Thoughts for Your Day

[david_myers]

One of my text-authoring pleasures is enlivening our prose with favorite cartoons, zany synopses, and playful one-liners. To judge from four decades of student feedback, science wisdom is much tastier when seasoned with wit. 

I love scouring cartoon sources such as CartoonStock, created by my cartoonist friend Bob Mankoff, a former psych major and New Yorker cartoon editor. Among Bob’s offerings is this classic illustration of the “just-world phenomenon” (people’s assumption that the world is just and people therefore get what they deserve and deserve what they get).

Bob Mankoff/ CartoonStock

​I have also found occasional inspiration in Reddit’s r/Showerthoughts—“miniature epiphanies.” A sample from a prior TalkPsych post:

• “All of your friends you made by talking to strangers.”

• “To age is to shift from a life of ‘no limits’ to ‘know limits.’” 

• “When you’re ‘biting down’ on something, you’re actually biting up.” 

My recent perusal inspired more offerings, each my own wording of Showerthought-seeded ideas. For my kindred spirits who love wordplay, perhaps some enjoyment:

• To start our day, we sleep.

• To fall asleep, we first fake sleep.

• When struggling to sleep, we only know we made it once we awaken. 

• Sleep is death’s free trial.

• If you live to be 90, you will have only been conscious for 60 years. The other 33 percent is nature’s tax on conscious life.

• Smell is an unsung sense. We have hearing tests and eye exams, but no smell exams.

• Depression is a tiredness that sleep doesn’t remedy.

• If alcohol is your best friend, then it is also your greatest enemy.

• To take no one’s advice, or to take everyone’s advice, is to be a fool.

• Sometimes to conform is to be wise.

• Bomb squad technicians are never conscious of failing.

• Most dreams are unpleasant. A really bad dream is a nightmare, but we have no comparable word for a really happy dream.

• If getting hit in a dream wakes us up, we’re knocked conscious.

• Male chromosomes determine sex, so you might say that **bleep** is gender fluid.

• At conception, a woman becomes a gene-splicer.

• Sign is the only language that travels at the speed of light.

• If only we had a mnemonic for how to spell mnemonic.

• The acronym of "The Only Day After Yesterday" is TODAY.

• The median human has two legs; the mean human has 1.99 legs.

• Critical thinkers who understand the placebo effect may forfeit its benefits.

• Puberty is the body’s software update.

Writing text narrative one April Fool’s Day, I explained to students that psychologists “explore interdisciplinary studies, such as psychobiography (the study of the personalities of public figures), psycholinguistics (the study of language and thinking), and psychoceramics (the study of crackpots)” . . . perhaps causing students to wonder if their author is a cracked pot.

David Myers, a Hope College social psychologist, authors psychology textbooks and trade books, including his recent essay collection, How Do We Know Ourselves? Curiosities and Marvels of the Human Mind.