Showing posts with label Objective Proficiency U 17. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Objective Proficiency U 17. Show all posts
Objective Proficiency p 146. Graham Hill: Less Stuff, More Happiness. Extra Listening
Writer and designer Graham Hill asks: Can having less stuff, in less room, lead to more happiness? He makes the case for taking up less space, and lays out three rules for editing your life.
Objective Proficiency p 146. Leisure. Extra Speaking
Vocabulary
Drag: to pull somebody/something along with effort and difficulty. E.g. I was dragged along to a party.
Stay in: to not go out or to remain indoors. E.g I feel like staying in tonight.
Drag: to pull somebody/something along with effort and difficulty. E.g. I was dragged along to a party.
Stay in: to not go out or to remain indoors. E.g I feel like staying in tonight.
Rut: a boring way of life that does not change. Sp. Estancarse. E.g. If you don't go out and meet new people, it's easy to get into a rut.
Splash: the sound of something hitting liquid or of liquid hitting something. E.g. We heard the splash when she fell into the pool.
Squad: (in sport) a group of players, runners, etc. from which a team is chosen for a particular game or match. Sp. Equipo. E.g. the Olympic/national squad.Settle in/ settle into something: to move into a new home, job, etc. and start to feel comfortable there. Sp. instalarse, adaptarse. E.g. It's not always easy for a new player to settle in.
Pick sth out: to play a tune on a musical instrument slowly without using written music. E.g. He picked out the tune on the piano with one finger.
Objective Proficiency p 146. Stephen Fry: The Secret Life Of The Manic Depressive
In the mid-1990s, Stephen Fry, the British actor and comedian, had a moment of crisis. He recalled in 2006:
"Eleven years ago, in the early hours of the morning, I came down from my flat in central London. I went into my garage, sealed the door with a duvet I’d brought and got into my car. I sat there for at least, I think, two hours in the car, my hands on the ignition key. It was, you know, a suicide attempt, not a cry for help".
Fry didn’t end up killing himself. We know that. Instead, he left the country, heading first to Europe, then to the US where he sought treatment and, at the age of 37, received a diagnosis explaining “the massive highs and miserable lows” he had experienced his whole life: manic depression.
Once he learned to live with manic depression, Fry decided to talk publicly about his struggle and break the taboos around the condition. So, in partnership with the BBC, Fry helped produce the 2006 documentary Stephen Fry: The Secret Life Of The Manic Depressive. The programme puts Fry’s personal experience center stage. But it also brings Fry to talk with other celebrities (Robbie Williams, Richard Dreyfuss & Carrie Fisher) and everyday people living with bipolar disorder.
Objective Proficiency p 146. Stephen Fry: What I Wish I Knew When I Was 18. Extra Listening
Above you can listen to British writer and actor Stephen Fry offering life lessons based on his 54 years living in this world. Some of the highlights:
- Don’t set goals for yourself, particularly material ones. They’re disastrous and will keep you from becoming who you really are.
- Keep your ego in check. You’ll be better liked, and more opportunities will come your way.
- Get outside your comfort zone by traveling to distant lands and reading books in a serendipitous way.
- Be a giver, not a taker. It’s more rewarding.
- Learn with friends.
- Have heroes.
- And always think for yourself.
Objective Proficiency p 145. Making Sense of Memory. Extra Reading
It happens to all of us: We think we learned of the Sept. 11 attacks from a radio report, when, in fact, the news came from a co-worker; we’re sure the robber running from the bank was tall, when actually he was short; we remember waking up at 7 yesterday, when 8 is closer to the truth. Such “false memories,” unavoidable in everyday life, can have disastrous consequences in courtrooms and other settings where exactitude matters.
We create these false memories, according to Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter, because our brains are designed to tell stories about the future. “Memory’s flexibility is useful to us, but it creates distortions and illusions,” says Schacter, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Psychology. “If memory is set up to use the past to imagine the future, its flexibility creates a vulnerability — a risk of confusing imagination with reality.”
Schacter, author of two books on memory, was recently honored with the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association (APA). In a review paper in a forthcoming edition of the journal American Psychologist, Schacter argues that the time machine of the brain is really a virtual reality simulator. Our memories are designed to flexibly imagine the future, Schacter says, but not to record the past verbatim — so they are inherently prone to predictable errors, which experiments reveal.
Misremembering happens to us all the time, Schacter says, because our minds rely on patterns to reconstruct memories — and the patterns often lead us astray. Routine behaviors, called “schemas” by the psychologist Frederic Bartlett in his classic “Remembering” (1932), distort our memories by making us assume events happened the way they usually do. For example, we may “remember” that we biked to work today because we ordinarily do, when today we actually drove. Our memories are also biased by our emotions.
“Positivity bias” is an example of such a memory distortion. Since we have a tendency to remember emotionally charged events, our memories are crowded more with emotional events than with ordinary things from our daily lives — and these tend to be biased toward the positive, while negative memories slip away. In a recent study with postdoctoral researcher Karl Szpunar, Schacter showed that when people are asked to imagine positive, negative, and neutral future scenarios, they forget the negative ones faster than the others. That study, subtitled “Remembering a Rosy Future,” was published in the journal Psychological Science in January.
We typically underestimate the length of time that something will take, or the likelihood of future events, because our memories are often weak on the most common (hence most likely) events in our past. We remember the emotional moments, the fun or scary or sexy ones, and forget the daily drives to work and lunch-table conversations. This leads us to predict the future inaccurately, because we misremember a richer past. Schacter thinks a malfunction in this system may be to blame for mood disorders like depression and anxiety — where simulations of the future are repetitively negative, and hammer home a distortedly negative worldview. His lab plans to follow up on this line of research.
Memory is inherently constructive, Schacter says: We remember by rebuilding the past from bits and pieces — and the same ability helps us imagine the future. The hippocampus, long considered the seat of memory in the brain, Schacter posits, is actually a “simulator” — the part of the brain responsible for creating movies in the mind, whether they are memories of yesterday, plans for tomorrow, or imaginings from a book or an article we read. In all cases, our minds draw from a store of memory details to build episodes.
Read the story on the Harvard website
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