mostly “for personal fulfillment.”
In short, everyone has a story — and everyone wants to tell it. Fewer people may be reading, but everywhere you turn, Americans are sounding their barbaric yawps over the roofs of the world, as good old Walt Whitman, himself a self-published author, once put it.
“As publishing has become less expensive, the urge to write my own self has become the opportunity to publish my own self,” said Gabriel Zaid, a Mexican critic and the author of “So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance,” a meditation on literary life in an over-booked world. Today, he added, “Everyone now can afford to preach in the desert.”
At the Book Review, dozens of self-published books arrive each week — poetry collections, children’s books, memoirs, self-help manuals, sci-fi novels, religious titles. “The Chronicles of a Hip Hop Legend: Paths of Grand Wizardry” recently crossed the transom, as did a technical monograph on the death of Napoleon, complete with charts on possible arsenic poisoning; an illustrated religious guide, “Hell: For Those Dying to Get There”; and “Disney Your Way,” with suggested itineraries for navigating Walt Disney World. There are memoirs by Holocaust survivors and people fighting eating disorders, and novels like “September Sun,” in which, “enticed by the powerful aphrodisiac of sex, Michael learns to his chagrin that Murphy’s Law is always in play.”
And the numbers suggest the books will keep on coming. IUniverse, a self-publishing company founded in 1999, has grown 30 percent a year in recent years; it now produces 500 titles a month and has 36,000 titles in print, said Susan Driscoll, a vice president of its parent company, Author Solutions. While some are “calling card” books that specialists sell at conferences and workshops, most are by ordinary people who want to get their work in print. The writers tend to be on both ends of the age spectrum. “As people get older, they have more time and more money and something to say,” Driscoll said, while their grandchildren are often driven by “that need for fame,” she said. “They may not be avid readers, but they certainly are writers.” Not that anyone is necessarily paying attention. Driscoll said that most writers using iUniverse sell fewer than 200 books.
Other self-publishing outfits report similar growth. Xlibris, a print-on-demand operation, has 20,000 titles in print, by more than 18,000 authors, said Noel Flowers, a company spokesman. It is “nonselective” in choosing manuscripts, he said, though it does screen “for any offensive or inappropriate content.” Xlibris’s top sellers include “Demonstrating to Win!,” a computer manual (15,600 sold, not including copies bought by the author), and “The Morning Comes and Also the Night,” which the company lists in the “religion/Bible/prophecies” category (10,500 sold).
For the most part, big booksellers shy away from carrying self-published books. But they’re still looking to jump into the game. IUniverse has a “strategic alliance” with Barnes & Noble, which sometimes considers stocking self-published titles for some local branches, Driscoll said. Amazon.com owns BookSurge, a print-on-demand operation that produces and distributes books for as little as $3.50 per copy. Borders recently started a self-publishing program with the print-on-demand company Lulu. Would-be authors can pay $299 for formatting, printing and an ISBN code, or for the $499 “premium package,” an editor will address structure, plot and documentation, along with basics like grammar, punctuation and spelling.
The Borders site says self-published authors can even arrange readings in local Borders stores, but the kinks still need to be worked out. “It is not possible to purchase a place on shelves or an author event today,” a spokeswoman for Borders said.
Borders lists its self-publishing program under the rubric “Borders Lifestyles,” as if writing were a hobby, like golf, rather than a calling or a craft. But for those seeking formal training, there are hundreds of creative writing programs offering M.F.A.’s and other credentialing. The Association of Writers and Writing Programs represented 13 programs when it was founded in 1967. Now it includes 465 full-fledged courses of study, and creative writing classes are offered at most of the 2,400 college English departments in North America.
Since the ’60s, creative writing programs have helped “democratize” the talent pool, providing “the encouragement to women and a lot of different people of different classes and ethnicities to tell their stories and write their poems,” said David Fenza, the organization’s executive director. He disagrees with those who think an oversupply of books is pushing readers away. “Some have argued that all this new literary activity is displacing the Great Works and therefore estranging the great audience for literature,” Fenza said. “Writing programs have their faults, but they still work as advocates for the mind that reads.”
Mark McGurl, an associate professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of a forthcoming book on the impact of creative writing programs on postwar American literature, agrees that writing programs have helped expand the literary universe. “American literature has never been deeper and stronger and more various than it is now,” McGurl said in an e-mail message. Still, he added, “one could put that more pessimistically: given the manifold distractions of modern life, we now have more great writers working in the United States than anyone has the time or inclination to read.”
Self-publishing companies may produce books for less than $5, but how much does all this production cost readers? In “So Many Books,” Zaid playfully writes that “if a mass-market paperback costs $10 and takes two hours to read, for a minimum-wage earner the time spent is worth as much as the book.” But for someone earning around $50 to $500 an hour, “the cost of buying and reading the book is $100 to $1,000” — not including the time it takes to find out about the book and track it down.
On the whole, Zaid is unworried about the proliferation of books, though he doesn’t think everyone should set pen to paper. “About would-be writers, André Gide used to say: ‘Découragez! Découragez!’”(discourage!), Zaid said in an e-mail message. “The implication was that real writers would not be discouraged, and the rest would save a lot of time. Of course, some mediocrities are never discouraged, and some potential real writers would be lost. But there is so much talent around that we can afford it.”
Indeed. There’s a lot of noise out there, and some of it is music.
Rachel Donadio is a writer and editor at the Book Review.
April 27, 2008
Essay
You’re an Author? Me Too!
By RACHEL DONADIO
It’s well established that Americans are reading fewer books than they used to. A recent report by the National Endowment for the Arts found that 53 percent of Americans surveyed hadn’t read a book in the previous year — a state of affairs that has prompted much soul-searching by anyone with an affection for (or business interest in) turning pages. But even as more people choose the phantasmagoria of the screen over the contemplative pleasures of the page, there’s a parallel phenomenon sweeping the country: collective graphomania.
In 2007, a whopping 400,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from 300,000 in 2006, according to the industry tracker Bowker, which attributed the sharp rise to the number of print-on-demand books and reprints of out-of-print titles. University writing programs are thriving, while writers’ conferences abound, offering aspiring authors a chance to network and “workshop” their work. The blog tracker Technorati estimates that 175,000 new blogs are created worldwide each day (with a lucky few bloggers getting book deals). And the same N.E.A. study found that 7 percent of adults polled, or 15 million people, did creative writing, mostly “for personal fulfillment.”
In short, everyone has a story — and everyone wants to tell it. Fewer people may be reading, but everywhere you turn, Americans are sounding their barbaric yawps over the roofs of the world, as good old Walt Whitman, himself a self-published author, once put it.
“As publishing has become less expensive, the urge to write my own self has become the opportunity to publish my own self,” said Gabriel Zaid, a Mexican critic and the author of “So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance,” a meditation on literary life in an over-booked world. Today, he added, “Everyone now can afford to preach in the desert.”
At the Book Review, dozens of self-published books arrive each week — poetry collections, children’s books, memoirs, self-help manuals, sci-fi novels, religious titles. “The Chronicles of a Hip Hop Legend: Paths of Grand Wizardry” recently crossed the transom, as did a technical monograph on the death of Napoleon, complete with charts on possible arsenic poisoning; an illustrated religious guide, “Hell: For Those Dying to Get There”; and “Disney Your Way,” with suggested itineraries for navigating Walt Disney World. There are memoirs by Holocaust survivors and people fighting eating disorders, and novels like “September Sun,” in which, “enticed by the powerful aphrodisiac of sex, Michael learns to his chagrin that Murphy’s Law is always in play.”
And the numbers suggest the books will keep on coming. IUniverse, a self-publishing company founded in 1999, has grown 30 percent a year in recent years; it now produces 500 titles a month and has 36,000 titles in print, said Susan Driscoll, a vice president of its parent company, Author Solutions. While some are “calling card” books that specialists sell at conferences and workshops, most are by ordinary people who want to get their work in print. The writers tend to be on both ends of the age spectrum. “As people get older, they have more time and more money and something to say,” Driscoll said, while their grandchildren are often driven by “that need for fame,” she said. “They may not be avid readers, but they certainly are writers.” Not that anyone is necessarily paying attention. Driscoll said that most writers using iUniverse sell fewer than 200 books.
Other self-publishing outfits report similar growth. Xlibris, a print-on-demand operation, has 20,000 titles in print, by more than 18,000 authors, said Noel Flowers, a company spokesman. It is “nonselective” in choosing manuscripts, he said, though it does screen “for any offensive or inappropriate content.” Xlibris’s top sellers include “Demonstrating to Win!,” a computer manual (15,600 sold, not including copies bought by the author), and “The Morning Comes and Also the Night,” which the company lists in the “religion/Bible/prophecies” category (10,500 sold).
For the most part, big booksellers shy away from carrying self-published books. But they’re still looking to jump into the game. IUniverse has a “strategic alliance” with Barnes & Noble, which sometimes considers stocking self-published titles for some local branches, Driscoll said. Amazon.com owns BookSurge, a print-on-demand operation that produces and distributes books for as little as $3.50 per copy. Borders recently started a self-publishing program with the print-on-demand company Lulu. Would-be authors can pay $299 for formatting, printing and an ISBN code, or for the $499 “premium package,” an editor will address structure, plot and documentation, along with basics like grammar, punctuation and spelling.
The Borders site says self-published authors can even arrange readings in local Borders stores, but the kinks still need to be worked out. “It is not possible to purchase a place on shelves or an author event today,” a spokeswoman for Borders said.
Borders lists its self-publishing program under the rubric “Borders Lifestyles,” as if writing were a hobby, like golf, rather than a calling or a craft. But for those seeking formal training, there are hundreds of creative writing programs offering M.F.A.’s and other credentialing. The Association of Writers and Writing Programs represented 13 programs when it was founded in 1967. Now it includes 465 full-fledged courses of study, and creative writing classes are offered at most of the 2,400 college English departments in North America.
Since the ’60s, creative writing programs have helped “democratize” the talent pool, providing “the encouragement to women and a lot of different people of different classes and ethnicities to tell their stories and write their poems,” said David Fenza, the organization’s executive director. He disagrees with those who think an oversupply of books is pushing readers away. “Some have argued that all this new literary activity is displacing the Great Works and therefore estranging the great audience for literature,” Fenza said. “Writing programs have their faults, but they still work as advocates for the mind that reads.”
Mark McGurl, an associate professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of a forthcoming book on the impact of creative writing programs on postwar American literature, agrees that writing programs have helped expand the literary universe. “American literature has never been deeper and stronger and more various than it is now,” McGurl said in an e-mail message. Still, he added, “one could put that more pessimistically: given the manifold distractions of modern life, we now have more great writers working in the United States than anyone has the time or inclination to read.”
Self-publishing companies may produce books for less than $5, but how much does all this production cost readers? In “So Many Books,” Zaid playfully writes that “if a mass-market paperback costs $10 and takes two hours to read, for a minimum-wage earner the time spent is worth as much as the book.” But for someone earning around $50 to $500 an hour, “the cost of buying and reading the book is $100 to $1,000” — not including the time it takes to find out about the book and track it down.
On the whole, Zaid is unworried about the proliferation of books, though he doesn’t think everyone should set pen to paper. “About would-be writers, André Gide used to say: ‘Découragez! Découragez!’”(discourage!), Zaid said in an e-mail message. “The implication was that real writers would not be discouraged, and the rest would save a lot of time. Of course, some mediocrities are never discouraged, and some potential real writers would be lost. But there is so much talent around that we can afford it.”
Indeed. There’s a lot of noise out there, and some of it is music.
Rachel Donadio is a writer and editor at the Book Review.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
The New York Times
April 22, 2008
A Conversation With Daniel Gilbert
The Smiling Professor
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
At Harvard, the social psychologist Daniel Gilbert is known as Professor Happiness. That is because the 50-year-old researcher directs a laboratory studying the nature of human happiness. Dr. Gilbert’s “Stumbling on Happiness” was a New York Times paperback best seller for 23 weeks and won the 2007 Royal Society Prize for Science Books.
Q. HOW DID YOU STUMBLE ONTO YOUR AREA OF STUDY?
A. It was something that happened to me roughly 13 years ago. I spent the first decade of my career studying what psychologists call “the fundamental attribution error,” which is about how people have the tendency to ignore the power of external situations to determine human behavior.
Why do many people, for instance, believe the uneducated are stupid?
I’d have been content to work on this for many more years, but some things happened in my own life.
Within a short period of time, my mentor passed away, my mother died, my marriage fell apart and my teenage son developed problems in school. What I soon found was that as bad as my situation was, it wasn’t devastating. I went on.
One day, I had lunch with a friend who was also going through difficult times. I told him: “If you’d have asked me a year ago how I’d deal with all this, I’d have predicted that I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning.”
He nodded and added, “Are we the only people who could be so wrong in predicting how we’d respond to extreme stress?”
That got me thinking. I wondered: How accurately do people predict their emotional reactions to future events?
Q. HOW DOES THAT RELATE TO UNDERSTANDING HAPPINESS?
A. Because if we can’t predict how we’d react in the future, we can’t set realistic goals for ourselves or figure out how to reach to them.
What we’ve been seeing in my lab, over and over again, is that people have an inability to predict what will make us happy — or unhappy. If you can’t tell which futures are better than others, it’s hard to find happiness. The truth is, bad things don’t affect us as profoundly as we expect them to. That’s true of good things, too. We adapt very quickly to either.
So the good news is that going blind is not going to make you as unhappy as you think it will. The bad news is that winning the lottery will not make you as happy as you expect.
Q. ARE YOU SAYING THAT PEOPLE ARE HAPPY WITH WHATEVER CARDS ARE DEALT TO THEM?
A. As a species, we tend to be moderately happy with whatever we get. If you take a scale that goes from zero to 100, people, generally, report their happiness at about 75. We keep trying to get to 100. Sometimes, we get there. But we don’t stay long.
We certainly fear the things that would get us down to 20 or 10 — the death of a loved one, the end of a relationship, a serious challenge to our health. But when those things happen, most of us will return to our emotional baselines more quickly than we’d predict. Humans are wildly resilient.
Q. DO MOST OF US HARBOR UNREASONABLE NOTIONS OF WHAT HAPPINESS IS?
A. Inaccurate, flawed ideas. Few of us can accurately gauge how we will feel tomorrow or next week. That’s why when you go to the supermarket on an empty stomach, you’ll buy too much, and if you shop after a big meal, you’ll buy too little.
Another factor that makes it difficult to forecast our future happiness is that most of us are rationalizers. We expect to feel devastated if our spouse leaves us or if we get passed over for a big promotion at work.
But when things like that do happen, it’s soon, “She never was right for me,” or “I actually need more free time for my family.” People have remarkable talent for finding ways to soften the impact of negative events. Thus they mistakenly expect such blows to be much more devastating than they turn out to be.
Q. SO, IF WE DIDN’T HAVE THESE MECHANISMS, WOULD WE BE TOO DEPRESSED TO GO ON?
A. There may be something to that. People who are clinically depressed often seem to lack the ability to reframe events. That suggests that if the rest of us didn’t have this, we might be depressed as well.
Q. AS THE AUTHOR OF A BEST SELLER ABOUT HAPPINESS, DO YOU HAVE ANY ADVICE ON HOW PEOPLE CAN ACHIEVE IT?
A. I’m not Dr. Phil.
We know that the best predictor of human happiness is human relationships and the amount of time that people spend with family and friends.
We know that it’s significantly more important than money and somewhat more important than health. That’s what the data shows. The interesting thing is that people will sacrifice social relationships to get other things that won’t make them as happy — money. That’s what I mean when I say people should do “wise shopping” for happiness.
Another thing we know from studies is that people tend to take more pleasure in experiences than in things. So if you have “x” amount of dollars to spend on a vacation or a good meal or movies, it will get you more happiness than a durable good or an object. One reason for this is that experiences tend to be shared with other people and objects usually aren’t.
Q. HAVE YOU JUST EXPRESSED A VERY ANTI-AMERICAN IDEA?
A. Oh, you can spend lots of money on experiences. People think a car will last and that’s why it will bring you happiness. But it doesn’t. It gets old and decays. But experiences don’t. You’ll “always have Paris” — and that’s exactly what Bogart meant when he said it to Ingrid Bergman. But will you always have a washing machine? No.
Today, I’m going to Dallas to meet my wife and I’m flying first class, which is ridiculously expensive. But the experience will be far more delightful than a new suit. Another way I follow what I’ve learned from data is that I don’t chase dollars now that I have enough of them, because I know that it will take a very large amount of money to increase my happiness by a small amount.
You couldn’t pay me $100,000 to miss a play date with my granddaughters.
And that’s not because I’m rich. That’s because I know that a hundred grand won’t make me as happy as nurturing my relationship with my granddaughters will.
Q. SO YOU HOLD WITH THE NOTION THAT “MONEY CAN’T BUY YOU HAPPINESS”?
A. I wouldn’t say that. The data says that with the poor, a little money can buy a lot of happiness. If you’re rich, a lot of money can buy you a little more happiness. But in both cases, money does it.
Q. ARE YOU, DAN GILBERT, HAPPY?
A. I am. I think good things are happening to me and will continue. I am not optimistic about the rest of the species, but I’m so blessed, it’s almost scary. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I have a wildly sunny disposition. I love to laugh. My book is full of jokes.
April 22, 2008
A Conversation With Daniel Gilbert
The Smiling Professor
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
At Harvard, the social psychologist Daniel Gilbert is known as Professor Happiness. That is because the 50-year-old researcher directs a laboratory studying the nature of human happiness. Dr. Gilbert’s “Stumbling on Happiness” was a New York Times paperback best seller for 23 weeks and won the 2007 Royal Society Prize for Science Books.
Q. HOW DID YOU STUMBLE ONTO YOUR AREA OF STUDY?
A. It was something that happened to me roughly 13 years ago. I spent the first decade of my career studying what psychologists call “the fundamental attribution error,” which is about how people have the tendency to ignore the power of external situations to determine human behavior.
Why do many people, for instance, believe the uneducated are stupid?
I’d have been content to work on this for many more years, but some things happened in my own life.
Within a short period of time, my mentor passed away, my mother died, my marriage fell apart and my teenage son developed problems in school. What I soon found was that as bad as my situation was, it wasn’t devastating. I went on.
One day, I had lunch with a friend who was also going through difficult times. I told him: “If you’d have asked me a year ago how I’d deal with all this, I’d have predicted that I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning.”
He nodded and added, “Are we the only people who could be so wrong in predicting how we’d respond to extreme stress?”
That got me thinking. I wondered: How accurately do people predict their emotional reactions to future events?
Q. HOW DOES THAT RELATE TO UNDERSTANDING HAPPINESS?
A. Because if we can’t predict how we’d react in the future, we can’t set realistic goals for ourselves or figure out how to reach to them.
What we’ve been seeing in my lab, over and over again, is that people have an inability to predict what will make us happy — or unhappy. If you can’t tell which futures are better than others, it’s hard to find happiness. The truth is, bad things don’t affect us as profoundly as we expect them to. That’s true of good things, too. We adapt very quickly to either.
So the good news is that going blind is not going to make you as unhappy as you think it will. The bad news is that winning the lottery will not make you as happy as you expect.
Q. ARE YOU SAYING THAT PEOPLE ARE HAPPY WITH WHATEVER CARDS ARE DEALT TO THEM?
A. As a species, we tend to be moderately happy with whatever we get. If you take a scale that goes from zero to 100, people, generally, report their happiness at about 75. We keep trying to get to 100. Sometimes, we get there. But we don’t stay long.
We certainly fear the things that would get us down to 20 or 10 — the death of a loved one, the end of a relationship, a serious challenge to our health. But when those things happen, most of us will return to our emotional baselines more quickly than we’d predict. Humans are wildly resilient.
Q. DO MOST OF US HARBOR UNREASONABLE NOTIONS OF WHAT HAPPINESS IS?
A. Inaccurate, flawed ideas. Few of us can accurately gauge how we will feel tomorrow or next week. That’s why when you go to the supermarket on an empty stomach, you’ll buy too much, and if you shop after a big meal, you’ll buy too little.
Another factor that makes it difficult to forecast our future happiness is that most of us are rationalizers. We expect to feel devastated if our spouse leaves us or if we get passed over for a big promotion at work.
But when things like that do happen, it’s soon, “She never was right for me,” or “I actually need more free time for my family.” People have remarkable talent for finding ways to soften the impact of negative events. Thus they mistakenly expect such blows to be much more devastating than they turn out to be.
Q. SO, IF WE DIDN’T HAVE THESE MECHANISMS, WOULD WE BE TOO DEPRESSED TO GO ON?
A. There may be something to that. People who are clinically depressed often seem to lack the ability to reframe events. That suggests that if the rest of us didn’t have this, we might be depressed as well.
Q. AS THE AUTHOR OF A BEST SELLER ABOUT HAPPINESS, DO YOU HAVE ANY ADVICE ON HOW PEOPLE CAN ACHIEVE IT?
A. I’m not Dr. Phil.
We know that the best predictor of human happiness is human relationships and the amount of time that people spend with family and friends.
We know that it’s significantly more important than money and somewhat more important than health. That’s what the data shows. The interesting thing is that people will sacrifice social relationships to get other things that won’t make them as happy — money. That’s what I mean when I say people should do “wise shopping” for happiness.
Another thing we know from studies is that people tend to take more pleasure in experiences than in things. So if you have “x” amount of dollars to spend on a vacation or a good meal or movies, it will get you more happiness than a durable good or an object. One reason for this is that experiences tend to be shared with other people and objects usually aren’t.
Q. HAVE YOU JUST EXPRESSED A VERY ANTI-AMERICAN IDEA?
A. Oh, you can spend lots of money on experiences. People think a car will last and that’s why it will bring you happiness. But it doesn’t. It gets old and decays. But experiences don’t. You’ll “always have Paris” — and that’s exactly what Bogart meant when he said it to Ingrid Bergman. But will you always have a washing machine? No.
Today, I’m going to Dallas to meet my wife and I’m flying first class, which is ridiculously expensive. But the experience will be far more delightful than a new suit. Another way I follow what I’ve learned from data is that I don’t chase dollars now that I have enough of them, because I know that it will take a very large amount of money to increase my happiness by a small amount.
You couldn’t pay me $100,000 to miss a play date with my granddaughters.
And that’s not because I’m rich. That’s because I know that a hundred grand won’t make me as happy as nurturing my relationship with my granddaughters will.
Q. SO YOU HOLD WITH THE NOTION THAT “MONEY CAN’T BUY YOU HAPPINESS”?
A. I wouldn’t say that. The data says that with the poor, a little money can buy a lot of happiness. If you’re rich, a lot of money can buy you a little more happiness. But in both cases, money does it.
Q. ARE YOU, DAN GILBERT, HAPPY?
A. I am. I think good things are happening to me and will continue. I am not optimistic about the rest of the species, but I’m so blessed, it’s almost scary. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I have a wildly sunny disposition. I love to laugh. My book is full of jokes.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
The New York Times
April 21, 2008
On Par
Annoying Cellphones and 9 Other Hang-Ups
By BILL PENNINGTON
Are you the Annoying Guy in your weekend foursome?
What a silly question. If you were, you wouldn’t know it.
So let’s ask a few other questions: When you shank a shot, do you immediately pull another ball out of your pocket so you can shank another one? Do you take three, maybe four practice swings before every shot? Or, are you the one giving everyone else in the group unsolicited swing advice and golf lessons?
Aha, now you’re not so sure.
It is O.K., golf is a game of chivalry, and we are here to foster good social graces. Look, I have seen the Annoying Guy in the mirror more than once. So, as a public service, I propose the 10 Most Annoying Things People Do on the Golf Course.
10. They stand in another player’s line of sight and/or move when another player is hitting.
It’s pretty simple: stand where you can either see the chest or the back of the person hitting, preferably behind the player if on the tee. Anywhere else can be a distraction. And understand that it can be downright annoying if you choose this moment to fumble for a tee in your pocket or adjust your golf glove. Stand still, and unless a blimp is about to crash on the course, don’t move.
9. They play from the wrong tees, usually the back or championship tees.
New equipment technology has casual players thinking they can drive the ball 275 yards just because it happened once — on the range. Statistics show that the average golfer usually hits a driver less than 210 yards. Problem is, people don’t think they are average. So the tees that are farthest away, once actually reserved for championships, are jammed full of players insisting on “seeing the whole course.”
What this means is that they spend all day looking for sprayed drives farther from the green. And that often leads to more searching for second shots that end up in trouble around the green. This is apparently “the whole course” that is so important to see.
Golf is not a pie-eating contest. More is not better; it just makes you and everyone else take longer to play a round. If you’re playing from the blues or the tips, and you’re not consistently breaking 90 — be honest — move forward one set of tee boxes.
8. They act as if they were rules mavens.
There are a lot of rules in golf, and some people relish the intricacies and sleep with the rule book under their pillows. We need those people to settle arguments in the bar, but on the course, we don’t need anyone loudly and officiously castigating some novice player for innocently breaking Rule 18-2, because the player’s ball moved slightly after a practice swing.
I understand that the rules are essential and that no one likes people who blatantly ignore them (more on that later), but it’s also true that some people are just learning or are playing a friendly round. A quiet conversation later about some rules would suffice.
7. They make excuses after bad shots.
Golf is a fickle game. Unfair things happen out there. But it is better to take it in silence. I have done the opposite, and I swear that if you whine, the golf gods will make it worse.
6. They are oblivious, walking through the rough yelling, “Hey, did you see my ball?” just as someone else in the foursome is preparing to hit.
It is better to know what is going on around you and respect your surroundings. Don’t just pull the cigar out of your mouth and scream, “Found it!”
Even if your foursome isn’t bothered, someone on an adjacent tee might be.
5. They anoint themselves the golf instructor for the group.
People giving unsolicited lessons are just trying to help. But when someone has messed up a shot for all the world to see, trust me, a golf tutorial at that very moment is not a salve for the situation.
A nice smile aimed their way sometimes helps. Maybe add, “Crazy game, isn’t it?” Besides, giving advice on the golf course, according to the rule book, can be a two-stroke penalty. Not that I’m a rules maven.
4. They cheat.
We’ve all seen it. They roll their ball over to a better lie in the fairway (who cares if winter rules expired months ago). They roll their ball over to a better lie in the rough. Shoot, they think no one is looking as they kick their ball out from under the trees.
They also decline to putt out 3-footers, calling them all gimmes.
Who cares? Well, maybe nobody. But taking unashamed, unfair advantages cheapens the whole experience.
3. They take too many practice swings.
I know you’ve seen Tiger Woods take four or five practice swings on the 18th tee of a big tournament. Or maybe you just took a lesson, and you’re working on something. But the rest of us had hopes of getting to our cars before Jay Leno starts his monologue. Take one practice swing, at most. Chances are, you will play better.
2. They brag about their equipment.
If you are an 18 handicap but you genuinely feel you must play with blade irons or that you swing too hard to use those “too soft” graphite shafts, there’s no rule against such illusions. But the rest of us don’t have to be introduced to your dream world.
1. They use their cellphones.
This is, without question, the most annoying, irritating thing of all and the unquestioned scourge of the golf course. Turn them off, and if you must check into the digital world, be discreet and tactful. Turning your back to the green as you talk doesn’t qualify. It just makes everyone make faces behind your back.
Well, there you have it. Doubtlessly, I have left out some popular misbehavior. But golf being a game of decorum, I didn’t want to seem judgmental.
Because that is really annoying.
April 21, 2008
On Par
Annoying Cellphones and 9 Other Hang-Ups
By BILL PENNINGTON
Are you the Annoying Guy in your weekend foursome?
What a silly question. If you were, you wouldn’t know it.
So let’s ask a few other questions: When you shank a shot, do you immediately pull another ball out of your pocket so you can shank another one? Do you take three, maybe four practice swings before every shot? Or, are you the one giving everyone else in the group unsolicited swing advice and golf lessons?
Aha, now you’re not so sure.
It is O.K., golf is a game of chivalry, and we are here to foster good social graces. Look, I have seen the Annoying Guy in the mirror more than once. So, as a public service, I propose the 10 Most Annoying Things People Do on the Golf Course.
10. They stand in another player’s line of sight and/or move when another player is hitting.
It’s pretty simple: stand where you can either see the chest or the back of the person hitting, preferably behind the player if on the tee. Anywhere else can be a distraction. And understand that it can be downright annoying if you choose this moment to fumble for a tee in your pocket or adjust your golf glove. Stand still, and unless a blimp is about to crash on the course, don’t move.
9. They play from the wrong tees, usually the back or championship tees.
New equipment technology has casual players thinking they can drive the ball 275 yards just because it happened once — on the range. Statistics show that the average golfer usually hits a driver less than 210 yards. Problem is, people don’t think they are average. So the tees that are farthest away, once actually reserved for championships, are jammed full of players insisting on “seeing the whole course.”
What this means is that they spend all day looking for sprayed drives farther from the green. And that often leads to more searching for second shots that end up in trouble around the green. This is apparently “the whole course” that is so important to see.
Golf is not a pie-eating contest. More is not better; it just makes you and everyone else take longer to play a round. If you’re playing from the blues or the tips, and you’re not consistently breaking 90 — be honest — move forward one set of tee boxes.
8. They act as if they were rules mavens.
There are a lot of rules in golf, and some people relish the intricacies and sleep with the rule book under their pillows. We need those people to settle arguments in the bar, but on the course, we don’t need anyone loudly and officiously castigating some novice player for innocently breaking Rule 18-2, because the player’s ball moved slightly after a practice swing.
I understand that the rules are essential and that no one likes people who blatantly ignore them (more on that later), but it’s also true that some people are just learning or are playing a friendly round. A quiet conversation later about some rules would suffice.
7. They make excuses after bad shots.
Golf is a fickle game. Unfair things happen out there. But it is better to take it in silence. I have done the opposite, and I swear that if you whine, the golf gods will make it worse.
6. They are oblivious, walking through the rough yelling, “Hey, did you see my ball?” just as someone else in the foursome is preparing to hit.
It is better to know what is going on around you and respect your surroundings. Don’t just pull the cigar out of your mouth and scream, “Found it!”
Even if your foursome isn’t bothered, someone on an adjacent tee might be.
5. They anoint themselves the golf instructor for the group.
People giving unsolicited lessons are just trying to help. But when someone has messed up a shot for all the world to see, trust me, a golf tutorial at that very moment is not a salve for the situation.
A nice smile aimed their way sometimes helps. Maybe add, “Crazy game, isn’t it?” Besides, giving advice on the golf course, according to the rule book, can be a two-stroke penalty. Not that I’m a rules maven.
4. They cheat.
We’ve all seen it. They roll their ball over to a better lie in the fairway (who cares if winter rules expired months ago). They roll their ball over to a better lie in the rough. Shoot, they think no one is looking as they kick their ball out from under the trees.
They also decline to putt out 3-footers, calling them all gimmes.
Who cares? Well, maybe nobody. But taking unashamed, unfair advantages cheapens the whole experience.
3. They take too many practice swings.
I know you’ve seen Tiger Woods take four or five practice swings on the 18th tee of a big tournament. Or maybe you just took a lesson, and you’re working on something. But the rest of us had hopes of getting to our cars before Jay Leno starts his monologue. Take one practice swing, at most. Chances are, you will play better.
2. They brag about their equipment.
If you are an 18 handicap but you genuinely feel you must play with blade irons or that you swing too hard to use those “too soft” graphite shafts, there’s no rule against such illusions. But the rest of us don’t have to be introduced to your dream world.
1. They use their cellphones.
This is, without question, the most annoying, irritating thing of all and the unquestioned scourge of the golf course. Turn them off, and if you must check into the digital world, be discreet and tactful. Turning your back to the green as you talk doesn’t qualify. It just makes everyone make faces behind your back.
Well, there you have it. Doubtlessly, I have left out some popular misbehavior. But golf being a game of decorum, I didn’t want to seem judgmental.
Because that is really annoying.
Thursday, April 17, 2008
DANIEL KAHNEMAN
Psychologist, Princeton; Recipient, 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences
The sad tale of the aspiration treadmill
The central question for students of well-being is the extent to which people adapt to circumstances. Ten years ago the generally accepted position was that there is considerable hedonic adaptation to life conditions. The effects of circumstances on life satisfaction appeared surprisingly small: the rich were only slightly more satisfied with their lives than the poor, the married were happier than the unmarried but not by much, and neither age nor moderately poor health diminished life satisfaction. Evidence that people adapt — though not completely — to becoming paraplegic or winning the lottery supported the idea of a "hedonic treadmill": we move but we remain in place. The famous "Easterlin paradox" seemed to nail it down: Self-reported life satisfaction has changed very little in prosperous countries over the last fifty years, in spite of large increases in the standard of living.
Hedonic adaptation is a troubling concept, regardless of where you stand on the political spectrum. If you believe that economic growth is the key to increased well-being, the Easterlin paradox is bad news. If you are a compassionate liberal, the finding that the sick and the poor are not very miserable takes wind from your sails. And if you hope to use a measure of well-being to guide social policy you need an index that will pick up permanent effects of good policies on the happiness of the population.
About ten years ago I had an idea that seemed to solve these difficulties: perhaps people's satisfaction with their life is not the right measure of well-being. The idea took shape in discussions with my wife Anne Treisman, who was (and remains) convinced that people are happier in California (or at least Northern California) than in most other places. The evidence showed that Californians are not particularly satisfied with their life, but Anne was unimpressed. She argued that Californians are accustomed to a pleasant life and come to expect more pleasure than the unfortunate residents of other states. Because they have a high standard for what life should be, Californians are not more satisfied than others, although they are actually happier. This idea included a treadmill, but it was not hedonic – it was an aspiration treadmill: happy people have high aspirations.
The aspiration treadmill offered an appealing solution to the puzzles of adaptation: it suggested that measure of life satisfaction underestimate the well-being benefits of life circumstances such as income, marital status or living in California. The hope was that measures of experienced happiness would be more sensitive. I eventually assembled an interdisciplinary team to develop a measure of experienced happiness (Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Stone and Schwarz, 2004) and we set out to demonstrate the aspiration treadmill. Over several years we asked substantial samples of women to reconstruct a day of their life in detail. They indicated the feelings they had experienced during each episode, and we computed a measure of experienced happiness: the average quality of affective experience during the day. Our hypothesis was that differences in life circumstances would have more impact on this measure than on life satisfaction. We were so convinced that when we got our first batch of data, comparing teachers in top-rated schools to teachers in inferior schools, we actually misread the results as confirming our hypothesis. In fact, they showed the opposite: the groups of teachers differed more in their work satisfaction than in their affective experience at work. This was the first of many such findings: income, marital status and education all influence experienced happiness less than satisfaction, and we could show that the difference is not a statistical artifact. Measuring experienced happiness turned out to be interesting and useful, but not in the way we had expected. We had simply been wrong.
Experienced happiness, we learned, depends mainly on personality and on the hedonic value of the activities to which people allocate their time. Life circumstances influence the allocation of time, and the hedonic outcome is often mixed: high-income women have more enjoyable activities than the poor, but they also spend more time engaged in work that they do not enjoy; married women spend less time alone, but more time doing tedious chores. Conditions that make people satisfied with their life do not necessarily make them happy.
Social scientists rarely change their minds, although they often adjust their position to accommodate inconvenient facts. But it is rare for a hypothesis to be so thoroughly falsified. Merely adjusting my position would not do; although I still find the idea of an aspiration treadmill attractive, I had to give it up.
To compound the irony, recent findings from the Gallup World Poll raise doubts about the puzzle itself. The most dramatic result is that when the entire range of human living standards is considered, the effects of income on a measure of life satisfaction (the "ladder of life") are not small at all. We had thought income effects are small because we were looking within countries. The GDP differences between countries are enormous, and highly predictive of differences in life satisfaction. In a sample of over 130,000 people from 126 countries, the correlation between the life satisfaction of individuals and the GDP of the country in which they live was over .40 – an exceptionally high value in social science. Humans everywhere, from Norway to Sierra Leone, apparently evaluate their life by a common standard of material prosperity, which changes as GDP increases. The implied conclusion, that citizens of different countries do not adapt to their level of prosperity, flies against everything we thought we knew ten years ago. We have been wrong and now we know it. I suppose this means that there is a science of well-being, even if we are not doing it very well.
Psychologist, Princeton; Recipient, 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences
The sad tale of the aspiration treadmill
The central question for students of well-being is the extent to which people adapt to circumstances. Ten years ago the generally accepted position was that there is considerable hedonic adaptation to life conditions. The effects of circumstances on life satisfaction appeared surprisingly small: the rich were only slightly more satisfied with their lives than the poor, the married were happier than the unmarried but not by much, and neither age nor moderately poor health diminished life satisfaction. Evidence that people adapt — though not completely — to becoming paraplegic or winning the lottery supported the idea of a "hedonic treadmill": we move but we remain in place. The famous "Easterlin paradox" seemed to nail it down: Self-reported life satisfaction has changed very little in prosperous countries over the last fifty years, in spite of large increases in the standard of living.
Hedonic adaptation is a troubling concept, regardless of where you stand on the political spectrum. If you believe that economic growth is the key to increased well-being, the Easterlin paradox is bad news. If you are a compassionate liberal, the finding that the sick and the poor are not very miserable takes wind from your sails. And if you hope to use a measure of well-being to guide social policy you need an index that will pick up permanent effects of good policies on the happiness of the population.
About ten years ago I had an idea that seemed to solve these difficulties: perhaps people's satisfaction with their life is not the right measure of well-being. The idea took shape in discussions with my wife Anne Treisman, who was (and remains) convinced that people are happier in California (or at least Northern California) than in most other places. The evidence showed that Californians are not particularly satisfied with their life, but Anne was unimpressed. She argued that Californians are accustomed to a pleasant life and come to expect more pleasure than the unfortunate residents of other states. Because they have a high standard for what life should be, Californians are not more satisfied than others, although they are actually happier. This idea included a treadmill, but it was not hedonic – it was an aspiration treadmill: happy people have high aspirations.
The aspiration treadmill offered an appealing solution to the puzzles of adaptation: it suggested that measure of life satisfaction underestimate the well-being benefits of life circumstances such as income, marital status or living in California. The hope was that measures of experienced happiness would be more sensitive. I eventually assembled an interdisciplinary team to develop a measure of experienced happiness (Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Stone and Schwarz, 2004) and we set out to demonstrate the aspiration treadmill. Over several years we asked substantial samples of women to reconstruct a day of their life in detail. They indicated the feelings they had experienced during each episode, and we computed a measure of experienced happiness: the average quality of affective experience during the day. Our hypothesis was that differences in life circumstances would have more impact on this measure than on life satisfaction. We were so convinced that when we got our first batch of data, comparing teachers in top-rated schools to teachers in inferior schools, we actually misread the results as confirming our hypothesis. In fact, they showed the opposite: the groups of teachers differed more in their work satisfaction than in their affective experience at work. This was the first of many such findings: income, marital status and education all influence experienced happiness less than satisfaction, and we could show that the difference is not a statistical artifact. Measuring experienced happiness turned out to be interesting and useful, but not in the way we had expected. We had simply been wrong.
Experienced happiness, we learned, depends mainly on personality and on the hedonic value of the activities to which people allocate their time. Life circumstances influence the allocation of time, and the hedonic outcome is often mixed: high-income women have more enjoyable activities than the poor, but they also spend more time engaged in work that they do not enjoy; married women spend less time alone, but more time doing tedious chores. Conditions that make people satisfied with their life do not necessarily make them happy.
Social scientists rarely change their minds, although they often adjust their position to accommodate inconvenient facts. But it is rare for a hypothesis to be so thoroughly falsified. Merely adjusting my position would not do; although I still find the idea of an aspiration treadmill attractive, I had to give it up.
To compound the irony, recent findings from the Gallup World Poll raise doubts about the puzzle itself. The most dramatic result is that when the entire range of human living standards is considered, the effects of income on a measure of life satisfaction (the "ladder of life") are not small at all. We had thought income effects are small because we were looking within countries. The GDP differences between countries are enormous, and highly predictive of differences in life satisfaction. In a sample of over 130,000 people from 126 countries, the correlation between the life satisfaction of individuals and the GDP of the country in which they live was over .40 – an exceptionally high value in social science. Humans everywhere, from Norway to Sierra Leone, apparently evaluate their life by a common standard of material prosperity, which changes as GDP increases. The implied conclusion, that citizens of different countries do not adapt to their level of prosperity, flies against everything we thought we knew ten years ago. We have been wrong and now we know it. I suppose this means that there is a science of well-being, even if we are not doing it very well.
The New York Times
April 16, 2008
Economic Scene
Maybe Money Does Buy Happiness After All
By DAVID LEONHARDT
In the aftermath of World War II, the Japanese economy went through one of the greatest booms the world has ever known. From 1950 to 1970, the economy’s output per person grew more than sevenfold. Japan, in just a few decades, remade itself from a war-torn country into one of the richest nations on earth.
Yet, strangely, Japanese citizens didn’t seem to become any more satisfied with their lives. According to one poll, the percentage of people who gave the most positive possible answer about their life satisfaction actually fell from the late 1950s to the early ’70s. They were richer but apparently no happier.
This contrast became the most famous example of a theory known as the Easterlin paradox. In 1974, Richard Easterlin, then an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, published a study in which he argued that economic growth didn’t necessarily lead to more satisfaction.
People in poor countries, not surprisingly, did become happier once they could afford basic necessities. But beyond that, further gains simply seemed to reset the bar. To put it in today’s terms, owning an iPod doesn’t make you happier, because you then want an iPod Touch. Relative income — how much you make compared with others around you — mattered far more than absolute income, Mr. Easterlin wrote.
The paradox quickly became a social science classic, cited in academic journals and the popular media. It tapped into a near-spiritual human instinct to believe that money can’t buy happiness. As a 2006 headline in The Financial Times said, “The Hippies Were Right All Along About Happiness.”
But now the Easterlin paradox is under attack.
Last week, at the Brookings Institution in Washington, two young economists — from the University of Pennsylvania, as it happens — presented a rebuttal of the paradox. Their paper has quickly captured the attention of top economists around the world. It has also led to a spirited response from Mr. Easterlin.
In the paper, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers argue that money indeed tends to bring happiness, even if it doesn’t guarantee it. They point out that in the 34 years since Mr. Easterlin published his paper, an explosion of public opinion surveys has allowed for a better look at the question. “The central message,” Ms. Stevenson said, “is that income does matter.”
To see what they mean, take a look at the map that accompanies this column. It’s based on Gallup polls done around the world, and it clearly shows that life satisfaction is highest in the richest countries. The residents of these countries seem to understand that they have it pretty good, whether or not they own an iPod Touch.
If anything, Ms. Stevenson and Mr. Wolfers say, absolute income seems to matter more than relative income. In the United States, about 90 percent of people in households making at least $250,000 a year called themselves “very happy” in a recent Gallup Poll. In households with income below $30,000, only 42 percent of people gave that answer. But the international polling data suggests that the under-$30,000 crowd might not be happier if they lived in a poorer country.
Even the Japanese anomaly isn’t quite what it first seems to be. Ms. Stevenson and Mr. Wolfers dug into those old government surveys and discovered that the question had changed over the years.
In the late 1950s and early ’60s, the most positive answer the pollsters offered was, “Although I am not innumerably satisfied, I am generally satisfied with life now.” (Can you imagine an American poll offering that option?) But in 1964, the most positive answer became simply, “Completely satisfied.”
It is no wonder, then, that the percentage of people giving this answer fell. When you look only at the years in which the question remained the same, the share of people calling themselves “satisfied” or “completely satisfied” did rise.
To put the new research into context, I called Daniel Kahneman, a Princeton psychologist who shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics. He has spent his career skewering economists for their belief that money is everything and has himself written about the “aspiration treadmill” at the heart of the Easterlin paradox.
Yet Mr. Kahneman said he found the Stevenson-Wolfers paper to be “quite compelling.” He added, “There is just a vast amount of accumulating evidence that the Easterlin paradox may not exist.”
I then called Mr. Easterlin, who’s now at the University of Southern California and who had received a copy of the paper from Ms. Stevenson and Mr. Wolfers. He agreed that people in richer countries are more satisfied. But he’s skeptical that their wealth is causing their satisfaction. The results could instead reflect cultural differences in how people respond to poll questions, he said.
He would be more persuaded, he continued, if satisfaction had clearly risen in individual countries as they grew richer. In some, it has. But in others — notably the United States and China — it has not.
“Everybody wants to show the Easterlin paradox doesn’t hold up,” he told me. “And I’m perfectly willing to believe it doesn’t hold up. But I’d like to see an informed analysis that shows that.” He said he liked Ms. Stevenson and Mr. Wolfers personally, but he thought they had put out “a very rough draft without sufficient evidence.”
They, in turn, acknowledge that the data on individual countries over time is messy. But they note that satisfaction has risen in 8 of the 10 European countries for which there is polling back to 1970. It has also risen in Japan. And a big reason it may not have risen in the United States is that the hourly pay of most workers has not grown much recently.
“The time-series evidence is fragile,” Mr. Wolfers said. “But it’s more consistent with our story than his.”
So where does all this leave us?
Economic growth, by itself, certainly isn’t enough to guarantee people’s well-being — which is Mr. Easterlin’s great contribution to economics. In this country, for instance, some big health care problems, like poor basic treatment of heart disease, don’t stem from a lack of sufficient resources. Recent research has also found that some of the things that make people happiest — short commutes, time spent with friends — have little to do with higher incomes.
But it would be a mistake to take this argument too far. The fact remains that economic growth doesn’t just make countries richer in superficially materialistic ways.
Economic growth can also pay for investments in scientific research that lead to longer, healthier lives. It can allow trips to see relatives not seen in years or places never visited. When you’re richer, you can decide to work less — and spend more time with your friends.
Affluence is a pretty good deal. Judging from that map, the people of the world seem to agree. At a time when the American economy seems to have fallen into recession and most families’ incomes have been stagnant for almost a decade, it’s good to be reminded of why we should care.
E-mail: leonhardt@nytimes.com
April 16, 2008
Economic Scene
Maybe Money Does Buy Happiness After All
By DAVID LEONHARDT
In the aftermath of World War II, the Japanese economy went through one of the greatest booms the world has ever known. From 1950 to 1970, the economy’s output per person grew more than sevenfold. Japan, in just a few decades, remade itself from a war-torn country into one of the richest nations on earth.
Yet, strangely, Japanese citizens didn’t seem to become any more satisfied with their lives. According to one poll, the percentage of people who gave the most positive possible answer about their life satisfaction actually fell from the late 1950s to the early ’70s. They were richer but apparently no happier.
This contrast became the most famous example of a theory known as the Easterlin paradox. In 1974, Richard Easterlin, then an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, published a study in which he argued that economic growth didn’t necessarily lead to more satisfaction.
People in poor countries, not surprisingly, did become happier once they could afford basic necessities. But beyond that, further gains simply seemed to reset the bar. To put it in today’s terms, owning an iPod doesn’t make you happier, because you then want an iPod Touch. Relative income — how much you make compared with others around you — mattered far more than absolute income, Mr. Easterlin wrote.
The paradox quickly became a social science classic, cited in academic journals and the popular media. It tapped into a near-spiritual human instinct to believe that money can’t buy happiness. As a 2006 headline in The Financial Times said, “The Hippies Were Right All Along About Happiness.”
But now the Easterlin paradox is under attack.
Last week, at the Brookings Institution in Washington, two young economists — from the University of Pennsylvania, as it happens — presented a rebuttal of the paradox. Their paper has quickly captured the attention of top economists around the world. It has also led to a spirited response from Mr. Easterlin.
In the paper, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers argue that money indeed tends to bring happiness, even if it doesn’t guarantee it. They point out that in the 34 years since Mr. Easterlin published his paper, an explosion of public opinion surveys has allowed for a better look at the question. “The central message,” Ms. Stevenson said, “is that income does matter.”
To see what they mean, take a look at the map that accompanies this column. It’s based on Gallup polls done around the world, and it clearly shows that life satisfaction is highest in the richest countries. The residents of these countries seem to understand that they have it pretty good, whether or not they own an iPod Touch.
If anything, Ms. Stevenson and Mr. Wolfers say, absolute income seems to matter more than relative income. In the United States, about 90 percent of people in households making at least $250,000 a year called themselves “very happy” in a recent Gallup Poll. In households with income below $30,000, only 42 percent of people gave that answer. But the international polling data suggests that the under-$30,000 crowd might not be happier if they lived in a poorer country.
Even the Japanese anomaly isn’t quite what it first seems to be. Ms. Stevenson and Mr. Wolfers dug into those old government surveys and discovered that the question had changed over the years.
In the late 1950s and early ’60s, the most positive answer the pollsters offered was, “Although I am not innumerably satisfied, I am generally satisfied with life now.” (Can you imagine an American poll offering that option?) But in 1964, the most positive answer became simply, “Completely satisfied.”
It is no wonder, then, that the percentage of people giving this answer fell. When you look only at the years in which the question remained the same, the share of people calling themselves “satisfied” or “completely satisfied” did rise.
To put the new research into context, I called Daniel Kahneman, a Princeton psychologist who shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics. He has spent his career skewering economists for their belief that money is everything and has himself written about the “aspiration treadmill” at the heart of the Easterlin paradox.
Yet Mr. Kahneman said he found the Stevenson-Wolfers paper to be “quite compelling.” He added, “There is just a vast amount of accumulating evidence that the Easterlin paradox may not exist.”
I then called Mr. Easterlin, who’s now at the University of Southern California and who had received a copy of the paper from Ms. Stevenson and Mr. Wolfers. He agreed that people in richer countries are more satisfied. But he’s skeptical that their wealth is causing their satisfaction. The results could instead reflect cultural differences in how people respond to poll questions, he said.
He would be more persuaded, he continued, if satisfaction had clearly risen in individual countries as they grew richer. In some, it has. But in others — notably the United States and China — it has not.
“Everybody wants to show the Easterlin paradox doesn’t hold up,” he told me. “And I’m perfectly willing to believe it doesn’t hold up. But I’d like to see an informed analysis that shows that.” He said he liked Ms. Stevenson and Mr. Wolfers personally, but he thought they had put out “a very rough draft without sufficient evidence.”
They, in turn, acknowledge that the data on individual countries over time is messy. But they note that satisfaction has risen in 8 of the 10 European countries for which there is polling back to 1970. It has also risen in Japan. And a big reason it may not have risen in the United States is that the hourly pay of most workers has not grown much recently.
“The time-series evidence is fragile,” Mr. Wolfers said. “But it’s more consistent with our story than his.”
So where does all this leave us?
Economic growth, by itself, certainly isn’t enough to guarantee people’s well-being — which is Mr. Easterlin’s great contribution to economics. In this country, for instance, some big health care problems, like poor basic treatment of heart disease, don’t stem from a lack of sufficient resources. Recent research has also found that some of the things that make people happiest — short commutes, time spent with friends — have little to do with higher incomes.
But it would be a mistake to take this argument too far. The fact remains that economic growth doesn’t just make countries richer in superficially materialistic ways.
Economic growth can also pay for investments in scientific research that lead to longer, healthier lives. It can allow trips to see relatives not seen in years or places never visited. When you’re richer, you can decide to work less — and spend more time with your friends.
Affluence is a pretty good deal. Judging from that map, the people of the world seem to agree. At a time when the American economy seems to have fallen into recession and most families’ incomes have been stagnant for almost a decade, it’s good to be reminded of why we should care.
E-mail: leonhardt@nytimes.com
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
The New York Times
April 15, 2008
Mind
Who Are We? Coming of Age on Antidepressants
By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D.
“I’ve grown up on medication,” my patient Julie told me recently. “I don’t have a sense of who I really am without it.”
At 31, she had been on one antidepressant or another nearly continuously since she was 14. There was little question that she had very serious depression and had survived several suicide attempts. In fact, she credited the medication with saving her life.
But now she was raising an equally fundamental question: how the drugs might have affected her psychological development and core identity.
It was not an issue I had seriously considered before. Most of my patients, who are adults, developed their psychiatric problems after they had a pretty clear idea of who they were as individuals. During treatment, most of them could tell me whether they were back to their normal baseline.
Julie could certainly remember what depression felt like, but she could not recall feeling well except during her long treatment with antidepressant medications. And since she had not grown up before getting depressed, she could not gauge the hypothetical effects of antidepressants on her emotional and psychological development.
Her experience is far from unique. Since their emergence in the late 1980s, serotonin reuptake inhibitors like Prozac and Zoloft have become some of the most widely prescribed drugs in the world, for depressed teenagers as well as adults. Because depression is often a chronic, recurring illness, there are certain to be many young people, like Julie, who are coming of age on these newer antidepressants.
We know a lot about the course of untreated depression, probably more than we do about very long-term antidepressant use in this population. We know, for example, that depression in young people is a very serious problem; suicide is the third-leading cause of death in adolescents, not to mention the untold suffering and impaired functioning this disease exacts.
By contrast, the risk of antidepressant treatment is small. A 2004 review by the Food and Drug Administration, analyzing clinical trials of the drugs, did show an elevated risk of suicidal thinking and nonlethal suicide attempts in young people taking antidepressants — 3.5 percent, compared with 1.7 percent of those taking a placebo. But since the lifetime risk of actual suicide in depressed people ranges from 2.2 to 12 percent, risk from treatment is dwarfed by the risks of the disease itself.
Still, what do we know about the effects of, say, 15 to 20 years of antidepressant drug treatment that begins in adolescence or childhood? Not enough.
The reason has to do with the way drugs are tested and approved. To get F.D.A. approval, a drug has to beat a placebo in two randomized clinical trials that typically involve a few hundred subjects who are treated for relatively short periods, usually 4 to 12 weeks.
So drugs are approved based on short-term studies for what turns out to be long-term — often lifelong — use in the world of clinical practice. The longest maintenance study to date of one of the newer antidepressants, Effexor, lasted only two years and showed the drug to be superior to a placebo in preventing relapses of depression.
What do I say to a depressed patient who is doing well after five years on such a drug but can’t stop without a depressive relapse and who wants reassurance that the drug has no long-term adverse effects?
I usually say that we have no evidence that the drug poses a risk with long-term use; and since the risk of untreated depression is much greater than the hypothetical risk of the drug, it makes sense to stay on it.
This large gap in our clinical knowledge is compounded by the public’s growing and well-founded skepticism about research sponsored by drug makers. A study in the January 2008 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, involving 74 clinical trials with 12 antidepressants, found that 97 percent of positive studies were published, versus 12 percent of negative studies.
Clearly, physicians and the public need much better data on the safety and efficacy of drugs after they hit the market, which at present consists mainly of anecdotes and case reports.
Congress recently reauthorized the Prescription Drug User Fee Act, which will expand the F.D.A.’s post-marketing drug surveillance, though I think it did not go far enough in mandating the use of powerful epidemiological strategies to monitor drugs over the long term.
Beyond these concerns, there are other important issues to consider in long-term use of antidepressants, especially in young people. One patient, a woman in her mid-20s, told me that she felt pressured by her boyfriend to have sex more often than she wanted. “I’ve always had a low sex drive,” she said.
For the past eight years she had been taking Zoloft, which like all the antidepressants in its class is known to lower libido and to interfere with sexual performance. She had understandably mistaken the side effect of the drug for her “normal” sexual desire and was shocked when I explained it: “And I thought it was just me!”
This just underscores how tricky it can be to use psychotropic drugs during adolescence — when the brain is still developing, when one’s identity is still work in progress.
The drugs save lives, and we often have no choice but to use them — even if we have questions about their long-term use. But the questions are big ones, and we owe it to our patients to try to answer them.
Richard A. Friedman is a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College.
April 15, 2008
Mind
Who Are We? Coming of Age on Antidepressants
By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D.
“I’ve grown up on medication,” my patient Julie told me recently. “I don’t have a sense of who I really am without it.”
At 31, she had been on one antidepressant or another nearly continuously since she was 14. There was little question that she had very serious depression and had survived several suicide attempts. In fact, she credited the medication with saving her life.
But now she was raising an equally fundamental question: how the drugs might have affected her psychological development and core identity.
It was not an issue I had seriously considered before. Most of my patients, who are adults, developed their psychiatric problems after they had a pretty clear idea of who they were as individuals. During treatment, most of them could tell me whether they were back to their normal baseline.
Julie could certainly remember what depression felt like, but she could not recall feeling well except during her long treatment with antidepressant medications. And since she had not grown up before getting depressed, she could not gauge the hypothetical effects of antidepressants on her emotional and psychological development.
Her experience is far from unique. Since their emergence in the late 1980s, serotonin reuptake inhibitors like Prozac and Zoloft have become some of the most widely prescribed drugs in the world, for depressed teenagers as well as adults. Because depression is often a chronic, recurring illness, there are certain to be many young people, like Julie, who are coming of age on these newer antidepressants.
We know a lot about the course of untreated depression, probably more than we do about very long-term antidepressant use in this population. We know, for example, that depression in young people is a very serious problem; suicide is the third-leading cause of death in adolescents, not to mention the untold suffering and impaired functioning this disease exacts.
By contrast, the risk of antidepressant treatment is small. A 2004 review by the Food and Drug Administration, analyzing clinical trials of the drugs, did show an elevated risk of suicidal thinking and nonlethal suicide attempts in young people taking antidepressants — 3.5 percent, compared with 1.7 percent of those taking a placebo. But since the lifetime risk of actual suicide in depressed people ranges from 2.2 to 12 percent, risk from treatment is dwarfed by the risks of the disease itself.
Still, what do we know about the effects of, say, 15 to 20 years of antidepressant drug treatment that begins in adolescence or childhood? Not enough.
The reason has to do with the way drugs are tested and approved. To get F.D.A. approval, a drug has to beat a placebo in two randomized clinical trials that typically involve a few hundred subjects who are treated for relatively short periods, usually 4 to 12 weeks.
So drugs are approved based on short-term studies for what turns out to be long-term — often lifelong — use in the world of clinical practice. The longest maintenance study to date of one of the newer antidepressants, Effexor, lasted only two years and showed the drug to be superior to a placebo in preventing relapses of depression.
What do I say to a depressed patient who is doing well after five years on such a drug but can’t stop without a depressive relapse and who wants reassurance that the drug has no long-term adverse effects?
I usually say that we have no evidence that the drug poses a risk with long-term use; and since the risk of untreated depression is much greater than the hypothetical risk of the drug, it makes sense to stay on it.
This large gap in our clinical knowledge is compounded by the public’s growing and well-founded skepticism about research sponsored by drug makers. A study in the January 2008 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, involving 74 clinical trials with 12 antidepressants, found that 97 percent of positive studies were published, versus 12 percent of negative studies.
Clearly, physicians and the public need much better data on the safety and efficacy of drugs after they hit the market, which at present consists mainly of anecdotes and case reports.
Congress recently reauthorized the Prescription Drug User Fee Act, which will expand the F.D.A.’s post-marketing drug surveillance, though I think it did not go far enough in mandating the use of powerful epidemiological strategies to monitor drugs over the long term.
Beyond these concerns, there are other important issues to consider in long-term use of antidepressants, especially in young people. One patient, a woman in her mid-20s, told me that she felt pressured by her boyfriend to have sex more often than she wanted. “I’ve always had a low sex drive,” she said.
For the past eight years she had been taking Zoloft, which like all the antidepressants in its class is known to lower libido and to interfere with sexual performance. She had understandably mistaken the side effect of the drug for her “normal” sexual desire and was shocked when I explained it: “And I thought it was just me!”
This just underscores how tricky it can be to use psychotropic drugs during adolescence — when the brain is still developing, when one’s identity is still work in progress.
The drugs save lives, and we often have no choice but to use them — even if we have questions about their long-term use. But the questions are big ones, and we owe it to our patients to try to answer them.
Richard A. Friedman is a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College.
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Those who face that which is actually before them, unburdened by the past, undistracted by the future, these are they who live, who make the best use of their lives; these are those who have found the secret of contentment.
Alban Goodier
Alban Goodier
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
The New York Times
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April 2, 2008
Op-Ed Contributors
Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind
By SANDRA AAMODT and SAM WANG
DECLINING house prices, rising job layoffs, skyrocketing oil costs and a major credit crunch have brought consumer confidence to its lowest point in five years. With a relatively long recession looking increasingly likely, many American families may be planning to tighten their belts.
Interestingly, restraining our consumer spending, in the short term, may cause us to actually loosen the belts around our waists. What’s the connection? The brain has a limited capacity for self-regulation, so exerting willpower in one area often leads to backsliding in others. The good news, however, is that practice increases willpower capacity, so that in the long run, buying less now may improve our ability to achieve future goals — like losing those 10 pounds we gained when we weren’t out shopping.
The brain’s store of willpower is depleted when people control their thoughts, feelings or impulses, or when they modify their behavior in pursuit of goals. Psychologist Roy Baumeister and others have found that people who successfully accomplish one task requiring self-control are less persistent on a second, seemingly unrelated task.
In one pioneering study, some people were asked to eat radishes while others received freshly baked chocolate chip cookies before trying to solve an impossible puzzle. The radish-eaters abandoned the puzzle in eight minutes on average, working less than half as long as people who got cookies or those who were excused from eating radishes. Similarly, people who were asked to circle every “e” on a page of text then showed less persistence in watching a video of an unchanging table and wall.
Other activities that deplete willpower include resisting food or drink, suppressing emotional responses, restraining aggressive or sexual impulses, taking exams and trying to impress someone. Task persistence is also reduced when people are stressed or tired from exertion or lack of sleep.
What limits willpower? Some have suggested that it is blood sugar, which brain cells use as their main energy source and cannot do without for even a few minutes. Most cognitive functions are unaffected by minor blood sugar fluctuations over the course of a day, but planning and self-control are sensitive to such small changes. Exerting self-control lowers blood sugar, which reduces the capacity for further self-control. People who drink a glass of lemonade between completing one task requiring self-control and beginning a second one perform equally well on both tasks, while people who drink sugarless diet lemonade make more errors on the second task than on the first. Foods that persistently elevate blood sugar, like those containing protein or complex carbohydrates, might enhance willpower for longer periods.
In the short term, you should spend your limited willpower budget wisely. For example, if you do not want to drink too much at a party, then on the way to the festivities, you should not deplete your willpower by window shopping for items you cannot afford. Taking an alternative route to avoid passing the store would be a better strategy.
On the other hand, if you need to study for a big exam, it might be smart to let the housecleaning slide to conserve your willpower for the more important job. Similarly, it can be counterproductive to work toward multiple goals at the same time if your willpower cannot cover all the efforts that are required. Concentrating your effort on one or at most a few goals at a time increases the odds of success.
Focusing on success is important because willpower can grow in the long term. Like a muscle, willpower seems to become stronger with use. The idea of exercising willpower is seen in military boot camp, where recruits are trained to overcome one challenge after another.
In psychological studies, even something as simple as using your nondominant hand to brush your teeth for two weeks can increase willpower capacity. People who stick to an exercise program for two months report reducing their impulsive spending, junk food intake, alcohol use and smoking. They also study more, watch less television and do more housework. Other forms of willpower training, like money-management classes, work as well.
No one knows why willpower can grow with practice but it must reflect some biological change in the brain. Perhaps neurons in the frontal cortex, which is responsible for planning behavior, or in the anterior cingulate cortex, which is associated with cognitive control, use blood sugar more efficiently after repeated challenges. Or maybe one of the chemical messengers that neurons use to communicate with one another is produced in larger quantities after it has been used up repeatedly, thereby improving the brain’s willpower capacity.
Whatever the explanation, consistently doing any activity that requires self-control seems to increase willpower — and the ability to resist impulses and delay gratification is highly associated with success in life.
Sandra Aamodt, the editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience, and Sam Wang, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton, are the authors of “Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life.”
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April 2, 2008
Op-Ed Contributors
Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind
By SANDRA AAMODT and SAM WANG
DECLINING house prices, rising job layoffs, skyrocketing oil costs and a major credit crunch have brought consumer confidence to its lowest point in five years. With a relatively long recession looking increasingly likely, many American families may be planning to tighten their belts.
Interestingly, restraining our consumer spending, in the short term, may cause us to actually loosen the belts around our waists. What’s the connection? The brain has a limited capacity for self-regulation, so exerting willpower in one area often leads to backsliding in others. The good news, however, is that practice increases willpower capacity, so that in the long run, buying less now may improve our ability to achieve future goals — like losing those 10 pounds we gained when we weren’t out shopping.
The brain’s store of willpower is depleted when people control their thoughts, feelings or impulses, or when they modify their behavior in pursuit of goals. Psychologist Roy Baumeister and others have found that people who successfully accomplish one task requiring self-control are less persistent on a second, seemingly unrelated task.
In one pioneering study, some people were asked to eat radishes while others received freshly baked chocolate chip cookies before trying to solve an impossible puzzle. The radish-eaters abandoned the puzzle in eight minutes on average, working less than half as long as people who got cookies or those who were excused from eating radishes. Similarly, people who were asked to circle every “e” on a page of text then showed less persistence in watching a video of an unchanging table and wall.
Other activities that deplete willpower include resisting food or drink, suppressing emotional responses, restraining aggressive or sexual impulses, taking exams and trying to impress someone. Task persistence is also reduced when people are stressed or tired from exertion or lack of sleep.
What limits willpower? Some have suggested that it is blood sugar, which brain cells use as their main energy source and cannot do without for even a few minutes. Most cognitive functions are unaffected by minor blood sugar fluctuations over the course of a day, but planning and self-control are sensitive to such small changes. Exerting self-control lowers blood sugar, which reduces the capacity for further self-control. People who drink a glass of lemonade between completing one task requiring self-control and beginning a second one perform equally well on both tasks, while people who drink sugarless diet lemonade make more errors on the second task than on the first. Foods that persistently elevate blood sugar, like those containing protein or complex carbohydrates, might enhance willpower for longer periods.
In the short term, you should spend your limited willpower budget wisely. For example, if you do not want to drink too much at a party, then on the way to the festivities, you should not deplete your willpower by window shopping for items you cannot afford. Taking an alternative route to avoid passing the store would be a better strategy.
On the other hand, if you need to study for a big exam, it might be smart to let the housecleaning slide to conserve your willpower for the more important job. Similarly, it can be counterproductive to work toward multiple goals at the same time if your willpower cannot cover all the efforts that are required. Concentrating your effort on one or at most a few goals at a time increases the odds of success.
Focusing on success is important because willpower can grow in the long term. Like a muscle, willpower seems to become stronger with use. The idea of exercising willpower is seen in military boot camp, where recruits are trained to overcome one challenge after another.
In psychological studies, even something as simple as using your nondominant hand to brush your teeth for two weeks can increase willpower capacity. People who stick to an exercise program for two months report reducing their impulsive spending, junk food intake, alcohol use and smoking. They also study more, watch less television and do more housework. Other forms of willpower training, like money-management classes, work as well.
No one knows why willpower can grow with practice but it must reflect some biological change in the brain. Perhaps neurons in the frontal cortex, which is responsible for planning behavior, or in the anterior cingulate cortex, which is associated with cognitive control, use blood sugar more efficiently after repeated challenges. Or maybe one of the chemical messengers that neurons use to communicate with one another is produced in larger quantities after it has been used up repeatedly, thereby improving the brain’s willpower capacity.
Whatever the explanation, consistently doing any activity that requires self-control seems to increase willpower — and the ability to resist impulses and delay gratification is highly associated with success in life.
Sandra Aamodt, the editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience, and Sam Wang, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton, are the authors of “Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life.”
