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Shrink Rap: It’s Good to Laugh—Because Then You Live Longer
I was in the grocery store the other afternoon, chatting with the check-out gal and the elderly man who bags the groceries. He’s always struck me as the grandfatherly type who’d tell his grandkids interesting stories, or teach them silly card tricks, or just enjoy making them laugh. I have no evidence of any of this…it’s all purely in my imagination.
And don’t we do this all the time with people we don’t know: endow them with positive traits or negative traits, often based on nothing but the sound of their voice, the look of their clothing, their age, a tattoo, or whatever. We do this using nothing more concrete than the fantasies we create from our own personal history with people who sound like that, or look like that, or have a tattoo like that. Our human minds don’t do well with vacuums, so we fill the void with past references in an attempt to wrap our minds around a person who’s unfamiliar. Once we can find a category to put him or her in, then we feel we know how to more »
