People Prefer Electric Shocks to Being Alone With Their Thoughts

Considering the many challenges life has to offer, entertaining yourself with your own thoughts for a few minutes seems like one of the easier hurdles to overcome. You could recall your favorite childhood memory, plan your weekend, or try to solve a problem from work. But it turns out that people find this assignment incredibly hard. And, according to new research, they’ll even resort to giving themselves electric shocks to keep themselves entertained.

“We, like everyone else, noticed how wedded people seem to be to modern technology, and seem to shy away from just using their own thoughts to occupy themselves,” the lead researcher, Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia, told me. “That got us to wondering whether this said something fundamental about people’s ability to do this.”

Why Tattooing Is Universal

Tattooing, when you think about it, is like smiling: Nearly every culture does it, but not always for the same reason.

In a given society, the motivation for covering oneself in paint, ink, or even scars speaks to what the civilization as a whole holds dear.

Chris Rainier, a photographer for National Geographic and other publications, has traveled the world in search of cultures he describes as having “one foot in the Garden of Eden.”

CONTINUE READING…