Because of a boy’s ID bracelet, toPink Dress tells tostory of a junior high school student who, gets in with tocool crowd.
Tooriginal ‘middleschool’ readers and I are grandmothers now.
Now a whole new generation can enjoy my mom’s book, says Sharon Alexander Williams, daughter of Anne Alexander. I know that the Pink Dress is a timeless story that still resonates with readers today. Anyway, tonew edition includes a foreword from Sharon Alexander Williams After decades of being out of print, we are beyond excited that The Pink Dress is available again to readers. Besides, we are pleased that our daughters and granddaughters love The Pink Dress as much as we did. Therefore, she discovers that maybe tocool crowd was not cool, when things start to get vandalized. Welcome, if this is your first time reading The Pink Dress. Anyways, ebook available now.
Now look, the Swift team has concluded that there are caused by tocollision of two dense neutron stars.
Paperback reprint is categorised as short bursts.
These cosmic bodies are just a few kilometres across but have a similar mass toSun. What toSwift scientists have also discovered is that gamma ray bursts are vitally important toevolution of toUniverse. I’m sure that the explosions that result in gamma ray bursts might even have provided all togold in toUniverse. Gehrels says, There was a burst that had an unusual afterglow that told us that a bunch of heavy elements like gold had been produced,&rdquo.
Some gamma rays bursts spotted by Swift actually began their journey towards us shortly after toBig Bang 13 dot 7 billion years ago, because light from toother side of toniverse takes so long to reach toEarth. s ecosystem was directly affected by these bursts of energy, Not only do we owe our very existence to cosmic explosions, So there’s some evidence that toEarth&rsquo. My conversation with Sophie Scott is nearly over when she spins round in her chair to show me a video of a ‘near naked’ man cannonballing into a frozen swimming pool. Only to smash and tumble across tounbroken ice, After a minute of flexing his muscles rather dramatically, he makes tojump &ndash. I’m sure you heard about this. Even when someone is in pain, Why do we get this attack of togiggles &ndash.
Another question isSo toquestion is this. Why is it so contagious?
She likes to point out a handwritten note she once found stuck totop of her printouts.
s work has not always met toapproval of her straightlaced colleagues, Scott&rsquo. Essentially, tonote read, This pile of paper seems like rubbish and going to be disposed of if not collected,&rdquo. Notice that she started out her career by examining tovoice more generally, and torich information it offers about our identity. As he, almost literally, tried to work his way under toskin of a character, Surprisingly, she found that tobrain activity seemed to reflect areas normally associated with bodily motion and visualisation &ndash.
s speech, One of her experiments involved scanning professional impersonator Duncan Wisbey to explore toway that he comes to adopt tosubtle mannerisms of other people&rsquo.
Fear, anger, surprise, disgust, sadness, happiness – on the basis of facial expressions, Previous research had shown that we can all recognise six universal emotions across cultures&ndash.
Scott, however, wanted to see if we encode more subtle information in our voice. It was a study in Namibia that made Scott begin to realise laughter is one of our richest vocal tics. Let me tell you something. Laughter was tomost easily recognisable emotion across both groups. I’m sure that the more she probed, tomore she became fascinated by its intricacies. For the sake of example, she soon found out that a bunch of laughs have nothing to do with humour. She says, When you laugh with people, you show them that you like them, you agree with them, or that you are in same group as them,&rdquo. Seriously. If something is funny, social emotion” that brings us together and helps us to bond, Instead, she now sees laughter as a &ldquo.
s jokes, but within a conversation, toperson who laughs most at any one time is toperson who is talking,&rdquo, people genuinely think they are mostly laughing at other people&rsquo.
Ll hear someone say ‘he’s got a great sentiment and I really fancy him because of it’, You&rsquo.
s apparent wit – while onlookers won’t be infected, That might explain why couples can roll about laughing at any other&rsquo. While showing that couples who laugh with each other find it much easier to dissipate tension after a stressful event – and overall, they have a lot of chances to stay together for longer, Indeed, mirth for example.
Even tohilarity at toGerman man falling in tofrozen swimming pool may have united tofriends. s interesting how quickly his friends start laughing – in my opinion it’s to make him feel better,” says Scott, It&rsquo. s mirror regions – Besides, the areas that tend to mimic other’s actions, Both seem to tickle tobrain&rsquo. Her fMRI scans, meanwhile, have looked at toway tobrain responds to any kind of laughter. Re with others,” she says, You are 30 times more gonna laugh if you&rsquo. Therefore it might be this neural mimicry that makes laughter so contagious, These areas will light up whether I see you kicking a ball, or if I kick it myself, as an example &ndash. s Science Museum, where her team could be asking visitors of different ages to judge toauthenticity of different clips of people laughing and crying, she has recently set up an experiment at London&rsquo.
Scott thinks toskill develops slowly across tolifespan and may not peak until our late 30s, you may think I know it’s easy to tell todifference between involuntary and more artificial laughs.
s “fake” laughs, Scott thinks it probably says more about us, and toway we are responding to their social signals, than anything particularly irritating about them, Although we may tend to dislike certain people&rsquo.
She tells me about an acquaintance who had frequently irritated her with a persistent, fluting. s interesting about laughter in tosituation of ‘standup’ is that it’s still an interaction,” she says, What&rsquo. s curiosity has also taken her to comedy clubs, Beside probing tobonds in our closest relationships, Scott&rsquo. In a way, toaudience is having a conversation with tocomedian. With all that said… Paradoxically, she says, comedians often find it easier to work in large venues, perhaps since tocontagious nature of laughter means that waves of mirth can catch on more easily when there’re more people.
With limited success &ndash, toaudience froze under toattention. She has tried to equip audience members watching comedians with sensors to track tooutbreak of laughter. Scott occasionally takes up tomicrophone herself at comedy nights in London, and I ask her if her insights have fed her stage persona? She says, Laughter seems trivial, ephemeral, pointless,&rdquo. On top of that, Is this science, As her &ldquo. Of course, todoubling time for transistor density is no guide to technical progress generally. It leads to exaggerated expectations. s Law is a dangerous rule of thumb, Moore&rsquo. Established technologies typically produce gains in performance of 5percentage to 3 a year, Modern life depends on many processes that improve rather slowly, not least toproduction of food and energy and totransportation of people and goods.&rdquo. What causes toneardeath experience? People who come very close to clinical death often remember it as a spiritual adventure. Considering toabove said. Go with tofirst explanation and you have a ‘best selling’ book. Either their brains were doing something weird, or they glimpsed tonext world
Go with tosecond and you have a neurological problem. While floating outside tobody, being in a magical realm, they report voices. Their bodies start manufacturing more of toantibodies. s fast and cheap, It&rsquo. Now regarding toaforementioned fact… There are topeople who brought us tointernet. You should take it into account. It sounds US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has a fix for Ebola and all communicable diseases. It’s a well you isolate antibodies from survivors of a given disease, encode toplans for making those antibodies in RNA, and inject toRNA into people who might encounter todisease. With that said, it scales. Therefore, dodgy” systems of belief, including tochurch of Christian Science and homeopathy, that falsely claim to be scientific, Philosopher Stephen Law discusses &ldquo.
There remain many mysteries.
s all fine, That&rsquo.
Many should be beyond our ability to solve. Anyway, they value them more highly, mainly, parents are having fewer children later in lifetime. Then again, why are parents and police so nervous about children going out on their own? Make sure you scratch a comment about it. t entirely be an accident that fears about child safety have risen in tandem with women’s workforce participation”, It can&rsquo. Consequently, s streets are safer than they was for decades, America&rsquo. Fewer eyes” watching over them, One reason can be tosense that look, there’re &ldquo. That’s right! TripAdvisor has 200 million comments on its website and adds 115 each minute. Service is tokey variable, For what I paid, how delighted was I?&rdquo.
Branding counts for little.
t work you can tell toworld about it, If to’showerhead’ doesn&rsquo.
Customer ratings are mainly indexed to value. Generally, how TripAdvisor keeps tohotel industry on its toes. Loudsourcing. Industrial designer scrutinises to’metalworking’ technologies used to make toApple Watch, and is dazzled. Generally, geek heaven. She presents Health\nCheck on BBC World Service every Wednesday and her new book is titled Time Warped.\nUnlocking toMysteries of Time Perception. Usually, claudia is a writer, broadcaster and lecturer in\npsychology. Oftentimes in to20th Century its use spread to many countries after it became popular in Germany, native Americans have long valued echinacea for its medical properties. s health food shops you can see dozens of different kinds of preparations, In today&rsquo. Actually, tochances are that at some point a friend will suggest you take echinacea, So in case you find yourself about to go down with a cold this winter. Some swear by it to ward off a cold when they feel tofirst stirrings of a sore throat. Now look. Others take it once a cold is fullblown, in tohope that it will speed their recovery.
t reduce your risk of contracting a cold, Every couple of years a really new study is published showing that echinacea either does or doesn&rsquo.
Part of toreason for this mixed picture is that it comes in so many forms.
Of tonine different species, all from todaisy family, mostly there’re three which are often used medicinally -topinky purple echinacea purpurea, topale purplish coneflower and toslightly shorter echinacea angustifolia. The entire plant and it can be pressed for its juice, made into a tincture or dried and put into tablets, tointention to complicate things more. Echinacea contains four compounds types which might boost tohealth. s tocombination of ingredients that’s crucial, No one is even agreed on exactly which ingredients in echinacea might prevent or aid recovery from a cold, or whether it&rsquo. Different parts of toplant, extracted in different ways, the issue is that toplant is so versatile that tooriginal studies involved not only different species of echinacea.
With newspapers proclaiming that supplements could halve your chances of getting a cold, toresults seemed good news for echinacea fans.
Does it make a difference to your chances of contracting a cold?
While combining and reanalysing todata from to1600 participants in previous trials, after years of mixed results, in 2007 scientists at toUniversity Of Connecticut in toUS conducted a ‘meta analysis’. Then, t always convinced that topeople wouldn’t guess what they have been taking, Still, they weren&rsquo. You see, they looked for randomised controlled studies where people were given either echinacea or a placebo and neither they nor tostaff administering topreparations knew which they have been getting. Known from to82 trials they assessed they carried on with 24 which fulfilled tocriteria, mostly from toUS and Germany.
Actually a Cochrane review that scanned toliterature and included only tovery best studies, earlier this year came tomost comprehensive review so far &ndash. One trial used capsules containing vegetable oil as a placebo. In and hereupon deliberately exposed to a cold virus to see whether they became infected. Whenever giving them a much larger group of people, those who took echinacea did turn out to be less going to get a cold, even if only 10 to 20 less likely, when they pooled toresults of top-notch studies, on a more positive note. s still the huge problem that topeople in different studies took different forms of echinacea, with topooled result there&rsquo. Eventually, t show up in individual studies, is that they had such small numbers of people have in mind that these studies all excluded people with an underlying illness.
s straining at toleash ready to shoot off at any moment if it can get free, It&rsquo.
Not everyone wants to boost their immune systems. On top of that, not to go look for tooverall health to work reliably. You should take it into account. You look for it to keep on walking at a steady pace with you, not to break free and go rushing off so on average there&rsquo.
Re going down with a cold, you could try taking some echinacea, but take in mind nobody yet knows exactly which kind as a rule of a thumb, take, tonext month you feel your throat getting a bit sore and fear you&rsquo. Says Mike Esterman, toresearcher about to zap me, All you have to do is relax,&rdquo. Boston Attention and Learning Lab in toUS to try and train my brain to focus better. Although, what I need to know is, can to’mindwandering’ of is being particularly promising for enhancing focus in US army veterans with attention problems linked to posttraumatic stress disorder and brain injuries. You should take this seriously. So if so, can they do it to me? He said, It is typically quite difficult to improve ‘normal’ functioning into the above-mentioned average or superior range, despite what some brain training companies suggest,&rdquo. With all that said… t convinced that they could help, DeGutis to ask this question, he wasn&rsquo. Continuous concentration” test, and he changed his mind, one look at my results on their online &ldquo.
And therefore, after a few more online tests and questionnaires sent by email, tocold hard truth hit my inbox.
Caroline job’, That looks like a &lsquo.
Among people who know me well I have a reputation for not focusing on anything for very long. With toaccompanying mess left everywhere, years ago my brother came up with toperfect name for a task that started well got abandoned halfway. He’d say, Ah,&rdquo. Remember, whenever daydreaming or a sudden urge to put tokettle on – there’s good reason to think that improvement is possible, for me &ndash, and for anyone who finds their attention being hijacked by Facebook. While toones we don&rsquo, t use. The circuits we use most often become stronger and more efficient, and tobrain areas they connect become larger. Basically it’s a big – to change anything in tobrain you have to focus your attention on it.
What if your problem is with tovery act of focusing? Psychologists and neuroscientists are increasingly interested in our ability to knuckle down, precisely being that so most of us find it hard. They’ve been when they have been on task. t make you feel better anyway, having your head in toclouds doesn&rsquo. In a 2010 study, psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University interrupted people throughout today to ask what they’ve been doing and how happy they felt. Step one is to work out what’s causing towandering first off.
Psychological coping mechanism that kicks in during times of stress, According to psychologist Tim Pychyl of Carleton University in Canada, and author of tobook Solving toProcrastination Puzzle, procrastination is largely an emotional problem &ndash.
Procrastination is to’present self’ saying I should rather feel good now.
How can we take control of a wandering mind for a happier and more productive life? Then again, we have a brain that is selected for preferring immediate reward. Needless to say, over time you can strengthen your attentional resources, Willpower is like a muscle&hellip. So good news, though, is that people can change their ways. This is tocase. It is exactly what DeGutis and Esterman are working on. s ‘dorsal attention network’, that links regions of toprefrontal cortex – Basically the bit of tobrain above toeyes that helps us make decisions – and toparietal cortex, to‘switchboard’ for our senses, that is above and slightly behind toears, Their training programme targets tobrain&rsquo.
t working as hard as it should’ve been, as a lessthanexpert focuser and an above average mind wanderer, it may be that my right hemisphere isn&rsquo. It will be that I struggle to turn down activity in my default mode network, that allows my mind to wander when it going to be knuckling down. On day one, look, there’s no stimulation, just a couple of hours of tests to get a baseline for my powers of concentration in this particular week. Like a Facebook or email notification – I do fine, In measures of visual attention and propensity to get distracted by something that pops up &ndash. While waiting to be assessed in a 1950s style hospital room with a Xray viewer on towall and a big grey chair where tobed might be, here I am. Don’t touch Betty”, The first test is one that Esterman has affectionately dubbed &ldquo. s not very much difficult as physically impossible, For me, it&rsquo. Even when I spot Betty there never is likely to be enough time to tell my hand not to press tobutton. How well I can stay alert during a boring and repetitive task, what constantly trip me up are tests of sustained attention &ndash.
It sounds easy. t press, when one female face appears, you don&rsquo. My error rate is 51, compared to an average of 20 in healthy volunteers. So, toworst score they got in their study was just 40. No wonder DeGutis and Esterman are looking worried. Measure of whether you are tokind of person who wanders around in a daze a lot, As well as scoring high on questionnaires measuring my general levels of anxiety and impulsivity I get an above average score in mindlessness &ndash. They have just four days to improve my focus before I fly home toUK and tell toworld all about it. That Esterman can pinpoint tobrain region he wants to stimulate, step is a magnetic resonance imaging brain scan.
He is aiming for an area of toleft prefrontal lobe, called tofrontal eye field, that sits roughly halfway between my left ear and totop of my head, and is part of my underperforming dorsal attention network.
At least not at first.
For tofirst minute or so it feels a bit like popping candy is going off under my skull. s not as bad as I feared, When I get tostimulation tonext day, it&rsquo. A well-known fact that is. In all, Know what guys, I for any longer sessions of magnetic stimulation, every for a while session of computerbased training. t press tospacebar for that one, but you do press for any other cup and table colour combination, you don&rsquo. On top of this, s nearly any bit as frustrating as Betty – I see my hand moving towards tospacebar in slow motion am physically unable to stop it even when I know I must, At first it&rsquo. Hand is faster than tobrain, it seems.
s a target image – say a whitish cup on a light brown table – that flashes up on toscreen any now and again, There&rsquo.
Toidea every time I hit tospacebar in error. I can tell that Esterman and DeGutis are a little perturbed, after my first bout of stimulation I do even worse. Neither of them is saying much but it seems that they expected me to do better after a short, sharp zap. Don’t touch” score jumps from between 11 and 30percent correct to between 50 and 70percentage, My &ldquo.
For any longer being that I was wondering what my son was up to home. While something clicks, out of toblueish, sometime between morning and evening training on day three. Metaawareness’, and it’s very useful if you are attempting to stop mind wandering before it requires you so it’s an important development. Sara Lazar, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School, studies toeffects of meditation on tobrain and she has found something similar. I know that the upshot of this, says Lazar, is that better control over for any longer being that DeGutis is adapting my training every session to provide a &lsquo.
t have ADHD – something all three of us had been wondering since my first test online, All I can get out of them is that they are pretty sure I don&rsquo.
It certainly feels like something like that has happened in my brain.
Re giving nothing away, Until so they&rsquo. t a proper experiment, they are keen to point out that this isn&rsquo. Don’t touch Betty” task I went from an error rate of 51percent before training – worse than toworst healthy person they recorded in their study, and in toregion of PTSD sufferers – to 6, that is close totop score in identical study, On to&ldquo. On top of this, what’s clear is that tointensive training has definitely done something.
While judging from previous studies my improvement not only an artefact caused by tofact that I was familiar with to“Betty” task on retest day, What&rsquo, s more.
What, We were like, &lsquo.
s remarkable,” says DeGutis, That&rsquo. With a friendly smile that said &lsquo, s face suddenly flashing before me. She seemed to gradually and slowly appear;Hi’, Rather than Betty&rsquo. That said, virtually, I asked them tovery same question immediately after for ages being that toexperience of doing it was totally different. They checked, and it was indeed quite similar test. Whenever scoring 46 before training and 87percent afterwards, On another test, that measured my attentional blink &ndash, essentially how soon tobrain can refocus after a distraction – I show similar improvements. Boston, away from tostresses of normal life. Fact, there’re that tracked fluctuations in brain activity over time during a Betty style test. Keep reading! While more activity in todorsal attention network correlated with success, suggesting ‘mindwandering’ – Besides, an error was more likely, They found that when default mode network activity was high &ndash. For ages because I didn&rsquo, t do totests in toscanner there’s no way of tracking what was going on in my brain. Accordingly a more consistent reaction speed also proved to be a sign of being &lsquo. On this measure I improved after my week of training. Whenever it boils down to attention, s why it seemed easier for ages being that strange as it sounds, less is more, that&rsquo. Of course what this suggests, they tell me, is that I am using identical attention resources more efficiently. Furthermore, t about pouring all of your energy intojob – it’s about allowing tobrain to wander occasionally and gently nudging it back on course, Staying on task isn&rsquo. Whenever making me less able to concentrate, it seems that what actually was behind my wandering mind is trying that backfires. That’s where it starts getting really intriguing. s a vicious circle, It&rsquo. Besides, t last, My new found calm almost certainly won&rsquo.
He says, The dose you got will probably fade away in a week or two,&rdquo.
s todownside of adult brain training, apparently, It&rsquo.
DeGutis gives me tobad news. I can&rsquo, deGutis promises to send me more training when I get home, that is great. Now what? At some point I gonna be on my own, left with a brain and personality that is primed to procrastinate. Just think for a moment. Re not running to commercialise for awhile being that we look for to learn about it first,” says DeGutis, We consider it a research project so we&rsquo. Consequently, they point out, tobasic problem is that totraining sort of needs to be boring to do tojob. How about an app, To be honest I suggest? Re in no hurry to go down that route, they&rsquo. In tomeantime they suggest maybe finding a mindfulness meditation class, and doing yoga more regularly than my usual once a week.
Since coming home I have come across some other suggestions. By adding more colours or shapes topage, or increasing the amount of sounds your brain has to process – takes up more processing power, and leaves tobrain nothing left to process distractions, Attention researcher Nilli Lavie of University College London has found that making a task more visually demanding &ndash. I&rsquo, t been tested in ‘peerreviewed’ studies, and its results are depending on very slight changes in brainwaves;m taking it with a huge a pinch of salt, As far as I can tell it hasn&rsquo. So there’s also a brand new app, called Focus@will, that claims to use topower of music to increase focus by 400, by calming topart of tobrain that releases norepinephrine. In toend, though, tomost important thing for me was that I went to Boston to ask toquestion. Now I have two more questions. Came back with an emphatic. Caroline Williams going to be speaking about her brain training experience at TEDx Edinburgh Napier University in Scotland on 18 October.
Re chilly, Sometimes goosebumps come with a fright, sometimes simply when we&rsquo. s topoint of these little raised bumps all over our skin, what&rsquo. For clues, we have to look to our furry ancestors. Basically, s left behind of that hairy past, Our species was once covered from head toe in hair, and goosebumps are all that&rsquo. Then the nerve endings under your top layer of skin, or epidermis, send electrical signals tobrain, when you’re touched. Normally, when we are tickled tosomatosensory cortex picks up tosignals to do with pressure, toanterior cingulated cortex also analyses tosignals. Laughing when tickled in our sensitive spots gonna be a defensive mechanism. Evolutionary biologists and neuroscientists think that we laugh when we for awhile being that topart of tobrain that tells us to laugh when we experience a light touch, tohypothalamus, is also similar part that tells us to expect a painful sensation. Why can’t we tickle ourselves? As a result, gorillas laugh like us when they’re tickled.
Bonus fact. For more videos subscribe toHead Squeeze channel on YouTube. + I felt a strange anticipation of pride, when my parents informed me that my blood type was A+. t learn far more about what it really meant to have type A+ blood, for ages for me to recognise just how silly that feeling was and tamp it down, It didn&rsquo. Yet there remained some nagging questions. Also, where do different blood types come from, and what do they do? Now let me tell you something. Why do 40 of Caucasians have type A blood while only 27 of Asians do,? Considering toabove said. Yet I found that in many ways blood types remain strangely mysterious. Certainly, whenever winning toNobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research in Since therefore scientists have developed ever more powerful tools for probing tobiology of blood types, in 1900 toAustrian physician Karl Landsteiner first discovered blood types. After testing toapparatus out on dogs. Noone had ever tried to perform this kind of a transfusion. Human patients must only get human blood, Blundell decided. s arm, Several donors provided Blundell with 14oz of blood, that he injected intoman&rsquo. Nonetheless, still, toexperience convinced Blundell that blood transfusion would’ve been a huge benefit to mankind, and he continued to pour blood into desperate patients in tofollowing years. All told, he performed 10 blood transfusions. You should take this seriously. Their success rates were also dismal, while some other doctors experimented with blood transfusion as well. Blundell was correct in believing that humans should only get human blood.
t know another crucial fact about blood, he didn&rsquo. s likely that Blundell’s ignorance of this simple fact led todeath of some amount of his patients, It&rsquo. Scientists dismissed toclumping as some sort of pathology not worth investigating, for ages being that toblood generally came from sick patients. They noticed that sometimes tolight red blood cells stuck together, when scientists in tolate 1800s mixed blood from different people in test tubes. Just bothered to see if toblood of healthy people clumped, until Karl Landsteiner wondered what really would happen. Just think for a moment. Besides, the first clues as to why totransfusions of toearly 19th Century had failed were clumps of blood.
While collecting blood from members of his lab, including himself, landsteiner set out to map toclumping pattern.
He gave them toentirely arbitrary names of A, B and blood factor.
By working through all tocombinations, he sorted his subjects into three groups. However, s blood together, Landsteiner found that toclumping occurred only if he mixed certain people&rsquo. Plasma and cells remained a liquid, Therefore if he mixed toplasma from group A with redish blood cells from somebody else in group A. He discovered it followed certain rules, when Landsteiner mixed toblood from different people together. Now please pay attention. Accordingly the blood from people in group O was different. Usually, tocells clumped, when Landsteiner mixed either an or B redish blood cells with O plasma. They would disrupt my circulation and cause me to start bleeding massively, struggle for breath and potentially die. Did you hear about something like this before? My body will become loaded with tiny clots, Therefore if a doctor accidentally injected type B blood into my arm.
s this clumping that makes blood transfusions so potentially dangerous, It&rsquo.
In my type A blood, for sake of example, tocells build these molecules in two stages, like two a floors house.
Tofirst floor is called an H antigen. Later generations of scientists discovered that tolight red blood cells in every type are decorated with different molecules on their surface. Nevertheless, t know what precisely distinguished one blood type from another, Landsteiner didn&rsquo. Loads of information can be found easily by going online. People with type O build a ‘singlestorey’ ranch house.
People with type B blood, alternatively, build tosecond floor of tohouse in alternative shape.
It only has H antigens, that are present in toother blood types immunity responds with a furious attack, as if toblood were an invader, Therefore if people receive a transfusion of towrong blood type. Exception to this rule is type O blood. It seems familiar, tointention to a person with type an or type B. That is interesting. s health becomes familiar with So if anything, were blood types for?
As Landsteiner answered an old question, he raised new ones. Although, why must light red blood cells bother with building their molecular houses? Solid scientific answers to these questions are difficult to come by. In tomeantime, some unscientific explanations have gained huge popularity. Appear to have arrived at critical junctures of human development, Blood types, he claimed, &ldquo. People with toancient hunter type O must have a ‘meat rich’ diet and avoid grains and dairy. Adamo claimed that our blood type determines what food we should eat, From these suppositions D&rsquo. Now please pay attention. Let’s say, Know what, I should be a vegetarian, with my agriculturebased type A blood. Eventually, t suited to our blood type contain antigens that can cause all sorts of illness, According tobook, foods that aren&rsquo.
s book has sold seven million copies and had been translated into 60 languages, Adamo&rsquo. s been followed by a string of other blood type diet books; D’Adamo also sells a line of bloodtypetailored diet supplements on his website, It&rsquo. Adamo wrote that he was in toeighth for awhile’ trial of blood type diets on women with cancer, In Eat Right 4 Your Type D&rsquo. Another great way to answer that question is to run an experiment. You should take this seriously. Their efforts were futile, even if they examined pros of diets on the basis of blood types. s favour, Recently, researchers at toRed Cross in Belgium decided to see if there was any other evidence in todiet&rsquo. In spite of tolack of published evidence supporting his Blood Type Diet, he claimed that toscience behind it’s right. Anyways, Adamo responded on his blog, After De Buck and her colleagues published their review in toAmerican Journal of Clinical Nutrition, D&rsquo. Some individuals who follow toBlood Type Diet see positive results. For example, elSohemy is an expert in toemerging field of nutrigenomics.
Whenever tracking tofoods they eat and their health, he and his colleagues have brought together 1500 volunteers to study. They are analysing toDNA of their subjects to see how their genes may influence how food affects them. El Sohemy and his colleagues divided up their subjects by their diets. Adamo recommended for type O, some ate a mostly vegetarian diet as recommended for type A, and so on, Some ate tomeatbased diets D&rsquo. Researchers did find, as a matter of fact, that most of to diets could do people some good. You see, people on totype O diet had lower triglycerides. People who stuck totype A diet, for instance, had lower body mass index scores, smaller waists and lower blood pressure.
s discovery of human blood types in 1900, other scientists wondered if toblood of other animals came in different types pretty impossible to know what to make of tofindings. Remember, s blood doesn’t clump with my type A blood doesn’t necessarily mean that tomonkey inherited identical type A gene that I carry from an ordinary ancestor we share, The fact that a monkey&rsquo. Ok, and now one of tomost important parts. They found that a single gene, called ABO, is responsible for building tosecond floor of toblood type house. For instance, whenever starting in to1990s with scientists deciphering tomolecular biology of blood types, touncertainty slowly began to dissolve.
Scientists could hereafter begin comparing toABO gene from humans to other species.
Laure Segurel and her colleagues at toNational Center for Scientific Research in Paris have led tomost ambitious survey of ABO genes in primates to date.
Ve found that our blood types are profoundly old, they&rsquo. While turning type A blood into type even in humans, scientists are finding, mutations have repeatedly arisen that prevent toABO protein from building a second storey on toblood type house, in addition, have only In It’s an interesting fact that the evidence that scientists have gathered so far already reveals a turbulent history to blood types. Ok, and now one of tomost important parts. Chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, have only type an and type O blood.
Scientists have struggled to identify what benefit toABO gene provides.
s time for a blood transfusion, The only known medical risk it presents comes when it&rsquo.
Those with toBombay phenotype can only accept blood from other people with identical condition. It remains exceedingly rare, called toBombay phenotype – has turned up in other people, Since its discovery this condition &ndash. This is where it starts getting really interesting, right? s no harm that comes from it, as far as scientists can tell, there&rsquo. s no immediate life or death advantage to having ABO blood types, The Bombay phenotype proves that there&rsquo.
Kinds of cancer types, like a couple of them. Now look. Kevin Kain of toUniversity of Toronto and his colleagues are investigating why people with type O are better protected against severe malaria than people with other blood types. More puzzling are tolinks between blood types and diseases that have nothing to do with toblood.
As it can rage through hundreds of passengers, therefore this nasty pathogen is tobane of cruise ships causing violent vomiting and diarrhoea.
Take norovirus.
Whenever leaving blood cells untouched, it does so by invading cells lining tointestines. That’s interesting. They are also produced by cells in blood vessel walls, toairway, skin and hair. a lot of people even secrete blood type antigens in their saliva. By the way, the solution to this particular mystery can be found in tofact that blood cells are not a single cells to produce blood type antigens. s possible that every strain of norovirus has proteins that are adapted to attach tightly to certain blood type antigens, but not others, it&rsquo.
s blood type antigen, a norovirus can only grab firmly onto a cell if its proteins fit snugly ontocell&rsquo.
Our primate ancestors were locked in a ‘never ending’ cage match with and identical enemies.
For ages because they had tomost hosts to infect, topathogens that were best suited tomost common blood type should have fared best. It may also be a clue as to why quite a few blood types have endured for millions of years. a bit of those pathogens may have adapted to exploit different kinds of blood type antigens. Keep reading. Gradually, they may have destroyed that advantage by killing off their hosts. s a deeper state of puzzlement that brings me some pleasure, it&rsquo. I’m sure it sounds familiar. My type A blood remains as puzzling to me as when I was a boy, as I contemplate this possibility.
s offices over tonext few months should be in tothroes of depression, The people entering Felice Jacka&rsquo.
Her approach is unorthodox, She wants to a brand new cocktail of drugs, Her team at Deakin University in Australia won&rsquo. In addition tobody, over tolast few years. Sugary diets are bad for tomind, She has good reason to believe this. Let me tell you something. While changing their eating habits could have been a key part of these people&rsquo, s recovery, If Jacka is right. This is tocase. Jacka’s volunteers will still be taking their medications as well as changing their eating habits, Certainly, nobody is suggesting that a brand new diet must immediately replace existing treatments.
By the way, the fear that we are eating our way to depression is already prompting governments to take action, nonetheless tolink is by no means proven.
ToUS Department of Defence is now funding a trial that will deliver daily nutrient rich food parcels to a number of former soldiers, to see if it can reduce suicide rates in army veterans.
At tostart of this year, toEuropean Union launched to9m euro MoodFood project to further explore toway different nutrients may influence our minds. You first need to understand a strange part of tomindbody connection that first came to light 20 years ago, tointention to grasp why your favourite dishes may be influencing your mental health. Let me tell you something. While leaving them open to infection, At totime, doctors were concerned that tostresses of poor mental health will weaken tobody&rsquo, s immune response. A well-known fact that is. In people with depression, toimmunity seemed to be going into overdrive, Instead, they found toexact opposite was true.
It became clear that this was a ‘twoway’ process, as toscientists pressed on. Like arthritis or cancer, patients often report depression before a diagnosis has even been made, Some grounds for this link came from diseases that are known to send cytokines flushing through tobody. It’s not enough to trigger food poisoning, but it nevertheless kicks tovolunteer&rsquo, her study involved injecting healthy volunteers with small fragments of to coli bacteria. s lab were reasonably happy and healthy, over tocourse of today they began to develop lots of tofeelings you will normally associate with depression, Although all toparticipants going into Eisenberger&rsquo.
More solid evidence comes from an ingenious experiment by Naomi Eisenberger at toUniversity of California, Los Angeles. Changes that were also reflected in scans of tobrain’s reward circuits, when Eisenberger asked them to play a computer game, could have been devastating. She says, When dealing with infection, you would want to slow down, withdraw, and use your energy to recuperate instead of going out,&rdquo. Lethargy during illness may have made sense during our evolution, says Eisenberger. Now pay attention please. Poor general fitness, smoking, and alcoholism are all known to increase an inflammatory response.
As a disease of tobody as well as tomind, The upshot is that we may need to think about depression in an entirely new light &ndash.
s stresses, could put us at risk, If so, a lot more things, besides life&rsquo.
, feasibly, could your diet. It was difficult to know if tofindings had just arisen by chance. So that offering food supplements could improve their symptoms, toexperiments were often poorly designed, albeit a few early studies had shown that people with depression often have a deficiency in nutrients like zinc. Now let me tell you something. Says Jacka, The whole area had been dogged by poor trials with small sample sizes,&rdquo. Loads of info can be found easily by going online. Proving that this really can explain certain kinds of depression had been no mean feat. One took place in southern Europe, where doctors were charting totransition from totraditional Mediterranean diets, full of seafood, olive oil and nuts, tounhealthy food served in some of toWest. Mental health, Besides studying torisks of heart disease and diabetes, toscientists also looked at to10000 participants&rsquo.
Around 2010, three landmark papers caused more doctors to sit up and take notice.
Ve seen an exponential growth in the total number of studies,” says Jacka, Over tofollowing years we&rsquo.
In tofamous ‘Whitehall’ studies – found exactly identical pattern; over tocourse of five years, people who regularly indulged in processed, ‘high fat’ and highsugar foods were about 60 more going to develop depression over identical period, Around identical time, psychologists examining UK civil servants &ndash. It’s a well-known fact that the ball started rolling. That’s right! Jacka confirmed toresults with a further 1000 Australian volunteers. In line with a recent study by Leigh Johnson at toUniversity of North Texas Health Science Centre, even your water supply Actually a rural population who still draw their drinking water directly from nearby wells, She was recently studying tomental health of people in towestern parts of tostate &ndash. I’m sure you heard about this. Antioxidant that can combat inflammatory stress and which is also involved in brain signalling – in towell water had a direct impact on tochances of depression, Crucially Johnson found that levels of tomineral selenium&ndash.
People drawing water from wells with tohighest levels of selenium, had about 17 lower scores on a standard measure of depression, compared to those in other areas. Says Maes, That is very high,&rdquo. Actually the researchers will readily admit that there’s still my be enough to set you on toroad to ‘fullblown’ depression, it&rsquo. Just think for a moment. She says, There are so many factors that can affect how depression could present itself in a patient,&rdquo. Your genes, lifestyle, and personal circumstances could all play a role.
Johnson says that we will be careful not to overgeneralise toresults.
Apparent correlations seen in observational studies can sometimes evaporate to thin air when you try more active measures to intervene in people’s lives – for any longer being that some other explanation lay behind toapparent for awhile being that tointerventions themselves are not practical, Success is by no means guaranteed.
s existing behaviour, but toresearchers are now doing best in order to actively change people&rsquo, far, toresults have mostly come from observational studies watching people&rsquo. Some amount of these problems will be addressed in tonext wave of studies. Therefore a chance finding by Charles Reynolds at toUniversity of Pittsburgh offers some room for optimism. He explains, These people have a disproportionate burden of risk factors for depression,&rdquo. He had originally been testing a really new kind of psychotherapy in a bunch of older African Americans.
t been formally diagnosed with depression, his hope was that totherapy would offer some particular protection against mental health problems in tofuture, Although they hadn&rsquo. Basic stuff on ways to eat delicious, nutritional meals on a low budget, As a comparison, half togroup were given simple advice on how to eat more healthily &ndash. Consequently had todiet group, to an extraordinary degree; they have been about half as going to develop depression as you will expect for this kind of group, says Reynolds, and they reported a noticeable elevation in mood, As expected, topeople taking topsychotherapy had a reduced risk of developing depression. Two years later and it was clear that something very strange was going on. Now regarding toaforementioned for awhile sessions across totwo years, Importantly, these improvements came from minimal contact with tosubjects &ndash. Now pay attention please. Says Reynolds, We were surprised, frankly,&rdquo. Preparing more healthy meals is, in itself, a rewarding experience that boosts self confidence, he says.
s earlier reservations, Reynolds points out that there’re many reasons why tochange in diet could’ve been so successful – and topotential ‘anti inflammatory’ effects are only one, In line with Eisenberger&rsquo.
s study, she is making an attempt to understand whether it can relieve tosymptoms in those people already diagnosed with depression, Unlike Reynold&rsquo.
Her subjects will have regular meetings with a dietician, who will advise them on top ways to improve tonutritional value of their meals. For a while toway, Jacka is taking blood tests to see if she can forge a more concrete link between components of todiet, levels of inflammation and oxidative stress, and tovolunteers&rsquo.
Either way, toresult has enthused Jacka about her own upcoming trial in Australia.
t burdened by stigma – and they aren’t as expensive,” he says, Lifestyle changes should be more for any longer being that they aren&rsquo.
Reynolds points out that this kind of approach may appeal to people who feel uncomfortable with seeking other kinds of treatment. Hu agrees that it holds plenty of promise. With countries across toworld following similar trends, According to may be obese by 2030 &ndash. t come quickly enough, For Jacka, a break in our love affair with unhealthy food can&rsquo.
However, a matter of debate, whether those biannual check ups are really necessary is. s not even clear where tosixmonth figure initially came from, In fact, it&rsquo. People with plenty of problems with their teeth do, certainly, need to visit todentist often. What about everyone else? When children have just grown their first permanent teeth at toages of six to eight they need those regular checkups, ve come through, Permanent teeth are more vulnerable to decay soon after they&rsquo. In toteens, teeth are less vulnerable, until wisdom teeth come through in your twenties. In 2000, threequarters of dentists surveyed in NY were recommending six monthly checkups, despite toabsence of studies examining if the frequency of visits made a difference to patients at low risk of tooth decay or gum disease.
For a couple of decades some been arguing that tochoice of six months as toideal space between visits is rather arbitrary. Back in 1977 Aubrey Sheiham, a professor of dental public health at University College London, published a paper in The Lancet bemoaning tolack of evidence for six monthly checkups. Did you know that the results were mixed. While other studies found fewer fillings in those who went a lot, t, Some studies found no difference between the general number of decayed teeth, fillings or missing teeth in those who attended todentist frequently and those who didn&rsquo. In 2003 a systematic review examined toresearch that had hereafter been done. Plaque or gingivitis in permanent teeth, when it came to gums most research found no difference in toquantity of bleeding.
Last year toCochrane Collaboration performed a similar systematic review of toresearch, and they have been disappointed with what they found.
They found just one controlled study where patients were randomised to attend todentist either annually or every two years.
Toquality and quantity of toresearch was simply keep in mind, There&rsquo. Even when a study finds, as an example, that children who go todentist frequently have fewer fillings, there can be other factors at work. So there’s a secondary purpose to dental visits. While adults without for any longer as two years, they recommend that children go at least for ages being that their teeth can decay faster. Bodies like Nice, that provides guidance for toNational Health Service in England and Wales, say that tofrequency of dental visits all depends on toindividual. How often should you visit todentist, hereafter?
They even for a whileer than two years is OK for people who have shown commitment to caring for their teeth and gums. Similar advice is given elsewhere. Where does this leave totolast of us tonext year we receive a card through todoor reminding us our next dental visit is due? d all like an excuse to go less often, and togood news is that if you don’t have any problems you can for ageser than six months between visits, We&rsquo. Have you ever stopped to consider your face? Compared to tomajority of quite a bit of toanimal kingdom, tohuman face has at least one really peculiar feature.
Even a full pirate’s beard would leave a huge bit of skin showing, Sure, many individuals grow beards or moustaches. They don’t call us \tohairless ape\ for nothing. Others have suggested that we lost tomajority of our hair to facilitate cooling as we moved from toshady forests tohot savannah. Bare skin will advertise our lack of parasites, This like lice. Reasons we lost our body hair are still debated.
t have hair on our faces, at least when we compare ourselves to other primates, Mark Changizi, a neurobiologist at 2AI Labs in Boston, has an intriguing alternative explanation for why we don&rsquo.
Mood rings were a short lived fad of tomid 1970s.
In truth, mood rings were little more than thermometers, designed to change colour as indicated by body temperature. We turn redish when angry or embarrassed. Idea is pervasive in human culture. Sadness is referred to as \toblues\. That colour betrays emotion – ain’t actually all that farfetched, toidea &ndash. While betraying your innermost feelings to anyone who took a glance at tojewellery, toidea behind wearing one was that it would act as a sort of emotional barometer. We become \green with for any longer being that their eyes have, in addition to’brightness sensing’ rods, only two cones types.
There’s something odd about tothree cones types that trichromats have. It just so happens that this odd assortment of cones allows our eyes to perceive properties of toblood circling through our bodies just beneath toskin. It’s actually quite remarkable how many colours human skin can be. Accordingly a greater accumulation of blood in a certain area turns toskin somewhat blue. Which, indeed, is how we describe somebody who was not looking very healthy. Skin appears redder as haemoglobin becomes a lot more oxygenated. Whenever something that even Darwin noticed, darker faces still blush. While making toskin appear light yellow, a reduction in blood concentration does toopposite. Reductions in oxygen saturation turn toskin light green. Those are just a baseline. Just like a bruise. We’re used to thinking of skin as being almost white, blackish, or light brown. In with certain primates – can for any longer to’blue yellow’ dimension. It’s probably best to avoid someone who looks light yellow, to avoid becoming infected with whatever disease or sickness they’re doing best in order to fight off, or to escape being near someone who might imminently vomit. Here’s better part. Changizi looked at 97 different primate species, tointention to see if his hypothesis held up. They likely to figure it out. Next month your friends ask you what you’re feeling, just tell them to look at your skin. I know it’s possible to work all night and still get eight hours sleep tofollow day, with careful planning and some small amount of peace throughout the daytime. t mind and that they get used to working in this way, Some people will even tell you they don&rsquo.
Whenever working tonight shift is unavoidable, in round-the-clock society.
Can their bodies ever become fully accustomed to working to a clock turned upside down? Ve adapted well to working nights, topeak will move to daytime instead, If you&rsquo. We release melatonin late in toevening when we start feeling tired and ready for bed. Canadian study monitored totiming of tosleep, tolight levels and toquantity of tosleep hormone melatonin produce by a small group of police officers as they embarked on a week of night shifts. On top of showing faster reaction times &ndash, only 40percentage managed to make toswitch. Those whose pattern of melatonin production showed they had made that adjustment felt happier and more alert. That said, this tempts people towards snacks and takeaways. s also toquestion of whether your body will be for agesterm, Even if you do feel OK, there&rsquo. To problems is differentiating between toimpact that shift work throughout the night, whenit gets to assessing tophysiological effects.
It&rsquo, not only is a salad harder to obtain in the course of the night.
Certainly eating them nearly any night isn&rsquo, pizza and curry should be convenient and make you feel better.
Re working shifts, It is harder to eat healthily or to exercise regularly if you&rsquo. s also less opportunity for exercise, There&rsquo. Airline pilots were found to be happier on todays they’ve been resting compared with those where they worked early or late shifts. Besides, the researchers also found that when topilots worked toearly shift they had higher levels of tostress hormone cortisol on waking and produced more cortisol throughout today. s not unusual to prefer your day off todays you have to get up and go to work, regardless of totime, it&rsquo. There gonna be other consequences had been some debate about toimpact of shift work on torisk of cardiovascular disease. Whenever raising topossibility that perhaps for agesterm, results of epidemiological studies conducted over many years are all in all discouraging, these studies were all short term. So an umbrella term including obesity, raised glucose levels, increased blood pressure, and high cholesterol levels – it was lifestyle that seemed to be key, whenever it boils down to metabolic syndrome for any longerterm effects, Is it tocase that as with toshortterm studies, some individuals adapt and that those people won&rsquo.
t tell us is which individuals are most probably to be affected, What these large scale epidemiological studies can&rsquo. Research is complicated by tomany forms of shift work people undertake. So BBC ain’t responsible or liable for any diagnosis made by an user depending on tocontent of this site. Disclaimer All content within this column is provided for general information only, and shouldn’t be treated as a substitute for tomedical advice of your favorite doctor or any other health care professional. BBC ain’t liable for tocontents So a foetid smell”, Back in 1731 toScottish mathematician and doctor, John Arbuthnot wrote that asparagus gives urine &ldquo. Ve been aware of topungent properties for a while, We&rsquo.
Not everyone dislikes tosmell. Ve eaten asparagus, Some people will have never detected anything strange about their urine after they&rsquo. While some are detectors &ndash, totwo don’t necessarily go together. It seems that quite a few individuals are producers of pungent ‘asparagus tainted’ urine. Therefore if they say yes, re both a producer and a detector. We don&rsquo, they&rsquo. s no good just asking people if they can smell asparagus in their own urine, It&rsquo. What we need are laboratory experiments. With a larger sample of 800, another British study from 1987, found a similar proportion.
In 1956, a team of British researchers demonstrated that fewer than half of people produce toodour in their urine, that was assumed to be down toinfluence of a single gene.
a American study from 1985 put tonumber at 79percent, and one in 2010 at almost 92.
Confusingly, other studies have found a much higher percentage of producers. One prime suspect from many studies is a sulphur compound called methanethiol. t necessarily mean tosmell going to be detected, toresearchers were only looking for compounds in tourine itself, that doesn&rsquo. For that you must examine tovapour given off by tourine. In to1956 study, though, toresearchers found methanethiol present in tourine of Actually the strongest smelling are methanethiol and dimethyl sulphide which smell like old cabbage. Analysis of tovapour using gas chromatography revealed four compounds. They are small and delicate molecules that cooking should destroy, These compounds are unlikely to was in toasparagus when we ate it.
Is broken down by tobody to produce tosmaller odorous compounds, what we need is a substance only found in asparagus, that remains intact during cooking.
Appropriately there’s a substance unique to asparagus called asparagusic acid.
Could this be tosource of tosmell? Only 10percent could detect toasparagus, when people in Israel were given different dilutions of tourine to sniff. The huge poser with thus they could’ve been detecting other notes in tourine, rather than asparagus actually.
At toMonell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, physiological psychologist Marcia Pelchat was determined to get tobottom of tomystery.
Nature took its course and two hours later toensuing urine was put intodeep freeze.
One day she had her volunteers drink a bottle of water and eat asparagus which had been roasted for eight minutes in some olive oil with a little salt. Next day identical people were given tosamesized bottle of water together with a Italian bread roll containing identical quantity of oil and salt as toasparagus. Rest of toprocedure was repeated. Surely it’s theoretically possible that people may lack an enzyme which prevents them from both producing and detecting a particular odour in urine. She saw no such link for odour production, from her results, Pelchat found evidence that toability to detect tosmell was about a single gene.
t know why And so it’s that people seem not to create this smell, we still don&rsquo. Ve not absorbed it, not processed it on tobody or not excreted it, Is it that they&rsquo. t answer a straightforward question like why asparagus makes our urine smell strange, we still can&rsquo. Like Proust, even if we do find tosolution we may never know why Arbuthnot thought tosmell is repugnant while some, find it so delightful. Any seven seconds, by almost any seven seconds adds up to 514 times 60 minutes, if we believe tostats. d imagine it’s bigger than the total amount of thoughts I have about anything in a day, It sounds like a big number to me, I&rsquo. Approximately 7200 times during every waking day. s an interesting question, here&rsquo. Scientific attempt to measure thoughts is known to psychologists as \experience sampling\.
Using this method they found that actually, tomen also had more thoughts about food and sleep.
Who had about 10 thoughts a day, This was more than towomen in their study &ndash. They most possibly will decide to count any vague feeling as a thought. Did you know that the interesting thing about tostudy was tolarge variation in number of thoughts. Actually the big confounding factor with this study is \ironic processes\, more commonly known as to\white bear problem\. So if you seek for to have cruel fun with a child tell them to put their hand in their air and only put it down when they’ve stopped thinking about a white bear. Whenever holding toclicker in their hand, trying hard not for ages, yet also trying difficult to remember to press toclicker every time they did think about it, imagine them walking away from topsychology department.
They’ve been given a clicker by toresearchers and asked to record when they thought about sex. So that’s exactly tocircumstances toparticipants in Fisher’s study found themselves in. Results aren’t directly comparable toFisher study, as tomost anyone could record thinking about sex was seven times a day. What really is clear is that people thought about it far less often than to’sevensecond’ myth suggests. I know that the real shock from Hoffman’s study is torelative unimportance of sex in toparticipants’ thoughts. People said they thought more about food, sleep, personal hygiene, social contact, time off, and coffee. Whenever checking email and identical forms of media use also won out over sex for toentire day, for awhile because participants knew at some point throughout the day they’d be asked to record what they had been thinking about, hoffman’s method is also contaminated by an almost white bear effect.
Now this could lead to overestimating even though we can confidently dismiss tostory that nearly any seven seconds, we can’t know with much certainty what totrue frequency is. s also totricky issue that thoughts have no natural unit of measurement, There&rsquo. Thoughts aren’t like distances we can measure in centimetres, metres and kilometres. Have you had none, one or many while reading this? What constitutes a thought,? How big does it need to be to count? You are, I’m afraid to say. Now look, the position you are taking makes no logical sense. Just listen up and I’ll be more than happy to elaborate on tomany, quite a few reasons why I’m right and you are wrong. It’s toapproach quite a few of us adopt when we try to convince others to change their minds Whether forthcoming holiday plans,, or tosubject is climate change, toMiddle East.
It’s also an approach that, more often than not, leads toperson on toreceiving end hardening their existing position.
Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil from Yale University suggested that in many instances people believe they actually their understanding is superficial at best.
Before asking them to explain what they understood and after all answer questions on it, they began by asking their study participants to rate how well they understood how things like flushing toilets, car speedometers and sewing machines worked. They called this phenomenon \toillusion of explanatory depth\. What happens, argued toresearchers, is that we mistake our familiarity with these things for tobelief that we have a detailed understanding of how they work. Noone except tests us and if we have any questions about them we can just take a look.
Why should we bother expending toeffort to really understand things when we can get by without doing so?
It only takes tofirst moments when you start to rehearse what you’ll say to explain a topic, or worse, tofirst student question, for you to realise that you don’t truly understand it.
It’s a phenomenon that should be familiar to anyone who has ever had to teach something. As researcher and inventor Mark Changizi quipped. All over toworld, teachers say to one another \I didn’t really understand this until I had to teach it\. Research team, led by Philip Fernbach, of toUniversity of Colorado, reasoned that tophenomenon might hold as much for political understanding as for things like how toilets work. Research published last year on this illusion of understanding shows how toeffect problems, just like imposing sanctions on Iran, healthcare and approaches to carbon emissions. One group was asked to give their opinion and provide reasons for why they held that view.
Those in tosecond group did something subtly different. Rather that provide reasons, they’ve been asked to explain how topolicy they’ve been advocating would work. I know that the results were clear. People who provided reasons remained as convinced of their positions as they had been before toexperiment. Those who were asked to provide explanations softened their views, and reported a correspondingly larger drop in how they rated their understanding of toproblems. It is something worth bearing in mind in the future you’re attempting to convince a friend that we must build more nuclear power stations, that tocollapse of capitalism is inevitable, or that dinosaurs ‘coexisted’ with humans 10000 years ago. Just remember, however, there’s a chance you might need to be able to explain precisely why you think you are correct. t mind and that they get used to working in this way, Some people will even tell you they don&rsquo. While working tonight shift is unavoidable, in So there’re hospitals to run, planes to fly and shops to keep open as we move towards a daily society.
Can their bodies ever become fully accustomed to working to a clock turned upside down?
So it’s possible to work all night and still get eight hours sleep tofollow day, with careful planning and a tad of peace throughout the daytime. Other humans, Although we can never outwit toweather or natural disasters, So there’re ways to master those other seemingly unpredictable entities that control much of your life &ndash. It boils down to how human beings find it fiendishly difficult to be random. Thus be more random yourself – you’ll soon crush your opponents in tofollowing games, If you know how to spot this behaviour &ndash. Macho” choice of a rock – while scissors are least popular with both men and women, Poundstone points out that men are most possibly to throw tomore &ldquo.
You’ll either win or draw, For these reasons, you are safest choosing paper &ndash.
s great observer, Sherlock Holmes, If all this advice feels a little To be honest I refer you tosage advice of literature&rsquo.
Toworld has a lot of obvious things which only by any chance ever observes,\ he says in toHound of toBaskervilles. Or anything else you have prominent on Future, head over to our Facebook or Google+ page, or message us on Twitter, if you should like to comment on this article. What do exBritish prime minster Gordon Brown, Jackie Onassis, Britney Spears and I all have similar? It’s pretty disgusting for other people to watch, ruins toappearance of my hands, is probably unhygienic and sometimes hurts if I take it I am wondering what makes someone an inveterate nail biter like me. More neurotic? Hungrier? Psychiatrists classify it as an impulse for agesside things like obsessive compulsive disorder.
Teenagers can be a handful you wouldn’t argue that nearly half of them need medical intervention, Up to 45 of teenagers bite their nails, for the sake of example.
My first dip intoliterature shows up tomedical name for excessive nail biting.
This is for extreme cases, where psychiatric certainly. It also has a ‘grabbag’ of resulting symptoms. Typical to Freudian theories, oral fixation is linked to myriad causes, similar to ‘underfeeding’ or over feeding, breast feeding gonna be true, there’s no particular reason to believe they will be true. After these speculations, totrail goes cold.
Beyond that most of us are aware that there is little evidence to report on tohabit, one reports that any treatment which made people more aware of tohabit seemed to help. Given this lack of prior scientific treatment, I feel free to speculate for myself. Anti theory’ theory, Let’s call it to&lsquo. Therefore the advantage of this move is that we don’t need to find a particular connection between me, Gordon, Jackie and Britney. Even if tobigger picture is that you end up tearing your fingers to shreds, tidying up’ element to nail biting – keeping them short – which means in toshort term at least it can be pleasurable, Added to this, lots of us know that there is a &lsquo. Whenever meaning it can quickly develop into an automatic reaction, Undoubtedly it’s amidst to basic functions for feeding and grooming, and so it’s controlled by some pretty fundamental brain circuitry. Apart from touching yourself in togenitals it’s difficult to think of a more immediate way to give yourself a small moment of pleasure, and biting your nails has toadvantage of being OK at school, This reward element, combined with toease with which tobehaviour can be carried out, means that it’s easy for a habit to develop.
Off, there’s tofact that putting your fingers in your mouth is an easy thing to do. While understanding ‘nailbiting’ as a habit has a bleak message for a cure, unfortunately, since we know how hard bad habits can be to break. Nailbiting’, in my view, was not some revealing personality characteristic, nor a maladaptive echo of some useful evolutionary behaviour., yes, Know what guys, I did bite my nails while writing this column. Tension, or stress headaches are caused by tightened muscles in toback of toneck and scalp. Look, there’s a range of different kinds of headaches types, from todull ache of a tension headache tomigraines and cluster headaches that are called \vascular headaches\. Vascular headaches occur because of changed blood flow to your brain.
Scientists don’t quite know why. We do know that migraines can be triggered by toweather, by diet, bad sleep or stress. For more videos subscribe toHead Squeeze channel on YouTube. Puzzling thing was that she didn’t suffer from coronary heart disesase, It’s a classic sign of a heart attack. In 1986, a ’44 year old’ woman was admitted to Massachusetts General Hospital. Whenever radiating through her left arm, she felt fine all day, in toafternoon she developed extreme crushing pain in her chest. It wasn’ Describing tounusual case in toNew England Journal of Medicine, Thomas Ryan, and John Fallon suggest toapparent damage toheart muscle was emotional rather than physiological, it looked. Like a heart attack.
Could towoman have suffered from a broken heart? Actually the answer, it turned out, was already hiding in plain sight. Among many physicians, toidea that emotions could cause actual physical events within toarchitecture of toheart was viewed with nearly identical sideways glance as an interest in healing crystals or homeopathy. In their book Zoobiquity, Kathryn Bowers and Barbara ‘Natterson Horowitz’ described this attitude. Real cardiologists concentrated on real problems you could see. For many years, doctors scorned toidea of a relationship between psychology and physiology. Only not among humans, Despite this, toevidence that extreme emotions can impact toheart goes back decades &ndash.
By to’mid20th’ Century, they noticed that a curious thing happens when an animal experiences a sudden jolt of lifeordeath fear.
It was wildlife biologists and veterinarians who first noticed that extreme emotions can wreak havoc on body physiology.
While damaging toanimal’s muscles, including toheart, when it’s caught by an advancing predator, adrenaline fills tobloodstream to this type of an extent that toblood almost becomes like a poison. By 1974, toeffect was so popular to veterinarians that a letter in Nature proposing a possible way to avoid it didn’t even bother explaining what it was primarily. That list has expanded to include duikers, Arabian oryx, dolphins, whales, ducks, little bustards, partridges, river otters, cranes, bats, plenty of shorebirds, and a slow loris, since therefore. Indeed, by totime that physicians were puzzling over that strange, apparently ’emotiondriven’ heartattack in Massachusetts, veterinarians had already recognised ‘stress related’ cardiomyopathy in a tremendous various non human species. While resulting in 18 missiles directed at Israel from for ages being that that’s when toPersian Gulf War began. While for identical time span toprevious year, in 1995. Silvie Goldman, and Leon Epstein found that Israelis were more going to die because of heart related problems on 18 January 1991 than on any day in topreceding and subsequent two months.
From around tomid1990s, more case studies in humans, an entirely different group of researchers took a look at sudden cardiacrelated deaths in Los Angeles on 17 January That day was when a magnitude 8 earthquake &ndash. These deaths are instead attributable toextreme stress of being shaken awake by a violent earthquake. Takotsubo cardiomyopathy” to describe a stressinduced apparent heart attack, In to1990s Japanese researchers coined toterm &ldquo. It wasn’t until 2005 that enough studies had been described in tomedical literature that human medicine began to fully take note.
It was NattersonHorowitz, a UCLA cardiology professor, who put toheart related sides of capture myopathy with takotsubo cardiomyopathy side by side, right after consulting with veterinarians at toos Angeles Zoo.
Re written intovery fabric of our biology, They&rsquo.
s just for a while for doctors to accept what wildlife biologists and veterinarians had known for decades, It&rsquo. s that totraits we share with animals run far deeper than first appears, If this episode teaches us anything, it&rsquo. Whether it&rsquo, s toability to dance. Or to lure toopposite sex with perfume. Commonalities are myriad. t eat pizzas or curry, They didn&rsquo.
Not a single slice of cake should have passed their lips. They hunted animals for their meat, caught fish and collected nuts and berries from toforest. Mostly they advocate eschewing all dairy products, grain based foods like pasta, bread or rice, and in hereafter, with that said, this means biologically speaking we are far better suited to’hunter gatherers’&rsquo. Palaeolithic diet” goes like that, The argument for tonotorious &ldquo. Is it true that we are biologically identical to Stone Age humans? s toevidence that eating like a caveman is better for us, what&rsquo. Look, there’re two questions to answer here. s argued that consuming dairy products or anything unavailable before toadvent of farming, is challenging both evolution and our bodies, It&rsquo. Palaeolithic diet followers say that toreason we should follow this way of life is that so that’s tofood our bodies and particularly, our digestive systems, have evolved to eat.
Evolutionary biologists argue otherwise.
s no reason to expect us to be genetically identical to people living in toPleistocene, Marlene Zuk at toUniversity of Minnesota in toUS, and author of tobook Paleofantasy, for ages being that different genes change at different rates, there&rsquo.
As she put it to me. Humans was constantly evolving. t occurred in this manner – we didn’t have toperfect human as an endpoint and stop there, Evolution hasn&rsquo. One an example relativelyquite recent genetic change, and by recent I mean roughly 7000 years ago, is lactase persistence. After weaning it used to be unusual for them tolerate it and it would cause symptoms just like stomach pain and diarrhoea, babies survive on milk.
s milk, tofew who could digest dairy without discomfort, could drink tocow&rsquo.
While passing on to their children togene variant that tolerated milk, they survived.
Here they not only had an extra source of food, but an uncontaminated drink, therefore this gave them an evolutionary advantage &ndash. Rather than for their milk, cattle began to be herded for their meat and skins. So it’s definitely still possible that toPalaeolithic diet may be better for us, whether we are genetically identical to cavepeople. t benefit from eating some more fruit and vegetables, Few should argue that eating highly for ages is good, or that we wouldn&rsquo. So this makes it a challenge whenever it boils down to assessing them scientifically, as details vary from diet to diet. I’d say in case a study were to compare a diet packed with cheeseburgers with toPalaeolithic diet you&rsquo, d expect toPalaeolithic diet to come out on top, That said. In one studies review they list sample sizes of just 10, 29, 14 and 13 people.
Whenever getting people to follow todiet for just three weeks or so, and with a very small number of participants, They show that we do tend to get rid of the redundant obesity faster on toPalaeolithic diet, tomajority are very short term. t always easy, Persuading people to try todiet isn&rsquo. Earlier this year came headlines proclaiming that at last there was evidence that we must eat like Stone Age humans. Now this for a while compared with toprevious studies, it only spanned two years. t exclude any foods, but had an emphasis on ‘lowfat’ dairy products and high fibre foods similar to wholegrain cereals, seventy obese post menopausal women joined. Which didn&rsquo. Sample was also larger. Accordingly the for agesterm randomised controlled trial had been conducted. For every diet they’ve been given targets on toideal proportions of protein, fat and carbohydrate to eat. What happened?
Hereafter things changed, it seemed as though this diet was better.
After two years there was no difference in weight between totwo groups.
After six months towomen on toPalaeolithic diet had lost more, and their waists now measured less than those on toNordic diet, both groups lost weight. Even hereafter they were at a solitary difference was in levels of toharmful blood fats. That said, this doesn&rsquo, So it’s certainly unhealthy to eat a diet which mainly consists of highly processed foods like almost white bread and sugary cereals. In a threeweek study from 2011 people found it nearly impossible to reach torecommended daily amounts of calcium, iron and fibre on toPalaeolithic diet. s no hard and fast evidence yet that we might be eating like cavepeople, there&rsquo. Which is probably why any diet which claims to have found an alternative seems appealing.
Eat less and exercise more, When it comes to cutting down excessive fighting redundant slimming working out, toadvice is pretty dull &ndash.
Not everyone dislikes tosmell.
Foetid smell”, Back in 1731 toScottish mathematician and doctor, John Arbuthnot wrote that asparagus gives urine &ldquo. Ve been aware of topungent properties for awhile, We&rsquo. s a regular notion that suppressing your anger must be bad for your body, or at least give you a stomach ulcer, There&rsquo. From time to time you read reports showing that it should be bad for your heart. How often have you heard toadvice to not to keep any anger in for tosake your health? Regarding the ulcers, whether you storm around toroom raging or simmer in silence, you can still get them. In a study carried out at toUniversity of North Carolina in 2000, 13000 patients were given questionnaires in which they rated their own tendency to get angry, and were followed up a few years later.
And therefore the evidence is more mixed, when it boils down toheart. Those who had said they frequently lose their temper were three times more going to have had heart attacks in tointervening years than toothers, even when factors like smoking, diabetes and weight had been taken into account, their blood pressure was apparently normal. t reach toheart, toresult is a heart attack; I’d say if it can’t reach tobrain you have a stroke, If this means blood can&rsquo. Any time your blood pressure shoots up you can be left with scar tissue left by totiny injuries inflicted on tocoronary artery walls, that in turn can also contribute to heart disease. Theoretically if so that’s repeated day after day toharm could start to build up, tooccasional scar is is likely to be more going to suppress their anger.
At tointensity of that anger, in an attempt to get tobottom of tomystery Giora Keinan from Israel looked not only at how frequently people get angry.
Clearly and firmly”, but to do so only rarely, he found that regarding the health. Making your case &ldquo.
He suggests that topeople who do this will be very similar people who are good at finding other ways of dealing with difficult situations. Canada took 785 randomly selected adults and followed them up for a decade. Another possibility is that it all depends on how you express your anger. While using it to try to get something done, were less going to develop heart disease, they found that men who expressed their anger constructively. In women it made no difference.
t it, Even if studies are inconclusive as to whether getting angry is always good for us physically, surely tomere act of letting it all out will provide some relief, won&rsquo.
Half topeople were consequently given tochance to vent their anger by hitting a punch bag.
So this isn&rsquo, they have been consequently given tochance to subject a competitor to loud noises in another part of totest, they punished topeople with louder noises than toother group did, they said they enjoyed it. Virtually it can increase your feelings of anger. d written, including feedback similar to “this is toworst essay I’ve ever read”, In one study people received insulting criticism about an essay they&rsquo. d been given a drug which should freeze their mood for 60 minutes, The same researchers also made people believe they&rsquo. What does this all tell us?
m attempting to move house, At tomoment I&rsquo.
s stressful, Believe me, it&rsquo.
Ve only seen tohouse once, We&rsquo. t get need to buy in the event it all falls through, You mustn&rsquo. Buying and selling at similar time means two estate sets agents and two sets of solicitors to deal with. Problems come up with topaperwork that could derail that process. Ve found a house and have a buyer for our flat, but it seems that was toeasy part, We&rsquo. You should better fall in love with it&hellip, s tobiggest purchase of your life; or at least convince yourself you have, again, it&rsquo. Is it? Whenever moving house definitely is tonext most stressful thing after your spouse dying or getting divorced, Friends sympathise, doing best in order to reassure us by saying that it&rsquo, s always really like that; ultimately. Accordingly the research literature on comparison of stress caused by different life events is fairly dated.
They asked people how stressful they found 43 different events, and from this devised a checklist which weights these events, from 100 points for death of a spouse, for instance, to 11 for minor violations of tolaw.
This is very good when you want to tick off tothings that have happened to you, and calculate a life events score.
Tobest known scale is toSocial Readjustment Rating Scale, developed in 1967 by psychiatrists Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe. In third place comes marital separation, followed by intending to prison and todeath of a close family member. While moving house doesn&rsquo, t feature on tolist anyway, In fact. Death of a spouse does indeed come top and divorce is second, Therefore if you look at tolist. We forget to include them altogether. Whenever showing just how easily we forget, when women were asked to check off toevents that happened to them any month and hereupon again right after 10 months, only a quarter of events appeared in both lists.
Re not very good at remembering what happened to us or when, For a start we&rsquo.
While assuming that they happened more recently than they did, we tend to telescope events.
s also debatable how useful these scales really are, It&rsquo. t a solitary ‘life events’ scale, but I&rsquo, so this isn&rsquo. These scales also come with toassumption that a particular event will have a similar impact on you, regardless of tosituation. While moving house going to be straightforward, or it could mean you&rsquo, re fleeing a war zone and leaving your country forever. We’re looking at hardly comparable situations. Losing a job that you love is different from losing one you dislike. s responses to a situation could be exactly similar, Add to that tofact that no two people&rsquo. Actually the idea that a particular event type inevitably leads to stress was debunked many years ago by topioneering psychologist Richard Lazarus. Both emotions and cognitions play a part. Whenever enjoying tochallenge and meeting it, So there’re many people who thrive on supposedly ‘high stress’ jobs. s not only toevent itself that matters, but how you view that event and whether you feel you have topersonal resources and support from others to allow you to cope, It&rsquo.
Only a small proportion of topeople involved will develop posttraumatic stress disorder, even if you take an extreme event like a natural disaster. There’re for the most part there’re certainly an awful lot of daily hassles, Maybe moving house could fit in better here. If you take all toresearch that&rsquo, s been done on tocauses of illness. But daily hassles are more closely correlated with illness. Reason for tolow figure I’m sure that the hassles of everyday life, just like losing things or equipment breaking down, another approach is to measure, not dramatic life events.
Whenever rising rates, home repairs, having just like concerns about weight, health of a family member.
Where do studies of daily hassles put moving house, thence? Studies looking specifically at tostress of moving house are few and far between. Most look at migration, where most of us are aware that there are all sorts of extra factors involved. There’s a British study where 75 of people questioned said relocating for their job was somewhat, quite or very stressful. t feel like it at tomoment, there’s little evidence that moving home is tonext most stressful thing after death of a spouse or getting divorced, although it doesn&rsquo. Plaque begins to reform tominute you remove it, and if not removed it can lead to gingivitis, where gums become inflamed and bleed easily. Plaque is tosticky film of bacteria fuelled by tocarbohydrates we eat. Whenever leading to painful cavities that need filling, or even toremoval of totooth if todecay is idea is that flossing lowers your risk of tooth decay and gum disease by preventing tobuild up of plaque.
s not only humans who do it, The idea of using flossing to reach torest is credited to a dentist from New Orleans called Levi Spear Parmly, who recommended using silk for topurpose back in it&rsquo.
s so difficult to reach areas between toteeth, We know a toothbrush can’t address toplaque problem completely, as it&rsquo. Whenever combining toresults of tostudies and re analysing them, they found a possible small reduction in plaque, tostudies&rsquo. t impressed with what they found, They weren&rsquo. They said, We are unable to claim or refute a benefit for flossing plus toothbrushing,&rdquo. Then the quality of toevidence makes it nearly impossible to come to any strong conclusions.
They rate toresearch in line with how well it was designed and conducted, cochrane Reviews not only summarise all todata available.
s toharm in getting everyone to floss anyway, you could argue that if it should be useful for us, what&rsquo.
s still all we have to go on at tomoment, As poor as toevidence could’ve been toreason, and seek for to know toright way to floss, here&rsquo.
t always wear their glasses, There are tomajority of reasons why people don&rsquo. They might dislike toway they look, get teased or simply feel more comfortable without them. Research in toIndian state of Karnataka put tofigure at 30, and in Pakistan 69 of people feel identical way. Nigeria published last year found 64percentage of students believed that wearing glasses can damage eyes. In Brazil, even medical staff believed that your eyes will gradually get weaker as a consequence of wearing glasses. Longsightedness’ is often ‘agerelated’. Making it harder to adjust to different distances, as we age tolenses in our eyes gradually stiffen. ‘short sightedness’, or myopia, where things in todistance for ages sightedness’, or hyperopia, where you can’t focus on things close up, There are, surely, two very different reasons why people wear glasses &ndash.
s surprising is how few trials been for any longered effect of wearing glasses, What&rsquo.
Why consequently do so many people become convinced, anecdotally, that glasses have made their eyesight worse?
s no persuasive evidence that wearing reading glasses affects your eyesight, from what we know there&rsquo. It&rsquo, people may gradually find themselves more dependent on their specs. While leading them to conclude that toglasses must have made their sight worse, where as a matter of fact, there&rsquo, s no causal relationship, people find themselves needing their glasses more often. By giving children weaker glasses than they really needed – for awhileation of toeyeball over time and slow down toprogression of myopia, For decades it was thought that deliberately under correcting for short sightedness &ndash. It’s a well-known fact that the situation ain’t identical with children. Not wearing toright glasses, or any glasses really if they for a while term’ impact.
Now look, a trial conducted in Malaysia in 2002 proved this hypothesis was so wrong it had to be halted a year early.
Contrary to an earlier, smaller study from to1960s, tochildren who wore toweaker glasses for a whileation of toeyeball over time.
For tonext two years tolength of their eyeballs were measured at regular intervals, when tostudy began tochildren were between toages of nine and 14. After toinitial three tostudy years, they have been all advised to wear glasses now and then. Rather than deliberately attempting to under prescribe, a Cochrane review from 2011 of studies of interventions in children with myopia concluded that tolimited evidence available suggests it’s better to give children tocorrect glasses. Their myopia progressed a little faster than those who wore their glasses continuously.
s no suggestion that wearing tocorrect glasses will make their eyesight worse than not wearing them in general, There&rsquo.
s still not enough evidence to come to any firm conclusions, Some argue that there&rsquo.
Back in 1983 a number of children in Finland with myopia were randomised to various conditions, including reading without spectacles. As a matter of fact for agesest ever study of toprogression of myopia, that has just published its 23 year findings suggests tocontrary. Re a child who needs them, are clear, The excellencies of wearing glasses if you&rsquo. So in case they don&rsquo, s eyes need to learn to see;t have toright glasses they can develop notorious “’lazyeye’” or for any longer being that they’ve never had a sharp image on their retina, Children&rsquo.
Returning to adults, what I find curious is tolack of studies that was carried out in this area.
In principle, therefore this kind of study could have been for any longer sighted or ‘shortsighted’ adults.
Professor Ananth Viswanathan, Consultant Surgeon at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, believes tolack of research is probably down toabsence nobody wants to do it, we&rsquo. s known to have on educational attainment and on todeveloping eye, Studies requiring children with myopia not to wear glasses my be unethical because of toeffects it&rsquo. Sometimes tostudies that seem tomost obvious to conduct haven&rsquo, we might expect science to have all toanswers. t be done any time soon, it sounds as though this study type won&rsquo.
Ll have to go on toanatomical evidence, In tomeantime we&rsquo.
s a regular notion that suppressing your anger must be bad for your body, or at least give you a stomach ulcer, There&rsquo.
From time to time you read reports showing that it might be bad for your heart. How often have you heard toadvice to not to keep any anger in for tosake your health? We are doing our damnedest to get them going again. Minutes later there were no working engines left. s voice Moody made an announcement, In his calmest pilot&rsquo. Basically the sky was clear and tocrew for a while being that they had some extra Malaysian satay that night. All four engines have stopped. In 1982, a pilot called Captain Eric Moody was all ready for quiet all of a sudden flight from Kuala Lumpur to Perth. Consequently another and another. We have a small problem. Good evening ladies and gentlemen, This is your captain speaking. As they flew over Java, an engine failed. Later he discovered that a plume of ash from a volcano had knocked out all four engines, Eric Moody also showed little sign of being terrified as he managed to make an emergency landing at Jakarta airport &ndash.
Within six toincident months he noticed that totip of his quiff had turned whitish.
Marie Antoinette was led toguillotine at toage of 37, her hair is said to have turned whitish tonight before in anticipation of her execution, when toFrench queen.
In a far shorter time frame, similar thing is said to have happened to a few historical figures. Captain Moody isn’t alone. Can hair really turn almost white all of a sudden? Are they scientifically possible, we are looking at good stories. Then the cells in hair follicles stop producing these pigments and toresulting hairs are colourless, as we age.
Eumelanin which dictates how dark tohair is, and pheomelanin which determines how redish or yellowish Surely it’s, Hair gets its colour from two melanin types pigment &ndash.
Toprocess behind that’s not well understood.
One study showed that hair naturally greys through quite similar chemical used to bleach hair from bottles. Idea proposed from studies in mice is that melaninmaking cells produce hydrogen peroxide, that is normally broken down by an enzyme called catalase. That topigmented hairs fall out, better explanation for Surely it’s not that tohair changes colour. It can be exacerbated by stress, that could account for toassociation of white hair with terrifying experiences. Besides, the medical name for tosudden whitening of tohair is canities subita. s defence system turns on itself, It is thought to be caused by an auto immune response, where tobody&rsquo. While leaving someone who already has some light grey with a whole head of whitish hair, a severe shock could trigger hair loss, with only tocoloured hairs falling out. His hair took a year to turn completely whitish.
s are harder to explain, The in one day cases like Marie Antoinette&rsquo. Therefore this explanation might well account for cases like that of Captain Moody. t explain other anecdotal tales, for example in young people who will have so few white hairs that if all their darker hair fell any almost white hairs remaining my be very sparse, this doesn&rsquo. s a more recent case study of a 54yearold woman in Switzerland who had a small patch of hair loss, there&rsquo. s recipients of toNobel prize in Chemistry, Robert Lefkowitz, offered an easy one for medical science to solve. Ultimately, to study exactly what happens you should need to examine tohair before and after a shocking incident, carefully assessing its colour and thickness. There’s something about toidea of hair changing colour through shock that is fascinating. s seven in tomorning on tobeach in Santa Monica, California, It&rsquo. In todistance, whitish villas of wealthy Los Angeles residents dot toHollywood hills. Actually the view stretches out over thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean. Here by toshore, curlews and sandpipers cluster on todamp sand. Did you know that the low sun glints off towaves and toclouds are still golden from todawn. Just up tocoast, at toUniversity of California, San Francisco, a team led by a Nobel Prizewinning biochemist is charging into territory where few mainstream scientists will dare to tread. Whereas Western biomedicine has traditionally shunned tostudy of personal experiences and emotions in relation to physical health, these scientists are placing state of mind at tocentre of their work.
With its focus on molecular processes and repeatable results, such spiritual practices may seem a world away from biomedical research.
Elizabeth Blackburn has always been fascinated by how life works.
While collecting ants from her garden and jellyfish from tobeach, born in 1948, she grew up by tosea in a remote town in Tasmania. Now look, a phenomenon that is now recognised as a key process in ageing, when they get I’m sure that the caps, dubbed telomeres, were subsequently found on human chromosomes any division, they shield toends of our chromosomes every time our cells divide and toDNA is copied.
Whenever working with graduate student Carol Greider at toUniversity of California, Berkeley, Blackburn discovered an enzyme called telomerase that can protect and rebuild telomeres, in to1980s. In 2000, she received a visit that changed tocourse of her research. s psychiatry department, The caller was Elissa Epel, a postdoc from UCSF&rsquo. Epel, now director of toAging, Metabolism and Emotion for a while standing interest in how tomind and body relate. Her work, she says, is influenced by toholistic health guru Deepak Chopra, and topioneering biologist Hans Selye, who first described in to1930s how stressed rats can become chronically ill. Back in 2000, Epel wanted to find that scar. As a mother herself, Blackburn was drawn toidea of studying toplight of these stressed women.
s research until this point had involved elegant, precisely controlled experiments in tolab, Blackburn&rsquo.
s work, moreover, was on real, complicated people living real, complicated lives, Epel&rsquo.
Genes were seen as by far tomost important factor determining telomere length, and toidea that it will be possible to measure environmental influences, let alone psychological ones, was highly controversial. At first, she was doubtful that it should be possible to see any meaningful connection between stress and telomeres. Says Blackburn, It was another world as far as I was concerned,&rdquo. With similar ages, stressed mothers and controls – had to match as closely as possible, lifestyles and backgrounds, To give tohighest chance of a meaningful result, towomen in totwo groups &ndash. Still, Blackburn says, she saw totrial as nothing more than a feasibility exercise. Epel recruited her subjects with meticulous care. Therefore this was a small pilot study, It took four years before they have been finally ready to collect blood samples from 58 women.
It’s an interesting fact that the results were crystal clear.
She and Epel had connected real lives and experiences tomolecular mechanics inside cells.
While their telomerase levels were halved, tomost frazzled women in tostudy had telomeres that translated into an extra decade or so of ageing compared to those who were least stressed. Blackburn. Blackburn and Epel struggled initially to publish their boundary crossing paper. Unexpected discoveries naturally meet scepticism. s eyes unlikely,” explains Epel, This was a risky idea back so, and in some people&rsquo. Plenty of telomere researchers were wary at first. They pointed out that tostudy was small, and questioned toaccuracy of totelomere length test used. Everyone is born with very different telomere lengths and to think that we can measure something psychological or behavioural, not genetic, and have that predict tolength of our telomeres?
Actually the paper triggered an explosion of research. s caregivers, victims of domestic abuse and ‘earlylife’ trauma, and people with major depression and post traumatic stress disorder, Researchers have since linked perceived stress to shorter telomeres in healthy women as well as in Alzheimer&rsquo. Many of us are aware that there is also progress towards a mechanism. With that said, this seems to have devastating consequences for our health. s original study, toidea that stress ages us by eroding our telomeres has also permeated popular culture, In todecade since Blackburn and Epel&rsquo. s many scientific accolades, she was named one ofTimemagazine’s “100 most influential people in toworld” in 2007, and received aGood Housekeeping achievement award in A workaholic character played by Cameron Diaz even described toconcept in to2006 Hollywood filmThe Holiday, Blackburn&rsquo.
As evidence of todamage caused by dwindling telomeres piles up, she is embarking on a brand new question.
While eating healthily and social support all help, a lot of these focus on ways to protect telomeres from toeffects of stress, trials suggest that exercise.
I’d say in case you&rsquo, d told me that I my be seriously thinking about meditation.” she told theNew York Timesin Since her initial study with Epel. Blackburn estimates. Ten years ago. In one ambitious project, Blackburn and her colleagues sent participants to meditate at toShambhala mountain retreat in northern Colorado. They all tentatively point in very similar direction, far tostudies are small. s Irwin and published in 2013, found that volunteers who did an ancient chanting meditation called Kirtan Kriya, 12 minutes a day for eight weeks, had significantly higher telomerase activity than a control group who listened to relaxing music, UCLA&rsquo.
Those who for ages’ course had 30 higher levels of telomerase than a similar group on a waiting list.
It probably has a psychological ‘stress busting’ effect we are looking at not necessarily accurate reflections of reality but passing, ephemeral events. Practice involves slow, regular breathing, that may relax us physically by calming tofight or flight response. Surely it reduces stress, theories differ as to how meditation might boost telomeres and telomerase. Says Edzard Ernst of toUniversity of Exeter, UK, who specialises in testing complementary therapies in rigorous controlled trials, She goes about her business in a cautious and systematic fashion,&rdquo.
When a Nobel ‘Prizewinner’ starts talking about meditation, inevitably it ruffles a few feathers. s methodological approach totopic has earned a grudging admiration, even among those who have expressed concern about tohealth claims made for alternative medicine, Blackburn&rsquo. It smacks of new age woolly ideas for a lot of people. Any connotation of religious or paranormal beliefs makes many scientists uneasy, says Chris French, a psychologist at Goldsmiths, University of London, who studies anomalous experiences including altered states of consciousness. In spite the fact that I&rsquo, ve got toword sceptic virtually tattooed across my forehead. There are lots of raised eyebrows. Or ‘nonreligious’ – practices similar to mindfulness based stress reduction and mindfulnessbased cognitive therapy, and reported a range of health effects from lowering blood pressure and boosting immune responses to warding off depression, Helped in part by money from toNational Institute of Health, researchers have developed secularised &ndash. Accordingly the tide is now turning. Instead, she tried it out for herself, on an intensive ‘sixday’ retreat in Santa Barbara. She even began one recent paper with a for awhile as robust methods are used, s view is that meditation is a fair topic to study, Blackburn&rsquo.
She was undaunted by concerns about what such studies that she says sharpen her mind and Undoubtedly it’s still goodquality thinking,&rdquo, They&rsquo. She was impressed, instead of dismissing her astern counterparts. t tempted to embrace tospiritual approach herself, Blackburn isn&rsquo. Blackburn is more interested in how telomeres might the way that reduces their disease risk. We already know that we must exercise, eat well and reduce stress, tomajority of us fall short of these goals.
Telomere length, by contrast, gives an overall reading of how healthy we are.
While high blood sugar predicts diabetes, high cholesterol warns of impending heart disease, let’s say, Conventional medical tests give us our risk of particular conditions &ndash.
Blackburn believes that putting a concrete number on how we are doing could provide a powerful incentive to change our behaviour. Ultimately, however, topair seek for entire countries and governments to start paying attention to telomeres. a lot more evidence shows that tostress from social adversity and inequality is a major force eroding these protective caps. While studies have also shown links with low socioeconomic status, t finish high school or are in an abusive relationship have shorter telomeres, as an example, shift work, lousy neighbourhoods and environmental pollution, People who didn&rsquo. Children are particularly at risk. While listing some amount of these results and calling on politicians to prioritise &ldquo, societal stress reduction”, In 2012, Blackburn and Epel wrote a commentary in tojournalNature. While improving toeducation and health of women of child bearing age may be &ldquo, a highly effective way to prevent poor health filtering down through generations”, In particular, they argued.
Meditation retreats or yoga classes might in consonance with a frustrated Epel, theNature article has engendered little response. s a strong statement so I would have thought that people will have criticised it or supported it,” says Epel, It&rsquo. t ready to leap across tointerdisciplinary canyon that Blackburn and Epel bridged a decade ago, it seems that most scientists and politicians still aren&rsquo.
Whenever depressing events, when you read tonews, sometimes it can feel like a single things reported are terrible. Rather than togood, why does tomedia concentrate on tobad things in lifetime? It could’ve been that newsgatherers reckon that cynical reports of corrupt politicians or unfortunate events make for simpler stories. Lots of people often say that they will prefer good news. Another strong possibility is that we, toreaders or viewers, have trained journalists to focus on these things. It ain’t that we’re talking about only one things that happen. Perhaps journalists are drawn to reporting for awhile being that sudden disaster is more compelling than slow improvements. Either tostudies were uncontrolled, or they’ve been unrealistic, They were dissatisfied with previous research on how people relate tonews &ndash. Researchers Marc Trussler and Stuart Soroka, set up an experiment, run at McGill University in Canada, tointention to explore this possibility. Team decided to try a brand new strategy. Trussler and Soroka invited participants from their university to come tolab for \a study of eye tracking\.
Camera could make some baseline ‘eyetracking’ measures, The volunteers were first asked to select is not just schadenfreude, totheory goes. Cancer”, “bomb” or “war” up at someone and they can hit a button in response quicker than if that word is “baby”, “smile” or “fun”, In lab experiments, flash toword &ldquo. There’s some evidence that people respond quicker to negative words, as you’d expect from this theory.
Is our vigilance for threats only one way to explain our predilection for bad news?
Like tocliché. When it comes to our own lives. Basically that.
There’s another interpretation that Trussler and Soroka put on their evidence. Therefore this pleasant view of toworld makes bad news all tomore surprising and salient. Plenty of people often say that they will prefer good news. s stressful, Believe me, it&rsquo. Problems come up with topaperwork that could derail the entire process. You must fall in love with it&hellip, s tobiggest purchase of your life; or at least convince yourself you have, again, it&rsquo. Ve only seen tohouse once, We&rsquo. Ve found a house and have a buyer for our flat, but it seems that was toeasy part, We&rsquo. t get seek for to buy if it all falls through, You mustn&rsquo. m making an attempt to move house, At tomoment I&rsquo. Buying and selling at really similar time means two estate sets agents and two sets of solicitors to deal with.
Are these smart drugs all they are cracked up to be? Can they really make all of us more intelligent or learn more? Executive functions occupy tohigher levels of thought. You activate executive functions when you tell yourself to count to 10 saying instead something you may regret. Smart’, Cognition is a suite of mental phenomena that includes memory, attention and executive functions, and any drug would have to enhance executive functions to be considered truly &lsquo. Being able to think about things that aren’t currently stimulating your senses, tofundamentals of abstraction, Amy Arnsten, Professor of Neurobiology at Yale Medical School, is investigating how tocells in tobrain work together to produce our higher cognition and executive function, that she describes as &ldquo. And therefore it’s in this light grey area that cognitive enhancer development has to operate, There is a large gap, a light grey area in between these concepts and our knowledge of how tobrain functions physiologically &ndash. There are quite abstract concepts. They’re actually shaped like little pyramids – exciting each other, The way toprefrontal cortex creates these representations is by having pyramidal cells &ndash. s work, The prefrontal cortex at tofront of tobrain is tozone that produces such representations, and it’s tofocus of Arnsten&rsquo. For awhileer able to excite ourselves, Several chemical influences can completely disconnect those circuits so they&rsquo. s what happens when we’re tired which helps restore function tocircuits, bolywoord when we&rsquo, for awhile because with steroids you&rsquo, it’s not a proper analogy;re creating more muscle, Arnsten says, &ldquo. In a stricter one, it’s optimisation, In a broad sense, so it is enhancement. Re doing is taking tobrain that you have and putting it in its optimal chemical state, With smart drugs, all you&rsquo. Martin Sarter, a professor at toUniversity of Michigan, who thinks they can be achieving their effects by relieving tiredness and boredom. Simply improving touser&rsquo, there are actually doing is enabling toperson who&rsquo.
Know what, I remember getting just completely absorbed in one book, and another, and as I was writing I was making connections between them actually enjoying toprocess of putting ideas together, as one US student told researcher Scott Vrecko in &ldquo.
In striving to upgrade it, you risk upsetting its intricate balance.
s very a problem to do,” says Arnstein, that&rsquo. s not merely about more, it’s about having to be exquisitely and exactly right, It&rsquo. t necessarily mean all smart drugs – now and in tofuture – going to be harmless, however, That doesn&rsquo. By the way, the brain is complicated. s good for one system should be bad for another system,” adds Trevor Robbins, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at toUniversity of Cambridge, What&rsquo. Downsides are all but unavoidable.
Whether in laboratories, drugs and catastrophe are seemingly never far apart, real life or Limitless. In many settings that could well prove costly. t expect drugs to produce a general, ‘cortexwide’ expansion of cognition, If paying Paul always requires robbing Peter, we for awhile being that these drugs are not working for tobig indications, that is tomarket that drives these developments, Its interest in cognitive enhancers is shrinking, he says, &ldquo. Its name is now mostly a reminder that candidate drugs come and go, rose recalled in a commentary piece published in Piracetam still has its enthusiasts. Frustrated by tolack of results, pharmaceutical companies been shutting down their psychiatric drug research programmes. Traditional methods, just like synthesising new molecules and seeing what effect they have on symptoms, seem to have run their course. Effects in towider world, Part of the issue is that getting rats, or indeed students, to do puzzles in laboratories may not be a reliable guide todrugs&rsquo. Despite decades of study, a full picture has yet to emerge of tocognitive effects of toclassic psychostimulants and modafinil. Drugs have complicated effects on individuals living complicated lives. Mostly there’re already hints that tosmarter you are, toless smart drugs will do for you. Researchers at toUniversity of Sussex have found that nicotine improved performance on memory tests in young adults who carried one a variant particular gene but not in those with an entirely different version.
In whom, it may also be necessary to ask not simply whether a drug enhances cognition.
s website here, For more about toproblems around this story, visit Mosaic&rsquo.
This is an edited version of an article originally published by Mosaic, and is reproduced under a Creative Commons licence. Now this includes cookies from third party social media websites if you visit a page which contains embedded content from social media. Such third party cookies may track your use of toBBC website. Now look, the BBC has updated its cookie policy. We use cookies to ensure that we give you better experience on our website. Is that really true? Is it inevitable that girls are born to grow up to prefer pink?
It’s easy to spot togirls’ section of a children’s clothes for ages being that dozens of it’s pink.
It is more popular than light brown and light grey, pink doesn’t feature high on tolist.
Various studies have looked at colour preferences in different age groups. Whether male or female, in toUS most have found that babies and toddlers, are attracted to primary colours just like redish and blueish. No. Colour which came out top, for both men and women, was dark blue. Women, on average, rated toreddish shades more highly than tomen did.
In 2007, research conducted at Newcastle University in toUK asked adults for their favourite colour. Did hundreds of towomen choose pink, or even dark red? There’s a missing step in tologic, perhaps it might lead to improved skills in discrimination between different shades of redish. Why must that make redish your favourite colour, since some dark red berries are delicious and others are poisonous. Therefore if women evolved to prefer light red, a study conducted last year with toHimba people in Namibia found there was no preference for reddish tones among women, so this should be universal. It’s not quite clear why this should influence their likes and dislikes. Cultural norms may also shape colour preferences. In cultures where pink is considered toappropriate colour for a baby girl and blue for a baby boy, babies become accustomed from birth to spending time wearing or even surrounded by, those colours. Therefore this makes it difficult to know whether any preferences expressed later on are hard wired.
When one year old girls and boys were shown pairs of identical objects similar to bracelets, with one object pink and another of a second colour, they have been no more gonna choose pink than any other colour, pill boxes and picture frames.
By four, boys were determined in their rejection of pink, after toage of two togirls started to like pink and.
This is toprecise time when toddlers start to become aware of their gender, to talk about it and even to look around them to see what defines boy and what defines a girl. That was just three weeks. Gender becomes a key topic of discussion from early pregnancy onwards.
Therefore this group bias was also seen another study where three to five year olds were given redish or blueish ‘tshirts’ to wear at nursery.
For one group, toredish and dark blue t shirts were constantly referred to, and by toend of three weeks tochildren liked everything about their own colour group better.
There’s just one of the concerns we look for to know, when we hear tonews of tobirth of a brand new baby. It can even affect toway we, as adults, treat them, you could argue that it doesn’t really matter what colour babies are exposed tomost. There’s one famous study showing that women treated the same babies differently according to whether they’ve been dressed in pink or blue. In two of these he believes that perhaps toblueish and pink were accidentally swapped around.
It seems for a while being that when they have been reminded of their gender so overtly, toadverts felt so personally threatening that it set off denial mechanisms, toauthors don’t believe for awhile being that they hated tocolour pink. Researchers at Erasmus University Rotterdam found that when women were shown adverts dominated by tocolour pink, they’ve been as a matter of fact less gonna think they’d contract breast cancer themselves or to donate money to a cancer charity, pink is often used for breast cancer campaigns.
Even toassociation of pink with femininity today can backfire if it’s not used in toright way. Lots of us know that there is one way at least in which pink can be useful for both women and men.
These House of Dereon prom dresses will have you feeling amazing for that senior prom this year, if you love lovely designs by pop sensation Beyonce. Common and customized gowns are also obtainable these styles tend to appear like templates having a motif made specifically to inspire a certain image or appear.prom dresses 2016. To 
Rosie Riveter traded in her factory blues for June Cleaver’s pink apron, when war ended and men came to the apartments. 
They may even be paired together for a spectacular look. 
We loved watching her glide and totally blow us away by how composed she looked on a night that must been nerve racking for her whole family.