Category Archives: Human Behavior

Human Behavior

Behavioral Psychology and its Practical Implications – The Great Courses Daily News

By Steven Gimbel, Ph.D., Gettysburg CollegeThe implications of behavioral psychology led to the manipulation of masses in advertising and politics. (Image: Lightspring/Shutterstock)Frederic Skinners Ideas about the Human Mind

Burrhus Frederic Skinner, a Harvard psychologist, who was influenced by logical positivists, adopted Watsons work. He, too, was interested in studying human behavior in response to certain stimuli. He found a mathematical relationship between environmental factors and human responses as well as the influence of positive and negative reinforcement on such responses. For example, he studied how room temperature influenced how long it would take a subject to drink a glass of water. Even further, he observed how reward and punishment would make the subjects behave in specific ways that he wanted.

These findings had both theoretical and practical implications. They helped gain knowledge about the structure of reality and also to manipulate people.

Skinner wrote a book titled Beyond Freedom and Dignity, which was reminiscent of Friedrich Nietzsches book Beyond Good and Evil. According to Nietzsche, good and evil are not inherent properties of the world. They are human-made features manufactured by the weak to restrict the strong, which has helped the weak prosper and keep the strong behind. Thats why human progress has been restrained. Similarly, Skinner held that moral concepts of freedom and dignity are not features of the world. They are created to glorify the individual and have retarded human development.

Rather than autonomous agents capable of rational thinking, human beings are regarded as creatures of habit. If these habits are shaped randomly, they will have no consequences for us. If they are correctly shaped, they can lead to our advancement. They can also be formed in a way that they limit human progress. The only way to achieve human growth is to identify the best culture that contributes to such growth and prepare the conditions for humans to thrive. Freewill is a mere myth that deters human flourishing.

This is a transcript from the video series Redefining Reality: The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science. Watch it now, on The Great Courses Plus.

Learn more about solving psychological mysteries.

John Watson was fired from John Hopkins University, where he held an academic position. He pivoted his career to advertising to use his expertise in enriching business owners instead of advancing humans. By manipulating the masses, he used his knowledge of the human mind to create gold, like the alchemists philosopher stone.

Psychology gave him the power to shape individual minds and culture as a whole. He found out fear, rage, love, habits, or needs were crucial for making humans take the action we want. Testimonials from ordinary people and celebrities were two powerful marketing strategies proposed by Watson.

The same ideas were adopted in the fashion industry by Sigmund Freuds nephew, Edward Bernays. He found out that he could use the results of his psychological studies in the world of fashion and advertising.

The term public relations was his idea to replace propaganda. He rightly thought that propaganda had negative connotations because it was associated with the military and the Nazis. So, he used a propagandistic term as a euphemism for the word propaganda.

In one of his books, Propaganda, he outlines the instructions to engineer public opinion, which formed the basis of modern public relations. Due to the collapse of monarchies replaced by democracies around the world, he believed that Power had been taken from the king and given to the people. So, the power of masses had to be harnessed by controlling the peoples behavior to achieve profit and authority. Now, rather than a tool for searching the nature of the human mind, psychology was used to manufacture false realities in the mind of people to make business owners wealthier and help certain politicians get elected.

Learn more about how human nature evolved.

In the realm of arts, the same notion was adopted, too. In the 1910s, Marcel Duchamp started a series of works called Readymades. He treated mass-produced goods as works of art by putting them in galleries. He made people rethink the way they looked at these everyday objects by putting them in not-so-familiar places.

The same approach was taken by Andy Warhol with his paintings of soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles. In the same vein, he took objects out of their standardized contexts and made his audience see them from another angle. He meant to show us that we were conditioned and manipulated by advertising, and, as Skinner had in mind, we could finally behave like autonomous beings with freedom and dignity.

John Watson is the founder of behavioral psychology. He was the first person to introduce the doctrine of cognitive significance to oppose the idea that psychology was the study of consciousness.

Fredric Skinner was an American psychologist. He found a mathematical relationship between environmental factors and human responses as well as the influence of positive and negative reinforcement on such responses.

Edward Bernays was Sigmund Freuds nephew. He coined the term public relations to replace propaganda. He believed in controlling human minds to gain profit and authority.

Readymades are mass-manufactured products displayed in galleries as art. The concept was first introduced by Marcel Duchamp to make people see everyday objects in a different way.

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Behavioral Psychology and its Practical Implications - The Great Courses Daily News

Human Behavior

The World’s Biggest Digital Twin: The World Itself – RTInsights

The Digital Twin Earth model will monitor the health of the planet, perform simulations of interconnected systems with human behavior, and support sustainable development.

Digital twin is a concept being explored and pursued at many companies, especially manufacturers with many complex, moving parts. Building a digital twin that accurately captures all the systems and data inputs and outputs across a complex organization is a daunting task. Imagine, then, being tasked with building a digital twin for the entire planet.

See also: Digital Twin Market to See Tenfold Growth in Next 5 Years

Thats the goal of the European Space Agency (ESA), which recently provided details on its Digital Twin Earth initiative a digital replica of the planet which accurately mimics Earths behavior.

Constantly fed with Earth observation data, combined with in situ measurements and artificial intelligence, the Digital Twin Earth is intended to provide an accurate representation of the past, present and future changes of our world, according to ESA.

The Digital Twin Earth project began in September with the launch of an observation satellite that includes an artificial intelligence system, capable of streaming vast quantities of data back to Earth stations. The system includes an AI-powered automatic cloud detection algorithm which builds cloud imagery. The system is capable of autonomous processing.

Digital Twin Earth will help visualize, monitor, and forecast natural and human activity on the planet, according to ESA. The model will be able to monitor the health of the planet, perform simulations of Earths interconnected system with human behavior, and support the field of sustainable development.

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The World's Biggest Digital Twin: The World Itself - RTInsights

Human Behavior

Nevada will be the new hotbed of western wildfires – you will pay the price – The Sierra Nevada Ally

Opinion

Editors note: The Sierra Nevada Ally is inviting local writers to pen approved opinion columns for the publication. We invited Kyle Roerink to write columns on natural resource issues throughout Nevada.

This years fire season in Nevada anyways is not an anomaly. When history looks back 100 years from now, however, it will likely be considered below average in terms of damage done (fewer than 300,000 acres burned so far).

Compared to other states, we can currently count our blessings this year. But experts warn that fire seasons here will only get worse as temperatures warm, droughts persist, and human behavior disrupts ecosystems. A new study suggests that Nevada may soon be an epicenter of fire activity in the west. And recent fires and 40 years of data substantiate much of what the report implies.

ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine recently reviewed research from the Rhodium Group on the effects of high-emissions scenarios in the future i.e. what happens if we dont reduce greenhouse gases from our atmosphere.

What they discovered was unsettling for me especially as I was breathing in smoke:

By midcentury, the northern Great Basin, though not a densely forested region, will become the epicenter of large wildfires. These large, remote counties in Nevada and Oregon see cycles of wet and dry weather that turn the grassland into the fuel for fires that can easily rip through 10,000 acres a day with strong winds, wrote John Abatzoglou, one of the authors of the study.

This analysis reminded me of the largest fire in Nevadas history, the 2018 Martin Fire, which burned 439,000 acres of land in rural areas north of Winnemucca. When scientists forecast the future of fires in Nevada the Martin Fire exemplifies what it will look like. The fire moved quickly about 11 miles per hour at some stages through sagebrush ecosystems. It was 57 miles long and 31 miles wide. It destroyed prime sage grouse habitat and agricultural operations. It took 600 people to extinguish.

A fire like the Martin Fire is a result of warming temperatures, drought, and invasive flora species like cheatgrass. As California and the wetter states of Washington and Oregon proved this year, we know that across the west fires burn bigger, longer, and hotter. They kill more people, wildlife, and plant life. Air quality diminishes and suffocates. Local, state, and federal resources go poof.

Without the Martin Fire, the 2018 fire season would have likely looked more like this years season. According to Nevada wildfire data from the Bureau of Land Management, over 215,000 acres have burned in the state this year with about a month remaining in the fire season the biggest fire was around 60,000 acres.

Data from the last 40 years of fire in Nevada show that things are changing quickly. From 1980 to 1999, 4.2 million acres burned in the state, according to data compiled by the Nevada Legislative Counsel Bureau. From 2000 to 2018, more than 9 million acres burned. That increase should give us all pause. The forecasting of more fires like the Martin Fire should also compel us into action.

We need more proactive management techniques like prescribed burns and other fuel reduction programs. But we must first and foremost recognize that humans are a driving factor of this crisis across the west. The new research implies the best thing we can do is reduce greenhouse gases.

More fires will mean more families, businesses and ecosystems will face existential threats. More smoke will move us indoors. More resources will be spent on suppression. More of our friends and family will put their lives at risk fighting flames in more dangerous conditions.

Across many regions of the state, where real estate developers see public lands as future subdivisions, insurance companies may one day give pause before underwriting (happening in California).

The federal government wont help provide greater relief (happened after Martin Fire). Blackouts will be more common (happened this year in Nevada). Utility infrastructure will need to be replaced (See California). Ratepayers and taxpayers will be on the hook (duh). And those of us unwilling to leave the places we love will be left with the bill.

This year Nevada wasnt the epicenter of fire season. But that may not always be the case. And if those days of inferno do come, we will be inclined to ask: did we do everything possible to stop it?

Kyle Roerink is the executive director of the Great Basin Water Network. He and his wife live in Reno Nevada.Support his writing.

The opinions expressed above are not necessarily those of the Sierra Nevada Ally. Our newsroom remains entirely independent of our opinion page. Published opinions further public conversation to fulfill our civic responsibility to challenge authority, act independently of corporate or political influence, and invite dissent.

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Nevada will be the new hotbed of western wildfires - you will pay the price - The Sierra Nevada Ally

Human Behavior

Combination therapy is more effective at preventing recurrence of bipolar disorder – News-Medical.Net

Reviewed by Emily Henderson, B.Sc.Oct 15 2020

A review of 39 randomized clinical trials by scientists from UCLA and their colleagues from other institutions has found that combining the use medication with psychoeducational therapy is more effective at preventing a recurrence of illness in people with bipolar disorder than medication alone.

For the paper, published in JAMA Psychiatry, researchers analyzed studies that included adult and adolescent patients currently receiving medication for bipolar disorder who were randomly assigned to either an active family, individual or group therapy, or "usual care," meaning medication with routine monitoring and support from a psychiatrist.

David Miklowitz, PhD, the study's lead author, and a distinguished professor of psychiatry at the Jane and Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, said the studies reviewed followed patients for at least a year, measured rates of recurrence of bipolar disorder, depression and mania symptoms, and included study attrition or dropout rates.

The findings were:

Of the findings, Miklowitz said they point to the importance of having a support system.

Not everyone may agree with me, but I think the family environment is very important in terms of whether somebody stays well. There's nothing like having a person who knows how to recognize when you're getting ill and can say,

'you're starting to look depressed or you're starting to get ramped up.' That person can remind their loved one to take their medications or stay on a regular sleep-wake cycle or contact the psychiatrist for a medication evaluation."

David Miklowitz, PhD, Study' Led Author and Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry, Jane and Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, UCLA

Miklowitz said the same is true for a patient who may not have close relatives but does have support through group therapy.

"If you're in group therapy, other members of that group may be able to help you recognize that you're experiencing symptoms," he said. "People tend to pair off. It's a little bit like the AA model of having a sponsor."

Source:

Journal reference:

Miklowitz, D. J., et al. (2020) Adjunctive Psychotherapy for Bipolar Disorder: A Systematic Review and Component Network Meta-analysis. JAMA Psychiatry. doi.org/10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2020.2993.

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Combination therapy is more effective at preventing recurrence of bipolar disorder - News-Medical.Net

Human Behavior

Scientists Find Neurochemicals Dopamine and Serotonin Have Unexpectedly Profound Roles in the Human Brain – SciTechDaily

Dopamine, serotonin involved in sub-second perception, cognition.

In first-of-their-kind observations in the human brain, an international team of researchers has revealed two well-known neurochemicals dopamine and serotonin are at work at sub-second speeds to shape how people perceive the world and take action based on their perception.

The discovery shows researchers can continually and simultaneously measure the activity of both dopamine and serotonin whose receptor and uptake sites are therapeutic targets for disorders ranging from depression to Parkinsons disease in the human brain.

Furthermore, the neurochemicals appear to integrate peoples perceptions of the world with their actions, indicating dopamine and serotonin have far more expansive roles in the human nervous system than previously known.

Virginia Tech researchers with the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute Center for Human Neuroscience Research construct carbon fiber microelectrodes for real-time detection of dopamine and serotonin activity in human patients. Credit: Virginia Tech

Known as neuromodulators, dopamine and serotonin have traditionally been linked to reward processing how good or how bad people perceive an outcome to be after taking an action.

The study published in the journal Neuron on October 12, 2020, opens the door to a deeper understanding of an expanded role for these systems and their roles in human health.

An enormous number of people throughout the world are taking pharmaceutical compounds to perturb the dopamine and serotonin transmitter systems to change their behavior and mental health, said P. Read Montague, senior author of the study and a professor and director of the Center for Human Neuroscience Research and the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at Virginia Tech Carilion. For the first time, moment-to-moment activity in these systems has been measured and determined to be involved in perception and cognitive capacities. These neurotransmitters are simultaneously acting and integrating activity across vastly different time and space scales than anyone expected.

Better understanding of the underlying actions of dopamine and serotonin during perception and decision-making could deliver important insight into psychiatric and neurological disorders, the researchers said.

The relative size of a microelectrode used to make recordings of dopamine and serotonin activity during deep brain stimulation procedures. Credit: Virginia Tech

Every choice that someone executes involves taking in information, interpreting that information, and making decisions about what they perceived, said Kenneth Kishida, a corresponding author of the study and an assistant professor of physiology and pharmacology, and neurosurgery, at Wake Forest School of Medicine. Theres a whole host of psychiatric conditions and neurological disorders where that process is altered in the patients, and dopamine and serotonin are prime suspects.

Lack of chemically specific methods to study neuromodulation in humans at fast time scales has impeded understanding of these systems, according to Montague, who is an honorary professor at the Wellcome Center for Human Neuroimaging at University College London and a professor of physics at the Virginia Tech College of Science.

But now, in first-ever measurements, scientists used an electrochemical method called fast scan cyclic voltammetry, which employs a small carbon fiber microelectrode that has low voltages ramped across it for real-time detection of dopamine and serotonin activity.

In the study, researchers recorded fluctuations in dopamine and serotonin using specially designed electrodes in five patients undergoing deep brain stimulation electrode implantation surgery to treat essential tremor or Parkinsons disease. Patients were awake during surgery, playing a computer game designed to quantify aspects of thought and behavior while the measurements were taken.

Read Montague, a computational neuroscientist at the Center for Human Neuroscience Research at Virginia Techs Fralin Biomedical Research Institute, said dopamine and serotonin are at work at sub-second speeds to shape how people perceive the world and take action based on their perception. Credit: Virginia Tech

On each round of the game, patients briefly viewed a cloud of dots and were asked to judge the direction they were moving. The method, designed by corresponding author Dan Bang, a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow, and Steve Fleming, a Sir Henry Dale/Royal Society Fellow, both at the Wellcome Center for Human Neuroimaging at University College London, helped indicate that dopamine and serotonin were involved in simple perceptual decisions, outside of the traditional context of rewards and losses.

These neuromodulators play a much broader role in supporting human behavior and thought, and in particular they are involved in how we process the outside world, Bang said. For example, if you move through a room and the lights are off, you move differently because youre uncertain about where objects are. Our work suggests these neuromodulators serotonin in particular are playing a role in signaling how uncertain we are about the outside environment.

Montague and Kishida, along with Terry Lohrenz, a research assistant professor, and Jason White, a senior research associate, now both at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute, started working on a new statistical approach to identify dopamine and serotonin signals while still at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.

Ken rose to the challenge of doing fast neurochemistry in human beings during active cognition, Montague said. A lot of other good groups of scientists were not able to do it. Aside from the computation of enormous amounts of data, there are complicated issues to solve, including great, fundamental algorithmic tasks.

Until recently, only slow methodologies such as PET scanning could measure the impact of neurotransmitters, but they were nowhere near the frequency or volume of the second-to-second measurements of fast scan cyclic voltammetry.

The measurements in the new study were taken at the Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, and involved neurosurgical teams led by Adrian W. Laxton and Stephen B. Tatter.

The enthusiasm the neurosurgeons have for this research is derived from the same reasons that drove them to be doctors first and foremost, they want to do the best for their patients, and they have a real passion for understanding how the brain works to improve patient outcomes, said Kishida, who oversaw the data collection in the operating room during the surgeries. Both are collaborative scientists along with Charles Branch, the chair of the neurosurgery department at Wake Forest, who has been an amazing advocate for this work.

Likewise, Montague said, You cant do it without the surgeons being real, shoulder-to-shoulder partners, and certainly not without the people who let you make recordings from their brains while they are having electrodes implanted to alleviate the symptoms of a neurological disorder.

Montague had read a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that prompted him to approach colleagues Bang and Fleming at University College London to tailor a task for patients to perform during surgery that would reveal sub-second dopamine and serotonin signaling in real-time inference about the external world separate from their often-reported roles in reward-related processes.

I said I have this new method to measure dopamine and serotonin, but I need you to help with the task, Montague said. They ended up in the study. The research really took a lot of hard work and an integrated a constellation of people to obtain these results.

Reference: Sub-second Dopamine and Serotonin Signaling in Human Striatum during Perceptual Decision-Making by Dan Bang, Kenneth T. Kishida, Terry Lohrenz, Jason P. White, Adrian W. Laxton, Stephen B. Tatter, Stephen M. Fleming and P. Read Montague, 12 October 2020, Neuron.DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2020.09.015

The research was funded by grants to various researchers from the Wellcome Trust, the National Institutes of Health including the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

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Scientists Find Neurochemicals Dopamine and Serotonin Have Unexpectedly Profound Roles in the Human Brain - SciTechDaily

Human Behavior

How environmentally friendly are you if you only recycle? | TheHill – The Hill

American households have recycled for generations and as landfills began getting, well, full in the 1970s, the country turned to recycling as a solution.

Today, more than a third of Americans recycle, and many of them believe it's for the good of the environment. And it can be, the Environmental Protection Agency is clear on that, but it comes with its own issues and new research shows itseffect might not be as big as many Americans think.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE RIGHT NOW

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10 THINGS WE CAN ALL DO ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE

WE DONT BELONG ON MARS, WE HAVENT LANDED ON EARTH YET

Inspire, a clean energy company, surveyed close to 2,000 people between the ages of 21 and 65 with a household income of at least $40,000 and a median household income of $86,969. Of these respondents, many of whom were college-educated white people with children, 92 percent believe climate change is real and 78 percent believe human behavior has at least something to do with it. Nearly three-fourths of them recycle and a majority think it's the most impactful action they can take.

But Inspire calculated that if you recycle, saving more than 600 pounds of coal from being burned annually, you are making just a little more of an impact on the environment than going one day without meat, which saves about 500 pounds of coal burned in food production. Meanwhile, biking to work, driving a hybrid or electric vehicle and powering your home with renewable energy can have up to 10 times the impact.

America is changing faster than ever! Add Changing America to your Facebook or Twitter feed to stay on top of the news.

Of course, committing to clean or renewable energy isnt cheap. Wind, solar and other sources of renewable energy require more capital from energy companies than gas and oil power plants, and that cost can get handed down to customers. But solar and wind power can also be cheaper than coal and gas power, according to a 2019 report, especially once you make an initial investment in the infrastructure.

A little more than three-fourths, or 77 percent, of consumers surveyed said they were willing to make changes to their lifestyle to reduce their personal impact, even though more than half of them didn't have much faith in the world getting its act together to reverse climate change. Still, 49 percent said they wanted to know more about how to reduce their impact.

In 1960, less than 7 percent of Americans recycled. But faced with a decision, a not insignificant number of Americans chose to recycle over letting landfills spill over into their neighborhoods. As climate change continues to take its toll, Americans are once again being asked to make a decision.

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LOUISVILLE WORKING TO DECLARE RACISM A PUBLIC HEALTH CRISIS

ALMOST 100 PERCENT OF AMERICANS POLLED THINK POLICE REFORM IS NEEDED

GOOGLE ANNOUNCES FIRST U.S. OPERATIONS CENTER IN MISSISSIPPI

INJUSTICE BY DESIGN: CONFRONTING THE EMBEDDED RACISM OF AMERICAS CITIES

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How environmentally friendly are you if you only recycle? | TheHill - The Hill

Human Behavior

An open letter to the young people of the United States – Resilience

New scientific understanding shows we can drastically reduce the time it takes for our environment to stabilize if we elect a leader who will get us back on track with IPCC carbon emission guidelines

Hi my name is Sierra, I am 23 years old and this is beyond an opinion piece; for me, this is a piece of my heart and a plea to everyone, young, old, black, white, brown, purple, democrat or republican to vote to save our collective future.

Starting now and until November 3rd we must vote-in someone with the best interest of this planet and its people in mind.

In Environmental Studies at UCSB, a lot of us would joke (but more like inwardly cry) we have ESD (Environmental Studies Depression) because almost every day we went to class after class learning about how modern human behavior mixed with greed has and is causing irreversible devastation on planetary health.

I graduated from UCSB simultaneously feeling fired up to make change and completely burnt out and hopeless.

As the Trump administration continued to endanger the wild/natural world I loved and continued to ignore and beat down historically oppressed communities(ex: low income/underserved and indigenous communities) I found myself asking, where is my passion-my energy to fight?

As I struggled to find jobs (LOL and myself) and the global pandemic took off, my energy fizzled and reignited at the same time. I found myself, and still find myself, riding a roller coaster of depression and elation, feeling immense love and within seconds intense hatred and anger, feeling like I know my place in the world and then like Im floating in an endless dark paralyzing abyss.

People often say thats just how this stage in life feels and thats just how it goes in your early twenties but WHAT THE ACTUAL HELL THIS IS NOT JUST HOW IT GOES!

We live in truly unprecedented times (I would say un-president-ed times because we clearly lack a presidential leader) and it is really hard to be a young person right now because the future often looks really shitty with all the news spewing doom and devastation.

But it is not all doom and gloom.

Last Sunday on 60 minutes professor, Michael Mann, from Penn State University, dropped a good news BOMB on our world in relation to climate change. Mann revealed new scientific understanding that our planet still has a chance to avoid climate breakdown and recover faster than previously predicted if, and only if, we stick to IPCC guidelines to reduce our emissions by 5 percent every year and halve emissions by 2030. If we elect a leader who will get us back on track to hit these marks global warming lag time (The time between halting CO2 emissions and halting temperature rise) could be more like three to five years instead of the previously thought to be 50.

We can turn things around but we gotta V-O-T-E.

I speak to you the recently graduated the what-the-hell-do-I-do-now-ers.

Let me say I feel you.

But as crazy as the outside and inner world is right now and as much as it feels debilitating, there is something you can do right now and that thing is vote.

We must vote president Voldemort *excuse me* President Donald Trump out of his little White(supremacist)House to give our planet, our people, our plants, and our animals, micro and macro, a chance at life. Another 4 years with Trump as our president (who refuses to fight emissions and instead rolls back climate regulations) would kill our chances of preventing a catastrophic rise in global temperature.

All the issues we face today are interrelated, from racism to global CO2 concentrations. If we start to tackle one part of the beast we will start to weaken the whole beast! Yes, we have a fucked-up system that is all tangled up and our problems are complexly interrelated but this also means solving one issue helps resolve others simultaneously. Injustices happening to marginalized communities and the earth are interconnected and one in the same @Intersectional environmentalism!

We still have time to reverse the previously thought to be irreversible damage and hit IPCC guidelines for emission reductions and reduce the warming time to more like three to five years. instead of 50. But we have to

VOTE

We have to give the USA the chance to do its part in protecting our planet and our people.

If you dont know who to vote for, vote for your future, and not for Donald Trump.

Yes, Biden may not be the best, you may not like him in the slightest, but voting for Donald Trump ensures 4 more years of climate inaction and solidifies the devastating fate of our environment and front-line communities (communities at the front line of climate changes negative effects).

Im writing this because I love you and I love the fricken world so much and I know there are so many of us out there and if we choose to not label ourselves by our political affiliation, color, who we choose to love, what diet we eat, or god we pray to, and we have to focus on our common ground, literally, our common ground (our earth below our feetour air that which we breatheand water that we drink )and come together and vote for it and vote for us, then we will have a chance to turn things around and bring into reality an America and world we are proud of.

I hope my writing challenges you to think differently and empowers your own self-exploration and love journey. I truly believe a more fulfilling and environmentally/socially just way of living exist if we come together on our common ground and see each other for what we really are one of the same.Sierra Emrick

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An open letter to the young people of the United States - Resilience

Human Behavior

Local View: Is there a lesson behind the ‘Gorilla Theory’? – Duluth News Tribune

So, Plug, have you ever heard of the Gorilla Theory?

Plug, in his usual startled look when I turn a conversation, replied, Ugh, no.

Well, its like this. Its a thought experiment conceived by some psychologists on human behavior. These scientists put six gorillas in a large cage, and in the middle of the cage was a platform with stairs leading up to it. Hanging above the platform was a bunch of bananas. Now the scientists also installed a water-jet system so that if any gorilla attempted to go up the stairs to get the bananas, they would be forcefully hosed off the stairs. At the same time, water jets would hose down all the other gorillas, too. So, as you can imagine, at the start of the experiment all the gorillas attempted to climb the stairs and they all got hosed down. Now, gorillas are trainable, so they slowly realized that attempts to get to the bananas resulted in all of them getting hosed down. To prevent this, the gorillas started beating up any gorilla that attempted to climb the stairs.

After the six gorillas stopped attempting to climb the stairs, the scientists took one of the six gorillas out of the cage and introduced a new gorilla. The new gorilla, of course, promptly saw the bananas and headed for the stairs. As he started to climb, he was promptly beaten and pulled from the stairs by the other gorillas. Eventually, the new gorilla realized that if he attempted to climb the stairs he got beat up.

So, the experiment proceeded with the scientists slowly taking out all of the original six gorillas, one at a time, and replacing them with new gorillas which attempted to climb the stairs to get to the bananas and were quickly beaten up by the other gorillas.

Eventually all of the original six gorillas were removed and only replacements existed in the cage. Scientists then removed the hose system because newly introduced gorillas were quickly beaten up by the others if they attempted to climb the stairs to get to the bananas. Funny thing was, none of the gorillas knew why they had to beat up any gorilla attempting to get to the bananas. It was just what they had always done.

Plug stared at me with some wide-eyed confusion and replied, You sure took a hard-right rudder with that one. Whats your point?

I guess Im not really sure. But curious, how long do you intend to wear that face mask?

Dave Crockett of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, owns engineering firms in Arizona and Michigan; is politically active; and is currently on sabbatical, working at Cirrus Aircraft in Duluth.

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Local View: Is there a lesson behind the 'Gorilla Theory'? - Duluth News Tribune

Human Behavior

Brainstorm: Breaking down the science behind the bean – Daily Northwestern

Podcast (brain-storm): Play in new window | Download

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How much caffeine is too much caffeine? Brainstorm spoke to the experts to find out (and drank copious amounts of coffee while doing so).

NEYA THANIKACHALAM: Hi everyone! Long time, no listen. Sorry its been a while, Ive just been grinding away at all of my schoolwork

EMMA EDMUND: Now is that a coffee pun I hear?

NEYA THANIKACHALAM: Why yes, Emma, that was.

EMMA EDMUND: Well, I guess I shouldve heard that coming, considering you and I have a quintessential caffeine addiction. What cup are we on so far today? Two? Three?

NEYA THANIKACHALAM: Ive honestly lost track.

EMMA EDMUND: I guess it also depends on if were just counting coffee, or if youre including tea, energy drinks or even chocolate. You know, the four food groups.

NEYA THANIKACHALAM: Health is wealth. Speaking of health, welcome back to another episode of Brainstorm, a podcast about all things health, science and tech. And if you havent caught on yet, this is the caffeine episode. Im Neya Thanikachalam

EMMA EDMUND: And Im Emma Edmund. Cue the coffee shop music. There we go. I smelled beans roasting, and I needed to know what was going on.

NEYA THANIKACHALAM: Speaking of roasting beans we spoke with Isaac Bloom, one of the co-founders of Backlot Coffee and a roaster himself. He showed me around Backlots roastery, which is in Evanston.

Let me set the scene for you: Theres a large gas roaster and burlap sacks filled with green coffee beans, which turn deep brown when roasted. When Isaac gets a new batch of coffee beans from a vendor, he tests out the flavor profile of the beans by smelling them, roasting a small amount of the beans and making coffee from them. He uses cupping, a taste technique, to test the quality of the beans and judge their flavor.

ISAAC BLOOM: From the sample roasting and the cupping, I can get a general idea of how its going to perform on the big gas roaster.

NEYA THANIKACHALAM: Even when Isaac decides on the roasting style, there are other factors, like the humidity in the air and the temperature of the roastery that can affect the flavor of the coffee beans.

ISAAC BLOOM: In Chicago, in Evanston, as you know, we have some very drastic seasonal changes, so a hot, humid summer day is going to affect the roast in ways that a cold, dry winter day wont. Over the past couple of years, Ive had to learn how to adjust my roasting style to kind of fit the temperature and the humidity level.

EMMA EDMUND: Oh, sorry, Neya and I are just prepping our coffee beans. But thats not to say there arent plenty of grab-and-go options in Evanston. Backlot is one of the 78,943 coffee shops on and around Northwesterns campus. No, not actually, but there are a lot. In downtown Evanston, theres Colectivo, Newport, Backlot, Patisserie Coralie, Philz, Peets and Sherbucks, the Starbucks on Sherman Avenue. Then theres Norbucks, which is the Starbucks on campus, BrewBike, Coffee Lab for our north campus friends by God, we all know they need caffeine and some fun and flirty coffee shops in the form of Brothers K, Reprise and Dollop. And dont get me started on the Chicago coffee shops

NEYA THANIKACHALAM: All right, all right, I think they get the picture. Evanston loves its caffeine. And, specifically, Evanston loves the idea of getting coffee.

ISAAC BLOOM: Its about giving time to something, making it special, making it a ritual, making it a part of your day, a part of your routine. So the experience of coffee lends so much to the final product that you take out into your day with you in a cup.

EMMA EDMUND: So what is it about that perfect cup of coffee, or tea, or whatever poison you pick, that makes it so addictive? NEYA groans. Sorry, sorry! Its almost Halloween, I had to. But is it the coffee shop vibes, with the cool indie music? Or the way you can study with your friends and cry over finals together? Or is it the coffee itself, brimming with caffeine?

NEYA THANIKACHALAM: Id say it all depends on how much caffeine is in my drink I like something strong, like an espresso or cold brew. Caffeine is great at keeping us up. Unfortunately, one of the effects of constantly drinking caffeinated beverages is developing a caffeine dependency. To speak more on this, Im going to turn it over to Dr. Marilyn Cornelis, who has spent much of her career looking into the ways that caffeine affects our brains. Maybe she can break it down a little for us.

MARILYN CORNELIS: I would say that there is definitely a caffeine dependence trait that people do have. But interestingly, if people are very interested in cutting back on their caffeine, its very possible to do that by just slowly tapering off the amount of caffeine and eventually those withdrawal symptoms do go away.

NEYA THANIKACHALAM: As a frequent coffee consumer, that did make me worry a little bit about how much I depend on caffeine. So, how much caffeine can we have in a day?

MARILYN CORNELIS: I wouldnt be too worried about 400 milligrams of caffeine a day. So thats about four to five cups of coffee a day.

EMMA EDMUND: OK, good to know how much coffee I can drink before keeling over. But why do I drink it? Or, for that matter, why do college students in general consume caffeine? Harris Lieberman, a research psychologist at the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, might have an answer. He studies the relationship between nutrition and brain function, and he also does a lot of work looking at how stress affects human behavior and psychology.

And as Neya said, the effects of caffeine can enhance mental and physical performance, making it of interest to the military, and, as it turns out, many soldiers are similar in age to us college kiddos. So Lieberman and his team researched caffeine use among college students as a marker of the civilian population compared to soldiers.

HARRIS LIEBERMAN: At some universities, they would administer it if the students volunteered, in-person, during a class, or after class had either ended or began.

EMMA EDMUND: Lieberman surveyed over 1,200 students at five colleges: Louisiana State, Kent State, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, California State University Fullerton, and Tufts. They represented the variety of four-year schools students across the country attend. The survey included questions on types of caffeinated products, including beverages, gum and medications.

NEYA THANIKACHALAM: And the results? Did people consume caffeine?

EMMA EDMUND: Yes oh yes. Ninety-two percent of respondents claimed to consume caffeine, with more females than males which, you know, guilty as charged. And people cited all kinds of reasons why, from feeling more awake to improving mood to even just liking the taste.

HARRIS LIEBERMAN: I think what we were a little surprised about was that almost all college students who use caffeine said they used it in some way to enhance their mental, and to a lesser extent, physical performance. We kind of have studied that, for many years, but we werent sure that we were going to find that typical individuals out there explicitly said thats why they use caffeine. If you talk to folks theyll often say I do it because, you know, its just my usual habit in the morning.

NEYA THANIKACHALAM: Well, glad to see science confirms my caffeine habits.

EMMA EDMUND: The real question is, should we stop this podcast to make some coffee?

NEYA THANIKACHALAM: Ooh, yes.

NEYA THANIKACHALAM: Sounds like our espressos are almost ready.

Lets sign off real quick. From The Daily Northwestern, Im Neya Thanikachalam.

EMMA EDMUND: And Im Emma Edmund. Thanks for listening to another episode of Brainstorm.

NEYA THANIKACHALAM: This episode was reported and produced by me, Neya Thanikachalam

EMMA EDMUND: And me, Emma Edmund. The audio editor is Alex Chun, the digital managing editors are Molly Lubbers and Jacob Ohara, and the editor-in-chief of The Daily Northwestern is Marissa Martinez. The co-host of this podcast is me, and if you want Caffeine Part Two: Electric Boogaloo, let us know and well make it happen. Maybe. Its midterm season.

NEYA THANIKACHALAM (from far away): Emma!

EMMA EDMUND: Sorry, sorry! Have a brew-tiful day!

Email: [emailprotected]

Email: [emailprotected]

Twitter: @emmaeedmund

Twitter: @neyachalam

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Brainstorm: Breaking down the science behind the bean - Daily Northwestern

Human Behavior

ASWSU hosts virtual event on environmental awareness The Daily Evergreen – The Daily Evergreen

Proposed solutions from climate change policy include innovating technology, changing human behavior

SCREENSHOT OF EVENT

There are several different routes that cancombat climate change, said Kara Whitman, instructor for WSUs School of the Environment.

The ASWSU Environmental Sustainability Alliance and TEDxWSU Countdown held an event featuring WSU faculty to discuss how climate change is impacting people locally and worldwide.

There are areas of the Arctic where a boat can be sailed through, said Von Walden, professor for WSUs Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The melting of Greenland, which is in the Arctic, is a significant contributor to climate change.

The Arctic region was the first place where changes were seen, he said.

In the western U.S., there are more wildfires and they are larger, he said. The fires from California generated so much smoke it was seen in Europe, Walden said.

If the [smoke] index gets over 500 [parts per million], it is beyond the EPA scale for human health, he said.

There are several different routes that cancombat climate change, said Kara Whitman, instructor for WSUs School of the Environment.

The climate change policy focuses on mitigation and adaptation, she said. The proposed solutions are innovating technology, putting a price on carbon, changing human behavior and creating a new economic system.

The goal is to make energy more efficient, she said. Sixty-three percent of the energy for residential, industrial and transportation use was wasted in 2019, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

There is a lot of concern over how we are going to meet the demand, she said. Are we going to add energy sources or address the inefficiencies in the use of energy?

Climate change affects all of us, said Deepti Singh, WSU Vancouver assistant professor in the School of the Environment.

Louisiana had one of the strongest hurricanes it has had in over 100 years, she said. A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture and moisture fuels these storms.

Each of these events will likely impact communities around the world, she said. Our first responders are experiencing anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.

There are people and animals who will be displaced for years because of the fires, Singh said.

Wildfires and hurricanes are worse because of a one degree Celsius increase, she said. Changing to energy-efficient devices and conserving energy in homes helps.

Humans are not understanding climate change because they are static thinkers and their thoughts are fragmented, said Chuck Pezeshki, professor for WSUs School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering and owner of the blog Empathy Guru.

We live in a trauma-soaked environment and we need to start connecting with other people, he said.

By having discussions with other people, the brain becomes more complex, he said. This is what is needed to come up with new ideas to solve climate change.

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ASWSU hosts virtual event on environmental awareness The Daily Evergreen - The Daily Evergreen