James' World 2

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Sometimes, it’s easier to tell a friend you like their mediocre gift or sugar-coat your feelings about their new love interest than share how you really feel.

It might not always feel great after the fact, but according to Gail Heyman, a developmental psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, learning to lie is a natural part of human development.

In one 2017 study from Hangzhou Normal University and UCSD, Heyman had toddlers play a one-on-one game with an experimenter in which the toddlers hid a treat under a cup while the experimenter closed their eyes. The children were told they could keep the treat if the experimenter did not find it. When the experimenter opened their eyes, they had to look under whichever cup the kid pointed to.

“So if the child pointed to the wrong cup, then the experimenter would pick the wrong cup and then the child would win the prize instead of the experimenter,” said Heyman.

Over the ten-day experiment, most of the young children figured out how to deceive the experimenters and win the treats. Heyman’s research suggests that we learn to lie early and can do so without any special instructions. But as we get older, and our cognitive abilities expand, our fibs become more sophisticated.

Jacquelyn Johnson, a psychologist based in Los Angeles, says that many of our white lies can happen reflexively and are motivated by our desire to preserve our sense of belonging.

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Whether you’re in the middle of a deep slumber or tossing and turning in the early hours of the morning, a vivid dream can be a highlight of your sleep routine that you never expected. But as wild as dreams can be—fantastic adventures, terrifying nightmares, or really strange mysteries—they’re notoriously hard to remember when you wake up. If you’ve ever wondered why you can remember dreams that feel unremarkable and not others, you’re not alone.

“We remember dreams when we wake up during a dream for long enough to think about it for at least a few seconds,” explains Jade Wu, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University. “Often, we dream, wake up very briefly, and that dream is gone forever because we never encode the memory of it into long-term memory.”

Believe it or not, many of your dreams occur in the early hours of the morning, adds Wu, as dreams almost always occur during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep periods. Many often drift in and out of REM sleep periods, a type of sleep where eyes dart around without sending any information to the brain all while your heart rate and breathing quickens. These periods of sleep get longer and occur more frequently after we have fallen asleep and remained asleep for an extended period of time.

Usually, those who are dreaming in the middle of the night “are likely just waking up after an earlier bout of REM and remembering their dream,” says Wu. And most times, the dream is nearly instantly forgotten. Why? “We don’t encode dreams into memory the same way we do real experiences. There are fewer sensory details and contextual clues,” she explains. “We also have less time to transfer those memories of dreams into long-term memory, usually [with] just a few seconds or less, since that’s usually how long we’re awake in between REM and other sleep stages.”

Why can I never remember my dreams?

As we’ve learned, REM sleep (lots of eye movement and heart-pumping breathing!) often leads to vivid dreams—in fact, nearly 80% of all dreams take place during this memory-boosting period of sleep, says Rebecca Robbins, Ph.D., an instructor at Harvard Medical School and researcher at nearby Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

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On an early July day, Amber Betts spent the afternoon in the community rose garden in Grandview, Washington. Several weeks earlier, invasive Japanese beetles had emerged in droves everywhere in Grandview, a town in central Washington’s Yakima Valley. The infestation had since quieted, but she still spotted a few insects: A cluster of fingernail-size iridescent green beetles, their coppery wings shining, were devouring a rose.

Unchecked, Japanese beetles’ numbers can skyrocket, and the insects can do extensive damage to plants, Betts, a public-information officer at the Washington State Department of Agriculture, told me. Cherries and hops, which collectively generated more than $800 million of revenue for the state last year, are among the 300 plants the beetles are known to eat. Although a population has taken up residence in Grandview, the beetles have not yet spread throughout Washington. Greg Haubrich, the manager of the pest program at the state’s department of agriculture, told me that officials are trying to eliminate the insect from the entire state. “We still do have a good chance of eradicating this,” he said.

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The camera pans slowly across a close-up of crispy, golden McDonald’s fries, standing tall like ears of corn. “We used to think this was the best thing a plant could grow into,” a deep voice proclaims during the commercial. “And then we made this.” Into view emerges a glistening cheeseburger topped with lettuce, tomatoes, and pickles. “Introducing the new McPlant,” the narrator continues, “made with the first plant-based patty worthy of being called a McDonald’s burger.”

The ad, from early 2022, seemed like a sign that plant burgers had made it big. Six years after they arrived on the market, America’s biggest restaurant chain had endorsed them. The news garnered cautious praise from some environmental advocates: Not only could meatless meat patties reduce animal cruelty, but they also promised to ease climate change. They looked, tasted, and bled like beef but had none of the drawbacks — no cows that burp methane, no butchered animals, and barely any cholesterol. 

By most metrics, plant-based meat has been a resounding success. Brands like Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, and Gardein are sold in thousands of grocery stores and restaurants across the country. Dollar sales in the U.S. have tripled over the past decade. Ten years ago, you couldn’t buy fake-blood burgers anywhere. Today, they’re on the grill at Burger King, Carl’s Jr., and other restaurants all over the world. When Beyond Meat went public in 2019, its stock climbed more than 700 percent. The buzz was compared to that of Bitcoin.

Yet a tour of recent headlines suggests that something has gone awry. Last year, Forbes described a “lifeless market for meatless meat.” The Guardian asserted that “plant-based meat’s sizzle fizzled in the U.S.” A Bloomberg headline in January went further, declaring that fake meat was “just another fad.” As for the McPlant, McDonald’s erased it from its menu in the U.S. last August, less than a year after it started a trial run.

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Dear Prudence,

I (47 F) have been in a relationship with my boyfriend (50 M) for three years. I can make a long list of his good qualities, and my teenage children really enjoy spending time with him on occasion. I’m going to get straight to the “but.” Although we have been together for three years, I see him sparingly, as I am a single mom to three great kids. I mainly spend a night or two with him every other weekend while the kids are with their dad. Thus, I don’t really have the opportunity to know what he is like on a day-to-day basis. I probably see him on his best behavior. But I’ve had reason to question some things about him.

I think, but don’t know, that he drinks daily and probably too much. I expressed this concern to him, and he basically said he would take it into consideration, but I don’t see any change in his drinking. We have politically different views, which is fine with me, except his views are driven by anger and misinformation rather than logic and fact, such that I have had to tell him that we cannot discuss politics; we simply agree to disagree. Once, we were visiting some friends of his a few hours away, and he got drunk and told me that he thought I was flirting with another man and didn’t want me coming home with him. I ended up walking by myself at night through a city I didn’t know and taking an Uber two hours home. Last weekend, we drove a few hours to stay at the beach and once each on the way there and the way back, he had an instance of road rage so severe that he was driving alongside the other car screaming and gesturing. I felt so upset and unsafe. And I can’t stop thinking that he has jeopardized my safety on multiple occasions now.

But the instances are few and far between, and so out of line with everything else I know about him, so I end up letting them go. So, I am three years invested in this relationship. I feel like I would tell anyone else that this guy obviously has some issues and they should move on, but I have spent my whole life finding ways to justify and excuse others’ bad behavior—it’s my superpower and my kryptonite!—so I’m not confident about what to do here. I feel stuck and not sure which part of myself to trust.

—Determined to See the Best

Dear Determined,

Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Igor Vershinsky/iStock/Getty Images Plus. 

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There are plenty of fair criticisms of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. The film’s frenetic pace can make the viewer feel a bit like an Adderall-addled college student blitzing through the physicist’s biography before a midterm. The score veers toward the overwrought. Nolan finds a way to make a sex scene between Cillian Murphy and Florence Pugh into one of the least titillating things I’ve ever witnessed. At stake in the first two acts is whether Americans or Nazis will be the first to bring hellfire to planet Earth; at stake in the third is the outcome of an administrative hearing concerning the renewal of a national security clearance.

Despite these flaws, I think it’s a good flick. In an age when superhero sequels dominate box offices, the fact that Nolan managed to turn a three-hour history lesson about one of the 20th century’s most important nerds into a blockbuster is a real achievement and a boon to America’s cultural life.

Nevertheless, the aesthetic critiques of Oppenheimer have been largely reasonable. The political ones have been less so.

The film has taken fire from both left and right. Critics in the former camp have derided the film’s failure to center the experiences of those harmed by J. Robert Oppenheimer’s work, from Native Americans displaced by atomic weapons tests to Japanese civilians incinerated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They deem the film’s decision to withhold any images from the aftermath of those bombings to be cowardly at best and tantamount to a “glorification of mass murder” at worst.

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Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pic/Melinda Sue Gordon

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Everyone likes efficiency: If you can simplify a task, especially a task you need to do multiple times every day, your life becomes that much easier. NFC tags can help you turn these types of repetitive obligations into simple automations, and you don’t need many tech skills to start. In fact, all you actually need is a smartphone and a tag.

What are NFC tags?

NFC tags are stickers with “near field communication” technology built in. You know NFC from services like Apple Pay or Google Pay: It’s technology that lets two devices communicate with each other quickly and instantly. Your smartphone has NFC, as do these tags.

Unlike a POS (point of sale) at the store, however, NFC tags are a blank slate: You won’t be using one to purchase a product (although you could probably program it to do that), but you can use NFC tags to do just about anything you can think of using your iPhone or Android, specifically automated tasks that can save you time and energy.

For example, this Instagram creator uses an NFC tag as a way to communicate with her partner whenever one of them feeds the dog. It’s a great use case: Whenever one of them gives the dog breakfast on their way out for the day, they’ll scan the NFC tag. Doing so triggers an automation on their iPhone to send a text to the other that reads, “The dog has been fed.”

Another example is for simple wifi sharing, at least on Android: When someone new comes over your house, instead of pointing them to a sign with your wifi information on it, they can hover their smartphone over an NFC tag (maybe outfitted with a wifi theme for easy identification), which will trigger an automation to connect them to your home internet.

How to set up an NFC tag on your iPhone or Android

Because of the seemingly endless possibilities with NFC tags, there’s no single universal guide for setting up NFC tags. If you have a specific task you have in mind, you’ll need to do some research to figure out the exact steps to make it work. However, there are some universal aspects about using NFC tags in general, so we’ll get you started.

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Photo: Julia Albul (Shutterstock)

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Your mind flits away, zigzagging near and far until you notice the other attendees gathering up their notebooks and tablets as they head for the door. The lecture is over, and you’ve missed out on much of the wisdom that held you momentarily entranced.

In our age of handheld devices and communicable ADHD, human beings are more distracted than ever. No matter how determined our efforts to keep focused, our eyes and our minds seem equally determined to ricochet hither and thither, drawn to any target that will eclipse what should be the object of our attention.

It may be comforting to learn that, by design, rapid eye movement extends beyond the realm of sleeping and dreaming. Even better news is that it’s not necessarily a symptom of inattention when we’re awake. In fact, just the opposite may be true. Which brings us to our most recent entry into the Ethical Lexicon:

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[Source Photo: Andrea Piacquadio/Pexels]

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On a January evening in 1992, I was sitting in our kitchen, reading a comic book. My older sister Claudia went out to run an errand at a nearby minimart, just before it closed. Her keys jingled as she said goodbye and pulled the door shut. Her footsteps rushed down the stairs. A minute later, I heard her slam the garage door after she had pulled out her bicycle. Moments later, I heard a loud thud from down the street. I also thought I heard a muffled scream. I was 10. I couldn’t connect the dots.

A speeding car had hit Claudia while she was crossing the street. She didn’t die on the spot. Her boyfriend rushed my mom to the hospital. They spent the night at the ICU, while I spent the night in my best friend’s apartment. We set up camp on mattresses on his living room floor. He said: ‘I’m sure it’s just a broken leg.’ I said: ‘You’re right, she’ll be fine.’ We prayed. The next day, my mom stood in the doorframe, sobbing. ‘Claudia is dead,’ she said. I hugged her. I knew I had to be strong for her. What I did not know is that my sister’s death would, in some way, end my mom’s life as well.

We cried at the funeral. We cried at the cemetery. We cried at home. After a few months, I stopped crying. My mom never stopped crying. She became obsessed with Claudia’s grave. She would visit it every day, clean the white marble and bring fresh flowers. At the same time, she became frustrated and angry with the world. I spent my entire youth listening to her angry words, but her grief wouldn’t recede the tiniest bit.

Somewhere in my teens, I concluded that she must be suffering from depression. But I was wrong.

It’s no surprise I had it wrong. Back in the day, even professional psychologists lacked an official diagnosis for persisting grief. That changed in March 2022, when the condition my mom most likely suffered from was added as ‘prolonged grief disorder’ to the latest revision of the psychologists’ diagnostic manual, the DSM–5-TR. The diagnosis hinges on two factors. The first is denial: mourners cannot accept the death of the person they lost. This, in turn, causes symptoms like sadness, anger, or guilt that last for more than 12 months.

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Need to know

Do you feel blah? Not exactly suffering, but lacking interest and excitement? Do your days feel like a monotonous toil, akin to toothbrushing, but stretched over the entire day: same routines, same tiny annoyances? Are you unable to find motivation to do the activities that used to give you joy? If this describes your experience, then you may be going through a period of languishing.

People often think of mood as a battle between well-being and illbeing: either you feel good or bad. But if you don’t feel much of either, that’s the territory of languishing. It’s ‘the neglected middle child of mental health’, as Adam Grant put it in The New York Times in 2021. Whereas depression is active illbeing – feeling sad, powerless, and drained – and flourishing is active well-being – feeling engaged, excited, and empowered – languishing sits in between. It is a sense of stagnation where nothing is too wrong or painful but everything feels a bit boring and uninteresting. The world is grey.

A brief taxonomy of well-being states

To further understand languishing, it helps to recognize that an absence of illbeing does not mean the presence of well-being. Psychological research has shown that positive and negative feelings are partly independent processes – even neurologically and biologically. In moments of flourishing, you are high on excitement and joy, and low on negative feelings. In moments of suffering, there is not much joy but only sadness in our life. But there are also bittersweet moments where we feel strong positive and negative emotions simultaneously – such as feeling excited about one’s new job while feeling sad about leaving the old work community. Then there is languishing – moments when we don’t feel much of either. Languishing is thus about feeling low – but low on both positive and negative feelings.

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Katharina Merian, attributed to the 16th-century painter Hans Brosamer. Courtesy the Met Museum, New York

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