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‘It’s a Superpower’: How Walking Makes Us Healthier, Happier and Brainier

By Thinking Outline ; Pratay Das

Neuroscientist Shane O’Mara believes that plenty of regular walking unlocks the cognitive powers of the brain like nothing else. He explains why you should exchange your gym kit for a pair of comfy shoes and get strolling.

Taking a stroll with Shane O’Mara is a risky endeavour. The neuroscientist is so passionate about walking, and our collective right to go for walks, that he is determined not to let the slightest unfortunate aspect of urban design break his stride. So much so, that he has a habit of darting across busy roads as the lights change. “One of life’s great horrors as you’re walking is waiting for permission to cross the street,” he tells me, when we are forced to stop for traffic – a rude interruption when, as he says, “the experience of synchrony when walking together is one of life’s great pleasures”. He knows this not only through personal experience, but from cold, hard data – walking makes us healthier, happier and brainier.

We are wandering the streets of Dublin discussing O’Mara’s book, In Praise of Walking, a backstage tour of what happens in our brains while we perambulate. Our jaunt begins at the grand old gates of his workplace, Trinity College, and takes in the Irish famine memorial at St Stephen’s Green, the Georgian mile, the birthplace of Francis Bacon, the site of Facebook’s new European mega-HQ and the salubrious seaside dwellings of Sandymount.

O’Mara, 53, is in his element striding through urban landscapes – from epic hikes across London’s sprawl to more sedate ambles in Oxford, where he received his DPhil – and waxing lyrical about science, nature, architecture and literature. He favours what he calls a “motor-centric” view of the brain – that it evolved to support movement and, therefore, if we stop moving about, it won’t work as well.

This is neatly illustrated by the life cycle of the humble sea squirt which, in its adult form, is a marine invertebrate found clinging to rocks or boat hulls. It has no brain because it has eaten it. During its larval stage, it had a backbone, a single eye and a basic brain to enable it to swim about hunting like “a small, water-dwelling, vertebrate cyclops”, as O’Mara puts it. The larval sea squirt knew when it was hungry and how to move about, and it could tell up from down. But, when it fused on to a rock to start its new vegetative existence, it consumed its redundant eye, brain and spinal cord. Certain species of jellyfish, conversely, start out as brainless polyps on rocks, only developing complicated nerves that might be considered semi-brains as they become swimmers.

Sitting at a desk all day, it’s easy to start feeling like a brainless polyp, whereas walking and talking, as we are this morning, while admiring the Great Sugar Loaf mountain rising beyond the city and a Huguenot cemetery formed in 1693, our minds are fizzing. “Our sensory systems work at their best when they’re moving about the world,” says O’Mara. He cites a 2018 study that tracked participants’ activity levels and personality traits over 20 years, and found that those who moved the least showed malign personality changes, scoring lower in the positive traits: openness, extraversion and agreeableness. There is substantial data showing that walkers have lower rates of depression, too. And we know, says O’Mara, “from the scientific literature, that getting people to engage in physical activity before they engage in a creative act is very powerful. My notion – and we need to test this – is that the activation that occurs across the whole of the brain during problem-solving becomes much greater almost as an accident of walking demanding lots of neural resources.”

O’Mara’s enthusiasm for walking ties in with both of his main interests as a professor of experimental brain research: stress, depression and anxiety; and learning, memory and cognition. “It turns out that the brain systems that support learning, memory and cognition are the same ones that are very badly affected by stress and depression,” he says. “And by a quirk of evolution, these brain systems also support functions such as cognitive mapping,” by which he means our internal GPS system. But these aren’t the only overlaps between movement and mental and cognitive health that neuroscience has identified.

I witnessed the brain-healing effects of walking when my partner was recovering from an acute brain injury. His mind was often unsettled, but during our evening strolls through east London, things started to make more sense and conversation flowed easily. O’Mara nods knowingly. “You’re walking rhythmically together,” he says, “and there are all sorts of rhythms happening in the brain as a result of engaging in that kind of activity, and they’re absent when you’re sitting. One of the great overlooked superpowers we have is that, when we get up and walk, our senses are sharpened. Rhythms that would previously be quiet suddenly come to life, and the way our brain interacts with our body changes.”

From the scant data available on walking and brain injury, says O’Mara, “it is reasonable to surmise that supervised walking may help with acquired brain injury, depending on the nature, type and extent of injury – perhaps by promoting blood flow, and perhaps also through the effect of entraining various electrical rhythms in the brain. And perhaps by engaging in systematic dual tasking, such as talking and walking.”

One such rhythm, he says, is that of theta brainwaves. Theta is a pulse or frequency (seven to eight hertz, to be precise) which, says O’Mara, “you can detect all over the brain during the course of movement, and it has all sorts of wonderful effects in terms of assisting learning and memory, and those kinds of things”. Theta cranks up when we move around because it is needed for spatial learning, and O’Mara suspects that walking is the best movement for such learning. “The timescales that walking affords us are the ones we evolved with,” he writes, “and in which information pickup from the environment most easily occurs.”

Essential brain-nourishing molecules are produced by aerobically demanding activity, too. You’ll get raised levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) which, writes O’Mara, “could be thought of as a kind of a molecular fertiliser produced within the brain because it supports structural remodelling and growth of synapses after learning … BDNF increases resilience to ageing, and damage caused by trauma or infection.” Then there’s vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), which helps to grow the network of blood vessels carrying oxygen and nutrients to brain cells.

Some people, I point out, don’t think walking counts as proper exercise. “This is a terrible mistake,” he says. “What we need to be is much more generally active over the course of the day than we are.” And often, an hour at the gym doesn’t cut it. “What you see if you get people to wear activity monitors is that because they engage in an hour of really intense activity, they engage in much less activity afterwards.”

But you don’t get the endorphin high from walking, I say. “The same hit you get from running is what you’d get from taking morphine? We simply don’t know that’s true,” he says. “People who study this area don’t go on about endorphins and there may be a reason for that.” Not that he is opposed to vigorous exercise, but walking is much more accessible and easily woven into everyday life: “You don’t need to bring anything other than comfy shoes and a rain jacket. You don’t have to engage in lots of preparation; stretching, warm-up, warm-down …” O’Mara gets off his commuter train a stop early so that he can clock up more steps on his pedometer. To get the maximum health benefits, he recommends that “speed should be consistently high over a reasonable distance – say consistently over 5km/h, sustained for at least 30 minutes, at least four or five times a week.”

Twice during our circuitous route, he asks me to point to where I think our starting point of Trinity College is, and my estimates are pretty close. “That just shows you how good your GPS is,” he says. “You have never been here before, but you have a very good sense of where you need to go.” This is reassuring, I say, because, of course, Google Maps is enfeebling our innate abilities to find our way. “That’s absolute garbage,” says O’Mara. “We really have to get a grip. If you hire a car and drive around a country you’ve never been in, taking a route into a city you’ve never driven into before, the first time, you rely very heavily on the GPS. The second time, not quite so much and, by the third or fourth time, you don’t need the GPS at all, because you’ve learned the route. I actually think GPS is great for helping us disambiguate where we are.”

So it’s mere speculation that relying on satnavs is killing our sense of direction? “Yeah it is. There is no data of any quality showing that, over the long term, reliance on GPS is a bad thing. Honestly, the brain is much more robust.”

O’Mara describes our inbuilt GPS, or cognitive mapping system, as a silent sense. “It is constructed largely without our awareness, and we only notice it if it fails us.” While the sensitive vestibular system of the inner ear governs balance, for mental mapping (which can work even when our eyes don’t), we have what are known as place cells in our hippocampi. If you stay in one place, the cell for that position keeps firing, but if you move, that cell will stop firing and a cell marking your new position will start firing and so on. In rat experiments, the system worked less well when the rodents were wheeled around as opposed to walking.

It’s clever, but not infallible. “We get fooled when we walk a long way in a single direction,” says O’Mara. We need to keep looking around us and recalibrating with visual cues. “If you’re feeding your place cells by coming from a single direction, what they know about the environment is that single direction and you want them to have input from all directions, so look around occasionally and your place cells will reset from the whole sensorium around you.”

While all this is going on in the background, our social brains are working to predict which direction others will take, to avoid collision. In order to walk and navigate, the brain flickers between regions, just as our waking minds are often, says O’Mara, “flickering between big-picture states – thinking about what we have to do tomorrow, plans for next year, engaging in what is called ‘mental time travel’ – and task-focused work. And you need to flicker between these states in order to do creative work.” That’s how important associations get made, and this flickering seems to be bolstered by walking.

It’s part of the reason, O’Mara suspects, that the prolific writer and thinker Bertrand Russell said that walking was integral to his work. Likewise, the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton, who pondered a single problem on his daily walks for seven years, eventually inventing a number system called quaternions, without which we couldn’t make electric toothbrushes or mobile phones.

O’Mara’s ultimate ode to urban walking is TS Eliot’s 1915 poem The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, which he describes as “a journey on foot, and a journey through states of mind”. Wordsworth composed poetry as he wandered, while Aristotle delivered lectures on foot in the grounds of his school in Athens. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche memorably said that “only thoughts reached by walking have value”, a notion that Charles Dickens – who was as prolific a walker as he was a writer – would no doubt have seconded.

And, while my mind has been flickering through the streets of Dublin, says O’Mara, “you haven’t died or fallen over, and you’re continuing to breathe. Your heart is booming away. You’re putting one foot in front of the other, and we’re engaging in this conversation, information exchange.” Plus, I’m checking out the area, admiring fanlights and looking for clues of neighbourhood life. “All of this is going on all the time. Robots can’t do this. Getting a robot to cross the road is really hard.” Whereas for our brains, “evolution has been solving this problem, billions of times an hour, for the past 400m years”.

[thinking-outline]

The Life-Changing Habit of Journaling

Why Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, and many more great minds recommend it.

Pratay Das ; thinking-outline

Ever wondered why history’s great minds including Isaac Newton, Abraham Lincoln, Andy Warhol, Leonardo Da Vinci, Marcus Aurelius, Charles Darwin, Winston Churchill, Benjamin Franklin, Ernest Hemingway, George Bernard Shaw and Maya Angelou would spend so much of their precious time writing things that will never be seen by another soul?

Jim Rohn says, “If you’re serious about becoming a wealthy, powerful, sophisticated, healthy, influential, cultured, and unique individual, keep a journal.”

Many famous creatives, writers, innovators and original thinkers of our generation keep journals— for many, it is a creative necessity, for others, a place for exploration, and for some an art form in and of itself.

Albert Einstein’s travel diary to the United States recorded his experiences abroad from November 1930 to June 1931. Photo from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

But you don’t have to be creative, scientist or an innovator for this practice to be worthwhile.

Journaling helps you prioritize, clarify thinking, and accomplish your most important tasks, over urgent busy work.

Thinking in writing has this magical quality of clarifying your thoughts.

Tim Ferriss calls journaling the deloading phase in life. He explains, “I use it as a tool to clarify my thinking and goals, much as Kevin Kelly (one of my favorite humans) does. The paper is like a photography darkroom for my mind.”

Get used to the pen again!

Reflective writing has also been shown to improve decision-making and critical thinking in a number of medical professions.

Michael Hyatt says “What happens to us is not as important as the meaning we assign to it. Journaling helps sort this out.”

Journals give you a record of the progress you’ve made toward your goals to keep you motivated in the long slog of actually reaching them.

Charles Darwin kept numerous notebooks to record his discoveries and thoughts on everything from his first sketch of an evolutionary tree (left) to important books to read (right). Photo from Public Domain.

“As part of your morning creative burst, use your journal to review and hone your daily to-do list. Review and hone your life vision and big picture goals” says Benjamin Hardy.

Numerous studies (of the scientifically rigorous variety) have shown that personal writing can help people better cope with stressful events, relieve anxiety, boost immune cell activity

Judy Willis MD, a neurologist, and former classroom teacher explains, “The practice of writing can enhance the brain’s intake, processing, retaining, and retrieving of information… it promotes the brain’s attentive focus … boosts long-term memory, illuminates patterns, gives the brain time for reflection, and when well-guided, is a source of conceptual development and stimulus of the brain’s highest cognition.”

What you write, you control. You don’t have to spend your whole morning writing, but the only rule is to write continuously. Be consistent to make the most of it.

Throughout his life, inventor Thomas Edison jotted down ideas and thoughts in personal journals. Photo from Edison and the Rise of Innovation.

An Optimal Approach to Start Journaling

Start each morning by identifying tasks, goals for the day.

Only write a few bullet points (2/3) to make it easier to start and make progress. You can mix personal and work stuff together.

By keeping each day’s entry short and simple, you are making it so easy to journal without excuses.

At the end of each day, look back at what you accomplished, what you learned, what you want to follow-up on tomorrow, and what you want to pursue tomorrow.

Start small. Make micro-commitment each day to get started.

Don’t make a huge commitment. Try it for 30 days. Spend just 5- 10 minutes a day reflecting in your journal. When the 30 days are up, go back and review what you’ve learned and the progress you’ve made. Then you can decide if you want to continue journaling.

Aim for 5 to 10 minutes of uninterrupted time to do your journaling, ideally the same time every day.

What you write, draw or sketch is completely up to you.

Just sit and write.

Over 7,000 pages of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings, ideas, and natural inspirations have been preserved. Photo from The British Library.

Mind-map, list goals, outline your vision, doodle, draw, sketch, make a gratitude list, list your short-term and long-term, write down everything you are curious about, list your passion projects, make a daily entry of needs to be done, reflect on your accomplishments, etc.

Just get all the ideas out on paper, and push yourself to see if more are hanging around in the background of your mind.

Come back to them later to see if anything jumps out at you.

As part of your morning and post-work journaling sessions, be sure to write about everything you are grateful for. Gratitude journaling is a scientifically proven way to overcome several psychological challenges.

It will change your entire life orientation from scarcity to abundance.

“Writing in a journal each day, with a structured, strategic process allows you to direct your focus to what you did accomplish, what you’re grateful for, and what you’re committed to doing better tomorrow. Thus, you more deeply enjoy your journey each day, feel good about any forward progress you made, and use a heightened level of clarity to accelerate your results,” says Hal Elrod, author of “The Miracle Morning.”

According to Dr. James Pennebaker, an expert in the field of expressive writing, to get the best results from journaling, it was recommended that you:

Forget about grammar/spelling when you write.

Be honest and authentic (write like no one else is going to read it).

Write by hand for better memory recall.

Adopt cursive writing to get your thoughts out faster.

Journaling alone won’t boost your productivity. But when you combine action with reflection you’ll take better actions over time.

“Writing accesses you’re the left hemisphere of the brain, which is analytical and rational,” says Maud Purcell, a psychotherapist and journaling expert. “While your left brain is occupied, your right brain is free to do what it does best, i.e. create, intuit and feel. In this way, writing removes mental blocks and allows us to use more of our brainpower to better understand ourselves and the world around us.”

Journaling is not a commonplace habit, it is a keystone habit. Keystone habits affect how you work, eat, play, live, spend, and communicate.

As Charles Duhigg, author of “The Power of Habit” says, “..they encourage change by creating structures that help other habits to flourish.” A minor change in one aspect of your life can trigger so many other positive changes.

Journaling is a practical and accessible way to stay connected to your inner self, your body, your dreams and your purpose in life.

[thinking-outline]

6 Genius Little Ways to Repurpose Used Candle Jars

Don’t throw them out.

thinking-outline ; Pratay Das

My apartment is essentially a graveyard for things that should have been thrown in the trash. Ombre paint chip strips have found a home on my gallery wall. Dead flowers (sorry, dried flowers) have taken the place of any living blooms, much to my roommate’s chagrin. And when it comes to the vessels I have adorning every available surface, they’re largely trash. Well technically, they’re upcycled trash: I have a thing for hoarding empty candle jars.

The root of my obsession with repurposing every glass and ceramic jar stems—as most things in my life are wont to do—from a borderline insane fear I have of accidentally tossing something I’ll one day have a use for. This fear is the reason I still own low-rise jeans. Except, in this case, repurposing old candle jars has proved incredibly fruitful; not to mention, more sustainable and budget-friendly.

Candles tend to run fairly expensive, and it seems a shame to waste them after they’re burnt out. Especially when they come in such pretty containers. Whether repurposed for organizational or ornamental functions, there are so many uses for old candle jars. The main problem is figuring out how to get them clean.

This is the method I have found to be most effective:

Remove any stickers.

Pop your finished candles in the freezer for a minimum of 24 hours.

Using a sharp knife, carefully jab at the wax to break it into pieces; once these fall out (usually taking the wick with them), your candle should be wax-free.

Soak in a sink of warm, soapy water for an hour or so. Scrub with an old sponge or toothbrush to get rid of residue and soot. In more dire cases, you can also use Goo Gone.

To really sanitize, run the now-empty jars through the dishwasher.  

Convinced yet? Here are a few ways to reuse candle jars in every room of your home.

Succulent Planters

More often than not, plants bought at garden centers don’t come in the most interesting pots. If you have a terra-cotta candle jar, use it to re-pot your succulents and other hard-to-kill greenery. These tiny planters make a great addition to an empty windowsill.

Cotton Beauty Product Holders

Are your medicine and under-sink cabinets cluttered with boxes of Q-tips and plastic tubes of cotton pads? Use sleek glass jars to organize them in style. You’ll be able to use them to decorate your bathroom vanity without worrying about anything clashing with your aesthetic.

Coffee Table Centerpiece

Larger candle jars make the perfect containers for things like shells or polaroids and, in turn, are a great centerpiece for your living room coffee table or end table. I collect matchboxes (because I am a cliche) and store them all in one frosted glass vessel that once housed a three-wick candle.

Entryway Catchall

If your entryway doesn’t have room for much more than a mounted picture ledge, use a smaller jar to hold things like keys and that one lipstick you always grab before running out the door.

Glassware

Aside from two massive water glasses sourced from IKEA, every single cup in my kitchen used to be a candle. I love the mismatched look, and if your style errs more eclectic, collecting an assortment of glass jars in different shapes, colors, and sizes is a budget-friendly way to build out your kitchenware inventory. Plus, they’ll look pretty great on open shelving.

Desktop Organizer

If you work from home, eschew traditional office supplies—which can often feel a bit cold and corporate—for something a little more style-driven. Chic ceramic candle holders make great catchalls for necessities like writing utensils or paper clips.

[thinking-outline]

Bad Thinkers

Why do some people believe conspiracy theories? It’s not just who or what they know. It’s a matter of intellectual character.

Thinking Outline ; Pratay Das

Meet Oliver. Like many of his friends, Oliver thinks he is an expert on 9/11. He spends much of his spare time looking at conspiracist websites and his research has convinced him that the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, of 11 September 2001 were an inside job. The aircraft impacts and resulting fires couldn’t have caused the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center to collapse. The only viable explanation, he maintains, is that government agents planted explosives in advance. He realises, of course, that the government blames Al-Qaeda for 9/11 but his predictable response is pure Mandy Rice-Davies: they would say that, wouldn’t they?

Polling evidence suggests that Oliver’s views about 9/11 are by no means unusual. Indeed, peculiar theories about all manner of things are now widespread. There are conspiracy theories about the spread of AIDS, the 1969 Moon landings, UFOs, and the assassination of JFK. Sometimes, conspiracy theories turn out to be right – Watergate really was a conspiracy – but mostly they are bunkum. They are in fact vivid illustrations of a striking truth about human beings: however intelligent and knowledgeable we might be in other ways, many of us still believe the strangest things. You can find people who believe they were abducted by aliens, that the Holocaust never happened, and that cancer can be cured by positive thinking. A 2009 Harris Poll found that between one‑fifth and one‑quarter of Americans believe in reincarnation, astrology and the existence of witches. You name it, and there is probably someone out there who believes it.

You realise, of course, that Oliver’s theory about 9/11 has little going for it, and this might make you wonder why he believes it. The question ‘Why does Oliver believe that 9/11 was an inside job?’ is just a version of a more general question posed by the US skeptic Michael Shermer: why do people believe weird things? The weirder the belief, the stranger it seems that someone can have it. Asking why people believe weird things isn’t like asking why they believe it’s raining as they look out of the window and see the rain pouring down. It’s obvious why people believe it’s raining when they have compelling evidence, but it’s far from obvious why Oliver believes that 9/11 was an inside job when he has access to compelling evidence that it wasn’t an inside job.

I want to argue for something which is controversial, although I believe that it is also intuitive and commonsensical. My claim is this: Oliver believes what he does because that is the kind of thinker he is or, to put it more bluntly, because there is something wrong with how he thinks. The problem with conspiracy theorists is not, as the US legal scholar Cass Sunstein argues, that they have little relevant information. The key to what they end up believing is how they interpret and respond to the vast quantities of relevant information at their disposal. I want to suggest that this is fundamentally a question of the way they are. Oliver isn’t mad (or at least, he needn’t be). Nevertheless, his beliefs about 9/11 are the result of the peculiarities of his intellectual constitution – in a word, of his intellectual character.

***

Usually, when philosophers try to explain why someone believes things (weird or otherwise), they focus on that person’s reasons rather than their character traits. On this view, the way to explain why Oliver believes that 9/11 was an inside job is to identify his reasons for believing this, and the person who is in the best position to tell you his reasons is Oliver. When you explain Oliver’s belief by giving his reasons, you are giving a ‘rationalising explanation’ of his belief.

The problem with this is that rationalising explanations take you only so far. If you ask Oliver why he believes 9/11 was an inside job he will, of course, be only too pleased to give you his reasons: it had to be an inside job, he insists, because aircraft impacts couldn’t have brought down the towers. He is wrong about that, but at any rate that’s his story and he is sticking to it. What he has done, in effect, is to explain one of his questionable beliefs by reference to another no less questionable belief. Unfortunately, this doesn’t tell us why he has any of these beliefs. There is a clear sense in which we still don’t know what is really going on with him.

Now let’s flesh out Oliver’s story a little: suppose it turns out that he believes lots of other conspiracy theories apart from the one about 9/11. He believes the Moon landings were faked, that Diana, Princess of Wales, was murdered by MI6, and that the Ebola virus is an escaped bioweapon. Those who know him well say that he is easily duped, and you have independent evidence that he is careless in his thinking, with little understanding of the difference between genuine evidence and unsubstantiated speculation. Suddenly it all begins to make sense, but only because the focus has shifted from Oliver’s reasons to his character. You can now see his views about 9/11 in the context of his intellectual conduct generally, and this opens up the possibility of a different and deeper explanation of his belief than the one he gives: he thinks that 9/11 was an inside job because he is gullible in a certain way. He has what social psychologists call a ‘conspiracy mentality’.

The gullible rarely believe they are gullible and the closed-minded don’t believe they are closed-minded

Notice that the proposed character explanation isn’t a rationalising explanation. After all, being gullible isn’t a reason for believing anything, though it might still be why Oliver believes 9/11 was an inside job. And while Oliver might be expected to know his reasons for believing that 9/11 was an inside job, he is the last person to recognise that he believes what he believes about 9/11 because he is gullible. It is in the nature of many intellectual character traits that you don’t realise you have them, and so aren’t aware of the true extent to which your thinking is influenced by them. The gullible rarely believe they are gullible and the closed-minded don’t believe they are closed-minded. The only hope of overcoming self-ignorance in such cases is to accept that other people – your co-workers, your spouse, your friends – probably know your intellectual character better than you do. But even that won’t necessarily help. After all, it might be that refusing to listen to what other people say about you is one of your intellectual character traits. Some defects are incurable.

Gullibility, carelessness and closed-mindedness are examples of what the US philosopher Linda Zagzebski, in her book Virtues of the Mind (1996), has called ‘intellectual vices’. Others include negligence, idleness, rigidity, obtuseness, prejudice, lack of thoroughness, and insensitivity to detail. Intellectual character traits are habits or styles of thinking. To describe Oliver as gullible or careless is to say something about his intellectual style or mind-set – for example, about how he goes about trying to find out things about events such as 9/11. Intellectual character traits that aid effective and responsible enquiry are intellectual virtues, whereas intellectual vices are intellectual character traits that impede effective and responsible inquiry. Humility, caution and carefulness are among the intellectual virtues Oliver plainly lacks, and that is why his attempts to get to the bottom of 9/11 are so flawed.

Oliver is fictional, but real-world examples of intellectual vices in action are not hard to find. Consider the case of the ‘underwear bomber’ Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit in 2009. Abdulmutallab was born in Lagos, Nigeria, to affluent and educated parents, and graduated from University College London with a degree in mechanical engineering. He was radicalised by the online sermons of the Islamic militant Anwar al-Awlaki, who was subsequently killed by an American drone strike. It’s hard not to see the fact that Abdulmutallab was taken in by Awlaki’s sermons as at least partly a reflection of his intellectual character. If Abdulmutallab had the intellectual character not to be duped by Awlaki, then perhaps he wouldn’t have ended up on a transatlantic airliner with explosives in his underpants.

***

Intellectual character explanations of questionable beliefs are more controversial than one might imagine. For example, it has been suggested that explaining peoples’ bad behaviour or weird beliefs by reference to their character makes us more intolerant of them and less empathetic. Yet such explanations might still be correct, even if they have deleterious consequences. In any case, it’s not obvious that character explanations should make us less tolerant of other peoples’ foibles. Suppose that Oliver can’t help being the kind of person who falls for conspiracy theories. Shouldn’t that make us more rather than less tolerant of him and his weird beliefs?

A different objection to character-based explanations is that it’s just not true that people have questionable beliefs because they are stupid or gullible. In How We Know What Isn’t So (1991), the US social psychologist Thomas Gilovich argues that many such beliefs have ‘purely cognitive origins’, by which he means that they are caused by imperfections in our capacities to process information and draw conclusions. Yet the example he gives of a cognitive explanation takes us right back to character explanations. His example is the ‘hot hand’ in basketball. The idea is that when a player makes a couple of shots he is more likely to make subsequent shots. Success breeds success.

Gilovich used detailed statistical analysis to demonstrate that the hot hand doesn’t exist – performance on a given shot is independent of performance on previous shots. The question is, why do so many basketball coaches, players and fans believe in it anyway? Gilovich’s cognitive explanation is that belief in the hot hand is due to our faulty intuitions about chance sequences; as a species, we’re bad at recognising what genuinely random sequences look like.

And yet when Gilovich sent his results to a bunch of basketball coaches, what happened next is extremely revealing. One responded: ‘Who is this guy? So he makes a study. I couldn’t care less.’ This seems like a perfect illustration of intellectual vices in operation. The dismissive reaction manifested a range of vices, including closed-mindedness and prejudice. It’s hard not to conclude that the coach reacted as he did because he was closed-minded or prejudiced. In such cases as this, as with the case of Oliver, it’s just not credible that character traits aren’t doing significant explanatory work. A less closed-minded coach might well have reacted completely differently to evidence that the hot hand doesn’t exist.

Could we explain the dismissiveness of the coach without referring to his personality in general? ‘Situationists’, as they are called, argue that our behaviour is generally better explained by situational factors than by our supposed character traits. Some see this as a good reason to be skeptical about the existence of character. In one experiment, students at a theological seminary were asked to give a talk elsewhere on campus. One group was asked to talk about the parable of the Good Samaritan, while the rest were assigned a different topic. Some were told they had plenty to time to reach the venue for the lecture, while others were told to hurry. On their way to the venue, all the students came across a person (an actor) apparently in need of help. In the event, the only variable that made a difference to whether they stopped to help was how much of a hurry they were in; students who thought they were running late were much less likely to stop and help than those who thought they had time. According to the Princeton philosopher Gilbert Harman, the lesson of such experiments is that ‘we need to convince people to look at situational factors and to stop trying to explain things in terms of character traits’.

You say that Oliver is gullible for believing his 9/11 conspiracy theory; he retorts that you are gullible for believing the conclusions of the 9/11 Commission

The character traits that Harman had in mind are moral virtues such as kindness and generosity, but some situationists also object to the idea of intellectual virtues and vices. For example, they point to evidence that people perform much better in problem-solving tasks when they are in a good mood. If trivial situational factors such as mood or hunger are better at explaining your intellectual conduct than your so-called intellectual character, then what is the justification for believing in the existence of intellectual character traits? If such traits exist, then shouldn’t they explain one’s intellectual conduct? Absolutely, but examples such as Oliver and Gilovich’s basketball coach suggest that intellectual character traits do explain a person’s intellectual conduct in an important range of cases. People don’t believe weird things because they are hungry or in a bad (or good) mood. The view that people don’t have character traits such as gullibility, carelessness or prejudice, or that people don’t differ in intellectual character, deprives us of seemingly compelling explanations of the intellectual conduct of both Oliver and the basketball coach.

Suppose it turns out that Oliver lives in a region where conspiracy theories are rife or that he is under the influence of friends who are committed conspiracy theorists. Wouldn’t these be perfectly viable situational, non-character explanations of his beliefs about 9/11? Only up to a point. The fact that Oliver is easily influenced by his friends itself tells us something about his intellectual character. Where Oliver lives might help to explain his beliefs, but even if conspiracy theories are widespread in his neck of the woods we still need to understand why some people in his region believe them, while others don’t.

Differences in intellectual character help to explain why people in the same situation end up believing such different things. In order to think that intellectual character traits are relevant to a person’s intellectual conduct, you don’t have to think that other factors, including situational factors, are irrelevant. Intellectual character explains intellectual conduct only in conjunction with a lot of other things, including your situation and the way your brain processes information. Situationism certainly would be a problem for the view that character traits explain our conduct regardless of situational factors, but that is not a view of character anyone has ever wanted to defend.

***

In practical terms, one of the hardest things about dealing with people such as Oliver is that they are more than likely to accuse you of the same intellectual vices that you detect in them. You say that Oliver is gullible for believing his 9/11 conspiracy theory; he retorts that you are gullible for believing the conclusions of the 9/11 Commission. You say that he dismisses the official account of 9/11 because he is closed-minded; he accuses you of closed-mindedness for refusing to take conspiracy theories seriously. If we are often blind to our own intellectual vices then who are we to accuse Oliver of failing to realise that he believes his theories only because he is gullible?

These are all legitimate questions, but it’s important not to be too disconcerted by this attempt to turn the tables on you. True, no one is immune to self-ignorance. That doesn’t excuse Oliver. The fact is that his theory is no good, whereas there is every reason to believe that aircraft impacts did bring down the Twin Towers. Just because you believe the official account of what happened in 9/11 doesn’t make you gullible if there are good reasons to believe that account. Equally, being skeptical about the wilder claims of 9/11 conspiracy theorists doesn’t make you closed-minded if there are good reasons to be skeptical. Oliver is gullible because he believes things for which he has no good evidence, and he is closed-minded because he dismisses claims for which there is excellent evidence. It’s important not to fall into the trap of thinking that what counts as good evidence is a subjective matter. To say that Oliver lacks good evidence is to draw attention to the absence of eye-witness or forensic support for his theory about 9/11, and to the fact that his theory has been refuted by experts. Oliver might not accept any of this but that is, again, a reflection of his intellectual character.

The aims of education should include cultivating intellectual virtues and curtailing intellectual vices

Once you get past the idea that Oliver has somehow managed to turn the tables on you, there remains the problem of what to do about such people as him. If he is genuinely closed-minded then his mind will presumably be closed to the idea that he is closed-minded. Closed-mindedness is one of the toughest intellectual vices to tackle because it is in its nature to be concealed from those who have it. And even if you somehow get the Olivers of this world to acknowledge their own vices, that won’t necessarily make things any better. Tackling one’s intellectual vices requires more than self-knowledge. You also need to be motivated to do something about them, and actually be able to do something about them.

Should Oliver be condemned for his weaknesses? Philosophers like to think of virtues as having good motives and vices as having bad motives but Oliver’s motives needn’t be bad. He might have exactly the same motivation for knowledge as the intellectually virtuous person, yet be led astray by his gullibility and conspiracy mentality. So, both in respect of his motives and his responsibility for his intellectual vices, Oliver might not be strictly blameworthy. That doesn’t mean that nothing should be done about them or about him. If we care about the truth then we should care about equipping people with the intellectual means to arrive at the truth and avoid falsehood.

Education is the best way of doing that. Intellectual vices are only tendencies to think in certain ways, and tendencies can be countered. Our intellectual vices are balanced by our intellectual virtues, by intellectual character traits such as open-mindedness, curiosity and rigour. The intellectual character is a mixture of intellectual virtues and vices, and the aims of education should include cultivating intellectual virtues and curtailing intellectual vices. The philosopher Jason Baehr talks about ‘educating for intellectual virtues’, and that is in principle the best way to deal with people such as Oliver. A 2010 report to the University College London Council about the Abdulmutallab case came to a similar conclusion. It recommended the ‘development of academic training for students to encourage and equip them not only to think critically but to challenge unacceptable views’. The challenge is to work out how to do that.

What if Oliver is too far gone and can’t change his ways even if he wanted to? Like other bad habits, intellectual bad habits can be too deeply entrenched to change. This means living with their consequences. Trying to reason with people who are obstinately closed-minded, dogmatic or prejudiced is unlikely to be effective. The only remedy in such cases is to try to mitigate the harm their vices do to themselves and to others.

Meanwhile, those who have the gall to deliver homilies about other peoples’ intellectual vices – that includes me – need to accept that they too are likely very far from perfect. In this context, as in most others, a little bit of humility goes a long way. It’s one thing not to cave in to Oliver’s attempt to turn the tables on you, but he has a point at least to this extent: none of us can deny that intellectual vices of one sort or another are at play in at least some of our thinking. Being alive to this possibility is the mark of a healthy mind.

[thinking-outline]

Why It Pays to Be Grumpy and Bad-Tempered

Being bad-tempered and pessimistic helps you to earn more, live longer and enjoy a healthier marriage. It’s almost enough to put a smile on the dourest of faces.

Thinking Outline ; Pratay Das

On stage he’s a loveable, floppy-haired prince charming. Off camera – well let’s just say he needs a lot of personal space. He hates being a celebrity. He resents being an actor. To his ex-girlfriend Elizabeth Hurley's friends he was apparently known as ‘Grumpelstiltskin.’

Hugh Grant may be famed for being moody and a little challenging to work with. But could a grumpy attitude be the secret to his success?

The pressure to be positive has never been greater. Cultural forces have whipped up a frenzied pursuit of happiness, spawning billion-dollar book sales, a cottage industry in self-help and plastering inspirational quotes all over the internet.

Now you can hire a happiness expert, undertake training in ‘mindfulness’, or seek inner satisfaction via an app. The US army currently trains its soldiers – over a million people – in positive psychology and optimism is taught in UK schools. Meanwhile the ‘happiness index’ has become an indicator of national wellbeing to rival GDP.

The truth is, pondering the worst has some clear advantages. Cranks may be superior negotiators, more discerning decision-makers and cut their risk of having a heart attack. Cynics can expect more stable marriages, higher earnings and longer lives – though, of course, they’ll anticipate the opposite.

Good moods on the other hand come with substantial risks – sapping your drive, dimming attention to detail and making you simultaneously gullible and selfish. Positivity is also known to encourage binge drinking, overeating and unsafe sex.

Hugh Grant apparently hates every film he’s been in, even though they’ve made him $80m. Credit: Rex Features.

At the centre of it all is the notion our feelings are adaptive: anger, sadness and pessimism aren’t divine cruelty or sheer random bad luck – they evolved to serve useful functions and help us thrive.

Take anger. From Newton’s obsessive grudges to Beethoven’s tantrums – which sometimes came to blows – it seems as though visionary geniuses often come with extremely short tempers. There are plenty of examples to be found in Silicon Valley. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is famed for his angry outbursts and insults (such as “I’m sorry, did I take my stupid pills today?”) yet they haven’t stopped him building a $300 billion company.

For years, the link remained a mystery. Then in 2009 Matthijs Baas from the University of Amsterdam decided to investigate. He recruited a group of willing students and set to work making them angry in the name of science. Half the students were asked to recall something which had irritated them and write a short essay about it. “This made them a bit angrier, though they weren’t quite driven to full-blown fits of rage,” he says. The other half of the group were made to feel sad.

Next the two teams were pitched against each other in a game designed to test their creativity. They had 16 minutes to think of as many ways as possible to improve education at the psychology department. As Baas expected, the angry team produced more ideas – at least to begin with. Their contributions were also more original, repeated by less than 1 percent of the study’s participants.

Crucially, angry volunteers were better at moments of haphazard innovation, or so-called “unstructured” thinking. Let’s say you’re challenged to think about possible uses for a brick. While a systematic thinker might suggest ten different kinds of building, it takes a less structured approach to invent a new use altogether, such as turning it into a weapon.

In essence, creativity is down to how easily your mind is diverted from one thought path and onto another. In a situation requiring fight or flight, it’s easy to see how turning into a literal “mad genius” could be life-saving.

“Anger really prepares the body to mobilise resources – it tells you that the situation you’re in is bad and gives you an energetic boost to get you out of it,” says Baas.

To understand how this works, first we need to get to grips with what’s going on in the brain. Like most emotions, anger begins in the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure responsible for detecting threats to our well-being. It’s extremely efficient – raising the alarm long before the peril enters your conscious awareness.

Then it’s up to chemical signals in the brain to get you riled up. As the brain is flooded with adrenaline it initiates a burst of impassioned, energetic fury which lasts for several minutes. Breathing and heart rate accelerate and blood pressure skyrockets. Blood rushes into the extremities, leading to the distinctive red face and throbbing forehead veins people get when they’re annoyed.

Though it’s thought to have evolved primarily to prepare the body for physical aggression, this physiological response is known to have other benefits, boosting motivation and giving people the gall to take mental risks.

Beethoven was easily frustrated and would throw objects at his servants. Credit: Shizhao/Wikimedia Commons.

All these physiological changes are extremely helpful – as long as you get a chance to vent your anger by wrestling a lion or screaming at co-workers. Sure, you might alienate a few people, but afterwards your blood pressure should go back to normal. Avoiding grumpiness has more serious consequences.

The notion that repressed feelings can be bad for your health is ancient. The Greek philosopher Aristotle was a firm believer in catharsis (he invented the modern meaning of the word); viewing tragic plays, he conjectured, allowed punters to experience anger, sadness and guilt in a controlled environment. By getting it all out in the open, they could purge themselves of these feelings all in one go.

His philosophy was later adopted by Sigmund Freud, who instead championed the cathartic benefits of the therapist’s couch.

Then in 2010 a team of scientists decided to take a look. They surveyed a group of 644 patients with coronary artery disease to determine their levels of anger, suppressed anger and tendency to experience distress, and followed them for between five and ten years to see what happened next.

Over the course of the study, 20 percent experienced a major cardiac event and 9 percent percent died. Initially it looked like both anger and suppressed anger increased the likelihood of having a heart attack. But after controlling for other factors, the researchers realised anger had no impact – while suppressing it increased the chances of having a heart attack by nearly three-fold.

It’s still not known exactly why this occurs, but other studies have shown that suppressing anger can lead to chronic high blood pressure.

And not all benefits are physical: anger can help with negotiating, too. A major flashpoint for aggression is the discovery that someone does not value your interests highly enough. It involves inflicting costs – the threat of physical violence – and withdrawing benefits – loyalty, friendship, or money – to help them see their mistake.

Support for this theory comes from the faces we pull when angry. Research suggests they aren’t arbitrary movements at all, but specifically aimed at increasing our physical strength in the eyes of our opponent. Get it right and aggression can help you advance your interests and increase your status – it’s just an ancient way of bargaining.

In fact, scientists are increasingly recognising that grumpiness may be beneficial to the full range of social skills – improving language skills, memory and making us more persuasive.

Now known for donating over $28bn to charity, Bill Gates was once famously easy to anger. In fact, anger and altruism may be closely linked. Credit: Getty Images.

“Negative moods indicate we’re in a new and challenging situation and call for a more attentive, detailed and observant thinking style,” says Joseph Forgas, who has been studying how emotions affect our behaviour for nearly four decades. In line with this, research has also found that feeling slightly down enhances our awareness of social cues. Intriguingly, it also encourages people to act in a more – not less – fair way towards others.

Harsh, but Fair

Though happiness is often thought of as intrinsically virtuous, the emotion brings no such benefits. In one study, a group of volunteers was made to feel disgusted, sad, angry, fearful, happy, surprised or neutral and invited to play the “ultimatum game.”

In the game, the first player is given some money and asked how they’d like to divide it between themselves and another player. Then the second player gets to decide whether or not to accept. If they agree, the money is split how the first player proposed. If not, neither player gets any money.

The ultimatum game is often used as a test of our sense of fairness by showing whether you expect to get a 50-50 share or whether you are happy for each person to be in it for themselves. Interestingly, all negative emotions led to more rejections by the second player, which might suggest that these feelings enhance our sense of fairness and the need for everyone to be treated equally.

Reversing the set-up reveals this is not just a case of sour grapes, either. The “dictator game” has exactly the same rules except this time the second player has no say whatsoever – they simply receive whatever the first player decides not to keep. It turns out that happier participants keep more of the prize for themselves, while those in a sad mood are significantly less selfish.

“People who are feeling slightly down pay better attention to external social norms and expectations, and so they act in a fairer and just way towards others,” says Forgas.

In some situations, happiness carries far more serious risks. It’s associated with the cuddle hormone, oxytocin, which a handful of studies have shown reduces our ability to identify threats. In prehistoric times, happiness would have left our ancestors vulnerable to predators. In modern life, it prevents us paying due attention to dangers such as binge drinking, overeating and unsafe sex.

“Happiness functions like a shorthand signal that we’re safe and it’s not necessary to pay too much attention to the environment,” he says. Those in a continuous happy haze may miss important cues. Instead, they may be over-reliant on existing knowledge – leaving them prone to serious errors of judgement.

In one study, Forgas and colleagues from the University of New South Wales, Australia, put volunteers in either a happy or sad mood by screening films in the laboratory. Then he asked them to judge the truth of urban myths, such as that power lines cause leukaemia or the CIA murdered President Kennedy. Those in a good mood were less able to think sceptically and were significantly more gullible.

Next Forgas used a first-person shooter game to test if good moods might also lead people to rely on stereotyping. As he predicted, those in a good mood were more likely to aim at targets wearing turbans.

Of all the positive emotions, optimism about the future may have the most ironic effects. Like happiness, positive fantasies about the future can be profoundly de-motivating. “People feel accomplished, they relax, and they do not invest the necessary effort to actually realise these positive fantasies and daydreams,” says Gabriele Oettingen from New York University.

Graduates who fantasize about success at work end up earning less, for instance. Patients who daydream about getting better make a slower recovery. In numerous studies, Oettingen has shown that the more wishful your thinking, the less likely any of it is to come true. “People say ‘dream it and you will get it’ – but that’s problematic,” she says. Optimistic thoughts may also put the obese off losing weight and make smokers less likely to plan to quit.

Defensive Pessimism

Perhaps most worryingly, Oettingen believes the risks may operate on a societal level, too. When she compared articles in the newspaper USA Today with economic performance a week or a month later, she found that the more optimistic the content, the more performance declined. Next she looked at presidential inaugural addresses – and found that more positive speeches predicted a lower employment rate and GDP in during their time in office.

Combine these unnerving findings with optimism bias – the tendency to believe you’re less at risk of things going wrong than other people – and you’re asking for trouble. Instead, you might want to consider throwing away your rose-tinted spectacles and adopting a glass half-empty outlook. “Defensive pessimism” involves employing Murphy’s Law, the cosmic inevitability that whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. By anticipating the worst, you can be prepared when it actually happens.

It works like this. Let’s say you’re giving a talk at work. All you have to do is think of the worst possible outcomes – tripping up on your way to the stage, losing the memory stick which contains your slides, computer difficulties, awkward questions (truly accomplished pessimists will be able to think of many, many more) – and hold them in your mind. Next you need to think of some solutions.

Psychologist Julie Norem from Wellesley College, Massachusetts, is an expert pessimist. “I’m a little clumsy, especially when I’m anxious, so I make sure to wear low-heeled shoes. I get there early to scope out the stage and make sure that there aren’t cords or other things to trip over. I typically have several backups for my slides: I can give the talk without them if necessary, I email a copy to the organizers, carry a copy on a flash drive, and bring my own laptop to use…” she says. Only the paranoid survive, as they say.

So the next time someone tells you to “cheer up” – why not tell them how you’re improving your sense of fairness, reducing unemployment and saving the world economy? You’ll be having the last laugh – even if it is a world-weary, cynical snort.

This post originally appeared on BBC Future and was published August 10, 2016. This article is republished here with permission.

[thinking-outline]

#thout #thinkingoutline

“I Take Responsibility” and the Limits of Celebrity Activism

The current cultural moment is one whose urgency feels particularly ill-suited to the sort of vapid pageantry on display in the video made to promote the “I Take Responsibility” initiative.Source: Confluential Films / YouTube

Hollywood is perhaps one of the last places to look for inspiration—practical, emotional, or otherwise—in times of crisis. Still, our gilded class’s response to the societal shitstorm that has dominated our minds and screens for the last four months has felt notably unfastened. In April, the comedian and talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres made headlines when she joked that life while quarantined in her ten-thousand-square-foot Beverly Hills mansion felt like “being in jail.” The same week, the Times reported on the four hundred inmates being held at Rikers Island for minor parole violations, despite a worsening pandemic. The inmates included Raymond Rivera, a fifty-five-year-old man who, after having his case delayed several months, contracted covid-19 in jail and died the day after state officials lifted the warrant against him. As public sentiment has turned from coronavirus-induced fear to sadness and anger following the tragic killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, the celebrity response has ranged from milquetoast to head-scratching.

In a video shared to Instagram on June 2nd, the movie heartthrob turned Silicon Valley financier Ashton Kutcher choked back tears as he recounted a pre-bedtime conversation that he had with his two young children. He explained how his son wanted to be read to first, but Kutcher told him that his sister would go first because “for some boys, girls don’t get to go at all.” The story was meant to serve as a poignant and instructive allegory for the scores of Instagram users who had commented “All Lives Matter” under a recent post of his where he had opined “BLM.” Around the same time, Virgil Abloh, the artistic director of menswear for Louis Vuitton and the founder and C.E.O. of Off-White, was being memed into a fine dust after posting a screenshot of his paltry fifty-dollar donation to a bail fund started by the Miami art collective (F)empower. And, on Thursday, a two-minute video for an initiative bluntly titled “I Take Responsibility” joined the ever-growing canon of the unsought celebrity P.S.A. The video features a coalition of white actors and entertainers asserting their culpability in perpetuating anti-black racism. Filmed in a sombre black-and-white and scored with saccharine piano, the spot shows Sarah Paulson, Stanley Tucci, Kesha, and others vowing no longer to “turn a blind eye” or “allow racist, hurtful words . . . to be uttered in my presence” and “to stand against hate.” The Web site for the initiative allows visitors to decide which vice they feel most guilty of (“Saying racism doesn’t exist,” “not being inclusive,” etc.) and to “make it better today” by pledging to do things like “donate to families affected [by racism]” before directing them to various organizations and petitions. Elsewhere, many celebrities simply invoked proverbial, and often literal, “prayer hands” emoji (🙏)—a de-facto “get well soon” to society and all its ills.

The missed notes have been particularly grating in the pop-music world, where many stars have built careers and amassed huge profits working within black musical traditions and selling their work to black audiences. As black communities are being disproportionately decimated by the coronavirus and black people continue to die at the hands of law enforcement, there are some who feel that figures like Drake should use their gigantic platforms to do more than, say, offer a fan the chance to fly on his private jet. (On June 1st, Drake was challenged by his fellow Toronto artist Mustafah the Poet to match a four-hundred-dollar donation to a black bail-fund network. The rapper reportedly replied, “Say less, brother,” and posted a donation receipt for a hundred thousand dollars.)

A similar desire to push industry leaders toward more decisive action in combatting anti-black racism is likely how #TheShowMustBePaused was first conceived. Led by Jamila Thomas and Brianna Agyemang—two black women who have worked in executive roles at major record labels—the initiative was meant to be an industry-wide day of observance for “the long-standing racism and inequality that exists from the boardroom to the boulevard.” According to the stated mission on the project’s Web site, the women hoped that this day of reflection would be a positive first step in the effort to “hold accountable the industry at large . . . including major corporations and their partners who benefit from the efforts, struggles and successes of Black people.” On Tuesday, June 2nd, scores of artists posted black squares on their Instagram feeds, often alongside the hashtag #BlackoutTuesday. Nearly all the major music labels observed the blackout, and explained, with varying levels of specificity, what a continued commitment to this mission would look like at their respective companies. The trend was quickly picked up by many people outside the industry, too. And, somewhat ironically, the flood of black-square posts ended up saturating the #blacklivesmatter tag on Instagram, displacing resources and information that some organizers had been compiling for years. By Wednesday, it was back to business as usual on many artists’ feeds—after all, there were deluxe-edition albums to promote.

The current cultural moment is one whose urgency feels particularly ill-suited to the sort of vapid pageantry that typically constitutes the “socially conscious” arm of a celebrity’s public-relations repertoire. Given all the vested corporate interests that celebrities have, and the timeworn tradition of rewarding famous people for the appearance of political integrity more than its actual presence, it’s wishful to expect every musician with more than a million followers to be schooled in the perils of systemic racial inequality, much less to be equipped to speak publicly about it. In fact, it would probably be in our collective best interest that not all of them did. Still, one hopes that, among the faction of the highly followed and highly influential who were jumping to post black squares and vague sentence fragments, there are some who could use their visibility to do more. The increased pressure on artists to monetize their personal brands and the subsequent professionalization of social media have turned these solipsistic Internet spaces into de-facto storefronts for mini corporations. Sadly, it seems that many of the famous names behind these accounts have also adopted the sort of risk-averse, politically opaque rhetoric favored by Fortune 500 companies—opting for tepid platitudes and lazy hashtag activism in lieu of more resolute (and potentially alienating) public displays.

The tiptoeing of the entertainment industry’s biggest names has been made all the more conspicuous by the activity of their less popular peers. Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, and now in the wake of the George Floyd murder and other police-related violence, smaller and independent artists have used their reach to compile and disseminate resources like recommended viewing and reading lists (flawed as they may be), to amplify the work of organizers, and to publicize bail funds to donate to in support of the many protesters who have been arrested in cities across the country, and they have gone to protests themselves. Corpus Family Mutual Aid Fund, the initiative started by the New York creative collective affiliated with the Queens hardcore band Show Me the Body, has amassed more than twenty-two thousand dollars in just over a month, with the bulk of proceeds going to members of the New York City D.I.Y. music scene who have been financially affected by the coronavirus pandemic.

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Of course, not all of the ultra-famous have blown hot air. Various high-profile figures have disrupted their seemingly endless promotion cycles and retrofitted their social channels to speak pointedly about the current moment. One such figure is “Star Wars” ’s John Boyega. Despite apparent pushback from some of his fans, the British actor, who is of Nigerian descent, has been very outspoken in disparaging racism and brutal policing and has voiced support for protests around the world. On June 3rd, a video of an impassioned Boyega addressing the crowd at a large Black Lives Matter demonstration in London circulated widely online. Elsewhere, figures such as the Chicago rapper Noname, whose popular online book club has highlighted titles by Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire, and Octavia Butler, have continued to use their platforms to galvanize their following and espouse their unequivocal beliefs. Some celebrities who in the past had been perhaps overzealous in exploiting their soapbox (ahem, Kanye) even seem to have stepped back and taken a more measured approach this time around.

What shouldn’t be overlooked is the work that plain old non-celebrity people have been doing. Within the past few weeks, funds for, among other causes, pretrial bail for trans people being held in New York City jails, George Floyd’s young daughter Gianna, and Ramsey Orta—the man who filmed the murder of his friend Eric Garner in 2014 and was released from prison this year—have been flooded with contributions. Bail-fund organizers in particular have seen an unprecedented spike in support in recent weeks. Many people have been posting receipts of their donations and challenging friends in their network to match them.

What these examples show is not that every single celebrity has to commit to leading the revolution but what can happen if these platforms were treated less like public-relations buildouts and more like the powerful communication channels and resource vectors that they are. Ideological fluffiness on the part of people with huge online followings can be at its best a wasted opportunity and at its worst deleterious to more substantive activism happening on social media. A #blacklivesmatter post on Jennifer Lopez’s Instagram page reaches an audience larger than those of most regional television stations. And although reposting an aerial video of a street mural is nice, it lacks the efficacy of a bail-fund link to free those arrested while marching across it.