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Some days I could only muster half a page. In retrospect, I think shifting my routine to write at the dining table helped me keep my writing habit intact. But whenever I had the time to sit down in my usual spot on the couch, I ended up writing just as much as I did in March. The power of environment on human behavior Building this daily journaling habit has been an interesting case study in the power of habit and environment. During my grand jury tenure, I read Adam Alter’s Drunk Tank Pink. It’s an interesting book that chronicles several studies on how very small changes in our environment affect our behavior. For example, lighting can affect how truthful we are, looking at nature appears to help our bodies heal, and the presence of the color red can trigger anxiety responses that lead us to perform worse on tests.
One of the studies I found most interesting was philippines photo editor a memory recall study involving divers. . One memorized a list of words underwater and another memorized those words on land. Then, they tested the students’ recall. Some were asked to remember the words in the same place they memorized them ecalled the words underwater when they memorized the words underwater), others did the opposite ., recalled the words underwater when they had memorized the words on land). The hypothesis was that if environment didn’t matter, there shouldn’t be a difference in accuracy, no matter where the students were. So, this study directly asked: Does environment have an effect on memory? As it turns out, it did.
Divers were more accurate when remembering the words in the same environment they had learned them. Alter writes: “These studies tell us something profound and perhaps a bit disturbing about what makes us who we are. “There isn’t a single version of ‘you.’ When you’re surrounded by litter, you’re more likely to be a litterbug; when you’re walking past buildings with broken windows, you’re more likely to disrespect the property that surrounds you. These norms change from minute to minute, as quickly as a New Yorker walks from one part of the city to another.” How we think, feel, and behave in the world is subject to a range of influences much broader than our rational thoughts.
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