To see your home city anew, try this

A traffic light showing a green transgender symbol in front of a historic city square with statues and buildings.

One of my favourite walking routes though London goes from Waterloo Bridge to the London Eye, across the Thames to Big Ben, up Whitehall, and on to Soho for much-needed refreshment. But this spring, when a friend was visiting me from the United States, something happened on that familiar walk that made me see my home city with fresh eyes.

At a crossing by Trafalgar Square, she stopped in her tracks, though the lights were green. ‘What’s that?’ She pointed to the light flashing, not with the usual walking man, but with two female symbols, intertwined. ‘Oh that,’ I said shrugging. ‘The gay traffic lights of London.’ They’d gone up years ago, for the annual Pride Festival, and were so popular, they’d stayed – a little like my friend and I, who had a blast running back and forth between crossings so she could photograph all the LGBTQ+ symbols. Though she lives in San Francisco with her wife, these lights tickled her pink – and now they had the same effect on me.

This is an example of what the social psychologist Clayton Critcher at the University of California, Berkley calls the ‘vicarious construal effect’. By seeing an experience through someone else’s eyes, you can capture a feeling you’ve lost – or one you never even had. In an interview, Critcher said: ‘Simply trying to think about what someone else might see actually changes the way we see and interpret what we’re doing, changes the emotions we feel.’

This effect works whether rediscovering your hometown or more fully understanding another’s lived experience. So next time you notice yourself becoming oblivious to the place where you live, try to see it through the eyes of a visitor. Or better still, invite one over and share their perspective.

by Elena Seymenliyska

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For looking at the world with the wide eyes of a child, check out the Psyche Guide ‘How to Revive Your Sense of Wonder’ (2022) by Frank Keil.

And for more on the joys of exploring with an open mind, follow the Guide ‘How to Wander’ (2023) by Jordan Fisher Smith.


As if

Pencil sketches of six faces and profiles on paper including bearded men and a woman with hair tied back.

Two puny words shoulder a substantial, if diffuse, philosophical outlook: as if. Epicurus was perhaps the first to put this unexceptional construction to good use. He felt that life was about attaining whatever passing happiness we might find, while avoiding as much pain and suffering as we can. In neither endeavour will we be very successful, but one strategy he suggested was to adopt values that increase our joy and diminish our sorrow, and live as if those values were actually true, though they may not be.

So began the history of as if, which flows through the Western tradition, intermittently emerging in the thought of thinkers from disparate schools. The idea, at bottom, that we should embrace beliefs or stories that may not be, strictly speaking, true but are to some extent useful or good. In the 18th century, Immanuel Kant held that we must act as if we have free will, even though science might one day demonstrate that we do not. The American philosopher William James’s pragmatism leans heavily upon living as if certain things were true, including meaningful human lives. The most prominent expositor was Hans Vaihinger, who attempted in his book The Philosophy of ‘As If’ (1911) to show that life is lived atop a teetering tower of ever-changing fictions.

All this resonates with my understanding of the way we tumble through existence. The phrase captures the latent but necessary hopes that get us over the numberless obstacles to living well and living happily – even if those hopes are, when we get down to it, preposterous. So, if it’s a question between truth and goodness, then I’ll take the latter and chuck the former. I’m satisfied to live as if it’s all worth something – whether or not, in the last analysis, it really is.

by Sam Dresser

FIND OUT MORE

Read Tereza Matějčková’s short but harrowing piece about the philosopher Emil Utitz, the Theresienstadt ghetto, and his reflections on ‘as if’.

For a contemporary take on the work that this philosophical outlook is doing today, this review by Thomas Kelly of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s book As If (2017) is a good place to start.


An unlikely meeting that shaped history

Black and white photo of soldiers and damaged tanks under trees in a wartime setting. One soldier crouches in the foreground.

In 1917, France was on the brink of calamity. The great incinerator known as the Western Front consumed young men as voraciously as ever; supplies dwindled; mutinous unrest percolated in the ranks. Desperate for American intervention to tip the balance against the Central Powers, the French prime minister Aristide Briand pled for the US president Woodrow Wilson to commit his huge country to the war. But Wilson, messianic and haughty, bided his time.

Briand huddled with his ministers. They needed a new tactic, something unexpected. What if, someone bravely suggested, we send a philosopher to Washington, DC and see what he can do?

That philosopher was Henri Bergson, an extraordinarily popular thinker whose public lectures on time, memory, and the élan vital packed auditoriums with swooning fans: he appeared to imbue life with the creativity and mystery that science seemed to diminish. Passionately patriotic, he accepted the mission and took a liner to Washington.

Black and white photo of a man in a suit, Henri Bergson, sitting in a library with bookshelves and a desk filled with papers.

Henri Bergson in his study. Courtesy the BnF, Paris

Bergson was granted an audience with the president, whose self-love was most intense when it came to his own intellect. They talked for hours. Bergson played his cards well: he appealed to Wilson’s desire to strut the world stage as the bringer of peace, the founder of the League of Nations. They plumbed Bergson’s philosophy, which he said implied that the Germans were the enemies of civilisation. A few weeks later, the United States was at war.

I don’t want to give too much credit to Bergson – and I don’t think the US should have joined the war – though at least one Wilson adviser said that Bergson gave the president the push he needed. This little-known story of the philosopher and the president is remarkable: it is perhaps the most important diplomatic intervention by a philosopher, and a reminder, as if we needed it, of the extraordinary consequences of unlikely meetings.

by Sam Dresser

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Well worth a read is the wonderful Aeon essay ‘Henri Bergson, Celebrity’ (2019) by Emily Herring on the philosopher’s immense popularity, particularly with women.

To read (a lot) more about the meeting between Bergson and Wilson, the paper ‘The Philosopher and the Rooster’ (2020) by Geert Somsen has everything you need.


NOTE TO SELFCAREGIVING

Caregivers have more youthful brains

A man with a beard sitting on a sofa with two young children, one resting on his head, in a room with bookshelves.

My twins turned 11 the other day. I’m thankful the endless nappy changing and interrupted nights of their infancy are in the distant past. But there are new stresses, such as becoming an on-call chauffeur – to parties, sleepovers and sports clubs. Then, as now, the end result is similar: I’m frazzled most of the time. Ask me to guess and I’d say that being a parent has probably accelerated my brain age. So you can imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon a new paper in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience by James K Rilling and colleagues that claims caregiving – including being a dad – is associated with having a brain that’s young for your age.

The study builds on past research that found mothers and fathers in their 50s had a younger ‘brain age’ compared with their childless peers – by about half a year. This was based on measures of their brain structure, such as white- and grey-matter volume, as judged against databases of hundreds of brains of various ages. The new study extended this pattern to grandmothers and people caring for someone with dementia, and the findings suggested the brain age benefit might be even greater later in life. Compared with controls, grandmothers and caregivers had brain ages that were between four and six years younger, on average (after adjusting for other factors such as income and BMI). Both the old research and the new suggest there’s a sweet spot – too many (grand)kids or too much stress and the brain benefits are reduced.

As to why caregiving is associated with lower brain age, the researchers propose various reasons, such as being more mentally and physically active, the emotional connection, and the sense of meaning and purpose that comes from being a caregiver. My brain feels tired, but it’s nice to know the responsibilities of parenthood might be keeping it youthful!

by Christian Jarrett

FIND OUT MORE

I first wrote about the neural consequences of fatherhood 11 years ago for Wired in the article ‘How Becoming a Father Changes Your Brain’ (2014).

In the Psyche Guide ‘How to Get the Most Out of Caregiving’ (2024), Elissa Strauss shows how to see the challenges of caregiving in a positive light.


The benefits of thinking about deep time

A mountain peak with a walking path and hikers, under a clear blue sky with scattered clouds.

Last September, I took part in a ‘Deep Time Walk’: a 4.6 km hike through the Welsh countryside, mirroring 4.6 billion years of Earth history. As the kilometres passed, our guide took us from the Precambrian to the Holocene, stopping periodically to share pivotal moments: life’s origin, cataclysmic bombardments, mass extinctions. Every metre we stepped was a million years.

In the last moments of the walk – our legs well exercised by this point – our guide pulled out a tape measure. The last 30 cm of the 4.6 km, he explained, represent Homo Sapiens. The final half-centimetre? Recorded human history. And right at the end, some of humanity’s most consequential events – the invention of the printing press, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution – could all squeeze into the final millimetre. After walking for kilometres through Earth’s past, I felt a sublime smallness, but also awe.

A growing body of research suggests there are myriad psychological benefits to feeling small in the face of nature’s vastness: it dampens the ego, and can foster feelings of humility, reciprocity and generosity. Most of these studies have focused on the physical world – boundless landscapes or the enormity of the cosmos, for instance – but one recent paper, by Matthew Hornsey and colleagues, showed there are also upsides to experiencing smallness in time.

Rather than go on a walk, the researchers simply showed people a video that compressed the Universe’s 14-billion-year history into one year, then asked them to reflect on how human history and their lives fit within that story. The psychologists wondered if it might prompt thoughts of mortality, but the effects were actually positive: in particular, people reported greater self-forgiveness and lower anxiety.

Our time on Earth is short – and, from the planet’s perspective, we are just flashes of sunlight on a pond – but it turns out that embracing that fact could be good for you.

by Richard Fisher

FIND OUT MORE

Watch the clip, used in the study by Matthew Hornsey and colleagues, that compressed the 14-billion-year history of the Universe into a year, edited from the US TV series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014).

You can discover more about Deep Time Walks, or download the app to walk one wherever you are.

My Psyche Guide ‘How to Do Mental Time Travel’ (2024) and my book The Long View (2023) both explore how to take a longer perspective of time.

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