Being Human

I came back searching for a note from Delwin and to talk to Steven, and I was surprised to see people still blogging here.

Since it seems to be something that people liked, I wanted to share a few resources with you that you may enjoy:

Rick has a neat project called Olyblog that may be a great place for folks to migrate to, since it is set up similarly to this website and will feel very familiar. I wrote a couple of things over there today as "Pattytoo", which was my first step into that system.

There are also really great online communities like Livejournal, which are a bit different but super neat. I've had a journal over there under one name or another for quite a few years, and it really allows for some interesting community building. My latest one has been online for about a year, and I've met many real life friends and had great conversations with it. Some of those conversations have literally been going on for ten years now, and they have greatly enriched my life.

There are other tools too, like blogger or myspace as well. The coolest thing about myspace is that it allows you to check up on professors before you take them, sort of like ratemyprofessor.com.

I think Rick said that he'd be leaving this one alone for about a year, but I thought it might be good for folks to know about these other places too.

Patty 

In a small but highly provocative study, a UW-Madison research team has found, for the first time, that a short program in "mindfulness meditation" produced lasting positive changes in both the brain and the function of the immune system. - source

This is a couple of years old, but still worth looking at. It is one study from the HealthEmotions Research Institute located at the University of Wisconsin. Their goal is to scientifically determine how emotions influence health. They have quite a few studies going on at the moment, and I look forward to seeing the results of all of them.

I think that this sort of study speaks to a side of human development that we haven't discussed a lot in class. The conscious development of the self, through discipline and choice.

I like to dwell on this aspect of development, as it is the part we have a lot of control over. I can't change my parents or my heredity. I can have a direct impact on the way my brain functions and how I navigate what I've been given though.

You can read more about how science is approaching meditation here and here.

Since we are reading a lot in Bloom's book about emotions and why they may exist, you might also find how people are manipulating their emotions for their own gain interesting. There is a "new" practice called Laughter Therapy that has become quite popular with some folks. Here is a Laughter Yoga page that has several short movies about the practice. They even go into "laughter clubs" as they exist in India.

I honestly can't believe that MUDs are being discussed now, after almost everyone on the net has abandoned them.

It is like watching a debate about whether the Model T is taking humanity in the wrong direction. This debate is even more ridiculous though, because most of the experts with an opinion on this stuff have never even meaningfully participated in the things they are commenting on. Their outsider interpretation is just academese drivel.They wouldn't even know these things if they saw them!

One of the best places to hook up with a MUD on the web would be The Mud Connector , and you can check the population of that site. When I was there, it was at 74,063 members distributed over 1,642 games.

Let's get modern for a moment and look at 2006. Welcome to the land of the MMORPG! World of Warcraft alone has seven million subscribers.

In an old MUD you might see a screen like this. In a modern MMORPG you might see a screen like this.

Even smaller populations like that found on Second Life (where there are only about 873,495 people right now) utterly dwarf MUDs and their ilk. (Second Life is one of the games with US dollars trading hands. When I visited the site said that over $271, 563 US Dollars had been spent in the last 24 hours. This sort of thing was never accomplished in MUDs.)

The program SimLife is just as ridiculously outdated. The writer gets thrown by a word like "orgot", as if she has never heard an imaginary word used during gameplay before or insider terminology. (An orgot is the word for a simulated organism in the game. That's it.)

This movie is all about how children deal with stressful events, and how parents can help them to deal with such things in better ways.

I like the suggestions that they make here about modeling coping skills. I also like the fact that they mention that if you don't do a good job of modeling those coping skills the children might benefit from hearing you admit that you have a problem with it, and showing them that you are going to get help with it to get better.

I really think kids need to see parents ask for help when they don't know something, and then show growth and strength to change. I think it gives children a very firm idea of their own responsibility to recognize their issues and consciously work on them.

Patty
 

One of the things I'm really interested in is language development and acquisition.

I found two very basic films about it that you can watch here and here. I'm currently very fascinated with how children are being taught sign language, and I found a short video about that as well.

I'm curious about whether any of you have tried teaching your children ASL? Did they seem less frustrated and less likely to spend a lot of time crying or having tantrums after you taught them how to communicate?

I tried that approach with my own child, and she picked up quite a bit. The thing is, gestures just don't come naturally to her (so in her case she actually prefers to talk or write). Before she could speak or write down things, the best intervention I ever found was art. The first time she painted a representational figure (which was of a woman that looked remarkably like the goddess figures popular in early human civilizations) I cried my eyes out because we'd finally found a way to "talk".

I know that most children are way more comfortable with gesturing before talking or drawing though, so I wonder how this panned out in your households?

Do you know what your first word or words were?

In family lore, my first utterance was, "No, Bob that's my cookie!"

I was always wordy. I have also continued to have strong feelings about cookies. heh

Patty

(I'm pretty sure my language started out more basic than that. I think that my parents just didn't pay attention until that particular incident.)

I noticed that very few people have added personal information, and I thought I'd mention how to do it.

If you want to add a picture or personal information, you can follow these steps:

• Click on "my account" in the top left box on your screen under your user name.
• Click on the "edit" tab in the right field of your screen. It will be below the blue bar that goes across the top.
• Click on the "personal information" link. It will be one of the options under the edit tab.
• Add info!
• Click the submit button underneath when you are done.

When you fill it out, you will have some "stuff" on your personal information page. When people see your name in blue (like in comments), they can click on it and find out who you are.

Here are some of the pages (as examples) for me, Ryan, and Annie. As you can see, these personal info pages allow you to send private messages or read other things that the same person has written. (In order to recieve private messages back, you have to go into "my account", then go into the tab "account settings". Scroll down until you see "Private Message Settings" and then make sure the box next to "Allow Private Messages" is checked. After you do that, you can get things in your inbox on this site.)

The one odd thing is that (at least on my computer) the name attached to main articles is never clickable unless it is Rick with a "submitted by Rick" tagline, so you can never click through from an original blog article. I can only get to profiles through comments or if someone is listed under "who's online" on the left side of the screen.

If you investigate the personal information area, you'll find there are places for you to put in your home page info and other cool stuff.

I really enjoyed the bit of film we were able to watch on Richard Dawkins, and was particularly enthused about the computer programs that he used to demonstrate the mechanisms of evolution.

The last program that he shared, in which he was evolving a simple creature over generations, reminded me of a new computer game that is causing a rather large buzz in the video gaming community.

It is called Spore. The game is the brain child of Will Wright, a person well known for his innovation in the industry.

It is essentially a much more complex version of Richard Dawkins' program, in that it is a "game" of evolution. You start out as a single celled organism and evolve depending upon how you use what you are originally given. The game moves from single celled organism right up to a social society that engages in space exploration, with many stops inbetween (obviously).

In the June issue of Computer Gaming World magazine, they asked Wright what his biggest hope was for the game.

"I want it to change their self-perception of how creative they are or can be. And I hope it makes them think about the nature of life and ponder some of the philosophical questions around life."

I wonder whether people playing this game will get a bit of a boost of understanding about evolution? While it isn't a highly technical look at the process, I think it could help kids to understand how small adaptations over time can lead to big changes. It is also interesting seeing complex "evolutionary" algorithms try to imitate life.

Then again, it does put someone behind the creation of objects and lifeforms in the game. Even when the computer takes over life forms and runs them through the evolutionary process (since critters and objects from other players will be sort of cross-pollinated with the worlds of others and then computer controlled), there was a jump start at the beginning by someone with intention. So, perhaps it will reinforce that all things start with intention (and that intention is on the part of an intelligent being). Who knows?

The experience of sleep is different for different animals, and different for humans as they age.

• For reasons that are not clear, the amount of REM sleep each day decreases from about 8 hours at birth to 2 hours at 20 years to only about 45 minutes at 70 years of age. - Source
  

• "Interestingly, REM sleep is found only in mammals (and juvenile birds)." - Source

• Adding to the uncertainty about the purposes of REM sleep and dreaming is the fact that deprivation of REM sleep in humans for as much as two weeks has little or no obvious effect on behavior. Such studies have been done by waking volunteers whenever their EEG recordings showed the characteristic signs of REM sleep. Although the subjects in these experiments compensate for the lack of REM sleep by having more of it after the period of deprivation has ended, they suffer no obvious adverse effects. Similarly, patients taking certain antidepressants (MAO inhibitors) have little or no REM sleep, yet show no obvious ill effects, even after months or years of treatment. The apparent innocuousness of REM sleep deprivation contrasts markedly with the effects of total sleep deprivation (see earlier). The implication of these several findings is that we can get along without REM sleep, but need non-REM sleep in order to survive. - Source

• A wide variety of animals have a rest-activity cycle that often (but not always) occurs in a daily (circadian) rhythm. Even among mammals, however, the organization of sleep depends very much on the species in question. As a general rule, predatory animals can indulge, as humans do, in long, uninterrupted periods of sleep that can be nocturnal or diurnal, depending on the time of day when the animal acquires food, mates, cares for its young, and deals with life's other necessities. The survival of animals that are preyed upon, however, depends much more critically on continued vigilance. Such species—as diverse as rabbits and giraffes—sleep during short intervals that usually last no more than a few minutes. Shrews, the smallest mammals, hardly sleep at all.
  An especially remarkable solution to the problem of maintaining vigilance during sleep is shown by dolphins and seals, in whom sleep alternates between the two cerebral hemispheres (see figure). Thus, one hemisphere can exhibit the electroencephalographic signs of wakefulness, while the other shows the characteristics of sleep (see Box C and Figure 28.5). - Source

There are several odd things going on here that leave me with a lot of questions.

The gene, SOX2, stimulates stem cells on the surface of the embryonic tongue and in the back of the mouth to transform into taste buds, according to the researchers. Stem cells are immature cells that can develop into several different cell types depending on what biochemical instructions they receive.

...

"In my laboratory, we were studying the role of SOX2 in the development of the lung, esophagus and the gut in embryonic mice" she said. "We were quite surprised when we accidentally found the gene's role to be so pronounced in the developing tongue."

You can read more at Duke Health.

Aside from this new finding about one of our senses, I found the mechanism that the researchers used to find out this information even more curious. Here is a short description:

Pevny combined the SOX2 gene with another gene, derived from jellyfish, and inserted the combination into the animals' chromosomes. She selected the added gene for its capacity to produce a special protein, called enhanced green fluorescent protein, that glows green when exposed to ultraviolet light.
"When we shine light on tissue from these animals, any cell that is expressing SOX2 will fluoresce, or light up," Pevny explained. "This allows us to directly visualize those areas where SOX2 is active. It is a very powerful tool."

Patty

There are many different ways to approach human development, which is even evident in our introductory text Notable Selections in Human Development.

I'm not just talking about schools of thought within psychology, like the difference between a Freudian psychosexual stages approach and a Paiget cognitive-developmental stage model.

I'm thinking a bit broader. I'm going to use categories that come to mind and give them my own names, although there may be a much better way to say the same thing.(This is tricky, so please excuse the rough outline. Maybe some of these are subcategories of others.)

For example:

Genetic model - Development as a function of genetic programming. We unfold within the set capacities of our specific biology.

Social model - We develop according to what the society we grow up in values and demands.

Environmental model - We develop according to how the environment has acted upon us, both individually and as a species. (An example? Nutrition.)

Self Determination model - We develop according to our choices. We are what we choose to be. These choices occur on both a conscious and unconscious level.

Spiritual model - We develop according to our soul and the moral/ethical choices that we make. (This is an attempt to describe something that isn't necessarily religious in nature, it could be a purely self-imposed and self-taught ethical/moral system or sense of self that is not merely mortal in nature.)

I'm sure there are more. Which ones can you think of? Are there important subcategories that you can think of?

I find that while I'm personally interested in how individuals come to be who they are, I'm even more interested in how individuals come to be different than they are now. The process, for the lack of a better word, of actively becoming.

I'm also personally interested in the interaction of all these elements within each individual and society, rather than looking at a singular model of "explanation" or description. So, this list is to help me to remember elements that go into making a person (rather than looking for a "right" one).

Patty

Billionaire philanthropist Paul Allen unveiled on Tuesday a $41 million computerized atlas of the 20,000 genes that animate the brain of the common mouse.

As the first of its kind, the privately funded atlas encompasses 85 million photos, 250,000 slides and a gigabyte of laboratory data on each gene.

A mouse brain, weighing little more than a teaspoon of sugar, may be hundreds of times smaller than the human brain, yet both require the activity of thousands of genes. Mice and men share almost 90 percent of their genes.

Read more from this article here.

If you are interested in this work, you should check out the website for the Allen Institute for Brain Science. There is a nice little video on the site that quickly explains what they are doing and why they are doing it. There is also a link to the brain atlas.

The thing I find the most interesting is that Paul Allen funded this project mainly out of an interest in determining the difference between organic brains and computers. It will have meaning that far exceeds abstractly comparing computer function to organic brain function, however.

The first thing I personally thought of while reading about this project is how computers and brains are now starting to act together more than ever.

An example of this would be brain implants.

While the EEG contacts the only the patient's scalp, brain implants are surgically implanted directly into brain tissue. Most implants are used in patients with Parkinson's disease or other movement disorders. They work by sending electrical shocks to the brain that result in improved muscle control.

But with a new implant called Braingate, communication moves in the opposite direction. An implanted sensor transmits the brain's electrical signals out to a computer-interface, allowing the patient to operate the computer with thought commands. (See "Hardwired with Braingate" sidebar for information on the first patient.)

Other neuroscientists are developing microchip brain implants to ease the distress of patients with Alzheimer's, strokes and other memory-impairment disorders. While use in human patients is probably 15 years off, the researchers are confident that their chips already accurately mimic the activity of neurons in the hippocampus (a part of the brain that re-encodes short-term into long-term memory).

Like the fMRI and the EEG/computer interface, it's likely that the brain-computer interface will have non-medical applications in future, especially when the wireless technology is perfected.