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Lab meetings begin in silence
A moment of remembrance
People were upset, and the group wanted some way to acknowledge what had happened. The moment of silence morphed over time. People could remember whoever they liked, or simply relax and recalibrate from the busy world before the research presentation.
The Monday routine
Now, every Monday at noon, laptops and phones go down and a picture of a beautiful beach on the north shore of Kauai goes up. People spend three to five minutes in meditative quiet, and many close their eyes. The aim is to arrive at the talk with a clear mind instead of one buzzing with an email here and a ringing phone there, so listeners are receptive to the presentation.
Learning to sit still
New summer students look around, confused, the first time. Sitting silent is stressful for them, and inhibiting behavior is hard. People walking past the glass-walled conference room see a group sitting in silence. Once everyone gets used to it, it is easy, and it is a trainable skill.
Why is sitting in silence so hard?
In a 2014 study in Science, psychologist Timothy Wilson and colleagues asked people to sit alone with their thoughts for six to fifteen minutes. Most found it unpleasant, and many said they struggled to concentrate. In one experiment, participants who had earlier said they would pay to avoid an electric shock chose to shock themselves while waiting. Sixty-seven percent of the men and twenty-five percent of the women did so.
How does a beach scene settle the mind?
Environmental psychologists Rachel and Stephen Kaplan proposed attention restoration theory in 1989. Natural scenes draw attention gently, which lets the effortful, directed kind of attention rest and recover. Roger Ulrich reported in Science in 1984 that patients recovering from gallbladder surgery in rooms with a window view of trees left the hospital sooner than those who faced a brick wall. Pictures of nature have shown smaller but similar effects in later experiments.
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