Skip to main content

Home/ TOK Friends/ Group items tagged adaptation

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Javier E

Pandemic Advice From Athletes - The New York Times - 0 views

  • There’s a special kind of exhaustion that the world’s best endurance athletes embrace. Some call it masochistic, others may call it brave. When fatigue sends legs and lungs to their limits, they are able to push through to a gear beyond their pain threshold. These athletes approach fatigue not with fear but as a challenge, an opportunity.
  • It’s a quality that allows an ultramarathoner to endure what could be an unexpected rough segment of an 100-mile race, or a sailor to push ahead when she’s in the middle of the ocean, racing through hurricane winds alone.
  • The drive to persevere is something some are born with, but it’s also a muscle everyone can learn to flex. In a way, everyone has become an endurance athlete of sorts during this pandemic, running a race with no finish line that tests the limits of their exhaustion.
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • One message they all had: You are stronger than you think you are, and everyone is able to adapt in ways they didn’t think possible.
  • there are a few techniques to help you along — 100-mile race not required.
  • There’s a pacing in living day to day, just as there’s pacing in climbing.
  • Training to become an elite endurance athlete means learning to embrace discomfort. Instead of hiding from pain, athletes must learn to work with it. A lot of that comes down to pacing
  • Similarly, as you muscle through an ongoing pandemic, you must look for ways to make peace with unknowns and new, uncomfortable realities. “When we think about the coronavirus, we are in it for the long run; so how do you pace yourself?”
  • She recommends thinking about your routines, practicing positive self-talk and focusing on processes instead of outcomes
  • You don’t know when the pandemic will end, but you can take control of your daily habits
  • “always have a little in reserve.”
  • Deplete your resources early and you’ll be in trouble. Focusing on day-to-day activities will pay off in the long run.
  • If you burn out all your mental energy in one day or week, you may find it more difficult to adapt when things don’t return to normal as quickly as you would hope.
  • Pace Yourself
  • “Don’t play all your cards at once and keep a little something in reserve.”
  • Create Mini-Goals
  • Sports psychologists frequently recommend creating mini milestones en route to a big goal. There are many steps on the path from base camp to a mountain’s summit. Likewise, there are smaller, more achievable milestones to reach and celebrate as you venture ahead into the unknown.
  • Focus on Something New
  • “I’m really good at breaking things down into small increments and setting micro-goals,” he said. How micro?
  • “I break things down to 10 seconds at a time,” Mr. Woltering continued. “You just have to be present in what you are doing and you have to know that it may not be the most fun — or super painful — now, but that could change in 10 seconds down the road.”
  • And it may not change quickly. Mr. Woltering said he has spent six-hour stretches counting to 10 over and over again. “You just keep moving and keep counting,” he said. “And you have to have faith that it will change at some point.”
  • Create Structure
  • “Part of expedition life is having a routine that you’re comfortable with. When I’m on expedition, I always start the day with a basin of warm water and soap. I wash my hands, face, neck and ears and get the sand out of my eyes,” he said. “It’s something that’s repeated that gets you a sense of comfort and normalcy.”
  • During the pandemic, he has found comfort and normalcy by getting outdoors, and climbing whenever possible to “run the engine.”
  • Dee Caffari, a British sailor and the first woman to sail solo, nonstop, around the world in both directions, said structure is imperative to fight back loneliness and monotony.
  • “In your day you need structure,” Ms. Caffari said. “You need to get up in the morning knowing you’re going to make something happen.”
  • “Setting goals that are controllable makes it easier to adapt,” Dr. Meijen said. “If you set goals that are controlled by other people, goals that aren’t realistic or are tough or boring, those are much harder to adapt to.”
  • When all else fails, look to something new: a new hobby, a new goal, a new experience
  • During a particularly hard patch of a competition, some athletes say they focus on a different sense, one that perhaps is not at the forefront of their mind when the pain sets in. A runner could note the smells around her and a climber could note the way his hair is blowing in the wind.
  • When athletes are injured, sports psychologists and coaches frequently encourage them to find a new activity to engage their mind and body. The key is to adapt, adapt and then adapt again.
  • “We all want mental toughness, it’s an important part of dealing with difficult things,”
  • “The current definition of mental toughness is the ability to pivot and to be nimble and flexible.”
  • “The next moment is always completely uncertain, and it’s always been that way,” Dr. Gervais said. But adapting, adjusting expectations and discovering new goals or hobbies can allow you to continue to build the muscle that is mental toughness.
  • Bottom line? “Optimism is an antidote to anxiety,”
Javier E

Adam Kirsch: Art Over Biology | The New Republic - 1 views

  • Nietzsche, who wrote in Human, All Too Human, under the rubric “Art dangerous for the artist,” about the particular ill-suitedness of the artist to flourishing in a modern scientific age: When art seizes an individual powerfully, it draws him back to the views of those times when art flowered most vigorously.... The artist comes more and more to revere sudden excitements, believes in gods and demons, imbues nature with a soul, hates science, becomes unchangeable in his moods like the men of antiquity, and desires the overthrow of all conditions that are not favorable to art.... Thus between him and the other men of his period who are the same age a vehement antagonism is finally generated, and a sad end
  • What is modern is the sense of the superiority of the artist’s inferiority, which is only possible when the artist and the intellectual come to see the values of ordinary life—prosperity, family, worldly success, and happiness—as inherently contemptible.
  • Art, according to a modern understanding that has not wholly vanished today, is meant to be a criticism of life, especially of life in a materialist, positivist civilization such as our own. If this means the artist does not share in civilization’s boons, then his suffering will be a badge of honor.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • The iron law of Darwinian evolution is that everything that exists strives with all its power to reproduce, to extend life into the future, and that every feature of every creature can be explained as an adaptation toward this end. For the artist to deny any connection with the enterprise of life, then, is to assert his freedom from this universal imperative; to reclaim negatively the autonomy that evolution seems to deny to human beings. It is only because we can freely choose our own ends that we can decide not to live for life, but for some other value that we posit. The artist’s decision to produce spiritual offspring rather than physical ones is thus allied to the monk’s celibacy and the warrior’s death for his country, as gestures that deny the empire of mere life.
  • Animals produce beauty on their bodies; humans can also produce it in their artifacts. The natural inference, then, would be that art is a human form of sexual display, a way for males to impress females with spectacularly redundant creations.
  • For Darwin, the human sense of beauty was not different in kind from the bird’s.
  • Still, Darwin recognized that the human sense of beauty was mediated by “complex ideas and trains of thought,” which make it impossible to explain in terms as straightforward as a bird’s:
  • with the rise of evolutionary psychology, it was only a matter of time before the attempt was made to explain art in Darwinian terms. After all, if ethics and politics can be explained by game theory and reciprocal altruism, there is no reason why aesthetics should be different: in each case, what appears to be a realm of human autonomy can be reduced to the covert expression of biological imperatives
  • Put more positively, one might say that any given work of art can be discussed critically and historically, but not deduced from the laws of evolution.
  • Still, there is an unmistakable sense in discussions of Darwinian aesthetics that by linking art to fitness, we can secure it against charges of irrelevance or frivolousness—that mattering to reproduction is what makes art, or anything, really matter.
  • In particular, Darwin suggests that it is impossible to explain the history or the conventions of any art by the general imperatives of evolution
  • Dutton’s Darwinism was aesthetically conservative: “Darwinian aesthetics,” he wrote, “can restore the vital place of beauty, skill, and pleasure as high artistic values.” Dutton’s argument has recently been reiterated and refined by a number of new books,
  • “The universality of art and artistic behaviors, their spontaneous appearance everywhere across the globe ... and the fact that in most cases they can be easily recognized as artistic across cultures suggest that they derive from a natural, innate source: a universal human psychology.”
  • Again like language, art is universal in the sense that any local expression of it can be “learned” by anyone.
  • Yet earlier theorists of evolution were reluctant to say that art was an evolutionary adaptation like language, for the simple reason that it does not appear to be evolutionarily adaptive.
  • Stephen Jay Gould suggested that art was not an evolutionary adaptation but what he called a “spandrel”—that is, a showy but accidental by-product of other adaptations that were truly functiona
  • the very words “success” and “failure,” despite themselves, bring an emotive and ethical dimension into the discussion, so impossible is it for human beings to inhabit a valueless world. In the nineteenth century, the idea that fitness for survival was a positive good motivated social Darwinism and eugenics. Proponents of these ideas thought that in some way they were serving progress by promoting the flourishing of the human race, when the basic premise of Darwinism is that there is no such thing as progress or regress, only differential rates of reproduction
  • The first popular effort in this direction was the late Denis Dutton’s much-discussed book The Art Instinct, which appeared in 2009.
  • Boyd begins with the premise that human beings are pattern-seeking animals: both our physical perceptions and our social interactions are determined by our brain’s innate need to find and to
  • Art, then, can be defined as the calisthenics of pattern-finding. “Just as animal physical play refines performance, flexibility, and efficiency in key behaviors,” Boyd writes, “so human art refines our performance in our key perceptual and cognitive modes, in sight (the visual arts), sound (music), and social cognition (story). These three modes of art, I propose, are adaptations ... they show evidence of special design in humans, design that offers survival and especially reproductive advantages.”
  • make coherent patterns
Javier E

Big Think Interview With Nicholas Carr | Nicholas Carr | Big Think - 0 views

  • Neurologically, how does our brain adapt itself to new technologies? Nicholas Carr: A couple of types of adaptations take place in your brain. One is a strengthening of the synaptical connections between the neurons involved in using that instrument, in using that tool. And basically these are chemical – neural chemical changes. So you know, cells in our brain communicate by transmitting electrical signals between them and those electrical signals are actually activated by the exchange of chemicals, neurotransmitters in our synapses. And so when you begin to use a tool, for instance, you have much stronger electrochemical signals being processed in those – through those synaptical connections. And then the second, and even more interesting adaptation is in actual physical changes,anatomical changes. Your neurons, you may grow new neurons that are then recruited into these circuits or your existing neurons may grow new synaptical terminals. And again, that also serves to strengthen the activity in those, in those particular pathways that are being used – new pathways. On the other hand, you know, the brain likes to be efficient and so even as its strengthening the pathways you’re exercising, it’s pulling – it’s weakening the connections in other ways between the cells that supported old ways of thinking or working or behaving, or whatever that you’re not exercising so much.
  • And it was only in around the year 800 or 900 that we saw the introduction of word spaces. And suddenly reading became, in a sense, easier and suddenly you had to arrival of silent reading, which changed the act of reading from just transcription of speech to something that every individual did on their own. And suddenly you had this whole deal of the silent solitary reader who was improving their mind, expanding their horizons, and so forth. And when Guttenberg invented the printing press around 1450, what that served to do was take this new very attentive, very deep form of reading, which had been limited to just, you know, monasteries and universities, and by making books much cheaper and much more available, spread that way of reading out to a much larger mass of audience. And so we saw, for the last 500 years or so, one of the central facts of culture was deep solitary reading.
  • What the book does as a technology is shield us from distraction. The only thinggoing on is the, you know, the progression of words and sentences across page after page and so suddenly we see this immersive kind of very attentive thinking, whether you are paying attention to a story or to an argument, or whatever. And what we know about the brain is the brain adapts to these types of tools.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • we adapt to the environment of the internet, which is an environment of kind of constant immersion and information and constant distractions, interruptions, juggling lots of messages, lots of bits of information.
  • Because it’s no longer just a matter of personal choice, of personal discipline, though obviously those things are always important, but what we’re seeing and we see this over and over again in the history of technology, is that the technology – the technology of the web, the technology of digital media, gets entwined very, very deeply into social processes, into expectations. So more and more, for instance in our work lives. You know, if our boss and all our colleagues are constantly exchanging messages, constantly checking email on their Blackberry or iPhone or their Droid or whatever, then it becomes very difficult to say, I’m not going to be as connected because you feel like you’re career is going to take a hit.
  • With the arrival – with the transfer now of text more and more onto screens, we see, I think, a new and in some ways more primitive way of reading. In order to take in information off a screen, when you are also being bombarded with all sort of other information and when there links in the text where you have to think even for just a fraction of a second, you know, do I click on this link or not. Suddenly reading again becomes a more cognitively intensive act, the way it was back when there were no spaces between words.
  • If all your friends are planning their social lives through texts and Facebook and Twitter and so forth, then to back away from that means to feel socially isolated. And of course for all people, particularly for young people, there’s kind of nothing worse than feeling socially isolated, that your friends are you know, having these conversations and you’re not involved. So it’s easy to say the solution, which is to, you know, becomes a little bit more disconnected. What’s hard it actually doing that.
  • if you want to change your brain, you change your habits. You change your habits of thinking. And that means, you know, setting aside time to engage in more contemplative, more reflective ways of thinking and that means, you know, setting aside time to engage in more contemplative, more reflective ways of thinking, to be – to screen out distractions. And that means retreating from digital media and from the web and from Smart Phones and texting and Facebook and Tweeting and everything else.
  • The Thinker was, you know, in a contemplative pose and was concentrating deeply, and wasn’t you know, multi-tasking. And because that is something that, until recently anyway, people always thought was the deepest and most distinctly human way of thinking.
  • we may end up finding that those are actually the most valuable ways of thinking that are available to us as human beings.
  • the ability to pay attention also is very important for our ability to build memories, to transfer information from our short-term memory to our long-term memory. And only when we do that do we weave new information into everything else we have stored in our brains. All the other facts we’ve learned, all the other experiences we’ve had, emotions we’ve felt. And that’s how you build, I think, a rich intellect and a rich intellectual life.
  • On the other hand, there is a cost. We lose – we begin to lose the facilities that we don’t exercise. So adaptation has both a very, very positive side, but also a potentially negative side because ultimately our brain is qualitatively neutral. It doesn’t pare what it’s strengthening or what it’s weakening, it just responds to the way we’re exercising our mind.
  • the book in some ways is the most interesting from our own present standpoint, particularly when we want to think about the way the internet is changing us. It’s interesting to think about how the book changed us.
  • So we become, after the arrival of the printing press in general, more attentive more attuned to contemplative ways of thinking. And that’s a very unnatural way of using our mind. You know, paying attention, filtering out distractions.
  • what we lose is the ability to pay deep attention to one thing for a sustained period of time, to filter out distractions.
tongoscar

Russia Unveils Climate Change Adaptation Plan - 0 views

  • The National Action Plan for the First Phase of Adaptation to Climate Change for the Period up to 2022 was published online by the Russian government.
  • The document outlines the measures to be taken by federal and regional authorities to “reduce the vulnerability of the population, economy and natural environment to the impacts of climate change.” Moreover, it defines a number of possible opportunities arising from climate change.
  • Russia will likely experience more intense and frequent droughts, precipitation, floods, fires, and the degradation of permafrost in the North.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The first seven pages of the document outline the planning, implementation and evaluation of a climate change adaptation plan. The government pledges its support by offering scientific assistance and expects to take responsibility for the security of people impacted by the consequences of climate change. Russia only officially ratified the Paris agreement in October 2019. The new plan reiterates Russia’s obligation to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and other international treaties.
  • These measures include upgrading the national climate monitoring system, preparing assessments of the impacts of climate change and developing adaptation strategies for specific sectors (such as the energy, transport and agriculture industries).
  • Russia, the world’s largest country, is particularly vulnerable to climate change. In July 2019, the government declared an emergency after raging wildfires engulfed an area in Siberia bigger than the size of Belgium.
Javier E

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

  • Expert judges and amateurs alike claim to judge classical musicians based on sound. But Tsay’s research suggests that the original judges, despite their experience and expertise, judged the competition (which they heard and watched live) based on visual information, just as amateurs do.
  • just like with classical music, we do not appraise wine in the way that we expect. 
  • Priceonomics revisited this seemingly damning research: the lack of correlation between wine enjoyment and price in blind tastings, the oenology students tricked by red food dye into describing a white wine like a red, a distribution of medals at tastings equivalent to what one would expect from pure chance, the grand crus described like cheap wines and vice-versa when the bottles are switched.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • Taste does not simply equal your taste buds. It draws on information from all our senses as well as context. As a result, food is susceptible to the same trickery as wine. Adding yellow food dye to vanilla pudding leads people to experience a lemony taste. Diners eating in the dark at a chic concept restaurant confuse veal for tuna. Branding, packaging, and price tags are equally important to enjoyment. Cheap fish is routinely passed off as its pricier cousins at seafood and sushi restaurants. 
  • Just like with wine and classical music, we often judge food based on very different criteria than what we claim. The result is that our perceptions are easily skewed in ways we don’t anticipate. 
  • What does it mean for wine that presentation so easily trumps the quality imbued by being grown on premium Napa land or years of fruitful aging? Is it comforting that the same phenomenon is found in food and classical music, or is it a strike against the authenticity of our enjoyment of them as well? How common must these manipulations be until we concede that the influence of the price tag of a bottle of wine or the visual appearance of a pianist is not a trick but actually part of the quality?
  • To answer these questions, we need to investigate the underlying mechanism that leads us to judge wine, food, and music by criteria other than what we claim to value. And that mechanism seems to be the quick, intuitive judgments our minds unconsciously make
  • this unknowability also makes it easy to be led astray when our intuition makes a mistake. We may often be able to count on the price tag or packaging of food and wine for accurate information about quality. But as we believe that we’re judging based on just the product, we fail to recognize when presentation manipulates our snap judgments.
  • Participants were just as effective when watching 6 second video clips and when comparing their ratings to ratings of teacher effectiveness as measured by actual student test performance. 
  • The power of intuitive first impressions has been demonstrated in a variety of other contexts. One experiment found that people predicted the outcome of political elections remarkably well based on silent 10 second video clips of debates - significantly outperforming political pundits and predictions made based on economic indicators.
  • In a real world case, a number of art experts successfully identified a 6th century Greek statue as a fraud. Although the statue had survived a 14 month investigation by a respected museum that included the probings of a geologist, they instantly recognized something was off. They just couldn’t explain how they knew.
  • Cases like this represent the canon behind the idea of the “adaptive unconscious,” a concept made famous by journalist Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink. The basic idea is that we constantly, quickly, and unconsciously do the equivalent of judging a book by its cover. After all, a cover provides a lot of relevant information in a world in which we don’t have time to read every page.
  • Gladwell describes the adaptive unconscious as “a kind of giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of the data we need in order to keep functioning as human beings.”
  • In a famous experiment, psychologist Nalini Ambady provided participants in an academic study with 30 second silent video clips of a college professor teaching a class and asked them to rate the effectiveness of the professor.
  • In follow up experiments, Chia-Jung Tsay found that those judging musicians’ auditions based on visual cues were not giving preference to attractive performers. Rather, they seemed to look for visual signs of relevant characteristics like passion, creativity, and uniqueness. Seeing signs of passion is valuable information. But in differentiating between elite performers, it gives an edge to someone who looks passionate over someone whose play is passionate
  • Outside of these more eccentric examples, it’s our reliance on quick judgments, and ignorance of their workings, that cause people to act on ugly, unconscious biases
  • It’s also why - from a business perspective - packaging and presentation is just as important as the good or service on offer. Why marketing is just as important as product. 
  • Gladwell ends Blink optimistically. By paying closer attention to our powers of rapid cognition, he argues, we can avoid its pitfalls and harness its powers. We can blindly audition musicians behind a screen, look at a piece of art devoid of other context, and pay particular attention to possible unconscious bias in our performance reports.
  • But Gladwell’s success in demonstrating how the many calculations our adaptive unconscious performs without our awareness undermines his hopeful message of consciously harnessing its power.
  • As a former world-class tennis player and coach of over 50 years, Braden is a perfect example of the ideas behind thin slicing. But if he can’t figure out what his unconscious is up to when he recognizes double faults, why should anyone else expect to be up to the task?
  • flawed judgment in fields like medicine and investing has more serious consequences. The fact that expertise is so tricky leads psychologist Daniel Kahneman to assert that most experts should seek the assistance of statistics and algorithms in making decisions.
  • In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, he describes our two modes of thought: System 1, like the adaptive unconscious, is our “fast, instinctive, and emotional” intuition. System 2 is our “slower, more deliberative, and more logical” conscious thought. Kahneman believes that we often leave decisions up to System 1 and generally place far “too much confidence in human judgment” due to the pitfalls of our intuition described above.
  • Not every judgment will be made in a field that is stable and regular enough for an algorithm to help us make judgments or predictions. But in those cases, he notes, “Hundreds of studies have shown that wherever we have sufficient information to build a model, it will perform better than most people.”
  • Experts can avoid the pitfalls of intuition more easily than laypeople. But they need help too, especially as our collective confidence in expertise leads us to overconfidence in their judgments. 
  • This article has referred to the influence of price tags and context on products and experiences like wine and classical music concerts as tricks that skew our perception. But maybe we should consider them a real, actual part of the quality.
  • Losing ourselves in a universe of relativism, however, will lead us to miss out on anything new or unique. Take the example of the song “Hey Ya!” by Outkast. When the music industry heard it, they felt sure it would be a hit. When it premiered on the radio, however, listeners changed the channel. The song sounded too dissimilar from songs people liked, so they responded negatively. 
  • It took time for people to get familiar with the song and realize that they enjoyed it. Eventually “Hey Ya!” became the hit of the summer.
  • Many boorish people talking about the ethereal qualities of great wine probably can't even identify cork taint because their impressions are dominated by the price tag and the wine label. But the classic defense of wine - that you need to study it to appreciate it - is also vindicated. The open question - which is both editorial and empiric - is what it means for the industry that constant vigilance and substantial study is needed to dependably appreciate wine for the product quality alone. But the questions is relevant to the enjoyment of many other products and experiences that we enjoy in life.
  • Maybe the most important conclusion is to not only recognize the fallibility of our judgments and impressions, but to recognize when it matters, and when it doesn’t
Javier E

Why Are Pessimists Ignored? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • in any emergency, it is optimism that triumphs, and the prophets of doom who are pushed aside.
  • People interested in truth seek out those who disagree with them. They look for rival opinions, awkward facts and the grounds that might engender hesitation. Such people have a far more complicated life than the optimists
  • It is easy to trace disasters, in retrospect, to the bursts of unfounded optimism that gave rise to them.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • we can trace the major disasters of 20th century politics to the impeccably optimistic doctrines of Marx, Lenin, Mao, and the many others for whom progress was the inevitable tendency of history. Pessimism, so obviously vindicated in retrospect, is almost always ineffective at the time. Why is this?
  • Our approaches to questions of that kind have been strongly influenced in recent years by evolutionary psychology, which tells us that we are endowed with traits of character and patterns of feeling that were “adaptive” in the conditions from which human societies first emerged. And what was adaptive then might be profoundly maladaptive today, in the mass societies that we ourselves have created. It was adaptive in those small bands of hunter-gatherers to join the crowd, to persecute the doubter, to go cheerfully forward against the foe. And from these traits have sprung certain patterns of thinking that serve the vital purpose of preventing people from perceiving the truth, when the truth will discourage them.
Javier E

How Did Consciousness Evolve? - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Theories of consciousness come from religion, from philosophy, from cognitive science, but not so much from evolutionary biology. Maybe that’s why so few theories have been able to tackle basic questions such as: What is the adaptive value of consciousness? When did it evolve and what animals have it?
  • The Attention Schema Theory (AST), developed over the past five years, may be able to answer those questions.
  • The theory suggests that consciousness arises as a solution to one of the most fundamental problems facing any nervous system: Too much information constantly flows in to be fully processed. The brain evolved increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for deeply processing a few select signals at the expense of others, and in the AST, consciousness is the ultimate result of that evolutionary sequence
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • Even before the evolution of a central brain, nervous systems took advantage of a simple computing trick: competition.
  • It coordinates something called overt attention – aiming the satellite dishes of the eyes, ears, and nose toward anything important.
  • Selective enhancement therefore probably evolved sometime between hydras and arthropods—between about 700 and 600 million years ago, close to the beginning of complex, multicellular life
  • The next evolutionary advance was a centralized controller for attention that could coordinate among all senses. In many animals, that central controller is a brain area called the tectum
  • At any moment only a few neurons win that intense competition, their signals rising up above the noise and impacting the animal’s behavior. This process is called selective signal enhancement, and without it, a nervous system can do almost nothing.
  • With the evolution of reptiles around 350 to 300 million years ago, a new brain structure began to emerge – the wulst. Birds inherited a wulst from their reptile ancestors. Mammals did too, but our version is usually called the cerebral cortex and has expanded enormously
  • According to fossil and genetic evidence, vertebrates evolved around 520 million years ago. The tectum and the central control of attention probably evolved around then, during the so-called Cambrian Explosion when vertebrates were tiny wriggling creatures competing with a vast range of invertebrates in the sea.
  • The tectum is a beautiful piece of engineering. To control the head and the eyes efficiently, it constructs something called an internal model, a feature well known to engineers. An internal model is a simulation that keeps track of whatever is being controlled and allows for predictions and planning.
  • The tectum’s internal model is a set of information encoded in the complex pattern of activity of the neurons. That information simulates the current state of the eyes, head, and other major body parts, making predictions about how these body parts will move next and about the consequences of their movement
  • In fish and amphibians, the tectum is the pinnacle of sophistication and the largest part of the brain. A frog has a pretty good simulation of itself.
  • All vertebrates—fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals—have a tectum. Even lampreys have one, and they appeared so early in evolution that they don’t even have a lower jaw. But as far as anyone knows, the tectum is absent from all invertebrates
  • The cortex also takes in sensory signals and coordinates movement, but it has a more flexible repertoire. Depending on context, you might look toward, look away, make a sound, do a dance, or simply store the sensory event in memory in case the information is useful for the future.
  • The most important difference between the cortex and the tectum may be the kind of attention they control. The tectum is the master of overt attention—pointing the sensory apparatus toward anything important. The cortex ups the ante with something called covert attention. You don’t need to look directly at something to covertly attend to it. Even if you’ve turned your back on an object, your cortex can still focus its processing resources on it
  • The cortex needs to control that virtual movement, and therefore like any efficient controller it needs an internal model. Unlike the tectum, which models concrete objects like the eyes and the head, the cortex must model something much more abstract. According to the AST, it does so by constructing an attention schema—a constantly updated set of information that describes what covert attention is doing moment-by-moment and what its consequences are
  • Covert attention isn’t intangible. It has a physical basis, but that physical basis lies in the microscopic details of neurons, synapses, and signals. The brain has no need to know those details. The attention schema is therefore strategically vague. It depicts covert attention in a physically incoherent way, as a non-physical essence
  • this, according to the theory, is the origin of consciousness. We say we have consciousness because deep in the brain, something quite primitive is computing that semi-magical self-description.
  • I’m reminded of Teddy Roosevelt’s famous quote, “Do what you can with what you have where you are.” Evolution is the master of that kind of opportunism. Fins become feet. Gill arches become jaws. And self-models become models of others. In the AST, the attention schema first evolved as a model of one’s own covert attention. But once the basic mechanism was in place, according to the theory, it was further adapted to model the attentional states of others, to allow for social prediction. Not only could the brain attribute consciousness to itself, it began to attribute consciousness to others.
  • In the AST’s evolutionary story, social cognition begins to ramp up shortly after the reptilian wulst evolved. Crocodiles may not be the most socially complex creatures on earth, but they live in large communities, care for their young, and can make loyal if somewhat dangerous pets.
  • If AST is correct, 300 million years of reptilian, avian, and mammalian evolution have allowed the self-model and the social model to evolve in tandem, each influencing the other. We understand other people by projecting ourselves onto them. But we also understand ourselves by considering the way other people might see us.
  • t the cortical networks in the human brain that allow us to attribute consciousness to others overlap extensively with the networks that construct our own sense of consciousness.
  • Language is perhaps the most recent big leap in the evolution of consciousness. Nobody knows when human language first evolved. Certainly we had it by 70 thousand years ago when people began to disperse around the world, since all dispersed groups have a sophisticated language. The relationship between language and consciousness is often debated, but we can be sure of at least this much: once we developed language, we could talk about consciousness and compare notes
  • Maybe partly because of language and culture, humans have a hair-trigger tendency to attribute consciousness to everything around us. We attribute consciousness to characters in a story, puppets and dolls, storms, rivers, empty spaces, ghosts and gods. Justin Barrett called it the Hyperactive Agency Detection Device, or HADD
  • the HADD goes way beyond detecting predators. It’s a consequence of our hyper-social nature. Evolution turned up the amplitude on our tendency to model others and now we’re supremely attuned to each other’s mind states. It gives us our adaptive edge. The inevitable side effect is the detection of false positives, or ghosts.
Javier E

People Argue Just to Win, Scholars Assert - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • For centuries thinkers have assumed that the uniquely human capacity for reasoning has existed to let people reach beyond mere perception and reflex in the search for truth.
  • Now some researchers are suggesting that reason evolved for a completely different purpose: to win arguments. Rationality, by this yardstick (and irrationality too, but we’ll get to that) is nothing more or less than a servant of the hard-wired compulsion to triumph in the debating arena. According to this view, bias, lack of logic and other supposed flaws that pollute the stream of reason are instead social adaptations that enable one group to persuade (and defeat) another.
  • the argumentative theory of reasoning
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • It was a purely social phenomenon. It evolved to help us convince others and to be careful when others try to convince us.” Truth and accuracy were beside the point.
  • Mr. Sperber wanted to figure out why people persisted in picking out evidence that supported their views and ignored the rest — what is known as confirmation bias — leading them to hold on to a belief doggedly in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence.
  • Other scholars have previously argued that reasoning and irrationality are both products of evolution. But they usually assume that the purpose of reasoning is to help an individual arrive at the truth, and that irrationality is a kink in that process, a sort of mental myopia.
  • distortions in reasoning are unintended side effects of blind evolution. They are a result of the way that the brain, a Rube Goldberg mental contraption, processes memory. People are more likely to remember items they are familiar with, like their own beliefs, rather than those of others.
  • In a new paper, he and Hélène Landemore, an assistant professor of political science at Yale, propose that the arguing and assessment skills employed by groups make democratic debate the best form of government for evolutionary reasons, regardless of philosophical or moral rationales.
  • attempts to rid people of biases have failed because reasoning does exactly what it is supposed to do: help win an argument.
  • To Ms. Narvaez, “reasoning is something that develops from experience; it’s a subset of what we really know.” And much of what we know cannot be put into words, she explained, pointing out that language evolved relatively late in human development.
  • Mr. Sperber and Mr. Mercier contend that as people became better at producing and picking apart arguments, their assessment skills evolved as well.
  • “At least in some cultural contexts, this results in a kind of arms race towards greater sophistication in the production and evaluation of arguments,” they write. “When people are motivated to reason, they do a better job at accepting only sound arguments, which is quite generally to their advantage.” Groups are more likely than individuals to come up with better results, they say, because they will be exposed to the best arguments
  • What is revolutionary about argumentative theory is that it presumes that since reason has a different purpose — to win over an opposing group — flawed reasoning is an adaptation in itself, useful for bolstering debating skills.
  • Mr. Mercier and Ms. Landemore, as a practical matter, endorse the theory of deliberative democracy, an approach that arose in the 1980s, which envisions cooperative town-hall-style deliberations. Championed by the philosophers John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, this sort of collaborative forum can overcome the tendency of groups to polarize at the extremes and deadlock,
Javier E

Why Success Starts With Failure - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Tim Harford’s new book, “Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure.”
  • Harford starts out with the premise that the world is a very complicated and difficult place.
  • Harford’s basic lesson is you have to design your life to make effective use of failures. You have to design systems of trial and error, or to use a natural word, evolution. Most successful enterprises are built through a process of groping and adaptation, not planning.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • First seek out new ideas and new things. Next, try new things on a scale small enough so that their failure is survivable. Then find a feedback mechanism so you can tell which new thing is failing and which is succeeding.
  • That’s the model—variation, survivability, selection.
  • Harford then illustrates how this basic process can work across a variety of contexts, from business to war to poetry.
Javier E

E. O. Wilson's Theory of Everything - Magazine - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Wilson told me the new proposed evolutionary model pulls the field “out of the fever swamp of kin selection,” and he confidently predicted a coming paradigm shift that would promote genetic research to identify the “trigger” genes that have enabled a tiny number of cases, such as the ant family, to achieve complex forms of cooperation.
  • In the book, he proposes a theory to answer what he calls “the great unsolved problem of biology,” namely how roughly two dozen known examples in the history of life—humans, wasps, termites, platypodid ambrosia beetles, bathyergid mole rats, gall-making aphids, one type of snapping shrimp, and others—made the breakthrough to life in highly social, complex societies. Eusocial species, Wilson noted, are by far “the most successful species in the history of life.”
  • Summarizing parts of it for me, Wilson was particularly unsparing of organized religion, likening the Book of Revelation, for example, to the ranting of “a paranoid schizophrenic who was allowed to write down everything that came to him.” Toward philosophy, he was only slightly kinder. Generation after generation of students have suffered trying to “puzzle out” what great thinkers like Socrates, Plato, and Descartes had to say on the great questions of man’s nature, Wilson said, but this was of little use, because philosophy has been based on “failed models of the brain.”
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • His theory draws upon many of the most prominent views of how humans emerged. These range from our evolution of the ability to run long distances to our development of the earliest weapons, which involved the improvement of hand-eye coordination. Dramatic climate change in Africa over the course of a few tens of thousands of years also may have forced Australopithecus and Homo to adapt rapidly. And over roughly the same span, humans became cooperative hunters and serious meat eaters, vastly enriching our diet and favoring the development of more-robust brains. By themselves, Wilson says, none of these theories is satisfying. Taken together, though, all of these factors pushed our immediate prehuman ancestors toward what he called a huge pre-adaptive step: the formation of the earliest communities around fixed camps.
  • “Within groups, the selfish are more likely to succeed,” Wilson told me in a telephone conversation. “But in competition between groups, groups of altruists are more likely to succeed. In addition, it is clear that groups of humans proselytize other groups and accept them as allies, and that that tendency is much favored by group selection.” Taking in newcomers and forming alliances had become a fundamental human trait, he added, because “it is a good way to win.”
  • “The humans become consistent with all the others,” he said, and the evolutionary steps were likely similar—beginning with the formation of groups within a freely mixing population, followed by the accumulation of pre-adaptations that make eusociality more likely, such as the invention of campsites. Finally comes the rise to prevalence of eusocial alleles—one of two or more alternative forms of a gene that arise by mutation, and are found at the same place on a chromosome—which promote novel behaviors (like communal child care) or suppress old, asocial traits. Now it is up to geneticists, he adds, to “determine how many genes are involved in crossing the eusociality threshold, and to go find those genes.”
  • Wilson posits that two rival forces drive human behavior: group selection and what he calls “individual selection”—competition at the level of the individual to pass along one’s genes—with both operating simultaneously. “Group selection,” he said, “brings about virtue, and—this is an oversimplification, but—individual selection, which is competing with it, creates sin. That, in a nutshell, is an explanation of the human condition.
  • “When humans started having a camp—and we know that Homo erectus had campsites—then we know they were heading somewhere,” he told me. “They were a group progressively provisioned, sending out some individuals to hunt and some individuals to stay back and guard the valuable campsite. They were no longer just wandering through territory, emitting calls. They were on long-term campsites, maybe changing from time to time, but they had come together. They began to read intentions in each other’s behavior, what each other are doing. They started to learn social connections more solidly.”
  • If Wilson is right, the human impulse toward racism and tribalism could come to be seen as a reflection of our genetic nature as much as anything else—but so could the human capacity for altruism, and for coalition- and alliance-building. These latter possibilities may help explain Wilson’s abiding optimism—about the environment and many other matters. If these traits are indeed deeply written into our genetic codes, we might hope that we can find ways to emphasize and reinforce them, to build problem-solving coalitions that can endure, and to identify with progressively larger and more-inclusive groups over time.
Javier E

How Humans Ended Up With Freakishly Huge Brains | WIRED - 0 views

  • paleontologists documented one of the most dramatic transitions in human evolution. We might call it the Brain Boom. Humans, chimps and bonobos split from their last common ancestor between 6 and 8 million years ago.
  • Starting around 3 million years ago, however, the hominin brain began a massive expansion. By the time our species, Homo sapiens, emerged about 200,000 years ago, the human brain had swelled from about 350 grams to more than 1,300 grams.
  • n that 3-million-year sprint, the human brain almost quadrupled the size its predecessors had attained over the previous 60 million years of primate evolution.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • There are plenty of theories, of course, especially regarding why: increasingly complex social networks, a culture built around tool use and collaboration, the challenge of adapting to a mercurial and often harsh climate
  • Although these possibilities are fascinating, they are extremely difficult to test.
  • “What kinds of mutations occurred, and what did they do? We’re starting to get answers and a deeper appreciation for just how complicated this process was.”
  • contrary to long-standing assumptions, larger mammalian brains do not always have more neurons, and the ones they do have are not always distributed in the same way.
  • The human brain has 86 billion neurons in all: 69 billion in the cerebellum, a dense lump at the back of the brain that helps orchestrate basic bodily functions and movement; 16 billion in the cerebral cortex, the brain’s thick corona and the seat of our most sophisticated mental talents, such as self-awareness, language, problem solving and abstract thought; and 1 billion in the brain stem and its extensions into the core of the brain
  • In contrast, the elephant brain, which is three times the size of our own, has 251 billion neurons in its cerebellum, which helps manage a giant, versatile trunk, and only 5.6 billion in its cortex
  • primates evolved a way to pack far more neurons into the cerebral cortex than other mammals did
  • The great apes are tiny compared to elephants and whales, yet their cortices are far denser: Orangutans and gorillas have 9 billion cortical neurons, and chimps have 6 billion. Of all the great apes, we have the largest brains, so we come out on top with our 16 billion neurons in the cortex.
  • Although it makes up only 2 percent of body weight, the human brain consumes a whopping 20 percent of the body’s total energy at rest. In contrast, the chimpanzee brain needs only half that.
  • there was a strong evolutionary pressure to modify the human regulatory regions in a way that sapped energy from muscle and channeled it to the brain.
  • Accounting for body size and weight, the chimps and macaques were twice as strong as the humans. It’s not entirely clear why, but it is possible that our primate cousins get more power out of their muscles than we get out of ours because they feed their muscles more energy. “Compared to other primates, we lost muscle power in favor of sparing energy for our brains,” Bozek said. “It doesn’t mean that our muscles are inherently weaker. We might just have a different metabolism.
  • a pioneering experiment. Not only were they going to identify relevant genetic mutations from our brain’s evolutionary past, they were also going to weave those mutations into the genomes of lab mice and observe the consequences.
  • Silver and Wray introduced the chimpanzee copy of HARE5 into one group of mice and the human edition into a separate group. They then observed how the embryonic mice brains grew.
  • After nine days of development, mice embryos begin to form a cortex, the outer wrinkly layer of the brain associated with the most sophisticated mental talents. On day 10, the human version of HARE5 was much more active in the budding mice brains than the chimp copy, ultimately producing a brain that was 12 percent larger
  • “It wasn’t just a couple mutations and—bam!—you get a bigger brain. As we learn more about the changes between human and chimp brains, we realize there will be lots and lots of genes involved, each contributing a piece to that. The door is now open to get in there and really start understanding. The brain is modified in so many subtle and nonobvious ways.”
  • As recent research on whale and elephant brains makes clear, size is not everything, but it certainly counts for something. The reason we have so many more cortical neurons than our great-ape cousins is not that we have denser brains, but rather that we evolved ways to support brains that are large enough to accommodate all those extra cells.
  • There’s a danger, though, in becoming too enamored with our own big heads. Yes, a large brain packed with neurons is essential to what we consider high intelligence. But it’s not sufficient
  • No matter how large the human brain grew, or how much energy we lavished upon it, it would have been useless without the right body. Three particularly crucial adaptations worked in tandem with our burgeoning brain to dramatically increase our overall intelligence: bipedalism, which freed up our hands for tool making, fire building and hunting; manual dexterity surpassing that of any other animal; and a vocal tract that allowed us to speak and sing.
  • Human intelligence, then, cannot be traced to a single organ, no matter how large; it emerged from a serendipitous confluence of adaptations throughout the body. Despite our ongoing obsession with the size of our noggins, the fact is that our intelligence has always been so much bigger than our brain.
blythewallick

Brave new world: Simple changes in intensity of weather events 'could be lethal' -- Sci... - 0 views

  • "It is difficult to predict how organisms will respond to changes in extreme events because these events tend to be, by definition, quite rare," Botero said. "But we can have a pretty good idea of how any given species may respond to current changes in this aspect of climate -- if we pay attention to its natural history, and have some idea of the climatic regime it has experienced in the past."
  • develop an evolutionary model of how populations respond to rare environmental extremes. (Think: 500-year floods.) These rare events can be tricky for evolution because it is difficult to adapt to hazards that are almost never encountered
  • Haaland and Botero also found that factors speeding up trait evolution are generally likely to hinder -- rather than favor -- adaptation to rare selection events. Part of the reason: High mutation rates tend to facilitate the process of adaptation to normal conditions during the long intervals in between environmental extremes.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • "Our results challenge the idea that species that have been historically exposed to more variable environments are better suited to cope with climate change," Botero said.
  • The simple framework that Haaland and Botero describe can be applied to any kind of environmental extreme including flooding, wildfires, heatwaves, droughts, cold spells, tornadoes and hurricanes -- any and all of which might be considered part of the "new normal" under climate change.
  • "In this case, our model suggests that the typical inhabitants of these places are likely to be more vulnerable to hotter temperatures than to longer or more widespread heat waves."
  • "While this simple conservation action is unlikely to completely shift the balance from a 'conservative' to a 'care-free' evolutionary response to extreme events, it may nevertheless reduce the strongest vulnerability of these 'conservative' lizard populations," Botero said. "It might just buy them enough time to accumulate sufficient evolutionary changes in their toes and limbs to meet the new demands of their altered habitat."
Javier E

How Climate Change Is Changing Therapy - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Andrew Bryant can still remember when he thought of climate change as primarily a problem of the future. When he heard or read about troubling impacts, he found himself setting them in 2080, a year that, not so coincidentally, would be a century after his own birth. The changing climate, and all the challenges it would bring, were “scary and sad,” he said recently, “but so far in the future that I’d be safe.”
  • That was back when things were different, in the long-ago world of 2014 or so. The Pacific Northwest, where Bryant is a clinical social worker and psychotherapist treating patients in private practice in Seattle, is a largely affluent place that was once considered a potential refuge from climate disruption
  • “We’re lucky to be buffered by wealth and location,” Bryant said. “We are lucky to have the opportunity to look away.”
  • ...61 more annotations...
  • starting in the mid-2010s, those beloved blue skies began to disappear. First, the smoke came in occasional bursts, from wildfires in Canada or California or Siberia, and blew away when the wind changed direction. Within a few summers, though, it was coming in thicker, from more directions at once, and lasting longer.
  • Sometimes there were weeks when you were advised not to open your windows or exercise outside. Sometimes there were long stretches where you weren’t supposed to breathe the outside air at all.
  • Now lots of Bryant’s clients wanted to talk about climate change. They wanted to talk about how strange and disorienting and scary this new reality felt, about what the future might be like and how they might face it, about how to deal with all the strong feelings — helplessness, rage, depression, guilt — being stirred up inside them.
  • As a therapist, Bryant found himself unsure how to respond
  • while his clinical education offered lots of training in, say, substance abuse or family therapy, there was nothing about environmental crisis, or how to treat patients whose mental health was affected by it
  • Bryant immersed himself in the subject, joining and founding associations of climate-concerned therapists
  • could now turn to resources like the list maintained by the Climate Psychology Alliance North America, which contains more than 100 psychotherapists around the country who are what the organization calls “climate aware.”
  • Over and over, he read the same story, of potential patients who’d gone looking for someone to talk to about climate change and other environmental crises, only to be told that they were overreacting — that their concern, and not the climate, was what was out of whack and in need of treatment.
  • “You come in and talk about how anxious you are that fossil-fuel companies continue to pump CO2 into the air, and your therapist says, ‘So, tell me about your mother.’”
  • In many of the messages, people asked Bryant for referrals to climate-focused therapists in Houston or Canada or Taiwan, wherever it was the writer lived.
  • his practice had shifted to reflect a new reality of climate psychology. His clients didn’t just bring up the changing climate incidentally, or during disconcerting local reminders; rather, many were activists or scientists or people who specifically sought out Bryant because of their concerns about the climate crisis.
  • Climate change, in other words, surrounds us with constant reminders of “ethical dilemmas and deep social criticism of modern society. In its essence, climate crisis questions the relationship of humans with nature and the meaning of being human in the Anthropocene.”
  • It had been a challenging few years, Bryant told me when I first called to talk about his work. There were some ways in which climate fears were a natural fit in the therapy room, and he believed the field had coalesced around some answers that felt clear and useful
  • But treating those fears also stirred up lots of complicated questions that no one was quite sure how to answer. The traditional focus of his field, Bryant said, could be oversimplified as “fixing the individual”: treating patients as separate entities working on their personal growth
  • Climate change, by contrast, was a species-wide problem, a profound and constant reminder of how deeply intertwined we all are in complex systems — atmospheric, biospheric, economic — that are much bigger than us. It sometimes felt like a direct challenge to old therapeutic paradigms — and perhaps a chance to replace them with something better.
  • In one of climate psychology’s founding papers, published in 2011, Susan Clayton and Thomas J. Doherty posited that climate change would have “significant negative effects on mental health and well-being.” They described three broad types of possible impacts: the acute trauma of living through climate disasters; the corroding fear of a collapsing future; and the psychosocial decay that could damage the fabric of communities dealing with disruptive changes
  • All of these, they wrote, would make the climate crisis “as much a psychological and social phenomenon as a matter of biodiversity and geophysics.”
  • Many of these predictions have since been borne out
  • Studies have found rates of PTSD spiking in the wake of disasters, and in 2017 the American Psychological Association defined “ecoanxiety” as “a chronic fear of environmental doom.”
  • Climate-driven migration is on the rise, and so are stories of xenophobia and community mistrust.
  • eventually started a website, Climate & Mind, to serve as a sort of clearing house for other therapists searching for resources. Instead, the site became an unexpected window into the experience of would-be patients: Bryant found himself receiving messages from people around the world who stumbled across it while looking for help.
  • Many say it has led to symptoms of depression or anxiety; more than a quarter make an active effort not to think about it.
  • A poll by the American Psychiatric Association in the same year found that nearly half of Americans think climate change is already harming the nation’s mental health.
  • In June, the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine published a paper cautioning that the world at large was facing “a psychological condition of ‘systemic uncertainty,’” in which “difficult emotions arise not only from experiencing the ecological loss itself,” but also from the fact that our lives are inescapably embedded in systems that keep on making those losses worse.
  • According to a 2022 survey by Yale and George Mason University, a majority of Americans report that they spend time worrying about climate change.
  • This is not an easy way to live.
  • Living within a context that is obviously unhealthful, he wrote, is painful: “a dimly intuited ‘fall’ from which we spend our lives trying to recover, a guilt we can never quite grasp or expiate” — a feeling of loss or dislocation whose true origins we look for, but often fail to see. This confusion leaves us feeling even worse.
  • When Barbara Easterlin first started studying environmental psychology 30 years ago, she told me, the focus of study was on ways in which cultivating a relationship with nature can be good for mental health
  • There was little or no attention to the fact that living through, or helping to cause, a collapse of nature can also be mentally harmful.
  • the field is still so new that it does not yet have evidence-tested treatments or standards of practice. Therapists sometimes feel as if they are finding the path as they go.
  • Rebecca Weston, a licensed clinical social worker practicing in New York and a co-president of the CPA-NA, told me that when she treats anxiety disorders, her goal is often to help the patient understand how much of their fear is internally produced — out of proportion to the reality they’re facing
  • climate anxiety is a different challenge, because people worried about climate change and environmental breakdown are often having the opposite experience: Their worries are rational and evidence-based, but they feel isolated and frustrated because they’re living in a society that tends to dismiss them.
  • One of the emerging tenets of climate psychology is that counselors should validate their clients’ climate-related emotions as reasonable, not pathological
  • it does mean validating that feelings like grief and fear and shame aren’t a form of sickness, but, as Weston put it, “are actually rational responses to a world that’s very scary and very uncertain and very dangerous for people
  • In the words of a handbook on climate psychology, “Paying heed to what is happening in our communities and across the globe is a healthier response than turning away in denial or disavowal.”
  • But this, too, raises difficult questions. “How much do we normalize people to the system we’re in?” Weston asked. “And is that the definition of health?
  • Or is the definition of health resisting the things that are making us so unhappy? That’s the profound tension within our field.”
  • “It seems to shift all the time, the sort of content and material that people are bringing in,” Alexandra Woollacott, a psychotherapist in Seattle, told the group. Sometimes it was a pervasive anxiety about the future, or trauma responses to fires or smoke or heat; other times, clients, especially young ones, wanted to vent their “sort of righteous anger and sense of betrayal” at the various powers that had built and maintained a society that was so destructive.
  • “I’m so glad that we have each other to process this,” she said, “because we’re humans living through this, too. I have my own trauma responses to it, I have my own grief process around it, I have my own fury at government and oil companies, and I think I don’t want to burden my clients with my own emotional response to it.”
  • In a field that has long emphasized boundaries, discouraging therapists from bringing their own issues or experiences into the therapy room, climate therapy offers a particular challenge: Separation can be harder when the problems at hand affect therapist and client alike
  • Some therapists I spoke to were worried about navigating the breakdown of barriers, while others had embraced it. “There is no place on the planet that won’t eventually be impacted, where client and therapist won’t be in it together,” a family therapist wrote in a CPA-NA newsletter. “Most therapists I know have become more vulnerable and self-disclosing in their practice.”
  • “If you look at or consider typical theoretical framings of something like post-traumatic growth, which is the understanding of this idea that people can sort of grow and become stronger and better after a traumatic event,” she said, then the climate crisis poses a dilemma because “there is no afterwards, right? There is no resolution anytime in our lifetimes to this crisis that we nonetheless have to build the capacities to face and to endure and to hopefully engage.”
  • “How,” she asked, “do you think about resilience apart from resolution?”
  • many of her patients are also disconnected from the natural world, which means that they struggle to process or even recognize the grief and alienation that comes from living in a society that treats nature as other, a resource to be used and discarded.
  • “I’m so excited by what you’re bringing in,” Woollacott replied. “I’m doing psychoanalytic training at the moment, and we study attachment theory” — how the stability of early emotional bonds affects future relationships and feelings of well-being. “But nowhere in the literature does it talk about our attachment to the land.”
  • Torres said that she sometimes takes her therapy sessions outside or asks patients to remember their earliest and deepest connections with animals or plants or places. She believes it will help if they learn to think of themselves “as rooted beings that aren’t just simply living in the human overlay on the environment.” It was valuable to recognize, she said, that “we are part of the land” and suffer when it suffers.
  • Torres described introducing her clients to methods — mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation — to help them manage acute feelings of stress or panic and to avoid the brittleness of burnout.
  • She also encourages them to narrativize the problem, including themselves as agents of change inside stories about how they came to be in this situation, and how they might make it different.
  • then she encourages them to find a community of other people who care about the same problems, with whom they could connect outside the therapy room. As Woollacott said earlier: “People who share your values. People who are committed to not looking away.”
  • Dwyer told the group that she had been thinking more about psychological adaptation as a form of climate mitigation
  • Therapy, she said, could be a way to steward human energy and creative capacities at a time when they’re most needed.
  • It was hard, Bryant told me when we first spoke, to do this sort of work without finding yourself asking bigger questions — namely, what was therapy actually about?
  • Many of the therapists I talked to spoke of their role not as “fixing” a patient’s problem or responding to a pathology, but simply giving their patients the tools to name and explore their most difficult emotions, to sit with painful feelings without instantly running away from them
  • many of the methods in their traditional tool kits continue to be useful in climate psychology. Anxiety and hopelessness and anger are all familiar territory, after all, with long histories of well-studied treatments.
  • They focused on trying to help patients develop coping skills and find meaning amid destabilization, to still see themselves as having agency and choice.
  • Weston, the therapist in New York, has had patients who struggle to be in a world that surrounds them with waste and trash, who experience panic because they can never find a place free of reminders of their society’s destruction
  • eston said, that she has trouble with the repeated refrain that therapist and patient experiencing the same losses and dreads at the same time constituted a major departure from traditional therapeutic practice
  • she believed this framing reflected and reinforced a bias inherent in a field that has long been most accessible to, and practiced by, the privileged. It was hardly new in the world, after all, to face the collapse of your entire way of life and still find ways to keep going.
  • Lately, Bryant told me, he’s been most excited about the work that happens outside the therapy room: places where groups of people gather to talk about their feelings and the future they’re facing
  • It was at such a meeting — a community event where people were brainstorming ways to adapt to climate chaos — that Weston, realizing she had concrete skills to offer, was inspired to rework her practice to focus on the challenge. She remembers finding the gathering empowering and energizing in a way she hadn’t experienced before. In such settings, it was automatic that people would feel embraced instead of isolated, natural that the conversation would start moving away from the individual and toward collective experiences and ideas.
  • There was no fully separate space, to be mended on its own. There was only a shared and broken world, and a community united in loving it.
Javier E

Synthetic Thinking | Jerome Groopman | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

  • Did you hope to combine chemistry and political philosophy in some way in your medical career?
  • Chemistry requires synthetic thinking. You have to bring disparate pieces of knowledge together in order to look for a chemical structure. Political philosophy, to some degree, also involves disparate aspects of knowledge: economics, sociology, history, pure philosophy
  • I found that in medicine, you don’t have an answer when you start out. You’re looking for clues that are often distributed in different places: family history, as there might be a genetic predisposition; social history, because the person smoked or was exposed to a toxin; the physical examination, where you find that an organ might be disordered. Add to that the blood test, the CAT scan, all of it, but most importantly, the person, the psychology of the person you’re dealing with. It’s the same kind of synthetic process as political philosophy, but in a different dimension.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Writing, especially the kind of writing that I do, brings together narrative, science, sometimes history, and an appreciation for the person who might be at the center of the narrative.
  • The greatest influence on me was Oliver Sacks, because he could capture people as people, and he always integrated serious science into his pieces.
  • The two subjects that were most prominent for him, as I once wrote for you, were identity and adaptation: Who is this person, despite their illness? How does that illness interface with their behavior and their decisions, how do people perceive them from the outside, and how do they try to find meaning and adapt to what looks like a disability, but sometimes—not always, but sometimes—gives them hidden strength?
  • I’ve gone from witnessing the depths of disability and death, like with AIDS: I saw some of the first people with AIDS in California, in 1982 or so. The average lifespan was six months. They were mostly young gay men, and it was devastating, the infections they got, the cancers they got. Now, with all the new drugs that have been developed, someone who gets HIV is projected to have a normal lifespan. From six months to fifty years: it’s miraculous
  • that’s part of what keeps you going: the belief that things can advance in a meaningful way.
  • Are there any major or interesting medical stories that the public doesn’t know enough about? 
  • The idea of genetic treatments. Often when people hear the words “genetics” or “DNA” or “RNA,” they shut down. The challenge is how to make it accessible.
  • There’s a wonderful line in the Talmud that says, “Whoever saves a single life saves the whole world.” There might be only a few hundred people in the whole country who have a particular genetic disorder. I
aliciathompson1

BBC - Future - The 'sea-nomad' children who see like dolphins - 0 views

  • They are uniquely adapted to this job – because they can see underwater. And it turns out that with a little practice, their unique vision might be accessible to any young person.
  • Gislen figured that in order for the Moken children to see clearly underwater, they must have either picked up some adaption that fundamentally changed the way their eyes worked, or they had learned to use their eyes differently under water.
  • There are two ways in which you can theoretically improve your vision underwater. You can change the shape of the lens – which is called accommodation – or you can make the pupil smaller, thereby increasing the depth of field.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • “The adult eye just isn’t capable of that amount of accommodation,” she says.
sissij

Let Women Drive, a Prince in Saudi Arabia Urges - The New York Times - 0 views

  • he couched his views in economic terms, noting that foreign drivers are typically paid 3,800 riyals, or about $1,000, a month to shuttle women around.
  • The driving ban is enforced by Saudi Arabia’s religious police, and it has been the occasional target of protests. Women were allowed to vote and run in local elections last December for the first time.
  • Ending the ban would allow the kingdom to eventually “dispense with” the services of an estimated one million drivers and would stimulate the economy by allowing women to work by driving other women who did not feel comfortable behind the wheel.
  •  
    I think this article is very interesting because it shows how religion is conflicted with the modern society. I think religion should be able to adapt with the modern society. It shouldn't be misused for personally considerations and discriminations. It is very hard to make clear the line of proper religion and using it as a reason for our own benefit because religion itself is an invented thing. --Sissi (12/2/2016)
Javier E

Sexual Freelancing in the Gig Economy - The New York Times - 0 views

  • We constantly use economic metaphors to describe romantic and sexual relations. Few people today refer to women as “damaged goods” or wonder why a man would “buy the cow when he can get the milk for free,” but we have “friends with benefits” and “invest in relationships.” An ex may be “on” or “off the market.” Online dating makes “shopping around” explicit. Blog after blog strategizes about how to maximize your “return on investment” on OkCupid.
  • he ways that people date — who contacts whom, where they meet and what happens next — have always been tied to the economy. Dating applies the logic of capitalism to courtship. On the dating market, everyone competes for him or herself.
  • If you want to understand why “Netflix and chill” has replaced dinner and a movie, you need to look at how people work.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Today, people are constantly told that we must be flexible and adaptable in order to succeed. Is it surprising that these values are reshaping how many of us approach sex and love?
  • part-timers, contractors and other contingent workers — who constitute some 40 percent of the American work force — are more inclined to text one another “u still up?” than to make plans in advance
  • Smartphones have altered expectations about when we are “on” and “off,” and working from home or from cafes has blurred the lines between labor and leisure.
  • The 2013 and 2014 Work and Education Poll conducted by Gallup found that the average full-time American worker reported working 47 hours per week. Moreover, 21 percent of the people surveyed reported working 50 to 59 hours per week; and another 18 percent said they worked 60 or more hours a week.
  • marriage rates have declined significantly since 1960. The median age of first marriage has risen to a record high: 27 for women and 29 for men.
  • “Knot Yet: The Benefits and Costs of Delayed Marriage in America” observed that young adults have gone from seeing marriage as a “cornerstone” of adult life to its “capstone,” something you enter only after you complete your education and attain professional stability
  • DATING itself is a recent invention. It developed when young people began moving to cities and women began working outside private homes. By 1900, 44 percent of single American women worked. Previously, courtship had taken place under adult supervision, in private places: a parlor, a factory dance or church social. But once women started going out and earning wages, they had more freedom over where and how they met prospective mates. Because men vastly out-earned women, they typically paid for entertainment.
  • In the 1920s and ‘30s, as more and more middle-class women started going to college, parents and faculty panicked over the “rating and dating” culture, which led kids to participate in “petting parties” and take “joy rides” with members of the opposite sex.
  • By the 1950s, a new kind of dating took over: “going steady.
  • by the post-war era of full employment, this form of courtship made perfect sense. The booming economy, which was targeting the newly flush “teen” demographic, dictated that in order for everyone to partake in new consumer pleasures — for everyone to go out for a burger and root beer float on the weekends — young people had to pair off
  • The generation of Americans that came of age around the time of the 2008 financial crisis has been told constantly that we must be “flexible” and “adaptable.” Is it so surprising that we have turned into sexual freelancers? Many of us treat relationships like unpaid internships: We cannot expect them to lead to anything long-term, so we use them to get experience. If we look sharp, we might get a free lunch.
  • this kind of dating isn’t any more transactional than it was back when suitors paid women family-supervised visits or parents sought out a yenta to introduce their children at a synagogue mixer.
  • Courtship has always been dictated by changes in the market. The good news is that dating is not the same thing as love. And as anyone who has ever been in love can attest, the laws of supply and demand do not control our feelings.
Javier E

The Evolving Teenage Brain - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Why do teenagers “behave with such vexing inconsistency: beguiling at breakfast, disgusting at dinner; masterful on Monday, sleepwalking on Saturday?” David Dobbs has compiled the available scientific answers to that question masterfully in “Teenage Brains” for the May issue of National Geographic. Teenage brains, he says, are effectively bringing a new operating system online.
  • “as we move through adolescence, the brain undergoes extensive remodeling, resembling a network and wiring upgrade.”
  • This period of development, he writes, is also adaptive: it is perfect for “the job of moving from the safety of home into the complicated world outside.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Teenagers take more risks, this new view of the research shows, because risk-taking in adolescence has historically given them an adaptive edge. “Succeeding often requires moving out of the home and into less secure situations.” They prefer the company of other teenagers because they are designed to “invest in the future rather than the past.” And they perceive a social crisis as a threat to their very existence because, on a neural level, “our brains react to peer exclusion much as they respond to threats to physical health or food supply.”
  • Studies show that when parents engage and guide their teens  with a light but steady hand, staying connected but allowing independence, their kids generally do much better in life. Adolescents want to learn primarily, but not entirely, from their friends. At some level and at some times (and it’s the parent’s job to spot when), the teen  recognizes that the parent can offer certain kernels of wisdom — knowledge valued not because it comes from parental authority, but because it comes from the parent’s own struggles to learn how the world turns.
julia rhodes

Q&A: Why It's Sometimes Rational to Be Irrational - Wired Science - 0 views

  • I think it’s safe to claim that magical thinking emerges from basic underlying cognitive mechanisms — shortcuts that we take, biases, heuristics.
  • A more controversial claim, which is very possible, is that magical thinking is an exaptation. An exaptation is some adaptation that emerged as a byproduct of something else, but became so useful that evolution started to select for aspects of that in addition to the initial thing.
  • Some people have argued that belief in god probably emerged from dualism, anthropomorphism and teleological reasoning. But then it became such a useful idea on its own that now we’re evolving to have a stronger belief in god, because belief in god is evolutionarily adaptive.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • There are a lot of dangers to magical thinking.
  • It can lead to fatalism if you think your life is completely controlled by supernatural forces.
  • But if used carefully, magical thinking can have benefits, such as a sense of control or a sense of meaning in life. So I take this somewhat paradoxical stance of using irrationality rationally.
  • eling lucky is irrational because the charm or wish itself isn’t lucky. But feeling lucky gives you a sense of control, which increases your confidence and increases your performance in various challenges. So it’s rational to hold onto that irrational belief, on some level, because it can benefit you — even if the charm can’t.
catbclark

The weaker sex | The Economist - 0 views

  • One group in particular is suffering (see article). Poorly educated men in rich countries have had difficulty coping with the enormous changes in the labour market and the home over the past half-century.
  • The two-parent family, still the norm among the elite, is vanishing among the poor.
  • Policymakers also need to lend a hand, because foolish laws are making the problem worse. America reduces the supply of marriageable men by locking up millions of young males for non-violent offences and then making it hard for them to find work when they get out (in Georgia, for example, felons are barred from feeding pigs, fighting fires or working in funeral homes).
1 - 20 of 164 Next › Last »
Showing 20 items per page