Category Archives: Human Behavior

Human Behavior

The Lowdown Revelations – Sarnia Observer

Recent times have made for vast introspect and reflection on past moments in my life; Ive found myself in a deep state of observation while I navigate my way through my days. My work helps bring normalcy while I confess to feeling guilty that many of you dont have the same outlet currently. It truly is difficult for every one of us in our own way and that is something I think is overlooked by many. Based on what I come across on social media and comment sections in news columns I am finding myself intrigued in what I am reading. There is a great opportunity to see society for what it is to many, by way of their contribution. You can see their intent, clear as day as their person self exposes who they really are in the depths between their sentences. This social behavior is frightening in its re-emergence once more in our cultural breath; my grandfather would have a hard time with this.

Its important for humans to fit in and there is a wave of collective belonging when it comes to COVID19. Like a movement, its crucial that the message is carried forward. Its bigger than all of us and there is a feeling of belonging to something. People want to fit in, and once they find their common circle, they can sometimes lash out at those who either choose to create their own place of comfort or those who choose to criticize. Similar behaviors occur in marketing; therefore, fads catch on. No one wants to be left behind, belonging is important to the collective physiology. I recall from my school days that if you wore Levi red tab jeans, you were in, your family had money. Orange tabs were a sign of poverty and came with ridicule and shame; I hated those jeans but wore them because I knew how hard my mother was trying.

As old as time, power ultimately corrupts regardless of social status. People who can dominate, immediately show their truculence in their commentary towards others who may not be falling into the same line as they have found their comfort and acceptance. Weve come a long way from that guy at the house party who spoke of counterculture truths that he believed about the government; He was not only cool but accepted. Today, weve made words like conspiracy, weapons of control when we ourselves may not hold enough information to counter what were struggling to comprehend. We only really know what we accept and somehow, weve come to where its encouraged to strip our neighbour of their right to disagree, with contempt. Many people lack the life experience to think critically on matters beyond their own point of view and want nothing more than to silence and discredit those who differ in opinion.

I dont think there is anything wrong, whatsoever, in understanding that natural human behavior occurs on all levels. Simply consider your immediate life as you read my words. If you hold any position today in your workplace and answer to someone above you, I guarantee that you do not know the all inner details of that business. Your top leadership has a vision that very likely hasnt been entirely cascaded down to you yet and there is a plethora of good reasons for this. In fact, in this very community, most people dont know who really runs Airdrie, let alone the pathway of decisions that have taken place to bring our city to where it is today. In saying all of that Im simply sharing my revelation to create an inner dialogue of hope, understanding and empathy for those we may not see parallel with.

One incredible thing I think Ive taken from COVID19 is what an essential worker really is. As Ive grown through life, Ive held a significant range of careers and jobs; Everything from dishwasher to headlining stand up comedian. Currently, I am a component repair machinist and a small business owner. Both deemed essential. Ive come across many people in my time who held their titles as the beacon of their value while openly chastising those theyve deemed as beneath them. Matter of fact, back in the middle 90s I worked as an Auto Tech and Service Writer at Walmart St. Vital in Winnipeg. One day a specific customer thought so little of my place in their imagined Caste system, they felt entitled to verbally and physically assault me for not immediately satisfying their unreasonable demand. Ironically today, both Walmart and the Hospital are considered essential and are open. I remember that day very well and as this man finished his assault, customers who transitioned organically by mere happenstance of their presence, became witnesses to this nonsense. After he left the store, those people immediately surrounded me with their kind words, support and general commentary of how this event made them feel. They all handed me their home phone numbers and offered their testimony to my defence if this situation should escalate to the store management, which it did.

In the end, were all just people. Regardless of the situation, together is the only way forward. Compassion teaches that listening is almost always a great approach to everything; a skill I confess to still be studying. The sad truth is, ignorance is like wisdom in that theyre both acquired as we go. Once possessed, we build the foundations of our lives from what weve learned.

Noam Chomsky once said, If we dont believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we dont believe in it at all.

Thanks again for reading The Lowdown. You can read this and archived columns at timlowing.com.

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The Lowdown Revelations - Sarnia Observer

Human Behavior

Jez Rose on being vulnerable, human, and proactive at work – HR Dive

Jez Rose is a man of many successes. Hes a broadcaster, award-winning writer, speaker, and host, and he lives on the world's first certified carbon neutral honey farm, helping to reverse Britain's honeybee decline.

In anticipation of his keynote for Perspectives 2020, we connected with Jez to talk about topics ranging from vulnerability and authenticity, to being proactive, human, and connected to nature in the workplace.

Here are some key highlights and takeaways from the interview.

I've spent a lot of time in 15 years working with senior leadership teams and at the board level and one of the things I think I'm a bit more intrinsically aware of now that resonates much deeper is the need for authenticity and vulnerability. I think this whole global situation has demonstrated just how vulnerable we are and just how much we need connection with people.

There's an old maxim in healthcare, which is: "Patients don't need to know how much you know, but they need to know how much you care." And I think there's a really interesting takeaway, in that vulnerability is about being human.

It doesn't make you any less of a good person; it doesn't make you any less competent at your job. In fact, if anything, it makes you better at both of those things, because you expose yourself to the fact youre just human. To be able to hold up your hands and say, "I don't know, I don't have the answer, but together, let's find the answer is a very powerful way of moving groups of people forward.

We know that, for example, minimal interactions with nature change us. You can have a potted plant on your desk, and the presence of a plant on your desk increases happiness and efficiency by as much as 15%, and those people also score happier and enjoy their immediate working environment.

The greater the void between our connection with nature, the more unhappy and the less effective we are as human beings.

Even seeing pictures of nature or having a potted plant on your desk, even in the most technical job involving a computer all day, will make you happier and more efficient, and you'll enjoy your immediate working environment simply by having a connection with nature.

There are two questions I encourage everybody to ask themselves, both at home and at work, and it's a two-step process. The first question is, "What are we doing?" And the second is, "Why are we doing it?" Because it offers you immediate recognition, to just take a moment to pause.

The "what" is very important, but the "why" is fundamentally important because that's what drives all human behavior. So why we're doing what we're doing is very important.

No behavior just happens. Every behavior is caused; it happens for a reason. And those organizations and individuals that seem to achieve really remarkable things are the people who don't wait for behaviors to happen and then react; those are the people who are proactive. They say, "Okay what's the desirable consequence? What's the end result we're looking for? Now, how do we influence the right behaviors to achieve the right consequence?"

And it sounds like a relatively complex construct, but it's just exactly what we do right now, but the other way around. Most people kind of start at the beginning, step by step by step, and end up with a behavior; they end up having to manage a consequence.

But what I'm saying is, let's look at it the other way around, long-term. What do we want to achieve now? Then work our way backwards, one step at the time, to where we are right now, so we know how we can influence behavior to create something more extraordinary.

If youd like to hear more from Jez, listen to our full podcast interview on the Perspectives 2020 homepage. And if youd like to tune into his upcoming keynote speech on May 13, register for Perspectives 2020 for a 24-hour digital learning experience that includes Jezs and other keynotes, debates, courses, and moreall for free!

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Human Behavior

The importance of business culture in a time of crisis – ZDNet

Peter Drucker famously said that culture eats strategy for lunch. I believe a healthy culture would invite strategy to lunch, engage with intent to learn and grow during lunch, and then pick up the tab. In a hyper-connected, knowledge-sharing economy, your company culture is your brand. And the collective behavior -- collective thoughts, words, and actions -- of your employees will reveal your culture, core values, and guiding principles. A simple definition of culture that I used to convey to management was this: culture is what happens when the managers leave the room. Do employees make the right decisions, that benefit all stakeholders, at the right time, for the right reason, even in the absence of authority? If the answer is yes, then you have a healthy culture of trust, empowerment, and care. The benefits of a healthy culture are magnified during difficult times.

"Bad companies are destroyed by crisis, good companies survive them, great companies are improved by them." --Andy Grove

Throughout my career, I've worked with some extraordinary business leaders who helped turn unhealthy companies into growing and profitable businesses by transforming their culture. To better understand the importance of strong company culture and its benefits during a crisis, I connected with one such senior executive who I consider to be a business culture transformational expert.

Brad Martin is executive vice president of operations at ATN International. Martin previously served as chief operating officer for Senet Inc., a leading "low power wide area" network (LPWAN) operator and global service provider. Martin also served as senior vice president and chief quality officer with Extreme Networks, a global leader in software-driven networking solutions for Enterprise and Service Provider customers. Martin and I co-authored the bookThe Pursuit of Social Business Excellencewhen he served as vice president of engineering operations and quality with Siemens Enterprise Communications and Enterasys Networks.

We wrote the book because our company was named the fourth best place to work in Boston out of more than 1,600 companies, we were growing revenue and headcount, and we had built a strong company culture that we were both very proud of. Martin is one of the smartest, hardest working and caring senior executive that I have ever had the privilege of working with. I have learned many lessons about how to lead an organization, how to adopt a growth mindset, and how to place stakeholder success and trust as key core values from Martin.

Brad Martin, executive vice president of business operations at ATN International.

Martin is an award-winning cultural transformation and growth expert practitioner and thought leader. I asked Martin to share his thoughts about the importance of business culture during a crisis. Here's what Martin had to say:

Businesses in today's pandemic and quarantine environment have a choice. Adopt a culture of business agility to move your business forward in this new environment, or fall further behind. High-performance companies have already done this. They will thrive in this environment, and leave the crisis in a better competitive position then they were going into it. What does "culture of business agility" mean in today's business environment? If you can sum up in one word, it is "digitization."

Of course, having a digitally enabled business has many different contexts. A digitally enabled culture is underpinned by technology, a culture of adoption and management styles that encourage and reward communication, transparency, collaboration, respect, accountability, and fun. Reading about high-performance companies and their culture is important but what matters most is the relevant application of these cultural traits, and how the value of these traits is truly magnified in a crisis.

There are four questions to ask as you manage a business during a crisis (or anytime for that matter):

One area where all four of these pillars intersects is business digitization. Digitization helps your business be easier to interact with, whether that is purchasing product, provisioning service, paying bills or servicing and supporting your customers and partners.

Digitization helps your employees by making business processes simpler, faster and more accurate. It also helps your employees collaborate, communicate and to drive accountability cross-functionally. Digitization helps your stakeholders in ensuring that the business is optimized for speed, profitability, and agility for future growth. Digitization helps the societies in which your business operates by simplifying daily work life, simplifying service delivery, making governments for efficient, driving social messaging and awareness in a time of need.

There are thousands of tools and techniques to drive a digital strategy. All of which can make a major difference in your business. These tools and techniques will all fall short of expectations if the culture in your business is not appropriately defined, documented, taught, modeled, and supported each day. To define your culture is step one. Without definition, your culture will evolve to the lowest common denominator. This is no way to run a high-performance business with intent. In defining your culture there are many "words" that a company can use to capture the essence of your business and it's aspirations.

In Martin's experience, it is very beneficial to start with the following three elements:

1. A cultural theme needs to reflect the "why?" - Business leaders need to make a conscious decision to shift away from talking about "what we do" and "how we do" it, to instead talking about "what we believe in."

"People don't buy what you do; people buy why you do it." -- @SimonSinek

Your business cultural theme must reflect your "why." This will encourage and inspire employees, customers, stakeholders, and community members to support, and patronize your business for delivering optimized outcomes in a time of crisis or in time of business growth and prosperity.

Our Belief and our "Why": "Driving customer success through service excellence"

2. The definition of the word "culture" -There are many definitions of the word culture. It'd definition is important so that people understand its meaning and importance to human behavior.

The definition we have used: Culture: A shared, learned system of values and beliefs that shapes and influences perception and behavior.

3. Your summary cultural attributes for your business -The list of cultural attributes (or core values) needs to be simple, short, relatable and fundamentally supportive of your "why" or cultural theme. For our business, we chose six cultural attributes or traits: Communication, collaboration, accountability, transparency, respect, and fun.

A consistent definition of culture, and core values, is key to building alignment and commitment throughout your business.

These three steps help to set the table with the basics for cultural definitions. But we are all people with individual behaviors, and sometimes our behaviors are not perfect. It is crucially important to recognize that companies are made up of imperfect people. We all have good days and bad days at work, at home and in life in general. A very powerful addition to your cultural definition is to provide contrasting traits or behaviors that support and behaviors that do not support your culture. This simple aspect of behavioral definition and recognition helps to empower your employees and colleagues with three core beliefs:

The power of contrasting behavior definition provides each one of your employees a map and guide to how they can not only support the culture definition of your business but also to recognize and reward behaviors of their colleagues, employees, and management.

A healthy culture defines comparison behaviors -- positive and negative.

In a time of crisis, these cultural definitions will ensure that your teams and colleagues are aligned, organized and working with the intent to deliver value to the business. In normal circumstances, companies have field offices, headquarters, and stores that define groups and behaviors due to proximity. In today's work environment, physical proximity to your co-workers is not an option. You must embrace digital proximity, and empower this digital proximity with the best business culture to support your customers, employees, stakeholders, and community.

At ATN International, we deliver services in very different environments across multiple countries, cultures, social, and geographical demographics, and economic maturity models. What common behaviors of customers do we see across markets? Stakeholders want great service, supportive business models of mobile and remote individuals, "ease of engagement and connection to their communities. As a business in a community, it is crucial to support all of these common needs and wants. Your business culture can help enable your customers, but it typically does not happen by accident. You must be intentional with your culture in its definition, its support and its recognition. These actions will enable your business for optimized agility. Optimized agility will allow businesses to exit this epidemic more competitive, and well-positioned to grow market share and to grow employee and customer satisfaction.

This article was co-authored by Brad Martin, Executive Vice President Of Business Operations atATN International.

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The importance of business culture in a time of crisis - ZDNet

Human Behavior

NEI researchers link age-related DNA modifications to susceptibility to eye disease – National Institutes of Health

News Release

Tuesday, April 21, 2020

Findings point to targeting epigenome as a potential therapeutic strategy.

National Eye Institute (NEI) researchers profiling epigenomic changes in light-sensing mouse photoreceptors have a clearer picture of how age-related eye diseases may be linked to age-related changes in the regulation of gene expression. The findings, published online April 21 in Cell Reports, suggest that the epigenome could be targeted as a therapeutic strategy to prevent leading causes of vision loss, such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD). NEI is part of the National Institutes of Health.

Our study elucidates the molecular changes and biological pathways linked with aging of rod photoreceptors, light-sensing cells of the retina. Future investigations can now move forward to study how we can prevent or delay vision loss in aging and hopefully reduce the risk of associated neurodegeneration said the studys lead investigator, Anand Swaroop, Ph.D., senior investigator and chief of the NEI Neurobiology, Neurodegeneration, and Repair Laboratory.

Each organism is born with a genome, a library of genes that control all the bodys cellular and tissue functions. Expression of those genes when information stored in DNA is converted into instructions for making proteins or other molecules is modulated and maintained by the organisms epigenome. The epigenome tags the DNA code to modify gene expression in ways that can be favorable and unfavorable for survival.

As it turns out, that interplay between the genome and the epigenome evolves as the organism ages. Scientists therefore study epigenomic DNA modifications for clues about why certain diseases develop with advancing age.

To explore how such DNA modifications might influence visual function as we age, Swaroops team performed whole genome sequencing of DNA methylation changes in mouse rod photoreceptors at four separate stages over the animals lifetime. DNA methylation is an epigenetic mechanism essential for normal cell development and differentiation, and is also associated with aging and the formation of cancers. When present, DNA methylation generally represses gene expression.

The sequencing was performed at ages three months (young), 12 months (middle-aged), and 18 and 24 months (older). The average lifespan of a mouse is about two years.

Rod photoreceptors are the predominant type of cell in the retina, the light-sensing tissue at the back of the eye. Rod photoreceptors enable dim-light vision, and are critical for the survival of cone photoreceptors that enable daylight and color vision. Rod dysfunction is common in older human adults and can be an early warning sign of AMD and other retinal degenerative diseases.

The researchers identified 2,054 differentially methylated regions across the four mouse age groups, that is, genomic regions with differences in DNA methylation.

We know that DNA methylation changes are strongly associated with biological age, but prior to this study we had limited understanding of how these alterations correlated with cellular function, Swaroop said. This is the first study to look at DNA methylation changes as animals age. Very few studies have looked at DNA methylation changes in people with AMD, a leading cause of vision loss in people age 50 and older, which can progress even when vision loss is undetectable.

The researchers then analyzed the differentially methylated regions with RNA sequencing data to look more closely at how the mouse genes were transcribing proteins differently in the retina as the animals aged.

Those analyses uncovered distinct shifts in how the genes produced proteins relevant to energy metabolism, mitochondria function, and the longevity of rod photoreceptors, indicating their contribution to age-related disease susceptibility.

Rod photoreceptors require vast amounts of energy to sustain vision and are thus vulnerable to metabolic stresses that accompany aging. Energy deprivation of photoreceptors is believed to be a key driver of neurodegeneration of the retina.

Neurons, specifically photoreceptors, prefer glucose as a source of energy, but in aging, we surprisingly observed utilization of fatty acids as well. These studies suggest how changes in aging rod functions can make them vulnerable to genetic susceptibility variations and environmental factors, which together cause common blinding aging-associated diseases, Swaroop said.

Our work provides pivotal connections between aging, the epigenome, dysfunction of the cells mitochondria, and diseases such as AMD. The findings have broad implications for how we understand age-associated neurodegeneration, not only in the eye, but elsewhere in the body, he said.

Future studies will assess whether DNA methylation contributes to alterations in the expression of metabolic genes and thus introduce epigenomic editing as a therapeutic possibility for age-related retinal disease, said the studys first author, Ximena Corso-Daz, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in the Neurobiology, Neurodegeneration, and Repair Laboratory.

The study was supported by NEI Intramural Research Program grants ZIAEY000450 and ZIAEY000456.

This press release describes a basic research finding. Basic research increases our understanding of human behavior and biology, which is foundational to advancing new and better ways to prevent, diagnose, and treat disease. Science is an unpredictable and incremental process each research advance builds on past discoveries, often in unexpected ways. Most clinical advances would not be possible without the knowledge of fundamental basic research.

NEI leads the federal governments research on the visual system and eye diseases. NEI supports basic and clinical science programs to develop sight-saving treatments and address special needs of people with vision loss. For more information, visit https://www.nei.nih.gov.

About the National Institutes of Health (NIH):NIH, the nation's medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit http://www.nih.gov.

NIHTurning Discovery Into Health

Corso-Daz X, Gentry J, Rebernick R, Jaeger C, Brooks MJ, Asten FV, Kooragayala K, Gieser L, Nelissery J, Covian R, Cogliati T, Mondal AK, Jiang K, Swaroop A. Genomewide profiling identifies DNA methylation signatures of aging in rod photoreceptors associated with alterations in energy metabolism. Published April 21, 2020 in Cell Reports. DOI 10.1016/j.celrep.2020.107525

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NEI researchers link age-related DNA modifications to susceptibility to eye disease - National Institutes of Health

Human Behavior

What Kind of Love Is Enough For Relationships? – Thrive Global

People say that love is not enough to keep a relationship working. However, the love I am referring to here is not personal, romantic love. I am referring to the unconditional love that is the essence of who we are. This love is transformative and available no matter what the state of a relationship. And when we experiencing it, it is the best state of mind from which to make relationship decisions. Unconditional love is available, and it does not mean unconditional relationship, but it allows for truly self-honoring choices to be made that reflect authentic empowerment and inner wisdom.

Love is an experiential knowing of who you are. I am not speaking of desire or lust. I am speaking of an impersonal love where the interests of the personal self fall away and human behavior reflects this impersonal love.

This is the kind of love that allows humans to sacrifice our need for survival and willingly, without a thought, save anothers life. It opens up a reservoir of capacity within that is infinite and profoundly uplifting.

This love may sound extreme, but it is more available than we realize because it is who we are. There is a source within that is beyond personal survival because it is the same source that is inside of each of us. We are all called to experience this unconditional love and the freedom within that experience.

This experience of unconditional, impersonal love is more powerful at transforming relationships than psychology. The realization that we are greater than our personal biological needs for survival is freeing and eye-opening. It also frees us from needing to feel a certain way to be okay. This allows us to relax into our moment-to-moment experience and let go of the desire to feel or be different. This is liberating.

It is this freedom from the personal that favors impersonal experience that helps relations be more fun and work better.

This might sound like it would be hard to do. And it is when we focus on our psychology, it is. Psychology is about how to get our emotional needs met. How do we feel better? This puts the personal front and center when it comes to relationships. It is impossible for each person to put their psychology front and center and get along. It is too difficult to come into sync that way. One person needs closeness. One person needs space. Finding the overlaps of compatibility is hard work, and oftentimes, the common ground can look very small. That is the nature of our capricious psyches. They are ever-changing and self-focused. The survival of the body evolves into wanting our emotional needs to get met, and this is usually at the expense of the other person getting their emotional needs met. Compromise becomes the norm and is the perfect breeding ground for resentment. Relationships teeter on a precarious balance of give and take with fairness needing to be measured out on a daily basis. And it never feels fair.

The aliveness of love is suffocated by the attempts to fabricate a fairness that does not exist on the human level. I remember my step-father saying to me, Life is not fair. Or the saying, All is fair in love and war. But this inherent unfairness is not a bad thing.

What I mean by that is the unfairness in relationships requires us to grow beyond our personal needs in order to experience a greater good that is more beautiful and profound than what we have known from our individualistic self.

This is a common description used when people talk about loving their children. New parents will often say to me they did not know that a love so profound was possible. In this new experience, they are open to the impersonal love that puts the requirements of the personal ego aside and simply feels what is beyond personal psychology. There is a feeling greater than our individual needs getting met. And I think most would agree good parenting has nothing to do with fairness and parents getting their egoic needs met.

This kind of love does not need to be limited to our children. It is an experience that is available within us. It seems to get more easily evoked by babies, puppies, kittens etc, but it is who you are. And it is where the solution to relationship problems lies.

Romantic, sexual partnerships can help wake us up to our impersonal nature of love. This can happen naturally. It can also be chosen intentionally.

If you had a romantic beginning to your relationship, the power of love that brought you together was not personal. You might have felt magnetically drawn to one person, but what you were experiencing was within you. It is who you are.

For relationships that get into trouble, the balance shifts from this impersonal experience of love that has enormous room for our partners eccentricities and foibles to an experience of personal needs not getting met and needing to be satisfied.

Psychology offers strategies and techniques to try and get those needs met more effectively, but what it doesnt offer is the guidance to look beyond your emotional experience and human survival needs to your true nature of unconditional love.

Ultimately, that is what we all want. A deeper experience of that. And we dont get that from our partner no matter how nice they become and how thoughtful they learn to be. We get that from dropping into that space within ourselves where we realize we are greater than the sum of our human parts. We are infinite. That realization gives us the experience of love and from there we can enjoy our relationship, or, from love, not reactivity, choose to end our relationship.

This is so helpful to relationships because the relationship and our partner no longer have the burden of meeting our deepest need for love that they cant fulfill. Without this requirement, it becomes so much easier to enjoy each others humanness and the relationship, as well as share in the experience of love.

The realization that our true nature is love, and that is what fills us up, takes the pressure off the relationship. And consequently, this lack of pressure brings out the best in us. Our natural qualities of empathy, compassion, and kindness come to the surface, so all of the human preferences we were trying to get met previously are actually met more often and more easily. And, when they arent, because we know our source of love lies within, the fundamental unfairness of being human and not getting our emotional needs met all the time becomes so much more manageable.

Rohini Rossis passionate about helping people wake up to their full potential. She is a transformative coach, leadership consultant, a regular blogger for Thrive Global, and author of the short-readMarriage (The Soul-Centered Series Book 1)available on Amazon. You can get her free eBookRelationshipshere.Rohini has an international coaching and consulting practice based in Los Angeles helping individuals, couples, and professionals embrace all of who they are so they can experience greater levels of well-being, resiliency, and success. She is also the founder ofThe Soul-Centered Series: Psychology, Spirituality, and the Teachings of Sydney Banks.You can follow Rohini onFacebook,Twitter, andInstagram, and watch herVlogswith her husband. To learn more about her work go to her website,rohiniross.com.

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What Kind of Love Is Enough For Relationships? - Thrive Global

Human Behavior

A Brief History of Chimps in Space – Discover Magazine

Long before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin famously set foot on the moon, the hero of Americas human spaceflight program was a chimpanzee named Ham. On Jan. 31, 1961 a few months before Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarins pioneering flight Ham became the first hominid in space.

Other nonhominid animals had ventured into space before Ham, but he and his fellow astrochimps were trained to pull levers and prove it was physically possible to pilot the Project Mercury spacecraft. And, unlike many other unfortunate primates in the spaceflight program, Ham survived his mission and went on to have a long life.

Ham proved that mankind could live and work in space, reads his grave marker in New Mexico.

Miss Baker, a squirrel monkey, shown just before her flight to space in 1958 on a Jupiter rocket an intermediate-range ballistic missile designed to carry nuclear warheads, not monkeys. Miss Baker and another monkey, a rhesus macaque named Able, both survived the flight and became the first animals the U.S. returned safely from space. (Credit: NASA)

The U.S. Air Force was the first to launch primates into space. Instead of chimps, smaller monkeys were their preferred choice. But those early missions didnt go well for either human or animal.

In 1948, a decade before the creation of NASA, the Air Force strapped a male rhesus monkey named Albert into a capsule on top of a souped-up, Nazi-designed V-2 rocket and launched it from White Sands, New Mexico. Poor Albert suffocated before he reached space.

The next year, a monkey named Albert II was sent on a similar mission. Unlike his predecessor, Albert II succeeded in becoming the first monkey to survive a launch and reach space. Unfortunately, on his journey home, Albert II died when the capsules parachute failed. His spacecraft left a 10-foot-wide crater in the New Mexico desert.

In 1951, the Air Force finally managed to keep a monkey this one named Albert VI alive through both launch and landing. But his capsule failed to reach the boundary of space, leaving him out of the record books.

The honor of first primates to survive a return trip to space goes to a squirrel monkey named Miss Baker, and a rhesus macaque named Able. The pair were launched in 1959 on a Jupiter rocket, an intermediate-range ballistic missile designed to carry nuclear warheads, not monkeys. Sadly, Able died just days after returning to Earth due to complications from a medical procedure.

Ham the astrochimp wears his spacesuit complete with NASA meatball logo prior to his 1961 test flight into space. (Credit: NASA)

While America was struggling to send monkeys into space, their adversaries were racking up animal success stories. Rather than monkeys, the Soviet Union preferred to crew their early spacecraft with stray dogs. And by the time of Miss Bakers and Ables trip, the country had already safely launched and landed dozens of canines. (Though they also experienced a number of gruesome dog deaths.)

By the early 1960s, the U.S. was ready for its first real human spaceflight program, Project Mercury. But instead of monkeys or humans the nascent National Aeronautics and Space Administration decided its inaugural class of astronauts would be chimps.

Monkeys, chimps and humans are all primates. However, chimpanzees and humans are both hominids, which means were much more closely related. In fact, humans share more DNA with chimps than with any other animal.

Beyond their genetic similarities to humans, chimps are also incredibly smart and have complex emotions. This is why NASA figured that if chimps could endure the trip beyond Earths atmosphere in primitive early space capsules, there was a good chance a human astronaut could survive the journey, too.And, whereas monkeys and dogs had been mere passengers, NASA needed a test subject with the intelligence and dexterity to actually prove it could operate a spacecraft.

As NASA put it: Intelligent and normally docile, the chimpanzee is a primate of sufficient size and sapience to provide a reasonable facsimile of human behavior.

All told, the U.S. government acquired 40 chimps for its Mercury program. And one of those males was Ham. He had been captured by trappers in the French Cameroons and taken to the Miami Rare Bird Farm in Florida. From there, Ham and others were soon sold to the military and transferred to Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.

The chimps received daily training, including some of the same G-force exposure simulations as their human Mercury 7 counterparts. But, most importantly, handlers taught Ham and the other chimps to pull a lever every time a blue light came on. If they performed the task, they got a tiny banana treat. If they failed, they got a small electric shock to their feet.

Over the course of the training, handlers winnowed the final group of astrochimps down to just six, including four females and two males. Then, with their training complete, the Air Force sent the hominids to Cape Canaveral in Florida on Jan. 2, 1961.

Out of the six chimps, NASA and an Air Force veterinarian ultimately selected Ham, then known as No. 65. He was chosen just before his flight because he seemed particularly feisty and in good humor, according to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

Ham gives the commander of the USS Donner a handshake. (Credit: NASA)

Those traits would pay off during the mission. Following his launch on Jan. 31, 1961, Hams Mercury capsule unintentionally carried him far higher and faster than NASA intended. His capsule also partially lost air pressure, though the chimp was unharmed because he was sealed inside an inner chamber.

Well never know what Ham was thinking during his six and a half minutes of weightlessness. But, like the later human Mercury astronauts, Ham could have seen out of the capsules small porthole window.

As far as his mission was concerned, Ham successfully pulled his lever at the proper time, performing only a tad slower than he had during practice runs on Earth. By simply tugging on a lever, Ham proved that human astronauts could perform basic physical tasks in orbit, too.

Roughly 16 and a half minutes after launch, Ham splashed down in the ocean. And although the capsule took on some water while recovery crews converged, the chimp seemed unfazed once aboard the rescue ship USS Donner even shaking the commanders hand. Ham eventually became the subject of documentaries and cartoons and graced the covers of national magazines.

He lived out the rest of his life in the North Carolina Zoo, where he died in 1983 at age 25.

Following Ham, just one other chimp would ever journey to space. Enos, who was also bought from the Miami Rare Bird Farm and trained alongside Ham, orbited Earth on Nov. 29, 1961. He was the third hominid to circle our planet, following cosmonauts Gagarin and Gherman Titov.

In the decades since, many other types of monkeys have flown to space on U.S., Russian, Chinese, French and Iranian spacecraft. NASA continued sending monkeys to orbit all the way into the 1990s, when pressure from animal rights groups, including PETA, pushed the space agency to reexamine the ethics of such research. As a result, NASA pulled out of the Bion program, a series of joint missions with Russia that was intended to study the impact of spaceflight on living organisms.

These animals performed a service to their respective countries that no human could or would have performed, says NASAs history of animals in spaceflight webpage. They gave their lives and/or their service in the name of technological advancement, paving the way for humanitys many forays into space.

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A Brief History of Chimps in Space - Discover Magazine

Human Behavior

The 5 Primary Stressors and Their Coping Mechanisms – The Great Courses Daily News

By Mark Leary, Ph.D., Duke UniversityWorkplace problems are one of the five major chronic stressors. (Image: KieferPix/Shutterstock)

The five major categories of stressors are exceptionally common and virtually unavoidable, which also helps to explain why so many people are so stressed out.

The most common ongoing source of stress is money. Financial problems show up as the most common source of stress in America, according to many studies.

Even in a developed country like the United States, where the standard of living is high on average, many people dont have enough to pay the bills. And even people who have enough money for the basics of life live with the chronic stress of knowing that they dont have enough for the extra expenses that will arise.

Learn more about why do hurt feelings hurt.

Personal relationships also add to peoples stress. Of course, relationships are often a great source of pleasure and support. But relationships are also cauldrons of stress. Marital difficulties, conflicts with children, and arguments with family members can all create stress, particularly when the problems are protracted.

People also experience a good deal of stress because of work and school. Studies show that less than 50 percent of employees are happy with their jobs, and many people live with the constant threat of losing their job. And similarly, academic pressures also puts students under a good deal of chronic stress.

Health problems are the fourth major source of stress. Being ill or injured or learning that you have a serious medical condition or must undergo medical procedures are major causes of stress for everybody, at one time or another in their lives.

The fifth category is regarding what might seem to be relatively trivial situations and events: the daily hassles and irritants that we experience on an ongoing basis.

Just driving to work through heavy traffic is stressful for many people. Trying to balance work and family life is stressful. Putting up with the neighbors loud music or a barking dog also creates stress. Life is filled with these sorts of events that add to our stress.

Like the other four categories, these daily hassles, irritants, and frustrations are also unavoidable, and they add to the stress that people experience.

Learn more about why do we have emotions.

So, stress is a part of life. But as we look around, its easy to see that people differ in how well they cope with the stresses in their lives. Some people seem to come unglued at every turn and have lots of stress-induced problems, while other people seem to roll a little better with the punches.

In their efforts to understand the causes of stress and why some people manage stress better than other people, behavioral researchers have conducted a good deal of research on how different people relate to stress.

For instance, when people are exposed to a stressful situation or event, they evaluate the situation firsthow threatening is it? And they also judge their own ability to cope with the issuecan I handle this problem?

This is a transcript from the video series Understanding the Mysteries of Human Behavior. Watch it now, on The Great Courses Plus.

For example, people with type A personality experience more stress than people who are low in type A, also known as type B personality. And theres evidence that they are also more likely to have health problems that are due to stress, such as heart disease. So, why are type A people more stressed out than other people?

Type A people experience more stress because they genuinely experience more stressful events. And they experience more stressful events because they are engaged in a struggle to do more and more in less and less time. So, people with type A personality create lives for themselves in which they have too much to do. And as a result, they experience chronic stress from trying to squeeze too many things into too little time.

On top of that, a central aspect of being type A is having a sense of time urgencythe sense of never having enough time to get everything donewhich, of course, can be stressful for anyone. But the reason that people who are high in type A dont have enough time is that they try to do too much.

Another personality characteristic that is associated with high stress is neuroticism. Neuroticism involves the degree to which people experience negative emotions, such as anger, anxiety, sadness, and yes, even stress. They experience great stress when big negative things happen, but they also get more upset by minor daily hassles.

One reason why people high in neuroticism experience greater stress is because they are more likely to interpret ordinary situations as threatening and to view minor frustrations as hopelessly difficult. They dont necessarily experience more negative events, but they find ordinary problems and hassles more stressful.

Weve mentioned two personality characteristics associated with a good deal of stresstype A personality and neuroticism; so, lets close with a characteristic that has lower stressand thats self-compassion.

We all know what it means to have compassion toward other peopleto show others care and concern when things are going badly for someone else. Self-compassion is the same sort of compassionate reaction, except its directed at ones self.

How does one treat oneself when life goes badly? Many of us are really hard on ourselves in such situations, and particularly when were the ones who messed things up.

But some people are particularly forgiving and kind toward themselves when things go badly. They treat themselves with the same kind of caring and concern as they show to their loved ones when bad things happen. And a good deal of recent research shows that people who are self-compassionate experience less stress than people who are not self-compassionate.

People who are self-compassionate deal much better with stressful events for two reasons: They dont heap unnecessary self-criticism on themselves when things go badly, and they actually go out of their way to be nice to themselves when stressful events occur.

Learn more about what makes people happy.

Stress is a major problem for many people, one that undermines the quality of their lives and can lead to a variety of health problems. Though a certain amount of stress is unavoidable, its also true that we create a great deal of stress ourselves.

In either case, learning how to cope with life in ways that minimize stress is an important life skill. And its never too late to begin learning.

The coping mechanisms of stress are broadly categorized as active or avoidant. Activeusually involves an awareness of the stressor and our conscious attempts to reduce the stress, whereas avoidant method concentrates on either avoiding or forgetting the stressor.

The three things that could cause chronic stress are the death of a loved one, chronic illness or injury, and loss of a job or increase in financial obligations.

The coping efficacy is defined as a persons belief that they have the ability to impact their own well- being, as it pertains to their problems, either physically or emotionally, through their own actions.

Stressors in life could be related to finances, personal relationships, work and school, health problems, or daily hassles and irritants.

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The 5 Primary Stressors and Their Coping Mechanisms - The Great Courses Daily News

Human Behavior

Watching the Giant Sequoias Die – Slate

Photo by welcomia/iStock/Getty Images Plus

Each week this summer I snapped pictures of giant sequoias. Each week I documented their sparse, browning needles. They were dying. I was trying to track it.

Giant sequoias are special; they are both incomprehensibly massive and ancient. Reaching upward of 250 feet tall and over 100 feet in circumference, sequoias are among the largest living things on Earth. They can live to be 3,000 years old, which means that some giant sequoias alive today were here when King Solomon ruled Israel, Zoroaster prophesied, and the Mayan civilization arose. Of course they werent actually there in ancient Israel, Persia, or Central Americabecause sequoias are also rare, found only in about 75 isolated groves on the western slope of Californias Sierra Nevada. But statistics like those dont even begin to convey what makes giant sequoias special. You have to be there, to feel just how small you are, to see the Sierra sunshine illuminate a sequoias cinnamon-red trunk, to really understand. In the summertime, I get to work among these trees. For the past 12 years, Ive worked as a seasonal ranger in Yosemite National Park, leading visitors through the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias, in the parks south end, pointing out all the ways these trees are extraordinary.

Giant sequoias are so good at surviving that you almost never see a dead standing sequoia, I used to tell visitors. They keep living and growing for thousands of years, until they finally get too top-heavy for their shallow root systems to support. Then they topple over. I dont say that anymore.

Because now giant sequoias are starting to die where they stand. And its been my job to document it. Last summer, our park botanist requested a photo log of declining sequoia health. So each week when I was out in the field, I took pictures of several groups of dying sequoias, snapping photos from the same GPS point each time. Then I carefully labeled each photo with the date and location and dropped it into a folder on the parks internal network. These photos wont do anything to save the trees. But it seems important, somehow, to provide our grandchildren with some kind of record of the time we realized we might be losing the largest trees on Earth.

Now giant sequoias are starting to die where they stand. And its been my job to documentit.

Giant sequoia mortality is complicated and, as with all facets of science, attribution is difficult. But climate change is one suspectit appears to be affecting giant sequoia survival in other parts of their range. Perhaps this mortality is due to drought and heat, the direct effects of climate change in this region. Maybe its some kinds of beetles, some species of which are proliferating at exponential rates in warmer temperatures, unmolested by the cold snaps we used to get around here that once kept their numbers in check. Maybe its something else altogether. Its almost certainly a combination of factors. I dont know exactly whats going on; I only know that some groups of sequoias are visibly dying now, and they werent just a few years ago.

In graduate school I studied climate change communicationthe ways in which scientists, institutions, and laypeople perceive and talk about climate change. The received wisdom in this field holds that climate change is difficult to see because it happens gradually, making it imperceptible on a day-to-day scale. This is why, according to the experts, lots of people dont believe its happening. Maybe that used to be true, but I dont think its true anymore. Trees are dying, and people notice. Australia has gone up in flames, leading to the death of 1 billion animals, and people notice. Some part of California is likely to be on fire at any given time, and people notice. Droughts stretch on for years here in the American West, and people notice. Back east and along the Gulf Coast, hurricanes and flooding are ramping up, and people notice.

In fact, now more Americans than ever understand that climate change is happening. Seven in 10 believe it is. Thats not to say they all understand the scientific reality that human activity is the cause of climate changesome surveys shows that barely more than half of Americans believe the scientific consensus that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are to blame. And most wont do much about it, even if they realize its happening and realize our emissions are causing it. One poll conducted in 2018 found that 70 percent of Americans would be unwilling to contribute just $10 a month, the cost of a Netflix subscription, to combat climate change.

I didnt need a poll to tell me that. Just look at our behavior. Last May, the United Nations released a report on the massive extinction currently underway due to human activity. I wasnt all that surprised, but some part of me thought that maybe the tragic report would spur some kind of conservation action. Instead, within months of the reports release, humans were intentionally burning the Amazon. Here in the United States, the Trump administration proposed rollbacks to the Endangered Species Act, nixed greenhouse gas emissions limits, greenlit oil drilling projects in sensitive Arctic habitat, loosened restrictions on the fossil fuel industry, and much, much more. We are never going to wake up, I realized.

There are moments when I think maybe we will wake up. In September, 6 million people around the world participated in global climate protests. Anger was welling up and spilling into action, and I felt more hopeful than I had in a long time, even as I continued to snap pictures of ailing sequoias. But now, only a few months later, our attention is elsewhere. As a pandemic radically alters our day-to-day lives, its unsurprising that nearly every headline is about the coronavirus. But climate change continues to have serious impacts on just about every ecosystem on Earth. It will take long-term focus and the ability to reckon with multiple crises at once, along with sustained public outcry, to put enough pressure on our existing political and economic systems to force them to change. Maybe well see that kind of long-lasting focus and outcry at some point in the future, but were not seeing it yet. And while the all-consuming pandemic will presumably end at some point, there will inevitably be another crisis, another election, another distraction, to suck our attention away from the climate catastrophe. So now Im trying to come to terms with the fact that I will spend the rest of my life watching the world I love burn up, one beautiful species after another going up in flames.

In September, 6 million people around the world participated in global climate protests. Anger was welling up and spilling into action, and I felt more hopeful than I had in a longtime.

Nate Stephenson, an ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey who has spent his career studying giant sequoias, isnt so sure the trees are doomed. Over 3,000 years, a tree has gone through a lot of environmental changes, he says when I ask him if he thinks sequoias will survive climate change. But we could start leaving the realm of a 3,000-year-old trees experience. Maybe we already have. I dont know. But if you push hard enough, you can probably break their resilience. He says he doesnt know whats killing the trees I photographed in the Mariposa Grove last summer; it could be lots of other things besides climate change effects. Stephenson is a scientist, and he had to get permission from his agency to talk to me in the first place. So hes cautiousvery cautiousabout making any claims he cant back up directly with very specific scientific evidence. And the future, he notes, is impossible to predict, not only because of the complexities of climate science but also because of the unpredictability of human behavior and technological advances. We could find a geoengineering solution to climate change, he suggests. So many things are possible.

But do you think sequoias are resilient enough that theres still time for us to figure those things out? I ask. Can these trees really hang on that long?

He pauses. Maybe.

That optimismthe hope that giant sequoias might just be OKis the optimism of a scientist who doesnt yet have the models or the data to predict what will happen. Its the optimism of someone who is cautious about making definitive claims without hard evidence. Ive stopped pretending that I can predict the future, he says.

But me, Im not a scientistI have the freedom to look at the society around me and write about what I see and what I fear the future will look like. I dont need hard data to back up my fears; my fears are driven by something more intuitive. And when I look at a dying sequoia and a dozen fires burning across California and a hundred burning across Australia and record-breaking flooding back east and an utter lack of any responsible action to do something about any of itI am willing to predict that fragile species like giant sequoias are doomed. Or at least, I am willing to say out loud that Im afraid this will happen and that I believe my fear is realistic.

Last fall, Jonathan Franzen came to pretty much the same conclusion in a much-hated essay about the meaning of hope in the era of climate change. If you care about the planet, and about the people and animals who live on it, there are two ways to think about this, Franzen writes. You can keep on hoping that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the worlds inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope. For Franzen, hope at this late date means focusing on the small, specific thing you love, be it a species, a place, or an institution, and taking whatever small, specific actions you can to forestall its demise. Put your energy into the smaller, more local battles that you have some realistic hope of winning, he says. By Franzens lights, stopping or reversing climate change is not a winnable battle.

Climate scientists hated the essay, many taking to Twitter to express their dismay at Franzens nihilism and take issue with the scientific claims he made. As Myles Allen, the relevant lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes special report pointed out months before Franzens essay came out, climate change is complicated. Yes, its true that theres a certain amount of warming that weve already bought into and that climate changes effects are already being felt. Its also true that it is not an on/off switch, clicking on if we overshoot a certain warming threshold or staying off if we dont. Climate change is not so much an emergency as a festering injustice, he writes. Every half a degree of warming matters. In which case, every battle to curb every ounce of emitted carbon is a battle worth fighting, and giving into nihilism because we arent going to solve the whole thing is probably counterproductive.

I am willing to say out loud that Im afraid this will happen, and that I believe my fear isrealistic.

I dont pretend to be a climate scientist like Allen or an ecologist like Stephenson. Maybe thats why Franzens essay resonated with me. Just like him, when I look at the current state of affairs, I have no hope, or at least no hope for fragile species like giant sequoias. Climate change might not turn out to be a global apocalypse, universally awful for every human alive in a century, especially if we start fighting those battles against every ounce of carbon. But even if life goes on for humanity, and even if it goes on relatively comfortably for most people, my hunch is that it will probably be a life without giant sequoias, because Im willing to predict that we arent going to do enough in time to save beautiful, vulnerable species that dont necessarily serve human needs directly. Thats not a life I want, and its not a life I want for my great-grandchildren. But its probably the life theyll get, and that leaves me hopeless. Like Franzen, the reason for my pessimism is not scientific so much as anthropological. When I consider the total lack of meaningful policy action on climate change, and the fact that Americans will spend $10 a month on streaming services but not on climate change mitigation, I dont find any reasons for hope.

But this is not what I tell visitors to the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias. I tell them about the threats these trees face. I even tell them that some are dying for reasons we dont completely understand but that are probably related to climate change. But I also tell them its not too late to save them. Anything you can do thats good for the environment, that helps us start to address climate change, will also help giant sequoias, I say at the conclusion of each guided walk through the grove. Things like recycling, walking or biking or taking public transit instead of driving, simply consuming less stuffthese are small steps every one of us can take. Its probably also time to start thinking about much larger steps we can take as a global society, to restructure the way we live, in order to start to address the climate crisis. I dont know if well do enough in time to save giant sequoias. And heres where the big lie comes: But Yosemite gets about 5 million visitors a year, and it does give me a lot of hope to think about what would happen if each of those visitors started making some of these changes in their day-to-day lives. It could go a long way toward making sure that our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren get to live in a world with giant sequoias.

Here is why I lie: I dont have to be a climate scientist to know that 5 million people recycling isnt going to do much to save giant sequoias. But I have a masters degree in climate change communication, and I know that you cant leave people hopeless. You have to give them specific actions they can take, and you have to let them know those actions matter. Otherwise they get hopeless and they dont do anything at all. And even if 5 million people recycling isnt going to save giant sequoias, isnt it better than 5 million people not recycling?

But maybe the important thing, at this point, is to give up on the illusion that what we have to do is recycle. Maybe the important thing is getting people to understand what is at stake, and to feel the weight of all we stand to lose and all we have already lost. Take, for example, the woman from Germany who approached me after attending a program I gave in the Mariposa Grove. She was weeping. My whole life Ive wanted to see these trees, she said. They are so, so beautiful and we are killing them! We have to do something! Precisely. We have to do something. We have to do something. We dont just need 5 million individuals recycling or biking or switching to energy-efficient lightbulbs. We dont just need 5 million individuals doing anything. We need many millions of people coming together with sustained attention and outrage to demand that our lawmakers and corporations do what they have to do to put an end to this tragic status quo. It could happen. But it hasnt yet.

Without that kind of collective outrage, were stuck with individual actions like recycling. And Im not convinced that recyclingor anything else I do in my daily lifewill matter in the long run for giant sequoias, or any of the millions of other species that are threatened by climate change; the problem is so massive that its far, far beyond the scope of individual action. But action is all we have,and for now, as we wait for collective outrage to foment into coordinated collective action, were stuck with the small steps of personal action. Nate Stephenson seems to have reached the same conclusion. I went through my personal crisis, he told me, describing his realization several decades ago that ecosystems can no longer be preserved or restored to their pristine conditions due to the rapidity of climate change and the far reach of human influence. It took years, he said. But Ive come to a degree of peace about that. Where can that peace be found? For Stephenson, the answer is research. He has the skills to study changing ecosystems, to research the ways sequoias responded to the latest drought in order to predict how they might respond in a hotter, drier future. Armed with that information, he can help land management agencies like the National Park Service adapt to coming changes. But Im not a scientist, and I dont have those skills. All I have is a cheap point-and-shoot camera to document dying sequoias and the chance to tell visitors every day that their actions matter. Its a message I dont entirely buy. But doing something has to be better than doing nothingI have to believe that. And maybe that is its own form of hope.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

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Watching the Giant Sequoias Die - Slate

Human Behavior

All The Puzzles Flying To People’s Doors Are Bringing Joy And Sharpening Wits – The Federalist

Like many families around the world, ours has rediscovered over the past month the joys and challenges of the jigsaw puzzle.More or less confined to our home in Israel amid the coronavirus pandemic, we take for granted that these fun, frustrating diversions have sharpened our mental abilities and laid bare certain truths about our behavior, and recent studies bear this out.

Jigsaw puzzles have captured my attention since toddlerhood. Family trips and rainy weekends alike saw my siblings, parents, and me huddled over 500-piece photographs of German castles, Japanese temples, and Life Savers compilations. As Sabbath-observing Orthodox Jews, we spent many a Saturday afternoon completing these maddening masterpieces.

When my wife and I began dating, I quickly concluded she was the one, at least in part owing to the patience, cleverness, and visual acuity she deployed in completing jigsaw versions of Hawaiian waterfalls and Cape Cod summer homes.Years later in San Diego, when we wandered for the first time into the first home we would ever buy, we bonded with the sellers over the many thousand-piecers of national parks and kittens theyd conquered and proudly mounted on their and eventually our walls.

When our family moved to Israel, having fed our young children a steady diet of wooden puzzles, followed by more difficult ones depicting the birthplaces of the American presidents, the Seven Wonders of the World, and the heroes of Star Wars, we met another family with a serious puzzle obsession. We werent surprised to learn that their children, now fully grown, had been inducted into some of the Israel Defense Forces most elite intelligence units.

But now, with more than 1 billion people across the globe essentially locked down and homebound, the popularity of jigsaw puzzles has soared to levels not seen since the Great Depression. German puzzle-maker Ravensburger, one of the largest in the world, reported in March that its sales had skyrocketed 370 percent over the same period last year. Its North American CEO told CNBC it has sold 20 puzzles per minute during 2020.

VentureBeat revealed, [D]uring the week ending March 21, sales of board games, card games, and puzzles grew 228% from the previous week. The Wall Street Journal reported that puzzles were searched more frequently on Amazon in March than cleaning supplies.

This surge is unsurprising, given that many people otherwise find themselves even more absorbed than usual in their screens, whether through distance-learning classes, video workouts, mindless social-media scrolling, YouTubing, and watching movies. Jigsaw puzzles present a healthy respite from electronics fatigue, an analog, tangible break from an increasingly virtual world.

Indeed, in 2017, a team of German psychologists and neurobiologists surveyed the relevant literature and found that completing jigsaw puzzles can enhance cognitive abilities and help stave off Alzheimers disease and other forms of dementia. Puzzle-solving, they reckon, involves skills critical to sharp cognitive functioning, including visual perception, mental rotation, cognitive speed, visual scanning, perceptual reasoning, and memory, among others.

The journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience published the results of experimentation on a randomized group of 100 people 50-years-old and older completing, over the course of 30 days, a series of 250- to 1,500-piece puzzles one of the most comprehensive analyses of the intellectual benefits of puzzles to date. They confirmed that jigsaw puzzle-solving ability and experience were both strongly associated with the various cognitive skills identified in the literature. Earlier studies found that puzzles stave off the brain plaques that cause Alzheimers and that preschoolers benefit cognitively from completing them.

Moreover, a 2019 Ipsos survey commissioned by Ravensburger found that while 42 percent of puzzle-doers complete them as a brain booster, 59 percent of puzzlers do so to relax, and 34 percent to connect with others. As Ravensburger states on its #AtHomeWithRavensburger homepage, jigsaw puzzles inject variety and inspiration into this new, unfamiliar everyday family life.

In addition to providing these cognitive and emotional benefits, jigsaws also reveal patterns of human behavior.Take streakiness, for example. Every now and again when Im working on a jigsaw puzzle, I catch fire.

Every piece I successfully place into the 1,000-piece frame is rapidly followed by another, and another, and yet another. I cant be stopped. I rip pieces out of my kids and wifes hands in a frenzy of puzzle completion and they forgive me because the same hot streak can take hold of them, too, at any point.

I also see where pieces fit into areas of the puzzle others are working on, hand them those pieces, and inform them with determination and certainty that they will fit. Im almost always correct. That is, until one or two pieces in a row dont fit, at which point I revert to my baseline puzzle-solving ability.

This streakiness is surely familiar to all. In his fascinating new book The Hot Hand: The Mystery and Science of Streaks, Wall Street Journal sports reporter Ben Cohen traces the fall and rise of the hot hand theory, according to which consistent success in a given field itself breeds further success.

The paradigmatic instance of the hot hand involves streaky basketball shooters who make several consecutive baskets then simply cannot miss, such as Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry, who on Feb. 27, 2013, erupted for 54 points against the New York Knicks. In that game, he sunk a jaw-dropping 85 percent of his three-point shots. This same streakiness can be found among famous playwrights, attorneys, stock-pickers, directors, and chefs.

For more than four decades, social scientists have explored: Is a player who sinks one bucket actually more likely to bury the next shot he takes? The dominant academic approach, developed initially by famed cognitive psychologist Amos Tversky, held that not only was there no such thing as the hot hand, but its prevalence in the face of contrary evidence only highlights the fundamentally flawed human tendency to insist upon seeing invisible patterns in data. Tversky and company reached their conclusions by poring over mountains of early 1980s data involving the Boston Celtics and other teams.

But as Cohen demonstrates, Tverskys studies were flawed, and when measured properly, as it was in a set of experiments in the 2010s, a detectable albeit modest hot-hand effect emerges in basketball. These revisionist experiments, carried out by a newer generation of data scientists, even won the endorsement of Tverskys Nobel Prize-winning compadre, the illustrious psychologist Daniel Kahneman. I think clearly Tversky et al. were wrong, Kahneman told a Columbia University audience in 2015. Their test was biased, and there is a hot hand.

Cohen characterizes this phenomenon as an elevated state of ability in which you briefly feel superhuman. Anyone who gets on a hot puzzle-solving streak can relate to it.

Over the course of our family puzzle-solving, Ive seen personality types emerge among my family members, including a certain rascally tendency of my children, borrowed from my own childhood, to secretly purloin a piece or two so they can earn credit for officially completing the puzzle.

Squabbling aside, our family puzzling reinforces the closeness and teamwork the virus has forced upon us, a welcome and unifying break from the dizzying newsfeed destroying our serenity. Interestingly, the puzzle popularity surge appears to predate the pandemic. Ravensburgers CEO told VentureBeat, [W]hat weve seen in the last couple of years is that consumers want to disconnect from the being on a screen all the time and feel the need for a digital detox.

Whether the jigsaw craze will outlast the pandemic remains to be seen. But given what puzzles contribute to our mental abilities and how we understand them, lets hope it does.

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All The Puzzles Flying To People's Doors Are Bringing Joy And Sharpening Wits - The Federalist

Human Behavior

Why the panic over toilet paper – another case of death denial? – Open Democracy

This essay was originally published on April 9 2020 in The Arrow: A Journal of Wakeful Society, Culture & Politics.

The toilet paper aisle at my local grocery store was the first to go barren. Similar scenes of scatalogical scarcity are now the norm across North America and many other parts of the world as consumers prepare for months of physical distancing to slow the spread of COVID-19.

You can find footage online of shoppers fighting over the last roll, and the New York Times recently reported on a toilet paper shipment requiring police escort. Just when you thought the panic-buying was over, the Los Angeles Times reported this week on home hacks such as newspaper and gathered leaves if the shortages continue. It is peculiar that in the early days of this crisis, a pooping accessory took priority over food. Survival instincts appear low in late capitalism.

Fortunately, there is a body of social psychology that helps explain the collective impulse to put our heads in our asses in this moment of genuine crisis and its called Terror Management Theory (or TMT). TMT is rooted in the work of Ernest Becker, who won a Pulitzer for his 1973 book the Denial of Death. According to Becker, the intense existential fear caused by the reality of death compels us to psychologically buffer ourselves with fantasies of supremacy that compensate for the overwhelming powerlessness most of us feel in the face of mortality.

The illusions of human supremacy, white supremacy, male supremacy, and class supremacy are, for Becker, all shaped by death denial. The real world is simply too terrible to admit, he writes in the Denial of Death, it tells [humans] that they are small trembling animals who will decay and die. Illusion changes all this, makes [humans] seem important, vital to the universe, immortal in some way. Protecting ourselves from the terror of mortality with fantasies of supremacy is dangerous for others and, obviously, irrational death will still come. Yet according to Becker, it is what we regularly do to survive the idea of death, if not real death itself.

Since the early 1990s, terror management researchers have been experimentally testing Beckers theories. Although a recent canonical TMT experiment did fail a replication effort, to date, over 500 experiments in 25 countries have consistently supported his account of how fear of death shapes human behavior. It is clear that continued study of terror management is of great importance.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a real-life terror management experiment. In the lab versions, a test group is reminded of their mortality either with explicit or subliminal reminders of death and then tracked for how they respond to different situations or written statements. In recent weeks we have all been subject to constant death reminders as we read local and international news of the virus spread, crowding young and old into underfunded hospital systems, causing unnecessary death (with the elderly and immuno-compromised especially vulnerable, along with frontline, often racialized workers in health care, grocery stores, delivery). The phrase flattening the curve is a euphemism for slowing the kill rate given the limited supply of hospital beds and ventilators. These are anxious times.

So why in the midst of this genuine panic did North American consumers turn first, en masse, to toilet paper? Part of the answer may simply be the social contagion of seeing depleted aisles and joining the stampede (this depletion aggravated by supply chain delays). But it wasnt rice, nuts, or oranges that people snapped up first, it was toilet paper. From a terror management perspective, two-ply is an understandable balm because, along with toilet training in general, it serves to distinguish us from animality. From TP to bidets, we manage our excrement carefully, seeking to distance ourselves from the decay and disgust many of us read into it.

We believe that we are not animals, not poop anarchists (like my golden doodle for example): We are civilized! At a time when industrial human societies are being ground to a halt by a microscopic more-than-human force, it makes sense that we would cling to primary and visceral cultural reminders of our human exceptionalism. We are not powerless in the face of earthly forces such as disease, death, or calls of the wild we wipe.

Numerous TMT experiments have explored the link between death-fear and attachments to human supremacy. For example, one study found that death reminders increased participant support for the killing of animals. According to the researchers: The idea that humans are different from and superior to other animals is a fundamental part of most worldviews, and this is certainly true of the mainstream American view.

COVID-19 should tame illusions of human supremacy. And indeed, our survival and thriving as a species depends on human cultures, especially high-consuming Euro-American ones, transforming our relationships with the more-than-human world into mutually beneficial ones.

The animal holocaust in the recent Australian wildfires (nearly a billion individuals killed) is partly a product of fossil fuel companies treating our precious atmosphere without which earthly life would be nil as an emissions dump.

Climate change is also being accelerated by the felling of forests. Given the recent run on toilet paper, it is worth noting that TP is a major driver of global deforestation. U.S. Americans are the biggest buyers. Even in simpler, pre-pandemic times, they accounted for 20% of global consumption while only comprising 4% of world population. Paper companies that use virgin wood when alternatives are available such as Kirkland (Costcos house brand) are literally flushing forests down the toilet. At least U.S. bidet sales have skyrocketed in response to TP shortages, a good news story amidst these dark days.

Clinging to toilet paper in this time of crisis is not merely a cultural curiosity, it is also accelerating key drivers of future pandemics. Felling trees for paper product, or to make way for animal agriculture, or to facilitate oil and mineral extraction, all encroach on ecosystems, making it easier for zoonotic viruses like COVID-19 to jump from wildlife to domesticated animals and then to humans.

Youd think that runaway climate change and killer pandemics would force a rethink of capitalist extractivism and the illusions of human supremacy at its core. But TMT warns of a darker likelihood: that these fear-inducing events will lead people to double down on their illusions of supremacy, with morbid socio-ecological effects. The toilet paper panic is exemplary.

Rapprochement with the more-than-human world requires new cultural orientations towards death. Death is not alien; it is fundamental to earth processes. To deny death is to deny life. Capitalist destruction of earth systems is that denial materialized.

In the same year that Ernest Becker published the Denial of Death, Dakota scholar Vine Deloria Jr. who is an intellectual inspiration for contemporary Indigenous resurgence movements such as the water protectors at Standing Rock wrote that [r]ather than fearing death tribal religions see it as an affirmation of lifes reality. Deloria Jr. continued: The Indian ability to deal with death was a result of the much larger context in which Indians understood life. Human beings were an integral part of the natural world and in death they contributed their bodies to become the dust that nourished the plants and animals that had fed people during their lifetime.

For Deloria Jr., Indigenous approaches to mortality are linked to non-supremacist worldviews that position humans as fundamentally integrated with the natural world, feeding other life forms upon their physical death.

Arikara scholar Michael Yellow Bird has written about rituals that his nation used to rehearse for death. In one such ritual, someone would be chosen to represent death (e.g. dressing up and painting their bodies). They would leave the village and prepare themselves in isolation to return as death incarnate. As the ritual closed, death would disappear into the hills. Elders would then talk with fellow community members about how the encounter impacted them.

It is vital that non-Indigenous people learn from Indigenous ontologies and ceremonies without stealing knowledge in the same way that land has been violently stolen in settler colonial contexts such as the U.S. and Canada. Yellow Bird presents one possible way forward: He sees deep resonances between Indigenous ritual and Buddhist-inspired mindfulness practices that are increasingly available in the Euro-Americas.

A recent TMT study shows how mindfulness meditation can reduce defensive responses to death-fear and compensatory illusions of supremacy. The study goes even further, pinpointing the mechanism that likely allows for reduced defensiveness: the conscious experiencing of death-fear.

According to previous TMT studies, defensive responses to death arise due to thought suppression. Instead of directly facing death-anxiety, people tend to repress the fear into their unconscious. There, the felt powerlessness that death-fear can produce is alchemized into comforting illusions of supremacy. This particular study found that meditation halted thought suppression, allowing death-fears to be experienced consciously. This conscious experiencing appears to have been a key factor facilitating the non-defensive response to death-reminders.

Meditation alone will not undo death-anxiety or compensatory illusions of human supremacy and its deadly material effects. For mindfulness to support a new cultural orientation towards mortality in the Euro-Americas, it needs to be embedded in collective movements and institutions capable of culture change.

I have worked to limit my toilet paper panic in recent days, but I remain troubled by mortality. Buddhist meditation has helped, but I continue to struggle. As an asthmatic, Ive noticed my lungs constrict in fear when reading COVID-19 stories about 40-somethings like me needing ventilators to continue breathing.

Ive found succor in a dream I had two years ago when rampant wildfires darkened Vancouver Island skies. In the dream, I watched a bomb detonate some metres away. Time slowed down as the flames flew forward. I knew it was my end. I knelt down and placed my palm on the earth. In that moment I was home, at peace. The flames consumed me.

It is notoriously hard to die in a dream. This was no exception. There was a scene change and I was suddenly in some elsewhere, both relieved that the threat had passed, and disappointed that my union with primordial energy had ended. And this too shall pass. Even endings end. The show goes on. Energy transforms.

Why does this dream comfort me? Because death will come. Hopefully a long time from now. But it is a part of my life. Acknowledging the reality of death means accepting myself and this earth from which I come. This acknowledgement is not morbid; on the contrary, it promotes more life. Just like shit itself, compost for new growth.

Link:
Why the panic over toilet paper - another case of death denial? - Open Democracy