【推荐2】What are two things that make humans different from animals? One is language and the other is music. It’s true that some animals can sing. However, the songs of animals like birds are very limited. It’s also true that humans, not animals, have developed musical instruments.

Music is a strange thing. It’s clearly different from language. However, people can use music to communicate things—especially their emotions. When music is used with speech in a song, it’s a very powerful form of communication.

If music is truly different from speech, then we should process music and language in different parts of the brain. The scientific study suggests this is true. For example, Vissarion Shebalin, a Russian composer, had a stroke (中风) in 1953. It injured the left side of his brain. He could no longer speak or understand speech. He could, however, still compose music until his death ten years later. On the other hand, sometimes strokes cause people to lose their musical ability, but they can still speak and understand speech.

Why does music have such a strong effect on us physically and emotionally? That’s a harder question to answer. Geoffrey Miller, a researcher at University College, London, thinks that music and love have a strong connection. Music requires special talent, practice and physical ability. That’s some-one’s mate. For example, playing a musical instrument requires fine muscular control. You also need a good memory to remember the notes. And playing those notes correctly suggests that your hearing is in excellent condition. Finally, when a man sings to the woman he loves, it may be a way of showing off.

However, Miller’s theory still doesn’t explain why certain combinations of sounds influence our emotions so deeply. For scientists, this is clearly an area that needs further research.

【推荐3】You have probably heard of the Mozart effect. It’s the idea that if children or even babies listen to music composed by Mozart, they will become more intelligent. A quick Internet search reveals (透露) plenty of products to help you in the task. Whatever your age there are CDs and books to help you taste the power of Mozart’s music, but when it comes to scientific evidence that it can make you more clever, the picture is more mixed.

The phrase “the Mozart effect” was made up in 1991, but it was a study described two years later in the journal Nature that sparked (引发) real media and public interest about the idea that listening to classical music somehow improves the brain. It is one of those ideas that sound reasonable. Mozart was undoubtedly a genius himself; his music is complex and there is a hope that if we listen to enough of it, we’ll become more intelligent.

The idea took off, with thousands of parents playing Mozart to their children, and in 1998 Zell Miller, the Governor of the state of Georgia in the US, even asked for money to be set aside in the state budget so that every newborn baby could be sent a CD of classical music. It was not just babies and children who were exposed to Mozart’s music on purpose, even an Italian farmer proudly explained that the cows were played Mozart three times a day to help them to produce better milk.

I’ll leave the debate on the effect on milk yield to farmers, but what about the evidence that listening to Mozart makes people more intelligent? More research was carried out but an analysis of sixteen different studies proved that listening to music does lead to a temporary improvement in the ability to handle shapes mentally, but the benefits are short-lived and it doesn’t make us more intelligent.

【推荐1】The new radio programme from Self-help expert Glennon Doyle unexpectedly disturbed me. In a session of We Can Do Hard Things, she focuses on boundaries and their importance to our mental happiness. I heartily agree with her, because saying a polite but firm “no” is one of the basics for a happy life. I was, however, interested when she raised the idea that perhaps, as well as learning when to confirm our boundaries, we also need to stretch them. When does a boundary become a cage that locks us away?

Isn’t it always the case that just as you think you’ve got an area of life nailed; somebody comes along to show you that that’s not the case? As I listened, I started to see boundaries that might cause more problems than they were solving.

There was the work boundary that said that unless a project fell exactly into my topics, I wouldn’t take it-which meant that I turned down work that was otherwise interesting and rewarding.

There was the boundary that said I wasn’t to buy anything until I’d reached my savings goal-which resulted in me having to restart my laptop 20 times a day.

And then there was a boundary around relationships that set out exactly how I should be treated and what I wanted in them. Helpful to some extent, it blocked me from allowing someone to express their love for me, even if it wasn’t quite what I had predicted.

Had I been doing boundaries wrong all the time? Did I need to figure them all out again? I’ve spent the past few weeks looking at the boundaries I’ve secretly put in place, and I’ve let myself lower some that have been my protection over the years. Then I’ve come to the conclusion that, when it comes to boundaries, I’m a beginner again, and that’s fine. In fact, being back at the beginning is a blessing because it means there are still lessons to be learned and adventures to be had and that is something for which I can only be grateful.

【推荐2】There was a time when a trip to the supermarket in the United States often ended with a seemingly simple question from the cashier, “Paper or plastic?” Well, which type of bag would you choose?

While both types of bags have some influence on the environment, it has long been supposed that paper bags are better. They are made from a renewable source, are broken down easily, burn without giving off thick smoke and can be recycled. However, the producing process behind paper bags uses more energy than that of plastic ones. How can this be true?

Studies show that paper bag production requires four times as much energy as plastic bag production. And the amount of water used to make them is twenty times larger. Besides, the influence on forests is very serious. It takes about fourteen million trees to produce ten billion paper bags, which happen to be the number of bags used in the United States yearly. In terms of recycling, the idea that paper bags are more environment-friendly than plastic ones can be quickly discarded. Research shows it requires about 98% less energy to recycle plastic than it does to recycle paper.

Even though paper bags might be more harmful than plastic ones, plastic still seems to be considered as the more harmful of the two by governments. In Ireland, for example, a tax has been introduced to discourage the use of plastic bags. People have to pay 22 cents for every plastic bag, and as a result, their use has dropped quickly.

There’s no doubt that it makes more sense to reuse these bags. However, we don’t seem to be doing that at present. That may be because they fall apart quickly. If so, cloth bags are a better choice, but still, their production also has a bad influence on the environment. So what to do? How should we answer the question of “Paper or plastic?” It seems that we first need to ask ourselves one more general question: “What can I do to help the environment?”

【推荐3】Earthquake in Japan. Donald Trump is accused of planting story about actress’s height after she rejected him. Mexico arrests ex-police chief in case of 43 missing students. Do you really need to know all these things?

Three years ago, I began an experiment. I stopped reading all newspapers and magazines. Televisions and radios were rejected. I deleted title news apps from my iPhone. I didn’t touch a single free newspaper and deliberately looked the other way when someone tried to offer me any such reading material. The first weeks were hard. Very hard! I was constantly afraid of missing something. But after a while, I had a new understanding. The result after three years: clearer thoughts, more valuable ideas, better decisions, and much more time. And the best thing? I haven’t missed anything important.

A dozen reasons exist togive news a wide berth. Here are the top three: First, our brain reacts differently to different types of information. Shocking, people-based, fast-changing details all appeal to us. News producers capitalize on this. The result: Everything complex, abstract, and profound(深刻的) must be systematically singled out, even though such stories are much more relevant to our lives and to our understanding of the world. As a result, we walk around with a misrepresented mental map of the risks and threats we actually face.

Second, news is irrelevant. In the past year, you have probably consumed about ten thousand pieces of news. Be very honest: Name one of them, just one that helped you make a better decision－for your life, your career, or your business-compared with not having this piece of news. No one I have asked has been able to name more than two useful news stories—out of ten thousand. News organizations claim that their information gives you a competitive advantage. Too many fall for this. If news really helped people advance, journalists would be at the top of the income pyramid.

Third, news is a waste of time. An average human being spends half a day each week reading about current affairs. This is a huge loss of productivity. Take the 2008 terror attack in Mumbai. Let’s say a billion people viewed the minute-by-minute updates and listened to the chatter of a few “experts” and “commentators.” Thus our conservative calculation: One billion people multiplied by an hour’s distraction equals one billion hours of work stoppage. News wasted around two thousand lives—ten times more than the attack.

I would predict that turning your back on news will benefit you as much as removing any of the other ninety-eight errors we have covered in the pages of this book. Read long background articles and books. Nothing beats books for understanding the world.