Elena's Journal

Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 21:15:25 GMT

"If you're not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original."

Alan Kay: A powerful idea about teaching ideas

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 21:09:24 GMT

Linked from tdj

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:43:21 GMT

To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool. This doesn't mean you have to make something. If you learn how to hang glide, or to speak a foreign language fluently, that will be enough to make you say, for a while at least, wow, that's pretty cool. What there has to be is a test.
...
Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first...
Prestige is especially dangerous to the ambitious. If you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige. That's the recipe for getting people to give talks, write forewords, serve on committees, be department heads, and so on. It might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn't suck, they wouldn't have had to make it prestigious.
...
The test of whether people love what they do is whether they'd do it even if they weren't paid for it—even if they had to work at another job to make a living. How many corporate lawyers would do their current work if they had to do it for free, in their spare time, and take day jobs as waiters to support themselves?
...
It's hard to find work you love; it must be, if so few do. So don't underestimate this task. And don't feel bad if you haven't succeeded yet. In fact, if you admit to yourself that you're discontented, you're a step ahead of most people, who are still in denial. If you're surrounded by colleagues who claim to enjoy work that you find contemptible, odds are they're lying to themselves. Not necessarily, but probably.

http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 15:30:05 GMT

There aren't that many ideas for an icon better to represent stupidity than a boy with a box on his head jumping on a trampoline.

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 12:48:13 GMT

Rape: A "Preexisting Condition".
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/10/21/795692/-Another-Pre-Existing-Condition:-Rape

Nurses who deal with sexual assault cases say the industry’s policy creates a significant problem for those treating women who have been assaulted. "It’s difficult enough to make sure that rape victims take the drugs," said Diana Faugno, a forensic nurse in California and board director of End Violence Against Women International. "What are we supposed to tell women now? Well, I guess you have a choice – you can risk your health insurance or you can risk AIDS. Go ahead and choose."

...

A 38-year-old woman in Ithaca, N.Y., said she was raped last year and then penalized by insurers because in giving her medical history she mentioned an assault she suffered in college 17 years earlier. The woman, Kimberly Fallon, told a nurse about the previous attack and months later, her doctor’s office sent her a bill for treatment. She said she was informed by a nurse and, later, the hospital’s billing department that her health insurance company, Blue Cross Blue Shield, not only had declined payment for the rape exam, but also would not pay for therapy or medication for trauma because she "had been raped before."

How to Shoot an Anvil 200 Feet in the Air

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:45:32 GMT

Holy Crap!

Charlotte Renfaire

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:27:57 GMT

http://pics.livejournal.com/elena/gallery/000336cb

What the heck are these?

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 06:48:44 GMT

Problem solved -- its called Indian Pipe or Ghost Plant.

http://botit.botany.wisc.edu/toms_fungi/oct2002.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotropa_uniflora

some days, I hate being me.

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 13:57:05 GMT

Google Wave Developer Preview at Google I/O 2009

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 04:36:49 GMT

This is really worth watching. Start at 5:04 to avoid blah blah blah

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:32:25 GMT

I drove on that flooded portion around 7:30PM same day just fine. Glad I stayed inside all Monday!

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 18:45:02 GMT

Well, I found out where I want to go to school.

Too bad I'd have to sell my house to go.

Bonus: I am going to be able to sit in on some classes for free :)

I am going to go check this out Saturday.

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 16:06:44 GMT

http://creativecircus.edu/index.php

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 22:14:23 GMT

blooop new icons

Saving so I can ruminate on it later

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 03:24:07 GMT

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=depressions-evolutionary

Depression seems to pose an evolutionary paradox. Research in the US and other countries estimates that between 30 to 50 percent of people have met current psychiatric diagnostic criteria for major depressive disorder sometime in their lives. But the brain plays crucial roles in promoting survival and reproduction, so the pressures of evolution should have left our brains resistant to such high rates of malfunction. Mental disorders should generally be rare — why isn’t depression?

This paradox could be resolved if depression were a problem of growing old. The functioning of all body systems and organs, including the brain, tends to deteriorate with age. This is not a satisfactory explanation for depression, however, as people are most likely to experience their first bout in adolescence and young adulthood.

Or, perhaps, depression might be like obesity — a problem that arises because modern conditions are so different from those in which we evolved. Homo sapiens did not evolve with cookies and soda at the fingertips. Yet this is not a satisfactory explanation either. The symptoms of depression have been found in every culture which has been carefully examined, including small-scale societies, such as the Ache of Paraguay and the !Kung of southern Africa — societies where people are thought to live in environments similar to those that prevailed in our evolutionary past.

There is another possibility: that, in most instances, depression should not be thought of as a disorder at all. In an article recently published in Psychological Review, we argue that depression is in fact an adaptation, a state of mind which brings real costs, but also brings real benefits.

One reason to suspect that depression is an adaptation, not a malfunction, comes from research into a molecule in the brain known as the 5HT1A receptor. The 5HT1A receptor binds to serotonin, another brain molecule that is highly implicated in depression and is the target of most current antidepressant medications. Rodents lacking this receptor show fewer depressive symptoms in response to stress, which suggests that it is somehow involved in promoting depression. (Pharmaceutical companies, in fact, are designing the next generation of antidepressant medications to target this receptor.) When scientists have compared the composition of the functional part rat 5HT1A receptor to that of humans, it is 99 percent similar, which suggests that it is so important that natural selection has preserved it. The ability to “turn on” depression would seem to be important, then, not an accident.

This is not to say that depression is not a problem. Depressed people often have trouble performing everyday activities, they can’t concentrate on their work, they tend to socially isolate themselves, they are lethargic, and they often lose the ability to take pleasure from such activities such as eating and sex. Some can plunge into severe, lengthy, and even life-threatening bouts of depression.

So what could be so useful about depression? Depressed people often think intensely about their problems. These thoughts are called ruminations; they are persistent and depressed people have difficulty thinking about anything else. Numerous studies have also shown that this thinking style is often highly analytical. They dwell on a complex problem, breaking it down into smaller components, which are considered one at a time.

This analytical style of thought, of course, can be very productive. Each component is not as difficult, so the problem becomes more tractable. Indeed, when you are faced with a difficult problem, such as a math problem, feeling depressed is often a useful response that may help you analyze and solve it. For instance, in some of our research, we have found evidence that people who get more depressed while they are working on complex problems in an intelligence test tend to score higher on the test.

Analysis requires a lot of uninterrupted thought, and depression coordinates many changes in the body to help people analyze their problems without getting distracted. In a region of the brain known as the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), neurons must fire continuously for people to avoid being distracted. But this is very energetically demanding for VLPFC neurons, just as a car’s engine eats up fuel when going up a mountain road. Moreover, continuous firing can cause neurons to break down, just as the car’s engine is more likely to break down when stressed. Studies of depression in rats show that the 5HT1A receptor is involved in supplying neurons with the fuel they need to fire, as well as preventing them from breaking down. These important processes allow depressive rumination to continue uninterrupted with minimal neuronal damage, which may explain why the 5HT1A receptor is so evolutionarily important.

Many other symptoms of depression make sense in light of the idea that analysis must be uninterrupted. The desire for social isolation, for instance, helps the depressed person avoid situations that would require thinking about other things. Similarly, the inability to derive pleasure from sex or other activities prevents the depressed person from engaging in activities that could distract him or her from the problem. Even the loss of appetite often seen in depression could be viewed as promoting analysis because chewing and other oral activity interferes with the brain’s ability to process information.

But is there any evidence that depression is useful in analyzing complex problems? For one thing, if depressive rumination were harmful, as most clinicians and researchers assume, then bouts of depression should be slower to resolve when people are given interventions that encourage rumination, such as having them write about their strongest thoughts and feelings. However, the opposite appears to be true. Several studies have found that expressive writing promotes quicker resolution of depression, and they suggest that this is because depressed people gain insight into their problems.

There is another suggestive line of evidence. Various studies have found that people in depressed mood states are better at solving social dilemmas. Yet these would seem to have been precisely the kind of problems difficult enough to require analysis and important enough to drive the evolution of such a costly emotion. Consider a woman with young children who discovers her husband is having an affair. Is the wife’s best strategy to ignore it, or force him to choose between her and the other woman, and risk abandonment? Laboratory experiments indicate that depressed people are better at solving social dilemmas by better analysis of the costs and benefits of the different options that they might take.

Sometimes people are reluctant to disclose the reason for their depression because it is embarrassing or sensitive, they find it painful, they believe they must soldier on and ignore them, or they have difficulty putting their complex internal struggles into words.

But depression is nature’s way of telling you that you’ve got complex social problems that the mind is intent on solving. Therapies should try to encourage depressive rumination rather than try to stop it, and they should focus on trying to help people solve the problems that trigger their bouts of depression. (There are several effective therapies that focus on just this.) It is also essential, in instances where there is resistance to discussing ruminations, that the therapist try to identify and dismantle those barriers.

When one considers all the evidence, depression seems less like a disorder where the brain is operating in a haphazard way, or malfunctioning. Instead, depression seems more like the vertebrate eye—an intricate, highly organized piece of machinery that performs a specific function.

Are you a scientist? Have you recently read a peer-reviewed paper that you want to write about? Then contact Mind Matters co-editor Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist at the Boston Globe, where he edits the Sunday Ideas section.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Paul W. Andrews is a post-doctoral fellow at Virginia Commonwealth University. He did his PhD in behavioral ecology at the University of New Mexico, Department of Biology. His research focuses on understanding human mental health traits, particularly depression and suicidal behavior, from an evolutionary perspective. J. Anderson Thomson, Jr., is a psychiatrist in private practice in Charlottesville, Virginia and a staff psychiatrist at University of Virginia Student Health's Counseling and Psychological Services and at the Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy. He received his B.A. from Duke University (1970), his M.D. from the University of Virginia (1974) and did his adult psychiatry training at U.Va. (1974-77). Ten years ago Robert Wright's book, The Moral Animal, opened up the vista of evolutionary psychology, changed the way he viewed life and altered how he practices psychiatry.

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 00:27:30 GMT

“Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.”
- Catherine Drinker Bowen

"I've become wary of interviews in which you're forced to go back over the reasons why you made certain decisions. You tend to rationalize what you've done, to intellectually review a process that is often intuitive."
- Peter Weir

Just found these articles interesting

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 03:41:11 GMT

"Colored Spoons"
Social codes, autism, and behavior choices

http://ballastexistenz.autistics.org/?p=156

ATTN: Slavic peoples

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 17:56:25 GMT

Why are you Russian et al. type people Friending me? I don't speak your language : /

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 05:52:21 GMT

I have been thinking about this quote all week.

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:33:34 GMT

"Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one's ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonising preoccupation with self."
Iris Murdoch

The conflict:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willful_ignorance

I have to find a balance between these two things.

Best Worst Thing Ever

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 19:24:04 GMT

I am amused.

With your own tattoo gun!

The only thing I liked so far from the TV show Mental

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 18:13:34 GMT

"People who are drawn to this field, like you guys, usually do so because something in their own lives has led them to believe that people are, in general, including themselves, totally screwed up."

Cat Lady Moment

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:59:01 GMT

Eugene really is the best cat ever, even if he is a total asshole.

Interesting statement

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 20:58:50 GMT

A Farewell to Harms
"The media did her in." Her lack of any appropriate modesty did her in. Actually, it's arguable that membership in the self-esteem generation harmed her. For 30 years the self-esteem movement told the young they're perfect in every way. It's yielding something new in history: an entire generation with no proper sense of inadequacy.

Discuss.

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 16:57:04 GMT

That pretty much summarizes how I feel about it.