Thursday, March 28, 2024

Living with a popcorn brain

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an article by Tracy Swartz at the New York Post on February 18, 2024 titled What is ‘popcorn brain’? How social media may be killing your attention span. She quoted clinical psychologist Dr. Daniel Glazer as saying that:

 

“Popcorn brain refers to the tendency for our attention and focus to jump quickly from one thing to another, like popping corn kernels.”

 

It’s a very vivid term for describing behavior that does not rise to the level of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. On page 96 in her 2024 book The 5 Resets: Rewire your brain and body for less stress and more resilience Aditi Nerurkar describes A Classic Case of Popcorn Brain as follows:

 

“Julian was suffering from an increasingly common condition known as popcorn brain. While not a true medical diagnosis, popcorn brain is a growing cultural phenomenon. It’s a term coined by researcher David Levy to describe what happens to our brains when we spend too much time online. Our brain circuitry starts to ‘pop’ from being overstimulated by the fast-paced information stream Over time, our brains get habituated to this constant streaming of information, making it harder for us to look away and disconnect from our devices, slow down our thoughts, and live fully offline, where things move at a much different and slower pace.”

 

And on pages 103 and 104 she describes how to cure your popcorn brain:

 

“Aim to spend no more than twenty minutes a day scrolling on your phone. At all other times, use your phone only for essential calls, texts, and email. Set a timer and stay accountable. It’s easy to lose track of time when you’re in the digital space.

 

Opt out of push notifications and automatic pop-up features. Trust that if there’s something you need to know about, you’ll hear about it on your time.

 

While working, aim to keep your smartphone at least ten feet away from your workstation, At home, consider doing the same, especially when you’re with your family members.

 

At bedtime, keep your phone off your nightstand. This will help prevent nightime phone checks and also prevent you from reaching for your phone the first thing in the morning. Tell family members or colleagues to call you if there’s an emergency.”

 

 

My image was constructed by filling a silhouette of brain activity from Openclipart with an image of popcorn from Wikimedia Commons.

 


Monday, March 25, 2024

Do you like fried bologna sandwiches?

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have not tried them. But at the public library I recently found New York Times book critic Dwight Garner’s 2023 book The Upstairs Delicatessen. It is subtitled On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading. On March 24, 2024 I blogged about his writing about one offbeat combination in a post titled Have you ever eaten a peanut butter and pickle sandwich? Bologna Sandwiches are another offbeat combination, and there is a Wikipedia page about them. On page 103 Mr. Garner said:

 

“The other sandwich of my West Virginia youth that lives on in my mind, and in my kitchen, to Cree’s dismay, is fried bologna. Robert Sietsema, the great New York City food writer, is a devotee. He once worked in a Texas hospital where there was, amazingly, ‘a hot vending machine that sold nothing but fried baloney sandwiches on biscuits, oozing grease and mustard.’ I’ve scoured eBay for one of these, to no avail. The fried bologna sandwich is probably the sort of dish Jonathan Gold was referring to when he wrote about ‘the secret ethic cooking of the Dumb White Guy.’ But everyone likes them. Henry Louis Gates is an admirer. He grew up in Piedmont, West Virginia, about two hours east of where my family lived. In Colored People, his memoir, he wrote about a brand of bologna I wish I’d known about: Dent Davis’s Famous Homemade Ring Bologna, sold at a bakery. Gates called it ‘one of Piedmont’s singular attractions … dark red, with a tight, crimson, translucent skin.’ “

 

For nine years I lived in Columbus, Ohio. Forty miles north is the village of Waldo. It is home of the G & R Tavern. There is an article about the sandwich at Roadfood, and also a four-minute YouTube video at WOSU titled G & R Tavern’s Fried Bologna: Historic Idaho Food Establishments – which describes how their famous ‘fried’ (really grilled) bologna round is topped with Monterrey Jack cheese, pickle chips, and onions.  

 

The image from Wikimedia Commons shows a Blue Smoke Bologna Sandwich from Nationals Stadium in Washington, DC.

 


Sunday, March 24, 2024

Have you ever eaten a peanut butter and pickle sandwich?

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have. Mine are open-faced, topped with bread-and-butter-pickles. My mom had seen them described in an old Heinz cookbook. There even is a Wikipedia page on the Peanut Butter and Pickle Sandwich.

 

At the public library I recently found New York Times book critic Dwight Garner’s 2023 book The Upstairs Delicatessen. It is subtitled On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading. On page 101 he discusses on the peanut butter and pickle sandwich:

 

“Most days, I eat lunch at home. I make do with what’s in the house. Usually that means a sandwich – two pieces of bread, blank canvases, pale Mark Rothko slabs. I can be as geeky as the next person with the jamon iberico, or with the writer Julia Reed’s mother’s tuna salad, but I’m also on the record as being perhaps America’s most ardent consumer of the peanut butter and pickle sandwich.

 

It's a sandwich that my father bequeathed to me, the thrifty one that got him through law school. I wrote about the combination in 2012 for the Times food section. I called the sandwich the stay-at-home writer’s friend, there for you when nothing else was in the icebox. My essay prompted so much grossing out on social media, then in newspapers worldwide, that I fear that when I die, should I merit even a tiny obituary, the sandwich will be mentioned near the top (‘Dwight Garner, Literary Critic and Champion of Gross Sandwich Dies at 87’). I’ve always assumed that the PB&P was a West Virginia thing, but I’ve been unable to prove it. Neither has Emily Hilliard, the former state folklorist, who tried harder than I did. The sandwich appeared om lunch-counter menus during the Depression and in extension-service cookbooks in the 1930s and ‘40s in recipes that generally called for a few spoonfuls of pickle relish.”  

 

Mr. Garner’s 2012 Times article mentions that Kinsey Millhone, the fictional private investigator in the alphabet series of mysteries by Sue Grafton (all but the letter Z), is probably America’s best-known devotee.

 

Back on May 16, 2011 I blogged about Is arachibutyrophobia for real? That is a phobia of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth. I mentioned the pickles as a remedy.

 

An image of a sandwich was modified from this one at Wikimedia Commons.

 


Friday, March 22, 2024

Could you write a speech consisting of nothing but questions?


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Is that possible? Yes! I found a pair of commencement speeches where rather than provide answers they only had questions. One was given in 2019 by David Glaser at Tufts University. It is described in an article by Joel Abrams at The Conversation on May 16, 2019 titled This commencement speech had nothing but questions. A second, last year for the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University, is described in another article by Fred Sanders at LeadingWithQuestions on July 20, 2023 titled A Few Questions For You.

 

What about poems or songs? William Blake’s 1794 poem The Tyger just is questions. And in her 2023 album A Great Wild Mercy Carrie Newcomer has a song titled A Book of Questions. You can watch a five-minute lyric video for it on YouTube. (The brief chorus is not questions).

 

How about an entire novel consisting of questions? I have two examples with excerpts at Google Books. From 2001 there is Gold Fools by Gilbert Sorrentino. And from 2009 there is The Interrogative Mood by Padgett Powell. The Kirkus Reviews article on The Interrogative Mood opens by whining that:

 

“This novel a one-trick pony, and that trick is a question mark.”

 

How did I get started on this offbeat topic? At the public library I got Dwight Garner’s 2023 book The Upstairs Delicatessen. On page 108 he says:

 

“Powell wrote a 164-page novel, The Interrogative Mood, in which every sentence is a question. (Sample: ‘Have you decided yet which historical moment you would most like to have witnessed with your own eyes and ears?’) The form suited Powell, because he’s one of the most inquisitive writers we have.”

  

An image of a head full of questions was adapted from one at Openclipart.

 


Thursday, March 21, 2024

The BBC radio program More or Less fumbled in answering whether public speaking really is our biggest fear (for the U.S. it is not)


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On March 9, 2024 the BBC radio program More or Less had a nine-minute show titled Is public speaking really our biggest fear? Matt Abrahams asked them this question:

 

“As someone who teaches communication, we often say that speaking in public is people’s number one fear. But I’m not convinced the research really backs this up. I’d love to hear you do a deep dive into our greatest fears.”

 

They didn’t clearly explain how there are two distinct questions, with different answers for number one. The more often asked question is about how many – what is the most common fear (a percentage).  But a second is about how much – what is the largest fear (a Fear Score on a scale from none to terrified).

 

Their approach was summarized as:

 

“For over 50 years it’s been widely reported that speaking before a group is people’s number one fear. But is it really true? With the help of Dr Karen Kangas Dwyer, a former Professor in the School of Communication at the University of Nebraska-Omaha and Dr Christopher Bader, Professor of Sociology at Chapman University, Tim Harford tracks the source of the claim back to the 1970’s and explores whether it was true then, and whether it’s true today.”

 

The abstract for the 2012 magazine article by Dwyer and Davidson, Is Public Speaking Really Feared More Than Death? she discussed, which found death rather than speaking was the biggest fear for students, said:

 

“The purpose of this study was to investigate the genesis of the 1973 R. H. Bruskin Associate's American Fears study appearing in the London Sunday Times and often reported in communication textbooks as ‘people fear public speaking more than death,’ and to replicate the study among college students who read the textbooks. Participants in a multi-section communication course (N = 815) completed the survey during the first week of class by selecting their fears from a list of fears, ranking their top fears, and completing the 6 public speaking context items of the Personal Report of Communication Apprehension–24 items. This study found that public speaking was selected more often as a common fear than any other fear, including death. However, when students were asked to select a top fear, students selected death most often. These findings help authors and instructors aptly quote the 1973 Bruskin Associate's findings, which were confirmed by this study.”

 

 

I blogged about that article on May 17, 2012 in a post titled More university students in the U.S. fear public speaking than fear death, but death is their top fear. And October 27, 2009 I blogged about The 14 Worst Human Fears in the 1977 Book of Lists: where did this data really come from?

 

Christopher Bader is one of the principal investigators for the Chapman Survey of American Fears. In the show he changed the question back to about the most common fear – which is what they have reported in their web articles (the percentage who were Very Afraid plus Afraid). That is not Public Speaking, which he said has never appeared in their Top Ten.

 

But data in the nine Chapman Surveys also can be used to calculate Fear Scores for U.S. adults. On October 30, 2015 I first blogged about how According to the 2015 Chapman Survey of American Fears, adults are less than Afraid of federal government Corruption and only Slightly Afraid of Public Speaking. And on October 29, 2017 I blogged about What do Americans fear most? Fear Scores from the 2017 Chapman Survey of American Fears. More recently, on December 6, 2021, I blogged about how Most Americans are not terrified of public speaking.

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And on October 20, 2023 I posted about how Corrupt Government Officials (60.1%) was the most common fear in the ninth 2023 Chapman Survey of American Fears. Public speaking only was ranked # 53 (28.7%). As shown above Corrupt Government Officials also had the highest Fear Score – so it was the biggest fear.

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All eight times since it appeared on their fears list in 2015 Corrupt Government Officials has topped the list of percentages in the Chapman surveys. (In 2014 they asked another way, and the top fear was Identity Theft/Credit Card Fraud. As shown above in a table, it also was number one for its Fear Score and way outranked Public Speaking.

 

On November 10, 2015 I also blogged about another set of Fear Scores in a post titled YouGov survey done in 2014 found U.S. adults were less than A Little Afraid of public speaking. Snakes had the highest fear score (2.80), heights was second (2.63), and public speaking was third (2.55).

 

It’s rather curious that Matt Abrahams decided to finally ask More or Less for an answer. His Think Fast Talk Smart site incorrectly claims:

 

“….The Book of Lists has repeatedly reported that the fear of speaking in public is the most frequent answer to the question ‘What scares you most?’ ”

 

And he has also said:

 

“Research tells us that 85% of people feel anxious when speaking in front of others, and I fully believe that the other 15% are lying. 

 

I blogged about that on September 29, 2020 in a post titled A quantified version of a discredited Mark Twain quotation about fear of public speaking.

 

The #1 foam finger was adapted from this 1971 image at Wikimedia Commons.

 


Wednesday, March 20, 2024

A Savage Chickens cartoon about reserving your personal space – and a better alternative


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today’s Savage Chickens cartoon from Doug Savage’s titled Now Taking Orders shows one method for reserving your intimate space - a personal moat. (See the Wikipedia article on Proxemics). But there is a better alternative.

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As shown above, a large sombrero works as well as a personal moat, and you don’t need to add water or baby alligators. Back on October 22, 2014 I blogged about Sombreros and proxemics.

 

The image of a tourist came from Padaguan at Wikimedia Commons.

 


Monday, March 18, 2024

Should both stage fright and speech fright instead be portmanteau words?


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On May 6, 2022 I blogged about Who popularized the word glossophobia? What is a better Plain English alternative? I suggested ‘speech fright’ would be better. Perhaps even better would be to make it a portmanteau, speechfright. Portmanteau is defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as:

 

“…a word or part of a word made by combining the spellings and meanings of two or more words or word parts (such as smog from smoke and fog).”

 

Stage fright also can get this treatment - becoming stagefright. Wikipedia says that originally:

 

“A portmanteau is a piece of luggage, usually made of leather and opening into two equal parts.”

 

I’ve illustrated portmanteau by an anonymous version of the Wikimedia Commons image for a famous medical bag.