In the 1970s & 80s, anthropologists working in small-scale, non-industrial societies fastidiously noted down what people were doing throughout the day. I’ve been exploring the data & am struck by one of the most popular activities: doing nothing. [thread]
Background: The anthropologists (e.g., Bob Bailey, pictured) visited random people during waking hours & recorded what they were doing, building a representative sample of time use. Most of these data were collected while an anthropologist lived with the community for a year+.
The researchers typically chose among ~60 activity codes, one of which was "Idle, doing nothing". This is different from napping, chatting, fixing tools, tidying up, & idleness b/c of illness. As far as I can tell, it's really about doing nothing at all, at least apparently.
Here are data collected in '80-81 for the Efé, who lived mostly by hunting & gathering in the Ituri Rainforest of Central Africa. The median adult spent ~27% of their waking time doing nothing (in green). It was the most common activity.
Here are the data for two Machiguenga communities in Peru, collected in '72-'73 (left) and '86-'87 (right). The Machiguenga combined small-scale horticulture with foraging. Again, "doing nothing" leads the pack, either as number one or in the top 3.
"Doing nothing" didn't always win. For the Madurese (Indonesia), it ranked 12th, perhaps reflecting the tiresome lives of more full-time agriculturalists. Still, across 8 diverse communities "doing nothing" came in 4th behind agri work, learning/teaching, & socializing (see plot)
Most of the high-ranking activities in these plots are well-studied by psychologists. But how much do we know about doing nothing? Not much. Living in fast-paced, industrialized societies with constant access to entertainment, it’s easy to lose sight of the value of doing nothing
These data were collected in the 70s & 80s but were digitized (I believe) by @JoHenrich & then released in 2019 with this paper led by @RaBhui: pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.107…
Finally, I’ve been exploring these data in preparation for my talk at the Sophia Club (hosted by @Aeon) on June 14th in NYC! If you’re in the city that night, come & chat about leisure, idleness, & work across cultures: sophiaclub.co/event/what-wor…
An addendum: There have been lots of questions on gender. As I showed in my response to @kris_m_smith, if we compare the data for adults across the 8 communities (women in gray, men in green), we don't see a difference in how often men & women do nothing:
Yet women do work more, where work includes food prep, food production, childcare, manufacture, housework, etc. @RaBhui@JoHenrich found this when they analyzed these datasets in their PNAS paper, although they also found that the gender work gap declines with market integration:
So, men & women do nothing at similar rates, yet women work more. How are men filling that extra time? We can make informed speculations. Look at the data again: Men socialize more (first on the right) & engage in more recreation. They also hunt, fish, & do more wage labor, but
apparently not enough to outweigh work by women.
These are just impressions when aggregating individual-level data across the 8 communities. I'm sure each society exhibits its own idiosyncratic patterns.
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I've seen debate on here lately about Black Africans in the Greco-Roman world.
The best book on the topic is probably Frank Snowden Jr.'s "Blacks in Antiquity". Here's a recap of what he found:
Snowden Jr. focused on the period from ~600 BC to 400 AD. Greeks & Romans were clearly familiar with Black Africans, who they called "Ethiopians". They interacted most with the people of Nubia (then, the Kingdom of Kush, whose capital was Meroë for most of this period).
There are many indications of familiarity w/ Black Africans. Take artwork. Snowden Jr. argued that Greek & especially Roman artisans knew Black Africans intimately enough that they realistically depicted their features (rather than producing caricatures). Here are some examples:
Advocates of Paleo-inspired carnivore diets (e.g., @PaulSaladinoMD @SBakerMD) often point to the Inuit as having a traditionally carnivorous diet. Yet there are at least five problems with using the Inuit as the quintessential ancestral carnivores:
1. The Inuit lifestyle is relatively new. Human migrations into the Arctic occurred just a couple thousand years ago. If the idea is to return to an ancestral diet, they are arguably a less appropriate model than early agricultural populations who lived thousands of years before.
2. Inuit people ate plants. For example, in their intensive study of a Baffin Island community's diet in the 1980s, Kuhlein & Soueida found Inuit people eating kelp, berries, sorrel, & willow: https://t.co/MO9T8XA2xGsciencedirect.com/science/articl…
Did we evolve to respond to music? In our new @NatRevPsych article, @samuelmehr & I address this question, focusing on the universality, domain-specificity, & development of emotional & behavioral responses to music.
Starting with emotional responses, we review evidence of universality & early expression: People are pretty good at identifying emotions in foreign music (though culture still matters), & even infants can discriminate between some expressed emotions (see figure for ontogeny).
However, there is little research indicating that emotional responses evolved to be music-specific. Rather, we seem to express & recognize emotions in music using the same cognitive mechanisms involved in emotional communication in non-musical vocalizations like speech.
Stories of Spanish conquest in the Americas often focus on rapid events like the fall of the Aztecs or the capture of the Inca Atahualpa, creating the impression that conquest was fated. Yet look at the Maya, who took far longer to conquer, and a different story emerges.
To start: People often talk about a Mayan "collapse" in 900 CE. Yet Mayan civilization lived on. Yes, cities in the Southern Lowlands (see map) were abandoned, but other Mayan states prospered, especially in the Northern Lowlands (the Yucatan Peninsula).
Armed Spanish expeditions were sent to Maya lands starting in the 1510s. In 1524, after conquering the Aztecs & years after smallpox spread through Yucatan, Cortés marched there w/ an army. He got lost in the jungle & suffered huge casualties, though, and had to return to Mexico.
A trope of historical narratives is that superstitious natives believed European invaders to be gods. Yet the more I read, the more it seems these stories are post-conquest propaganda. Take the claim that the Aztecs (Mexica) thought Hernán Cortés was the god Quetzalcoatl.
You’re probably familiar w/ the standard story: The Aztecs believed that the feathered serpent, Quetzalcoatl, was destined to return from the east on a certain date. When the conquistador Hernán Cortés pulled up, they mistook him for the deity, making them easier to conquer.
This is popular. It appears in books like Todorov's "Conquest of America", along with a slew of history textbooks (search "Quetzalcoatl" here: historians.org/teaching-and-l…). Yet the evidence is tenuous.
In my recent @WIRED essay (wired.com/story/health-b…), I implied that there is little evidence of cognitive benefits of fasting. People have since sent me a lot of research, & I realize the story is more complicated. So here's what I've learned about how fasting affects cognition:
In thinking about effects, the 2 most important dimensions are: (1) The duration of fasting (e.g., 1/2 day fast vs 1 year of intermittent fasting) (2) The time-scale of effects (e.g., performance on the day of fasting vs cognitive performance after 6 months of fasting)
To start, cognitive performance seems to decline for single fasting events, esp if you don't normally fast. Here's a table from a review on short-term effects of fasting (refs below). Green means cognitive improvement, red means deficits. Most studies find deficits or no effects.