Music of the heart

A couple of days ago I was in my car, listening to Sirius XM Satellite Radio's station Symphony Hall, and was delighted when one of my favorite pieces of music came on -- Beethoven's Seventh Symphony.

What has always struck me as marvelous about this symphony is the contrast between the first and second movements.  The first movement is one of the most joyous pieces of music I know, a galloping romp that never fails to make me smile.  Then... the second movement begins.  It's quiet, dark, deeply melancholic, achingly beautiful.  It brings home what a genius Beethoven was, able to take us from one emotional extreme to the other in a heartbeat.

I've always reacted to music emotionally, ever since I was four years old and begged to be allowed to put my parents' vinyl records on the turntable and play them.  My mom, not trusting my capacity to handle them carefully, at first refused, but when it became clear that I would keep asking till I got my way, she finally caved and taught me how to operate it.

To my credit, I never so much as scratched a single record.  Even at that age, I recognized that they were far too precious to me to mishandle.  I did, however, play certain records over and over and over, undoubtedly making my mother question her decision to teach me how to use the record player.  Interestingly, I never had any interest in children's music -- not that my parents had much of that in any case -- the pieces I fell in love with as a child were Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade and Dvorak's Symphony #9: From the New World.  I remember being blown away when I was about twelve, and had a little portable AM/FM radio my grandmother gave me, and stumbled on the one radio station near where I lived that had a classical music program once a week.  I was idly flipping channels, and -- all of a sudden -- the opening chords of the first chorus of J. S. Bach's Magnificat in D came pouring out of the little speakers.

Three minutes later, when the piece ended, I was sitting on the floor in my bedroom with tears streaming down my face.  It was, truly, a transformative experience -- so much so that I worked it, very nearly verbatim, into my novel The Hand of the Hunter.

But I didn't know then, and still don't know, why some music resonates so strongly with me, and other pieces don't generate any emotional response at all.  I was spellbound when I discovered Stravinsky's Firebird when I was seventeen; it's still my very favorite piece of music.  On the other hand, I've heard music-loving friends rave about the symphonies of Brahms, and I can say unequivocally that I've never heard anything by Brahms that has ever generated more than a "meh" reaction from me.

Why?  I don't think anyone could answer that.

What is certain is that music is, for most of us, a deeply emotional experience.  And two studies that just came out this week support the conclusion that this response is very likely to be innate.

The first, which appeared in the Journal of Complementary and Alternative Medicine, is perhaps not that surprising.  It studied the stress levels and mood of over seven hundred volunteers, and found that listening to music improved mood and reduced stress, pretty much across the board.  Most hearteningly, the stress reduction was greatest in those who registered the highest stress levels before the study.

Like I said, nothing too earthshattering.  But the second is absolutely astonishing.  A paper in Psychological Studies showed that newborns, when played music judged by listeners as "happy" or "sad," responded differently -- and that it seems to be independent of tempo ("happy" music generally having a faster rhythm than "sad" music).  Newborns listening to the tunes judged as "happy" showed greater focus, calmer facial expressions, reduced heartbeat, and less movement of the hands and feet; "sad" music produced no such effect.

So the hallmarks of a happy piece of music -- things like being in a major key, less harmonic dissonance, and wide pitch contours -- are markers we either learn prenatally, or else are (amazing as it may seem) hard-wired into our neural network.

I said earlier that this was "astonishing," but honestly, it shouldn't be.  Like I said, I've responded emotionally to music for as long as I can recall, and although my parents had a decent collection of records, neither of them played an instrument (nor made any real efforts to expose me to music).  Whatever capacity I had for music appreciation was already there somewhere.  And the fact that the link between emotion and music is so innate is pretty incredible.  I have to wonder what evolutionary purpose it serves.  We certainly get a lot of information about others' emotional states through the pitch contours of their speech; think about what it sounds like when an actor portrays a "robotic voice," for example.  The contours flatten out, leaving behind a monotonous, mechanical stream of words.

But is this really what drives our emotional response to music?  It's only a guess.  What's certain is that the current research explains why for so many of us, music is a critical piece of our lives -- something we return to again and again for solace, comfort, and emotional release.

****************************************

The nose knows

The first few years my wife and I were married, we had a dog named Doolin.

At least I think Doolin was a dog.  The story is that she was born to the unholy union between a border collie and a bluetick coonhound, but there's credible evidence she was an alien infiltrator from the planet K-9, sent to study humans by pretending to be a humble house pet.  My observations suggested that she was far smarter than humans but had only recently mastered pretending to be a dog.  She is, far and away, the weirdest dog I've ever met, and I've had dogs pretty much my whole life.  She figured out how to unlatch our gates (and let herself out) by watching us; we ultimately had to put carabiners on the latches to stop her from going on walkies by herself.  She valiantly attempted to herd our four cats, an effort that was ultimately unsuccessful.  Of her many odd habits, one of the funniest was that she was never without her favorite toy, a plush jack that she carried around in her mouth -- always pointing the same way.  (We tested this by taking it from her and sticking it in her mouth the other way 'round.  She dropped it, looked at us as if we'd lost our minds, and picked it up from the other direction.)

Doolin, with her jack toy sticking out of the right side of her mouth, as it obviously should be

One of Doolin's most curious traits was an extraordinary sensitivity to us, particularly to Carol.  She seemed to watch us continuously for cues about what was going on, and sensed when one of us was upset or feeling unwell.  Most strikingly, Doolin always knew when Carol was about to get a migraine.  Starting about a half-hour before the symptoms began, Doolin followed Carol around like her shadow, and if Carol sat down, Doolin smushed herself right up against her.  It got to be that Carol knew when to prep for a migraine once she saw Doolin acting weird (well, weirder than usual, which was admittedly a pretty high bar).

I used to think that people claiming their dogs had a second sense about how they (the owners) were feeling was an example of people anthropomorphizing, or at the very least, exaggerating their pets' intelligence and emotional sensitivity.  Until I had lived for a while with Doolin.

After that, a lot of the stories I'd heard began to seem a good bit more plausible.

Just this week, some research supported the contention with hard evidence.  A team of scientists in Belfast studied the responses of four dogs to breath and sweat samples from thirty-six volunteers, before and after doing a stressful exercise -- counting backwards from 9,000 by intervals of 17, without using calculators or pen and paper.  The researchers laid it on thick, telling the participants that it was very important to the study to do the counting exercise quickly and accurately.  A wrong answer got a shouted "No!", followed by being told the most recent correct response and an instruction to pick up from there.  For most of us, this would be a pretty high-stress activity, and would cause stress hormones (like cortisol and epinephrine) to pour into our bloodstreams.

And the breakdown products of those chemicals end up in our breath, sweat, and urine.  What's remarkable is that the four dogs, which had been conditioned to be able to discern between samples containing those breakdown products from ones which did not, correctly distinguished the post-stress breath and sweat samples from the pre-stress ones 93% of the time.

I know that our current dogs are pretty sensitive as well (although nowhere near the level of acuity that Doolin had).  Cleo, our Shiba Inu rescue, is really keyed in to me especially.  I had a couple of seriously high stress things happen in the last couple of months, and whenever I was really in freak-out mode, Cleo followed me around with a very worried expression on her face.  Her curly tail is like a barometer; the tighter the curl, the happier she is.  And when I was struggling, her tail was sagging.  Clearly an unhappy dog.

Cleo the Wonder Floof

So I guess all this stuff isn't our imagination.  Dogs really do sense our emotional states, not by some kind of canine telepathy, but because of plain old biochemistry coupled with an extraordinary sense of smell.

Although I wonder about Doolin.  I still think she was an alien spy, and was relaying information about us back to the Mother Ship.  Maybe the jack toy was some kind of transmitter, I dunno.

****************************************

Remembrance of stress past

About eighteen years ago, my wife and I went on a vacation to Hawaii.  The trip was awesome, and we had a fantastic time in Kauai, appreciating the beauty of the Garden Island, where "chill out" is the order of the day and there are signs that say "No shoes, no shirt, no problem."

Then we started on the voyage home.

I won't belabor you with the entire story.  Suffice it to say that it involved:

• two missed connections
• sleeping on the tile floor of two different airports on two successive nights
• a teenager breaching the security checkpoint, resulting in evacuating the entire airport and everyone having to be re-checked-in
• the airline crew "timing out," meaning they had to take a mandatory eight hours of rest while the passengers sat and waited
• a whole case of fine California wine... and no corkscrew
• a blackout that shut down the electrical grid in the entire northeastern United States for a day and a half
• a limo ride ending with the limo overheating and conking out just outside of Scott Run, Pennsylvania

Of course, I'm entirely to blame, because after each increasingly-ridiculous mishap, I said to my wife, "Well, what else could go wrong?"

Never ever say those words.  I'm not superstitious, but in this case I'm convinced that the universe waits for some hapless schlub to say that before dropping a piano on his head.

What is interesting about this whole thing -- besides the fact that in retrospect, it makes a hilarious story -- is that I remember the unpleasantness and stress of the trip back much better than I remember the relaxing and enjoyable vacation we were coming back from.  I'm hard-pressed to recall a single specific detail from being in Hawaii, other than a vague memory of sun, hiking, scuba diving, and drinks with little umbrellas -- but the memories of what it was like trying to return from Hawaii are so vivid it's like they happened yesterday.

Turns out, I'm not alone in finding that stressful experiences stick in our brains better than pleasant ones do.  A study released last week in Current Biology found that pretty much all of us remember trying situations much more vividly than we do positive ones.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Psy3330 W10, Sleeping while studying, CC BY-SA 3.0]

What's more, the researchers who did the study -- a team made up of Anne Bierbrauer, Marie-Christin Fellner, Rebekka Heinen, Oliver Wolf, and Nikolai Axmacher, of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany -- found the underlying mechanism for why awful memories seem to have such durability.  When a memory is connected with a stressful experience, the "memory trace" (neural firing pattern associated with recalling the memory) is linked through the amygdala -- a part of the brain associated with anxiety, fear, anger... as well as emotional learning and memory modulation.

The researchers write:

Recent evidence has further shown that amygdala neurons do not only respond to fearful or stress-related stimuli, but exhibit mixed selectivity as well: their firing may represent various different emotional and social dimensions, depending on task and context.  In humans, amygdala neurons respond to faces and to perceived emotions, and fMRI studies showed that the amygdala represents both fear memories and the subjective valence of odors.  Such multidimensional representations may serve to bind the diverse aspects of an emotional experience into one integrated episode.

Which certainly is the case with my memory of the Hawaii debacle.  My pleasant memories from the holiday -- which took place over six days -- are fragmentary and vague as compared with the memory of the trip back, which took only two days but plays out in my mind as a single coherent story.

When you think about it, it makes evolutionary sense.  Thag and Ogg having a vivid, detailed memory of the nice mammoth dinner they had two weeks ago is far less critical to survival than the memory of where they almost got killed by a saber-toothed tiger.  (That's an oversimplification, of course; complex behaviors are almost never the result of a single evolutionary driver.  But the value of remembering dangerous situations more strongly than happy ones can't be denied.)

The downside, of course, is that really negative memories get seared into our consciousness more or less permanently.  This can result in memory patterns that actively interfere with our ability to live a normal life -- better known as post-traumatic stress disorder.  So getting to the bottom of how this happens in the brain is the first step toward addressing that debilitating condition.

As for me, my silly return-voyage story doesn't cause me any anguish, and in fact, I've told it many times to various friends over pints of beer, to the general amusement of all.  The experience did, however, stop me from ever saying "What more could go wrong?"  Because I've found that not only is there always something else that can go wrong, when it does, you'll remember it forever.

**********************************

My dad once quipped about me that my two favorite kinds of food were "plenty" and "often."  He wasn't far wrong.  I not only have eclectic tastes, I love trying new things -- and surprising, considering my penchant for culinary adventure, have only rarely run across anything I truly did not like.

So the new book Gastro Obscura: A Food Adventurer's Guide by Cecily Wong and Dylan Thuras is right down my alley.  Wong and Thuras traveled to all seven continents to find the most interesting and unique foods each had to offer -- their discoveries included a Chilean beer that includes fog as an ingredient, a fish paste from Italy that is still being made the same way it was by the Romans two millennia ago, a Sardinian pasta so loved by the locals it's called "the threads of God," and a tea that is so rare it is only served in one tea house on the slopes of Mount Hua in China.

If you're a foodie -- or if, like me, you're not sophisticated enough for that appellation but just like to eat -- you should check out Gastro Obscura.  You'll gain a new appreciation for the diversity of cuisines the world has to offer, and might end up thinking differently about what you serve on your own table.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Grace under pressure

In the 1992 Winter Olympics, there was an eighteen-year-old French figure skater named Laëtitia Hubert. She was a wonderful skater, even by the stratospheric standards of the Olympics; she'd earned a silver medal at the French National Championships that year.  But 1992 was a year of hyperfocus, especially on the women's figure skating -- when there were such famous (and/or infamous) names as Nancy Kerrigan, Tonya Harding, Kristi Yamaguchi, Midori Ito, and Surya Bonaly competing.

What I remember best, though, is what happened to Laëtitia Hubert.  She went into the Short Program as a virtual unknown to just about everyone watching -- and skated a near-perfect program, rocketing her up to fifth place overall.  From her reaction afterward it seemed like she was more shocked at her fantastic performance than anyone.  It was one of those situations we've all had, where the stars align and everything goes way more brilliantly than expected -- only this was with the world watching, at one of the most publicized events of an already emotionally-fraught Winter Olympics.

This, of course, catapulted Hubert into competition with the Big Names.  She went into the Long Program up against skaters of world-wide fame.  And there, unlike the pure joy she showed during the Short Program, you could see the anxiety in her face even before she stated.

She completely fell apart.  She had four disastrous falls, and various other stumbles and missteps.  It is the one and only time I've ever seen the camera cut away from an athlete mid-performance -- as if even the media couldn't bear to watch.  She dropped to, and ended at, fifteenth place overall.

It was simply awful to watch.  I've always hated seeing people fail at something; witnessing embarrassing situations is almost physically painful to me.  I don't really follow the Olympics (or sports in general), but nearly thirty years later, I still remember that night.  (To be fair to Hubert -- and to end the story on a happy note -- she went on to have a successful career as a competitive skater, earning medals at several national and international events, and in fact in 1997 achieved a gold medal at the Trophée Lalique competition, bumping Olympic gold medalist Tara Lipinski into second place.)

I always think of Laëtitia Hubert whenever I think of the phenomenon of "choking under pressure."  It's a response that has been studied extensively by psychologists.  In fact, way back in 1908 a pair of psychologists, Robert Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson, noted the peculiar relationship between pressure and performance in what is now called the Yerkes-Dodson curve; performance improves with increasing pressure (what Yerkes and Dodson called "mental and physiological arousal"), but only up to a point.  Too much pressure, and performance tanks.  There have been a number of reasons suggested for this effect, one of which is that it's related to the level of a group of chemicals in the blood called glucocorticoids.  The level of glucocorticoids in a person's blood has been shown to be positively correlated with long-term memory formation -- but just as with Yerkes-Dodson, only up to a point.  When the levels get too high, memory formation and retention crumbles.  And glucocorticoid production has been found to rise in situations that have four characteristics -- those that are novel, unpredictable, contain social or emotional risks, and/or are largely outside of our capacity to control outcomes.

Which sounds like a pretty good description of the Olympics to me.

What's still mysterious about the Yerkes-Dodson curve, and the phenomenon of choking under pressure in general, is how it evolved.  How can a sudden drop in performance when the stress increases be selected for?  Seems like the more stressful and risky the situation, the better you should do.  You'd think the individuals who did choke when things got dangerous would be weeded out by (for example) hungry lions.

But what is curious -- and what brings the topic up today -- is that a study just published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that humans aren't the only ones who choke under pressure.

So do monkeys.

In a clever set of experiments led by Adam Smoulder of Carnegie Mellon University, researchers found that giving monkeys a scaled set of rewards for completing tasks showed a positive correlation between reward level and performance, until they got to the point where success at a difficult task resulted in a huge payoff.  And just like with humans, at that point, the monkeys' performance fell apart.

The authors describe the experiments as follows:

Monkeys initiated trials by placing their hand so that a cursor (red circle) fell within the start target (pale blue circle).  The reach target then appeared (gray circle with orange shape) at one of two (Monkeys N and F) or eight (Monkey E) potential locations (dashed circles), where the inscribed shape’s form (Monkey N) or color (Monkeys F and E) indicated the potential reward available for a successful reach.  After a short, variable delay period, the start target vanished, cueing the animal to reach the peripheral target.  The animals had to quickly move the cursor into the reach target and hold for 400 ms before receiving the cued reward.

And when the color (or shape) cueing the level of the reward got to the highest level -- something that only occurred in five percent of the trials, so not only was the jackpot valuable, it was rare -- the monkeys' ability to succeed dropped through the floor.  What is most curious about this is that the effect didn't go away with practice; even the monkeys who had spent a lot of time mastering the skill still did poorly when the stakes were highest.

So the choking-under-pressure phenomenon isn't limited to humans, indicating it has a long evolutionary history.  This also suggests that it's not due to overthinking, something that I've heard as an explanation -- that our tendency to intellectualize gets in the way.  That always seemed to make some sense to me, given my experience with musical performance and stage fright.  My capacity for screwing up on stage always seemed to be (1) unrelated to how much I'd practiced a piece of music once I'd passed a certain level of familiarity with it, and (2) directly connected to my own awareness of how nervous I was.  I did eventually get over the worst of my stage fright, mostly from just doing it again and again without spontaneously bursting into flame.  But I definitely still had moments when I'd think, "Oh, no, we're gonna play 'Reel St. Antoine' next and it's really hard and I'm gonna fuck it up AAAAUUUGGGH," and sure enough, that's when I would fuck it up.  Those moments when I somehow prevented my brain from going into overthink-mode, and just enjoyed the music, were far more likely to go well, regardless of the difficulty of the piece. 

One of my more nerve-wracking performances -- a duet with the amazing fiddler Deb Rifkin on a dizzyingly fast medley of Balkan dance tunes, in front of an audience of other musicians, including some big names (like the incomparable Bruce Molsky).  I have to add that (1) I didn't choke, and (2) Bruce, who may be famous but is an awfully nice guy, came up afterward and told us how great we sounded.  I still haven't quite recovered from that moment.

As an aside, a suggestion by a friend -- to take a shot of scotch before performing -- did not work.  Alcohol didn't make me less nervous, it just made me sloppier.  I have heard about professional musicians taking beta blockers before performing, but that's always seemed to me to be a little dicey, given that the mechanism by which beta blockers decrease anxiety is unknown, as is their long-term effects.  Also, I've heard more than one musician describe the playing of a performer on beta blockers as "soulless," as if the reduction in stress also takes away some of the intensity of emotional content we try to express in our playing.

Be that as it may, it's hard to imagine that a monkey's choking under pressure is due to the same kind of overthinking we tend to do.  They're smart animals, no question about it, but I've never thought of them as having the capacity for intellectualizing a situation we have (for better or worse).  So unless I'm wrong about that, and there's more self-reflection going on inside the monkey brain than I realize, there's something else going on here.

So that's our bit of curious psychological research of the day.  Monkeys also choke under pressure.  Now, it'd be nice to find a way to manage it that doesn't involve taking a mood-altering medication.  For me, it took years of exposure therapy to manage my stage fright, and I still have bouts of it sometimes even so.  It may be an evolutionarily-derived response that has a long history, and presumably some sort of beneficial function, but it certainly can be unpleasant at times.

*********************************

My friends know, as do regular readers of Skeptophilia, that I have a tendency toward swearing.

My prim and proper mom tried for years -- decades, really -- to break me of the habit.  "Bad language indicates you don't have the vocabulary to express yourself properly," she used to tell me.  But after many years, I finally came to the conclusion that there was nothing amiss with my vocabulary.  I simply found that in the right context, a pungent turn of phrase was entirely called for.

It can get away with you, of course, just like any habit.  I recall when I was in graduate school at the University of Washington in the 1980s that my fellow students were some of the hardest-drinking, hardest-partying, hardest-swearing people I've ever known.  (There was nothing wrong with their vocabularies, either.)  I came to find, though, that if every sentence is punctuated by a swear word, they lose their power, becoming no more than a less-appropriate version of "umm" and "uhh" and "like."

Anyhow, for those of you who are also fond of peppering your speech with spicy words, I have a book for you.  Science writer Emma Byrne has written a book called Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language.  In it, you'll read about honest scientific studies that have shown that swearing decreases stress and improves pain tolerance -- and about fall-out-of-your-chair hilarious anecdotes like the chimpanzee who uses American Sign Language to swear at her keeper.

I guess our penchant for the ribald goes back a ways.

It's funny, thought-provoking, and will provide you with good ammunition the next time someone throws "swearing is an indication of low intelligence" at you.  

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Thanks for the memories

I've always been fascinated with memory. From the "tip of the tongue" phenomenon, to the peculiar (and unexplained) phenomenon of déjà vu, to why some people have odd abilities (or inabilities) to remember certain types of information, to caprices of the brain such as its capacity for recalling a forgotten item once you stop thinking about it -- the way the brain handles storage and retrieval of memories is a curious and complex subject.

Two pieces of research have given us a window into how the brain organizes memories, and their connection to emotion.  In the first, a team at Dartmouth and Princeton Universities came up with a protocol to induce test subjects to forget certain things intentionally.  While this may seem like a counterproductive ability -- most of us struggle far harder to recall memories than to forget them deliberately -- consider the applicability of this research to debilitating conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder.

In the study, test subjects were shown images of outdoor scenes as they studied two successive lists of words.  In one case, the test subjects were told to forget the first list once they received the second; in the other, they were instructed to try to remember both.

"Our hope was the scene images would bias the background, or contextual, thoughts that people had as they studied the words to include scene-related thoughts," said Jeremy Manning, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth, who was lead author of the study.  "We used fMRI to track how much people were thinking of scene-related things at each moment during our experiment.  That allowed us to track, on a moment-by-moment basis, how those scene or context representations faded in and out of people's thoughts over time."

What was most interesting about the results is that in the case where the test subjects were told to forget the first list, the brain apparently purged its memory of the specifics of the outdoor scene images the person had been shown as well.  When subjects were told to recall the words on both lists, they recalled the images on both sets of photographs.

"[M]emory studies are often concerned with how we remember rather than how we forget, and forgetting is typically viewed as a 'failure' in some sense, but sometimes forgetting can be beneficial, too," Manning said.  "For example, we might want to forget a traumatic event, such as soldiers with PTSD.  Or we might want to get old information 'out of our head,' so we can focus on learning new material.  Our study identified one mechanism that supports these processes."

What's even cooler is that because the study was done with subjects connected to an fMRI, the scientists were able to see what contextual forgetting looks like in terms of brain firing patterns.  "It's very difficult to specifically identify the neural representations of contextual information," Manning said.  "If you consider the context you experience something in, we're really referring to the enormously complex, seemingly random thoughts you had during that experience.  Those thoughts are presumably idiosyncratic to you as an individual, and they're also potentially unique to that specific moment.  So, tracking the neural representations of these things is extremely challenging because we only ever have one measurement of a particular context.  Therefore, you can't directly train a computer to recognize what context 'looks like' in the brain because context is a continually moving and evolving target.  In our study, we sidestepped this issue using a novel experimental manipulation -- we biased people to incorporate those scene images into the thoughts they had when they studied new words.  Since those scenes were common across people and over time, we were able to use fMRI to track the associated mental representations from moment to moment."

In the second study, a team at UCLA looked at what happens when a memory is connected to an emotional state -- especially an unpleasant one.  What I find wryly amusing about this study is that the researchers chose as their source of unpleasant emotion the stress one feels in taking a difficult math class.

I chuckled grimly when I read this, because I had the experience of completely running into the wall, vis-à-vis mathematics, when I was in college.  Prior to that, I actually had been a pretty good math student.  I breezed through high school math, barely opening a book or spending any time outside of class studying.  In fact, even my first two semesters of calculus in college, if not exactly a breeze, at least made good sense to me and resulted in solid A grades.

Then I took Calc 3.

I'm not entirely sure what happened, but when I hit three-dimensional representations of graphs, and double and triple integrals, and calculating the volume of the intersection of four different solid objects, my brain just couldn't handle it.  I  got a C in Calc 3 largely because the professor didn't want to have to deal with me again.  After that, I sort of never recovered.  I had a good experience with Differential Equations (mostly because of a stupendous teacher), but the rest of my mathematical career was pretty much a flop.

And the worst part is that I still have stress dreams about math classes.  I'm back at college, and I realize that (1) I have a major exam in math that day, and (2) I have no idea how to do what I'll be tested on, and furthermore (3) I haven't attended class for weeks.  Sometimes the dream involves homework I'm supposed to turn in but don't have the first clue about how to do.  Sometimes, I not only haven't studied for the exam I'm about to take, I can't find the classroom.

Keep in mind that this is almost forty years after my last-ever math class. And I'm still having anxiety dreams about it.

What the researchers at UCLA did was to track students who were in an advanced calculus class, keeping track of both their grades and their self-reported levels of stress surrounding the course.  Their final exam grades were recorded -- and then, two weeks after the final, they were given a retest over the same material.

The fascinating result is that stress was unrelated to students' scores on the actual final exam, but the students who reported the most stress did significantly more poorly on the retest.  The researchers call this "motivated forgetting" -- that the brain is ridding itself of memories that are associated with unpleasant emotions, perhaps in order to preserve the person's sense of being intelligent and competent.

"Students who found the course very stressful and difficult might have given in to the motivation to forget as a way to protect their identity as being good at math," said study lead author Gerardo Ramirez.  "We tend to forget unpleasant experiences and memories that threaten our self-image as a way to preserve our psychological well-being.  And 'math people' whose identity is threatened by their previous stressful course experience may actively work to forget what they learned."

So that's today's journey through the recesses of the human mind.  It's a fascinating and complex place, never failing to surprise us, and how amazing it is that we are beginning to understand how it works.  As my dear friend, Professor Emeritus Rita Calvo, Cornell University teacher and researcher in Human Genetics, put it: "The twentieth century was the century of the gene.  The twenty-first will be the century of the brain.  With respect to neuroscience, we are right now about where genetics was in the early 1900s -- we know a lot of the descriptive features of the brain, some of the underlying biochemistry, and other than that, some rather sketchy details about this and that.  We don't yet have a coherent picture of how the brain works.

"But we're heading that direction.  It is only a matter of time till we have a working model of the mind.  How tremendously exciting!"

***********************************

Saber-toothed tigers.  Giant ground sloths.  Mastodons and woolly mammoths.  Enormous birds like the elephant bird and the moa.  North American camels, hippos, and rhinos.  Glyptodons, an armadillo relative as big as a Volkswagen Beetle with an enormous spiked club on the end of their tail.

What do they all have in common?  Besides being huge and cool?

They all went extinct, and all around the same time -- around 14,000 years ago.  Remnant populations persisted a while longer in some cases (there was a small herd of woolly mammoths on Wrangel Island in the Aleutians only four thousand years ago, for example), but these animals went from being the major fauna of North America, South America, Eurasia, and Australia to being completely gone in an astonishingly short time.

What caused their demise?

This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is The End of the Megafauna: The Fate of the World's Hugest, Fiercest, and Strangest Animals, by Ross MacPhee, which considers the question, and looks at various scenarios -- human overhunting, introduced disease, climatic shifts, catastrophes like meteor strikes or nearby supernova explosions.  Seeing how fast things can change is sobering, especially given that we are currently in the Sixth Great Extinction -- a recent paper said that current extinction rates are about the same as they were during the height of the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction 66 million years ago, which wiped out all the non-avian dinosaurs and a great many other species at the same time.  

Along the way we get to see beautiful depictions of these bizarre animals by artist Peter Schouten, giving us a glimpse of what this continent's wildlife would have looked like only fifteen thousand years ago.  It's a fascinating glimpse into a lost world, and an object lesson to the people currently creating our global environmental policy -- we're no more immune to the consequences of environmental devastation as the ground sloths and glyptodons were.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!] 

Finding the quiet

I've recognized for some time that I'm very sound-sensitive.  When I'm around loud, chaotic noise for too long, I get a little frantic, and if I can't get away it can bring on a full-blown anxiety attack.  What I've found interesting is how suddenly the switch can flip between "I'm okay" and "I've got to get out of here now."  In the pre-pandemic days, my wife and a few of our friends used to go to a local bar after Cornell hockey games, and like just about every bar in the world, it was noisy and crowded.  For a while, I'd be fine.  Okay, it wasn't my preferred environment even so, but I was coping.  Then, with a startling suddenness, I'd find I couldn't even hear what my friends were saying -- it was all lost in a gigantic roar of what sounded to me like white noise.

At that point, it was get out or risk a panic attack.

I've often wondered what the difference is between my brain and the brains of people who actually enjoy noisy chaos.  Along the same lines, you might be questioning how I managed to survive for 32 years as a high school teacher, because public schools are kind of inherently loud places.

As far as the latter goes, I coped by taking breaks.  I closed my classroom door during my planning period, and student contact during that time was by prior arrangement only.  I avoided the worst parts of it -- I very early on decided that rules or no rules, I wasn't attending pep assemblies or chaperoning school dances.  Most importantly, I made sure to take rests after the school day was over -- not naps, per se, but silence breaks.  Fortunately, my wife and I live in a big old house out in the country, so after school I usually had a good couple of hours after work to relax and play with my dog and, most importantly, enjoy the comparative quiet.

Turns out I'm not alone.  There are lots of people who have what neuroscientists call SPS (sensory processing sensitivity).  This phenomenon, and how people like me have coped with the extra stress of the pandemic and everything that's come with it, was the subject of a paper in the journal Neuropsychobiology by a team led by Bianca Acevedo of the University of California - Santa Barbara's Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.  In "Sensory Processing Sensitivity Predicts Individual Differences in Resting-State Functional Connectivity Associated with Depth of Processing," Acevedo and her team took test subjects who had been evaluated for their proneness to SPS, and gave them an emotionally evocative task -- looking at faces of people experiencing various strong emotions (positive and negative), and either going from one photograph to the next without a break or doing the equivalent of a mental palate-cleansing in between (counting backwards from a large number by sevens).

They found some fascinating patterns.  People who scored high on the SPS scale showed greater activity during breaks between the parts of the brain called the hippocampus and the precuneus, which are known to be involved in episodic memory consolidation.  From the fMRI studies, highly sensitive people showed a progressive weakening of signals between the periaqueductal gray matter and the amygdala, two parts of the brain controlling our perceptions of anxiety and distress, especially when they weren't given breaks.  Both trends were not as pronounced in people who scored lower on the SPS scale.

"Behaviorally, we observe it as being more careful and cautious when approaching new things," Acevedo said in a press release.  "In a new situation, those with the trait are more likely to hang back and see what happens.  Another broad way of thinking about it, that biologists have been using to understand people’s individual differences in responses to different things, is that the person with high sensitivity will be more responsive, both for better and for worse.  So while people with high sensitivity might get more rattled by uncomfortable situations, they might also experience higher levels of creativity, deeper bonds with others and a heightened appreciation of beauty.  What we found was a pattern that suggested that during this rest, after doing something that was emotionally evocative, their brain showed activity that suggested depth of processing, and this depth of processing is a cardinal feature of high sensitivity."

So SPS isn't all bad.  Besides my weird reaction to loud environments, it also explains why I get overwhelmed when I spend too much time doomscrolling through social media, something that occupied way too much of my time during the Former Guy's administration.  I found that if I didn't go on periodic news fasts, it would effectively short-circuit my ability to concentrate.  So emotional noise can be as debilitating to people with SPS as actual noise is.

"Take a break," Acevedo said.  "For all of us, but especially for the highly sensitive, taking a few minutes’ break and not necessarily doing anything but relaxing can be beneficial.  We’ve seen it at the behavioral level and the level of the brain."

Good advice.  These days we all need to be more cognizant of what helps us to cope with the ramped-up emotional stress we've been exposed to.  For me, listening to a quiet piece of music, walking around outside, or going for a run has the effect of discharging a lot of the built-up anxiety.  It's all a matter of finding what kind of pressure valve works for you.  But as the Acevedo et al. study shows, if the result is a better ability to manage the chaotic world we live in, it's well worth the search.

********************************

I have often been amazed and appalled at how the same evidence, the same occurrences, or the same situation can lead two equally-intelligent people to entirely different conclusions.  How often have you heard about people committing similar crimes and getting wildly different sentences, or identical symptoms in two different patients resulting in completely different diagnoses or treatments?

In Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, authors Daniel Kahneman (whose wonderful book Thinking, Fast and Slow was a previous Skeptophilia book-of-the-week), Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein analyze the cause of this "noise" in human decision-making, and -- more importantly -- discuss how we can avoid its pitfalls.  Anything we can to to detect and expunge biases is a step in the right direction; even if the majority of us aren't judges or doctors, most of us are voters, and our decisions can make an enormous difference.  Those choices are critical, and it's incumbent upon us all to make them in the most clear-headed, evidence-based fashion we can manage.

Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein have written a book that should be required reading for anyone entering a voting booth -- and should also be a part of every high school curriculum in the world.  Read it.  It'll open your eyes to the obstacles we have to logical clarity, and show you the path to avoiding them.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Isolation and anxiety

Last September I took a job working half-time, providing companion care for a senior gentleman who lives in a full-care facility about twenty minutes' drive from where I live.  The work was easy -- mostly what he wanted to do was go for long walks -- and it helped replace a little bit of the income I lost when I retired from teaching.  It also got me out of the house, and (in my wife's words) kept me from turning into a complete recluse.

Then in November, I was furloughed because of the pandemic.

I was in the fortunate position that the financial hit of not working wasn't the dire situation it is for many.  The loss of my weekly paycheck didn't mean we would go without food or miss our mortgage payment.  What it did mean -- both for my client and me -- was that since then, we've been pretty well totally isolated.  My client still sees the nursing staff at the facility; and, to be clear about this, they are stupendous, doing their best to see not only to the physical but to the mental and emotional health of their residents.  For me, it's meant that other than occasional quick trips to the grocery store, the only person I see is my wife.

That's been the situation since the first week of November.

I honestly thought it would be easier for me to deal with isolation.  I'm an introvert by nature, and pretty shy and socially awkward at the best of times.  But the last few months have been dismal, with the fact of it being the middle of an upstate New York winter not helping matters.  I've been fighting bouts of depression and anxiety -- something I've dealt with all my life, but lately it's seemed a lot worse than my usual baseline.

A couple of weeks ago, I was contacted by the director of the facility.  Because I've been vaccinated against COVID, and the residents were also receiving their vaccines, they were reopening to non-essential visits, and my client was eager to resume our daily time together.  Yesterday was my first day back at work after being stuck at home, pretty much continuously, for four months.

This is where things get weird.  Because instead of it relieving my anxiety, it made it spike higher.  I'm talking, to nearly panic-attack levels.

In case this isn't clear enough, there is nothing rational about this reaction.  My client has some developmental disabilities, and frequently needs a lot of help and encouragement, but he's kind, funny, and a pleasure to be with.  The job itself is the opposite of stressful; the worst part of it is having to keep track of the paperwork required by the agency and the state.  Being stuck home made my anxiety worse; if anything made sense about this, you'd think being given the green light to work again would assuage it.

Edvard Munch, Anxiety (1894) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Apparently, though, I'm not alone in this rather counterintuitive reaction.  A paper last week in the journal Brain Sciences found that the social isolation a lot of us have experienced over the past year has caused a measurable spike in the levels of a hormone associated with stress called cortisol.  Cortisol is a multi-purpose chemical; it has a role in carbohydrate metabolism, behavior, resilience to emotional stressors, and reducing inflammation (cortisone, used for treating arthritis and joint injury, and topically for relieving skin irritations, is basically synthetic cortisol).  This last function is thought to be why long-term stress has a role in many inflammatory diseases, such as ulcers, acid reflux, and atherosclerosis; just as overconsumption of sugar can lead to the body losing its sensitivity to the hormone that regulates blood sugar (insulin), continuous stress seems to lower our sensitivity to cortisol, leading to increased inflammation.

Apropos of its role in emotional stress, the authors write:

There are important individual differences in adaptation and reactivity to stressful challenges.  Being subjected to strict social confinement is a distressful psychological experience leading to reduced emotional well-being, but it is not known how it can affect the cognitive and empathic tendencies of different individuals.  Cortisol, a key glucocorticoid in humans, is a strong modulator of brain function, behavior, and cognition, and the diurnal cortisol rhythm has been postulated to interact with environmental stressors to predict stress adaptation.  The present study investigates in 45 young adults (21.09 years old, SD = 6.42) whether pre-pandemic diurnal cortisol indices, overall diurnal cortisol secretion (AUCg) and cortisol awakening response (CAR) can predict individuals’ differential susceptibility to the impact of strict social confinement during the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on working memory, empathy, and perceived stress.  We observed that, following long-term home confinement, there was an increase in subjects’ perceived stress and cognitive empathy scores, as well as an improvement in visuospatial working memory.  Moreover, during confinement, resilient coping moderated the relationship between perceived stress scores and pre-pandemic AUCg and CAR.

I thought it was pretty interesting that heightened cortisol has the effect of improving visuospatial working memory, but it makes sense if you think about it.  When a person is in a stressful situation, there's a benefit to being on guard, to keeping constant tabs on what's around you.  The downside, of course, is that such perpetual wariness is downright exhausting.

The last bit is also fascinating, if hardly surprising.  People who were capable of resilient coping with stress beforehand were less affected by the new emotional impact of being isolated; people like myself who were already struggling fared more poorly.  And interestingly, this was a pronounced enough response that it had a measurable effect on the levels of stress hormones in the blood.

This may explain my odd reaction to being taken off furlough.  Cortisol can be thought of as a sort of an "adrenaline for the long haul."  Adrenaline allows a fight-or-flight reaction in sudden emergencies, and has a rapid effect and equally rapid decline once the emergency is over.  Cortisol handles our response to long-duration stress -- and its effects are much slower to go away once the situation improves.  For people like myself who suffer from anxiety, it's like our brains still can't quite believe that we're no longer teetering over the edge of the cliff.  Even though things have improved, we still feel like we're one step from total ruin, and the added stressor of jumping back into a work situation when we've been safe at home for months certainly doesn't help.

In any case, yesterday's work day went fine.  As they always do.  I'm hoping that after a couple of weeks, my errant brain will finally begin to calm down once it realizes it doesn't have to keep me ramped up to red alert constantly.  It helps knowing I'm not alone in this reaction, and that there's a biochemical basis for it; that I'm not just making this up (something I was accused of pretty much every time I had an anxiety attack when I was a kid).

But it would also be nice if my brain would just think for a change.

***************************************

I've always been in awe of cryptographers.  I love puzzles, but code decipherment has seemed to me to be a little like magic.  I've read about such feats as the breaking of the "Enigma" code during World War II by a team led by British computer scientist Alan Turing, and the stunning decipherment of Linear B -- a writing system for which (at first) we knew neither the sound-to-symbol correspondence nor even the language it represented -- by Alice Kober and Michael Ventris.

My reaction each time has been, "I am not nearly smart enough to figure something like this out."

Possibly because it's so unfathomable to me, I've been fascinated with tales of codebreaking ever since I can remember.  This is why I was thrilled to read Simon Singh's The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography, which describes some of the most amazing examples of people's attempts to design codes that were uncrackable -- and the ones who were able to crack them.

If you're at all interested in the science of covert communications, or just like to read about fascinating achievements by incredibly talented people, you definitely need to read The Code Book.  Even after I finished it, I still know I'm not smart enough to decipher complex codes, but it sure is fun to read about how others have accomplished it.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The necessity of safety

I suppose it's a good sign when what I write grabs me by the emotions and swings me around, and it bodes well for the story having the same effect on my readers.  There are a few scenes that make me choke up every time I read them -- one of which boils down to a single line of dialogue.

In the story, one of the main characters wakes up in the middle of the night to find that his partner, who has gone through some terrible emotional trauma, is crying silently, obviously trying not to wake him up.  He pulls his lover into a hug and whispers, "Go ahead and cry if you need to.  I've got you.  You're safe in my arms."

What got me thinking about this scene is a conversation I had with some online writer friends, one of whom asked the provocative and fascinating question, "How could you tell someone 'I love you' without using those words?"  My immediate response was "You are safe."  Those words resonate with me for a great many reasons, not least because I virtually never felt safe as a child or young adult.  Everything around me always seemed precarious -- I spent the first half of my life feeling like I was a tightrope walker, always a single misstep from utter ruin, and because of that needed to be constantly vigilant and wary.

It was exhausting.

The pragmatists in the audience might point out that in reality none of us are safe, and technically they'd be right.  Bad stuff can happen any time, for any reason or no reason at all, and as the line from Fight Club says, "On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."  But still, that feeling of safety and security, that there's someone looking out for you and that your friends have your back, is pretty critical for our emotional health.

These days, a sense of safety is hard to find.  We're still in the midst of a pandemic, trying to guard ourselves against an invisible enemy that can jump from one person to another with frightening speed.  Here in the United States almost a half a million people have died of COVID, and countless others have become desperately ill with complications lasting for months.  Everywhere people are losing their jobs, businesses closing down, schools going entirely virtual.  Health care workers are facing the awful double-whammy of dealing with incredible overwork and the fact that despite their best efforts, some of their patients aren't going to survive.  Add to all that the fact that in many parts of the world we've seen unprecedented social unrest, with deep-seated hatred and prejudice bubbling up nearly everywhere -- and its victims are often people who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Security is in very short supply lately.

Three separate studies conducted late last year track the outcome.  The United States Center for Disease Control, Boston University, and Johns Hopkins University independently found that the incidence of anxiety, severe depression, and serious psychological distress has tripled since the start of the pandemic.  Unsurprisingly, the effect was larger in vulnerable populations -- low-income individuals, minorities, people with prior mental health issues, people who have lost friends or family members to COVID.  Most alarming, young adults across the board showed skyrocketing incidence of emotional distress -- the CDC study found that almost two-thirds of the people from eighteen to twenty-four who participated in the study reported experiencing severe depression since the outbreak started, a quarter reported greater use of alcohol or drugs to cope with the stress, and a quarter said they'd seriously considered suicide in the last thirty days.

This is horrifying and alarming.  We already had a built-in mental health crisis ongoing because of the stigma of mental illness and our society's unwillingness to radically revamp the way it's monitored, treated, and covered by insurance.  COVID has taken a dreadful situation and made it much, much worse, and I fear the repercussions will far outlast the pandemic itself.

The worst part is that the nature of the pandemic has taken away the one thing that can make emotional distress bearable; comfort from our friends and loved ones.  I was talking with some friends (online, of course) a few days ago about what we miss most from the pre-pandemic days, and one that came up over and over was "long hugs from friends."  I'm terribly shy by nature, but that one was spot-on.  Even we introverts are struggling with the isolation.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Smellyavocado, Bromances, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Unfortunately, it looks like we are going to be going without long hugs from friends for quite some time, and that means we need to be especially assiduous about looking out for each other.  Check in with the people you care about, especially the ones who don't seem to need it, who are used to being the strong, secure, competent ones who put everyone else's needs in front their own.  Okay, we can't have the level of physical and emotional real-time contact we had before, but we can do things to compensate -- Zoom or Skype visits, phone calls, even something simple like a text message saying, "Hi, I was thinking about you.  How are you doing?"

In times like these we have to lean on our friends -- and let our friends lean on us.  Be honest about what you're feeling, and reassure yourself that right now we're pretty much all feeling that way.  If you're having a hard time coping, let the people you love know rather than suffering in silence.  If you are really at the end of your tether, get on the phone -- the suicide prevention hotline is 1-800-273-8255.  There's help to be had if you are willing to reach out for it.

We'll get through this, but if we're to come through as unscathed as possible, it will be because we've banded together and helped each other through.  Don't be afraid to show others you're hurting; it's how you'll get past this horrible low point.

And don't be afraid to tell your friends and loved ones, "Go ahead and cry if you need to.  I've got you."  It may be a while before we can back it up with a long hug, but for now, it's the best we can do.

************************************

Science fiction enthusiasts will undoubtedly know the classic 1973 novel by Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama.  In this book, Earth astronomers pick up a rapidly approaching object entering the Solar System, and quickly figure out that it's not a natural object but an alien spacecraft.  They put together a team to fly out to meet it as it zooms past -- and it turns out to be like nothing they've ever experienced.

Clarke was a master at creating alien, but completely consistent and believable, worlds, and here he also creates a mystery -- because just as if we really were to find an alien spacecraft, and had only a limited amount of time to study it as it crosses our path, we'd be left with as many questions as answers.  Rendezvous with Rama reads like a documentary -- in the middle of it, you could easily believe that Clarke was recounting a real rendezvous, not telling a story he'd made up.

In an interesting example of life imitating art, in 2017 astronomers at an observatory in Hawaii discovered an object heading our way fast enough that it has to have originated outside of our Solar System.  Called 'Oumuamua -- Hawaiian for "scout" -- it had an uncanny, if probably only superficial, resemblance to Clarke's Rama.  It is long and cylindrical, left no gas or dust plume (as a comet would), and appeared to be solid rather than a collection of rubble.  The weirdest thing to me was that backtracking its trajectory, it seems to have originated near the star Vega in the constellation Lyra -- the home of the superintelligent race that sent us a message in the fantastic movie Contact.

The strangeness of the object led some to speculate that it was the product of an extraterrestrial intelligence -- although in fairness, a team in 2019 gave their considered opinion that it wasn't, mostly because there was no sign of any kind of internal energy source or radio transmission coming from it.  A noted dissenter, though, is Harvard University Avi Loeb, who has laid out his case for 'Oumuamua's alien technological origin in his new book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth.

His credentials are certainly unimpeachable, but his book is sure to create more controversy surrounding this odd visitor to the Solar System.  I won't say he convinced me -- I still tend to side with the 2019 team's conclusions, if for no other reason Carl Sagan's "Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence" rule-of-thumb -- but he makes a fascinating case for the defense.  If you are interested in astronomy, and especially in the question of whether we're alone in the universe, check out Loeb's book -- and let me know what you think.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds go to support Skeptophilia!]

Stress test

I ran into a piece of research today that left me scratching my head.

It was on the topic of teaching and stress, which (as you might imagine) I'm pretty interested in.  I'm a veteran teacher with 31 years in the classroom, and I can vouch for the fact that it can be a pretty stressful job.  So I thought that "Empirically Derived Profiles of Teacher Stress, Burnout, Self-Efficacy, and Coping and Associated Student Outcomes," by Keith C. Herman, Wendy M. Reinke, and Jal’et Hickmon-Rosa of the University of Missouri, would be intriguing.

Understanding how teacher stress, burnout, coping, and self-efficacy are interrelated can inform preventive and intervention efforts to support teachers.  In this study, we explored these constructs to determine their relation to student outcomes, including disruptive behaviors and academic achievement.  Participants in this study were 121 teachers and 1,817 students in grades kindergarten to fourth from nine elementary schools in an urban Midwestern school district.  Latent profile analysis was used to determine patterns of teacher adjustment in relation to stress, coping, efficacy, and burnout.  These profiles were then linked to student behavioral and academic outcomes.  Four profiles of teacher adjustment were identified.  Three classes were characterized by high levels of stress and were distinguished by variations in coping and burnout ranging from (a) high coping/low burnout (60%) to (b) moderate coping and burnout (30%), to (c) low coping/high burnout (3%).  The fourth class was distinguished by low stress, high coping, and low burnout.  Only 7% of the sample fell into this Well-Adjusted class.  Teachers in the high stress, high burnout, and low coping class were associated with the poorest student outcomes.

So far, so good, as it looks like the researchers were merely establishing a correlation.  But study co-author Herman was interviewed for a press release when the study was published, and from what he's saying it's pretty clear they thought they'd established causation:

It’s no secret that teaching is a stressful profession.  However, when stress interferes with personal and emotional well-being at such a severe level, the relationships teachers have with students are likely to suffer, much like any relationship would in a high stress environment.  It’s troubling that only 7 percent of teachers experience low stress and feel they are getting the support they need to adequately cope with the stressors of their job.  Even more concerning is that these patterns of teacher stress are related to students’ success in school, both academically and behaviorally.  For example, classrooms with highly stressed teachers have more instances of disruptive behaviors and lower levels of prosocial behaviors.

Now, just hang on a moment.

Saying that teacher stress levels are correlated with student behavioral problems and poor academic outcomes is decisively not the same thing as saying that teacher stress levels caused the problems and poor outcomes.  It's a possibility; I'm certainly not at my best in front of the classroom when I'm under stress, whether or not it came from my job.  But isn't it at least equally likely that teacher stress could be caused by having a class full of disengaged students who would rather act out than study?

[Image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Or, of course, that both the teacher stress and the student misbehavior could be caused by some third factor.  One of the biggest predictors of poor academic performance (and dropout rates) is poverty, as been shown by multiple studies (most strikingly by Lacour and Tissington in 2011).  And it doesn't stretch credulity much to imagine that classes full of students who live in impoverished conditions would cause a lot of stress to teachers, who (after all) went into the profession because they care about kids.

So the Herman et al. study doesn't come close to establishing a causative relationship between teacher stress and student behavior.  But it's way easier to throw the responsibility of reducing their stress back to the teachers, and ignore the other factors that almost certainly play a role.

I understand that no matter what, teaching has its stresses; and I preach to my students the importance of finding stress-relievers in their lives, so I'd be hypocritical not to acknowledge that it's necessary for me as well.  And Herman does seem to have his heart in the right place.  "We as a society need to consider methods that create nurturing school environments not just for students, but for the adults who work there," he said.  "This could mean finding ways for administrators, peers and parents to have positive interactions with teachers, giving teachers the time and training to perform their jobs, and creating social networks of support so that teachers do not feel isolated."

All of which I can get behind.  But the fact is, none of that is likely to improve student outcomes until the root causes are remedied.  I suspect that when public schools fail, it will prove to be -- as with many social problems -- the result of a variety of factors (almost certainly of which poverty is one).  But simply saying that if we give teachers options for stress relief, we can fix what's wrong with public schools, is facile thinking to say the least.

******************************

This week's featured book on Skeptophilia should be in every good skeptic's library: Michael Shermer's Why People Believe Weird Things.  It's a no-holds-barred assault against goofy thinking, taking on such counterfactual beliefs as psychic phenomena, creationism, past-life regression, and Holocaust denial.  Shermer, the founder of Skeptic magazine, is a true crusader, and his book is a must-read.  You can buy it at the link below!

Stress test

These days, it's pretty critical to find a way to reduce your stress.

It's endemic in our culture.  Between the chaos and noise, the frustrating jobs, and the continuing parade of bad news in the media, it'd be surprising if you weren't stressed.  And ongoing stress is linked to an increase in the hormone cortisol, long-term high levels of which are in turn connected to inflammatory diseases such as atherosclerosis and acid reflux disorder, and according to some studies, to dementia.

So reducing stress is pretty important, not just in the here-and-now to make your life more enjoyable, but to improve your chances at a healthy future.  So that's why I thought the research from Drexel University I read a couple of days ago was so interesting.

The paper "Reduction of Cortisol Levels and Participants' Responses Following Art Making," by Girija Kaimal, Kendra Ray, and Juan Muniz, appeared in the journal Art Therapy, and reports that the researchers found a reduction in cortisol levels in participants after spending only forty-five minutes making art -- a result that was irrespective of whether the participant had any prior experience as an artist.

"It was surprising and it also wasn’t," Kaimal said.  "It wasn’t surprising because that’s the core idea in art therapy: Everyone is creative and can be expressive in the visual arts when working in a supportive setting.  That said, I did expect that perhaps the effects would be stronger for those with prior experience."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Kaimal did report that a quarter of the subjects showed an increase in cortisol after making art.  Of this result, she said, "Some amount of cortisol is essential for functioning.  For example, our cortisol levels vary throughout the day — levels are highest in the morning because that gives us an energy boost to us going at the start of the day.  It could’ve been that the art-making resulted in a state of arousal and/or engagement in the study’s participants."

I would also suggest that it's possible the elevated cortisol may have come from frustration, although Kaimal reports that most of the test subjects reported feeling better and more relaxed after the experience, whatever their cortisol levels said.  I can vouch for the frustrations that making art can engender; some years ago, on the urging of my wife, I signed up for a pottery class, and have kept up the hobby since then despite the fact that I have the artistic ability that God gave gravy.  My first attempts looked like ceramics that were either created by a four-year-old or possibly an unusually intelligent chimp.  After four or five years, I was able to turn out pieces that were marginally better, but still looked like they might have gotten Honorable Mention in the sixth-grade art show.  And along the way, I experienced moments of enjoyment and stress-reduction interspersed with long stretches of wanting to fling the lump of clay at the nearest wall.

But I'm kind of a high-stress person anyhow, so maybe my experience isn't typical.  And it bears mention that I have high standards to live up to.  My wife is a professional artist (check out her work here if you want to be amazed), my dad made jewelry and gorgeous stained-glass windows, my mother was an oil painter and a porcelain artist, my older son is a talented cartoonist and caricaturist, and my younger son works full-time as a glassblower.  Somehow in all that, the Art Gene missed me, although in my own defense I can say with some confidence that I have excellent working copies of the Music Gene and the Fiction Writing Gene.

In any case, it's an interesting study.  As I said earlier, anything we can do to reduce the stress and anxiety in our lives is worthwhile.  And who knows?  Maybe I should give more of a chance to art.  Sign up for a painting class or something.  After ten years' practice, maybe I'd be able to do something more than a lopsided house with a yellow smiley-face as a sun.

Or maybe I should just go play the piano.