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Javier E

Economics: Economic history should be at the heart of economics instruction - 0 views

www.economist.com/...be_heart_economics_instruction

economics history instruction social science

shared by Javier E on 05 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • ONE of the stranger myths about the recent financial crisis is that no one saw it coming. In fact quite a lot of economists saw it coming, and for years had been writing with dread about the growing global imbalances and the necessary financial adjustments.
  • It didn't require a very sophisticated understanding of economics, just some knowledge of history. Every previous globalisation cycle except one (the one cut short in 1914) ended that way, and nothing in the current cycle seemed fundamentally different from what had happened before.
  • while many economists, bankers and policymakers were caught flatfooted by the crisis, most economists with real knowledge of economic and financial history—and by history I do not mean the last twenty years or thirty years—thought a crisis almost inevitable and broadly understood how it was going to occur.
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  • So how should the teaching of economics change? That's easy. While mathematical fluency is very useful, it should not be at the heart of economics instruction. That place should be reserved for economic history.
Javier E

Study Causes Splash, but Here's Why You Should Stay Calm on Alcohol's Risks - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-health-risks-study-worry.html

alcohol risks statistics

shared by Javier E on 28 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • there are limitations here that warrant consideration. Observational data can be very confounded, meaning that unmeasured factors might be the actual cause of the harm. Perhaps people who drink also smoke tobacco. Perhaps people who drink are also poorer. Perhaps there are genetic differences, health differences or other factors that might be the real cause
  • There are techniques to analyze observational data in a more causal fashion, but none of them could be used here, because this analysis aggregated past studies — and those studies didn’t use them.
  • when we compile observational study on top of observational study, we become more likely to achieve statistical significance without improving clinical significance. In other words, very small differences are real, but that doesn’t mean those differences are critical.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • even one drink per day carries a risk. But how great is that risk?
  • For each set of 100,000 people who have one drink a day per year, 918 can expect to experience one of the 23 alcohol-related problems in any year. Of those who drink nothing, 914 can expect to experience a problem. This means that 99,082 are unaffected, and 914 will have an issue no matter what. Only 4 in 100,000 people who consume a drink a day may have a problem caused by the drinking, according to this study.
  • I’m not advocating that people should ignore these risks. They are real, but they are much smaller than many other risks in our lives
  • This is a population-level study, arguably a worldwide study, but the results are being interpreted at an individual level. There are merging, for instance, the 23 alcohol-related health issues together. But not everyone experiences them at the same rate.
  • For diabetes and heart disease, for instance, the risks actually go down with light or moderate drinking. The authors argue that this result is overrun, however, by risks for things like cancer and tuberculosis, which go up. But for many individuals, the risks for diabetes and heart disease are much higher than those for cancer and tuberculosis.
  • For this study, a drink was defined as 10 grams of pure alcohol, as much as you might get in one ounce of spirits (a small shot glass) that is 40 percent alcohol; 3.4 ounces of wine that’s 13 percent alcohol; or 12 ounces of beer that’s 3.5 percent alcohol. Many people consume more than that and consider it “a drink.”
  • just because something is unhealthy in large amounts doesn’t mean that we must completely abstain. A chart in the study showed rising risks from alcohol from 0 to 15 drinks.
  • Consider that 15 desserts a day would be bad for you. I am sure that I could create a chart showing increasing risk for many diseases from 0 to 15 desserts. This could lead to assertions that “there’s no safe amount of dessert.” But it doesn’t mean you should never, ever eat dessert.
  • we could spend lifetimes arguing over where the line is for many people. The truth is we just don’t know. If these studies are intended to drive population-level policy, we should use them as such, to argue that we might want to push people to be wary of overconsumption.
Javier E

Here's what the government's dietary guidelines should really say - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...9-93d0-64dbcf38ba41_story.html

dietary government guidelines science nutrition reproduction results

shared by Javier E on 26 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • If I were writing the dietary guidelines, I would give them a radical overhaul. I’d go so far as to radically overhaul the way we evaluate diet. Here’s why and how.
  • Lately, as scientists try, and fail, to reproduce results, all of science is taking a hard look at funding biases, statistical shenanigans and groupthink. All that criticism, and then some, applies to nutrition.
  • Prominent in the charge to change the way we do science is John Ioannidis, professor of health research and policy at Stanford University. In 2005, he published “Why Most Research Findings Are False” in the journal PLOS Medicin
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • He came down hard on nutrition in a pull-no-punches 2013 British Medical Journal editorial titled, “Implausible results in human nutrition research,” in which he noted, “Almost every single nutrient imaginable has peer reviewed publications associating it with almost any outcome.”
  • Ioannidis told me that sussing out the connection between diet and health — nutritional epidemiology — is enormously challenging, and “the tools that we’re throwing at the problem are not commensurate with the complexity and difficulty of the problem.” The biggest of those tools is observational research, in which we collect data on what people eat, and track what happens to them.
  • He lists plant-based foods — fruit, veg, whole grains, legumes — but acknowledges that we don’t understand enough to prescribe specific combinations or numbers of servings.
  • funding bias isn’t the only kind. “Fanatical opinions abound in nutrition,” Ioannidis wrote in 2013, and those have bias power too.
  • “Definitive solutions won’t come from another million observational papers or small randomized trials,” reads the subtitle of Ioannidis’s paper. His is a burn-down-the-house ethos.
  • When it comes to actual dietary recommendations, the disagreement is stark. “Ioannidis and others say we have no clue, the science is so bad that we don’t know anything,” Hu told me. “I think that’s completely bogus. We know a lot about the basic elements of a healthy diet.”
  • Give tens of thousands of people that FFQ, and you end up with a ginormous repository of possible correlations. You can zero in on a vitamin, macronutrient or food, and go to town. But not only are you starting with flawed data, you’ve got a zillion possible confounding variables — dietary, demographic, socioeconomic. I’ve heard statisticians call it “noise mining,” and Ioannidis is equally skeptical. “With this type of data, you can get any result you want,” he said. “You can align it to your beliefs.”
  • Big differences in what people eat track with other differences. Heavy plant-eaters are different from, say, heavy meat-eaters in all kinds of ways (income, education, physical activity, BMI). Red meat consumption correlates with increased risk of dying in an accident as much as dying from heart disease. The amount of faith we put in observational studies is a judgment call.
  • I find myself in Ioannidis’s camp. What have we learned, unequivocally enough to build a consensus in the nutrition community, about how diet affects health? Well, trans-fats are bad.
  • Over and over, large population studies get sliced and diced, and it’s all but impossible to figure out what’s signal and what’s noise. Researchers try to do that with controlled trials to test the connections, but those have issues too. They’re expensive, so they’re usually small and short-term. People have trouble sticking to the diet being studied. And scientists are generally looking for what they call “surrogate endpoints,” like increased cholesterol rather than death from heart disease, since it’s impractical to keep a trial going until people die.
  • , what do we do? Hu and Ioannidis actually have similar suggestions. For starters, they both think we should be looking at dietary patterns rather than single foods or nutrients. They also both want to look across the data sets. Ioannidis emphasizes transparency. He wants to open data to the world and analyze all the data sets in the same way to see if “any signals survive.” Hu is more cautious (partly to safeguard confidentiality
  • I have a suggestion. Let’s give up on evidence-based eating. It’s given us nothing but trouble and strife. Our tools can’t find any but the most obvious links between food and health, and we’ve found those already.
  • Instead, let’s acknowledge the uncertainty and eat to hedge against what we don’t know
  • We’ve got two excellent hedges: variety and foods with nutrients intact (which describes such diets as the Mediterranean, touted by researchers). If you severely limit your foods (vegan, keto), you might miss out on something. Ditto if you eat foods with little nutritional value (sugar, refined grains). Oh, and pay attention to the two things we can say with certainty: Keep your weight down, and exercise.
  • I used to say I could tell you everything important about diet in 60 seconds. Over the years, my spiel got shorter and shorter as truisms fell by the wayside, and my confidence waned in a field where we know less, rather than more, over time. I’m down to five seconds now: Eat a wide variety of foods with their nutrients intact, keep your weight down and get some exercise.
Javier E

Ivy League Schools Are Overrated. Send Your Kids Elsewhere. | New Republic - 1 views

www.thenewrepublic.com/...rated-send-your-kids-elsewhere

inequality ivy league admissions university education elite success leadership class

shared by Javier E on 22 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • a blizzard of admissions jargon that I had to pick up on the fly. “Good rig”: the transcript exhibits a good degree of academic rigor. “Ed level 1”: parents have an educational level no higher than high school, indicating a genuine hardship case. “MUSD”: a musician in the highest category of promise. Kids who had five or six items on their list of extracurriculars—the “brag”—were already in trouble, because that wasn’t nearly enough.
  • With so many accomplished applicants to choose from, we were looking for kids with something special, “PQs”—personal qualities—that were often revealed by the letters or essays. Kids who only had the numbers and the résumé were usually rejected: “no spark,” “not a team-builder,” “this is pretty much in the middle of the fairway for us.” One young person, who had piled up a truly insane quantity of extracurriculars and who submitted nine letters of recommendation, was felt to be “too intense.”
  • On the other hand, the numbers and the résumé were clearly indispensable. I’d been told that successful applicants could either be “well-rounded” or “pointy”—outstanding in one particular way—but if they were pointy, they had to be really pointy: a musician whose audition tape had impressed the music department, a scientist who had won a national award.
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  • When I speak of elite education, I mean prestigious institutions like Harvard or Stanford or Williams as well as the larger universe of second-tier selective schools, but I also mean everything that leads up to and away from them—the private and affluent public high schools; the ever-growing industry of tutors and consultants and test-prep courses; the admissions process itself, squatting like a dragon at the entrance to adulthood; the brand-name graduate schools and employment opportunities that come after the B.A.; and the parents and communities, largely upper-middle class, who push their children into the maw of this machine.
  • Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.
  • “Super People,” the writer James Atlas has called them—the stereotypical ultra-high-achieving elite college students of today. A double major, a sport, a musical instrument, a couple of foreign languages, service work in distant corners of the globe, a few hobbies thrown in for good measure: They have mastered them all, and with a serene self-assurance
  • Like so many kids today, I went off to college like a sleepwalker. You chose the most prestigious place that let you in; up ahead were vaguely understood objectives: status, wealth—“success.” What it meant to actually get an education and why you might want one—all this was off the table.
  • It was only after 24 years in the Ivy League—college and a Ph.D. at Columbia, ten years on the faculty at Yale—that I started to think about what this system does to kids and how they can escape from it, what it does to our society and how we can dismantle it.
  • I taught many wonderful young people during my years in the Ivy League—bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it was a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Very few were passionate about ideas. Very few saw college as part of a larger project of intellectual discovery and development. Everyone dressed as if they were ready to be interviewed at a moment’s notice.
  • Look beneath the façade of seamless well-adjustment, and what you often find are toxic levels of fear, anxiety, and depression, of emptiness and aimlessness and isolation. A large-scale survey of college freshmen recently found that self-reports of emotional well-being have fallen to their lowest level in the study’s 25-year history.
  • So extreme are the admission standards now that kids who manage to get into elite colleges have, by definition, never experienced anything but success. The prospect of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them. The cost of falling short, even temporarily, becomes not merely practical, but existential. The result is a violent aversion to risk.
  • There are exceptions, kids who insist, against all odds, on trying to get a real education. But their experience tends to make them feel like freaks. One student told me that a friend of hers had left Yale because she found the school “stifling to the parts of yourself that you’d call a soul.”
  • What no one seems to ask is what the “return” is supposed to be. Is it just about earning more money? Is the only purpose of an education to enable you to get a job? What, in short, is college for?
  • The first thing that college is for is to teach you to think.
  • College is an opportunity to stand outside the world for a few years, between the orthodoxy of your family and the exigencies of career, and contemplate things from a distance.
  • it is only through the act of establishing communication between the mind and the heart, the mind and experience, that you become an individual, a unique being—a soul. The job of college is to assist you to begin to do that. Books, ideas, works of art and thought, the pressure of the minds around you that are looking for their own answers in their own ways.
  • College is not the only chance to learn to think, but it is the best. One thing is certain: If you haven’t started by the time you finish your B.A., there’s little likelihood you’ll do it later. That is why an undergraduate experience devoted exclusively to career preparation is four years largely wasted.
  • Elite schools like to boast that they teach their students how to think, but all they mean is that they train them in the analytic and rhetorical skills that are necessary for success in business and the professions.
  • Everything is technocratic—the development of expertise—and everything is ultimately justified in technocratic terms.
  • Religious colleges—even obscure, regional schools that no one has ever heard of on the coasts—often do a much better job in that respect.
  • At least the classes at elite schools are academically rigorous, demanding on their own terms, no? Not necessarily. In the sciences, usually; in other disciplines, not so much
  • professors and students have largely entered into what one observer called a “nonaggression pact.”
  • higher marks for shoddier work.
  • today’s young people appear to be more socially engaged than kids have been for several decades and that they are more apt to harbor creative or entrepreneurial impulses
  • they tend to be played out within the same narrow conception of what constitutes a valid life: affluence, credentials, prestige.
  • Experience itself has been reduced to instrumental function, via the college essay. From learning to commodify your experiences for the application, the next step has been to seek out experiences in order to have them to commodify
  • there is now a thriving sector devoted to producing essay-ready summers
  • To be a high-achieving student is to constantly be urged to think of yourself as a future leader of society.
  • what these institutions mean by leadership is nothing more than getting to the top. Making partner at a major law firm or becoming a chief executive, climbing the greasy pole of whatever hierarchy you decide to attach yourself to. I don’t think it occurs to the people in charge of elite colleges that the concept of leadership ought to have a higher meaning, or, really, any meaning.
  • The irony is that elite students are told that they can be whatever they want, but most of them end up choosing to be one of a few very similar things
  • As of 2010, about a third of graduates went into financing or consulting at a number of top schools, including Harvard, Princeton, and Cornell.
  • Whole fields have disappeared from view: the clergy, the military, electoral politics, even academia itself, for the most part, including basic science
  • It’s considered glamorous to drop out of a selective college if you want to become the next Mark Zuckerberg, but ludicrous to stay in to become a social worker. “What Wall Street figured out,” as Ezra Klein has put it, “is that colleges are producing a large number of very smart, completely confused graduates. Kids who have ample mental horsepower, an incredible work ethic and no idea what to do next.”
  • t almost feels ridiculous to have to insist that colleges like Harvard are bastions of privilege, where the rich send their children to learn to walk, talk, and think like the rich. Don’t we already know this? They aren’t called elite colleges for nothing. But apparently we like pretending otherwise. We live in a meritocracy, after all.
  • Visit any elite campus across our great nation, and you can thrill to the heart-warming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals
  • That doesn’t mean there aren’t a few exceptions, but that is all they are. In fact, the group that is most disadvantaged by our current admissions policies are working-class and rural whites, who are hardly present
  • The college admissions game is not primarily about the lower and middle classes seeking to rise, or even about the upper-middle class attempting to maintain its position. It is about determining the exact hierarchy of status within the upper-middle class itself.
  • This system is exacerbating inequality, retarding social mobility, perpetuating privilege, and creating an elite that is isolated from the society that it’s supposed to lead. The numbers are undeniable. In 1985, 46 percent of incoming freshmen at the 250 most selective colleges came from the top quarter of the income distribution. By 2000, it was 55 percent
  • The major reason for the trend is clear. Not increasing tuition, though that is a factor, but the ever-growing cost of manufacturing children who are fit to compete in the college admissions game
  • Wealthy families start buying their children’s way into elite colleges almost from the moment they are born: music lessons, sports equipment, foreign travel (“enrichment” programs, to use the all-too-perfect term)—most important, of course, private-school tuition or the costs of living in a place with top-tier public schools.
  • s there anything that I can do, a lot of young people have written to ask me, to avoid becoming an out-of-touch, entitled little shit? I don’t have a satisfying answer, short of telling them to transfer to a public university. You cannot cogitate your way to sympathy with people of different backgrounds, still less to knowledge of them. You need to interact with them directly, and it has to be on an equal footing
  • Elite private colleges will never allow their students’ economic profile to mirror that of society as a whole. They can’t afford to—they need a critical mass of full payers and they need to tend to their donor base—and it’s not even clear that they’d want to.
  • Elite colleges are not just powerless to reverse the movement toward a more unequal society; their policies actively promote it.
  • The SAT is supposed to measure aptitude, but what it actually measures is parental income, which it tracks quite closely
  • U.S. News and World Report supplies the percentage of freshmen at each college who finished in the highest 10 percent of their high school class. Among the top 20 universities, the number is usually above 90 percent. I’d be wary of attending schools like that. Students determine the level of classroom discussion; they shape your values and expectations, for good and ill. It’s partly because of the students that I’d warn kids away from the Ivies and their ilk. Kids at less prestigious schools are apt to be more interesting, more curious, more open, and far less entitled and competitive.
  • The best option of all may be the second-tier—not second-rate—colleges, like Reed, Kenyon, Wesleyan, Sewanee, Mount Holyoke, and others. Instead of trying to compete with Harvard and Yale, these schools have retained their allegiance to real educational values.
  • Not being an entitled little shit is an admirable goal. But in the end, the deeper issue is the situation that makes it so hard to be anything else. The time has come, not simply to reform that system top to bottom, but to plot our exit to another kind of society altogether.
  • The education system has to act to mitigate the class system, not reproduce it. Affirmative action should be based on class instead of race, a change that many have been advocating for years. Preferences for legacies and athletes ought to be discarded. SAT scores should be weighted to account for socioeconomic factors. Colleges should put an end to résumé-stuffing by imposing a limit on the number of extracurriculars that kids can list on their applications. They ought to place more value on the kind of service jobs that lower-income students often take in high school and that high achievers almost never do. They should refuse to be impressed by any opportunity that was enabled by parental wealth
  • More broadly, they need to rethink their conception of merit. If schools are going to train a better class of leaders than the ones we have today, they’re going to have to ask themselves what kinds of qualities they need to promote. Selecting students by GPA or the number of extracurriculars more often benefits the faithful drudge than the original mind.
  • reforming the admissions process. That might address the problem of mediocrity, but it won’t address the greater one of inequality
  • The problem is the Ivy League itself. We have contracted the training of our leadership class to a set of private institutions. However much they claim to act for the common good, they will always place their interests first.
  • I’ve come to see that what we really need is to create one where you don’t have to go to the Ivy League, or any private college, to get a first-rate education.
  • High-quality public education, financed with public money, for the benefit of all
  • Everybody gets an equal chance to go as far as their hard work and talent will take them—you know, the American dream. Everyone who wants it gets to have the kind of mind-expanding, soul-enriching experience that a liberal arts education provides.
  • We recognize that free, quality K–12 education is a right of citizenship. We also need to recognize—as we once did and as many countries still do—that the same is true of higher education. We have tried aristocracy. We have tried meritocracy. Now it’s time to try democracy.
Javier E

Now Is the Time to Talk About the Power of Touch - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...human-touch-aziz-ansari.html

sex eros soul dehumanization intimacy consent emotion psychology

shared by Javier E on 26 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • In 1945, the Austrian physician René Spitz investigated an orphanage that took extra care to make sure its infants were not infected with disease. The children received first-class nutrition and medical care, but they were barely touched, to minimize their contact with germs. The approach was a catastrophe. Thirty-seven percent of the babies died before reaching age 2.
  • It turns out that empathetic physical contact is essential for life. Intimate touch engages the emotions and wires the fibers of the brain together.
  • The famous Grant Study investigated a set of men who had gone to Harvard in the 1940s. The men who grew up in loving homes earned 50 percent more over the course of their careers than those from loveless ones. They suffered from far less chronic illness and much lower rates of dementia in old age. A loving home was the best predictor of life outcomes.
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  • For this reason, cultures all around the world have treated emotional touching as something apart. The Greeks labeled the drive to touch with the word “eros,” and they meant something vaster and deeper than just sexual pleasure.
  • “Animals have sex and human beings have eros, and no accurate science is possible without making this distinction,” Allan Bloom observed.
  • The Abrahamic religions also treat sex as something sacred and beautiful when enveloped in loving and covenantal protections, and as something disordered and potentially peace-destroying when not.
  • Over the past 100 years or so, advanced thinkers across the West have worked to take the shame out of sex, surely a good thing. But they’ve also disenchanted it
  • “One of the principal outcomes of the sexual revolution was to establish that sex is just like any other social interaction — nothing taboo or sacred about it.” Sex is seen as a shallow physical and social thing, not a heart and soul altering thing.
  • One unintended effect of this disenchantment is that it becomes easy to underestimate the risks inherent in any encounter.
  • The woman who talked in an online article about her date with Aziz Ansari is being criticized because what happened to her was not like what happened to the victims of Harvey Weinstein and Louis C.K
  • The assumption seems to be that as long as there’s consent between adults, everything else is kosher.
  • Everything we know about touch suggests that even with full consent, the emotional quality of an encounter can have profound positive or negative effects. If Ansari did treat her coldly or neglectfully, it’s reasonable to think that the shame she felt right after was the surface effect of a deeper wound. Neglectful, dehumanizing sex is not harassment, but it’s some other form of serious harm.
  • Disenchanting emotional touch also causes people to underestimate the way past experiences shape current behavior.
  • Agency is learned, not bred. And one of the things that undermines agency most powerfully is past sexual harm.
  • The abuse of intimacy erodes all the building blocks of agency: self-worth, resiliency and self-efficacy (the belief that you can control a situation).
  • It is precisely someone who lives within a culture of supposedly zipless encounters who is most likely to be unable to take action when she feels uncomfortable.
  • I hate the way Babe, which published the story about the Ansari date, violated everybody’s privacy here. But it seems that the beginning of good sense is to take the power of touch seriously, as something that has profound good and bad effects.
  • It seems that the smarter we get about technology, the dumber we get about relationships. We live in a society in which loneliness, depression and suicide are on the rise.
  • The guiding moral principle here is not complicated: Try to treat other people as if they possessed precious hearts and infinite souls. Everything else will follow.
sissij

Norway Is the World's Happiest Country, Survey Finds - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...worlds-happiest-countries.html

new york times social media research psychology

shared by sissij on 20 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Norwegians have one more reason to smile, not that they need it.
  • The authors of the report found that a half-dozen socioeconomic factors explain much of the difference in happiness among countries, but that social factors play an underappreciated role.
  • As evidence, they cite periods of substantial economic growth that were nonetheless matched by declining happiness in China and the United States, which ranked 14th.
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  • Still, there are outliers.
  • Humanity is about halfway up the ladder, with an average global score of 5.3, based on hundreds of thousands of surveys conducted by Gallup over those years.
  • The authors found that three-quarters of the variation among countries can be explained by six economic and social factors: gross domestic product per capita (a basic measure of national wealth); healthy years of life expectancy; social support (having someone to rely on during times of trouble); trust (a perceived absence of corruption in government and business); the perceived freedom to make life choices; and generosity (measured by donations).
  • “We’re getting richer, but our social capital is deteriorating,” Dr. Sachs said.
  • To fix that social fraying, Dr. Sachs argues policy makers should work toward campaign finance reform, reducing income and wealth inequality, improving social relations between native-born and immigrant populations, overcoming the national culture of fear induced by the Sept. 11 attacks, and improving the educational system.
  • sissij on 20 Mar 17
     
    As we learned in TOK, human social science is far more complicated than natural sciences as they are multiple factors leading to a phenomenon and the standard scientific method used in natural sciences are useless when applied in social sciences. The results of some social study are often found out of our expectation. For example, in tis article, the research find out that the growth in substantial economic is probably inversely proportional to the happiness of the residences. And in some cases, economics alone did not explain the high rates of happiness. As many countries put the improvement in GDP as their first priority, they should really consider improving other aspects such as social equality, educational system, and etc so  residences can feel happy from the bottom of their heart. --Sissi (3/20/2017)
maxwellokolo

Non-O Blood Groups Associated With Higher Risk of Heart Attack - 0 views

neurosciencenews.com/heart-attack-blood-type-6546

shared by maxwellokolo on 30 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • maxwellokolo on 30 Apr 17
     
    Neuroscience News has recent neuroscience research articles, brain research news, neurology studies and neuroscience resources for neuroscientists, students, and science fans and is always free to join. Our neuroscience social network has science groups, discussion forums, free books, resources, science videos and more.
sissij

New Research Suggests Working Out With a Friend, Even Online, Makes You Healthier | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...ven-online-makes-you-healthier

research psychology social media

shared by sissij on 25 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • That exercise is a social activity is not surprising. For millions of years our forebears physically worked together to provide shelter, craft rudimentary tools, hunt, and gather. If anything is strange today it’s how little we need to use our bodies to survive, which helps account for so many of our physical and emotional problems. 
  • Being socially active is the main reason I’m drawn to teaching group fitness, which has accounted for half of my career since 2004 (and complements the solitary time spent writing and editing nicely).
  • As it turns out, your friends don’t even have to live near you—social media is helping foster this trend as well.
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  • The researchers collected over five years of data from over a million runners, who collectively clocked in nearly 225 million miles. 
  • They noticed similar training patterns even if the runners were separated.
  • Weather, it turns out, did not dissuade one friend who saw their counterpart clocking in an extra ten minutes that day.
  • Risk of lagging behind proved to be a necessary catalyst for upping the ante. 
  • Which, obviously, is in good humor. But it helps.
  • sissij on 25 Apr 17
     
    Human is essentially a social animal. People cannot live without a community. Although loneliness is a aspect of life deep in everybody's heart, nobody can refuse their nature to make friends, talk to people, and emotionally engaged with others. This follows the logic of revolution. In cross-country, our coach always tells us to run together and work together in practices and races. I think maybe he is doing that in purpose since people tends to perform better with their friends around them.
pier-paolo

Opinion | Pool of Thought - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...pool-neuroscience.html

shared by pier-paolo on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • THERE is no drug — recreational or prescription — capable of inducing the tranquil euphoria brought on by swimming. I do all my best thinking in the pool, whether I’m trying to figure out how to treat a patient’s complicated ailment or write a paper.
  • I could flood you with facts about the physiology of swimming in an attempt to convince you of its cognitive benefits. Some point to endorphins — but the idea that exertion causes endorphin levels to rise in the brain seems to be a myth
  • Perhaps swimming improves brain function by increasing blood flow? Sure, that’s true. It also raises the level of BDNF, a protein that promotes neurogenesis, especially in the hippocampus, which supports memory. But so does nearly every form of exercise that speeds up your heart rate.
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  • And yet, immersion in water up to the level of the heart has been shown to increase blood flow to one of the brain’s major arteries by 14 percent over that which you’d expect on land. So perhaps there is something special about swimming that is distinct from exercise on land.
lucieperloff

Are Nightmares Bad for You? | TIME - 0 views

time.com/...are-nightmares-bad-for-you

psychology brain science nightmares knowledge research

shared by lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • But experts who study nightmares say this is a pretty typical bad-dream scenario. “There’s often some threat of death or injury or annihilation, and you’re trying to escape,”
  • In some instances, a bad dream’s setting or events may be innocent, but the emotions the dreamer feels are ones of terror, disgust or distress, he explains.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      It's not so much the event as it is how it makes you feel
  • “For people who have significant nightmare problems, it’s also common is for these individuals to actively try to avoid sleep in order to avoid having nightmares,” he says. “When they do have [a nightmare], they often don’t sleep for the rest of the night.”
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Nightmares can lead to sleep deprivation
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Chronic poor sleep can cause a whole range of mental and physical health issues, including depression and heart disease.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Nightmares have many effect other than just being tired
  • In many cases, they may help the dreamer ameliorate some of their daytime anxieties. Research has found that nightmares can help some people learn to better manage stress.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      How does this happen??
  • In much the same way, nightmares—especially those following an upsetting event—may allow a person’s brain to relive the event and move past it, Nadorff says.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      The brain's form of exposure therapy?
  • “We have the person talk through their nightmare and change it in a way that’s not threatening, and then they practice the new dream during the day using visual imagery,” Nadorff explains. This kind of daily rehearsal can help reshape the scary dream even while a person is sleeping.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      This seems much more difficult and abstract
krystalxu

Nine Ways Falling In Love Makes Us Do Strange Things | HuffPost - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...-strange-things_n_4340958.html

psychology relationship love stupidity strange fall in love brain science science knowledge

shared by krystalxu on 07 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • people who are passionately in love are less able to focus and to perform tasks that require attention.
  • because you spend a large part of your cognitive resources on thinking of your beloved,
  • When you fall in love, the same neural system in your brain linked to cocaine addiction becomes active, giving you that feeling of euphoria.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Love can make you less vulnerable to pain.
  • your heart beats as fast as your partner’s so they’re at the same rate. How romantic.
  • holding hands with the person you love may alleviate pain.
  • men adjust their walking speed to match their romantic partner’s pace
  • brain activated by feelings of intense love are the same areas that drugs use to reduce pain,”
  • people in a committed relationship who have been actively thinking about their partner actually avert their eyes from attractive members of the opposite sex unknowingly
  • men are more willing to take unnecessary risks for a romantic partner.
  • It makes your pupils grow.
  • pupil dilation correlates with intense emotional states
katherineharron

The recipe for happiness and success? Try compassion - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by katherineharron on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • (CNN)Looking for a way to be happier? Are you seeking deeper connections with friends or looking for more friends? Want to relate better to your co-workers? Try a little compassion.Compassion, as one scholar describes it, is "experiencing feelings of loving kindness toward another person's affliction." It's related to, but a little different from empathy, which the same scholar defines as "feeling with someone, that is, sharing the other person's emotion."
  • What she, and many other scholars have found, is that compassion is key to coping. The compassionate tend to have deeper connections with others and more friends. They are more forgiving and have a stronger sense of life purpose. Many studies have shown these results.
  • In that quiet space, sit in a comfortable position. Focus on your breath and try to clear your mind. The key is to be present in that space in that time. Then mentally focus on your heart area and think about someone you feel tenderness toward. This could be your spouse or your mom or your child.
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  • Dwell on those positive thoughts for a little bit. Then extend that same feeling toward yourself. Ruminate on that for a little while. Then expand that feeling out to others. Maybe think of someone you aren't as close to and think tenderly about them.
  • You also become more accepting of your own failings. That's what a 2014 study in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience found. In this experiment, there were three small groups of women who were subjected to videos of distressing images. One group got empathy training. Another got compassion training.
  • The people with the compassion training still felt these negative emotions, like those with empathy training did, but the part of their brain connected with reward and positive effect also lit up.
  • Compassion prompts your brain to have a wider sense of what's going on and it gives you access to more ideas on how to act. When your brain feels threatened like it does with pain, even someone else's, it focuses on the pain only to make it go away, and shuts down those other avenues that incentivize you to help.
  • Soldiers who took compassion training recovered faster from stressful situations, such as basic training. Their heart and breathing rates return to normal much quicker than those soldiers who don't get the training.
  • School children who did a short eight-week compassion training program functioned better overall, a study showed. After the training, even students who struggled with mental challenges such as ADHD had better attendance and behavior records, and their grades improved.
  • "Developing compassion, sets a foundation for the stability of the mind," Jha said. "And developing intrinsic compassion, a concern for the suffering of others and for oneself, that can be very powerful ... for all involved."
johnsonel7

What's Lost When a Language Disappears | The New Republic - 0 views

newrepublic.com/...g-reauthorization-act-congress

language culture history

shared by johnsonel7 on 02 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • The cultural practices and locales that define the hundreds of Native communities dotting the North American landscape are grounded in languages. Each is unique, with distinct dialects, accents, and slang. There are words, phrases, and concepts that do not exist in the American English lexicon, that confounding colonizer speech that Native Americans were forced to adopt and master. And nearly all of them are in danger of going extinct. In 1998, there were 175 Indigenous languages still in use within the United States. Today, there are 115. With each passing year, as elders are laid to rest and new babies are born, Native people lose their tongue.
  • Learning a Native language is not only about knowledge or authenticity; it extends a symbol of a thriving and unique culture to the rising generation. It’s the cadence of survival. And if it goes silent, a great tradition is broken.
  • The latest version of the bill, coming at the tail end of what the United Nations has dubbed the Year of Indigenous Language, will seek to lower the bill’s previous class-size restrictions, which were preventing tribes from obtaining federal grants to establish their own language programs because many smaller tribes had lower enrollment numbers than what the grant applications required.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The general experience of losing one’s language to American preference is not unique to being Indigenous. It’s an American philosophy, one that is echoed in the experience of the children of immigrants whose parents do not teach them their language, in an attempt to shield them from racism. The president enforces a regime of assimilation when he declares, “This is a country where we speak English. It’s English. You have to speak English!”
  • Many of these languages are not even a full lifetime away from disappearing. They exist for as long as the heart of the elder who carries the words continues to beat. One day, that heart will stop, and so too will the language.
tongoscar

How High Energy Music Can Make Your Workout More Effective - 0 views

www.healthline.com/...po-music-may-help-your-workout

shared by tongoscar on 22 Feb 20 - No Cached
  • A new study from Italy found that listening to high tempo music during exercise can distract you and make your workouts seem less challenging, ultimately making them more beneficial.
  • Researchers found that those who listened to the high tempo music while working out experienced the highest heart rates and also perceived their workout as less difficult.
  • Previous research has also shown that music has a profound impact on the mind and body.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • To understand how music affects people’s workouts, researchers from Italy evaluated 19 women who participated in endurance activities, such as walking, jogging, or biking, and high-intensity workouts, such as weightlifting or using a leg press.
  • “I think we have put such a negative perception to exercise, as another to-do to be thin, lose weight, burn calories,” said Sharon Zarabi, a fitness trainer and registered dietitian with Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. “If we took away the emphasis from ‘dieting and weight loss,’ we may actually enjoy it for all its other benefits, including lowering blood pressure, improving sleep, enhancing digestion, reducing stress, [and] lowering blood sugars.”
  • A new study from Italy found that listening to high tempo music during exercise can distract you and make your workouts seem less challenging, ultimately making them more beneficial. Music has been shown to have profound effects on the mind and body: It lifts our mood, increases our heart rate, and makes us want to groove. For those who struggle with completing a workout, music may be a powerful tool.
manhefnawi

Neuroscience: Overview, history, major branches - 0 views

www.medicalnewstoday.com/...248680.php

Cognitive Neuroscience

shared by manhefnawi on 12 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Neuroscience has traditionally been classed as a subdivision of biology. These days, it is an interdisciplinary science that liaises closely with other disciplines, such as mathematics, linguistics, engineering, computer science, chemistry, philosophy, psychology, and medicine.
  • The ancient Egyptians thought the seat of intelligence was in the heart. Because of this belief, during the mummification process, they would remove the brain but leave the heart in the body.
  • Behavioral neuroscience - the study of the biological bases of behavior. Looking at how the brain affects behavior.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Cognitive neuroscience - the study of higher cognitive functions that exist in humans, and their underlying neural basis. Cognitive neuroscience draws from linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science. Cognitive neuroscientists can take two broad directions: behavioral/experimental or computational/modeling, the aim being to understand the nature of cognition from a neural point of view.
katherineharron

'Life or death still possible': 31 days at my dad's virtual bedside - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by katherineharron on 27 May 20 - No Cached
  • The attending physician at the intensive care unit had called that morning and asked whether they should include a Do Not Resuscitate order in my dad's chart. They had asked before. I had been indecisive. A successful resuscitation would extend his life. But it might also lead to brain damage.
  • "If it continues in this direction," he told me, "we're talking about a single-digit chance of survival."
  • I suspected that my father had a will and a health care directive inside the house. I put on my mask but couldn't find a clean pair of latex gloves in my duffel bag. It was cold in the backyard. I had a pair of leather gloves. I put those on and entered my childhood home for the first time in weeks. My mother barely registered my presence. She was crying on the couch.
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • I was relieved -- we wouldn't have to make what felt like an impossible decision -- but then I kept reading. My father had noted that he did not want to be supported by a ventilator or hooked up to a feeding tube for any length of time. He had been connected to both for nearly two weeks.
  • There was grief on her face, but also curiosity. What had finally gotten to her younger son, the one who so rarely showed emotion during his father's hospitalization?
  • I called the hospital and approved the DNR. They told me his status was still dire. I called my dad's closest friends and started preparing them for the worst.
  • My father's lungs showed no signs of progress. The double pneumonia they diagnosed days before was worsening. His kidneys were failing. Dialysis was required but would put a strain on his blood pressure, which was already dangerously low. There was a special form of dialysis designed for delicate situations like this -- continuous veno-venous hemofiltration -- but it wasn't available at Lawrence
  • The morning after I searched for my father's health directive and drafted his obituary, I woke up and tried to turn on my laptop. It wouldn't start. When it eventually booted up, it asked if I wanted to restore an unsaved document. No, I thought, let's see what happens today.
  • It was the same doctor as yesterday, the one who asked about the DNR. "Look, your dad is on a ventilator. That's a form of life support. He's experiencing kidney failure and requires dialysis. His situation is still very acute. He was in good health before the Covid, but his kidney, heart, and lungs are 69 years old. It's tough for them to recover. But the numbers from today are undeniably better than yesterday. There's been an improvement at almost every level. Your dad is a tough guy."
  • One of my close friends, a nurse practitioner, would help me understand all the terminology and its implications. He was treating Covid patients at an ICU upstate. At the end of our calls I'd ask him how he was doing. "We ran out of gowns," he told me one day. "My ICU is out of ventilators -- we're diverting people to Albany," he said another time.
  • "There's a difference between good intentions and good outcomes," I explained to her. She would wave me away and pick up. Inevitably the call would bring her tears. I stewed on the porch. My brother, uncle and I would spend hours trying to ease her mind and pacify her anxiety. Any inquiry or outreach was like sticking a finger in the open wound of her anguish.
  • I called my friend, the nurse practitioner, and gave him the latest update. He seemed upset. "You OK, dude?" "A nurse from my hospital died," he explained.
  • The nurses and doctors who took care of my father -- first for four days at NewYork-Presbyterian Lawrence Hospital, then for nearly a month at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia -- were always empathetic, straightforward and willing to trust me with complicated details.
  • About a week after writing -- then refusing to recover -- my father's obituary, his condition was continuing to improve.
  • "He's only improving," I told her, "because of the life-saving care you guys have given him. The whole city is in awe of you. They should have a parade for you down the Canyon of Heroes."
  • Covid-19 was new and largely unstudied. Maybe one of these seemingly odd treatments would work.
  • "Yesterday was a stumble, but we're getting back on course," I emailed the group. "We always knew this recovery wasn't going to be a straight line. It's important to remain resilient and optimistic even when there are temporary setbacks."
  • "Oh Lou, I've been waiting for your call. I have such good news. They are planning to extubate him tomorrow. They are going to take your father off the ventilator!" She was practically screaming with excitement. I was speechless.
  • I had been withholding certain information from my family and friends during this whole ordeal. My dad had developed a blood clot two weeks into his hospitalization. Clots are extremely dangerous, of course, but it was small and in a relatively manageable location.
  • I called my brother and told him about the plan to get my father off the ventilator. Since there were a number of contingencies, we debated telling my mother. She was living and dying with every update.
  • My father's breathing was labored on the morning they were planning to extubate. They delayed the procedure a day. That next morning, April 16, a doctor called. I was in the shower and rushed out to answer my cell. He said they were doing the extubation within the hour. What do we want to do if the extubation fails?
  • "It went as well as we could have hoped for," the doctor said. "His vitals are stable and he's breathing well. He's resting now." She explained that my father was disoriented and it probably wasn't a great idea to speak with him that day. Whatever, I thought, I'll speak with him when he gets home. He had been on a ventilator for 28 days.
  • I called the doctor later in the day. She told me my dad seemed distressed. He was trying to speak, but his vocal cords were too swollen. "It's so frustrating," she told me. "I don't know what he wants to tell me."
  • "Each facility has their own Covid rules," she explained. "I'll send you over a list." On the list was the nursing home where my grandfather had died several years before. My father had visited him every day.
  • I called the step-down unit where he had been the past three days. They transferred me to his nurse. "He's doing better, love. We took him off the pressor and his blood pressure is in a good range. His heart rate is good. He's breathing fine. The doctors decided he didn't need to go back to the ICU. He's ok."
  • "I've repeatedly said that recovery isn't a straight line. ... Yesterday we managed the roller coaster ride as a family. My brother, uncle and I were with my mother the entire day. We never lost hope or confidence in my dad's medical care and ultimate recovery. If there's a light at the end of the tunnel, it's a blinking one. Right now, it shines again."
  • I drove back to my mom's house. I scanned the block for my brother's car. He had not arrived. I parked. I have to wait for him and then tell my mother, brother and uncle all at once, right? Should I call my wife first? Should I call my dad's best friend?
  • I called my wife. I called my dad's best friend. I called the guys he grew up with. I called his former colleagues. I began every conversation the same way, "This is that call." I listened to each of them yell and cry and ask if I was serious. Then I said I had to make another call.
  • I wrote about my father's career. How he got his law degree at night school and became a prosecutor at the city, state, and federal level. How he convicted mobsters, drug dealers, and those who abused power.
  • I wrote about my dad's volunteer work -- at the Special Olympics, at an organization he founded that helps police families with special needs, and at just about any Italian-American group that needed a lawyer. He was so proud of his Italian-American heritage. He loathed the mafioso caricatures and stereotypes found on TV -- he wrote countless op-eds attacking those -- but he revered the old-school virtues he associated with his Italian-American upbringing: loyalty, humility, hard work, dedication to family.
  • He was a Covid patient for 31 days. It was a painful experience, but ultimately unimportant. It doesn't matter how a man dies. It matters how he lives.
katherineharron

How to stop being annoyed by life - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by katherineharron on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Beyond improvements to your general mood and happiness, taming your anger can have important benefits to your health. Constant stress and aggravation is linked to a range of issues including overeating, insomnia and depression, and angry outbursts increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
  • Anger "is like a blazing flame that burns up our self-control," the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh wrote. I aimed to teach myself how to rob it of oxygen and snuff it out.
  • At the first moment you realize you are experiencing annoyance or anger, just breathe. Ten slow, deep, even breaths do wonders. Sometimes, the annoyance will have passed in just that time.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • If the breaths don't make a dent, try explaining what's happening to yourself. "I'm annoyed right now because ..." is a good sentence to finish. Articulating the issue changes your response from emotion to logic.
  • Make use of this step when another person is part of the reason you are upset. Try hard to see the situation from their reality and invent a subjective theory for why they did what they did.
  • Think beyond the annoyance, or annoying person, and focus on your own behavior. By thinking of how you can be a model for grace under pressure, you help yourself to become one.
  • If you've hit No. 10, it's time to talk about the frustration with someone you trust who is not involved in the situation. Start by telling them what you did in the previous steps and why they didn't fully work.
  • How important is the matter upsetting you? How does it stack up against the things in life that you know matter? What is important (loved ones are a good example) can be the antidote to what troubles you now -- as long as you can bring them to mind in this moment.
  • Whatever the annoyance, make a joke about it, even if it's a bad one. If you can find some grain of humor in the situation, smiling, laughing and even being silly can all defuse anger and annoyance. It's not psychologically possible to experience two emotions at once.
  • If you've made it this far up the steps and you are still really peeved, here's a good (if seemingly obvious) question to ask yourself: "Is there something I can do to make it better?" Even if the answer is a small step that may not seem that effective, just taking action gets you out into the frame of acting, not reacting.
  • In the future, it is possible that you will see this particular anger-causing situation differently. Look at past problems and see how they've been a catalyst for change or even a blessing in disguise. You may even look back at a difficult situation with fondness, humor or gratefulness (for having overcome it). It's worth keeping in mind that what seems bad now won't always be so.
  • Whatever it is that is getting your goat, it is temporary and manageable. You won't always feel this way. It's just a question of how long.
  • Beyond improvements to your general mood and happiness, taming your anger can have important benefits to your health. Constant stress and aggravation is linked to a range of issues including overeating, insomnia and depression, and angry outbursts increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
katherineharron

Happiness may be healthier for some cultures than others - CNN - 0 views

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

shared by katherineharron on 19 Jan 20 - No Cached
  • Just a few months ago, the New York Times declared that "studies have shown an indisputable link between having a positive outlook and health benefits like lower blood pressure, less heart disease, better weight control and healthier blood sugar levels." Plenty of news articles present similar ideas in a stark black-and-white fashion: optimists live longer; pessimism kills.
  • But some research suggests that things aren't so simple. In 2016, for example, a study of more than 700,000 British women failed to find a link between happiness and longevity. Which raises the question: What makes this particular group of study participants any different? Could it be that culture plays a role -- that British people, overall, are just more tolerant and accepting of gloominess?
  • Even after accounting for things like a person's age, gender, socioeconomic status, and chronic health conditions, there was a significant difference between the two groups: "American adults who experience high levels of positive emotions, such as feeling 'cheerful' and 'extremely happy,' are more likely to have healthy blood-lipid profiles," explains lead study author Jiah Yoo, but the same was not true among Japanese adults.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Past research has reached similar conclusions. In a 2015 Stanford study of 690 Chinese and American participants, for example, the Americans generally sought to maximize positive feelings and minimize negative ones, while the Chinese subjects were more likely to report that they commonly felt mixed emotions. The study authors argued that the results had to do with differing ideas about the importance of the individual: The individualistic American culture places more emphasis on people doing what's best for themselves, while more collectivist East Asian cultures prioritize doing what's best for the group.
  • Yoo believes the cultural influence on the positivity-health connection may be the result of culturally specific health behaviors. "Frequent experience of positive affect in the Western context would be aligned with prescribed values and beliefs, and thus likely motivate engagement in and pursuit of healthy behaviors," she explains. "In contrast, positive affect aligns less with norms and beliefs about positive affect in the East Asian context, and thus may not be associated with healthy behaviors."
  • It's not simply that Americans are more intent on seeking happiness, then -- there's also a high bar for how intense that happiness is supposed to feel. "Westerners value high-arousal emotions more than Easterners, so they promote activities that elicit high-arousal emotions.," Lim noted. "Even children of the West learn through storybooks that high-arousal emotions are ideal, and the opposite is true for children of the East."
g-dragon

Madhyamika - School of the Middle Way - 0 views

www.thoughtco.com/chool-of-the-middle-way-450006

Truth Middle Way Reality

shared by g-dragon on 05 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Phenomena are both real and not-real; things exist, yet nothing exists. No intellectual position is ever the correct one.
  • The Wisdom Sutras are about 40 texts collected under the title Prajnaparamita (Perfection of Wisdom) Sutra.
  • Of these, the best known in the West are the Heart Sutra (Mahaprajnaparamita-hridaya-sutra) and the Diamond (or Diamond Cutter) Sutra (Vajracchedika-sutra).
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • According to legend, however, they are the words of the Buddha that were lost to humankind for many centuries.
  • Whatever their provenance, the Wisdom Sutras focus on sunyata, “emptiness.” Nagarjuna’s principle contribution to Buddhism was his systematization of the sutras’ teachings.
  • What we think of as our self, our personality and ego, are temporary creations of the skandhas.
  • The "middle way" of Madhyamika refers to taking a middle way between affirmation and negation. Phenomena cannot be said to exist; phenomena cannot be said to not-exist.
  • Relative truth is the conventional way we perceive reality; absolute truth is sunyata. From the perspective of the relative, appearances and phenomena are real. From the perspective of the absolute, appearances and phenomena are not real. Both perspectives are true.
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