Lone Gunman

‘Touch­ier’ bas­ket­ball teams and play­ers (those who bump, hug and high five the most) are more suc­cess­ful than those who limit their non-playing phys­i­cal con­tact. Sim­i­larly, higher sat­is­fac­tion has been reported in roman­tic rela­tion­ships in which the part­ners touch more.

Just two of the find­ings from research look­ing at the impor­tance of touch­ing in rela­tion­ships.

Stu­dents who received a sup­port­ive touch on the back or arm from a teacher were nearly twice as likely to vol­un­teer in class as those who did not, stud­ies have found. A sym­pa­thetic touch from a doc­tor leaves peo­ple with the impres­sion that the visit lasted twice as long, com­pared with esti­mates from peo­ple who were untouched. […] A mas­sage from a loved one can not only ease pain but also soothe depres­sion and strengthen a relationship.

via @charliehoehn

I almost ignored this bit-too-long piece on the rise of the TV cook­ing show and the simul­ta­ne­ous fall of the home cooked meal (via @borrodell).

That decline has sev­eral causes: women work­ing out­side the home; food com­pa­nies per­suad­ing Amer­i­cans to let them do the cook­ing; and advances in tech­nol­ogy that made it eas­ier for them to do so. Cook­ing is no longer oblig­a­tory, and for many peo­ple, women espe­cially, that has been a bless­ing. But per­haps a mixed bless­ing, to judge by the culture’s con­tin­u­ing, if not deep­en­ing, fas­ci­na­tion with the sub­ject. It has been eas­ier for us to give up cook­ing than it has been to give up talk­ing about it — and watch­ing it.

But com­bined with this short arti­cle dis­cussing the joys a cook­ing show brought to one fam­ily, and the myr­iad ben­e­fits it brought to their chil­dren, I felt they were per­fect complements.

A funny thing hap­pened on the way through the cook­ing show obses­sion. What we were see­ing on the screen began trick­ling into our kitchen. The kids sud­denly perked up dur­ing our weekly vis­its to the local farm­ers’ mar­ket, insist­ing on check­ing out exotic fruits and veg­eta­bles and, even bet­ter, buy­ing, prepar­ing, and eat­ing them. […]

What are they learn­ing? How do I count the ways? Fine motor skills from chop­ping gar­lic. Multi-tasking from sautéing veg­eta­bles in olive oil. (Case in point is their star­tling real­iza­tion that you can’t just leave a saucepan unat­tended; this skill requires the need to over­come any ten­den­cies for ADD.) They’ve honed their orga­ni­za­tion and math skills, prac­ticed quick think­ing, and stretched to develop some orig­i­nal ideas. […] And, best of all, my kids are actu­ally eat­ing and enjoy­ing copi­ous veg­eta­bles and a vari­ety of other health­ful and exotic foods.

The lat­ter arti­cle also notes that a strong neg­a­tive cor­re­la­tion has been found between the amount of tele­vi­sion watched and hap­pi­ness. This does not sur­prise me.

Cook­books are designed to help us attain the “ideal sugar-salt-saturated-fat state” in our cook­ing while hid­ing that fact between the sautéing of onions and the reduc­tion of the sauce.

That won­der­ful propo­si­tion comes from Adam Gopnik’s look at our long-standing fas­ci­na­tion with cook­books, and how they are used in our homes.

The first thing a cadet cook learns is that words can become tastes, the sec­ond is that a space exists between what the rules promise and what the cook gets. It is partly that the steps between […] are often more sat­is­fy­ing than the fin­ished cake. But the trou­ble also lies in the same good words that got you going. How do you know when a thing “just begins to boil”? How can you be sure that the milk has scorched but not burned? Or touch some­thing too hot to touch, or tell firm peaks from stiff peaks? How do you define “chopped”? […]

Gram­mars teach for­eign tongues, and the advan­tage of [Mark Bittman’s] approach is that it can teach you how to cook. But is learn­ing how to cook from a gram­mar book—item by item, and by rote—really learn­ing how to cook? Doesn’t it miss the social context—the dia­logue of gen­er­a­tions, the com­mon­al­ity of the fam­ily recipe—that makes cook­ing some­thing more than just assem­bling calo­ries and nutrients? […]

[Con­ser­v­a­tive polit­i­cal philoso­pher Michael Oakeshott’s] much repeated point was that one could no more learn how to make good gov­ern­ment from a set of rules than one could learn how to bake a cake by read­ing recipe books. The cook­book, like the con­sti­tu­tion, was only the residue of a prac­tice. Even the most gram­mat­i­cal of cook­books dies with­out liv­ing cooks to illu­mi­nate its principles.

My ideal cook­book: one that explains why cer­tain recipes work. Not a book on ‘gram­mar’, but a sci­ence book mixed with art.

And one final quote:

In cook­ing, the pri­mal scene, or sub­stance, is salt, sugar, and fat held in max­i­mum solu­tion with starch; add pro­tein as nec­es­sary, and fin­ish with caf­feine (cof­fee or choco­late) as desired. That’s what, suit­ably dis­guised in some decent dimen­sion of dres­sup, we always end up making.

There is one essen­tial con­di­tion required in com­edy: “some kind of incon­gruity between two ele­ments […], resolved in a play­ful or unex­pected way”.

That’s accord­ing to a fairly com­pre­hen­sive arti­cle sum­maris­ing the neu­ro­science research con­ducted to dis­cover more about the phe­nom­e­non of why we find things funny (or not).

Of par­tic­u­lar inter­est was how we react dif­fer­ently to cer­tain types of jokes depend­ing on our sex and on our per­son­al­ity type:

• Women use more language-based decod­ing than men–this takes longer.
• Extro­verts receive greater neural rewards from com­edy than neurotics.
• ‘Expe­ri­ence seek­ers’ react to spe­cific types of com­edy more than oth­ers: they pre­fer ‘non­sense’ jokes to resolv­able jokes (the lat­ter is tech­ni­cally called “incongruity-resolution humour”).

The crux: a joke’s con­tent seems to be sec­ondary to how it is solved (neu­ro­log­i­cally speak­ing) if you’re tar­get­ing a cer­tain audience:

Although you might expect the sub­ject mat­ter — music or pol­i­tics, for exam­ple — to deter­mine joke pref­er­ence, [researcher Andrea Sam­son] found that it is the way a joke is solved that is most impor­tant. “The logic by which the incon­gruity is resolved mat­ters most, in terms of what kind of per­son a joke appeals to,” she says.

via Arts and Let­ter Daily

There are six essen­tial ele­ments of humour, sug­gests Dil­bert’s Scott Adams, as he looks briefly at how to write com­edy:

• Pick a Topic: The topic does half of your work. I look for top­ics that have at least one of the essen­tial ele­ments of humor: Clever, Cute, Bizarre, Cruel, Naughty, Recognizable.
• Sim­ple Sen­tences: Be smart, but not aca­d­e­mic. Prune words that don’t make a difference.
• Write About Peo­ple: If you must write about an object or a con­cept, focus on how some­one (usu­ally you) thinks or feels or expe­ri­ences those things. Humor is about peo­ple, period.
• Write Visu­ally: Paint a funny pic­ture with your words, but leave out any details that don’t serve the humor.
• Leave Room for Imag­i­na­tion: Leav­ing out details allows read­ers to fill them in with what­ever image strikes them as fun­ni­est. In effect, you let read­ers direct their own funny movie.
• Funny Words: Funny words are the ones that are famil­iar yet rarely used in con­ver­sa­tion. It’s a bonus when those words have funny sounds to them.
• Pop Cul­ture Ref­er­ences: Ref­er­ences to pop­u­lar cul­ture often add humor.
• Ani­mal analo­gies: Ani­mal ref­er­ences are funny. If you can’t think of any­thing funny, make some sort of animal/creature anal­ogy. It’s easy, and it almost always works.
• Exag­ger­ate, then Exag­ger­ate Some More: Fig­ure out what’s the worst that could hap­pen with your topic, then mul­ti­ple it by ten or more. […] The big­ger the exag­ger­a­tion, the fun­nier it is.
• Near Logic: Humor is about cre­at­ing logic that a-a-a-lmost makes sense but doesn’t. No one in the real world could put gum on his penis and retrieve an iPod from a storm drain. But your brain allows you to imag­ine that work­ing, while simul­ta­ne­ously know­ing it can’t. That incon­gruity launches the laugh reflex.
• Call­back: A call­back is when you end with a funny ref­er­ence that already got a laugh. It puts a nice period on your humor writing.

I won­der how much of this applies to speak­ing, too?

via Ben Cas­nocha