Enclothed cognition.

A term for "the mental changes that we undergo when we wear certain clothing."

"It’s all about the symbolic meaning that you associate with a particular item of clothing," [Northwestern researcher Hajo] Adam said. And he thinks the study’s results can be applied to many more fields, including activewear and fitness. "I think it would make sense that when you wear athletic clothing, you become more active and more likely to go to the gym and work out."

The linked article is almost entirely about athletic clothing, and there's almost nothing about the researchers' study and the term "enclothed cognition" which amused me enough to start this post. The insight seems so obvious — dressing the part will help you play the part — that it seems funny to have a term for it.

What I think would be fun to talk about is articles of clothing that you have used to alter your perceptions. And have you rejected items of clothing that you thought would skew your perceptions in ways you didn't like? Remember to exclude the idea of how others perceive you and how their response to you will affect you. It's just you. You and that item of clothing. Like this:



ADDED: Here's an Amazon link to a page where you can buy a nice porkpie hat, like the one Walter White uses to achieve enclothed cognition in "Breaking Bad." I searched only for "porkpie hat" and did not mention anything more "Breaking Bad"-related than that, but the Amazon page showed not only other elements for a Walter White costume (jacket, glasses, yellow coveralls) but also packets of blue raspberry rock candy.

50 years ago today, C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley died.

One might imagine them encountering John F. Kennedy in the antechamber of the afterlife.

I've been planning for a while to write this as the first post today, but I'm pleased to see that there are many news stories this morning honoring the 3 men who shared a death date. You may have noticed who entered the world on the same day as you. (Perhaps I had a conversation with Rush Limbaugh in the antechamber to life.) But will you know who passes through the departure gate alongside you?

ADDED: In The Guardian: , the author Laura Miller writes:

Apart from the Narnia books, the work of Lewis's I most cherish, "An Experiment in Criticism," makes the almost postmodern – and at the very least radically humble – proposition that we might best judge the literary merit of a book not by how it is written, but by how it is read. If "we found even one reader to whom the cheap little book with its double columns and the lurid daub on its cover had been a lifelong delight, who had read and reread it, who would notice, and object, if a single word were changed, then, however little we could see in it ourselves and however it was despised by our friends and colleagues, we should not dare to put it beyond the pale." That is a faith I am happy to share.

And Nicholas Murray writes:

The FBI kept a fat file on [Aldous Huxley] but failed utterly to find anything damning (as his biographer I was sorely disappointed when it slid out of the jiffy bag). He was nevertheless refused US citizenship...

He has survived his detractors and remains an eloquent critical voice, warning against our tendency to "love our slavery" – Brave New World's dystopian idea of manipulation and conformity and our tendency to submit to soft power, so clearly vindicated by the extraordinary complacency with which the public seems to have greeted the Snowden revelations of illegitimate surveillance. A free democrat to the core of his being, at war through words with "the great impersonal forces now menacing freedom," he shows that heroism can exist away from the noisy battlefield.

AND: "Yes, 'Everybody’s happy nowadays.' We begin giving the children that at five. But wouldn’t you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else's way." Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World (Kindle Locations 1167-1169).

ALSO: Kindle Locations 2729-2737:

“But do you like being slaves?” the Savage was saying as they entered the Hospital. His face was flushed, his eyes bright with ardour and indignation. “Do you like being babies? Yes, babies. Mewling and puking,” he added, exasperated by their bestial stupidity into throwing insults at those he had come to save. The insults bounced off their carapace of thick stupidity; they stared at him with a blank expression of dull and sullen resentment in their eyes. “Yes, puking!” he fairly shouted. Grief and remorse, compassion and duty—all were forgotten now and, as it were, absorbed into an intense overpowering hatred of these less than human monsters. “Don’t you want to be free and men? Don’t you even understand what manhood and freedom are?” Rage was making him fluent; the words came easily, in a rush. “Don’t you?” he repeated, but got no answer to his question. “Very well then,” he went on grimly. “I’ll teach you; I’ll make you be free whether you want to or not.” And pushing open a window that looked on to the inner court of the Hospital, he began to throw the little pill-boxes of soma tablets in hand-fills out into the area.

How is your carapace of thick stupidity today? Mine is chafing. I'm struggling not to concoct a joke out "little pill-boxes of soma tablets," Jackie's iconic pink hat, and my favorite Bob Dylan song. I need some rage to make me fluent.

Goodbye to Ruth Garland-Dewson, the San Francisco milliner.

"Mrs. Dewson owned a celebrated shop on upper Fillmore Street called Mrs. Dewson's Hats for more than 37 years. Among her customers were former Mayor Willie Brown, Bruce Springsteen, Samuel L. Jackson, B.B. King and Sharon Stone. Brown called her "the milliner to high society." Mrs. Dewson designed a hat for him, which she called the Willie Brown Snap Brim. 'It fit my personality,' Brown wrote in his autobiography, 'Basic Brown."

When I was in San Francisco back in 2007, I had a chance encounter with her. I blogged this:

I was traipsing about San Francisco yesterday, and, snapping dozens of pictures, I made my way over to Fillmore Street for a little window shopping. I saw this...



.. and was struggling against the glare and reflections to frame my shot — and also, idiotically, talking on my iPhone — when a woman — who I now understand to be Ruth Garland-Dewson — swept out of the store and flung herself between me and the picture of Barack Obama.

"Are you trying to take a picture of my man?" she said dramatically.

But she wasn't what I for a second thought she was: one of those shopkeepers who are touchy about having their place photographed. She wanted to come out and talk — about Barack Obama and other things as well. I got off my phone conversation and complimented her on the great shop and asked if she had extra large hats. I love women's hats, but since I need a men's extra-large size, I can never find a woman's hat — aside from something stretchy — that fits. She found me what might have been her largest hat, and it almost fit. You know, I should have bought it! It was ocher-colored with a dark purple spiral — a felt hat with a large brim. I think I would have bought it if she'd tried to talk me into it (as so many sales people have nudged me beyond my initial resistance — it's not very hard).

But she wanted to talk about Barack Obama. Do I like him? Yes! I think he's a good man, and that he would be able to do a lot of good. I added, "But I kind of like Giuliani." That was okay with her, it seemed — so long as I don't like Hillary.

I'm sad to read that she's died, and I'm sorry I didn't buy that hat. She was so sociable and nice to me that day. She seemed like she was ready to launch into a conversation with me just because I was the one person who happened to be around just then.

Can you see the printed text in my photograph, above? That's her line, "I would say, 'Go, Obama, you're black enough for me,'" which ended a letter that she had printed in the San Francisco Chronicle on March 1, 2007, reacting to what was then a hot dispute: whether Obama was "black enough."

Last night, in Milwaukee...

... I chose to wear a baseball cap for the first time in my life.

"If someone says I believe God requires me to wear a hat..."

"... it's considered completely inappropriate for the authorities or people who aren't intimate with the person to pressure him about whether there really is a God and whether that God cares about who's wearing hats."

The last sentence of my long comment at the end of the thread on the post "Not much is getting said about the Chelsea/Bradley Manning transgender announcement."

"Man who died in blast lived in foil-wrapped home, filmed neighbors."

"... About 5:45 p.m. Sunday, Costa Mesa police were called to Harris’ home for a report of a man down. When they got there, Harris got up and went back inside. He told police he was fine, and he was wearing a hat that said in effect, 'I don’t need any help,' said Sgt. Jerry Hildeman."

"Born with raised moles on her cheek that loosely resembled the constellation of The Big Dipper, Schiaparelli didn't have them removed..."

"... rather, she commissioned Cartier to make her a Big Dipper brooch, with diamonds for stars, mirroring the pattern of the moles on her face. Instead of the classic fur coat that Audrey Volk swore by, [Elsa] Schiaparelli designed high-heeled ocelot fur bowling shoes, as well as a hat made out of the taxidermied face of a cheetah whose open mouth looked like it was swallowing Schiaparelli's head."



From an NPR story about Patricia Volk's new book "Shocked: My Mother, Schiaparelli, and Me."

And here's Elsa Schiaparelli's own book "Shocking Life."

The "shocking" business relates to the "shocking pink," the shade of pink used on the box for Schiaparelli's perfume named Shocking, which came out in 1937, when it was possible for a magazine advertisement to look like this:

"When people come and visit me and have a hat made..."

"... it's a little bit like visiting a psychiatrist, but they don't actually realize that."

***

If the right hat would solve your mental problems, what would that hat look like?



ADDED: This one would help me:



Also:



(More like those here.)

"I think Justice Scalia would correct you and say it was a Saint Thomas More hat, rather than a Sir Thomas More hat."

Said Astro in the comments to the post about the hat Scalia wore to the inauguration.

I responded saying that "the truth is that the reason I used 'Sir' is that it was the caption on the Hans Holbein painting," but the comment got me researching what's the right way to refer to More, and Wikipedia's article begins: "Sir Thomas More... known to Catholics as Saint Thomas More...." So, it seems that the failure to say "Saint" is the shibboleth that reveals that I'm not Catholic. In which case, I don't think Scalia would correct me.

Notice my tendency to reinforce my original choice — which involved little thought — with additional reasons. That's the lawyer instinct. What happened happened, and now that I'm challenged, I furiously brainstorm reasons why it was correct. (What's not lawyer-like is to concede that and display it like this.)

Another reinforcement for my choice is, as I wrote in the comments at the first link:

It's a Sir Thomas More hat, that is, a hat that he wore in his role as a knight. There is no "saint hat," or if there is — maybe you get issued a hat in Heaven — it's not that hat.

It's like, say a cowboy died and was later beatified and we had a picture of him in his cowboy hat. Cowboy Bob. If I adopted his hat, it would be a Cowboy Bob hat, not a St. Bob hat.

I'd like to think Justice Scalia would be intrigued by this language usage question, whether the noun hat calls for the modifier Sir rather than Saint — even for those who revere him as a saint — because it's not a saint hat.

ADDED: Astro did a Google images search for "saint hat," with hilarious results. Before clicking on the link try to guess what 3 types of hats come up most often. It's not this:

Justice Scalia was wearing his Sir Thomas More hat.

Did you notice?

Pre-blizzard update.

Waiting for Draco.

Gift idea.

Slippers!

AND: Hat.

AND: The Official Althouse Gloves (for when it's not that cold).