Skip to main content

Home/ TOK Friends/ Group items tagged disorder

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
ilanaprincilus06

I survived a school shooting. My kids shouldn't have to face the same danger | Ashley J... - 1 views

www.theguardian.com/...g-northern-illinois-university

school shooting congress

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 05 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Surviving a school shooting was an initiation of evil. The world didn’t look or feel the same afterward
  • Despite 12 years and countless other mass shooting incidents across the country, not much has been done by our federal legislators to make anyone safer from gun violence anywhere – let alone at school.
  • I clutched my eight-month-old son to my chest as the precious faces of young children murdered at school cycled across my television screen on the evening news.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Little kids were new casualties in our country’s ongoing struggle to define itself. Its endless argument over guns appeared to be a symptom of a national identity crisis between political polar opposites – two parties so ideologically opposed that even the needless deaths of tiny innocents couldn’t bridge the divide between them.
  • What sickened me most, though, wasn’t our government’s failure to prioritize people over partisanship. It was knowing that there were parents who took their kids to school and returned home eternally empty-handed.
  • Survivors of school shootings like me are now raising kids of their own, worrying they will suffer similar fates. Although the psychological effects of school shootings on parents may not yet be fully known or understood, research suggests that those with loved ones who have been exposed to “assaultive violence” have a higher risk of mental health disorders.
  • School shootings don’t just deprive children of their lives and innocence; they deprive parents of a sense of safety and security their parents and grandparents took for granted.
  • This reality is a painful part of our collective consciousness. We send our kids to school, hoping the horror of gun violence won’t happen there, but knowing no child or school is immune.
  • Both sides seem content to debate the second amendment and the founders’ intent until they run out of breath. But in the meantime, Congress must come together, in earnest, to find common ground and common-sense solutions to stop this bleeding. The consequences of inaction have become too high – and our kids are counting on them.
Javier E

The Disease Detective - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...metagenomic-sequencing.html

detective disease Pandemic Science research medicine

shared by Javier E on 05 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • What’s startling is how many mystery infections still exist today.
  • More than a third of acute respiratory illnesses are idiopathic; the same is true for up to 40 percent of gastrointestinal disorders and more than half the cases of encephalitis (swelling of the brain).
  • Up to 20 percent of cancers and a substantial portion of autoimmune diseases, including multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis, are thought to have viral triggers, but a vast majority of those have yet to be identified.
  • ...34 more annotations...
  • Globally, the numbers can be even worse, and the stakes often higher. “Say a person comes into the hospital in Sierra Leone with a fever and flulike symptoms,” DeRisi says. “After a few days, or a week, they die. What caused that illness? Most of the time, we never find out. Because if the cause isn’t something that we can culture and test for” — like hepatitis, or strep throat — “it basically just stays a mystery.”
  • It would be better, DeRisi says, to watch for rare cases of mystery illnesses in people, which often exist well before a pathogen gains traction and is able to spread.
  • Based on a retrospective analysis of blood samples, scientists now know that H.I.V. emerged nearly a dozen times over a century, starting in the 1920s, before it went global.
  • Zika was a relatively harmless illness before a single mutation, in 2013, gave the virus the ability to enter and damage brain cells.
  • The beauty of this approach” — running blood samples from people hospitalized all over the world through his system, known as IDseq — “is that it works even for things that we’ve never seen before, or things that we might think we’ve seen but which are actually something new.”
  • In this scenario, an undiscovered or completely new virus won’t trigger a match but will instead be flagged. (Even in those cases, the mystery pathogen will usually belong to a known virus family: coronaviruses, for instance, or filoviruses that cause hemorrhagic fevers like Ebola and Marburg.)
  • And because different types of bacteria require specific conditions in order to grow, you also need some idea of what you’re looking for in order to find it.
  • The same is true of genomic sequencing, which relies on “primers” designed to match different combinations of nucleotides (the building blocks of DNA and RNA).
  • Even looking at a slide under a microscope requires staining, which makes organisms easier to see — but the stains used to identify bacteria and parasites, for instance, aren’t the same.
  • The practice that DeRisi helped pioneer to skirt this problem is known as metagenomic sequencing
  • Unlike ordinary genomic sequencing, which tries to spell out the purified DNA of a single, known organism, metagenomic sequencing can be applied to a messy sample of just about anything — blood, mud, seawater, snot — which will often contain dozens or hundreds of different organisms, all unknown, and each with its own DNA. In order to read all the fragmented genetic material, metagenomic sequencing uses sophisticated software to stitch the pieces together by matching overlapping segments.
  • The assembled genomes are then compared against a vast database of all known genomic sequences — maintained by the government-run National Center for Biotechnology Information — making it possible for researchers to identify everything in the mix
  • Traditionally, the way that scientists have identified organisms in a sample is to culture them: Isolate a particular bacterium (or virus or parasite or fungus); grow it in a petri dish; and then examine the result under a microscope, or use genomic sequencing, to understand just what it is. But because less than 2 percent of bacteria — and even fewer viruses — can be grown in a lab, the process often reveals only a tiny fraction of what’s actually there. It’s a bit like planting 100 different kinds of seeds that you found in an old jar. One or two of those will germinate and produce a plant, but there’s no way to know what the rest might have grown into.
  • Such studies have revealed just how vast the microbial world is, and how little we know about it
  • “The selling point for researchers is: ‘Look, this technology lets you investigate what’s happening in your clinic, whether it’s kids with meningitis or something else,’” DeRisi said. “We’re not telling you what to do with it. But it’s also true that if we have enough people using this, spread out all around the world, then it does become a global network for detecting emerging pandemics
  • One study found more than 1,000 different kinds of viruses in a tiny amount of human stool; another found a million in a couple of pounds of marine sediment. And most were organisms that nobody had seen before.
  • After the Biohub opened in 2016, one of DeRisi’s goals was to turn metagenomics from a rarefied technology used by a handful of elite universities into something that researchers around the world could benefit from
  • metagenomics requires enormous amounts of computing power, putting it out of reach of all but the most well-funded research labs. The tool DeRisi created, IDseq, made it possible for researchers anywhere in the world to process samples through the use of a small, off-the-shelf sequencer, much like the one DeRisi had shown me in his lab, and then upload the results to the cloud for analysis.
  • he’s the first to make the process so accessible, even in countries where lab supplies and training are scarce. DeRisi and his team tested the chemicals used to prepare DNA for sequencing and determined that using as little as half the recommended amount often worked fine. They also 3-D print some of the labs’ tools and replacement parts, and offer ongoing training and tech support
  • The metagenomic analysis itself — normally the most expensive part of the process — is provided free.
  • But DeRisi’s main innovation has been in streamlining and simplifying the extraordinarily complex computational side of metagenomics
  • IDseq is also fast, capable of doing analyses in hours that would take other systems weeks.
  • “What IDseq really did was to marry wet-lab work — accumulating samples, processing them, running them through a sequencer — with the bioinformatic analysis,”
  • “Without that, what happens in a lot of places is that the researcher will be like, ‘OK, I collected the samples!’ But because they can’t analyze them, the samples end up in the freezer. The information just gets stuck there.”
  • Meningitis itself isn’t a disease, just a description meaning that the tissues around the brain and spinal cord have become inflamed. In the United States, bacterial infections can cause meningitis, as can enteroviruses, mumps and herpes simplex. But a high proportion of cases have, as doctors say, no known etiology: No one knows why the patient’s brain and spinal tissues are swelling.
  • When Saha and her team ran the mystery meningitis samples through IDseq, though, the result was surprising. Rather than revealing a bacterial cause, as expected, a third of the samples showed signs of the chikungunya virus — specifically, a neuroinvasive strain that was thought to be extremely rare. “At first we thought, It cannot be true!” Saha recalls. “But the moment Joe and I realized it was chikungunya, I went back and looked at the other 200 samples that we had collected around the same time. And we found the virus in some of those samples as well.”
  • Until recently, chikungunya was a comparatively rare disease, present mostly in parts of Central and East Africa. “Then it just exploded through the Caribbean and Africa and across Southeast Asia into India and Bangladesh,” DeRisi told me. In 2011, there were zero cases of chikungunya reported in Latin America. By 2014, there were a million.
  • Chikungunya is a mosquito-borne virus, but when DeRisi and Saha looked at the results from IDseq, they also saw something else: a primate tetraparvovirus. Primate tetraparvoviruses are almost unknown in humans, and have been found only in certain regions. Even now, DeRisi is careful to note, it’s not clear what effect the virus has on people. “Maybe it’s dangerous, maybe it isn’t,” DeRisi says. “But I’ll tell you what: It’s now on my radar.
  • it reveals a landscape of potentially dangerous viruses that we would otherwise never find out about. “What we’ve been missing is that there’s an entire universe of pathogens out there that are causing disease in humans,” Imam notes, “ones that we often don’t even know exist.”
  • “The plan was, Let’s let researchers around the world propose studies, and we’ll choose 10 of them to start,” DeRisi recalls. “We thought we’d get, like, a couple dozen proposals, and instead we got 350.”
  • Metagenomic sequencing is especially good at what scientists call “environmental sampling”: identifying, say, every type of bacteria present in the gut microbiome, or in a teaspoon of seawater.
  • “When you draw blood from someone who has a fever in Ghana, you really don’t know very much about what would normally be in their blood without fever — let alone about other kinds of contaminants in the environment. So how do you interpret the relevance of all the things you’re seeing?”
  • Such criticisms have led some to say that metagenomics simply isn’t suited to the infrastructure of developing countries. Along with the problem of contamination, many labs struggle to get the chemical reagents needed for sequencing, either because of the cost or because of shipping and customs holdups
  • we’re less likely to be caught off-guard. “With Ebola, there’s always an issue: Where’s the virus hiding before it breaks out?” DeRisi explains. “But also, once we start sampling people who are hospitalized more widely — meaning not just people in Northern California or Boston, but in Uganda, and Sierra Leone, and Indonesia — the chance of disastrous surprises will go down. We’ll start seeing what’s hidden.”
Javier E

Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in | World news |... - 1 views

www.theguardian.com/...redicted-the-future-we-live-in

philosophy fringe acceleration psychology technology

shared by Javier E on 11 May 17 - No Cached
  • Roger Zelazny, published his third novel. In many ways, Lord of Light was of its time, shaggy with imported Hindu mythology and cosmic dialogue. Yet there were also glints of something more forward-looking and political.
  • accelerationism has gradually solidified from a fictional device into an actual intellectual movement: a new way of thinking about the contemporary world and its potential.
  • Accelerationists argue that technology, particularly computer technology, and capitalism, particularly the most aggressive, global variety, should be massively sped up and intensified – either because this is the best way forward for humanity, or because there is no alternative.
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • Accelerationists favour automation. They favour the further merging of the digital and the human. They often favour the deregulation of business, and drastically scaled-back government. They believe that people should stop deluding themselves that economic and technological progress can be controlled.
  • Accelerationism, therefore, goes against conservatism, traditional socialism, social democracy, environmentalism, protectionism, populism, nationalism, localism and all the other ideologies that have sought to moderate or reverse the already hugely disruptive, seemingly runaway pace of change in the modern world
  • Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian in their introduction to #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, a sometimes baffling, sometimes exhilarating book, published in 2014, which remains the only proper guide to the movement in existence.
  • “We all live in an operating system set up by the accelerating triad of war, capitalism and emergent AI,” says Steve Goodman, a British accelerationist
  • A century ago, the writers and artists of the Italian futurist movement fell in love with the machines of the industrial era and their apparent ability to invigorate society. Many futurists followed this fascination into war-mongering and fascism.
  • One of the central figures of accelerationism is the British philosopher Nick Land, who taught at Warwick University in the 1990s
  • Land has published prolifically on the internet, not always under his own name, about the supposed obsolescence of western democracy; he has also written approvingly about “human biodiversity” and “capitalistic human sorting” – the pseudoscientific idea, currently popular on the far right, that different races “naturally” fare differently in the modern world; and about the supposedly inevitable “disintegration of the human species” when artificial intelligence improves sufficiently.
  • In our politically febrile times, the impatient, intemperate, possibly revolutionary ideas of accelerationism feel relevant, or at least intriguing, as never before. Noys says: “Accelerationists always seem to have an answer. If capitalism is going fast, they say it needs to go faster. If capitalism hits a bump in the road, and slows down” – as it has since the 2008 financial crisis – “they say it needs to be kickstarted.”
  • On alt-right blogs, Land in particular has become a name to conjure with. Commenters have excitedly noted the connections between some of his ideas and the thinking of both the libertarian Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel and Trump’s iconoclastic strategist Steve Bannon.
  • “In Silicon Valley,” says Fred Turner, a leading historian of America’s digital industries, “accelerationism is part of a whole movement which is saying, we don’t need [conventional] politics any more, we can get rid of ‘left’ and ‘right’, if we just get technology right. Accelerationism also fits with how electronic devices are marketed – the promise that, finally, they will help us leave the material world, all the mess of the physical, far behind.”
  • In 1972, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari published Anti-Oedipus. It was a restless, sprawling, appealingly ambiguous book, which suggested that, rather than simply oppose capitalism, the left should acknowledge its ability to liberate as well as oppress people, and should seek to strengthen these anarchic tendencies, “to go still further … in the movement of the market … to ‘accelerate the process’”.
  • By the early 90s Land had distilled his reading, which included Deleuze and Guattari and Lyotard, into a set of ideas and a writing style that, to his students at least, were visionary and thrillingly dangerous. Land wrote in 1992 that capitalism had never been properly unleashed, but instead had always been held back by politics, “the last great sentimental indulgence of mankind”. He dismissed Europe as a sclerotic, increasingly marginal place, “the racial trash-can of Asia”. And he saw civilisation everywhere accelerating towards an apocalypse: “Disorder must increase... Any [human] organisation is ... a mere ... detour in the inexorable death-flow.”
  • With the internet becoming part of everyday life for the first time, and capitalism seemingly triumphant after the collapse of communism in 1989, a belief that the future would be almost entirely shaped by computers and globalisation – the accelerated “movement of the market” that Deleuze and Guattari had called for two decades earlier – spread across British and American academia and politics during the 90s. The Warwick accelerationists were in the vanguard.
  • In the US, confident, rainbow-coloured magazines such as Wired promoted what became known as “the Californian ideology”: the optimistic claim that human potential would be unlocked everywhere by digital technology. In Britain, this optimism influenced New Labour
  • The Warwick accelerationists saw themselves as participants, not traditional academic observers
  • The CCRU gang formed reading groups and set up conferences and journals. They squeezed into the narrow CCRU room in the philosophy department and gave each other impromptu seminars.
  • The main result of the CCRU’s frantic, promiscuous research was a conveyor belt of cryptic articles, crammed with invented terms, sometimes speculative to the point of being fiction.
  • At Warwick, however, the prophecies were darker. “One of our motives,” says Plant, “was precisely to undermine the cheery utopianism of the 90s, much of which seemed very conservative” – an old-fashioned male desire for salvation through gadgets, in her view.
  • K-punk was written by Mark Fisher, formerly of the CCRU. The blog retained some Warwick traits, such as quoting reverently from Deleuze and Guattari, but it gradually shed the CCRU’s aggressive rhetoric and pro-capitalist politics for a more forgiving, more left-leaning take on modernity. Fisher increasingly felt that capitalism was a disappointment to accelerationists, with its cautious, entrenched corporations and endless cycles of essentially the same products. But he was also impatient with the left, which he thought was ignoring new technology
  • lex Williams, co-wrote a Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics. “Capitalism has begun to constrain the productive forces of technology,” they wrote. “[Our version of] accelerationism is the basic belief that these capacities can and should be let loose … repurposed towards common ends … towards an alternative modernity.”
  • What that “alternative modernity” might be was barely, but seductively, sketched out, with fleeting references to reduced working hours, to technology being used to reduce social conflict rather than exacerbate it, and to humanity moving “beyond the limitations of the earth and our own immediate bodily forms”. On politics and philosophy blogs from Britain to the US and Italy, the notion spread that Srnicek and Williams had founded a new political philosophy: “left accelerationism”.
  • Two years later, in 2015, they expanded the manifesto into a slightly more concrete book, Inventing the Future. It argued for an economy based as far as possible on automation, with the jobs, working hours and wages lost replaced by a universal basic income. The book attracted more attention than a speculative leftwing work had for years, with interest and praise from intellectually curious leftists
  • Even the thinking of the arch-accelerationist Nick Land, who is 55 now, may be slowing down. Since 2013, he has become a guru for the US-based far-right movement neoreaction, or NRx as it often calls itself. Neoreactionaries believe in the replacement of modern nation-states, democracy and government bureaucracies by authoritarian city states, which on neoreaction blogs sound as much like idealised medieval kingdoms as they do modern enclaves such as Singapore.
  • Land argues now that neoreaction, like Trump and Brexit, is something that accelerationists should support, in order to hasten the end of the status quo.
  • In 1970, the American writer Alvin Toffler, an exponent of accelerationism’s more playful intellectual cousin, futurology, published Future Shock, a book about the possibilities and dangers of new technology. Toffler predicted the imminent arrival of artificial intelligence, cryonics, cloning and robots working behind airline check-in desks
  • Land left Britain. He moved to Taiwan “early in the new millennium”, he told me, then to Shanghai “a couple of years later”. He still lives there now.
  • In a 2004 article for the Shanghai Star, an English-language paper, he described the modern Chinese fusion of Marxism and capitalism as “the greatest political engine of social and economic development the world has ever known”
  • Once he lived there, Land told me, he realised that “to a massive degree” China was already an accelerationist society: fixated by the future and changing at speed. Presented with the sweeping projects of the Chinese state, his previous, libertarian contempt for the capabilities of governments fell away
  • Without a dynamic capitalism to feed off, as Deleuze and Guattari had in the early 70s, and the Warwick philosophers had in the 90s, it may be that accelerationism just races up blind alleys. In his 2014 book about the movement, Malign Velocities, Benjamin Noys accuses it of offering “false” solutions to current technological and economic dilemmas. With accelerationism, he writes, a breakthrough to a better future is “always promised and always just out of reach”.
  • “The pace of change accelerates,” concluded a documentary version of the book, with a slightly hammy voiceover by Orson Welles. “We are living through one of the greatest revolutions in history – the birth of a new civilisation.”
  • Shortly afterwards, the 1973 oil crisis struck. World capitalism did not accelerate again for almost a decade. For much of the “new civilisation” Toffler promised, we are still waiting
katedriscoll

Frontiers | A Digital Nudge to Counter Confirmation Bias | Big Data - 1 views

www.frontiersin.org/...full

shared by katedriscoll on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Information disorder in current information ecosystems arises not only from the publication of “fake news,” but also from individuals' subjective reading of news and from their propagating news to others. Sometimes the difference between real and fake information is apparent. However, often a message is written to evoke certain emotions and opinions by taking partially true base stories and injecting false statements such that the information looks realistic. In addition, the perception of the trustworthiness of news is often influenced by confirmation bias. As a result, people often believe distorted or outright incorrect news and spread such misinformation further. For example, it was shown that in the months preceding the 2016 American presidential election, organizations from both Russia and Iran ran organized efforts to create such stories and spread them on Twitter and Facebook (Cohen, 2018). It is therefore important to raise internet users' awareness of such practices. Key to this is providing users with means to understand whether information should be trusted or not.
  • In this section, we discuss how social networks increase the spread of biased news and misinformation. We discuss confirmation bias, echo chambers and other factors that may subconsciously influence a person's opinion. We show how these processes can interact to form a vicious circle that favors the rise of untrustworthy sources. Often, when an individual thinks they know something, they are satisfied by an explanation that confirms their belief, without necessarily considering all possible other explanations, and regardless of the veracity of this information. This is confirmation bias in action. Nickerson (1998) defined it as the tendency of people to both seek and interpret evidence that supports an already-held belief.
cvanderloo

3 medical innovations fueled by COVID-19 that will outlast the pandemic - 0 views

theconversation.com/ll-outlast-the-pandemic-156464

COVID innovations science health pandemic medicine knowledge research technology

shared by cvanderloo on 17 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • When COVID-19 struck, mRNA vaccines in particular were ready to be put to a real-world test. The 94% efficacy of the mRNA vaccines surpassed health officials’ highest expectations.
  • DNA and mRNA vaccines offer huge advantages over traditional types of vaccines, since they use only genetic code from a pathogen – rather than the entire virus or bacteria.
  • Gene-based vaccines also produce precise and effective immune responses. They stimulate not only antibodies that block an infection, but also a strong T cell response that can clear an infection if one occurs.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • These devices can measure a person’s temperature, heart rate, level of activity and other biometrics. With this information, researchers have been able to track and detect COVID-19 infections even before people notice they have any symptoms.
  • Wearables can detect symptoms of COVID-19 or other illnesses before symptoms are noticeable. While they have proved to be capable of detecting sickness early, the symptoms wearables detect are not unique to COVID-19.
  • So a logical way to look for new drugs to treat a specific disease is to study individual genes and proteins that are directly affected by that disease.
  • But this idea of mapping the protein interactions of diseases to look for novel drug targets doesn’t apply just to the coronavirus. We have now used this approach on other pathogens as well as other diseases including cancer, neurodegenerative and psychiatric disorders.
jmfinizio

Opinion: America was lucky to be saved by its democracy -- even if some don't realize i... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

democracy america cnn

shared by jmfinizio on 13 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • America's extraordinary privileges of law and functionality seemed to sustain, even in a brief moment of collapse
  • Americans perhaps also took that for granted
  • not fear at the new unknown - dominated. Chaos normally follows disorder, but in the United States the cogs kept whirring.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • This short moment of ugly collapse should not lead Americans to dismiss the extraordinary eloquence and value of their system.
  • Wednesday's violence didn't really fit the conventional description of an "attempted coup"
  • It was uglier.
  • the departing President's supporters did not take over parliament and change the government. The army did not switch sides. The rightful winner of the last election is not in hiding
  • Yet remember, between horror at what a sense of privilege among a small mob can do, there is also a moment of hope. Values worked.
  • But when you woke up each morning in Donetsk, the system continued to fall apart. In Washington DC, the opposite was true.
  • Now is not a time for chest-thumping over American values that have slowly deteriorated for years to get to this point.
  • The singular reason the US system has advantages over its authoritarian rivals is that it is based on the open competition and truth of ideas.
  • Many perhaps taking for granted how lucky they are to live in a nation where such a staggering abuse of democracy can still be eclipsed by its virtues.
ilanaprincilus06

A Medication-Assisted Treatment For Meth Addiction Shows Promise : Shots - Health News ... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...-proves-effective-in-new-trial

drugs addiction medical community

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • For the first time, a medication regime has been found effective for some patients with meth addiction in a large, placebo-controlled trial.
  • Unlike opioid addiction, for which medication-assisted treatment is the standard of care, no medication has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use with meth.
  • patients in clinics around the U.S. suffering from methamphetamine use disorder were treated for 12 weeks with a combination of medications — naltrexone and bupropion — or placebo.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • The treatment helped 13.4% of patients with their addiction, compared with 2.5% of the placebo group.
  • This medication therapy provides another tool for doctors to try with patients.
  • "As we understand the complexity of the human brain, it becomes very much of a magical thinking that one pill will solve the problem of addiction,"
  • The treatment regimen in the trial combined two medications that have been studied separately for treating methamphetamine addiction with limited success.
  • This clinical trial was successful enough that the National Institute on Drug Addiction's Volkow says she expects to move forward toward securing FDA approval.
  • lack of medical treatments for those addicted to meth has complicated efforts to curb demand for the drug.
  • The human cost has been catastrophic. Researchers say overdose deaths linked to meth increased fourfold over the last decade.
  • Even users who don't overdose often experience damage to the heart and other tissues, and can see their lives spiral out of control.
  • "For heroin users, there's methadone, there's suboxone. I just wonder why we haven't researched [treatments for] this drug yet,"
  • "It's about evidence-based care, it's about empathy and it's about survivability,"
margogramiak

COVID-19 anxiety linked to body image issues: Study finds association between stress an... - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...201022201407.htm

shared by margogramiak on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • A new study has found that anxiety and stress directly linked to COVID-19 could be causing a number of body image issues amongst women and men.
  • A new study has found that anxiety and stress directly linked to COVID-19 could be causing a number of body image issues amongst women and men.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      In class, we've talked countless times about how weird the brain is, and how there are so many things that simply don't make sense. Simply reading this description and title, this seems like ones of those things.
  • Amongst women, the study found that feelings of anxiety and stress caused by COVID-19 were associated with a greater desire for thinness
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      I need an explanation for this.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • COVID-19, and the consequences of the restrictions introduced to help tackle it, could be contributing to a number of serious mental health issues.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Yikes. So getting covid is a health issue, yet so is the worry of getting it.
  • Amongst the male participants, the study found that COVID-19-related anxiety and stress was associated with greater desire for muscularity, with anxiety also associated with body fat dissatisfaction.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Wow, that's so interesting.
  • In some cases, these issues can have very serious repercussions, including triggering eating disorders.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      What is it that connects the two?
  • Certainly during the initial spring lockdown period, our screen time increased, meaning that we were more likely to be exposed to thin or athletic ideals through the media, while decreased physical activity may have heightened negative thoughts about weight or shape. At the same time, it is possible that the additional anxiety and stress caused by COVID-19 may have diminished the coping mechanisms we typically use to help manage negative thoughts.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Ahhhhh. This makes sense. So it's quarantine's fault more than anything. People who have covid anxiety tend be more responsible, and tend to stay home more, This leads to more screen time which leads to body image issues.
  • uring lockdown, women may have felt under greater pressure to conform to traditionally feminine roles and norms
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      oh, really?
  • iven that masculinity typically emphasises the value of toughness, self-reliance, and the pursuit of status, COVID-19-related stress and anxiety may be leading men to place greater value on the importance of being muscular."
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Make sense.
tonycheng6

Covid Vaccine Deaths Rise in Norway Among Older People - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...people-75-and-older-rise-to-29

shared by tonycheng6 on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Norway expressed increasing concern about the safety of the Pfizer Inc. vaccine on elderly people with serious underlying health conditions after raising an estimate of the number who died after receiving inoculations to 29.
  • the vaccine produced by Pfizer and BioNTech SE was the only one available in Norway, and “all deaths are thus linked to this vaccine,”
  • “There are 13 deaths that have been assessed, and we are aware of another 16 deaths that are currently being assessed,”
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Norway’s experience doesn’t mean that younger, healthier people should avoid being vaccinated.
  • Official reports of allergic reactions have been rare as governments rush to roll out vaccines to try to contain the global pandemic.
  • All the reported deaths related to “elderly people with serious basic disorders,”
  • The first people to be immunized in many places have been older than that as countries rush to inoculate nursing-home residents at high risk from the virus.
  • for those with the most severe frailty, even relatively mild vaccine side effects can have serious consequences. For those who have a very short remaining life span anyway, the benefit of the vaccine may be marginal or irrelevant.
  • This does not mean that there is a causal link between vaccination and death.
ardenganse

Opinion | Everyone Knows Memory Fails as You Age. But Everyone Is Wrong. - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...age-memory.html

shared by ardenganse on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • This is widely understood to be a classic problem of aging. But as a neuroscientist, I know that the problem is not necessarily age-related.
  • But any distraction — a new thought, someone asking you a question, the telephone ringing — can disrupt short-term memory.
    • ardenganse
      ardenganse on 17 Jan 21
       
      I think this relates to our inability to multitask.
  • The relevant difference is not age but rather how we describe these events, the stories we tell ourselves about them. Twenty-year-olds don’t think, “Oh dear, this must be early-onset Alzheimer’s.” They think, “I’ve got a lot on my plate right now” or “I really need to get more than four hours of sleep.”
    • ardenganse
      ardenganse on 17 Jan 21
       
      I think this is very interesting reasoning to some of the stigmas surrounding age and memory loss.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • This is not to say that Alzheimer’s- and dementia-related memory impairments are fiction — they are very real — but every lapse of short-term memory doesn’t necessarily indicate a biological disorder.
  • Some aspects of memory actually get better as we age. For instance, our ability to extract patterns, regularities and to make accurate predictions improves over time because we’ve had more experience.
    • ardenganse
      ardenganse on 17 Jan 21
       
      Another interesting parallel to pattern recognition.
  • Second, older adults have to search through more memories than do younger adults to find the fact or piece of information they’re looking for. Your brain becomes crowded with memories and information.
margogramiak

We hear what we expect to hear -- ScienceDaily - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...210108120110.htm

shared by margogramiak on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Despite senses being the only window to the outside world, people do rarely question how faithfully they represent the external physical reality.
  • Despite senses being the only window to the outside world, people do rarely question how faithfully they represent the external physical reality.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      We've questioned our senses A LOT in TOK!
  • the cerebral cortex constantly generates predictions on what will happen next, and that neurons in charge of sensory processing only encode the difference between our predictions and the actual reality.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      That's really interesting. We've touched on similar concepts, but nothing exactly like this.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • that not only the cerebral cortex, but the entire auditory pathway, represents sounds according to prior expectations.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      So, multiple parts of our brain make predictions about what's going to happen next.
  • Although participants recognised the deviant faster when it was placed on positions where they expected it, the subcortical nuclei encoded the sounds only when they were placed in unexpected positions.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      That's interesting. How will this research affect medicine etc?
  • Predictive coding assumes that the brain is constantly generating predictions about how the physical world will look, sound, feel, and smell like in the next instant, and that neurons in charge of processing our senses save resources by representing only the differences between these predictions and the actual physical world.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      I remember from class that the brain looks for patterns with its senses. Does that apply here?
  • e have now shown that this process also dominates the most primitive and evolutionary conserved parts of the brain. All that we perceive might be deeply contaminated by our subjective beliefs on the physical world."
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Perception is crazy...
  • Developmental dyslexia, the most wide-spread learning disorder, has already been linked to altered responses in subcortical auditory pathway and to difficulties on exploiting stimulus regularities in auditory perception.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      That's interesting. I can see why that would affect learning.
pier-paolo

Opinion | The New Science of Mind - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-new-science-of-mind.html

shared by pier-paolo on 18 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • it is easy to get irritated with the exaggerated interpretations of brain imaging
  • uch irritation has led a number of thoughtful people to declare that we can never achieve a truly sophisticated understanding of the biological foundation of complex mental activity.
  • Consider the biology of depression. We are beginning to discern the outlines of a complex neural circuit that becomes disordered in depressive illnesses.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • One is Area 25 (the subcallosal cingulate region), which mediates our unconscious and motor responses to emotional stress; the other is the right anterior insula, a region where self-awareness and interpersonal experience come together.
ilanaprincilus06

'Brain fog': the people struggling to think clearly months after Covid | World news | T... - 1 views

www.theguardian.com/...ink-clearly-months-after-covid

Covid-19 brain fog memory

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Seven months later, the rollercoaster is far from over: the 36-year-old from Byron Bay, Australia is still experiencing symptoms – including difficulties with thinking that are often described as “brain fog”.
  • “Brain fog seems like such an inferior description of what is actually going on. It’s completely crippling. I am unable to think clearly enough to [do] anything,”
  • “When I get tired it becomes much worse and sometimes all I can do is lay in bed and watch TV.” Brain fog has made her forgetful to the point that she says she burns pots while cooking.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • “I feel like a shadow of my former self. I am not living right now, I am simply existing.”Nicholson-McKellar is far from alone.
  • “Doctors and scientists wouldn’t necessarily use [brain fog] as a diagnosis as it doesn’t exactly tell you what the problem is and what could be causing that,” says Zandi.
  • Zandi says there could be many causes of brain fog in Covid survivors, from inflammation in the body to a lack of oxygen to the brain – the latter is a particular concern for those who spent time on ventilators.
  • terms similar to “brain fog” have previously been used in connection with extreme tiredness, low mood and conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – the latter of which is thought to affect about a quarter of Covid survivors who were in intensive care.
  • The aim of the new work, he says, is to explore whether even those without neurological symptoms show markers of neurological damage, and to what extent any processes are ongoing.
  • “I’m just existing in this haze-like frame of mind in which I’m constantly on autopilot,” she says.
  • “What we don’t know is how long it will go on for,” says Zandi. “But we have seen patients who get better and are functioning.”
ilanaprincilus06

Scientists reverse memory decline using electrical pulses | Science | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-reverse-memory-decline-ageing

cognition working memory dementia Alzheimer's

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • focused on a part of cognition called working memory, the brain system that holds information for short periods while we are making decisions or performing calculations.
  • One factor in this decline is thought to be a disconnection between two brain networks, known as the prefrontal and temporal regions.
  • After the intervention, working memory in the older adults improved to match the younger group and the effect appeared to last for 50 minutes after the stimulation.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • “The findings need to be replicated under clinical trial conditions, with larger numbers of participants and with robust blinding of subjects and outcome assessors.
  • induced improvements in working memory might come at the price of worsening of other areas of cognitive function.”
  • it could also have applications in treating disorders linked to poor working memory, such as schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease.
ilanaprincilus06

Could a brain scan diagnose you as a psychopath? | Chris Chambers | Science | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...n-diagnose-you-as-a-psychopath

psychopathology logical fallacies neuroscience scientific method

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 01 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Society is intrigued by psychopaths, at least from a distance. Hollywood paints them as powerful and emotionless predators – a small few who have embraced their inner dark passengers.
  • Psychopathy is of course a very real disorder and a lot more complex than portrayed on film.
  • What Fallon found was his own scan, which appeared to show reduced activity in a part of the brain associated with empathy. Based on this, and some genetic tests, Fallon concluded that he himself was a psychopath
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • One of the most obvious mistakes in Fallon’s reasoning is called the fallacy of reverse inference.
  • areas of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and orbitofrontal cortex are important for empathy and moral reasoning. At the same time, empathy and moral reasoning are lost or impaired in many psychopaths.
  • The flaw with this argument – as Fallon himself must know – is that there is no one-to-one mapping between activity in a given brain region and complex abilities such as empathy. There is no empathy region and there is no psychopath switch.
  • these parts of the brain aren’t like hammers or screwdrivers that perform only one task. They’re more like Swiss army knives that have evolved to support a range of different abilities.
  • just because two things are associated with each other doesn’t mean one of them caused the other.
  • In neuroscience, confusing correlation with causation is close to unforgivable.
  • “The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion…draws all things else to support and agree with it.” If we only seek to confirm rather than falsify our beliefs then we will find that we are always right – or at least it will seem that way.
  • This confirmation bias is one of the most powerful traps in reasoning because we all like to be right, and we prefer to be consistent.
  • By consistently interpreting weak evidence in favour of his beliefs, Fallon’s investigation is a case study in bias.
  • real advances require a self-critical mindset and a strict adherence to the scientific method.
  • it can be tempting to forget these rules and exploit logical fallacies that we think others won’t notice.
  • “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool”.
pier-paolo

The Year of Blur - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-year-of-blur.html

shared by pier-paolo on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • “The days are long, but the years are short.” Except in the pandemic, she said, “the days are long, and the year is also long.”
  • You’re not alone if you feel that 2020, perhaps the most dramatic and memorable year of our lifetimes — and that’s before Election Day — seems shuffled and disordered, like a giant blur. A dream state, or perhaps a nightmare.
  • That’s the paradox of 2020, or one of them: A year so momentous also feels, in a way, as if nothing happened at all.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Without the usual work mixers, festive holiday celebrations, far-flung vacations or casual dinners that typically mark and divide the calendar, the brain has a harder time processing and cataloging memories,
  • the stress of the year itself can shift how our brains experience time
  • there is a medical explanation for the feeling of mental haziness: Covid brain fog, a lingering combination of dementia-like symptoms including memory loss, confusion and difficulty focusing
  • For some who have recovered from Covid-19
  • Sheer monotony has the ability to warp time and tangle our memories, psychologists say, with quarantines and lockdowns robbing us of the “boundary events” that normally divide the days, like chapters in a book.
  • Without breaks in a repetitive routine, the mind has difficulty differentiating between memories, which psychologists call pattern separation,
  • t doesn’t help that so much of our lives are virtual now, happening only on screens. Instead of stimulating our senses in real life — going to shops, meeting friends for coffee, chatting with colleagues in the office — we FaceTime when the mood strikes, we binge Netflix shows from three years ago and we browse Amazon perpetually
  • If one problem is that there is too little going on in our lives, another problem, it seems, is that there is also too much.
  • The unending sense of crisis is an “ongoing, chronic stressor” that can lead to a collapse of the reassuring sense that our lives move in orderly fashion: past, present, future, which is key to mental stability.
  • In researching the psychological repercussions of devastating Southern California wildfires in the 1990s, Dr. Holman said that victims felt like “time slowed down" and “the days blurred together.” “Their sense of reality changes,” she said. “They’re not sure what’s real anymore. They feel a sense of a blur, like time is just a blur.”
  • But even people in solitary confinement will tell you that the essence of that experience is something we’re all experiencing now — the deprivation of normal social contact. And human beings really do depend on each other to structure our lives and tell us who we are.”
  • “We’ve all had basically enough of wearing our masks and having our lives disrupted,” Ms. Spinney said, “which is what we’re seeing now with Covid fatigue.”
  • Or perhaps we just need to remember that time is a human construct.
lucieperloff

Van Gogh: Artist experienced 'delirium from alcohol withdrawal' - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-europe-54780434

mental health art brain science knowledge research

shared by lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Van Gogh dismissed the episode as "a simple artist's bout of craziness" and later a "mental or nervous fever".But research in the Netherlands has thrown new light on his mental state.
  • Van Gogh dismissed the episode as "a simple artist's bout of craziness" and later a "mental or nervous fever".But research in the Netherlands has thrown new light on his mental state.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      How have they learned more about this?
  • In Van Gogh's case, the epileptic activity could have been caused by brain damage as a result of his lifestyle. Alcohol abuse, malnutrition, poor sleep and mental exhaustion could all have been factors, researchers say.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Van Gogh is thought to have suffered from a combination of psychiatric disorders, most likely bipolar and borderline personality, but his suspected illnesses have never been diagnosed. According to this new research, it is unlikely that the Dutch painter had schizophrenia. As to whether he suffered from epilepsy, a diagnosis established by his own doctors, the researchers believe it was most likely "masked epilepsy".
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      A lot more to him than we initially thought
  • Van Gogh's creativity is sometimes attributed to his mental health issues, but art experts argue that his achievements were rooted in the skills of his craft, which he worked hard to develop over many years.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      His artistry isn't solely based in his mental health issues
lucieperloff

What Does It Mean to Have OCD? These Are 5 Common Symptoms | TIME - 0 views

time.com/...what-is-ocd-anxiety

psychology OCD mental health knowledge

shared by lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • In recent years, OCD has become the psychological equivalent of hypoglycemia or gluten sensitivity: a condition untold numbers of people casually—almost flippantly—claim they’ve got, but in most cases don’t.
  • In recent years, OCD has become the psychological equivalent of hypoglycemia or gluten sensitivity: a condition untold numbers of people casually—almost flippantly—claim they’ve got, but in most cases don’t.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      People use the term very casually - demeaning to those who actually have it?
  • Same with the pain of OCD, which can interfere with work, relationships and more.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Has more effects than just wanting things clean
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Yet the almost sing-songy declaration “I’m so OCD!” seems to be everywhere.
  • People with a common type of OCD can even have paralyzing anxiety over their own sexual orientation.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Wouldn't necessarily have considered that
  • Since absolute certainty is rarely possible, almost no reassurance clears the yes, but hurdle, and that keeps the anxiety wheels spinning.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Lack of absolute certainty increases anxiety and doesn't let someone with OCD relax
  • It’s common for people with OCD to believe that if they check the stove just once more, or Google just one more symptom of a disease they’re convinced they’ve got, then their mind will be clear.
  • “Performing the ritual just convinces it that the danger is real and that only perpetuates the cycle.”
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      While it can be soothing, allowing the rituals to continue can be more detrimental
  • For the person with OCD, he explains, the brain is signaling what feels like a life and death risk, and it’s hard to put a price on survival.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      the brain thinks it is helping to protect you
  • “The brain is conditioned to alert us to anything that threatens our survival, but this system is malfunctioning in OCD,” says psychologist Steven Phillipson, clinical director of the Center for Cognitive-Behavioral Psychotherapy in New York City. “That can result in a tsunami of emotional distress that keeps your attention absolutely focused.”
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      The brain is trying to protect you but with OCD, it goes way overboard.
  • “It’s the moment when a panic marries a concept,”
  • If you can live with the uncertainty those dangers can cause—even if they make you uncomfortable—you likely don’t have OCD, or at least not a very serious case of it. If the anxiety is so great it consumes your thoughts and disrupts your day, you may have a problem.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      There are definitely varying degrees of OCD but many people don't actually have it
  • Medications, including certain antidepressants, are often a big part of the solution, but psychotherapy—especially cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)—can be just as effective.
  • progress up the ladder of perceived danger
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Increasing the amount of fear associated with an action
caelengrubb

A new collaborative approach to investigate what happens in the brain when it makes a d... - 0 views

theconversation.com/when-it-makes-a-decision-85066

shared by caelengrubb on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Different areas process sounds, sights or pertinent prior knowledge.
  • neuroscience has operated in a traditional science research model: Individual labs work on their own, usually focusing on one or a few brain areas.
  • The BRAIN Initiative, which the Obama administration launched in 2013, started to encourage the kind of collaboration that neuroscience needs.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The first question the collaboration is tackling focuses on decision-making by the brain.
  • By collating information from the eyes, the ears and so on, the association areas may give a more coherent, big-picture view of what’s happening in the world.
  • Then, there’s the frontal cortex, which is believed to play a role in controlling voluntary action. Research suggests it’s involved in committing to a particular action once enough incoming information has arrived.
  • Research on decision-making may also inform treatment of patients with other disorders, such as substance abuse and addiction. Indeed, addiction is perhaps a prime example of how decision-making can go very wrong.
  • In real-world decisions, you’re combining lots of different pieces of information – your sensory signals, your internal knowledge about what’s rewarding, what’s risky.
  • Even in the simplest, very earliest stage we’re looking at, where the animals are just making voluntary movements, they’re deciding when to make a movement to harvest a reward
anonymous

It's Science: Eat Dinner Together - The Family Dinner Project - The Family Dinner Project - 0 views

thefamilydinnerproject.org/...science-eat-dinner-together

shared by anonymous on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • It turns out that sitting down for a nightly meal is great for the brain, the body and the spirit
  • And that nightly dinner doesn’t have to be a gourmet meal that took three hours to cook, nor does it need to be made with organic arugula and heirloom parsnips.
  • For starters, researchers found that for young children, dinnertime conversation boosts vocabulary even more than being read aloud t
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Other researchers reported a consistent association between family dinner frequency and teen academic performance. Adolescents who ate family meals 5 to 7 times a week were twice as likely to get A’s in school as those who ate dinner with their families fewer than two times a week.
  • Children who eat regular family dinners also consume more fruits, vegetables, vitamins and micronutrients, as well as fewer fried foods and soft drinks.
  • And the nutritional benefits keep paying dividends even after kids grow up: young adults who ate regular family meals as teens are less likely to be obese and more likely to eat healthily once they live on their own.
  • Some research has even found a connection between regular family dinners and the reduction of symptoms in medical disorders, such as asthma.
  • The benefit might be due to two possible byproducts of a shared family meal: lower anxiety and the chance to check in about a child’s medication compliance.
  • The dinner atmosphere is also important. Parents need to be warm and engaged, rather than controlling and restrictive, to encourage healthy eating in their children.
  • In a very recent study, kids who had been victims of cyberbullying bounced back more readily if they had regular family dinners.
  • Family dinners have been found to be a more powerful deterrent against high-risk teen behaviors than church attendance or good grades.
  • In a New Zealand study, a higher frequency of family meals was strongly associated with positive moods in adolescents. Similarly, other researchers have shown that teens who dine regularly with their families also have a more positive view of the future, compared to their peers who don’t eat with parents.
  • dinner is the most reliable way for families to connect and find out what’s going on with each other
  • American teens were asked when they were most likely to talk with their parents: dinner was their top answer
  • Kids who eat dinner with their parents experience less stress and have a better relationship with them
  • Of course, the real power of dinners lies in their interpersonal quality. If family members sit in stony silence, if parents yell at each other, or scold their kids, family dinner won’t confer positive benefits.
  • But, dinner may be the one time of the day when a parent and child can share a positive experience – a well-cooked meal, a joke, or a story – and these small moments can gain momentum to create stronger connections away from the table.
  • anonymous on 04 Nov 20
     
    Suggestion and effects of having family dinner!
« First ‹ Previous 101 - 120 of 143 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page