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kaylynfreeman

Why We Already Have False Memories of the COVID-19 Crisis | Psychology Today - 1 views

www.psychologytoday.com/...e-memories-the-covid-19-crisis

psychology knowledge bias

shared by kaylynfreeman on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • New research sheds light on spotting false memories of emotional events.
  • Have you heard people 'remember' things about the COVID-19 crisis that you know can't be right?
  • Or maybe you have a friend who keeps merging memories of social distancing guidelines?
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • Research has repeatedly shown that false memories can feel incredibly real and can be multi-sensory: In some, we can hear, feel, or see things, just like in real memories. Indeed, to be considered a false memory it can't be a lie, it needs to be part of our reality.
  • I found that if someone has a false memory, we probably can't tell just by looking at the memory. What may be more surprising is that people also seem to be no better than chance at identifying true memories.
  • Source confusion. What we learn from multiple sources about the same topic can very quickly become confused.
  • In both studies, participants were no better than chance at spotting whether a memory was true or false
  • It seems people were actively relying on bad cues when listening to the memories, and somehow these cues made them worse than had they tossed a coin.
  • Participants watched a video of a person recounting a true emotional memory, and the same person recount a false memory. They were told "All, some, or none of the videos you are about to watch involve memories of real accounts. Your task is to identify after each video whether you think the account described actually happened or not.".
  • What this means is that if you already have false memories of what you have done, heard, or seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, you probably can't spot them.
  • This can lead to creating false memories based on source confusion, which is when we misattribute where you learned something.
  • During these unusual times you may want to consider implementing additional safeguards to keep your memories safe.
  • Co-witness contamination. We are all witnesses of this world event, witnesses who are talking to each other all the time. If the COVID-19 pandemic were a crime scene, this would be really bad news.
  • Sameness. Every day we hear unprecedented news or horrific medical stories. But after weeks or months of the same type of information, with a reduction in the amount of new and exciting things happening elsewhere, it gets difficult to separate this long stream of information into meaningful bits.
  • Too late? Already think you or someone else has false memories? Look for independent evidence. You can check the news to see when you actually went into lockdown, or whether you tweeted something about how you felt, or maybe ask a friend what you said to them. That can help establish whether you have a false memory or not.
  • If you want reliable memories of this highly emotional time you need to keep a journal.
  • Assume that those feelings, ideas, fears, beliefs, and experiences will be forgotten. People are generally bad at remembering these details later on.
  • Fake news. Some of the content we see online will be false or misleading.
  • Research has repeatedly shown that false memories can feel incredibly real and can be multi-sensory: In some, we can hear, feel, or see things, just like in real memories.
  • But this week new research takes this even further, and shows that false memories also look real to other people.
  • Both your memory of the news, and your memories of emotional events that are happening in your life are possibly being changed or contaminated.
  • Prevention and evidence are what you need, because it's likely that once you have a false memory, neither you nor anyone else will be able to spot it.
knudsenlu

Mishearings - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...oliver-sacks-mishearings.html

Hearing sense perception brain sacks

shared by knudsenlu on 22 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Lack of clear enunciation, unusual accents or poor electronic transmission can all serve to mislead one’s own perceptions. Most mishearings substitute one real word for another, however absurd or out of context, but sometimes the brain comes up with a neologism.
  • If a mishearing seems plausible, one may not think that one has misheard; it is only if the mishearing is sufficiently implausible, or entirely out of context, that one thinks, “This can’t be right,” and (perhaps with some embarrassment) asks the speaker to repeat himself, as I often do, or even to spell out the misheard words or phrases.
  • While mishearings may seem to be of little special interest, they can cast an unexpected light on the nature of perception — the perception of speech, in particular. What is extraordinary, first, is that they present themselves as clearly articulated words or phrases, not as jumbles of sound. One mishears rather than just fails to hear.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Mishearings are not hallucinations, but like hallucinations they utilize the usual pathways of perception and pose as reality — it does not occur to one to question them. But since all of our perceptions must be constructed by the brain, from often meager and ambiguous sensory data, the possibility of error or deception is always present.
  • Was Freud entirely wrong then about slips and mishearings? Of course not. He advanced fundamental considerations about wishes, fears, motives and conflicts not present in consciousness, or thrust out of consciousness, which could color slips of the tongue, mishearings or misreadings. But he was, perhaps, too insistent that misperceptions are wholly a result of unconscious motivation
sanderk

Bose is the latest tech company to expand into healthcare - 0 views

www.fastcompany.com/...iefs-even-when-it-knows-better

knowledge brain science psychology research

shared by sanderk on 22 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • We form beliefs in a haphazard way, believing all sorts of things based just on what we hear out in the world but haven’t researched for ourselves.
  • It turns out, though, that we actually form abstract beliefs this way: We hear something; We believe it to be true; Only sometimes, later, if we have the time or the inclination, we think about it and vet it, determining whether it is, in fact, true or false
  • “People are credulous creatures who find it very easy to believe and very difficult to doubt. In fact, believing is so easy, and perhaps so inevitable, that it may be more like involuntary comprehension than it is like rational assessment.”
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Under any sort of pressure, they presumed all the statements were true, regardless of their labeling.
  • How we form beliefs was shaped by the evolutionary push toward efficiency rather than accuracy.
  • Before language, our ancestors could form new beliefs only through what they directly experienced of the physical world around them. For perceptual beliefs from direct sensory experience, it’s reasonable to presume our senses aren’t lying. Seeing is, after all, believing. In fact, questioning what you see or hear can get you eaten. For our evolutionary ancestors, it was better to be safe than sorry, especially when considering whether to believe that rustling in the grass is a lion.As a result, we didn’t develop a high degree of skepticism when our beliefs were about things we directly experienced, especially when our lives were at stake.
  • As complex language evolved, we gained the ability to form beliefs about things we hadn’t actually experienced for ourselves–and tended to believe them just as strongly.
  • The bigger risk is in failing to update our beliefs when new information arises
  • we still form beliefs without vetting most of them, and maintain them even after receiving clear, corrective information.
  • The next time you argue with someone about something you believe to be true, step back and ask yourself how you came to this conclusion.
sanderk

Being a Pilot is Even More Stressful Than Being a Passenger - VICE - 0 views

www.vice.com/...ressful-than-being-a-passenger

emotions stress education brain science psychology

shared by sanderk on 25 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Pilot often tops the list of most stressful careers, both in the amount of perceived stress and on quantifiable metrics of stress, like rates of burnout and health issues
  • For pilots, the basic requirements of the job are a major source of stress. “Number one, it’s what we call a high-consequence industry,” Bowen says. “When pilots make mistakes, the consequences can be catastrophic.”
  • sychologists think about stress on a curve: At the bottom, without stress, it’s hard to perform with excellence. As stress and arousal start to creep up, performance does too.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The day-to-day work of a pilot is unstable, and often unpredictable. They’re away from home, and from their families, for long stretches of time. The job isn’t a typical 9-to-5— instead, pilots fly overnight from timezone to timezone, at strange hours.
  • To reduce fatigue, which is linked to stress, rules and regulations from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) limit the number of hours a pilot can fly and how much rest they need. During a 24-hour period, a pilot flying alone can’t log more than eight hours, for example, and they have a ten-hour minimum rest period before taking off.
  • But if stress creeps past that midpoint, performance starts to drop off. Too-high levels of stress mean exhaustion, panic, and blunted brain power. That’s when mistakes happen.
  • CRM training is designed to help pilots and crew members develop efficiency communication and decision-making skills. “It was also saying, this is what fatigue looks like, and this is how to recognize it in your co-pilot,” Bowen says. From that point on, she says, the airlines worked to develop a culture where pilots would hold other pilots accountable when they weren’t fit to fly. “It was about not protecting their buddy, but protecting overall safety,” Bowen says.
  • Pilot mental health is another big issue to tackle, says Quay Snyder, a former Air Force flight surgeon and a member of the Aerospace Medical Association Working Group on Pilot Mental Health. Pilots are often reluctant to acknowledge the effect that emotional stressors might have on their ability to fly, he says.
  • “They’re slow to recognize mental health issues,” he says, “and they might think there’s a stigma against asking for help.”
  • “Pilots trust pilots,” he says. “Hearing from a peer could help a pilot recognize that they may not be fit to fly. Hearing it from a physician doesn’t carry much weight, but hearing it from a peer does.”
Javier E

Grand Old Planet - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...krugman-grand-old-planet.html

science bias partisan motivated reasoning knowledge evidence

shared by Javier E on 23 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Mr. Rubio was asked how old the earth is. After declaring “I’m not a scientist, man,” the senator went into desperate evasive action, ending with the declaration that “it’s one of the great mysteries.”
  • Reading Mr. Rubio’s interview is like driving through a deeply eroded canyon; all at once, you can clearly see what lies below the superficial landscape. Like striated rock beds that speak of deep time, his inability to acknowledge scientific evidence speaks of the anti-rational mind-set that has taken over his political party.
  • that question didn’t come out of the blue. As speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, Mr. Rubio provided powerful aid to creationists trying to water down science education. In one interview, he compared the teaching of evolution to Communist indoctrination tactics — although he graciously added that “I’m not equating the evolution people with Fidel Castro.
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  • What was Mr. Rubio’s complaint about science teaching? That it might undermine children’s faith in what their parents told them to believe.
  • What accounts for this pattern of denial? Earlier this year, the science writer Chris Mooney published “The Republican Brain,” which was not, as you might think, a partisan screed. It was, instead, a survey of the now-extensive research linking political views to personality types. As Mr. Mooney showed, modern American conservatism is highly correlated with authoritarian inclinations — and authoritarians are strongly inclined to reject any evidence contradicting their prior beliefs
  • it’s not symmetric. Liberals, being human, often give in to wishful thinking — but not in the same systematic, all-encompassing way.
  • We are, after all, living in an era when science plays a crucial economic role. How are we going to search effectively for natural resources if schools trying to teach modern geology must give equal time to claims that the world is only 6.000 years old? How are we going to stay competitive in biotechnology if biology classes avoid any material that might offend creationists?
  • then there’s the matter of using evidence to shape economic policy. You may have read about the recent study from the Congressional Research Service finding no empirical support for the dogma that cutting taxes on the wealthy leads to higher economic growth. How did Republicans respond? By suppressing the report. On economics, as in hard science, modern conservatives don’t want to hear anything challenging their preconceptions — and they don’t want anyone else to hear about it, either.
Javier E

Linguists identify 15,000-year-old 'ultraconserved words' - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...2-9a98-4be1688d7d84_story.html

linguistics evolution languages research

shared by Javier E on 14 May 13 - No Cached
  • You, hear me! Give this fire to that old man. Pull the black worm off the bark and give it to the mother. And no spitting in the ashes! It’s an odd little speech. But if you went back 15,000 years and spoke these words to hunter-gatherers in Asia in any one of hundreds of modern languages, there is a chance they would understand at least some of what you were saying.
  • That’s because all of the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in the four sentences are words that have descended largely unchanged from a language that died out as the glaciers retreated at the end of the last Ice Age. Those few words mean the same thing, and sound almost the same, as they did then.
  • A team of researchers has come up with a list of two dozen “ultraconserved words” that have survived 150 centuries. It includes some predictable entries: “mother,” “not,” “what,” “to hear” and “man.” It also contains surprises: “to flow,” “ashes” and “worm.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The existence of the long-lived words suggests there was a “proto-Eurasiatic” language that was the common ancestor to about 700 contemporary languages that are the native tongues of more than half the world’s people.
  • In all, “proto-Eurasiatic” gave birth to seven language families. Several of the world’s important language families, however, fall outside that lineage, such as the one that includes Chinese and Tibetan; several African language families, and those of American Indians and Australian aborigines.
Zack Lessner

Obama on Gun Control Petition: 'We hear you' - 0 views

usnews.nbcnews.com/...n-control-petition-we-hear-you

knowledge perspective

shared by Zack Lessner on 21 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Zack Lessner on 21 Dec 12
     
    Pro-increased gun control perspective
Emily Horwitz

News from The Associated Press - 0 views

hosted.ap.org/...US_OSCARS_FACT_OR_FICTION

historical movies truth fiction

shared by Emily Horwitz on 20 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • If you saw the film "Argo," no, you didn't miss this development, which is recounted in Mendez's book about the real-life operation. It wasn't there because director Ben Affleck and screenwriter Chris Terrio replaced it with an even more dramatic scenario, involving canceled flight reservations, suspicious Iranian officials who call the Hollywood office of the fake film crew (a call answered just in time), and finally a heart-pounding chase on the tarmac just as the plane's wheels lift off, seconds from catastrophe.
  • they've caught some flak for the liberties they took in the name of entertainment.
  • And they aren't alone - two other high-profile best-picture nominees this year, Kathryn Bigelow's "Zero Dark Thirty" and Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln," have also been criticized for different sorts of factual issues.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • But because these three major films are in contention, the issue has come to the forefront of this year's Oscar race, and with it a thorny cultural question: Does the audience deserve the truth, the whole truth and nothing but? Surely not, but just how much fiction is OK?
  • In response to a complaint by a Connecticut congressman, Kushner acknowledged he'd changed the details for dramatic effect, having two Connecticut congressmen vote against the amendment when, in fact, all four voted for it. (The names of those congressmen were changed, to avoid changing the vote of specific individuals.)
  • "Maybe changing the vote went too far," says Richard Walter, chairman of screenwriting at the University of California, Los Angeles. "Maybe there was another way to do it. But really, it's not terribly important. People accept that liberties will be taken. A movie is a movie. People going for a history lesson are going to the wrong place."
  • Kushner said he had "adhered to time-honored and completely legitimate standards for the creation of historical drama, which is what `Lincoln' is. I hope nobody is shocked to learn that I also made up dialogue and imagined encounters and invented characters."
  • Walter says he always tells his students: "Go for the feelings. Because the only thing that's truly real in the movies are the feelings that people feel when they watch."
  • No subject or individual's life is compelling and dramatic enough by itself, he says, that it neatly fits into a script with three acts, subplots, plot twists and a powerful villain.
  • Futterman says he was sympathetic to those concerns and would certainly have addressed them in the script, had he anticipated them.
  • "This is fraught territory," he says. "You're always going to have to change something, and you're always going to get in some sort of trouble, with somebody," he says.
  • Futterman also doesn't begrudge the "Argo" filmmakers, because he feels they use a directorial style that implies some fun is being had with the story. "All the inside joking about Hollywood - tonally, you get a sense that something is being played with," he says.
  • Reeves, who actually gave the "Lincoln" script a negative review because he thought it was too heavy on conversation and lacking action. He adds, though, that when the subject is as famous as Lincoln, one has a responsibility to be more faithful to the facts.
  • Of the three Oscar-nominated films in question, "Zero Dark Thirty" has inspired the most fervent debate. The most intense criticism, despite acclaim for the filmmaking craft involved, has been about its depictions of interrogations, with some, including a group of senators, saying the film misleads viewers for suggesting that torture provided information that helped the CIA find Osama bin Laden.
  • have been questions about the accuracy of the depiction of the main character, a CIA officer played by Jessica Chastain; the real person - or even combination of people, according to some theories - that she plays remains anonymous.
  • screenwriters have a double responsibility: to the material and to the audience.
  • The debate over "Argo" has been much less intense, though there has been some grumbling from former officials in Britain and New Zealand that their countries were portrayed incorrectly in the film as offering no help at all to the six Americans, whereas actually, as Mendez writes, they did provide some help.
  • "When I am hungry and crave a tuna fish sandwich, I don't go to a hardware store," he says. "When I seek a history lesson, I do not go to a movie theater. I loved `Argo' even though I know there was no last-minute turn-around via a phone call from President Carter, nor were there Iranian police cars chasing the plane down the tarmac as it took off. So what? These conceits simply make the movie more exciting."
  • Emily Horwitz on 20 Feb 13
     
    This article reaffirmed my feelings that we can't trust everything that we see or hear through the media, because it is often skewed to better captivate the target audience. As the article stated, there appears to be a fine line in catering to the attention span of the audience, and respecting the known facts of a given event that is portrayed by a movie.
Javier E

Meeting 'the Other' Face to Face - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-through-virtual-reality.html

virtual reality journalism understanding dialogue psychology conflict war empathy

shared by Javier E on 31 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Sitting in a conference room at a hotel near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology here, I slip on large headphones and an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset and wriggle into the straps of a backpack, weighed down with a computer and a battery.
  • when I stand, I quickly find myself in a featureless all-white room, a kind of Platonic vestibule. On the walls at either end are striking poster-size black-and-white portraits taken by the noted Belgian-Tunisian photographer Karim Ben Khelifa, one showing a young Israeli soldier and another a Palestinian fighter about the same age, whose face is almost completely hidden by a black hood.
  • Then the portraits disappear, replaced by doors, which open. In walk the two combatants — Abu Khaled, a fighter for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Gilad Peled, an Israeli soldier — seeming, except for a little pixelation and rigid body movement, like flesh-and-blood people who are actually in the room with me.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • What he saw there was a culture of warfare that often perpetuated itself through misunderstanding and misinformation, with no mechanism for those of opposing sects or political forces to gain a sense of the enemy as a fellow human being.
  • “I began to think, ‘I’m meeting the same people over and over again,’” he said. “I’m seeing people I knew as kids, and now they’re grown-up fighters, in power, fighting the same fight. And you start to think about your work in terms of: ‘Am I helping to change anything? Am I having any impact?’ ”
  • “I thought of myself as a war illustrator. I started calling myself that.”
  • as a visiting artist at the university’s Center for Art, Science and Technology, he transformed what he initially conceived of as an unconventional photo and testimonial project involving fighters into a far more unconventional way of hearing and seeing his subjects, hoping to be able to engender a form of empathy beyond the reach of traditional documentary film
  • He interviewed Mr. Khaled in Gaza and Mr. Peled in Tel Aviv, asking them the same six questions — basic ones like “Who’s your enemy and why?”; “What is peace for you?”; “Have you ever killed one of your enemies?”; “Where do you see yourself in 20 years?”
  • Then he and a small crew captured three-dimensional scans of the men and photographed them from multiple angles
  • he began to build avatars of his interviewees and ways for them to move and respond inside a virtual world so realistic it makes even a 3-D movie seem like an artifact from the distant past. Mr. Harrell describes it as “long-form journalism in a totally new form.”
  • “You have something here you don’t have in any other form of journalism: body language.”
  • indeed, inside the world they have made, the power comes from the feeling of listening to the interviewees speak (you hear Mr. Ben Khelifa’s disembodied voice asking the questions, and the men’s voices answer, overlaid by the voice of an interpreter) as your body viscerally senses a person standing a few feet away from you, his eyes following yours as he talks, his chest rising and falling as he breathes.
  • Sofia Ayala, an M.I.T. sophomore, tested the project after I did and emerged — as I did — with a mesmerized flush on her face, a feeling of meeting someone not really there. “It makes it feel so much more personal than just reading about these things online,” she said. “When someone’s right there talking to you, you want to listen.”
  • “In many places I’ve been, you’re given your enemy when you’re born,” he said. “You grow up with this ‘other’ always out there. The best we can hope is that the ‘other’ will now be able to come into the same room with you for a while, where you can listen to him, and see him face to face.”
oliviaodon

How Do We Learn Languages? | Brain Blogger - 0 views

brainblogger.com/...how-do-we-learn-languages

knowledge languages brain

shared by oliviaodon on 31 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • The use of sound is one of the most common methods of communication both in the animal kingdom and between humans.
  • human speech is a very complex process and therefore needs intensive postnatal learning to be used effectively. Furthermore, to be effective the learning phase should happen very early in life and it assumes a normally functioning hearing and brain systems.
  • Nowadays, scientists and doctors are discovering the important brain zones involved in the processing of language information. Those zones are reassembled in a number of a language networks including the Broca, the Wernicke, the middle temporal, the inferior parietal and the angular gyrus. The variety of such brain zones clearly shows that the language processing is a very complex task. On the functional level, decoding a language begins in the ear where the incoming sounds are summed in the auditory nerve as an electrical signal and delivered to the auditory cortex where neurons extract auditory objects from that signal.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The effectiveness of this process is so great that human brain is able to accurately identify words and whole phrases from a noisy background. This power of analysis brings to minds the great similarity between the brain and powerful supercomputers.
  • Functional imaging of the brain revealed that activated brain parts are different between native and non-native speakers. The superior temporal gyrus is an important brain region involved in language learning. For a native speaker this part is responsible for automated processing of lexical retrieval and the build of phrase structure. In native speakers this zone is much more activated than in non-native ones.
  • infants begin their lives with a very flexible brain that allows them to acquire virtually any language they are exposed to. Moreover, they can learn a language words almost equally by listening or by visual coding. This brain plasticity is the motor drive of the children capability of “cracking the speech code” of a language. With time, this ability is dramatically decreased and adults find it harder to acquire a new language.
  • clearly demonstrated that there are anatomical brain differences between fast and slow learners of foreign languages. By analyzing a group of people having a homogenous language background, scientists found that differences in specific brain regions can predict the capacity of a person to learn a second language.
  • Until the last decade few studies compared the language acquisition in adults and children. Thanks to modern imaging and electroencephalography we are now able to address this question.
  • Language acquisition is a long-term process by which information are stored in the brain unconsciously making them appropriate to oral and written usage. In contrast, language learning is a conscious process of knowledge acquisition that needs supervision and control by the person.
  • oliviaodon on 31 Oct 16
     
    Another cool article about how the brain works and language (inductive reasoning). 
lenaurick

The scientific mystery of why humans love music - Vox - 0 views

www.vox.com/...why-do-we-like-music

humans music psychology research science language culture

shared by lenaurick on 13 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • From an evolutionary perspective, it makes no sense whatsoever that music makes us feel emotions. Why would our ancestors have cared about music?
  • Why does something as abstract as music provoke such consistent emotions?
  • Studies have shown that when we listen to music, our brains release dopamine, which in turn makes us happy
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • It's quite possible that our love of music was simply an accident. We originally evolved emotions to help us navigate dangerous worlds (fear) and social situations (joy). And somehow, the tones and beats of musical composition activate similar brain areas.
  • Nature Neuroscience, led by Zatorre, researchers found that dopamine release is strongest when a piece of music reaches an emotional peak and the listener feels "chills"— the spine-tingling sensation of excitement and awe.
  • "Music engages the same [reward] system, even though it is not biologically necessary for survival," says Zatorre.
  • Presumably, we evolved to recognize patterns because it's an essential skill for survival. Does a rustling in the trees mean a dangerous animal is about to attack? Does the smell of smoke mean I should run, because a fire may be coming my way?
  • Music is a pattern. As we listen, we're constantly anticipating what melodies, harmonies, and rhythms may come next.
  • That's why we typically don't like styles of music we're not familiar with. When we're unfamiliar with a style of music, we don't have a basis to predict its patterns
  • We learn through our cultures what sounds constitute music. The rest is random noise.
  • When we hear a piece of music, its rhythm latches onto us in a process called entrainment. If the music is fast-paced, our heartbeats and breathing patterns will accelerate to match the beat.
  • Another hypothesis is that music latches onto the regions of the brain attuned to speech — which convey all of our emotions.
  • "It makes sense that our brains are really good at picking up emotions in speech," the French Institute of Science's Aucouturier says. It's essential to understand if those around us are happy, sad, angry, or scared. Much of that information is contained in the tone of a person's speech. Higher-pitched voices sound happier. More warbled voices are scared.
  • Music may then be an exaggerated version of speech.
  • And because we tend to mirror the emotions we hear in others, if the music is mimicking happy speech, then the listener will become happy too.
dicindioha

These Foods Aren't Genetically Modified but They Are 'Edited' - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...cally-edited-foods-crispr.html

shared by dicindioha on 11 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • dicindioha on 11 Jan 17
     
    this is very interesting at the beginning because people may not know that their food was altered in a way, even though they are saying this just cuts short certain aspects of the genes in order to change them, instead of cross breeding or something like that. it seems not all knowledge that is shared is shared to all, and it can depend on status, or even just job here. they regulate gene expression, but that is still an alteration made by humans. this begs the question of if this is a somewhat natural thing or is it still under the category of GMOs? Genetics are an interesting area of science in regards to human editing them, one that is very controversial, and this article presents gene editing as seemingly okay, but it would be interesting to hear another side.
  • dicindioha on 15 Jan 17
     
    I apologize, for some reason my highlights did not come up on this article, and only two on the article about climate change and the incoming trump government that I did right before this. Sorry I'm not sure how to fix that -Hailey
sissij

The Voices in Our Heads - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...the-voices-in-our-heads

brain science language

shared by sissij on 05 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • I converse with friends and family members, tell myself jokes, replay dialogue from the past.
  • But for some of us talking to ourselves goes much further: it’s an essential part of the way we think. Others experience auditory hallucinations, verbal promptings from voices that are not theirs but those of loved ones, long-departed mentors, unidentified influencers, their conscience, or even God.
  • “My ‘voices’ often have accent and pitch; they are private and only audible to me, and yet they frequently sound like real people.”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The results of another study suggest that, on average, about twenty to twenty-five per cent of the waking day is spent in self-talk. But some people never experienced inner speech at all
  • “dialogic inner speech must therefore involve some capacity to represent the thoughts, feelings, and attitudes of the people with whom we share our world.”
  • Inner speech could also serve as a safety mechanism. Negative emotions may be easier to cope with when channelled into words spoken to ourselves.
  • sissij on 05 Jan 17
     
    Speaking to ourselves is a action of reflecting on ourselves. I think this support the idea that our brain doesn't have a central executor that process the thought from the the other part of the gain. Our brain is more like a cooperation among different parts. So probably we don't have a unique self, we are the combination of our multiple selves. Being able to split ourselves also helps us separate our positive thoughts and negative thoughts. There is also a connection between the inner voice and religion because many people alleged to be hearing god but actually, it's just their inner voice. --Sissi (1/5/2017)
Javier E

Campus Suicide and the Pressure of Perfection - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...dia-and-suicide-on-campus.html

suicide pressure psychology mental health campus

shared by Javier E on 27 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • It also recognized a potentially life-threatening aspect of campus culture: Penn Face. An apothegm long used by students to describe the practice of acting happy and self-assured even when sad or stressed, Penn Face is so widely employed that it has showed up in skits performed during freshman orientation.
  • While the appellation is unique to Penn, the behavior is not. In 2003, Duke jolted academe with a report describing how its female students felt pressure to be “effortlessly perfect”: smart, accomplished, fit, beautiful and popular, all without visible effort. At Stanford, it’s called the Duck Syndrome. A duck appears to glide calmly across the water, while beneath the surface it frantically, relentlessly paddles.
  • Citing a “perception that one has to be perfect in every academic, cocurricular and social endeavor,” the task force report described how students feel enormous pressure that “can manifest as demoralization, alienation or conditions like anxiety or depression.”
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  • While she says her parents are not overbearing, she relishes their praise for performing well. “Hearing my parents talk about me in a positive way, or hearing other parents talk about their kids doing well in academics or extracurriculars, that’s where I got some of the expectations for myself,” she said. “It was like self-fulfillment: I’d feel fulfilled and happy when other people were happy with what I’m doing, or expectations they have are met.”
  • Getting a B can cause some students to fall apart, she said. “What you and I would call disappointments in life, to them feel like big failures.”
  • a shift in how some young adults cope with challenges. “A small setback used to mean disappointment, or having that feeling of needing to try harder next time,” he said. Now? “For some students, a mistake has incredible meaning.”
  • The existential question “Why am I here?” is usually followed by the equally confounding “How am I doing?” In 1954, the social psychologist Leon Festinger put forward the social comparison theory, which posits that we try to determine our worth based on how we stack up against others.
  • In the era of social media, such comparisons take place on a screen with carefully curated depictions that don’t provide the full picture. Mobile devices escalate the comparisons from occasional to nearly constant.
  • When students remark during a counseling session that everyone else on campus looks happy, he tells them: “I walk around and think, ‘That one’s gone to the hospital. That person has an eating disorder. That student just went on antidepressants.’ As a therapist, I know that nobody is as happy or as grown-up as they seem on the outside.”
  • Madison Holleran’s suicide provided what might be the ultimate contrast between a shiny Instagram feed and interior darkness. Ms. Holleran posted images that show her smiling, dappled in sunshine or kicking back at a party. But according to her older sister, Ashley, Madison judged her social life as inferior to what she saw in the online posts of her high school friends
  • These cultural dynamics of perfectionism and overindulgence have now combined to create adolescents who are ultra-focused on success but don’t know how to fail.
  • Julie Lythcott-Haims watched the collision of these two social forces up close. In meetings with students, she would ask what she considered simple questions and they would become paralyzed, unable to express their desires and often discovering midconversation that they were on a path that they didn’t even like.
  • “They could say what they’d accomplished, but they couldn’t necessarily say who they were,”
  • She was also troubled by the growing number of parents who not only stayed in near-constant cellphone contact with their offspring but also showed up to help them enroll in classes, contacted professors and met with advisers (illustrating the progression from helicopter to lawn mower parents, who go beyond hovering to clear obstacles out of their child’s way). But what she found most disconcerting was that students, instead of being embarrassed, felt grateful. Penn researchers studying friendship have found that students’ best friends aren’t classmates or romantic partners, but parents.
  • Eventually she came to view her students’ lack of self-awareness, inability to make choices and difficulty coping with setbacks as a form of “existential impotence,” a direct result of a well-meaning but misguided approach to parenting that focuses too heavily on external measures of character.
  • “The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self.” In the book, published in 1979 and translated into 30 languages, Ms. Miller documents how some especially intelligent and sensitive children can become so attuned to parents’ expectations that they do whatever it takes to fulfill those expectations — at the expense of their own feelings and needs. This can lead to emotional emptiness and isolation
  • “In what is described as depression and experienced as emptiness, futility, fear of impoverishment, and loneliness,” she wrote, “can usually be recognized as the tragic loss of the self in childhood.”
sissij

The Economics of Obesity: Why Are Poor People Fat? - 0 views

www.institutefornaturalhealing.com/...besity-why-are-poor-people-fat

economics psychology research bias

shared by sissij on 08 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • This is what poverty looked like in the Great Depression…
  • This is what poverty looks like today…
  • For most of recorded history, fat was revered as a sign of health and prosperity. Plumpness was a status symbol. It showed that you did not have to engage in manual labor for your sustenance. And it meant that you could afford plentiful quantities of food.
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  • The constant struggle to hunt and harvest ensured that we stayed active. And for those with little money, the supply of calories was meager. This ensured that most of the working class stayed slim.
  • Rich people were fat. Poor people were thin.
  • What he found is that he could buy well over 1,000 calories of cookies or potato chips. But his dollar would only buy 250 calories of carrots. He could buy almost 900 calories of soda… but only 170 calories of orange juice.
  • The primary reason that lower-income people are more overweight is because the unhealthiest and most fattening foods are the cheapest.
  • Within the current system, the best we can hope for is a situation where public funds are diverted from the corporate Agri-Giants (which is nothing more than welfare for the wealthy) to family farms and fruit and vegetable growers. Currently, almost 70% of farmers receive no subsidies at all, while the biggest and strongest take the bulk of public funds.
  • sissij on 08 Feb 17
     
    This article shows a very interesting stereotyping that rich people ought to be fat and poor people ought to be thin. It reminded me of I video I have just seen, in which a poor but fat woman is trying to explain why now people in poverty is more likely to be fat. She shows us some comments from people when they hear that she is very poor. The vehement reaction and bad language they used showed that this stereotyping is very deep in our society. However, time is very different now. Food is not as expensive as we think, what is expensive is actually healthy food, that's why poor people tends to be fat. My grandpa once told me that when he was young, he was confused why poor people in Honking movie are eating chicken legs. This is the result of the transformation of society.--Sissi (2/8/2017)
Javier E

Clouds' Effect on Climate Change Is Last Bastion for Dissenters - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...st-bastion-for-dissenters.html

global warming science methods research clouds

shared by Javier E on 02 May 12 - Cached
  • For decades, a small group of scientific dissenters has been trying to shoot holes in the prevailing science of climate change, offering one reason after another why the outlook simply must be wrong. Enlarge This Image Josh Haner/The New York Times A technician at a Department of Energy site in Oklahoma launching a weather balloon to help scientists analyze clouds. More Photos » Temperature Rising Enigma in the Sky This series focuses on the central arguments in the climate debate and examining the evidence for global warming and its consequences. More From the Series » if (typeof NYTDVideoManager != "undefined") { NYTDVideoManager.setAllowMultiPlayback(false); } function displayCompanionBanners(banners, tracking) { tmDisplayBanner(banners, "videoAdContent", 300, 250, null, tracking); } Multimedia Interactive Graphic Clouds and Climate Slide Show Understanding the Atmosphere Related Green Blog: Climate Change and the Body Politic (May 1, 2012) An Underground Fossil Forest Offers Clues on Climate Change (May 1, 2012) A blog about energy and the environment. Go to Blog » Readers’ Comments "There is always some possibility that the scientific consensus may be wrong and Dr. Lindzen may be right, or that both may be wrong. But the worst possible place to resolve such issues is the political arena." Alexander Flax, Potomac, MD Read Full Comment » Post a Comment » Over time, nearly every one of their arguments has been knocked down by accumulating evidence, and polls say 97 percent of working climate scientists now see global warming as a serious risk.
  • They acknowledge that the human release of greenhouse gases will cause the planet to warm. But they assert that clouds — which can either warm or cool the earth, depending on the type and location — will shift in such a way as to counter much of the expected temperature rise and preserve the equable climate on which civilization depends.
  • At gatherings of climate change skeptics on both sides of the Atlantic, Dr. Lindzen has been treated as a star. During a debate in Australia over carbon taxes, his work was cited repeatedly. When he appears at conferences of the Heartland Institute, the primary American organization pushing climate change skepticism, he is greeted by thunderous applause.
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  • His idea has drawn withering criticism from other scientists, who cite errors in his papers and say proof is lacking. Enough evidence is already in hand, they say, to rule out the powerful cooling effect from clouds that would be needed to offset the increase of greenhouse gases.
  • “If you listen to the credible climate skeptics, they’ve really pushed all their chips onto clouds.”
  • Dr. Lindzen is “feeding upon an audience that wants to hear a certain message, and wants to hear it put forth by people with enough scientific reputation that it can be sustained for a while, even if it’s wrong science,” said Christopher S. Bretherton, an atmospheric researcher at the University of Washington. “I don’t think it’s intellectually honest at all.”
  • With climate policy nearly paralyzed in the United States, many other governments have also declined to take action, and worldwide emissions of greenhouse gases are soaring.
  • The most elaborate computer programs have agreed on a broad conclusion: clouds are not likely to change enough to offset the bulk of the human-caused warming. Some of the analyses predict that clouds could actually amplify the warming trend sharply through several mechanisms, including a reduction of some of the low clouds that reflect a lot of sunlight back to space. Other computer analyses foresee a largely neutral effect. The result is a big spread in forecasts of future temperature, one that scientists have not been able to narrow much in 30 years of effort.
  • The earth’s surface has already warmed about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since the Industrial Revolution, most of that in the last 40 years. Modest as it sounds, it is an average for the whole planet, representing an enormous addition of heat. An even larger amount is being absorbed by the oceans. The increase has caused some of the world’s land ice to melt and the oceans to rise.
  • Even in the low projection, many scientists say, the damage could be substantial. In the high projection, some polar regions could heat up by 20 or 25 degrees Fahrenheit — more than enough, over centuries or longer, to melt the Greenland ice sheet, raising sea level by a catastrophic 20 feet or more. Vast changes in  rainfall, heat waves and other weather patterns would most likely accompany such a large warming. “The big damages come if the climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases turns out to be high,” said Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, a climate scientist at the University of Chicago. “Then it’s not a bullet headed at us, but a thermonuclear warhead.”
  • But the problem of how clouds will behave in a future climate is not yet solved — making the unheralded field of cloud research one of the most important pursuits of modern science.
  • for more than a decade, Dr. Lindzen has said that when surface temperature increases, the columns of moist air rising in the tropics will rain out more of their moisture, leaving less available to be thrown off as ice, which forms the thin, high clouds known as cirrus. Just like greenhouse gases, these cirrus clouds act to reduce the cooling of the earth, and a decrease of them would counteract the increase of greenhouse gases. Dr. Lindzen calls his mechanism the iris effect, after the iris of the eye, which opens at night to let in more light. In this case, the earth’s “iris” of high clouds would be opening to let more heat escape.
  • Dr. Lindzen acknowledged that the 2009 paper contained “some stupid mistakes” in his handling of the satellite data. “It was just embarrassing,” he said in an interview. “The technical details of satellite measurements are really sort of grotesque.” Last year, he tried offering more evidence for his case, but after reviewers for a prestigious American journal criticized the paper, Dr. Lindzen published it in a little-known Korean journal. Dr. Lindzen blames groupthink among climate scientists for his publication difficulties, saying the majority is determined to suppress any dissenting views. They, in turn, contend that he routinely misrepresents the work of other researchers.
  • Ultimately, as the climate continues warming and more data accumulate, it will become obvious how clouds are reacting. But that could take decades, scientists say, and if the answer turns out to be that catastrophe looms, it would most likely be too late. By then, they say, the atmosphere would contain so much carbon dioxide as to make a substantial warming inevitable, and the gas would not return to a normal level for thousands of years.
  • In his Congressional appearances, speeches and popular writings, Dr. Lindzen offers little hint of how thin the published science supporting his position is. Instead, starting from his disputed iris mechanism, he makes what many of his colleagues see as an unwarranted leap of logic, professing near-certainty that climate change is not a problem society needs to worry about.
  • “Even if there were no political implications, it just seems deeply unprofessional and irresponsible to look at this and say, ‘We’re sure it’s not a problem,’ ” said Kerry A. Emanuel, another M.I.T. scientist. “It’s a special kind of risk, because it’s a risk to the collective civilization.”
Emily Horwitz

News from The Associated Press - 0 views

hosted.ap.org/...US_SCI_STEM_CELLS_DEAFNESS

science ethics AP knowledge research stem cells

shared by Emily Horwitz on 13 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • For the first time, scientists have improved hearing in deaf animals by using human embryonic stem cells, an encouraging step for someday treating people with certain hearing disorders.
  • it will be years before human patients might benefit.
  • Human embryonic stem cells can be manipulated to produce any type of cell. Using them is controversial because they are initially obtained by destroying embryos.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Yehoash Raphael of the University of Michigan, who didn't participate in the work, said it's possible the stem cell transplants worked by stimulating the gerbils' own few remaining nerve cells, rather than creating new ones. But either way, "this is a big step forward in use of stem cells for treating deafness," he said.
Emily Freilich

The Danger of Telling Poor Kids That College Is the Key to Social Mobility - Andrew Sim... - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...283120

education college

shared by Emily Freilich on 22 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • She’d been promised that good grades and a ticket to a good college would lead to a good job, one that would guarantee her financial independence and enable her to give back to those hard-working people who had placed their faith in her.
  • When administrators, counselors, and teachers repeat again and again that a college degree will alleviate economic hardship, they don’t mean to suggest that there is no other point to higher education.
  • educators risk distracting them from the others, emphasizing the value of the fruits of their academic labor and skipping past the importance of the labor itself. The message is that intellectual curiosity plays second fiddle to financial security.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • My students are understandably preoccupied with money. They don’t have the privilege to not worry about it.
  • . The irony, though, is that many of these students aspire to go to a liberal-arts school but don’t necessarily understand its significance.
  • School can either perpetuate inequity through social reproduction or have a transformative effect and help students transcend it.
  • schools teaching the children of affluent families prepared those kids to take on leadership roles and nurtured their capacity for confident self-expression and argument.
  • Schools teaching children from low-income families focused on keeping students busy and managing behavior
  • While the vagueness stems from the lack of models in their communities, it also comes from the lack of imagination with which mentors have addressed their professed college plans. Students hear that being a doctor is great because doctors can make money, enjoy respect, and have a great life. They don’t hear that being a doctor is great because doctors possess the expertise to do great things.
  • College should be “sold” to all students as an opportunity to experience an intellectual awakening. All students should learn that privilege is connected to the pursuit of passions.
  • People are privileged to follow their hearts in life, to spend their time crafting an identity instead of simply surviving
Emily Freilich

What Is The Funniest Joke In The World? : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...the-funniest-joke-in-the-world

joke culture language

shared by Emily Freilich on 09 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • What's brown and sticky? A stick. I actually laugh every time I hear this joke.
  • People laugh at different jokes. And there seem to be social, cultural, national, age and gender differences in what we find funny
  • Americans like jokes that include insults or vague threats,
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Europeans, it is claimed, go for the absurd or surreal:
  • A German Shepherd went to the telegram office, took out a blank form, and wrote: "Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof." The clerk examined the paper and politely told the dog: "There are only nine words here. You could send another 'Woof' for the same price." "But," the dog replied, "that would make no sense at all."
  • what is the funniest joke in the world?
  • It's pretty clear that whatever Wiseman came up with, it isn't gonna be the funniest joke in the world. His website was in English; so jokes in other tongues were excluded. Or consider this: maybe the funniest joke in the world isn't something that you can write down. Maybe it needs to be told. And even more to the point: maybe jokes are necessarily specific to situations, cultures, anxieties.
  • t jokes have deep sources in our human needs and psychologies. Human life is complex, not simple, although we have simple needs (food, sex, safety, sleep, friendship, etc.). Humor is a response to inevitable conflict. The humor isn't in the joke; it is in the attitudes of those telling and hearing the joke
  • What is the funniest joke in the world, at least according to Wiseman? Are you ready? Here it is: Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps, "My friend is dead! What can I do?". The operator says "Calm down. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guys says "OK, now what?"
Roth johnson

The Science of Snobbery: How We're Duped Into Thinking Fancy Things Are Better - Alex M... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...279571

shared by Roth johnson on 12 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Roth johnson on 12 Sep 13
     
    Do we perceive a sound just by seeing what is making it? Scroll down to "Watching Not Hearing"
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