Blogging and Stone Age Life

"Blogging, of course, is one of the ultimate forms of self-experimentation," Tyler Cowen wrote me. I wasn't quite sure what he meant. He explained: "Your blood pressure, how your brain is working, what new ideas you have, how your attention span has changed, how you now read other people's work differently, who you find yourself liking more (and less), etc. I believe those effects [of blogging] are often quite striking."

A fascinating idea. As I blogged earlier, James Pennebaker, a professor at UT Austin, has done many studies of the therapeutic effects of keeping a journal. A book on therapeutic journaling gives "examples of how expressive writing can improve the immune system and lung function," according to its website. Do blogging and keeping a journal supply something important to human health and happiness present in Stone Age life but now usually missing? My self-experimentation about faces suggests Stone Agers had a lot more face-to-face conversations in the morning than most of us. Could they have been more listened to than most of us?

Addendum: Right after I wrote this, I read a post about interviewing people for a book. "They don't have to be prompted; they're utterly compelled to tell their stories," the interviewer wrote. For a term project, one of my students interviewed homeless people. He noticed something similar. Whatever the solution to homelessness, he concluded, it would involve a lot of listening.