After dinner and before their late-night studying, a few students meet in the Buck Center’s meditation room Thursday evenings for a conversation quite different than the ones they likely had earlier in class or in the dining hall.
Circle participants practice a guided meditation. Counter-clockwise from the right is Spiritual Life Intern Nanci Adair, Coral Sandler '12, Imelda Ko '14, Jennifer Wenz '12, Chengying Liao '15 and Peter Newman '12.
Sitting on purple pillows piled on the floor, the students talk about their spiritual lives — covering ground such as dreams, journeying, myths and prayer. While they may bring up personal experiences, they often approach the subjects analytically, asking questions such as, “What is prayer, and how does it extend across different religious traditions? And can a higher power be a creative force you connect with?” Coral Sandler ’12 said, in way of examples.
Christian Marclay’s 24-hour filmic montage, The Clock, was a runaway international success last year, taking the Golden Lion at the 2011 Venice Biennale. Newsweek responded by calling him “one of the 10 most important artists” of the day.
Baseball — The baseball team received a pair of sparkling pitching performances to take a season-opening doubleheader sweep over Endicott Monday. The Polar Bears took game one by a 3-1 score before taking a 3-0 win in game two.
Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist who made his name with the notorious 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, is these days talking more about the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment — “a rather more adorable experience than the prison experiment,” writes Sean Carroll in Discover.
Zimbardo in this video recreates the Marshmallow Experiment, originally conducted by Walter Mischel in 1972. He asks four-year-old children to do some easy tasks for a reward of one marshmallow. After completing the task, the children are told to sit tight and not eat their marshmallow until Zimbardo returns from briefly stepping out of the room. If they can hold off while he’s gone, they are promised an additional marshmallow.
The video shows mixed results (with some very cute children squirming with the challenge of resisting temptation while others popping the treat into their mouth right away), and Zimbardo says these results may predict life outcomes. When Mischel followed up with his original test subjects 14 years later, the children who had been able to wait for a second marshmallow had higher SAT scores and performed better at school. In other words, they were future oriented. Zimbardo explains that our personalities are shaped by our attitude toward time, whether it’s on the past, present or future.
