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StillnessReflection

A drawer of old cables is rarely about the cables. It holds chargers for phones you no longer own and the manual for an appliance that broke years ago, kept less out of need than because throwing each one away means one more small decision. Letting go rarely happens in one clean sweep; it happens drawer by drawer.

Original reflection

Mind

The story behind the card

Two well-studied habits of mind keep the drawer full. Status quo bias, named by William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser in 1988, is our tendency to leave things as they are, because any change asks for a decision. The endowment effect makes things we own feel more valuable: in a 1990 experiment by Daniel Kahneman, Jack Knetsch and Richard Thaler, people given a mug asked about twice as much to sell it as others were willing to pay for it.

Türkçe oku
Eski kablolarla dolu bir çekmece aslında kablolarla ilgili değildir. İçinde artık elinde olmayan telefonların şarj aletleri, yıllar önce bozulmuş bir cihazın kılavuzu durur. Bunları lazım olacağı için değil, her birini atmak bir karar daha demek olduğu için saklarız. Bırakmak nadiren tek hamlede olur; çekmece çekmece olur.

Çekmeceyi dolu tutan, iyi incelenmiş iki zihin alışkanlığıdır. William Samuelson ve Richard Zeckhauser'in 1988'de adlandırdığı statüko yanlılığı, her değişiklik bir karar gerektirdiği için işleri olduğu gibi bırakma eğilimimizdir. Sahiplenme etkisi ise sahip olduğumuz şeyleri gözümüzde değerli kılar: Daniel Kahneman, Jack Knetsch ve Richard Thaler'in 1990'daki deneyinde, kendisine bir kupa verilen kişiler onu satmak için, başkalarının ödemeye razı olduğu fiyatın yaklaşık iki katını istedi.

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While you sleep, the brain strengthens what you learned during the day. This process, called memory consolidation, works both on facts, such as names and dates, and on skills, such as playing a piece of music. After a short or broken night, the brain holds on to new learning less well.

Memory consolidation is the slow process that turns a fresh, fragile memory into a lasting one, and much of it happens during sleep. In 1997 the German researchers Werner Plihal and Jan Born showed that different parts of the night help different kinds of memory. Twenty healthy men learned lists of word pairs and practised mirror tracing, drawing a shape while watching only its reflection. Recall of the word pairs improved most over the first half of the night, when deep, slow-wave sleep dominates, while the drawing skill improved most over the second half, when REM sleep, the stage of vivid dreams, lasts longer. Researchers think that during sleep the brain replays the day's experiences and moves new memories from temporary storage in the hippocampus, deep in the brain, into longer-lasting networks in its outer layer, the cortex.

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Some benefits of exercise begin on the day you do it, according to US guidance promoted by the CDC. After a single session of moderate or vigorous activity, such as a brisk walk, blood pressure can fall, anxiety can ease, and sleep that night and some kinds of thinking can improve.

The CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) is the United States' national public health agency, founded in Atlanta in 1946. Its advice on exercise follows the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, whose second edition, published in 2018, drew on a review of the previous decade's research. Earlier advice had focused on preventing disease over the years; the new edition also listed benefits people can feel at once. Besides easing anxiety and lowering blood pressure, a single session helps the body respond to insulin, the hormone that moves sugar from the blood into cells. Most of these effects grow with regular activity, while others, such as fitness, strength and a lasting fall in blood pressure, take weeks or months. The guidelines recommend at least 150 minutes of moderate activity a week.

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Regular physical activity protects the heart, lifts mood, eases anxiety and improves sleep, according to the World Health Organization. These benefits do not depend on losing weight: people of every shape and size gain them, even when nothing changes on the scales or in the mirror.

The World Health Organization counts any movement that uses energy as physical activity: walking, cycling, sport, active play, housework and physical work. Its 2020 guidelines advise adults to do 150 to 300 minutes of moderate activity a week, such as brisk walking, or 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous activity, such as running, plus muscle-strengthening exercise on at least two days. In 2022 about 31% of adults worldwide, some 1.8 billion people, fell short of that. Weight is a poor guide to these benefits. The US Physical Activity Guidelines state that they are generally independent of body weight, and a 2014 analysis of ten studies found that fit people who were overweight or obese had death rates similar to fit people of normal weight, while unfit people had about twice the risk, whatever their weight.

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Kerb cuts, the small ramps where a pavement meets the road, were won by disabled campaigners for wheelchair users. They now help anyone pushing a pram, pulling a suitcase or wheeling a trolley.

Kalamazoo, Michigan, installed some of the first kerb cuts in the 1940s, in a pilot scheme proposed by the lawyer and war veteran Jack H. Fischer to help disabled veterans get to work. In the 1970s the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley, California, a group run by disabled people and co-founded by Ed Roberts, pushed for cuts along Telegraph and Shattuck Avenues, creating one of the first continuous step-free routes through an American city. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 later made kerb ramps a legal requirement on new and altered streets across the United States. In 2017 the policy advocate Angela Glover Blackwell named the wider pattern the 'curb-cut effect': a change made for one group often ends up helping almost everyone.

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Braille is a writing system read with the fingertips: each letter is a pattern of raised dots within a small cell of six.

The system takes its name from Louis Braille, a blind French student who published it in 1829. Each cell has two columns of three dot positions, which gives 63 possible patterns in a space small enough to be felt with one touch of a fingertip. Besides letters, braille has contractions, short patterns for common words that make reading faster, and separate codes for mathematics, science and music. Today there are braille codes for more than 133 languages, including Turkish, which has its own signs for letters such as ç, ğ and ş. Many blind readers also use refreshable braille displays, devices whose small pins rise and fall to show text from a computer or phone. Since 2019 the United Nations has marked 4 January, Louis Braille's birthday, as World Braille Day.

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