Sombras vespertinas

Evening shadows.

And now for your evening news (because I have an overload of news items I’ve wanted to comment on over the last month).

Tonight’s news will be broken up into segments.

We’ll look at stress, the brain, education, the Pope, preparation, the economy, and fashion.

We’ll start with stress (let’s just get that out of the way so we can calmly look at other things).

Stress

A researcher at the U of A is looking at the different ways men and women respond to stress. Women have a more robust hormone response, but men have a larger behavioral response. This indicates that men and women have different coping strategies to stress. I could’ve told him that part, but the physiological side of it is interesting.

Now while we all experience stress, some people are simply amazing at being able to handle it and always remain calm. Scientific American had a little bit recently about learning to stay calm. I know for me, when I start to feel stressed, I don’t imagine a sound, but I do start to focus on my breathing the way I do when I do yoga. And that almost always calms me down so I can be more rational in the situation.

BYU has also done some research on stress, particularly on lowering blood pressure. A massage lowered the husband’s blood pressure more than the wife’s, but both benefited from it. Now, to find a husband who can give me massages.

Now that we are all less stressed, why not more stories about the brain?

The Brain

Scientific American also did a story about how our brains order sentences, and how it’s different from how we speak. You’d probably expect the brain to follow the same pattern as your native language, but research has shown that probably isn’t the case. No wonder I get mixed up when I’m speaking, my brain and mouth aren’t following the same pattern!

A lot of people like to think they are good at multitasking or that they are succesfully doing more than one thing at a time. This doesn’t seem to be the case (story 1, story 2). Our minds can only do one thing at a time, some people’s minds are just better at switching between different things and do so faster, but they are still only doing one thing at a time. It’s probably similar to how I cooked dinner last night. First I put the chicken in the oven. Then I got the rice going, then I made the bread sticks. And while all of that was cooking I mixed up a fruit salad. Yes, I was cooking everything all at once, but I’d only been able to focus on one thing at a time. Dinner was delicious too.

BYU (yeah BYU!) has also been doing research on just what it is in our brains that create memories (story 1, story 2). This has been something I’ve wondered about. How can a series of electrical impulses hold that memory? Doesn’t make sense. But the researchers say that more receptors means a bigger memory. I still think it’s a bit like magic. But good for them for studying it.

But is there more to us than just the electrical impulses in our brain? Many say yes (I’m one of them). And it seems to be part of our consciousness as to why we simply can’t imagine death and ceasing to exist (could be because we don’t cease to exist, but the scientists are going to take a while to realize that). Many people who are clinically dead claim to have experiences during that time. And after they are revived they tell about them. Death is the great mystery in life. A long term study is being created to scientifically study these experiences. How we deal with death is also a topic of study. The stages we are all familiar with (and which are one of my high school summer school stories) don’t seem to have any base to them. The stages are all a myth. I’m familiar with other stage theories being not so good either. So it makes sense that the stages of grief would have problems as well.

And a study on how the brain reacts to food seems to be a clue to obesity. I have to say, any study that involves me eating a chocolate milk shake – sign me up. It seems there is a gene variant that in the people that have it, blunts their ability to get pleasure from food. So it takes more food for them to feel good. The dopamine levels in their brains just aren’t as high as others when they have a chocolate milk shake. Me, I love chocolate milk shakes.

Now for a health/brain relationship challenge. Four different places published stories about a study done at the University of Colorado and Yale about how being physically warm makes a person more metaphysically warm (Scientific American, BBC, NPR, CNN). Why is this a challenge you might ask? Because I have almost chronic cold hands and I get cold very easily. So someone who wants to me to be nice, is first going to have to warm me up physically before they can warm me up metaphysically. On the other side of that, BBC reported that people who are lonely often feel colder than others. Interesting studies on both sides of the issue.

Now we’ll move on to children and education.

Education

This BBC article on remembering teachers made my eyes a bit misty. I fondly remember several of my teachers and the lasting impact they had on my life. And maybe it’s a bit selfish of me, but I hope I had an impact on some of my students. The first of my students will graduate this year. I wonder what they are going to do next.

One professor says he didn’t have an impact though. A Devon professor believes he was not the inspiration for Dumbledore, and this because he doesn’t like sweets. I think he should just go with it. There are worse characters he could be compared to.

Latin is a dead language that seems to be getting new life. More students are enrolling in Latin classes. I admit that I want to see if they’ll let me audit Latin while I’m working on my Ph.D. And I have Harry Potter in Latin on my wish list.

First you have to get children in school. And certain areas are making that very serious business. Parents who don’t get their kid to school can face jail time. I think it’s about time! A person’s rights only extend so far, and if being negligent and not getting your child to school endangers their future (which it does), than you should be held accountable. Thumbs up for those brave people who are enforcing it.

Children are definitely multi-faceted. One side they can share everything with everyone. And on the other they can throw a tantrum that can be heard through the entire mall. These two studies show that both being generous or the aggression of a tantrum can be promoted and influence a person later in life. I can think of many people who are amazingly generous now that they are adults. I can also think of a handful that seem to still be stuck in the aggressive tantrum stage.

A good evening news program will mention the Pope on occasion.

The Pope

It was with a bit of a smile that I read recently about the Pope’s sadness at the declining interest in the Bible. I’m reading the whole Bible this year. But the number of people I know who have ever read the whole thing in their life is small. It is a world wide problem. And solving that problem would solve so many other problems in the world. It’s such a simple solution. To bring awareness to the bible, the Pope called a synod to study the problem, and he organized a marathon reading of the bible in one week. Over 1,000 people participated, reading a chapter from the bible over 7 days and 6 nights. The Pope started it off reading the first chapter.

There’s always advice about doing something in the news.

Preparation

Talk about being prepared! The BBC already had a script ready to go in the 1970s that would be read in the event of a nuclear attack. Should I be preparing scripts (blog posts) for possible events in my life?

What about the economy?

Economy & Employment

Research has shown that you are much more likely to work at a place that shares your initials. Some match might be expected, but they found more correlation than would be expected by chance. So now I’m thinking about my initials and where I’ve worked, and… I’m not seeing any matches at all. Hmm. Wonder what that means. Do your initials and your job match? Oh wait, the elementary school I worked at matches my middle initial. Okay, I’m not as weird as I thought. Weird, yes, but not that weird.

This is an interesting assessment of the credit crisis facing our country right now. Nobody wants to accept that it was their fault. It’s much easier to blame someone else for your bad financial decisions. But until everyone takes responsibility for their own actions, we can never expect a full recovery.

And for the fashion conscious out there.

Fashion

Looking through my closet, it looks like I might need to go on a shopping trip. CNN, Scientific American, and the BBC all reported on a study showing that men find women wearing red more attractive. I want to know what color they find more intelligent too though.

This broadcast has been brought to you by the letters M, R, and the number 31.