Neuroscience

‘Out of control:’ students share their struggles with eating disorders – University Press

Editors note: The Counseling and Psychological Services hotline is 561-297-3540.

Breanna Jomsky didnt get her period for four years.

From late 2011 to 2015, she lived with anorexia, an eating disorder characterized by difficulties maintaining an appropriate body weight for height, age, and stature and, in many individuals, distorted body image, according to the National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA). Because she was exercising too much and eating too little, her body wasnt able to release an important hormone thats necessary for periods.

She also bruised easily, slept awfully and cried frequently at the thought of eating food.

Now, the cellular neuroscience major says shes as fully recovered as possible. But there are college students who are still struggling with eating disorders. According to the NEDAs most recent data, roughly 5 percent of students enter college with an eating disorder.

This week, NEDA celebrated Eating Disorder Awareness Week, where they encouraged people to reflect on the positive steps youve taken including those stemming from setbacks or challenges toward accepting yourself and others, their website says.

While Jomsky dealt with anorexia, another FAU student, environmental engineering major Samuel Gerstein is currently recovering from binge eating disorder, which is characterized by recurrent episodes of eating large quantities of food often very quickly and to the point of discomfort and a feeling out-of-control while binging, according to NEDA.

Here are Jomskys and Gersteins stories with each of their eating disorders:

Around August 2011, when Breanna Jomsky was 13 years old, her parents sent her to an endocrinologist because of her menstrual pains. Jomsky said the rude doctor had zero bedside manner, and told her she should lose 15 to 20 pounds. After that, she lost 30 pounds in just three months.

I slowly started eating healthier, Jomsky said, but that just went out of control.

Over the next few years, she ended up visiting five different psychologists. She also saw a nutritionist but was reluctant to.

Jomsky started out lying to her nutritionist about what and how much she was eating and became obsessed with counting calories.

Id be in class and have my calculator out and it would be Spanish and Id be trying to plan things out for the day, she said. That was something that took a lot of brain space and energy.

There are apps that count calories for you now, like MyFitnessPal and Lifesum. But a BBC investigation last year reported that those apps can exacerbate such behaviors and make recovery harder.

Jomsky had eventually lost so much weight that when she would sit in the passenger seat of her moms Honda, the dashboard would notify her that the airbag in her seat was off. She said she didnt weigh enough to activate it.

During that time, she would go to the gym and just to cardio. She avoided parties because of the food and cried at the thought of eating a bowl of pasta.

After getting comfortable with her nutritionist, Jomsky began to gain back weight and she eventually started getting her period again.

Having an eating disorder is like: you want to get better but you dont, Jomsky said. Theres a lot of cognitive dissonance, or inconsistent thoughts about your own attitude or behavior.

Now, Jomsky doesnt just eat the crusts of her turkey sandwiches as a snack anymore or bruise just from sleeping. She lifts at the gym, paints in her Jupiter dorm and sings covers of rock songs.

She thought that once she gained a certain amount of weight, she would just lose it all again.

That didnt happen, luckily, she said. I worked too hard to get to where I was and I was starting to feel better about myself and my body and I just didnt want to go back there.

Samuel Gersteins eating disorder started to develop when he was around 13 years old, he said. Thats when he started the ketogenic diet, which is very restrictive in carbs and high in fat.

Even though it was very extreme, he said, he lost 60 pounds in a year and maintained it for longer than that. But he eventually started to stray away from it and started binging on weekends.

I would eat copious amounts of carbs and sugary food because I was depriving myself of it, he said. As school started to get harder, I noticed I would binge and I would literally just shove food down my throat. And it kind of got out of hand.

Now 16 years old, the FAU High environmental engineering major said hes recently started to recover by going to therapy.

He stopped following the ketogenic diet around last September, since Hurricane Dorian hit Florida and the same high-fat foods werent going to be available to him. But once he stopped, he said he felt so much better.

Why was I eating that way? he asked himself after coming off the diet. I shouldnt be having this infinite sense of hunger.

One of the biggest misconceptions he thinks people have about eating disorders is that you have to look a certain way specifically, he said, its not just people who are skinny that have eating disorders.

According to NEDA, binge eating disorder is three times more common than anorexia and bulimia combined.

People like myself, that do engage in disordered eating, arent aware that you dont need to be 2 percent body fat to have an eating disorder, he said. You can be skinny and you can be healthy; you can be chubby and you can have anorexia; or you can be skinny and have binge eating disorder.

Gerstein also advocated for people who may have eating disorders but dont yet know it because they cant afford the means to get help, like low-income families. He argued that structural change needs to be made to allow more people access to nutritious food rather than frozen and canned foods.

I think that we have a very fatphobic culture inside of our health institutions, as well as inside of our inside of our social system, he said. And its a very degrading system of oppression that we see.

Kristen Grau is the editor-in-chief of the University Press. For information regarding this or other stories, email [emailprotected] or tweet her at @_kristengrau.

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'Out of control:' students share their struggles with eating disorders - University Press

Neuroscience

New genes preventing healthy aging in China – Free Press Journal

Chinese researchers found that two new genes can prevent healthy aging, which provides a theoretical basis for delaying brain aging, according to a report by Science and Technology Daily.

The research published in Nature was jointly carried out by two research teams from the Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the Institut Pasteur of Shanghai, CAS.

Previous studies found that longevity genes do not necessarily delay the behavioral deterioration of animals in aging, which means increasing longevity is rarely accompanied by an extended healthspan.

Through screening of genes that regulate behavioral deterioration in aging Caenorhabditis elegans and the examination of human databases, researchers found that the expression of two genes, BAZ2B and EHMT1, increases with age and correlates positively with the progression of Alzheimer's disease, said the research paper.

The research further showed that reducing the function of BAZ2B can improve cognitive function and behavioral ability of aging C. elegans or mice.

Considering the large species differences between human beings and animals, there is still great uncertainty as to whether the study can be applied to human beings, the researchers said.

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New genes preventing healthy aging in China - Free Press Journal

Human Behavior

Better rat control in cities starts by changing human behavior – Salon

For centuries, rats have thrived in cities because of human behavior. In response, humans have blamed the rats and developed techniques for poisoning them.

We research urban rat populations and recognize that rats spread disease. But they are fascinating creatures that think, feel and show a high level of intelligence. Public concerns about rat poison harming wildlife are growing a trend that we believe could eventually lead to rodenticide bans in many parts of the world. Without poison as an option, humans will need other rat control methods.

Rats' many negative traits are well known. They are among the most detrimental invasive animals in cities. Urban rats are like disease sponges, congregating in the foulest reaches, where they pick up harmful pathogens. They carry the antibiotic-resistent MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus pseudintermedius). Inside the rat gut, MRSA can interact with other diseases like ingredients in a mixing bowl, creating newer bugs that can be transported from septic systems into homes.

But common approaches to managing rats often fail to address the most important factor contributing to infestations: humans and the prolific quantities of food that they waste. The more research we do on rats in New York City and worldwide, the more we realize that rat behaviors contribute less to infestations than do humans.

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Piles of trash near large homeless camps in Los Angeles encourage rats and the diseases they carry.

Concerns about rat poison

On Jan. 4, 2020, Malibu, California banned rodenticides due to their harmful effects on nontarget wildlife, such as mountain lions. This came after the California Assembly passed a bill to ban rodenticides statewide; the measure died in the State Senate, but could reappear this year.

If curbs on use of rat poison start to spread, communities will need other ways to manage infestations. Rats cost the world's economy billions of dollars yearly, mostly from contaminating food in warehouses, restaurants and home kitchens. The costs of illnesses vectored by rats are unknown because medical providers treat many sicknesses without knowing what caused them. As human populations become increasingly clustered in cities, these effects could increase.

Meanwhile, climate change is shortening winter seasons that limit rat reproduction. Globalization, climate change and inability to use rodenticides could result in a "perfect storm" of vulnerability to rodents on a scale humans have not experienced since the Middle Ages.

https://twitter.com/WorldAnimalNews/status/1181994915120570368 A food-focused approach

Research shows that to address this problem effectively, people must start by understanding the ecology of wild rodents. Rats adapt to human food sources and reproduce at remarkable rates. If enough food is present, a single Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus) can give birth to up to 12 pups in a litter. And each well-fed pup could give birth to 12 pups of its own in as few as six weeks.

We believe the key to controlling rats is appreciating a key point: Because rats have short life spans of one to two years and reproduce often, they adapt quickly to changing environments. In our view, until people change their behavior, they may fail at controlling rat numbers.

Current mechanisms for rat control are more reactive than proactive. Urban hygiene has become big business for exterminators, but does little to control rat populations.

A typical approach is to take action once rodent populations are high enough that their presence cannot be ignored. But rats are mostly nocturnal, small and elusive, so they typically are noticed only after their numbers are already high.

This reactive approach makes any control measures excluding rats from buildings and feeding sites, setting poison baits, introducing predators, asphyxiating them with dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide) or treating them with immuno-contraceptives comparable to putting a bandage on a cancer.

In our lab, we study the scents that rats prefer. As nocturnal animals, rats have poor vision and rely on olfaction to identify potential mates, habitats and food sources.

Molly, a rat in the authors' study, wearing a GPS tag. Determining what scents rats are attracted to could aid the development of rat control tools. Michael Parsons, Author provided

Rats' dietary habits are predictable. In Brooklyn, New York, they eat pizza, bagels and beer. In Paris they consume croissants, butter and cheese. Whatever local tastes people prefer, rats eat. Interrupt the continuous food supply and the rat population will drop.

Many city dwellers eat when they are busy, stuck in traffic or otherwise on the run. They drop wastes, such as grease-soaked napkins and hot dog buns, onto streets, playgrounds and subway tracks. Even highly conscientious people may hastily toss uneaten food and wrappers onto the top of an overflowing rubbish bin when they are stressed for time.

People who are working and caring for families do not take time to think about what unseen rats are doing. But our research convinces us that society can learn to stop feeding rats inadvertently. Pest management professionals, academics, policymakers and citizens can all help advance this goal, because people can radically change the ways in which they handle and dispose of food.

We believe that giving people incentives to create sanitary environments is an effective and socially progressive strategy. Here is one example: Because so much of the rat problem in New York City is driven by curbside garbage sitting outdoors overnight, we suggest hiring unemployed or homeless individuals as evening sentinels. They would move garbage bags from the curbside into guarded common areas and then return them to the curb for early morning collections.

Some cities could establish citizen rat patrols that would train residents to identify and notify property owners when they detect that rats are present. The typical indicators are barely noticeable openings appearing around buildings, or dark grease stains on sidewalks, parks or undeveloped lots. This approach eliminates the social stigma often associated with rats by showing people how to take proactive steps before an infestation develops.

Neuroscientist Kelly Lambert taught rats to drive miniature cars in order to study neuroplasticity and learning skills.

Rats cause very expensive problems, but they also are surprisingly engaging animals that exhibit human-like qualities, such as remorse and empathy. Scientists have trained them to drive tiny cars. As evidence that rats are thinking, feeling beings accumulates, we expect that it could make many communities more reluctant to poison them.

In our view, since rats are deeply rooted in human society, people need to understand how their own actions encourage rat behavior. We want to encourage brainstorming about this issue and help identify the most promising ways to manage urban rat problems effectively and humanely.

Michael H. Parsons, Visiting Research Scholar, Fordham University and Jason Munshi-South, Associate Professor of Biological Sciences, Fordham University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

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Better rat control in cities starts by changing human behavior - Salon

Human Behavior

Epidemics Reveal the Truth of the Societies They Hit – The Atlantic

Graeme Wood: Iran cant handle the coronavirus

Part of the problem is that the danger cannot be seen: A pestilence does not have human dimensions, so people tell themselves that it is unreal, that it is a bad dream that will end, Albert Camus wrote in The Plague. This, of course, very much describes the current situation: many people cannot bear the idea that something invisible can change their plans. Published in 1947, The Plague has often been read as an allegory, a book that is really about the occupation of France, say, or the human condition. But its also a very good book about plagues, and about how people react to thema whole category of human behavior that we have forgotten.

In the novel, a part of the quarantined town continued with business, with making arrangements for travel and holding opinions. Why should they have thought about the plague, which negates the future, negates journeys and debates? Their modern equivalents in the city of Milan have already launched a #Milanononsiferma Milan Doesnt Stophashtag campaign. Other cities have followed. Social media is full of Italian business owners and hotel managers denouncing the government for the unnecessary precautions.

But invisibility also creates uncertainty, and uncertainty can be manipulated so that it serves other ends. One of Camuss characters is a priest, for example, who uses the plague to increase his flock: He tells his congregation that the epidemic is Gods way of punishing unbelievers. In modern Italy, the first person to seek to manipulate the anxiety created by coronavirus was Matteo Salvini, the Italian far-right leader who immediately called for the government to shut the countrys borders, stop all public meetings, and keep people home.

Salvini would no doubt have pressed this point farther had it not begun, almost immediately, to backfire. The virus first appeared in Lombardy and Veneto, the two Italian provinces where his party, the Northern League, is strongest. When Salvini realized that a shutdown would inflict the worst economic damage there, he switched to a different argument: a call on the government to defend Italy and Italians from African refugees. There is no evidence that African refugees are carrying the virus, but still, the link between foreigners, impurity, and disease is a very old one. Marine Le Pen, the French far-right leader, has also called on France to shut the border with Italy, even though that too is nonsensical, since the first French cases seem mostly to come from elsewhere, as well.

I am due to fly to London in a few days, and have been carefully watching the British right-wing tabloids, to gauge their level of hysteria. So far, it has been relatively lowthey are distracted by Prime Minister Boris Johnsons engagement to his pregnant girlfriendwhich means that the planes will continue flying. Once they focus on the virus, I am certain that there will be calls to block all contacts with Italy, and I am certain that this tabloid-dependent British government will heed them.

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Epidemics Reveal the Truth of the Societies They Hit - The Atlantic

Human Behavior

Why a go-it-alone approach to combatting the coronavirus won’t work | TheHill – The Hill

Global health is a public good, which means that successfully addressing the current coronavirus outbreak (COVID-19) requires internationally coordinated efforts. While spillover events like COVID-19 cannot be prevented, there are investments that the international community can make to minimize their overall effects.

First, current information on economic activity can be used to produce estimates of hotspots. Second, a strategic global response network can create an infrastructure for rapidly addressing health risks. Finally, when designing policy to manage an outbreak, it is important consider how its incentives affect human behavior. This helps ensure that the policy actually achieves the intended outcome (reducing the spread of infection).

More than one month after the outbreak of COVID-19 was reported in China, the White House requested $1.25 billion in emergency funds to combat the outbreak. While only a handful of infections have reached U.S. soil, addressing infectious disease overseas is a form of national defense.

Further, the United States alone cannot manage the outbreak; there needs to be a globally coordinated response. This global effort does not preclude domestic investments in building capacity to respond to outbreaks either. Our work shows that this type of self-insurance via having plenty of nurses and hospital beds complements investments in preventing domestic outbreaks by fighting disease abroad.

The current coronavirus outbreak will not be the last disease outbreak, and these risks are also highly transferable. Isolated efforts to respond to risks in one location without a coordinated policy can leave other locations vulnerable through wildlife trade, human travel and other vectors.

The coronavirus is a zoonotic disease, meaning that the first human infections of the virus were transmitted (or spilled over) from animal populations. These spillover events are extremely rare. Since we cannot predict where or when the next spillover will happen, we cannot prevent outbreaks from occurring.

As a result, our ability to detect and rapidly respond to an event once it occurs is our best bet for reducing the economic and human cost of infectious disease. Since controlling a zoonotic disease outbreak is effectively a race between the spreading pathogen and containment, the more developed our response network before an outbreak happens, the faster and more readily we will be able to respond to it. Recent proposed cuts to both the domestic and global health funding in the form of cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and World Health Organization budgets, as well as the elimination of the cabinet-level position tasked with preparing for disease outbreaks, have made the United States less prepared for events like COVID-19.

While the number of the new infections that can be attributed to a single infected individual is influenced by characteristics of the pathogen, there are ways in which people can mitigate or exacerbate their risk of infection. The economics literature has shown that people respond to the risk of infection they cancel trips, keep their children out of school and avoid potential sources of infection. Additionally, typical public health interventions such as contact tracing and encouraging hand washing are designed to reduce new infections. These efforts to avoid infection come with a cost that forgone travel or time at school is costly to the people who miss trips or class.

In addition to infection and loss of human life, outbreaks such as the coronavirus have a broader economic cost. In January, Wuhan, China, a city of 11 million people, was placed in a travel ban and 10 other Chinese cities were placed under quarantine orders to contain the virus. The outbreak and regional containment measures aligned with the celebration of the Chinese New Year, which for most Chinese means long-distance travel and celebration with family. To date, travel bans and a reduction in flights to Asia are projected to cost the airline industry $28 billion. Similar travel restrictions are now in place in South Korea and Europe, and the CDC has suggested that Americans prepare for major disruptions in the form of school closures, cancelled events and more.

In addition to avoidance behavior and quarantine, containment measures produce tremendous indirect economic effects. Travel bans and reduced sales of jet fuel lowered demand for oil and impacted global oil prices. Asia is a tremendous player in global supply chains, and understaffed ports have halted the transportation of all goods, from fresh food to electronics. Companies like Apple are affected when, as travel bans and trade restrictions are put in place, they are forced to source materials and manufacture parts in different locations. These efforts can affect international supply chains and lead to economic chaos.

Unfortunately, these changes in behavior, while potentially chaotic, do not by themselves eliminate the risk of infectious disease. Travel bans are imperfectly enforced, driving trade and travel underground. This makes it more difficult to screen for the disease.

Whats more, uncoordinated quarantine efforts and communication strategies intended to mitigate economic damages risk downplaying the threat and complicate the politics of investing in what does work, while time to react is scarce. A public that does not understand the risk will be less likely to support the investments needed to counter outbreaks. When the potential outcome of being proactive is becoming an international pariah and economic disaster, policymakers face perverse incentives to underreport.

Additionally, go-it-alone policies, while immediately satisfying, may damage longer run efforts to build capacity and international cooperation, both of which are necessary to effectively manage the risk of not just of the current outbreak but a future pandemic.

KevinBerryis an assistant professor of economics at the University of Alaska Anchorage. He is an author on seven peer-reviewed academic papers on prevention and infectious disease.Follow him on Twitter @kberry6788. KatherineLee is an assistant professor of agricultural economics and ruralsociology at the University of Idaho.

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Why a go-it-alone approach to combatting the coronavirus won't work | TheHill - The Hill

Human Behavior

Children With Autism Saw Their Learning and Social Skills Boosted After Playing With This AI Robot – Newsweek

Scientists who designed an artificially intelligent robot that helped children with autism boost their learning and social skills hope such technology could one day aid others with the developmental disorder.

The study saw seven children with mild to moderate autism take home what is known as a socially assistive robot, named Kiwi, for a month. According to a statement by the University of Southern California where the team is based, the participants from the Los Angeles area were aged between three and seven years old, and played space-themed games with the robot almost daily.

As Kiwi was fitted with machine-learning technology, it was able to provide unique feedback and instructions to the children based on their abilities. For instance, if the child got a question wrong Kiwi would give prompts to help them solve it, and tweak the difficulty levels to challenge the child appropriately.

The authors of the paper published in the journal Science Robotics found all of the children saw their reasoning skills improve. Some 92 percent had better social skills after playing with Kiwi for a month, according to the statement.

Cameras hooked up to Kiwi enabled the team to also monitor how engaged the kids were with the robot, based on where their eyes were looking, the position of their heads, their speech and how well they performed on a task. The team found engagement ranged from 48 to 84 percent on average among the participants, and Kiwi was able to detect a disengaged child with 90 percent accuracy. That was despite potential distractions such as home appliances, as well as friends and family. The team found participants were most engaged immediately after the robot had spoken, but this went down if the gap lasted longer than a minute.

Lead author Shomik Jain, told Newsweek the children became less engaged as the month went on.

"Examples of child behavior during these disengaged periods included playing with toys, interacting with siblings, and even abruptly leaving the intervention setting."

"This served as a motivation for our work, which created models that could be used for real-time recognition and response to disengagement in order to re-engage the child to continue with the educational and/or therapeutic activity," he said.

Around one in 59 children in the U.S. have autism, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. People with the condition, also known as autism spectrum disorder (ASD), can find it challenging to communicate and interact in the same way as neurotypical people. While therapists can give individualized services that help to teach such children social skills, not everyone can afford this, the team said. As such, they wanted to explore the potential of plugging the gap with robots.

Co-author Maja Matari Maja J Matari, distinguished professor of computer science, neuroscience, and pediatrics at the University of Southern California told Newsweek:

"We and other researchers have been actively exploring SAR [socially assistive robotics] for children with ASD, because SAR has great potential in supporting the learning of children with ASD. Since we were one of the very few labs that has worked in SAR from its inception, we used our experience over the past 15 years to develop the robot that would meet the needs and interests of children with ASD while being safe and non-threatening."

Jain said: "Currently, robots are limited in their ability to autonomously recognize and respond to human behavior, especially in atypical users and real-world settings such as homes and schools. Engaging users is a key HRI [human-robot interaction] capability previously unexplored in the context of long-term, in-home SAR interventions for children with ASD.

"Therefore this study is the first to apply machine learning modeling to long-term in-home data with children with ASD. "

Asked why the children's engagement and learning improved after interacting with the robot, Matari said: "The purpose of a socially assistive robot, in general, is to serve in the role of a motivating and supportive companion. In the specific context of this study, the robot served to motivate the children to do the math exercises, and to support them as they were succeeding or failing during those exercises."

However, children with autism don't need robots to reap the benefits seen in the study, Matari said.

"The most therapeutic effects come from caring human interactions," Matari explained. "Parents, siblings, caregivers and friends can effectively motivate and support learning and therapy of children with ASD by paying careful attention to what children find rewarding and encouraging, and focusing on those interactions, shaping toward the child's specific needs."

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Children With Autism Saw Their Learning and Social Skills Boosted After Playing With This AI Robot - Newsweek

Human Behavior

Judo may help promote healthy behaviors and social interaction in youth with autism – PsyPost

A specially-tailored judo program can help youth diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) increase their level of physical activity, according to new research published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.

The findings provide preliminary evidence that the martial arts program can help autistic youth achieve the 60 minutes of daily moderate-to-vigorous physical activity recommended by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

My research interests focus on improving health factors, such as physical activity and nutrition, in youth with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) From my past research, Ive learned that martial arts may be an enjoyable activity that may appeal to this population and provide mental and physical health benefits, explained Jeanette M. Garcia, an assistant professor at the University of Central Florida who led the study.

While karate, a form of martial arts, has documented benefits for the autism population related to social interaction, we hypothesized that the emphasis on mindfulness and self-defense promoted by judo would provide additional benefits for ASD youth, she said in a news release.

In the study, 14 participants between the ages 8 and 17 participated in a 45-minute judo lesson once a week for eight weeks. The class was specifically designed for children diagnosed on the autism spectrum and participants were separated into smaller groups based on their age.

The lessons consisted of a brief warm-up, followed by instructions on judo holds and throws. The primary instructor would break each routine exercise into small steps while verbally describing and repeating it multiple times. Assistant instructors would demonstrate modified versions of the exercise for any participants who were struggling, the researchers explained.

Each session was concluded with time allocated to practice breathing techniques and mindfulness, including participant reflection on the activities completed and a reminder that judo should only be used during the sessions. Each participant also wore an accelerometer to measure their daily physical activity throughout the course of the study.

The researchers found that the judo lessons were associated with increases in moderate to vigorous physical activity among the participants.

It is often thought that youth with ASD arent good at physical activity or prefer not to be active. However, its about finding activities that work best for these kids, similar to any typically developing youth. These kids enjoyed the program, and many of them continued practicing judo after the study, Garcia told PsyPost.

Half of the sample continued to participate in judo lessons or a similar martial arts program following the 8-week program. Many of those who did not continue failed to do so because of scheduling or transportation problems, rather than lack of interest.

Garcia thought judo might be a good fit because its approach held promise for addressing some of the challenges these children face, including communication deficits, high levels of anxiety, difficulties with social interaction, and preferences for structured and repetitive activities. Judo promotes social interaction, emphasizes mindfulness, and focuses on balance, strength, and coordination, while alternating between low, moderate, and high-intensity exercise.

Indeed, our study shows that judo not only promotes social skills, but is well accepted by this population and is a great program for reducing sedentary behavior and increasing confidence, Garcia said.

But given the limited sample size and lack of a control group, more studies are needed to support the findings. One major question is whether the benefits we are seeing extend to kids with greater severity levels of ASD, Garcia noted.

I have realized that youth with ASD can do anything that typically developing youth can do, however, they may just learn or communicate in a different way, she added.

The study, Brief Report: Preliminary Efficacy of a Judo Program to Promote Participation in Physical Activity in Youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder, was authored by Jeanette M. Garcia, Nicholas Leahy, Paola Rivera, Justine Renziehausen, Judith Samuels, David H. Fukuda, and Jeffrey R. Stout.

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Judo may help promote healthy behaviors and social interaction in youth with autism - PsyPost

Human Behavior

Walking The Talk On Change – Forbes

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In the United States, leadership is front page news as primary voters cast their ballots for the candidates running for president. Wherever in the world they take place, political contests come down to a question of leadership, and, hopefully the ability to lead change.

My first model of leadership was my father, a self-made entrepreneur. The first in his family to go to college, he trained as a dentist, and in the late 1970s had his entrepreneurial break-out when he launched a pioneering dental insurance company. When it comes to leadership and change, he mostly does things instinctually. Whats so complicated? he says. Just go do it!

Its a simple but fair question. After all, what is so complicated?

The reality is that most leaders, whether politicians or CEOs, struggle with change, and the data bears this out. One of the saddest numbers in business is the statistic on how many corporate change efforts fail. Bain research has found 88% fall short of their original goals, and multiple other studies, while they vary in their specific findings, also conclude that the figure is high, indeed, too high.

Most of the business executives I talk with genuinely understand both the importance and the difficulty of getting organizations and the people within them to change. Their instinct is right. Their talk is right. But then the action falls short. They can talk the talk, but dont walk the walk.

Why is it so hard? Let me offer up three potential reasons, and some hope for whats on the horizon.

First, change can feel vague and intangible, and, consequently, hard to act on. Its like the wind: you feel its influence all around you, but cannot reach out and grab it. Managing change doesnt lend itself easily to clean, analytic problem solving the way mathematics and engineering do. Its complicated by human behavior and all the richness and, sometimes, craziness that brings. Because of this complexity, its often hard to know exactly what to do. So we retreat to our instincts with all the best intentions, and end up falling well short of what we could be. Luckily, there are practical tools and approaches that make it possible to break down change and tackle it analytically, just like any other challenge or opportunity.

Second, because change is hard to measure, its also hard to manage. If executives want to improve the change-ability of their organization, they need to answer some basic questions: What baseline are we starting from? What should we do first? How do we measure progress? An instructive analogy here would be to examine the impact that measurements of customer loyalty have had over the past 20 years. Companies have long had a strong financial currency, a way to measure, talk about, and manage financial impact, but prior to these new measures, they had no equivalent currency for the health of their customer base. The advent of simple and effective ways to measure customer advocacy, including the Net Promoter Score, ushered in a revolution of investment, activity and improvement. We need the equivalent currency for change, to develop practical solutions.

Third, and perhaps most profoundly, we all suffer from a number of cognitive biases, often unconcious, that can hold us back. Perhaps the most relevant is the natural human tendency to assume that how we did something in the past will also work in the future. What behavioral scientists term outcome bias stems from judging decisions by their outcome without sufficiently considering that chance or some other factor may have had an important impact. The outcome, even if positive, may have been even better if we had followed a different process, something we also tend to discount. Decision making generally can be improved by focusing more on process than outcome.

Change can also take a long time, and this conflicts with another bias behavioral economists have recognized: time discounting. We weigh present rewards more heavily than future ones. Indeed, the further out the reward or change, the less valuable we see it. As humans, we gravitate toward immediate gratification, and therefore prioritize short-term action. But real change requires linking long-term thinking and strategy to implementation in order to see results.

As my father also says, there are always reasons, but never excuses. Recognizing these reasons can help us better understand why its so hard to walk the talk, but whats most important is what we do about that.

How does a leader choose to react to these forces described above? Does he or she retreat to instinct? Refocus on more tangible and pressing topics? Delegate the problem to others? Or does he or she instead take up the challenge? Open up to learning new things? Make change tangible and part of the strategic plan? Fight accepting change is hard as the final answer?

It may be complicated, yes, but with the right choices, we can indeed just go do it.

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Walking The Talk On Change - Forbes

Human Behavior

The physics of swarm behaviour – OUPblog

The locusts have no king, and yet they all go forth in ranks, noted King Solomon some three thousand years ago. That a multitude of simple creatures could display coherent collective behavior without any leader caused his surprise and amazement, and it has continued to do so for much of our thinking over the following millennia. Caesars legions conquered Europe, Napoleons armies reached Moscow: We always think of a great commander telling the thoughtless multitudes what to do.

Statistical physics pioneered an opposite view. When a piece of iron is cooled down to a certain temperature (the Curie temperature), the majority of the atoms align their spins, thereby making it magnetic. No atomic general gives any commands; each atom communicates only with its neighbors, and yet there is an overall alignment. It shows us that local microscopic interactions as such can lead to dramatic global behavior, and this realization brought about a revolution in the understanding of swarm behavior.

Some hundred years ago, serious biologists still thought that the coordination of birds in a flock was reached by telepathy, and the synchronized light emission by fireflies in the Asiatic jungle was attributed to faulty observation by the observer. The introduction of physics concepts in biology has to a large extent resolved these puzzles. Flocks of birds are much more like the atoms in iron than they are like the armies of Napoleon, and the fireflies act much like a laser. Collective behavior in the world of living beings is after all not so different from that in the inanimate world.

The fusion of physics concepts and biological observations has proven fruitful for both sides, and the conceptual transfer worked in both directions. For centuries, physics concentrated on simple systems, since these were solvable by the available techniques. Scientists broke up a large system into many simple little ones, which could be handled. Putting them back together then described the large system. At the turn of the last century, Per Bak, a pioneer of the truly new physics of complexity, noted that the laws of physics are simple, but nature is complex. If the Big Bang initially produced an ideal gas of primordial particles, how could this eventually lead to the appearance of Per Bak? A living being is more than a set of molecules, and today we study systems in physics which refuse to be decomposed additively into little subsystems.

The understanding of collective behavior of animal societies can perhaps act as a first step in the search for an answer. Today we can simulate a flock of birds on a computer, allowing each bird to move freely, subject to only two social rules: Follow your neighbor, but dont crowd him. Putting a large number of such simplistic birds on the computer then produces the behavior observed for flocks of real birds. A primitive way to achieve collective behavior is provided by commands of Caesar or Napoleon; a more subtle and more natural way is to allow a many component system to move subject to the simple clear social rules.

A still more dramatic form of collective behavior appears in insect societies. The whole now no longer consists of identical components. Evolution has found it preferable to have different components designed specifically to carry out particular tasks. In an ant colony, we have workers, nannies, soldiers, drones, and a queen. Each individual carries out specific tasks; it is dependent on the others in order to exist, it cannot survive alone. And no matter how good a worker ant is, it will never have children to whom it can pass on its capabilities. All descendants are produced by the queen and the drones. Charles Darwins survival of the fittest now takes on a new and unexpected form. It no longer applies to individuals, but rather to the entire collective system. Insect societies thus in a way precede the pattern of modern industrial societies, in which large firms employ different species of workers to carry out dedicated tasks. In most human societies, the caste status is not (yet) inherited, and caste transitions are possible. Hopefully, evolution will consider this as dominant.

In any case, human societies have led to one collective feature not paralleled on a comparable level by any animals: we have language. Only the existence of language allows the abstract thinking of humans; we can imagine and talk about the past and the future, the here and the elsewhere. It is probably this more than anything that has allowed humans to take over the entire earth.

Image byJames Wainscoatvia Unsplash

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The physics of swarm behaviour - OUPblog

Human Behavior

The revenge of nature? – UCAN

The new coronavirus threatens the health of millions of people around the world if it spreads uncontrollably. Every precaution must be taken to prevent its spread and that means practicing greater personal and public hygiene and avoiding contact with people traveling from an infected area. We must show concern and never discriminate against anyone. Besides strict containment, strict personal hygiene, the washing of hands and clean surroundings can hold its spread. Public health officials must be prepared for an outbreak. The flu-like disease does not have a high fatality rate: only two people in every hundred die from it. People can get very sick with severe respiratory problems and yet recover. Others can have the virus but have no symptoms. Everywhere, including the Philippines, doctors and medical personnel have been briefed and advised on the potential health problem and we are reminded that prevention is better than cure. So, there is no need to panic or raise alarm, but intelligent planning, preparation and prevention are what is needed. Besides, most people are recovering from it with good medical care. The big hope is that the virus cannot survive in high temperatures, so bring on a hot summer everywhere, and with global warming we can expect that. The highest temperatures ever recorded in Australia and parts of Europe in 2019 are stunning. That is because of man-made climate change. That might kill off this deadly virus and tropical countries like the Philippines might be spared. The good news is the World Health Organization has announced that the virus may have reached its peak in China as fewer daily infections have been recorded. The coronavirus is also the result of ill-advised and illegal human behavior. We have seen the outbreak of many deadly diseases and viruses in recent decades. More viruses that are affecting humans are crossing over from other mammals and birds. Remember the avian flu? The human immunodeficiency virus is said to have crossed over from monkeys when people ate them as bush meat. Likewise, Ebola likely came from eating monkeys, they say. Then, we had the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), said to have originated from bats, and today the 2019 coronavirus that possibly came from bats, too, although it is not yet proven. You might say these diseases are the revenge of nature. The natural world is striking back at the disastrous human exploitation of the rainforests, the oceans and all wildlife by driving them to extinction. There is destruction in almost every habitat in the developing world and in some parts of the developed world, too. Illegal trade and trafficking in many endangered animal species for huge profit could be the cause of coronavirus. China is a big market for endangered animals and thousands of animals are butchered each year, mostly in Africa, to provide elephant ivory for the China ornament trade, now banned but still thriving. In 2009, there was as many as 109,000 elephants in Tanzania but due to poaching and slaughter, there were only 43,000 left in 2014, a 60 percent loss according to government reports. There are even less today. In 1970, the number of rhino had decreased to 70,000 and as of today there are only 29,000 left on the planet. They are on the way to extinction like the white rhino by bandits killing them for their valuable horn for Chinese traditional medicine. Scientific research has shown the horn to have no more medicinal value than horses hooves. Hundreds of creatures are killed and collected to supply the demand for Chinese traditional medicine, most of which are ineffective, have no medical benefit and are unnecessary considering the huge advances in Chinese health care. The small ant-eating creature called the pangolin could be responsible for the jump of the 2019 coronavirus from animal to human. They are the most widely traded and trafficked creature stolen from the wild in Southeast Asia, India and Africa. They are now practically extinct in China because they killed them for food and their scales are used in traditional Chinese medicine. They have been found in the wild food market of Wuhan where the coronavirus first made the crossover leap from animal to humans. According to an investigative report by The Guardian, one shop was found to have for sale live animals such as "live wolf pups, golden cicadas, scorpions, bamboo rats, squirrels, foxes, civets, hedgehogs (probably porcupines), salamanders, turtles and crocodiles." All destined for the cooking pot, it seems. Bats are known carriers of many viruses and the forest dwelling pangolin could have picked up the virus from bats droppings on the forest floor, some speculate. This is a likely cross over for the virus. Or some human ate the bats. They are on sale in wildlife markets. Corrupt governments like that in Brazil allow traders and loggers to attack the last of the rai forests and destroy their natural beauty by cutting trees, driving out and killing their indigenous people and trafficking their wildlife. We can expect more health problems in the future. Nature will rebel just like the mighty storms and heatwaves caused by man-made climate change are coming back to hit us. Why cant we respect nature, preserve the forest, protect the environment and its wildlife? The answer is easy. It is because of human greed. It is an insatiable, unquenchable drive beyond control. To stop the greed and trafficking of wildlife and the crossover of animal-borne viruses to humans, the authorities worldwide must go after the traffickers and traders of wildlife. They must identify their bank accounts and confiscate their property, assets and money and jail the big-time traders. It is essential to ban all sale and trading in wildlife. Father Shay Cullen is an Irish missionary priest and founder of the Preda Foundation in the Philippines. He is a member of the Missionary Society of St. Columban. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of UCA News.

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The revenge of nature? - UCAN