If depression didn’t exist — if we didn’t react to stress and trauma with endless ruminations — then we would be less likely to solve our predicaments. Wisdom isn’t cheap, and we pay for it with pain.
Great article in the New York Times, titled “Depression’s Upside”, on a developing theory that human depression may have evolved as a biological advantage.
Perhaps there’s something to the idea that designers are more prone to sarcasm than the average person. According to Katherine P. Rankin’s new study of Alzheimer’s patients, the part of the brain we use to appreciate sarcasm is not in the left brain where most of us process our primary language, but in the right hemisphere. As explained in the New York Times:
…the magnetic resonance scans revealed that the part of the brain lost among those who failed to perceive sarcasm was not in the left hemisphere of the brain, which specializes in language and social interactions, but in a part of the right hemisphere previously identified as important only to detecting contextual background changes in visual tests.