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Human memory is tricky, to say the least. It’s an ever-changing cloud of imperfect recollections, distortions and outright fabrications. It’s a tag cloud full of joys, torments and minutia. And while savants and mnemonists can sometimes exhibit startling displays of memory, there is no such thing as total recall.
Following a 2005 study published in the journal Neurocase, however, the media had a field day with Jill Price, a California woman with an amazing capacity for personal memory. Give her a name and she can tell you exactly where and when she spoke to that person last and what the subject was. Throw out a date and she can link it to plane crashes, presidential elections and episodes of “Dallas.”
Why does time fly as you get older?
by Robert Lamb | February 5, 2010
Remember what summer was like when you were a kid? The season seemed to span an eternity and Christmas might as well have been a million years in the future. But then you grew older. Summers passed in quick succession, Christmases and birthdays swept by like pages in a flip book. Everything seems to be speeding towards an unavoidable conclusion.
When it comes to office fashion, my guru is the always stylish Candace Keener, editor extraordinaire here at HowStuffWorks. According to Candace, the fashion trends we should avoid at all costs this season include shapeless tunics, acid-wash denim and anything with Ed Hardy’s name on it (sorry, Jon Gosselin). Her fashion do’s include animal prints and booties (the shoes, not the shorts). While I’ll never match her ability to throw an outfit together effortlessly, I do pay attention to what Candace says about clothing, which was why I was intrigued when she sent me an article about the Happiness Hat this morning.
The Happiness Hat is a white knit cap designed by Lauren McCarthy. That sounds practical enough – winter is approaching, and we all need a good head cover for those cold days. But the Happiness Hat sets itself apart from other cold weather accessories by including a smile sensor.
I can usually spot good friends’ phony smiles when I see them. One girlfriend looks off to the side and drops her jaw a little bit, and another shows a disproportionate amount of bottom teeth. Me? I usually do a closed-mouth, cheeks-only grin that probably comes off as more of a wince.
Positive psychologists who study the science of happiness would probably refer to those plastic expressions as Pan American smiles. They would classify the look of pure joy on my face when, say, someone offers me a chocolate cupcake, as a Duchenne smile. Supposedly, the quality of smile on your face — either Pan American or Duchenne — reflects how authentically happy you are at the time. But it doesn’t take an expert to decipher my friends’ Pan American poses from their Duchennes. All you have to do is pay attention to the eyes.
This week, Katie and I put a historical spin on two very broad topics: philanthropy and happiness.
In the philanthropy podcast, we began by sorting out the differences between charity and philanthropy. Put simply, you know the old adage about giving a man a fish and teaching him how to fish? Giving the fish is charity, and teaching how to fish is philanthropy.
But can anyone determine who was the first philanthropist in history? Katie and I chose to discuss a class of American businessmen who seemingly redefined charitable contributions. This was a turning point in American history when the wealthy began regurgitating cash and giving it back to the society that set them up to become billionaires. The Robber Barons changed the way many of us think about philanthropy — plus, they’re a lot of fun to talk about.
Happiness might seem like a pretty staggering concept for a how-to blog to tackle in its first month, but the fact of the matter is, some of your favorite HowStuffWorks writers and editors are becoming quite the happiness gurus. So many of us are writing about happiness that I sometimes wonder if we’re all going to spontaneously grab hands and start singing “Walking on Sunshine.”
Here at HowStuffWorks.com we’re putting together a bunch of articles on happiness, which makes me all yellow smiley face. It looks like I’m jaundiced here I’m so happy. I’m writing a some of the articles in the happiness suite and there’s this weird thing that keeps popping up, laughing rats. Not just in congruous articles either — laughing rats were coming at me from all angles! Run for your life, yellow boy! Run!
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