This week Oliver Burkeman journalist and author of “Meditations for Mortals” discusses the complexities of trying to be perfect in an imperfect world. Accepting our limitations, he says, is a pathway to liberation and happiness.

Last week’s MR …[This week Kate Murphy, journalist and author of “You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why It Matters,” sheds some light on the value of true friendships, why quality is often more important than quantity and why it is so important to give time and space to the friendships we truly care about. ]

​This episode with Oliver Burkeman was originally broadcast October 27, 2024

Journalist and author Oliver Burkeman discusses the complexities of happiness, well-being, and productivity — emphasizing the futility of seeking a single solution.

Burkeman offers guidance on why we shouldn’t sacrifice the very essence of living in search of perfection and doing it all. Treasuring those simple moments in daily life, which doesn’t mean settling for less, Burkemans says, “is a precondition for a really full life.”

Delve deeper into life, philosophy, and what makes us human by joining the Life Examined discussion group on Facebook.

This week Kate Murphy, journalist and author of “You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why It Matters,” sheds some light on the value of true friendships, why quality is often more important that quantity and why it is so important to give time and space to the friendships we truly care about.

​This episode with Kate Murphy was originally broadcast June 5th, 2021

As the years go on and as science and research advances, we’re learning more and more about how animals are able to use sound and vibrations to effectively communicate with each other. Elephants, for example, can communicate through seismic vibrations felt through the pads of their feet.

So what do we know about the nature of sound? How has it defined who we are and how we live? What role does it play in the lives of hearing individuals, deaf individuals, and everyone in between?

In his book Experiencing Sound: The Sensation of Being author Lawrence Kramer writes that “sound is an agent of transformation.” Throughout human history, “sound is one of the fundamental phenomena that links us to the sense of inhabiting and sharing a world.” Of all the human senses, contrary to what we might think, sound is “a uniquely empowered form of sensory experience that links us to our lives and our being more intimately than sight does.”

“Sound is always inside us as well as outside us, and heightened experiences of sound really take that vibratory presence and amplify it so that our most intense experiences of sound are really whole body experiences.”

Carolyn Korsmeyer, research professor of philosophy at the University at Buffalo and author of several books including, Making Sense of Taste; Food and Philosophy explains why there’s so much more to taste than flavor. “Taste,” Korsmeyer says, “deserves greater respect and attention.” In addition to providing physical pleasure, eating and drinking bear symbolic and aesthetic value in the human experience.

“One of the prejudices against taste is that it's all in your mouth,” Korsmeyer shares. “It's only about the flavor that is happening in your taste buds right now. But it is usually outer-directed as well. I am not just tasting, I'm tasting a strawberry. I'm not just drinking, I'm drinking a Coca-Cola — or a beer, or a glass of wine, [etc.] So taste, people think of it as being entirely subjective. By that, I think they mean it's just yours, but it really isn't.”

She also talks about the evocative nature of the human touch. Korsmeyer argues that touch, along with being psychologically beneficial, can offer a deeper and perhaps even spiritual connection. “When you are in the presence of something very old, or very special, or [something] that belonged to someone whom you have an attachment to and you touch it, you are, in a sense, feeling that age. That specialness, that person … There's a proximity and an intimacy that touch permits that I think is often overlooked.”

Delve deeper into life, philosophy, and what makes us human by joining the Life Examined discussion group on Facebook.

This week Judson Brewer psychiatrist, neuroscientist at Brown University and author of “Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind” addresses how we can recognize certain behaviors that trigger anxiety disorders. Continually worrying feeds into an anxiety habit loop and the more we worry, the more anxious we become.

The amazing sights of the vast African savannas are familiar to many of us through the lens of superb documentary films and videos. Though there are many animals we watch with awe, there’s one rather peculiar looking animal that captivates the heart — the elephant.

So much about elephants make them intriguing creatures: The oversized ears, the unique nature of their trunks (which, by the way, have more muscles than an entire human body), and perhaps most of all the fact that they’re a lot like us. Elephants are loving, loyal, intelligent, family oriented, and great at teamwork.

Elephant scientist and author Caitlin O’Connell has spent the last 30 years in Namibia’s Etosha National Park studying elephants. Amongst the many things O’Connell’s observed is the value and effort elephants place on greeting, playing, and communicating with each other. These are behaviors which O’Connell has observed could help us understand ourselves better.

“The most powerful thing that struck me in the beginning,” O’Connell says, “is the importance of greeting. They may have only been separated for a few minutes, because the matriarch is older and slower, and she took a little longer to get to the waterhole than the rest of the group. All of a sudden [once she arrives] they have a huge greeting ceremony for her. Each one will place their trunk in her mouth and they get all excited and flap their ears. Also, for elephants, part of the greeting is urinating and defecating because they get so excited … But just seeing all of these rituals that we can see in our own lives and the importance of them, it's always a reminder to me that, ‘wow, we take some of these things for granted, that they don't.’”

O’Connell, a conservation biologist at Harvard Medical School and award-winning author of Wild Rituals: 10 Lessons Animals Can Teach Us About Connection, Community, and Ourselves, has specifically focused on researching the ways elephants communicate with each other — including the intriguing ground-based vibrations of an elephant’s “rumble.”

“For a long time we knew that elephants emit these low frequency rumbles in the range of 20 hertz for a female, 10 hertz for a male,” O’Connell tells us. “They communicate in this way so that [their sounds] travel long distances … Those signals are something that they use to coordinate.”

Perhaps the most touching and moving ritual O’Connell describes, is how one elephant will grieve the loss of a family member: “They would touch the bones in a way that it wasn't like a salt lick — like [the way that] you see some animals sucking on bones of other species — [theirs] was more a tactile exploration. They would take the end of their trunk and press it down [for example] on the hip of this individual [elephant].”

“He [the elephant] would take the sand, a little bit moist as it hasn't been that long since this [other] elephant passed away, and he would take the sand and press it against his chest and press it behind his ears in such a delicate way that it was almost as if he was trying to carry him. It was really compelling. I just have never seen that before.”

This week Peter Wohlleben, renowned German forester and author of “The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate,” talks about the age-old connection between humans and the forest and encourages us to take notice. Wohlleben says that research indicates sitting under a tree or ‘forest bathing’ is beneficial for our health - it can reduce blood pressure and help us to stay calm and relax.

Why do we get bored? And what exactly happens to us when we experience boredom? Like joy and anxiety, boredom is a state of mind. Being bored does not mean you’re lazy and it has little to do with external factors like new cars, gadgets, or experiences.

James Danckert, professor of psychology and director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Area at the University of Waterloo, has been studying why we get bored. He studies the reasons behind why boredom occurs, alongside the effects that boredom can have on our minds and the larger purpose that it can serve. Danckert says, “people confuse boredom with the couch potato, some sort of laziness and inaction, but it can't be further from the truth. When we're bored, we're really quite motivated and we want to be doing something… we just can't figure out what.”

The definition that Danckert feels perfectly captures what boredom is comes from Leo Tolstoy in Anna Karenina. Tolstoy describes boredom as “the desire for desires.”

And regardless of how active or engaged a person is, the feelings of boredom are familiar to most as a “restless, agitated experience.” “The key,” Danckert says, “is to recognize those signs early on, to calm down, and think of some options out of it … You need to let the little things that normally would bore you suddenly thrill you.”

And Danckert says that “boredom is often associated with a lack of meaning.” What we feel is that, “what you're doing is not meaningful, or your life doesn't feel quite meaningful to you and that's going to be a key component of being bored.”

“To ensure that you don't get bored,” Danckert says, “you don't have to start pursuing a cure for cancer, you don't have to do anything grand, you don't have to choose an activity that somehow is momentous — you just have to choose something that matters to you, and that could be big [or] small.”

Kids most often associate boredom with having nothing to do, but Danckert says there is a good deal of work to suggest that “we have over-scheduled our kids and that makes them more anxious than you might imagine.” “Kids need their downtime,” Danckert says. When we overschedule them, we are “taking away their agency.”

Danckert also suggests that parents do too much: “When kids come to us and they say that they're bored, are we doing the right thing in terms of responding to that? Of course, you don't want to give them full control because they're kids, they'll make big mistakes, and you want to have some safety net around them. But over-scheduling is not a solution to boredom.”

Danckert also highlights the fact that boredom can be the root of many maladaptive behaviors:

“There's lots and lots of instances where aggressive, violent, and abhorrent behaviors are blamed on boredom. But I would suggest that we can't really blame boredom for those kinds of things. I think boredom is a call to action. We have to take ownership of what actions we choose in response to boredom.” People who are prone to boredom,” Danckert says, “are also a little bit lower in self-control. They don't have great control over their actions and their emotions, and so those people might be more likely to choose those kinds of maladaptive and abhorrent responses.”

“Boredom isn't likely to make you a genius sculptor, painter, or guitar player any more than it's likely to turn you into a killer. So what we do with boredom is really up to us.”

Ultimately the feeling of boredom is a call to action, it highlights a need to be agentic. What we decide to do when we feel this way is ultimately up to us, but a tip that Danckert offers is to find the little things that matter: “Celebrate those little things and engage with them with intentionality.”

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