How Ideology Ruins Lives

One of the best posts I have read this year - by Alex Knap (checkout the heartbreaking story - How Ayn Rand Ruined A Childhood):

"Human beings are not omniscient, nor are they identical. Two people who experience the same event may walk away with a completely different meaning and story about what happened. We all walk through life carrying with us memories, ideas, and experience, and so it’s inevitable that we will disagree with one another. That we will have radically different notions of life from one another.

But to reject a person because they have different ideas is the worst kind of pride. To allow your ideology to prevent you from sharing your life with another person seems abhorrent to me. People are wonderful. Different ideas are wonderful. Different thoughts, feelings, and stories are wonderful.

To miss out on all that because it doesn’t fit in with the story you tell yourself is a tragic waste of life — a missed opportunity to experience true communion with other people. It’s a one-way ticket to a lonely, bitter old age.

I think that it’s important to work out the meaning in your own life. I think it’s vital to develop a philosophy for yourself. But it’s equally important to realize that you are not that philosophy. You are not that meaning. Philosophy; meanings — they’re just ideas. You have to embrace that in your life, your ideas will change. You will think differently about things as you experience new people, new places, new books, etc. But those changes in ideas don’t change who you are. Remembering that is, I think, vital for a happy life."

Long Telomeres - How Fast Are We Aging

"Doctors routinely urge their patients to quit smoking and exercise regularly. But what if there were a blood test that could show smokers and couch potatoes the damage their lifestyle was actually wreak­ing on their chromosomes?

Two groups of prominent researchers have started companies to provide just such a test, which would measure the length of one’s telomeres. Telomeres are caps on the ends of chromosomes, protecting them much as plastic tips on the ends of shoelaces keep the laces from fraying. Whenever chromosomes—the store­houses of our genes—are replicated in preparation for cell division, their telomeres shorten. That shrinking has led many scientists to view telomere length as a marker of biological aging, a “molecular” clock ticking off the cell’s life span, as well as an indicator of overall health. Studies comparing the telomere length of white blood cells among groups of volunteers show distinct correlations between telomere length and lifestyle. Those who exercise regularly have longer telomeres than those who do not. Folks who perceive themselves as the most stressed have shorter telomeres than those who see themselves as the least. Certain diseases, too, correlate with shorter telomeres, including cardiovascular, obesity and Alzheimer’s.

“Knowing whether our telomeres are a normal length or not for a given chronological age will give us an indication of our health status and of our physiological ‘age’ even before diseases appear,” says María A. Blasco, who heads the Telomeres and Telomerase Group at the Spanish National Cancer Research Center and who co-founded the company Life Length in September. Telomere research pioneer Calvin B. Harley, who co-founded Telome Health last spring with Nobel laureate Elizabeth H. Blackburn, considers telomere length “probably the best single measure of our integrated genetics, previous lifestyle and environmental exposures.” Beginning as early as this spring, the companies will offer telomere-measurement tests to research centers and companies studying the role of telomeres in aging and disease; the general public may have access by the fall through doctors and laboratories, perhaps even directly."

-More here

The Zeigarnik Effect - I've Started So I'll Finish

"One of the simplest methods for beating procrastination in almost any task was inspired by busy waiters.
It's called the Zeigarnik effect after a Russian psychologist, Bluma Zeigarnik (above left), who noticed an odd thing while sitting in a restaurant in Vienna. The waiters seemed only to remember orders which were in the process of being served. When completed, the orders evaporated from their memory.
Zeigarnik went back to the lab to test out a theory about what was going on. She asked participants to do twenty or so simple little tasks in the lab, like solving puzzles and stringing beads (Zeigarnik, 1927). Except some of the time they were interrupted half way through the task. Afterwards she asked them which activities they remembered doing. People were about twice as likely to remember the tasks during which they'd been interrupted than those they completed.
What does this have to do with procrastination? Almost sixty years later Kenneth McGraw and colleagues carried out another test of the Zeigarnik effect (McGraw et al., 1982). In it participants had to do a really tricky puzzle; except they were interrupted before any of them could solve it and told the study was over. Despite this nearly 90% carried on working on the puzzle anyway."

- More Here

Quote of the Day

"The common interpretation is that communism failed because it did not line-up to human nature, disregarded incentives, free-market matters etc. But I have not heard any commentary attributing a share of the failure to the top-down implementation by gigantic states & the necessity of a large state for that --making nonlinearities & second order effects dominate.

The large state is qualitatively different from the very small municipal state, one in which people have visual contact with those implementing public policy. The large state brings fragility, the small municipality brings robustness. Just as there is a fallacy of aggregation, I believe in the fallacy of scale (because of concavities). Properties change with scale."

-Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Theory of Neural Darwinism - Consciousness Evolved

"(1) Developmental selection – During the development of the brain, neurons that fire together wire together. While there are a number of genetic constraints on the formation of brain circuits, a number of epigenetic processes leads to extensive individual variance. These circuits constitute a primary repertoire for further selection.
(2) Experiential selection – During development and after the formation of variant neuroanatomy, changes in synaptic strength result in the further selection of variant neuronal groups that is characteristic of individual experience, constituting a secondary repertoire. The distribution and magnitude of these changes are constrained by inborn value systems, a diverse set of neural circuits producing various neuromodulators selected over evolutionary time.
(3) Reentry – Long-range, reciprocal, and massively parallel connections from one brain area to another provide the dynamic spatiotemporal coordination in circuits of groups that is necessary for integrated and adaptive conscious behavior."

-More Here

Biotech Billionaires - A Rare Breed

This is not good news... via forbes:

"Medicines change our world, preventing heart attacks, easing mental illness, and prolonging the lives of cancer patients. But according to Forbes’ annual lists of theWorld’s Billionaires and the 400 Richest Americans, they don’t create billion-dollar fortunes.
On the 400, which was released last fall, I could only find three men for who became rich by spearheading the development and marketing of a new drug. If we go into the deeper pool of the billionaires list, which includes 1210 people with fortunes of over $1 billion, there still aren’t many candidates.
Part of the reason is that health care in general is a pretty bad choice of a sector if you want to make a mega-fortune. Only 14 of the 400, or 3.5%, get their money from health care or medicine. On the 1210-person billionaires list, about 60, or 5%, made their money in health care. That compares to 90 billionaires from the tech industry, 80 from finance, and 140 who make their money from investments. (All that data is available by using our lists — and counting.).
why biotech hasn’t produced a Bill Gates, a Sergey Brin, or a Mark Zuckerberg. All of those men were able to make their fortunes by deploying their technical expertise quickly, with low barriers to entry. They might have needed outside investors, but they did not have to give up their controlling stakes. They made the right bet, and they got rich.
In biotech, by contrast, investors have to make the right bet and stick with it for years. Making matters worse, not only are the time frames of drug development measured in years or decades, the cost can be extremely high. A cheap drug development program can cost $50 million; an expensive one, for a heart drug, for instance, might cost well more than $1 billion. Most inventors who manage to invent a new drug and hold on to some interest in it cash out before the medicine gets to market or end up so diluted that they don’t make that much money. An odd result of this is that the men who have become billionaires by developing medicines have done so based on drugs that wouldn’t make anybody’s short list of the most important or best-selling medicines."

Quote of the Day

"Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone."

-Fred Rogers

Inside the World of TED

Videogames & Limitations of Cognitive Benefits

"The fact is, such broad claims about the cognitive benefits of video games, and by extension other digital media, have always been dubious. They stretch the truth. The mental faculties of attention and memory have many different facets - neuroscientists are still a long way from hashing them out - and to the extent that past gaming studies demonstrate improvements in these areas, they relate to gains in the kinds of attention and memory used in the fast-paced processing of a welter of visual stimuli.

A 2009 study by a different group of Iowa State researchers, published inPsychophysiology, investigated the effects of videogaming on cognitive control, through experiments with 51 young men, both heavy gamers and light gamers. The study indicated that videogaming has little effect on "reactive" cognitive control - the ability to respond to some event after it happens. But when it comes to "proactive" cognitive control - the ability to plan and adjust one's behavior in advance of an event or stimulus - videogaming has a significant negative effect. "The negative association between video game experience and proactive cognitive control," the researchers write, "is interesting in the context of recent evidence demonstrating a similar correlation between video game experience and self-reported measures of attention deficits and hyperactivity. Together, these data may indicate that the video game experience is associated with a decrease in the efficiency of proactive cognitive control that supports one’s ability to maintain goal-directed action when the environment is not intrinsically engaging." Videogamers, in other words, seem to have a difficult time staying focused on a task that doesn't involve constant incoming stimuli. Their attention wavers.
These findings are consistent with more general studies of media multitasking. In a much-cited 2009 paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, for example, Stanford's Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass, and Anthony D. Wagner show that heavy media multitaskers demonstrate significantly less cognitive control than light multitaskers. The heavy multitaskers "have greater difficulty filtering out irrelevant stimuli from their environment" and are also less able to suppress irrelevant memories from intruding on their work. The heavy multitaskers were actually less efficient at switching between tasks - in other words, they were worse at multitasking.
So should people be prevented from playing video games? Not at all (though parents should monitor and restrict young kids' use of the games). Moderate game-playing probably isn't going to have any significant long-term cognitive consequences, either good or bad. Video-gaming is fun and relaxing, and those are good things. Besides, people engage in all sorts of pleasant, diverting pursuits that carry risks, from rock-climbing to beer-drinking (don't mix those two), and if we banned all of them, we'd die of boredom."

More Here from Nicholas Carr

Singing Cotton Trees - Dr.Bernie Krause