Oliver Sacks, the “Neurological Philosopher”

Oliver Sacks, the “Neurological Philosopher”

by SUSAN BABBITT

SEPTEMBER 11, 2019

Photograph Source: Luigi Novi / Wikimedia Commons – CC BY 3.0

Oliver Sacks, the “neurological philosopher”, did a “different sort of medicine on behalf of chronic often warehoused and largely abandoned patients.” It combined art and science. Lawrence Weschler, in How Are You, Dr. Sacks?, says Sacks was from “the period before the science and the humanities split apart”.^[1]

But they didn’t just “split apart”. They were torn apart. Weschler doesn’t name the ideology responsible.

It didn’t convince everyone. Some saw through it, especially in the global South. Like Sacks, they wanted to know persons. Sacks had the “audacity to imagine that there might in fact be ongoing life persisting deep within those long-extinguished cores.” A nun at Little Sisters in the Bronx said: “Everyone who reads his [clinical] notes sees the patients differently …. Most consultants’ notes are cut and dried, aimed at the problem with no sense of the person …. With him the whole person becomes visible.”

European philosophers separated science and the humanities. They invented the “fact/value” distinction, between what is and what ought to be. They said knowledge of the latter doesn’t exist, or might not exist. Cuban scholar Armando Hart says anyone who cares about global justice in the 21^st century should notice the damage done to the world by European philosophy. He meant liberalism. It denied truth – or at least put it in doubt – about humanness.

It made sense for those who defined humanness.

Sacks called himself a “clinical ontologist”. His science was about being, but not in the abstract. He meant the being of people, the “living statues” who were the subject of his masterpiece, Awakenings, later a film and a one-act play. He saw their stillness as active. Being as doing. Sacks responded to “philosophical emergencies”. It was part of his science.

There is an expectation in the North that Philosophy is useless, that it is at best a luxury for elite academics who live in universities and speak in complicated ways, only to each other. But Gramsci said that if you don’t understand the ideas explaining ideas, making them plausible, new ideas are ineffective because they are understood in terms of the old, mitigating their effect.

Weschler presents Sacks (affectionately) as odd without naming the ideology that makes him odd. Yet Sacks’ view was not odd.

Tolstoy knew it. Lenin commented that Tolstoy’s ideas were bourgeois but his writing revolutionary. It’s because artists, unlike philosophers, articulate the human condition. And human emancipation is impossible without knowing the human condition.

Tolstoy’s Pierre Bezukhov (War and Peace) reverses the popular myth of instrumental rationality. Pierre “did not wait, as before, for personal reasons, which he called people’s merits, in order to love them, but love overflowed his heart, and, loving people without reason, he discovered the unquestionable reasons for which it was worth loving them”.

Tolstoy calls it “insanity”. Pierre feels love, and as a result, has reasons. He doesn’t have purpose and from that get reasons. Indeed, he has no purpose. He has feeling, which Tolstoy describes as love. Pierre’s feelings explain what matters to him; it is not what matters to him – purpose – that explains his feelings: of energy, for instance, or importance.

In theory, Pierre’s approach is suspect. The 20th century philosopher, Che Guevara, said, “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love”. The risk is real because love is not rational. Feelings are not rational. Love cannot guide because it is a feeling.

But this is ideology. And Guevara rejected it. He argued against the splitting of mind and body, feeling and intellect, art and science, faith and proof. Moreover, he followed a whole tradition of thinkers, not all revolutionaries, who also so argued. They wanted human, not just political, liberation, and they needed to know what “human” meant. They rejected liberalism because it didn’t make sense.

It doesn’t make sense, and this is known. But it persists because liberal intellectuals like Weschler don’t bother with philosophy. He admires Sacks, and names repeatedly the philosophers Sacks cared about. But he doesn’t do the work Gramsci said is essential to criticism: explaining the ideas that make other ideas plausible, even when they’re not, and it’s known.

It is significant that Pierre comes to his “insanity” after confronting death. He is a prisoner of Napoleon and is lined up to be executed. He watches the young man before him as he is shot dead. He notices how he crosses his leg as he stands, waiting to die. It is an ordinary gesture, but striking in the face of death, precisely for being ordinary.

Pierre expects to die. There’s no storytelling, no generating of meaning “from within” aimed at some abstraction called “self” or “purpose”. Herein lie what Tolstoy calls “unshakeable foundations”.

It’s mental silence: experience of the here and now, without expectations. A quiet mind is the exercise of one’s faculties – to see, hear, touch, smell, remember – without jarring, uncontrollable, mostly illogical mental conversation. Quietness fascinated Sacks.

He didn’t like Sartre’s “uncalmness”, his “chargedness”. Weschler mentions this but doesn’t explain. But we know Sacks didn’t like his own 1960s theory of behaviour because it didn’t account for “peacefulness, enoughness, satiety, repletion.” Sacks wouldn’t have liked Sartre because Sartre’s existentialism can’t handle stillness.

Liberal philosophy generally can’t handle it. It doesn’t fit with the liberal, capitalist “man of action”, the unrealistic individual with “power to seize their destiny”. Philosophers invented the “fact/value” distinction, suggesting knowledge about existence – what is – but not about what it means to be human.

It doesn’t respect science because it doesn’t respect cause and effect. But this is known, intellectually. It’s been argued for more than half a century in analytic philosophy of science. In practise, though, philosophy of science has no effect beyond its narrow specialization.

Sacks did have effect. His effect could be made more useful, though, if its real target were named and fully denounced.

Notes.

1. And How Are You, Dr. Sacks? A Biographical Memoire of Oliver Sacks (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019). See review https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/and-how-are-you ↑

 

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Susan Babbitt is author of Humanism and Embodiment (Bloomsbury 2014).

Neuroscience Reveals: This Is How Gratitude Literally Rewires Your Brain to Be Happier

Neuroscience Reveals: This Is How Gratitude Literally Rewires Your Brain to Be Happier

realfarmacy.com

By Justin Brown

Published here on Aug 11, 2019

 

We often hear about the power of gratitude for creating a more positive and happy mental state. But did you know that gratitude literally transforms your brain?

According to UCLA’s Mindfulness Awareness Research Center, regularly expressing gratitude literally changes the molecular structure of the brain, keeps the gray matter functioning, and makes us healthier and happier.

When you feel happiness, the central nervous system is affected. You are more peaceful, less reactive, and less resistant. And gratitude is the most effective practice for stimulating feelings of happiness.

In this article we’ll share some of the research demonstrating that gratitude makes you happier, followed by some practical steps you can take to positively transform the molecular structure of the brain.

Studies of gratitude making you happier

In one study of gratitude, conducted by Robert A. Emmons at the University of California at Davis and his colleague Mike McCullough at the University of Miami, randomly assigned participants were given one of three tasks. The participants kept a journal each week, with one group describing things they were grateful for, another describing what’s hassling them and the other keeping track of neutral events. After ten weeks, the participants in the gratitude group felt 25 percent better than the other groups, and had exercised an average of 1.5 hours more.

In a later study by Emmons with a similar set up, participants completing gratitude exercises each day offered other people in their lives more emotional support than those in other groups.

Another study on gratitude was conducted with adults suffering from congenital and adult-onset neuromuscular disorders (NMDs), with the majority of people having post-polio syndrome (PPS). Compared to those not jotting down what they’re grateful for every night, participants that did express gratitude felt more refreshed each day upon wakening. They also felt more connected with others than did participants in the group not expressing gratitude.

A fourth study didn’t require a gratitude journal, but looked at the amount of gratitude people showed in their daily lives. In this study, a group of Chinese researchers found that higher levels of gratitude were associated with better sleep, and also with lower levels of anxiety and depression.

Better sleep, with less anxiety and depression. Some compelling reasons to express gratitude more regularly.

Three simple steps to becoming more grateful

If you’ve only got time to say one prayer today, make it the simple words of “thank you.”

This is worth keeping in mind as you go about figuring out your daily practices and routines.

Here are three practical steps you can take to infusing routines of gratitude into your life.

1) Keep a daily journal of three things you are thankful for. This works well first thing in the morning, or just before you go to bed.

2) Make it a practice to tell a spouse, partner or friend something you appreciate about them every day.

3) Look in the mirror when you are brushing your teeth, and think about something you have done well recently or something you like about yourself.

Source: ideapod.com

Here’s How Elon Musk Plans to Stich a Computer Into Your Brain

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http://www.wired.comAUTHOR: ADAM ROGERSJuly 17, 2019

At a presentation at the California Academy of Sciences Tuesday night, Elon Musk unveiled the first products from his neuroscience startup, Neuralink.

JOSHUA LOTT/GETTY IMAGES

ELON MUSK DOESN’T think his newest endeavor, revealed Tuesday night after two years of relative secrecy, will end all human suffering. Just a lot of it. Eventually.At a presentation at the California Academy of Sciences, hastily announced via Twitter and beginning a half hour late, Musk presented the first product from his company Neuralink. It’s a tiny computer chip attached to ultrafine, electrode-studded wires, stitched into living brains by a clever robot. And depending on which part of the two-hour presentation you caught, it’s either a state-of-the-art tool for understanding the brain, a clinical advance for people with neurological disorders, or the next step in human evolution.

The chip is custom-built to receive and process the electrical action potentials—“spikes”—that signal activity in the interconnected neurons that make up the brain. The wires embed into brain tissue and receive those spikes. And the robotic sewing machineplaces those wires with enviable precision, a “neural lace” straight out of science fiction that dodges the delicate blood vessels spreading across the brain’s surface like ivy.

If Neuralink’s technologies work as Musk and his team intend, they’ll be able to pick up signals from across a person’s brain—first from the motor cortex that controls movement but eventually throughout your think-meat—and turn them into machine-readable code that a computer can understand. It might use them to control a computer or a prosthesis, to someday even feed information back to help the blind see, or to create entire virtual Matrixes inside your mind. “All this will occur I think quite slowly,” Musk said from the stage. “It’s not as if Neuralink will suddenly have this incredible neural lace and take over people’s brains. It will take a long time.” But after tests, and FDA approval, and more advances, this tech could be the thing that lets people commune with the ultrasmart artificial intelligences Musk is convinced are on the way. “Even in a benign AI scenario we will be left behind,” he said. “With a high-bandwidth brain-machine interface, we can actually go along for the ride. We can have the option of merging with AI.”

This is all pretty on-brand for Musk. As the guy who runs the electric-car company Tesla and the rocket company SpaceX, Musk has gotten very good at—in trouble, even, for—taking impressive technological achievements and, well, maybe not hyping them, but let’s say skipping all the way to the end of their speculative narrative arcs. It’s not enough to have superslick electric cars; no, they’re also going to drive themselves. That rocket isn’t just going to ferry cargo to a space station; no, it’s going to take people to Mars. How exciting!

Since The Wall Street Journal revealed Neuralink’s existence two years ago, the tech and neuroscience worlds have buzzed about what Musk’s team of brain-machine interface experts was up to. Other companies, including Kernel and Facebook, announced they, too, were working on the technology, which has so far been used only in research and rare clinical settings. Darpa, the US government’s advanced-science division, has been funding brain-computer interface work since the 1970s, and the agency has been part of the government-wide Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (yes, the acronym is also “Brain”) since 2013.

So it’s hard to know exactly how to calibrate Musk’s claims for a device that he plans to eventually stick into healthy people’s brains. “We hope to have this aspirationally in a human patient by the end of next year,” Musk said. The first volunteers, he hopes, will be people with quadriplegia, willing to have four chips implanted, three in the motor cortex of the brain (roughly running from above the ear to the top of the head) and on providing closed-loop feedback to the somatosensory cortex. That’s even though, according to an article distributed at the presentation—and not peer-reviewed—the Neuralink technology is so far only in the heads of 19 rats, and even then with only 87 percent of the electrodes successfully inserted. The FDA is going to want more than that before it approves human use.

And, sure, there’s more. A public records request from WIRED in April 2019 found that Neuralink is licensed to have hundreds of rats and mice in its research facilities. In a seemingly unplanned moment at the Cal Academy, Musk also acknowledged that Neuralink’s research had progressed beyond rodents to non-human primates. It’s only because of a records request filed by Gizmodo that Neuralink’s affiliation with the primate research center at UC Davis is public knowledge. That affiliation has apparently progressed: “A monkey has been able to control a computer with its brain, just FYI,” Musk said during the Q and A after the presentation.

His team seemed as surprised and discombobulated by the announcement as the audience. “I didn’t know we were running that result today, but there it goes,” said Max Hodak, president of the company, on stage next to Musk. (Monkeys have controlled computers via BCIs before, though presumably this would be the first time one used Neuralink.)

(A separate records request from WIRED in August of 2018 reveals that Neuralink re-upped its deal with UC Davis in June of that year, a month after the Gizmodo article. That relationship hasn’t always been entirely cordial; emails obtained by WIRED show that in June of 2018 John Morrison, director of the California National Primate Research Center at UC Davis, complained that Neuralink was trying to poach UC Davis staffers. “I realize that this is routine practice in the private sector, but I am a little surprised since my understanding is that there was an interest in developing scientific collaboration between Neuralink and the CNRPC,” Morrison wrote to a redacted contact apparently at Neuralink. “Hiring away personnel does not build a relationship.”)

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Music engagement and achievement predicts higher grades in math, science, and English

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theconversation.com

Peter Gouzouasis

Professor, University of British Columbia

Martin Guhn

Assistant Professor, University of British Columbia

July 1, 2019

What does maturing mean after elementary school? Here’s one thing it shouldn’t mean: dropping music at school.

My colleagues and I at the University of British Columbia studied over 110,000 public school students. We learned that students involved in extended music engagement (between grades 8 – 12) do one full year better academically than non-music peers, particularly when engaged in instrumental music sustained over years of schooling. Also, music achievement predicts academic achievement in math, science and English.

Music matters for its own sake, but also because, as our study shows, music engagement sustained from childhood into adolescence – particularly instrumental music that begins in elementary school – is significantly related to better high school achievement.

Study: Rich data

Thanks to rich educational and socio-economic data capturing the full population of B.C. public school students for several cohorts, we had an unprecedented opportunity to examine how student participation in music and music achievement predicted and related to provincial examination scores in high school English, math and science subjects. We looked at scores from provincial testing from Grade 10 math, science and English as well as Grade 12 English in relationship to students’ participation in music.

In our study, we counted both the number of high school courses taken, as well as student high school involvement and grades in graduation program music courses (concert band, jazz band, orchestra, piano and choir) taken across public high school years (Grades 8-12).

Based on previous research we inferred that music involvement that continued up to Grade 12 would be associated with (and predict) higher high school grades in mathematics, science and English. We expected instrumental music would have a more pronounced positive impact than vocal music.

We found that this is true, even when we take into account the following four factors: children’s prior elementary school educational achievement in numeracy and literacy, as captured by the B.C. Foundation Skills Assessment Grade 7 examination; gender; socioeconomic background (as gauged by the student’s home neighbourhood); linguistic diversity, captured by language spoken in the home.

We used a statistical regression model and adjusted our analyses to control for those four factors. We did this to demonstrate that these factors were not key determinants in musical or academic achievement and to address the problem of what researchers call confounding — unaccounted-for factors that might lead to incorrect findings.

While we are not yet able to infer causality — that music causes students to be smarter or improve their grades — we were able to identify a predictive relationship between music achievement and academic achievement, and demonstrate that more music engagement can be better for overall learning.

Sustained engagement

A handful of experiments have found that students randomly assigned to music training outperform those assigned to non-music groups.

But music is an inherently complex phenomenon — there are many ways to make and engage with music. Many other studies have examined music participation but they didn’t take into account different types of music making such as instrumental music, vocal music, or other forms and amounts of engagement.

There are many ways to make music. (Shutterstock)

Also, several earlier studies have been based on small, unrepresentative samples or considered only brief exposure to music training — whereas a central claim substantiated by our study underscores the academic achievement benefits from sustained engagement in music training over several years.

Increased cognitive capacity

Students in the present study who were highly engaged in instrumental music were, on average, over one year ahead in their math, English and science skills, compared to those peers not engaged in school music.

We say one year ahead because the math, science and English grades that music-engaged students obtained in Grade 10 could place them a full year ahead in their curricular studies. In practical terms, the effect sizes we measured when comparing adolescents in the very highly engaged instrumental music group with the no music group (even after adjustment) were of a magnitude similar to or greater than the average annual gains in reading, science and math that are seen during the high school years in the U.S. context

We attribute these strong associations between music engagement and academic achievement to a combination of increased cognitive capacity. In the brain, instrumental music changes the structure and function of the Heschl’s gyrus (HG) and the specific area which contains it, the auditory cortex (AC).

Students learn to ‘think music’ as their musical learning deepens. (Shutterstock)

To make music in upper secondary grade levels, students need to go beyond simple button pushing and the mechanical playing of instruments. Students need to “think music” through a process known as audiation. Audiation is the ability to compare what was heard in the immediate past in music listening with the present, and to connect what was heard with our expectations of what might come next. Music audiation ability is significantly correlated to the structure and function of the Heschl’s gyrus in the auditory cortex.

We do not yet fully understand the mechanisms of how music learning transfers to other developmental areas, but our work and numerous studies suggest that extended, engagement with music learning (particularly instrumental music) enhances cognitive mechanisms.

It is also likely that prolonged and more music engagement results in higher motivation and self-efficacy, executive functions and a positive impact on emotional development and self esteem.

The patterns of our findings suggest that music participation – especially in instrumental music, and multiple years of engagement over time – confers cognitive benefits in the form of tangible differences in many aspects of academic learning.

Significant associations

When focusing solely on learners who took instrumental music, additional important and theoretically plausible findings are revealed — namely that there is a “dose-response” type relationship. This means that higher levels of engagement (more classes) in music are related to incrementally higher exam scores. We also see significant, predictive relationships between higher grades in instrumental music courses and higher exam scores.

Music may not make you smarter, but we now know that music engagement sustained from childhood into adolescence — and more of it, especially instrumental music — may lead to doing better in high school.

An emphasis on numeracy and literacy at the cost of other areas of learning, particularly music, should not be acceptable in our public schools.

Let the band play on!

Scott Emerson contributed to this study’s literature review and statistical analyses.

1984 Doublespeak: Israel and the United States Targets “the Left” as Traitorous

“A divided, poorly educated and uncritical society is particularly susceptible to a reactionary leader who can syncretize identity constructs and scapegoat others while gutting the public sphere. The use of fear to instill complacency, a sense of powerlessness and addiction to aggression at the behest of expansionism is characteristic of white supremacist, settler colonialist countries such as the US and Israel.”

Doublespeak in Israel and the United States Targets “the Left” as Traitorous

http://www.counterpunch.org

by YOAV LITVIN

June 12, 2019

Photograph Source: U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv – Public Domain

No syncretistic faith can withstand analytical criticism. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.

~ Umberto Eco

In spite of a seemingly convincing victory in Israel’s recent elections, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to form a right-wing coalition, which would secure him the premiership for an additional four years.

The reason: hard-right Member of Knesset (MK), former Israeli Security Minister, and leader of the Yisrael Beiteinu party Avigdor Lieberman – a settler in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, ex-nightclub bouncer and convicted child beater – refused to budge on a draft bill for ultra-orthodox Jews. In response to Lieberman’s opportunistic move, a disheveled-looking Netanyahu spoke to reporters claiming: “Lieberman is now part of the left”.

Yet Lieberman is as far from left-wing politics as can be. In fact, his signature fascistic opinions are no secret – e.g. he has openly endorsed expulsion of Palestinians from Israel and spearheaded attempts to legalize execution and even beheading of Palestinian prisoners, whom he collectively refers to as “terrorists”.

Across the pond in the United States, President Donald Trump has adopted the term “radical left” to describe his opponents in the media and the Democratic Party. With the ramping up of the 2020 election fever, Trump will likely soon drop the “radical” and simply scapegoat the “left”.

These instances of illogical characterization of critique as coming from “the left” are a form of reactionary doublespeak, well-established in Israel and the United States of America. Those who challenge members of the ruling class are stereotyped, smeared and nonsensically labeled as traitorous lefties regardless of true political orientation.

Big (white) brother

According to Collins dictionary, the term “doublespeak”, widely attributed to George Orwell’s 1984 though it was never explicitly mentioned in the book (Orwell coined the terms “newspeak” and “doubletalk”, among others), is a means of ‘… presenting things in a way that is intended to hide the truth or give people the wrong idea.’

Doublespeak is a propaganda tool which purposefully obscures, falsifies, and/or reverses the meaning of language. It is used to shift the conversation away from the content of criticism illustrating logical fallacies, uncomfortable truths, and corruptions of the ruling class, toward an illogical, emotional, and cognitively dissonant reaction to an established stereotype – a “leftist” as contemptible, disloyal, hypocritical and cowardly.

Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.

~ Paulo Freire

According to this narrative, the leftist seeks to weaken the “freedoms” and identity of supposed merited elements of society by promoting, at their expense, lazy freeloaders.

Thus, doublespeak serves to hardwire oppression, misogyny and the status quo of white male supremacy, protecting its accumulation and hoarding of resources at the expense of vulnerable societal groups.

Individualism versus collaboration

As a social species, humankind relies on its members for survival and progress. The modern scientific framework promotes a collaborative model in which conflict rooted in the premise of a critical interchange of ideas is encouraged as part of a need for the constant evolution of understanding and consequent ideas, ultimately leading to an equitable and sustainable existence.

In contrast, an individualistic approach animates an inherently oppressive cult of xenophobic identity and destructive conflict, discouraging collaboration and sustaining privilege through a denial of inconvenient facts and an ongoing obstruction of collectivism.

Instead of perceiving challenge, peer review and the scientific method as necessary for truth, subsequent accountability and consequent growth of humanity as a whole, it is perceived by individualists as an existential threat to their privilege. As such, reactionaries typically villainize academia and science, media and the arts and rely on celebritized pseudo-intellectuals to justify their privilege and oppression of others.

Pseudo-intellectuals and cults

Ben Shapiro, social media celebrity, pseudo-intellectual and inspiration to anti-Semites and white supremacists worldwide, recently exemplified doublespeak in an interview with BBC’s right-wing journalist Andrew Neil. When Neil challenged his opinions, Shapiro pleaded with the veteran Brit to admit he was “on the left” and abandoned the interview in protest, claiming Neil was “badly motivated”.

Pop psychologist Jordan Peterson is an additional noteworthy example of a pseudo-intellectual outside his own field who has become a cult-like thought leader amongst reactionaries. In his work, Peterson justifies inequality by claiming humans are naturally inclined to form hierarchies. He compares humans with lobsters and suggests neural systems involved in hierarchy formation in both species are controlled by the neurotransmitter molecule serotonin.

Peterson ignores and disappears studies of evolutionary biology and behavioral neuroscience which have demonstrated repeatedly the deep flaws of such a reductionist approach to the human brain and behavior. Drawing conclusions about complex social behaviors from comparisons between humans, a species with highly evolved brains with complex structures and many neurotransmitter systems, to lobsters, crustaceans with a comparatively primitive nervous system (comprised of ganglia and no brain) is blatant propagandistic pseudoscience.

This misuse of science to code cult dogma has its roots in the now highly discredited and racist theory of social Darwinism.

Trump and Netanyahu follow the fascistic playbook

Human progress – defined as sustainable, equitable and just – occurs when societies rely on historical precedents to build a framework of norms and taboos. In turn, these serve to promote progress by social enrichment on the one hand and curtailment of abuses of vulnerable and disenfranchised elements of society, on the other.

A divided, poorly educated and uncritical society is particularly susceptible to a reactionary leader who can syncretize identity constructs and scapegoat others while gutting the public sphere. The use of fear to instill complacency, a sense of powerlessness and addiction to aggression at the behest of expansionism is characteristic of white supremacist, settler colonialist countries such as the US and Israel.

Both charismatic leaders, Trump and Netanyahu skillfully use doublespeak to promote their reactionary, capitalist and white supremacist agendas. Alongside the degradation of intellectualism and collectivism, they employ trial balloons as a means of assessing public resistance before creating precedents and slogannistic memes, which serve to shatter acceptable taboos as preludes to authoritarianism.

Both Trump and Netanyahu have been able to manipulate a corrupt and often times subservient media to serve their purposes of distraction and scapegoating, which mask their ongoing looting of their country’s public domains.

The deployment of a barrage of manufactured spectacles produces an apathetic, distracted and fragmented public less likely to protest when its civil liberties are attacked and more likely to engage in infighting rather than confront the white patriarchal ruling class hegemony.

Whether it is Trump’s lies and daily tirades on Twitter or Netanyahu’s racist calls to his fanatical supporters on election night, both are adept at manipulating the public and media to serve their purposes.

With the growing tide of the global right, education of the public to the importance of reason, the scientific method and skills necessary for collaborative creation utilizing the power of conflict rooted in the premise of a critical interchange of ideas, are crucial to combat the contradictions of ruling class dogma and the complacency it manufactures.

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Yoav Litvin is a Doctor of Psychology/ Behavioral Neuroscience

Rhythm of Breathing Affects Memory and Fear

NEUROSCIENCE NEWS

Source

DECEMBER 7, 2016

Summary: A new study reports the rhythm of your breathing can influence neural activity that enhances memory recall and emotional judgement.

Source: Northwestern University.

Breathing is not just for oxygen; it’s now linked to brain function and behavior.

Northwestern Medicine scientists have discovered for the first time that the rhythm of breathing creates electrical activity in the human brain that enhances emotional judgments and memory recall.

These effects on behavior depend critically on whether you inhale or exhale and whether you breathe through the nose or mouth.

In the study, individuals were able to identify a fearful face more quickly if they encountered the face when breathing in compared to breathing out. Individuals also were more likely to remember an object if they encountered it on the inhaled breath than the exhaled one. The effect disappeared if breathing was through the mouth.

“One of the major findings in this study is that there is a dramatic difference in brain activity in the amygdala and hippocampus during inhalation compared with exhalation,” said lead author Christina Zelano, assistant professor of neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “When you breathe in, we discovered you are stimulating neurons in the olfactory cortex, amygdala and hippocampus, all across the limbic system.”

The study was published Dec. 6 in the Journal of Neuroscience.

The senior author is Jay Gottfried, professor of neurology at Feinberg.

Northwestern scientists first discovered these differences in brain activity while studying seven patients with epilepsy who were scheduled for brain surgery. A week prior to surgery, a surgeon implanted electrodes into the patients’ brains in order to identify the origin of their seizures. This allowed scientists to acquire electro-physiological data directly from their brains. The recorded electrical signals showed brain activity fluctuated with breathing. The activity occurs in brain areas where emotions, memory and smells are processed.

This discovery led scientists to ask whether cognitive functions typically associated with these brain areas — in particular fear processing and memory — could also be affected by breathing.

The amygdala is strongly linked to emotional processing, in particular fear-related emotions. So scientists asked about 60 subjects to make rapid decisions on emotional expressions in the lab environment while recording their breathing. Presented with pictures of faces showing expressions of either fear or surprise, the subjects had to indicate, as quickly as they could, which emotion each face was expressing. NeuroscienceNews.com image is for illustrative purposes only.

The amygdala is strongly linked to emotional processing, in particular, fear-related emotions. So scientists asked about 60 subjects to make rapid decisions on emotional expressions in the lab environment while recording their breathing. Presented with pictures of faces showing expressions of either fear or surprise, the subjects had to indicate, as quickly as they could, which emotion each face was expressing.

When faces were encountered during inhalation, subjects recognized them as fearful more quickly than when faces were encountered during exhalation. This was not true for faces expressing surprise. These effects diminished when subjects performed the same task while breathing through their mouths. Thus the effect was specific to fearful stimuli during nasal breathing only.

In an experiment aimed at assessing memory function — tied to the hippocampus — the same subjects were shown pictures of objects on a computer screen and told to remember them. Later, they were asked to recall those objects. Researchers found that recall was better if the images were encountered during inhalation.

The findings imply that rapid breathing may confer an advantage when someone is in a dangerous situation, Zelano said.

“If you are in a panic state, your breathing rhythm becomes faster,” Zelano said. “As a result, you’ll spend proportionally more time inhaling than when in a calm state. Thus, our body’s innate response to fear with faster breathing could have a positive impact on brain function and result in faster response times to dangerous stimuli in the environment.”

Another potential insight of the research is on the basic mechanisms of meditation or focused breathing. “When you inhale, you are in a sense synchronizing brain oscillations across the limbic network,” Zelano noted.

Anger more harmful to health of older adults than sadness

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NEUROSCIENCE NEWS

MAY 9, 2019

Summary: Experiencing daily anger increases inflammation and raises the risk of developing chronic illnesses, such as heart disease and cancer, in those aged 80 and over.

Source: APA

Anger may be more harmful to an older person’s physical health than sadness, potentially increasing inflammation, which is associated with such chronic illnesses as heart disease, arthritis and cancer, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.

“As most people age, they simply cannot do the activities they once did, or they may experience the loss of a spouse or a decline in their physical mobility and they can become angry,” said Meaghan A. Barlow, MA, of Concordia University, lead author of the study, which was published in Psychology and Aging. “Our study showed that anger can lead to the development of chronic illnesses, whereas sadness did not.”

Barlow and her co-authors examined whether anger and sadness contributed to inflammation, an immune response by the body to perceived threats, such as infection or tissue damage. While inflammation, in general, helps protect the body and assists in healing, long-lasting inflammation can lead to chronic illnesses in old age, according to the authors.

The researchers collected and analyzed data from 226 older adults ages 59 to 93 from Montreal. They grouped participants as being in early old age, 59 to 79 years old, or advanced old age, 80 years old and older.

Over one week, participants completed short questionnaires about how angry or sad they felt. The authors also measured inflammation from blood samples and asked participants if they had any age-related chronic illnesses.

“We found that experiencing anger daily was related to higher levels of inflammation and chronic illness for people 80 years old and older, but not for younger seniors,” said study co-author Carsten Wrosch, PhD, also of Concordia University. “Sadness, on the other hand, was not related to inflammation or chronic illness.”

Sadness may help older seniors adjust to challenges such as age-related physical and cognitive declines because it can help them disengage from goals that are no longer attainable, said Barlow.

This study showed that not all negative emotions are inherently bad and can be beneficial under certain circumstances, she explained.

“Anger is an energizing emotion that can help motivate people to pursue life goals,” said Barlow. “Younger seniors may be able to use that anger as fuel to overcome life’s challenges and emerging age-related losses and that can keep them healthier. Anger becomes problematic for adults once they reach 80 years old, however, because that is when many experience irreversible losses and some of life’s pleasures fall out of reach.”

 

This study showed that not all negative emotions are inherently bad and can be beneficial under certain circumstances, she explained. The image is in the public domain.

The authors suggested that education and therapy may help older adults reduce anger by regulating their emotions or by offering better-coping strategies to manage the inevitable changes that accompany aging.

“If we better understand which negative emotions are harmful, not harmful or even beneficial to older people, we can teach them how to cope with loss in a healthy way,” said Barlow. “This may help them let go of their anger.”

ABOUT THIS NEUROSCIENCE RESEARCH ARTICLE

Source:
APA
Media Contacts: 
Michael Shulman – APA
Image Source:
The image is in the public domain.

Original Research: Open access
“Is anger, but not sadness, associated with chronic inflammation and illness in older adulthood?”. Barlow, Meaghan A.; Wrosch, Carsten; Gouin, Jean-Philippe; Kunzmann, Ute.
Psychology and Aging. doi:10.1037/pag0000348

Abstract

Is anger, but not sadness, associated with chronic inflammation and illness in older adulthood?

The discrete emotion theory of affective aging postulates that anger, but not sadness, becomes increasingly maladaptive during older adulthood in predicting health-relevant physiological processes and chronic disease (Kunzmann & Wrosch, 2018). However, it is largely unknown whether different negative emotions have distinct functional consequences in the development of older adults’ physical disease. To start examining this possibility, we investigated whether older adults’ daily experiences of anger and sadness were differentially associated with two biomarkers of chronic low-grade inflammation (interleukin-6 [IL-6] and C-reactive protein [CRP]) and the number of chronic illnesses (e.g., heart disease, cancer, etc.). In addition, we examined whether such divergent associations would become paramount in advanced, as compared with early, old age. A community-dwelling study of 226 older adults (age 59 to 93; M = 74.99, SD = 7.70) assessed participants’ anger and sadness over 1 week, inflammatory processes, number of chronic illnesses, and relevant covariates. Regression analysis showed that anger predicted higher levels of IL-6 and chronic illness in advanced, but not in early, old age. The age effect of anger on chronic illness was mediated by increased IL-6 levels. Sadness exerted a reversed, but nonsignificant, association with IL-6 and chronic illness, independent of age. No emotion or age effects were obtained for CRP. The study’s findings inform theories of health, emotion, and life span development by pointing to the age-related importance of discrete negative emotions in predicting a major physiological pathway to physical health across older adulthood.