AddictiveWritings
Bio
I’m a young creative writer and artist from Germany who has a fable for anything strange or odd.^^
Stories (51/0)
The five big questions of happiness research
Where do the happiest people live? Economic crises, wars, violence, hunger, poverty, discrimination -because of such circumstances, it is obvious that happiness is not equally distributed around the world. As part of the "World Happiness Report," scientists have been regularly investigating people's life satisfaction for several years on behalf of the United Nations. According to the "World Happiness Report 2019," the best chances of happiness are in Finland, where people are the most satisfied overall in an international comparison of 157 countries. The inhabitants of Denmark, Norway, and Iceland are almost as happy. They are followed (in descending order) by the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, New Zealand, Canada, and Austria. Germany still manages 17th place, with Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan bringing up the rear on the happiness scale.
By AddictiveWritings3 years ago in Longevity
Five things you should know about psychologically good gifts
It's not the price that counts Studies show that a gift does not automatically go down better with the recipient if we dig deep into our pockets. Nevertheless, many people apparently believe this. This is shown, for example, by a study conducted by Francis Flynn and Gabrielle Adams at Stanford University. The scientists asked their subjects to imagine that they were giving a friend either a CD or an iPod as a high school graduation present. Subsequently, the test participants were asked to assess, among other things, how happy their friend would be about the gift. On average, the subjects clearly thought the more expensive iPod was the better gift.
By AddictiveWritings3 years ago in Humans
How plant-meth from Afghanistan is conquering the world
A group of men sits in a living room in the township of Khayelitsha in Cape Town, South Africa. We're talking on WhatsApp in a video call when one of them holds up a small baggie full of white crystalline powder in front of the screen.
By AddictiveWritings3 years ago in FYI
A treacherous black box
Dean Pomerleau can still remember the first time he struggled with the black box problem. The year was 1991, and Pomerleau was trying to teach a computer to drive. It's become more commonplace now, thanks to research on autonomous vehicles. At the time, it was a true pioneering act.
By AddictiveWritings3 years ago in Futurism
Virtual games, real drugs
The stakes are high in the final rounds of major Counter-Strike tournaments. The teams face hours of competition, they have to think strategically and show skill. They still have the battles of the last rounds in their bones, not to mention the hours of daily training to prepare. If even one player loses concentration, the glory of victory may be gone - and with it prize money and lucrative sponsorship and advertising contracts. It's no wonder that it's tempting to give your brain a boost. Ritalin gives your gray cells the decisive kick, you hear behind closed doors. Or: Take Adderall instead, it makes you fit.
By AddictiveWritings3 years ago in Psyche
From intoxicant to remedy
On a sunny day in 2015, Kirk Rutter took the Tube to Hammersmith Hospital in London, hoping to finally get rid of his depression. In the years before, he had struggled on and off with isolated episodes of illness. Since the death of his mother in 2011, the end of a relationship and a car accident the following year, it had become particularly bad. It felt like his brain was stuck in an endless loop, repeating the same negative thoughts over and over like a mantra: "'Everything I do turns to shit.' I really believed that," he recalls.
By AddictiveWritings3 years ago in Potent
Design for the soul MDMA (Ecstasy): The drug of the party people
Developed by the Merck pharmaceutical company and launched in 1914 as an appetite suppressant (after all, it was wartime...), it never became popular as such. After various stages of distribution - in the US military as a truth serum, in psychotherapies, where it may still be used in Switzerland today - and oblivion, it was discovered in the 80s by the nuclei of the forming rave movement and in the 90s by 'Stern', 'Focus', and other media as the hip drug of the decade. Since 1986 it falls under the narcotics law in the FRG - a fate it should successively share with its close friends and relatives like MDA, MMDA, MDEA, etc... As part of the hegemonic campaigns against the oh-so-unpredictable danger of the so-called "designer drugs", everything chemically reminiscent of ecstasy was prophylactically banned by administrative act.
By AddictiveWritings3 years ago in Potent
The dematerialization of matter goes too far
Richard Feynman once remarked, when asked which physical statement contains the most information in the least words: “I am convinced that this would be the atomic hypothesis (…), which says that all things are made of atoms. That material things consist of atoms and that these consist of further particles is today part of the canon of the naturalistic understanding of the world. Now, of course, a strange epistemological uncertainty relation is increasingly noticeable in this naturalism. The deeper the understanding of matter, the more the concept of matter evaporates.
By AddictiveWritings3 years ago in Futurism
No smoking, no sex — and always fold in the side mirrors
So someone had taken the trouble to have forms made to call drivers to order. “Park properly and become a valued member of society,” it says in the fine print. At the moment I’m still worthless because I haven’t folded my mirrors. The author, however, wants to help me to social advancement by giving them up. I’m really glad because then I won’t have to fold them either.
By AddictiveWritings3 years ago in Motivation
Why do we see the world stable even when we move our eyes?
While reading this text, your eyes jump over the line, pause briefly, and then move on to the next jump. Such eye movements — so-called saccades — do not only occur when reading. We humans and other primates perform them two to three times per second, usually without being aware of it. Most remarkable, however, is that we do not perceive the resulting movement of the image on our retina. Rather, the environment appears stable. How can this be?
By AddictiveWritings3 years ago in FYI
The First Theory of Evolution in Religious Studies
Back to the origins The works of Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) are undoubtedly among the first drafts that had a lasting influence on religious studies. Tylor’s first major scientific work entitled “Researches into the Early History of Mankind” was written in the early 1860s, a period in which Darwin’s “Origin of Species” set the framework for the discussion of evolutionary processes in biology, while Spencer’s “System of Synthetic Philosophy” focused on the description and analysis of the social development of mankind. During this time, public interest turned increasingly to ethnological topics. Not only the extremely popular travelogues of Wallace, Darwin, and others and the formulation of the theory of evolution had contributed to this. The rapid growth of ethnographic data, but above all the discovery of the remains of fossil humans and their artifacts, as well as speculations about the possible age of the human race, had drawn the attention of science and the lay public to the question of the origins of cultures.
By AddictiveWritings3 years ago in Humans