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Scientists are always chasing the elusive secret to happiness: is it to do with quitting Facebook, speaking Spanish, or having sex more often? Or perhaps we can trace it to maintaining close relationships
and keeping healthy? A new study has found that valuing your time over
your money can help you feel more content with the hand you've been
dealt. Researchers from the University of British Columbia in Canada recruited more than 4,600 participants, and found
an almost even split between those who prioritised their time and those
who prioritised their wealth, but the older participants were more
likely to favour time over money. The team also found that those who put
time first tended to be happier overall. "It appears that people have a stable preference for valuing their
time over making more money, and prioritising time is associated with
greater happiness," said lead researcher Ashley Whillans.
"Having more free time is likely more important for happiness than
having more money. Even giving up a few hours of a paycheck to volunteer
at a food bank may have more bang for your buck in making you feel
happier." Despite the large sample size, the study does have its
limitations: it doesn't include people living on the poverty line, for
example, who may not have the luxury of prioritising anything other than
money. But the research did find that gender, income, and marital
status had no effect on whether participants placed time over money or
the other way around. Some of the questions involved in the study used real-world
examples to gauge the predispositions of volunteers: whether they would
prefer a more expensive apartment with a longer commute to work or a
less flashy pad and a quick commute, for example. Some were asked to
choose between a job with long hours and good pay or one with shorter
hours and a lower starting salary. Not that a little bit of extra cash can't make you happy - it sure can, and previous research has confirmed it, but not if that pay rise is fleeting or takes up more of your time. The study has now been published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. The results suggest that cherishing the moments you have to enjoy
yourself is more likely to bring you happiness than counting your
pennies, but don't expect it to extend your life expectancy. A recent study of
1 million women in the UK from the University of Oxford found that
happiness in and of itself doesn't affect how long you're going to live
for. As Peter Dockrill reported for us back in December:
"After taking into account considerations in the women’s lives such
as smoking and ill health - including clinical depression and anxiety,
which are distinct from general unhappiness - plus lifestyle and
socio-economic factors, the researchers found that the death rate among
those who were unhappy was the same as the death rate for those who said
they were happy."
So don't get sucked into working extra hours - clock off and enjoy yourself while you can. By David Nield With many thanks to Science Alert.
LONG dismissed as a waste of time, doodling is getting new respect. Recent research in neuroscience, psychology and design shows that
doodling can help people stay focused, grasp new concepts and retain
information. A blank page also can serve as an extended playing field
for the brain, allowing people to revise and improve on creative
thoughts and ideas.
Doodles are spontaneous marks that can take
many forms, from abstract patterns or designs to images of objects,
landscapes, people or faces. Some people doodle by retracing words or
letters, but doodling doesn’t include note-taking.
“It’s a
thinking tool,” says Sunni Brown, an Austin, Texas, author of a new
book, “The Doodle Revolution.” It can affect how we process information
and solve problems, she says. Doodling in meetings and lectures helps ease tension for Samantha
Wilson, a high-school teacher and graduate student from Southborough,
Massachusetts. Drawing squiggly patterns that are “very vegetal,
scrolling and organic,” with shaded blocks and spirals in red and blue
pen on paper, also allays boredom, she says.
“It looks like I’m
spacing out when I’m doodling, but I’m actually making my thoughts come
together, solidifying my own ideas,” Ms Wilson says. Doodling recently
helped her come up with a theme for a paper in a graduate-school course
she is taking, she says.
Scientists in the past thought doodles
provided a window into the doodler’s psyche, but the idea isn’t
supported by research, says a 2011 study in The Lancet, a medical
journal. Some researchers suspect doodling may help the brain
remain active by engaging its “default networks” — regions that maintain
a baseline of activity in the cerebral cortex when outside stimuli are
absent, the Lancet study says.
People who were encouraged to
doodle while listening to a list of people’s names being read were able
to remember 29 per cent more of the information on a surprise quiz
later, according to a 2009 study in Applied Cognitive Psychology.
Jesse
Prinz draws people’s heads to help himself pay attention during
lectures and speeches at conferences he attends. The head usually has
“something happening to it — an animal on top of it or something coming
out of it,” says Dr Prinz, a distinguished professor of philosophy at
the City University of New York Graduate Center.
When Dr Prinz
returns to the doodle later, “I can reconstruct a lot of what I heard”
in the lecture. He compares it to a postcard: a traveller may forget
specifics about a trip, but “if you look at that postcard, a lot of
things that aren’t depicted in it come back to you,” he says.
Ms
Brown, the author, says doodling provides an alternate route to learning
for some people. Her professional work includes training company
managers to translate ideas and concepts into sketches and drawings in
order to spark ideas and improve communication.
Michiko Maruyama, a
medical-school student, says she writes down key words during class
lectures and later draws “daily doodles” that bring together what she
learned.
Ms Maruyama, who attends the University of British
Columbia in Vancouver, says she fills gaps in her understanding while
she draws images of gastric secretions, hernias and other subjects of
study.
“It’s not until I doodle that I think about how everything
comes together. I find out what I know and what I don’t know,” she says.
When she stopped doodling for a week, her grades went down.
The
appearance of a doodle can stimulate ideas for improvement, according to
a 2014 study by Gabriela Goldschmidt, a professor emeritus of
architecture at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa and
a researcher on learning techniques of design. A doodle can spark a
“dialogue between the mind and the hand holding a pencil and the eyes
that perceive the marks on paper,” the study says.
The study
discussed an architecture student who became stalled in his efforts to
design a new kindergarten and started a habitual doodle he found
pleasurable — writing his signature over and over.
The student
soon began to see between the letters of the doodle the outline of a
layout for the kindergarten’s three activity spaces. He drew
progressively larger versions that eventually became an architectural
sketch, the study says.
A doodle also can express emotions too
complex for words. Ten doodlers in a four-week study were equipped by
researchers to share their sketches on social media, using digital pens
and Bluetooth-equipped phones.
Many of the participants’ doodles
expressed complex emotions they wouldn’t have shared via written posts
or texts, according to the study, presented in 2011 at a Stockholm
conference on human-computer interaction.
One 37-year-old teacher,
the father of a newborn baby, drew a frazzled-looking brain to convey a
feeling of being overwhelmed. A 27-year-old graduate student drew a
towering obelisk looming over a childlike figure, to convey the pressure
she felt over a deadline for a paper, according to the study, which was
led by Lisa Cowan, who earned a Ph.D. in computer science at University
of California San Diego and now works as a software developer in
Mammoth Lakes, California.
The opportunity to doodle “changed the
way people expressed their feelings,” says Nadir Weibel, a research
assistant professor in computer science at UCSD and a co-author of the
study. “Their pictures communicated more than just a text or a regular
photo. They were more personal, more intimate.”
Doodling doesn’t
work for all tasks. People who were asked to view and remember a
collection of images struggled at the task if they were asked to doodle
at the same time, according to a 2012 study published by the University
of British Columbia.
The likely reason: doodlers’
visual-processing ability was split between two visual tasks, says the
study’s author, Elaine Chan, a former psychology student at the
university who is now a researcher at a Vancouver children’s hospital.
Put another way, when doodling and another task use the same cognitive pathways, “you have a traffic jam,” says Ms Brown.
By Sue Shellenbarger
Above: Peggy Lee - The Doodlin' Song With thanks to The Australian
