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Setting the stage for possible advances in pain treatment, researchers at The Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland report they have pinpointed two molecules involved in perpetuating chronic pain in mice. The molecules, they say, also appear to have a role in the phenomenon that causes uninjured areas of the body to be more sensitive to pain when an area nearby has been hurt. A summary of the research will be published on Jan. 23 in the journal Neuron.
“With the identification of these molecules, we have some additional targets that we can try to block to decrease chronic pain,” says Xinzhong Dong, Ph.D., associate professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and an early career scientist at Howard Hughes Medical Institute. “We found that persistent pain doesn’t always originate in the brain, as some had believed, which is important information for designing less addictive drugs to fight it.”
Chronic pain that persists for weeks, months or years after an underlying injury or condition is resolved afflicts an estimated 20 to 25 percent of the population worldwide and about 116 million people in the U.S., costing Americans a total of $600 billion in medical interventions and lost productivity. It can be caused by everything from nerve injuries and osteoarthritis to cancer and stress.
In their new research, the scientists focused on a system of pain-sensing nerves within the faces of mice, known collectively as the trigeminal nerve. The trigeminal nerve is a large bundle of tens of thousands of nerve cells. Each cell is a long “wire” with a hub at its center; the hubs are grouped together into a larger hub. On one side of this hub, three smaller bundles of wires — V1, V2 and V3 — branch off. Each bundle contains individual pain-sensing wires that split off to cover a specific territory of the face. Signals are sent through the wires to the hubs of the cells and then travel to the spinal cord through a separate set of bundles. From the spinal cord, the signals are relayed to the brain, which interprets them as pain.
When the researchers pinched the V2 branch of the trigeminal nerve for a prolonged period of time, they found that the V2 and V3 territories were extra sensitive to additional pain. This spreading of pain to uninjured areas is typical of those experiencing chronic pain, but it can also be experienced during acute injuries, as when a thumb is hit with a hammer and the whole hand throbs with pain.
To figure out why, the researchers studied pain-sensing nerves in the skin of mouse ears. The smaller branches of the trigeminal V3 reach up into the skin of the lower ear. But an entirely different set of nerves is responsible for the skin of the upper ear. This distinction allowed the researchers to compare the responses of two unrelated groups of nerves that are in close proximity to each other.
To overcome the difficulty of monitoring nerve responses, Dong’s team inserted a gene into the DNA of mice so that the primary sensory nerve cells would glow green when activated. The pain-sensing nerves of the face are a subset of these.
When skin patches were then bathed in a dose of capsaicin — the active ingredient in hot peppers — the pain-sensing nerves lit up in both regions of the ear. But the V3 nerves in the lower ear were much brighter than those of the upper ear. The researchers concluded that pinching the connected-but-separate V2 branch of the trigeminal nerve had somehow sensitized the V3 nerves to “overreact” to the same amount of stimulus. (Watch nerves light up in this video.)
Applying capsaicin again to different areas, the researchers found that more nerve branches coming from a pinched V2 nerve lit up than those coming from an uninjured one. This suggests that nerves that don’t normally respond to pain can modify themselves during prolonged injury, adding to the pain signals being sent to the brain.
Knowing from previous studies that the protein TRPV1 is needed to activate pain-sensing nerve cells, the researchers next looked at its activity in the trigeminal nerve. They showed it was hyperactive in injured V2 nerve branches and in uninjured V3 branches, as well as in the branches that extended beyond the hub of the trigeminal nerve cell and into the spinal cord.
Next, University of Maryland experts in the neurological signaling molecule serotonin, aware that serotonin is involved in chronic pain, investigated its role in the TRPV1 activation study. The team, led by Feng Wei, M.D., Ph.D., blocked the production of serotonin, which is released from the brain stem into the spinal cord, and found that TRPV1 hyperactivity nearly disappeared.
Says Dong: “Chronic pain seems to cause serotonin to be released by the brain into the spinal cord. There, it acts on the trigeminal nerve at large, making TRPV1 hyperactive throughout its branches, even causing some non-pain-sensing nerve cells to start responding to pain. Hyperactive TRPV1 causes the nerves to fire more frequently, sending additional pain signals to the brain.” | <urn:uuid:811913f2-344a-449c-9f60-96fc2cc191d5> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://scienceblog.com/69805/serotonin-perpetuates-chronic-pain-signals-in-local-nerves/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474649.44/warc/CC-MAIN-20240225234904-20240226024904-00898.warc.gz | en | 0.959014 | 1,084 | 3.140625 | 3 | 0 |
Rationality is the quality or state of being reasonable, based on facts or reason. Rationality implies the conformity of one's beliefs with one's reasons to believe, or of one's actions with one's reasons for action. "Rationality" has different specialized meanings in philosophy, economics, sociology, psychology, evolutionary biology, and political science.
- Max Weber
- Richard Brandt
- Theoretical and practical
- Artificial intelligence
- International relations
To determine what behavior is the most rational, one needs to make several key assumptions, and also needs a quantifiable formulation of the problem. When the goal or problem involves making a decision, rationality factors in how much information is available (e.g. complete or incomplete knowledge). Collectively, the formulation and background assumptions are the model within which rationality applies. Illustrating the relativity of rationality: if one accepts a model in which benefitting oneself is optimal, then rationality is equated with behavior that is self-interested to the point of being selfish; whereas if one accepts a model in which benefiting the group is optimal, then purely selfish behavior is deemed irrational. It is thus meaningless to assert rationality without also specifying the background model assumptions describing how the problem is framed and formulated.
The German sociologist Max Weber proposed an interpretation of social action that distinguished between four different idealized types of rationality. The first, which he called Zweckrational or purposive/instrumental rationality, is related to the expectations about the behavior of other human beings or objects in the environment. These expectations serve as means for a particular actor to attain ends, ends which Weber noted were "rationally pursued and calculated." The second type, Weber called Wertrational or value/belief-oriented. Here the action is undertaken for what one might call reasons intrinsic to the actor: some ethical, aesthetic, religious or other motive, independent of whether it will lead to success. The third type was affectual, determined by an actor's specific affect, feeling, or emotion—to which Weber himself said that this was a kind of rationality that was on the borderline of what he considered "meaningfully oriented." The fourth was traditional or conventional, determined by ingrained habituation. Weber emphasized that it was very unusual to find only one of these orientations: combinations were the norm. His usage also makes clear that he considered the first two as more significant than the others, and it is arguable that the third and fourth are subtypes of the first two.
The advantage in Weber's interpretation of rationality is that it avoids a value-laden assessment, say, that certain kinds of beliefs are irrational. Instead, Weber suggests that a ground or motive can be given—for religious or affect reasons, for example—that may meet the criterion of explanation or justification even if it is not an explanation that fits the Zweckrational orientation of means and ends. The opposite is therefore also true: some means-ends explanations will not satisfy those whose grounds for action are Wertrational.
Weber's constructions of rationality have been critiqued both from a Habermasian (1984) perspective (as devoid of social context and under-theorised in terms of social power) and also from a feminist perspective (Eagleton, 2003) whereby Weber's rationality constructs are viewed as imbued with masculine values and oriented toward the maintenance of male power. An alternative position on rationality (which includes both bounded rationality, as well as the affective and value-based arguments of Weber) can be found in the critique of Etzioni (1988), who reframes thought on decision-making to argue for a reversal of the position put forward by Weber. Etzioni illustrates how purposive/instrumental reasoning is subordinated by normative considerations (ideas on how people 'ought' to behave) and affective considerations (as a support system for the development of human relationships).
In the psychology of reasoning, psychologists and cognitive scientists have defended different positions on human rationality. One prominent view, due to Philip Johnson-Laird and Ruth M. J. Byrne among others is that humans are rational in principle but they err in practice, that is, humans have the competence to be rational but their performance is limited by various factors. However, it has been argued that many standard tests of reasoning, such as those on the conjunction fallacy, on the Wason selection task, or the base rate fallacy suffer from methodological and conceptual problems. This has led to disputes in psychology over whether researchers should (only) use standard rules of logic, probability theory and statistics, or rational choice theory as norms of good reasoning. Opponents of this view, such as Gerd Gigerenzer, favor a conception of bounded rationality, especially for tasks under high uncertainty.
Richard Brandt proposed a "reforming definition" of rationality, arguing someone is rational if their notions survive a form of cognitive-psychotherapy.
Abulof argues that rationality has become an "essentially contested concept," as its "proper use… inevitably involves endless disputes." He identifies "four fronts" for the disputes about the meaning of rationality:
- The purpose, or function, of ascribing rationality: Is it descriptive/explanatory, prescriptive or subjunctive (rationality "as if" real)?
- The subject of rationality: What, or who, is rational: the choice, the act, or the choosing actor?
- Cognition: What is the quality of the cognitive decision-making process: minimal (calculative intentionality) or optimal (expected-utility)?
- Rationale: Is rationality merely instrumental, that is, agnostic about the logic of human action and its motivations (instrumental rationality) or does it substantially inform them (substantive rationality, focusing on material maximization)?
It is believed by some philosophers (notably A. C. Grayling) that a good rationale must be independent of emotions, personal feelings or any kind of instincts. Any process of evaluation or analysis, that may be called rational, is expected to be highly objective, logical and "mechanical". If these minimum requirements are not satisfied i.e. if a person has been, even slightly, influenced by personal emotions, feelings, instincts, or culturally specific moral codes and norms, then the analysis may be termed irrational, due to the injection of subjective bias.
Modern cognitive science and neuroscience show that studying the role of emotion in mental function (including topics ranging from flashes of scientific insight to making future plans), that no human has ever satisfied this criterion, except perhaps a person with no affective feelings, for example an individual with a massively damaged amygdala or severe psychopathy. Thus, such an idealized form of rationality is best exemplified by computers, and not people. However, scholars may productively appeal to the idealization as a point of reference.
Theoretical and practical
Kant had distinguished theoretical from practical reason. Rationality theorist Jesús Mosterín makes a parallel distinction between theoretical and practical rationality, although, according to him, reason and rationality are not the same: reason would be a psychological faculty, whereas rationality is an optimizing strategy. Humans are not rational by definition, but they can think and behave rationally or not, depending on whether they apply, explicitly or implicitly, the strategy of theoretical and practical rationality to the thoughts they accept and to the actions they perform.
The distinction is also described as that between epistemic rationality, the attempt to form beliefs in an unbiased manner, and instrumental rationality.
Theoretical rationality has a formal component that reduces to logical consistency and a material component that reduces to empirical support, relying on our inborn mechanisms of signal detection and interpretation. Mosterín distinguishes between involuntary and implicit belief, on the one hand, and voluntary and explicit acceptance, on the other. Theoretical rationality can more properly be said to regulate our acceptances than our beliefs. Practical rationality is the strategy for living one’s best possible life, achieving your most important goals and your own preferences in as far as possible.
As the study of arguments that are correct in virtue of their form, logic is of fundamental importance in the study of rationality. The study of rationality in logic is more concerned with epistemic rationality, that is, attaining beliefs in a rational manner, than instrumental rationality.
Rationality plays a key role and there are several strands to this. Firstly, there is the concept of instrumentality—basically the idea that people and organisations are instrumentally rational—that is, adopt the best actions to achieve their goals. Secondly, there is an axiomatic concept that rationality is a matter of being logically consistent within your preferences and beliefs. Thirdly, people have focused on accuracy of beliefs and full use of information—in this view a person who is not rational has beliefs that don't fully use the information they have.
Debates within economic sociology also arise as to whether or not people or organizations are "really" rational, as well as whether it makes sense to model them as such in formal models. Some have argued that a kind of bounded rationality makes more sense for such models.
Others think that any kind of rationality along the lines of rational choice theory is a useless concept for understanding human behavior; the term homo economicus (economic man: the imaginary man being assumed in economic models who is logically consistent but amoral) was coined largely in honor of this view. Behavioral economics aims to account for economic actors as they actually are, allowing for psychological biases, rather than assuming idealized instrumental rationality.
Within artificial intelligence, a rational agent is typically one that maximizes its expected utility, given its current knowledge. Utility is the usefulness of the consequences of its actions. The utility function is arbitrarily defined by the designer, but should be a function of "performance", which is the directly measurable consequences, such as winning or losing money. In order to make a safe agent that plays defensively, a nonlinear function of performance is often desired, so that the reward for winning is lower than the punishment for losing. An agent might be rational within its own problem area, but finding the rational decision for arbitrarily complex problems is not practically possible. The rationality of human thought is a key problem in the psychology of reasoning.
There is an ongoing debate over the merits of using “rationality” in the study of international relations (IR). Some scholars hold it indispensable. Others are more critical. Still, the pervasive and persistent usage of "rationality" in political science and IR is beyond dispute. "Rationality" remains ubiquitous in this field. Abulof finds that Some 40% of all scholarly references to "foreign policy" allude to "rationality"—and this ratio goes up to more than half of pertinent academic publications in the 2000s. He further argues that when it comes to concrete security and foreign policies, IR employment of rationality borders on "malpractice": rationality-based descriptions are largely either false or unfalsifiable; many observers fail to explicate the meaning of "rationality" they employ; and the concept is frequently used politically to distinguish between "us and them." | <urn:uuid:e7910236-831c-4203-bf32-72f7dae22c14> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://alchetron.com/Rationality | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474674.35/warc/CC-MAIN-20240227085429-20240227115429-00898.warc.gz | en | 0.954169 | 2,279 | 3.4375 | 3 | 1 |
May 9, 2018
Did you know you can achieve accomplish and achieve anything with effort, patience and the right mindset?
According to Carol Dweck, our mindsets are malleable, and you can support the development of a growth mindset when working with students and parents alike. In her book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Dweck defines two distinct mindsets and how they contribute to our success and failure. On one end of the spectrum is the FIXED mindset and the GROWTH mindset lies on the other end.
This webinar will challenge and provide you with the tools you need to stretch yourself like a rubber band beyond your wildest expectations. We will examine two mindsets using a power -point presentation to see how they contribute to success and failure. Additionally, the course will provide you with the opportunity to learn all you want to know or able to be by positively altering your thought processes as a result of the intense interaction we will have in this class. The presentor will start off by examining research on babies, the research on mind sets, the importance of the brain and how if functions and specific ways to foster a growth mind set. The course will finally look at new neuroscience studies of the brain that shows that you are in control of your abilities and that you are responsible to develop and sharpen your skills and abilities. This class will provide you with told and steps you can take to continually strive for excellence in an all that you do by exemplifying the GROWTH mindset. This course objective is to transform, motivate and inspire you to continually reach out for the stars because you have the gusto, grit and perseverance to do whatever it takes!
Are you ready to dive into the BRAINIOLOGY? | <urn:uuid:53869274-262d-49cc-a599-e9a5100797cd> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://fostergeorgia.com/mc-events/brainiology/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474674.35/warc/CC-MAIN-20240227085429-20240227115429-00898.warc.gz | en | 0.934484 | 356 | 2.6875 | 3 | 2 |
The pigs had been lying dead in the lab for an hour — no blood was circulating in their bodies, their hearts were still, their brain waves flat. Then a group of Yale scientists pumped a custom-made solution into the dead pigs’ bodies with a device similar to a heart-lung machine.
What happened next adds questions to what science considers the wall between life and death. Although the pigs were not considered conscious in any way, their seemingly dead cells revived. Their hearts began to beat as the solution, which the scientists called OrganEx, circulated in veins and arteries. Cells in their organs, including the heart, liver, kidneys and brain, were functioning again, and the animals never got stiff like a typical dead pig.
Other pigs, dead for an hour, were treated with ECMO, a machine that pumped blood through their bodies. They became stiff, their organs swelled and became damaged, their blood vessels collapsed, and they had purple spots on their backs where blood pooled.
The group reported its results Wednesday in Nature.
The researchers say their goals are to one day increase the supply of human organs for transplant by allowing doctors to obtain viable organs long after death. And, they say, they hope their technology might also be used to prevent severe damage to hearts after a devastating heart attack or brains after a major stroke.
But the findings are just a first step, said Stephen Latham, a bioethicist at Yale University who worked closely with the group. The technology, he emphasized, is “very far away from use in humans.”
The group, led by Dr. Nenad Sestan, professor of neuroscience, of comparative medicine, of genetics and of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, was stunned by its ability to revive cells.
“We did not know what to expect,” said Dr. David Andrijevic, also a neuroscientist at Yale and one of the authors of the paper. “Everything we restored was incredible to us.”
Others not associated with the work were similarly astonished.
“It’s unbelievable, mind blowing,” said Nita Farahany, a Duke law professor who studies ethical, legal and social implications of emerging technologies.
And, Dr. Farahany added, the work raises questions about the definition of death.
“We presume death is a thing, it is a state of being,” she said. “Are there forms of death that are reversible? Or not?”
The work began a few years ago when the group did a similar experiment with brains from dead pigs from a slaughterhouse. Four hours after the pigs died, the group infused a solution similar to OrganEx that they called BrainEx and saw that brain cells that should be dead could be revived.
That led them to ask if they could revive an entire body, said Dr. Zvonimir Vrselja, another member of the Yale team.
The OrganEx solution contained nutrients, anti-inflammatory medications, drugs to prevent cell death, nerve blockers — substances that dampen the activity of neurons and prevented any possibility of the pigs regaining consciousness — and an artificial hemoglobin mixed with each animal’s own blood.
When they treated the dead pigs, the investigators took precautions to make sure the animals did not suffer. The pigs were anesthetized before they were killed by stopping their hearts, and the deep anesthesia continued throughout the experiment. In addition, the nerve blockers in the OrganEx solution stop nerves from firing in order to ensure the brain was not active. The researchers also chilled the animals to slow chemical reactions. Individual brain cells were alive, but there was no indication of any organized global nerve activity in the brain.
There was one startling finding: The pigs treated with OrganEx jerked their heads when the researchers injected an iodine contrast solution for imaging. Dr. Latham emphasized that while the reason for the movement was not known, there was no indication of any involvement of the brain.
Yale has filed for a patent on the technology. The next step, Dr. Sestan said, will be to see if the organs function properly and could be successfully transplanted. Some time after that, the researchers hope to test whether the method can repair damaged hearts or brains.
The journal Nature asked two independent experts to write commentaries about the study. In one, Dr. Robert Porte, a transplant surgeon at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, discussed the possible use of the system to expand the pool of organs available for transplant.
In a telephone interview, he explained that OrganEx might in the future be used in situations in which patients are not brain-dead but brain injured to the extent that life support is futile.
In most countries, Dr. Porte said, there is a five-minute “no touch” policy after the respirator is turned off and before transplant surgeons remove organs. But, he said, “before you rush to the O.R., additional minutes will pass by,” and by that time organs can be so damaged as to be unusable.
And sometimes patients don’t die immediately when life support is ceased, but their hearts beat too feebly for their organs to stay healthy.
“In most countries, transplant teams wait two hours” for patients to die, Dr. Porte said. Then, he said, if the patient is not yet dead, they do not try to retrieve organs.
As a result, 50 to 60 percent of patients who died after life support was ceased and whose families wanted to donate their organs cannot be donors.
If OrganEx could revive those organs, Dr. Porte said, the effect “would be huge” — a vast increase in the number of organs available for transplant.
The other comment was by Brendan Parent, a lawyer and ethicist who is director of transplant ethics and policy research at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine.
In a telephone interview, he discussed what he said were “tricky questions around life and death” that OrganEx raises.
“By the accepted medical and legal definition of death, these pigs were dead,” Mr. Parent said. But, he added, “a critical question is: What function and what kind of function would change things?”
Would the pigs still be dead if the group did not use nerve blockers in its solution and their brains functioned again? That would create ethical problems if the goal was to preserve organs for transplant and the pigs regained some degree of consciousness during the process.
But restoring brain functions could be the goal if the patient had had a severe stroke or was a drowning victim.
“If we are going to get this technology to a point where it can help people, we will have to see what happens in the brain without nerve blockers,” Mr. Parent said.
In his opinion, the method would eventually have to be tried on people who could benefit, like stroke or drowning victims. But that would require a lot of deliberation by ethicists, neurologists and neuroscientists.
“How we get there is going to be a critical question,” Mr. Parent said. “When does the data we have justify making this jump?”
Another issue is the implications OrganEx might have for the definition of death.
If OrganEx continues to show that the length of time after blood and oxygen deprivation before which cells cannot recover is much longer than previously thought, then there has to be a change in the time when it is determined that a person is dead.
“It’s weird but no different than what we went through with the development of the ventilator,” Mr. Parent said.
“There is a whole population of people who in a different era might have been called dead,” he said. | <urn:uuid:e77b6127-0d39-48f5-99d9-4f2edcb60051> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://deboodschappenwijzer.nl/how-scientists-are-reviving-cells-in-dead-pigs-organs/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474744.31/warc/CC-MAIN-20240228175828-20240228205828-00898.warc.gz | en | 0.972224 | 1,634 | 3.109375 | 3 | 3 |
At first glance, Down syndrome and Alzheimer’s disease, two severe brain abnormalities, may seem to have little in common. Down syndrome is a hereditary disease, the source of which has long been recognized — a triplication of chromosome 21. By contrast, the overwhelming majority of Alzheimer’s cases (more than 95 percent) do not have a clear-cut genetic source. Instead, the disease, which usually becomes clinically apparent late in life, is caused by a perplexing constellation of factors. While these have been the focus of intense study for more than 100 years, few conclusive answers have come to light.
In new research, Antonella Caccamo and her colleagues explore a number of critical factors that appear to link the two illnesses. The current project will use Down syndrom (DS) as a window into the underlying mechanisms that may give rise to Alzheimer’s pathology. Using this complementary approach, her $3.1 million NIH grant will explore the effects of a critical protein complex known as mTOR.
In the healthy brain, mTOR is involved in a range of essential physiological processes. mTOR is a regulator of protein synthesis and degradation. It plays a critical role in cell growth, longevity and the formation of the cytoskeleton, which provides living cells with their shape and structure, and mTOR is vital to maintaining the proper energy balance in many tissues throughout the body. mTOR is also implicated in synaptic plasticity, neuronal recovery and the retention of memory.
Caccamo is a researcher in the ASU-Banner Neurodegenerative Disease Research Center. Much of her research focuses on investigating Down syndrome molecular alterations in the brain in order to shed new light on Alzheimer’s disease (AD).
“The ultimate goal of my research is to identify novel and clinically translatable targets, thus aiding in the development of new treatments for AD,” Caccamo said.
Learning from mTOR
Disruption of the mTOR pathway has been implicated in diseases including cancer, obesity and cardiovascular disease. Dysregulation of mTOR also plays an important role in diabetes and aging, two known risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease. Irregularities in mTOR functioning are linked to other neurodegenerative diseases and have been shown to give rise to two distinct neuropathologies: depositions in the brain of plaques composed of the protein amyloid beta (Aβ), and accumulations of another protein — known as tau — that aggregates within neuronal cell bodies, forming neurofibrillary tangles.
Plaques and tangles are the classic hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease. Intriguingly, they also occur in the brains of virtually all patients with Down syndrome, some 60 percent of whom go on to develop Alzheimer’s disease by age 60. Interestingly, APP (amyloid precursor protein), a protein that when cleaved generates beta amyloid (Aβ), the toxic protein that accumulates in AD and DS brains, is located on chromosome 21, the same chromosome that is triplicated in Down syndrome.
Could disruption of the vital mTOR pathway offer clues to the development of plaques and tangles and the onset of dementia in both DS and AD patients? Is mTOR dysregulation also linked with a particular form of cell death known as necroptosis, likewise implicated in AD and DS pathology? Most importantly, can the investigation of the molecular drivers of AD pathology in DS patients provide a new window into the early mechanisms underlying the development of sporadic Alzheimer’s, the form of the disease that commonly strikes aging adults? These are some of the important questions Caccamo’s new study intends to address.
Alzheimer’s disease remains the only leading killer lacking any means of treatment, prevention or cure. The disease is pitiless in its systematic destruction of brain functioning, wiping memories clean and robbing the brain of its essential capacities, ultimately resulting in death — typically within eight to 10 years of clinical diagnosis, though in some cases, Alzheimer’s can drag on for as long as 20 years. The emotional toll on patients, caregivers and society is immense and rapidly mounting.
Additionally, the staggering economic burden currently figures in the hundreds of billions of dollars in the U.S. alone and is projected to top $1 trillion by 2050. The need for viable treatments and preventive strategies could not be more acute.
Today, researchers know that the onset of Alzheimer’s begins decades before its telltale signs become apparent. Some have gone so far as to say that while AD is usually thought of as a disease of old age, it may also be associated with adolescence when the early signposts of the disease are planted in the seemingly healthy brain. Many in the field believe that the best hope for arresting the ominous trajectory of the disease lies in identifying causal mechanisms at the earliest stage, and developing effective means of intervention before the brain is irreparably damaged.
Caccamo believes that mTOR dysregulation may be one such early mechanism, giving rise to AD pathology in aging adults as well as DS patients. Research has demonstrated that mTOR is hyperactive in specific brain regions in both AD and DS patients. mTOR hyperactivity is further associated with tau pathology as well as low levels of TSC2, a critical gene product that is believed to keep mTOR hyperactivity in check. Finally, preliminary data from Caccamo’s research indicates that cell loss in DS patients results in part from necroptosis, a unique form of cell suicide linked with dysregulation of mTOR.
This combination of factors has led to the central hypothesis of the new study: Dysfunction of the TSC2 complex causes an increase in mTOR activity in DS, leading to AD-like neurodegeneration by inducing necroptosis.
Streams and tributaries of Alzheimer’s pathology
Caccamo’s new project, entitled "Identify common mechanisms of neurodegeneration between Alzheimer’s disease and Down syndrome," addresses these issues on several fronts. The first aim of the project is to identify the molecular mechanisms underlying mTOR hyperactivity in DS. Here, the association of dysfunctional TSC2 with mTOR hyperactivity is explored. What might be causing the downregulation of TSC2 leading to mTOR hyperactivity? Three possibilities are experimentally probed: the presence of epigenetic changes in TSC2 and mTOR, alteration of the turnover rate of the TSC2 protein and newly detected proteins that may likewise contribute to destabilizing the delicate TSC2/mTOR axis.
The second aim of the study is to determine the role of hyperactive mTOR in the development of AD-like phenomena in DS. Here, the hypothesis of hyperactive mTOR leading to AD pathologies, particularly Aβ plaques and neurofibrillary tangles, is explored using Ts65Dn mice, a genetic model of Down syndrome. Caccamo’s preliminary results show that mTOR hyperactivity precedes an increase in Aβ and tau levels and degeneration of cholinergic neurons in mice. By subtly increasing or decreasing mTOR signaling, the study will test the effects of reducing mTOR on Aβ and tau levels as well as degeneration of neurons in the mice. Further, increased mTOR levels will be examined to see if such changes increase AD-like pathology and cognitive deficits. Finally, the study will identify additional proteins falling under the regulation of hyperactive mTOR in DS.
Although the death of nerve cells in both Alzheimer’s and DS brains is a well-recognized occurrence associated with impaired cognitive ability, the mechanisms leading to cell death are still not well understood. The third aim of the new study will be to examine how mTOR hyperactivity contributes to neuronal loss. Earlier work by Caccamo and others suggests that a form of programmed cell death known as necroptosis contributes to the neurodegeneration typically observed in AD brains.
The third phase of the new study will investigate the hypothesis that hyperactive mTOR helps set this neurodegeneration process in motion by activating necroptosis pathways in the brain. Systematically modulating mTOR activity and necroptosis signaling in mouse neurons will be used to test this hypothesis. In addition to improving the understanding of the mechanisms leading to cell death in DS and AD, the research will help elucidate possible therapeutic targets for these two tragic afflictions.
Researchers have much to learn from in-depth studies like these, which delve into mTOR’s profound influence on the brain, in sickness and in health. In addition to its relevance in neurodegenerative disease, mTOR’s crucial role in the aging process may shed new light on other foundational issues in neuroscience.
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The Milo Space Science Institute, led by Arizona State University, will offer its space workforce training program to university… | <urn:uuid:ff314fd3-d5c5-4eaa-b10f-32da4059f45f> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://news.asu.edu/20181017-fight-against-alzheimers-down-syndrome-may-hold-vital-clues | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474744.31/warc/CC-MAIN-20240228175828-20240228205828-00898.warc.gz | en | 0.936753 | 1,918 | 3.234375 | 3 | 4 |
Assessment in the early years: physical, social and emotional development
The second in a series, this article presents research evidence on why supporting and assessing young children’s physical, social and emotional development alongside their cognitive skills is essential for successful early learning and assessment.
Social and emotional development
Children’s ability to form healthy relationships, through understanding and developing behavioural expectations for both themselves and others, includes skills such as empathy, self-regulation, prosocial behaviour and emotion identification. Research suggests that solid foundations in social and emotional development are crucial for wider development:
- five-year-olds with strong prosocial skills score higher in areas of learning including emergent literacy, emergent numeracy, working memory, mental flexibility and emotion identification1
- longitudinal studies have revealed significant associations between young children’s self-regulation skills and later academic success 2
- neuroscience studies have shown that the areas in the brain for cognition and emotion are interlinked and work together to inform a child’s behaviour.3
How has Covid-19 affected children’s social and emotional development?
From spring 2020 to autumn 2021, Reception children made less progress than expected in all areas of learning including social and emotional development. In a study into the impact of Covid-19, personal, social and emotional development (PSED) was raised by teachers and parents as a prominent learning concern upon the start of school in September 2020.
Moreover, early years children who were able to attend school more frequently during the third lockdown (January-March 2021) were noticeably more advanced in their learning and development, particularly in PSED, than peers with lower attendance. While there may be other confounding factors which influenced regular attendance during the third lockdown, this research suggests that a focus on PSED could be important in closing learning gaps.4
Results from IELS5 suggest that physical development, consisting of both gross and fine motor skills, plays an important role in a child’s holistic development at age five:
- fine and gross motor development were positively related to emergent numeracy, emergent literacy, emotion identification and mental flexibility
- physical development, particularly fine motor skills, was positively related to children’s ability to stay on task during assessments.
How has Covid-19 affected children’s physical development?
Emerging evidence suggests the physical development of young children is likely to have been negatively affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. This is especially true for vulnerable groups, including children from disadvantaged backgrounds and those from UK ethnic minorities. Lifestyle change during the pandemic is thought to be a contributing factor in reduced physical activity among early years children.6,7
How can we support the assessment and development of social, emotional and physical development in the early years?
Rather than viewing social, emotional and physical development as separate to cognitive skills, they should be embedded into classroom learning and assessment, particularly to support children in the early years to recover from the impact of school closures. A variety of strategies can be utilised.
- Access to larger spaces (indoor and outdoor) is essential for supporting and assessing children’s gross motor skills to give them freedom to move; where possible these spaces should be available more frequently so that children can practise these skills on their own terms rather than during dedicated sessions.
- Increased opportunities, resources and spaces for children to be on their own or come together in pairs or small and large groups will enable them to practise self-regulation strategies as well as essential prosocial skills such as listening, sharing feelings and negotiating.
- Teacher support, such as explicit structured teaching, teacher-led discussions and scaffolding should be provided alongside the space and opportunity for children to practise these independently during free-flow play.
Such provision increases the likelihood of accurate assessment: observing children in play and self-select activities rather than in more planned ‘on-demand’ assessment activities allows for more authentic contexts where children’s skills are more accurately determined. | <urn:uuid:436194b6-979d-4a21-9138-3b48b6a464b1> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.nfer.ac.uk/assessments/assessment-in-the-early-years-physical-social-and-emotional-development/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474744.31/warc/CC-MAIN-20240228175828-20240228205828-00898.warc.gz | en | 0.960899 | 815 | 3.609375 | 4 | 5 |
A new high-density EEG captures the brain’s neural activity at a higher spatial resolution than ever before, report researchers.
The next-generation brain-interface technology—the first non-invasive, high-resolution system of its kind—offers higher density and coverage than any existing system and has the potential to revolutionize future clinical and neuroscience research as well as brain-computer interfaces, scientists say.
To test the system, researchers had 16 participants view pattern-reversing black and white checkerboards while wearing the new “super-Nyquist density” EEG. They compared the results from all electrodes to results when using only a subset of the electrodes, which is an accepted standard for EEG density.
The results, which appear in Scientific Reports, show that the system captured more information from the visual cortex than any of the four standard versions tested.
“These results are crucial in showing that EEG has enormous potential for future research,” says lead author Amanda K. Robinson, a postdoctoral fellow in the psychology department at Carnegie Mellon University and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at the time of the study.
“Ultimately, capturing more neural information with EEG means we can make better inferences about what is happening inside the brain. This has the potential to improve source detection, for example in localizing the source of seizures in epilepsy.”
To create the new tool, researchers modified an EEG head cap from a 128-electrolode system, which increased its sensor density by two to three folds over occipitotemporal brain regions. They designed the experiments to use visual stimuli with low, medium, and high spatial frequency content.
They then used a visual paradigm designed to elicit neural responses with differing spatial frequencies in the brain and examined how the new EEG performed. The subtle patterns of neural activity uncovered by the new system were closely related to a model of primary visual cortex.
This “opens doors for utilizing higher-density EEG systems for clinical and neuroscientific applications,” says Pulkit Grover, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering. “It also validates some of our fundamental information-theoretic studies in the past few years.
Additional researchers from Carnegie Mellon the University of Pittsburgh participated in the study. Early financial support to modify and test the new EEG came from Carnegie Mellon’s BrainHub initiative and ProSEED program. Instrumentation of the novel cap was in part funded by the SONIC center of the Semiconductor Research Corporation.
Source: Carnegie Mellon University | <urn:uuid:e6843484-8535-4957-9867-37c3079dd6e3> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.futurity.org/super-nyquist-density-eeg-1621012-2/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707948223038.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20240305060427-20240305090427-00898.warc.gz | en | 0.918972 | 526 | 3.0625 | 3 | 6 |
There are about 100 billion neurons in the adult human brain. Neurons communicate with each other by means of electrical signals flowing through them. However, a neuron cannot receive this electrical signal from the thalamus and transmit it to the region of interest. Neurons need to cooperate with each other while maintaining this electrical conduction. Neurons include gaps called apt synaptic spaces (and no, the brain of people you think to be “empty brains does not consist entirely of these spaces).
Neurons consist of a cell body and protrusions branching from the body. These extensions are called “axons’’. Information input is provided by dendrites at the end of the extension, passes through the cell nucleus, goes a long way in the axons and comes to the end terminals. This is the space we have just mentioned after the end terminals. So, how does the electrical pulse move through this gap? How is it transmitted to the next neuron?
What is neurochemical?
The end terminals of neurons are like vesicles containing small molecules. The molecules in these vesicles are chemicals that determine our “mood hal. These molecular compounds, which are called ‘neurotransmitters’ in simple molecular structures and ‘neuropeptides’ in long molecular structures, are synthesized from amino acids in our bodies. Neurons also transmit the necessary message with chemical compounds that are transmitted from one neuron to the other recipient in synaptic spaces during the electrical signals they send to each other.
In fact, these neurochemicals determine our sad, irritable, obsessive, happy, confident, careful or careless behavior. Neurochemicals pass through transmission channels called ‘pathways’. Not every neurochemical brain is released from every neuron end. The pathways through which these chemicals pass are of great importance in determining the human mood. According to research and articles on mice, the main neurochemicals and pathways that operate learning and memory systems are as follows:
Glutamate is one of the leading neurochemical systems related to learning and memory. Glutamate is known as the stimulating neurotransmitter agent of the central nervous system. If it works very effectively, the person shows an aggressive, restless psychological state. Research has been conducted on the effect of glutamate deficiency on the reduction of cognitive functions.
Gamma-aminobutyric acid is the natural sedative of the brain. It works in the opposite direction with glutamate. In this way, instead of being aggressive, nervous, ready to have a panic attack at any moment, we live as balanced people who control their nerves and joy. The less active GABA causes severe panic and severe stress even in a small problem.
What does dopamine do? All emotions related to pleasure, reward, feeling of accomplishment and enjoyment of life pass through the mesocorticolimbic pathway, which is also difficult to read or say. Pleasure and joy are mediated by dopamine released in this region. Excessive activity of dopamine is manifested by symptoms such as hearing voices and delusion within the head. Negative symptoms associated with decreased cognitive functions also indicate decreased dopamine delivery.
Acetylcholine, which provides communication between the hippocampus and the ‘septum’ of the brain, regulates learning and memory processes. Lack of acetylcholine in this pathway leads to learning difficulties and memory blur. Acetylcholine deficiency causes dementia and Alzheimer’s disease in later stages.
Although it is named as ‘happiness hormone’, serotonin is not a hormone. It has also been scientifically proven that people who receive external serotonin supplements do not experience the feeling of extra happiness, aliveness or vitality. The main task of serotonin is to dream. Regulates sleep and alertness. It makes people feel sleepy during the evening. (All of this has a relative relationship with happiness, yes.) An important part of the serotonin in the brain is in the rafe core in the brain.
Serotonin, travels from the rafe core to the spinal canal by its own paths. Serotonin, which is released in the pathway up to the spinal cord, contributes particularly to pain control. Herbal medicines taken with the idea that serotonin increases happiness sometimes cause very serious results. Serotonin syndrome is a great risk for children and it is important to focus on expert recommendations and exercises for serotonin-enhancing activities.
This neurotransmitter, also known as noradrenaline, determines the state of alertness, excitement and emotion in the brain. It is responsible for the regulation of blood pressure and heart rate. Starts from the locus serulens, just above the brainstem, mediating nerve conduction through a large pathway system that reaches many places within the brain shell. Excessive norepinephrine activity leads to anxiety, irritability and spine. Excessive self-confidence, meaningless laughter crises, excessive speech and risky behavior manifests itself in mania. Slow or inadequate release of norepinephrine causes self-insecurity, depressive mood, self-blame and low energy.
HOW WILL WE USE THIS INFORMATION IN EDUCATION?
We love to use the brain knowledge while preparing a special, individual education program for our children. Preparing brain-based trainings is not very common in our country. In the examples of educational psychology brain-based learning programs in the world, we observed that neurotransmitters are the most important issue to be overlooked. What is a neurotransmitter? The best answer to the question is: Neurotransmitters are the hormones of the brain and they make the transmission between nerves easy and fast. This means that no matter how effective the program we are preparing, if the brain hormones are not at the required level, learning will not be fast. So we will give you little information about which hormones affect learning, symptoms when they are not at the appropriate level and what will be done to eliminate these problems.
Glutamate is higher than normal in individuals with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder and may cause dyslexia. This leads to problems in the field of reading.
Glutamate is an amino acid found in meat products and is not as toxic as claimed. Glutamate is an important brain hormone for learning and memory in the brain. Keeping meat products in our child’s nutrition is very important for this brain hormone to fulfill its tasks.
Gamma-aminobutyric acid, one of the by-products of glutamate, is also the building block of the GABA hormone.
GABA levels were found to be low in individuals with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder. This makes it difficult for people with ADHD to remain calm.
The presence of rice, green beans, sweet potatoes, spinach, chestnuts and especially probiotic foods in our nutrition program will increase the amount of GABA. It is also important to increase the amount of GABA in sports and especially yoga.
Dopamine deficiency is seen in individuals with autism spectrum disorder. There are also studies suggesting that dopamine deficiency also exists under problem behaviors such as self-mutilation (auto-mutilation).
Dopamine excess is seen in individuals with dyslexia. High dopamine causes plenty of daytime thinking, making it difficult to concentrate on the outside world.
We need plenty of sunshine and fresh air to reduce reluctance, lack of motivation and increase dopamine levels. This shows that we need to increase our parking hours with our child. We need plenty of high-quality protein, so we need to put eggs, meat and dairy products, pulses, bananas, nuts and avocado in our children’s diet. Since all of these are digested and synthesized in the intestines, we should include delicious foods such as pickle with probiotic content, pickle juice, vinegar, kefir and probiotic yogurt in the nutrition of our children.
In addition, saturated fats, carbohydrates and high-sugar foods should keep our children away. Dopamine is thought to increase more when consuming foods such as chocolate and saturated fat, carbohydrates and sugars. These substances mimic dopamine at first. It makes us feel happy and motivated. However, it reduces motivation and happiness from the first moment to a low level during the withdrawal. This leads to a desire to consume more. These foods make us feel unhappy by being upside down by dopamine levels. And of course the same goes for tea and coffee, but we didn’t even have to tell you that you didn’t make your children drink tea or coffee.
Let’s play games where we get excited with exaggerated reactions to remind our child how dotamine is as well as motivation to increase motivation. During the game, let us express our happiness and pleasure of the activity verbally. Thus, we pass on to our child how happy and motivated it is to do a job as a model. It is also important to teach motivation by setting short- and long-term goals with our children, and celebrating what we accomplish and visualize. Running, playing, exercising and meditating or worshiping with our child are also activities that raise dopamine.
Acetylcholine hormone that provides myelination is also higher than normal in individuals with ADHD and dyslexia like glutamate. Acetylcholine levels are also different in people with intellectual disabilities. Since learning in the brain is due to myelination, the abnormal in their level makes learning difficult.
min B-5 that help convert choline to acetylcholine should not be forgotten.
In the training program, activities that simultaneously increase the level of focus and alertness should be added. In order to reduce the aggressiveness in acetylcholine deficiency, drama and social story studies can be conducted on methods of coping with anger.
The reason for the claims that the intestine is the second brain: Serotonin. Since serotonin is produced in the intestine, an imbalance in the intestinal flora prevents us from relaxing and being happy by reducing serotonin production. Therefore, consuming probiotic foods keeps our intestinal flora in balance, making us happy and comfortable. A happy and peaceful individual’s focus and learning skills reach a better level. In addition, since the sleep hormone melatonin is also synthesized from serotonin, our sleep quality will increase and the persistence of learning will increase thanks to comfortable sleep.
Studies show that differences in serotonin levels seen in some individuals with autism lead to sleep and learning problems.
In order to achieve the optimal level of acetylcholine, we should add choline-rich foods such as egg yolk, offal, and soy to our nutrition routine. Meat, milk, mushrooms, peanuts and vegetables with vita
Being in the sun and nature, touching the soil is the fastest way to increase serotonin. Again, instead of shopping malls, we need to go to the parks and take off our shoes and run around in the grass. Spending time in prayer or meditation, sporting and socializing increases serotonin.
In our diet, animal proteins such as meat, fish, chicken and eggs are again very important. In addition to this, nuts and chickpeas, especially pumpkin seeds, increase serotonin. We do not forget to take vitamin B6.
Neurrepinephrine levels were found to be low in children with autism. This disrupts the levels of physical arousal.
Norepinephrine, also known as noradrenaline shortage, causes anxiety. High levels of anxiety prevent learning persistence. Since it is made from serotonin, everything we do to increase serotonin is also valid here. In addition, we need to consume foods containing vitamin C, D, B6 and folic acid for the synthesis of serotonin. | <urn:uuid:0818097e-2227-4d97-9df9-ccaa7fa25142> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.otizmpedia.com/en/brain-based-education-2-neurochemicals-and-learning/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707948223038.94/warc/CC-MAIN-20240305060427-20240305090427-00898.warc.gz | en | 0.947159 | 2,374 | 3.84375 | 4 | 7 |
BYU researchers have created a miniaturized, portable version of a tool now capable of analyzing Mars’ atmosphere — and that’s just one of its myriad possible uses.
For decades mass spectrometers have offered a relatively fast and highly sensitive way to analyze and detect chemical compounds. But their bulky size has been a hindrance, limiting their in-field potential.
But after spending 12 years exploring the problem, BYU chemistry professor Daniel Austin, joined by electrical engineering professor Aaron Hawkins and other colleagues, has developed a much smaller spectrometer that still has the capabilities of its larger counterparts.
“The goal was to take what would otherwise be a huge, benchtop instrument to something that’s small enough to carry with you,” said Austin, whose team’s findings were recently published in the Journal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry.
Though smaller spectrometers have been developed in the past, they’ve generally been less sensitive and more likely to break down. But a small spectrometer whose capacity and strength isn’t minimized by its size, Austin said, opens up a world of potential applications, including the following:
- A miniaturized mass spectrometer could detect and find chemical weapons, minimizing danger to soldiers in a given region.
- In the homeland security realm, miniaturized mass spectrometers could help detect explosives in airports or elsewhere.
- For forensic investigators, portable spectrometers could help with a range of on-site needs, including determining whether a white powder is an illegal drug or something benign.
“Because mass spectrometers are typically large and expensive and require technicians to operate, not many people can get access to them,” said Yuan Tian, a study co-author and recent BYU chemistry Ph.D. grad. “But miniaturized mass spectrometers aim at overcoming these traditional problems by reducing their physical size, weight and cost.”
That, in turn, “provides a faster and simpler way for compound analysis,” added fellow co-author and chemistry Ph.D. grad Ailin Li.
Ion trap mass spectrometers typically work by metal electrodes creating an electric field. That electric field has a radio frequency signal applied to it, which traps ions. Scientists gather samples, ionize them, trap the ions and then eject and detect those ions based on their masses, which then tells them the chemical composition of the sample.
Austin and his colleagues use a process called microlithography on ceramic and glass plates to miniaturize the ion traps. The space between the plates is less than a millimeter and is “where the action happens,” Austin said, adding that the resulting device is a hundred times lighter and smaller than a conventional ion trap.
This specific project was funded in part by the National Science Foundation, and related research has also been funded by NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense. The team’s spectrometer is now being eyed for commercial development.
“Portable mass spectrometry will enable lots of applications that you just can’t do right now,” Austin said. “There’s a lot of new science that can be done with an instrument that can be taken anywhere. Instead of sending samples to a distant lab and waiting for results, a portable instrument can give immediate results, allowing quick decisions.”
Learn more: BYU-created mini tool has massive potential
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via Google News and Bing News | <urn:uuid:53ef5abe-d50a-4a7d-b103-675555073234> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://innovationtoronto.com/2017/09/portable-mass-spectrometry-will-enable-lots-of-applications-that-you-just-cant-do-right-now/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473690.28/warc/CC-MAIN-20240222030017-20240222060017-00098.warc.gz | en | 0.90549 | 1,396 | 3.46875 | 3 | 8 |
Mobile App Screenshots
Mobile App Storyboards
This mobile application was created for the Texas A&M Galveston Sea Camp in conjunction with their Camp Program Coordinator, Lorena Elsor, as a graduate level project. It is an eco-friendly initiative to encourage responsible beach-going habits, as well as familiarizing users with the natural flora and fauna of Texas beaches. The app allows users to take something from the beach without leaving a human trace. Users will be encouraged to take nothing but a picture and reduce the human impact of taking shells and organic materials that eventually damages the shoreline. Although created for the Texas A&M Galveston Sea Camp, it could be a supplemental tool for marine biology or aquatic science classes in schools or universities.
I created the Storyline training module as a follow-up project this year with the idea that mobile apps would be great for either pre-training or a take-away from training. Having the training at your fingertips to update your team, or in this case, help identify native species would be an added bonus to any training. Providing training with a sister-app is a tool I hope to provide in my role as an instructional designer.
I used the Backwards Design Model of instructional design to create the Storyline learning module. This theory has designers identify the desired results before planning instruction. The desired goal of the learning module was to familiarize students with the mobile application before going out into the "field" to explore. The training accomplishes this by presenting and assessing safety content first, and then introducing the mobile applications features and content. | <urn:uuid:7dc094de-b3d1-4717-a92a-58b072da80e2> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://meleahgayle.com/mobile-app | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473690.28/warc/CC-MAIN-20240222030017-20240222060017-00098.warc.gz | en | 0.937632 | 325 | 2.53125 | 3 | 9 |
Bridgeway Math has a special one-year course that should be very useful for students in junior high who have a shaky foundation in math or gaps in their learning. It reviews basics that should have been learned in first grade through sixth or seventh grade, up through what I would consider a pre-pre-algebra level.
This is a mastery course along the same lines as Alpha Omega’s LifePacs and A.C.E.’s Paces. Students can work independently through worktexts which contain instruction, practice problems, and self-assessments. Self-assessments are taken by students for them to determine for themselves whether or not they are ready to take the actual tests. Tests are given to students by the teacher. (In Bridgeway Math, tests need to be removed from the back of the student books in advance.) No teaching is required.
While LifePac and Pace courses typically come in ten or twelve smaller workbooks, Bridgeway Math combines six Success Math PAKs into each of two worktexts. The worktexts are titled Bridgeway Math 1: Math Foundations and Bridgeway Math 2: Pre-Algebra. The entire course consists of the two student worktexts and a teacher answer key.
The Success Math PAKs function like units in a typical textbook. However, a student should not progress to the next unit/PAK without achieving a score of 80% or higher on the previous unit.
Bridgeway Math 1 is designed to bring older students up to speed by reviewing basic math concepts that might not have been mastered. It begins with the concept of place value then moves immediately into addition with carrying. It skips over simple addition and subtraction since those usually aren’t areas of difficulty. It works on rounding, estimating, multiplication and division—again jumping past basic math facts.
Similarly, the first worktext takes students through fractions (including finding least common denominators), decimals, and many types of word problems. Instruction on concepts is brief. It teaches the algorithms or strategies without expanding into conceptual explanations as to why they work.
Bridgeway Math 1 might work if students just need to apply themselves to mastering lower level math skills. However, students who have struggled with math in the past might not have grasped concepts when they were taught in a previous course, and they might need a hands-on approach or another form of explanation this time around as well. This book gives parents an easy way to breeze through a number of years of math instruction and, at the very least, identify problem areas. As long as additional instruction is provided when needed, this is a relatively efficient way to help a student catch up. I can see this first book as also being useful in situations where students have been switched from program to program and might have missed something along the way. Because Bridgeway Math assumes that students have already been through basic math and it skips some foundational topics like addition and subtraction facts, it cannot serve as your primary source of instruction for students have never been taught those topics.
Bridgeway Math 2: Pre-Algebra begins with fractions, decimals, and percents, taking fractions and decimals further than in Bridgeway Math 1. It moves on to proportions, probability, tables, graphs, mean/median/mode, measurement, word problems, angles, triangles, geometric shapes, area, perimeter, volume, exponents, square roots, scientific notation, the Pythagorean Theorem, and working with positive and negative numbers.
The final Success Math PAK in both worktexts reviews concepts taught throughout each respective books.
Even though the second volume is labeled “pre-algebra,” the content is not as challenging as most pre-algebra courses for average students such as Saxon Math 87 or BJU Press’s Pre-Algebra. Most pre-algebra courses spend more time on algebra and geometry than does Bridgeway Math. Unless you plan to use a very simple first-year algebra course, I would recommend following the second book with another pre-algebra course. If you do so, most topics will be covered at a deeper level than in Bridgeway Math. While there might be repetition, it will reinforce learning and take students into more complex levels of math.
Worktexts, printed in black-and-white, are consumable and include enough space for students to show their work for each problem. Scattered black-and-white illustrations follow a different theme in each Success Math PAK. The themes are loosely connected to math to show how math is used in real life. For example, space shuttles are the theme in the first PAK, and images gradually tell the story of space shuttles. Images don’t tie directly to the math on a particular page. Some of the other themes are the Leaning Tower of Pisa, sports, music, the World Trade Center’s twin towers, and volcanoes.
In addition to the illustrations, the worktexts also feature occasional quotes from well-known people such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s remark, “Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.” (I’m not convinced that these are helpful.)
The teacher answer key has one page of instructions, then the rest of the book consists or reduced images of student pages (reduce to fit two student pages on each page of the teacher answer key) with answers overprinted. Answer keys for the tests are together at the back of the book rather than following each PAK.
You can purchase the worktexts individually if you don’t need both, but you will still need the same teacher answer key with either book.
This course caught my attention because it is one of the rare options for helping students catch up in math. Its self-instructional design should be great for self-motivated students who prefer to work on their own. | <urn:uuid:66663426-1a1f-40f4-a4d3-f2f31f4c13cd> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://cathyduffyreviews.com/homeschool-reviews-core-curricula/math/math-grades-7-8/bridgeway-math | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474569.64/warc/CC-MAIN-20240224212113-20240225002113-00098.warc.gz | en | 0.956412 | 1,241 | 2.921875 | 3 | 10 |
1. Developmental interplay between beliefs, functional brain networks, and school trajectories
Why do some adolescents avoid challenges, while others thrive at challenging school tasks? Why are some students more resilient to setbacks at school than others? In this project, we investigate the interplay between beliefs that students have about their abilities (mindset), how their functional brain networks for processing errors and feedback develop, and their actual learning trajectories and well-being in school. We longitudinally follow children from the first until the third year of high school, and assess their motivational profile using questionnaires, their learning behavior using computer tasks (a math task with self-adjusted difficulty and an explore/exploit task) and using fMRI, how their brain prioritizes different types of feedback and anticipates on effort and reward.
2. Intervention RCT: Influencing beliefs to stimulate resilient learning behavior at school
In this project, we developed an intervention in which adolescents experience the malleability of their own brain activity, and that they have influence on their own learning processes. We use portable EEG-neurofeedback to create this experience, and developed different interactive neurofeedback games in collaboration with Waag Technology & Society.
3. Motivation and the social environment: the role of peers and parents
It is known that adolescents are highly flexible in goal-directed behaviour and adolescents’ beliefs and goals are likely to be strongly influenced by peers and parents. This project moves beyond the level of individual students. The overall aim is to investigate how peers and parents influence both early (12-14 years old) and late adolescents’ (15-17 years old) ability beliefs, goal orientation and study motivation. To investigate the role of parents and peers, we assess social networks at school, use diary techniques and observations of peer-to-peer and parent-child interactions during learning.
4. The role of ability beliefs in effort investment, stress and failure attribution: physiological mechanisms
Making mistakes is inherent to learning. Students, however, may hold different views on what these mistakes mean to them. In this project, we addresses the underlying (electro)physiological correlates of confrontation with errors and helpless attributions, in relation to ability beliefs. Electrocardiograms (ECG) and Encephalo-Electrograms (EEG) are measured in undergraduate students while they perform a math task (Math Effort Task; MET, in which participants choose their own difficulty levels) and a stop signal task.
5. Understanding the motivation-performance cycle
Education is an important contributor to young people’s development. To optimize the learning process in youth, understanding the underlying mechanisms is essential. However, numerous motivational and cognitive variables are known to affect learning, which all change continuously and mutually influence each other. Existing learning theories typically focus on a limited set of variables, and capture just one direction of causality (e.g., intrinsic motivation increases performance). In this project, we will develop a new cyclical model of learning, grounded in a network approach, linking sub-networks of motivation, effort-related behaviours (i.e., perseverance), and performance. All variables can mutually influence each other, and each outcome can be the starting point for a new learning cycle. The model will highlight which interventions seem most promising depending on where a learner is in the cycle, thereby informing teachers where and when best to intervene. We will tackle the cycle of motivation, effort, and performance by analysing longitudinal datasets covering different components of the cycle. These datasets cross boundaries between the lab and educational practice, and between the global North (the Netherlands) and the global South (Peru) communities.
6. Exploring the possibilities of portable neurotechnology for educational research and practice
In the past few decades, neuroscience and cognitive psychology have produced a rich body of research on memory, learning and attention, but for the most part the translational value of this work to classroom practices has been limited. A major challenge for translation is that neuroscience research is typically conducted in artificial and highly controlled laboratory settings. Interestingly, recent developments in portable neurotechnology (e.g. electroencephalography (EEG) and functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS)) now allow taking neuroscience research out of the lab and into working classrooms and other real-life settings. Moreover, portable technologies enable research in young children, and in areas of the world where access to advanced research labs is limited. In this recently founded Emerging Field Group, we will jointly explore the use of portable brain technologies to increase the ecological validity and worldwide implementation of educational neuroscience research.
7. How neuroscience impacts society
Neuroscience research and neuro-imaging in particular is popular in the media and in diverse daily-life settings such as the educational practice. This makes it very important to safeguard accurate and realistic communication about neuroscience results, and to investigate the public impact of neuroscience. In 2015, we published the book “Kijken in het brein” (“Looking into the brain”) to help the general public to separate myths from the promising directions in our field. In addition, we investigate neuroscience communication and the impact of developments in neuroscience on society (in collaboration with the Athena Institute). For example, we recently studied public perceptions of the ‘teenage brain’, and how these views impact adolescent behavior.
8. Social Educational Neuroscience Amsterdam (SENSA)
Together with a team of VU researchers, we jointly tackle urgent issues at the intersection of social psychology, developmental psychology, cognitive neuroscience and educational neuroscience. We focus on investigating the behavioral and brain mechanisms of social and motivational processes in educational settings from childhood to adolescence. We integrate lab-based experimental approaches with more ecologically valid methods, for example by using portable neuroimaging techniques that can be applied in the classroom while students are interacting.
This project is funded by the Ammodo Science Award for Groundbreaking Research 2020.
For more information see: https://socialeducationalneuroscience.com/ | <urn:uuid:98ed49e9-6e14-48d6-b803-cb4bb51f4132> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://laboflearning.com/research/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474653.81/warc/CC-MAIN-20240226062606-20240226092606-00098.warc.gz | en | 0.921937 | 1,233 | 3.46875 | 3 | 11 |
Adults often perceive young children’s play fighting and use of war toys as violent or aggressive behaviour rather than beneficial to their development. Movies (e.g., Star Wars), books (e.g., Harry Potter), national figures (e.g. military forces), community helpers (e.g., police officers), professional sports (e.g., rugby) and commercial toys (e.g., Nerf guns) influence young children’s desire to engage in such play. In spite of that, educational programs often either discourage or ban this controversial form of play resulting in contrasting societal messaging for young children related to the appropriateness of play fighting and war toys. For example, fencing, an international sport, where those who excel are awarded medals, features three types of bladed weapons maneuvered in actions representative of fighting. Further, police officers use stun guns, firearms, and tear gas, yet are often recognized as instrumental for any society seeking to protect citizens. A closer look at the characteristics of children’s play fighting and use of war toys will indicate that the behaviour is voluntary, choreographed, enjoyable and usually proceeds with caution and care.
Parents and educators struggle with the appropriateness of young children’s play fighting,1 and interest in war toys (e.g., guns, swords, bombs, light sabers and blasters) in home and school settings. Play fighting with symbolic weapons or war toys is a form of socio-dramatic play predominantly observed amongst boys ages three to six years. Play fighting is defined as verbally and physically cooperative play behaviour involving at least two children, where all participants enjoyably and voluntarily engage in reciprocal role-playing that includes aggressive make-believe themes, actions, and words; yet lacks intent to harm either emotionally or physically. Play fighting encompasses superhero play,2 “bad guy” play,3 active pretend play,4 physically active and imaginative play,5 rough-and-tumble play,6,7,8 and war play.
Educators are pressured to disregard the benefits of aggressive socio-dramatic play resulting in prohibition of various forms of the play, particularly play fighting4,9 and engagement with war toys. However, the elimination of play fighting and war toys by parents and educators may have a significant impact on young children’s development. Research suggests that the optimal education and development of young children, particularly boys, is not being met when playful aggressive tendencies are forbidden.4,6,7,10 Further, educational programs that restrict play types may foster play deficits, which inadvertently will leave children unprepared for future experiences.11 While educators are often uncomfortable with play fighting and with war toys, it can be argued that the omission of these forms of play in early childhood programs limits opportunities for development of social, emotional, physical, cognitive and communicative abilities in young children.
Play fighting generates central social learning experiences which support children as they practice controlled and motivated competitive and cooperative behaviour among peers.6 Understandably, this form of play is controversial. Carlsson-Paige suggest that war play is detrimental to child development due to its imitative nature rather than the creation of novel play experiences.12 Nevertheless, research supports dramatic and sociodramtic play as important to child development2,5 with two key elements of sociodramatic play being imitation and make-believe.1
Professional organizations have influenced early childhood practice when considering exposure to fighting and war toys. For example, developmentally appropriate practice, the initiative by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), supports and encourages the presence of certain forms of uniforms and images in the classroom, yet bans weapons and actions symbolic of, or believed to glorify, violence. Educator training and development often does not delineate playful aggression from serious aggression perpetuated by the aspiration to decrease violence in all forms13 and promote legislative efforts for the standardization of manufacturing physically and psychologically safe commercial toys.14 For example, Watson and Peng15 suggest that toy gun play is not associated with many positive behaviours, while Fry16 noted that play fighting and serious fighting can be categorized into separate types of behaviour in young children. Hellendoorn and Harinck17 differentiated play fighting as make-believe-aggression and rough-and-tumble since playful aggression should not be considered real aggression. Educators may discourage or ban play fighting and war toys because they perceive the play fighting as detrimental to child development rather than beneficial3,4,8 and the war toys as symbols of violence.
It is important to recognize that play fighting and play with war toys lack intent to harm. Participants may sustain injuries, but such injuries are due to the nature of play, and not the purpose. This is an important distinction when identifying serious aggression, where the manifestation of behaviour holds the purpose of explicitly intending to injure or destroy and such behaviour is directed towards another with the intent to harm.18,19 However, children who exhibit significantly higher rates of antisocial behaviour and negative emotion display more violent actions during pretend play and engage in more frequent antisocial behaviour outside the context of their play.20 Additional support is needed for young children who lack age-appropriate prosocial skills and emotional regulation.
Key Research Questions
Smilansky21 suggests socio-dramatic play involves the cooperative interaction of at least two children, who act out roles both verbally and physically, with two key elements: imitation and make-believe. The acceptance or suppression of socio-dramatic play is determined by the knowledge and perceptions of early childhood educators. For greater understanding researchers should consider to what extent play fighting and war toys are accepted in the home and educational settings along with the contextual components that influence acceptance or suppression.
Recent Research Results
Parents and educators often misinterpret or are uncomfortable with play fighting due to its resemblance to serious aggression and difficulty recognizing subtle differences between the two.3,7 Playful aggression is a common component in socio-dramatic play — typically among boys.6,10,22,23 If playful aggression is supported, it is highly beneficial to child development.3 The act of pretending to be aggressive is not equivalent to being aggressive.3 Role reversal, cooperation, voluntary engagement, chasing and fleeing, restrained physical contact, smiling and laughing are common characteristics of playful aggression.16 Within this framework of understanding, play fighting and war toys can be considered components of socio-dramatic play.3 This suggests that early childhood educators need opportunities to enhance their understanding of the benefits of pretend play, including aggressive dramatic play themes such as fighting and war, in order to more effectively support play.
Although there is abundant literature supporting forms of socio-dramatic play commonly perceived as appropriate (i.e., house keeping, community helpers), little is known of how to support aggressive socio-dramatic play such as play fighting1 and the use of war toys in the classroom. Research is needed to develop a cohesive terminology that clearly identifies various types of aggressive socio-dramatic play, targets the developmental benefits of each type, and distinguishes various toys and actions characteristic of aggressively representative play. Research findings to date have supported the inclusion of aggressive socio-dramatic play in early childhood education, yet minimal practical guidance for educators is offered to aid in the development of strategies and clear tactics for supervising play fighting and war toy play.
Research demonstrates distinct differences between serious aggressive behaviour and playful aggressive behaviour, with intent to harm being the major factor of serious aggression. Research further demonstrates playful aggressive behaviour as a neglected, yet important element of socio-dramatic play, especially for young boys. Children who engage in play fighting are simply pretending to be aggressive as they develop a fighting theme that commonly involves symbolic weapons or war toys. They frequently exchange roles, collaboratively develop storylines, and repeat sequences in an effort to perfect their physical movements and the social dynamics of their play. Participants enjoyably and voluntarily engage in reciprocal role-playing that includes aggressive make-believe themes, actions, words and weapons; yet lacks intent to harm either emotionally or physically. However, educators must be cognizant of supervision, a key component for supporting play fighting. As with learning to cut with scissors, writing with a sharp pencil, and climbing on playground equipment, young children need the establishment of clear guidelines and reinforcement or redirection from educators to ensure their safety is assured within developmentally appropriate play.
Implications for Parents, Services and Policy
Without a full understanding of the distinct difference between serious and symbolic aggression educators may react with conflicting messages to young children regarding the appropriateness of engaging in socio-dramatic play involving play fighting and war toys. This confusion often results in educators who are pressured to disregard the benefits of aggressive socio-dramatic play by banning play fighting4,9 and war toys.
Inconsistent rules and guidelines relating to the role of play fighting and war toys in early childhood education contribute to the struggle to recognize benefits and support children’s engagement. Educators who hold a foundation of understanding will be better able to communicate the importance of not only allowing playful aggression but also supporting it with the inclusion of war toys in early childhood programs.
- Pellis SM, Pellis VC. Rough-and-tumble play and the development of the social brain. Current Directions in Psychological Science. 2007;16:95-98. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8721.2007.00483.x.
- Bauer KL, Dettore E. Superhero play: What’s a teacher to do? Early Childhood Education Journal. 1997;25(1):17-21. doi:10.1023/A:1025677730004.
- Logue ME, Detour A. “You be the bad guy”: A new role for teachers in supporting children’s dramatic play. Early Childhood Research & Practice. 2011;13(1):1-16.
- Logue ME, Harvey H. Preschool teachers’ views of active play. Journal of Research in Childhood Education. 2010;24(1):32-49. doi:10.1080/02568540903439375.
- Parsons A, Howe N. Superhero toys and boys’ physically active and imaginative play. Journal of Research in Childhood Education. 2006;20:802-806. doi:10.1080/02568540609594568.
- Jarvis P. Monsters, magic and mr psycho: A biocultural approach to rough and tumble play in the early years of primary school. Early Years: An International Journal of Research and Development. 2007;27(2):171-188. doi:10.1080/09575140701425324.
- Pellegrini AD. Rough-and-tumble play: Developmental and educational significance. Educational Psychologist. 1987;22:23-43. doi:10.1207/s15326985ep2201_2.
- Tannock MT. Rough and tumble play: An investigation of the perceptions of educators and young children. Early Childhood Education Journal. 2008;35:357-361. doi:10.1007/s10643-007-0196-1.
- Carlson FM. Rough play: One of the most challenging behaviours. Young Children. 2011:18-25.
- DiPietro JA. Rough and tumble play: A function of gender. Developmental Psychology. 1981;17(1):50-58. doi:10.1037/0012-16188.8.131.52.
- Sutton-Smith B. Play as adaptive potentiation. Sportswissenschaft. 1975;5:103-118.
- Carlsson-Paige N. Young children and war play. Educational Leadership. 1987;45:80-84.
- Violence in children’s Lives; A Position Statement of the National Association for the Education of Young Children; http://www.naeyc.org/files/naeyc/file/positions/ PSMEVI98.PDF; Adopted July 1993.
- Media Violence in Children’s Lives; A Position Statement of the National Association for the Education of Young Children; http://www.naeyc.org/files/naeyc/file/positions/ PSMEVI98.PDF; Adopted April 1990; Reaffirmed July 1994.
- Watson MW, Peng Y. The relation between toy gun play and childrens’ aggressive behavior. Early Education and Development. 1994;3:370-389.
- Fry DP. Differences between playfighting and serious fighting among Zapotec children. Ethology and Sociobiology. 1987;(8)4:285-306. doi:10.1016/0162-3095(87)90020-X.
- Hellendoorn J, Harinck, FJH. War toy play and aggression in Dutch kindergarten children. Social Development. 1997;6(3):340-354. doi:10.1111/j.
- Bandura A. Social learning theory of aggression. The Journal of Communication. 1978; 28(3):12-29. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.1978.tb01621.x.
- Roberton T, Daffern M, Bucks RS. Emotion regulation and aggression. Aggression and Violent Behaviour. 2011;17:72-82. doi:10.1016/j.avb.2011.09.006.
- Dunn J, Hughes C. “I got some swords and you’re dead!”: Violent fantasy, antisocial behavior, friendship, and moral sensibility in young children. Child Development. 2001;72:491-505. doi:10.1111/1467-8624.00292.
- Smilansky S. Sociodramatic play: Its relevance to behaviour and achievement in school. In: Klugman E, Smilansky S, ed. Children’s play and learning: Perspectives and policy implications. Columbia University: Teachers College Press; 1990:18-42.
- Humphreys AP, Smith PK. Rough-and-tumble play friendship and dominance in school children: Evidence for continuity and change with age. Child Development. 1987;58: 201-212. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.1987.tb03500.x.
- Pellegrini AD. Elementary-school children’s rough-and-tumble play. Early Childhood Quarterly. 1989;4:245-260. doi:10.1016/S0885-2006(89)80006-7.
How to cite this article:
Hart JL, Tannock MT. Young Children’s Play Fighting and Use of War Toys. In: Tremblay RE, Boivin M, Peters RDeV, eds. Smith PK, topic ed. Encyclopedia on Early Childhood Development [online]. https://www.child-encyclopedia.com/play/according-experts/young-childrens-play-fighting-and-use-war-toys. Published: June 2013. Accessed February 26, 2024.Text copied to the clipboard ✓ | <urn:uuid:337feb40-056c-4b2d-8348-af18370be862> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.child-encyclopedia.com/play/according-experts/young-childrens-play-fighting-and-use-war-toys | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947474676.79/warc/CC-MAIN-20240227153053-20240227183053-00098.warc.gz | en | 0.891275 | 3,152 | 3.5625 | 4 | 12 |
Aspects of human nature - like our capacity for language, reasoning or emotions - are amenable to scientific analysis that looks at where they come from and how they work, using tools like evolutionary biology, genetics, or neuroscience. But not everything about us that is important is innate. Many deeply entrenched features and characteristics of human life are contingent not essential. They come from our human history, not our human biology. Such aspects of the human condition - like marriage, sports, and war - resist scientific analysis and must be studied in a more humanistic way. | <urn:uuid:4041e28c-5e34-4164-933a-a1ff7bfc764c> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2011/03/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947475238.84/warc/CC-MAIN-20240301093751-20240301123751-00098.warc.gz | en | 0.941579 | 111 | 2.609375 | 3 | 13 |
Do the Math: the Difference Between Chinese and American Teachers
A new study finds that while American teachers know more about theories of teaching, Chinese teachers can do the math
For the past 20 years, studies of math achievement have shown that Chinese (and other East Asian) children consistently outperform their American counterparts in almost every area. Explanations have focused on differences ranging from number-word systems and parental expectations to student motivation and curriculum content.
Now a study published in Contemporary Educational Psychology by Teachers College Professor Stephen Peverly and former TC students Zheng Zhou of St. John's University and Tao Xin of Beijing Normal University suggests that Asian teachers simply know more about math. In a comparison of 162 third-grade mathematics teachers in the US and the People's Republic of China, the researchers found that while American teachers were more knowledgeable about general educational theories and classroom skills, Chinese teachers had stronger knowledge of the subject matter they were teaching, as well as a better understanding of the overall elementary curriculum that their students had covered and would cover in later years.
The difference was partly attributed to the fact that most U.S. teacher preparation programs focus on how to teach mathematics rather than on mathematics itself -- and that once U.S. teachers become certified they do not often have the opportunity to improve their knowledge of the subject. The study's authors also suggest that many U.S. math teachers are not adequately prepared to teach their subject because they, themselves, were poorly educated in math in elementary and secondary school
The study focused on teachers' level of knowledge about concepts, computations and word problems involving fractions; their skills in teaching fractions in a way that ensures student comprehension; and their knowledge of more general issues such as child development, learning theories, and classroom management.
Researchers looked at both the content teachers said they would assign to their students and the way they presented the concepts. While both Chinese and American teachers used similar methods to teach fractions-'"using hands-on learning tools, folding pieces of paper, coloring in geometric shapes.-'"there was a big difference in the information each group presented. Most of the American teachers in the study, when asked to about their teaching methods, rarely mentioned content. Chinese teachers, on the other hand, spoke in great detail about the content they present to students, and that content demonstrated a deep understanding of the subject matter as well as knowledge of the entire elementary mathematics curriculum.
Overall, Chinese teachers had a better understanding of the mathematical concepts they were teaching than did their U.S. counterparts. The study confirmed findings of a previous study that found that U.S. teachers do not have "a profound understanding of fundamental mathematics." This, despite the fact that all the American teachers in the study held a bachelor's degree and more than half had obtained a master's degree, while most of the Chinese teachers were trained, after junior high school, at a three-year teacher-training school where they studied subjects equivalent to those offered in high school. American teachers also had taken more courses on teaching methods and general educational and psychological principles related to teaching than did Chinese teachers.
The researchers found that more experienced American teachers were better able to identify important points for teaching fraction concepts. For Chinese teachers, however, mastery of this skill did not depend on experience, with less experienced Chinese teachers demonstrating the same proficiency as their more experienced counterparts.
Chinese teachers also showed a better understanding than American teachers of their students' prior mathematics knowledge relating to fractions. The Chinese teachers reviewed concepts students had studied previously and found opportunities to lay the groundwork for what students would be learning later. American teachers rarely displayed the same understanding.
American teachers, on the other hand, were more knowledgeable than Chinese teachers about concepts covered in educational psychology texts.
Researchers summarized that while Chinese teachers were effective in providing instruction based on how well they knew the subject matter, their limited understanding of underlying psychological aspects of learning could be problematic. This limitation could possibly lead to problems related to student motivation, spontaneity, and creativity among other things. American teachers' comparative lack of understanding of the subject matter revealed that teacher preparation programs in the U.S. should focus more on increasing understanding of the subject and that in-service training should be improved.
Published Tuesday, Dec. 12, 2006 | <urn:uuid:32e2d12b-95d8-4581-af8c-3f1ed7c29318> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.tc.columbia.edu/articles/2006/december/do-the-math--the-difference-between-chinese-and-american-te/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947475238.84/warc/CC-MAIN-20240301093751-20240301123751-00098.warc.gz | en | 0.977631 | 860 | 3.171875 | 3 | 14 |
By Rodney Glasgow
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in Volume 2 of “Think Differently and Deeply” (2015).
I have begun my middle school Religion class the same way for all of the three years that I have been the teacher. Students pair up, and they discuss a given question with their partner. Tell your partner about your religion. What is your religion? How do you practice it? Then, they find another student, and they prepare to discuss a new question. How do you believe the world began? Three minutes later, they find a different student. Talk about a time when you experienced something that you could not explain. They switch partners again to discuss, What do you think God looks like? This continues for a few more rounds of questions, and ends with: How have you seen people using or practicing religion around you?
Although I start my class the same way every time, each time is a different experience. This exchange of stories and ideas between students is a novelty for each Religion section. Students present their answers to these questions to the whole class aided by a creative slideshow, and after each presentation the class must ask two questions of the student about something that interests them from what they heard. That begins our exploration of Genesis and the founding of Judeo-Christian beliefs.
When I created this opening unit, I surely had James Banks whispering in my ear. The transformation approach to curriculum development that he describes in his “Four Approaches to Multicultural Education” is evident here. The transformation approach restructures curriculum to include multiple perspectives. (1) It often involves doing what I did—throwing out the existing curriculum and reimagining the course altogether. The other three approaches all speak to some aspect of the foundations of multicultural education: the contributions approach (heroes and holidays), the additive approach (stand alone units and cultural days, weeks, or months), and the social action approach (using what is learned to actively address a current real world issue). As Sonia Nieto tells us:
“Multicultural education is a process of comprehensive school reform and basic education for all students. It challenges and rejects racism and other forms of discrimination in schools and society and accepts and affirms the pluralism (ethnic, racial, linguistic, religious, economic, and gender, among others) that students, their communities, and teachers represent. Multicultural education permeates the curriculum and instructional strategies used in schools, as well as the interactions among teachers, students, and parents, and the very way that schools conceptualize the nature of teaching and learning. Because it uses critical pedagogy as its underlying philosophy and focuses on knowledge, reflection, and action (praxis) as the basis for social change, multicultural education promotes the democratic principles of social justice.” (2)
Multicultural education is an idea born of the ’70s that gained popularity in the ’90s. More recently, the nomenclature has shifted as the philosophy has deepened. Instead of talking about multicultural education, which most confuse with simply addressing race in the classroom, educational leaders are now focusing on inclusive pedagogy.
Inclusive pedagogy or inclusive teaching describes instructional strategies used to create engaging learning environments. Inclusive teaching equips students to learn from differences in perspectives, learning differences, cultural and social backgrounds, and exceptionalities in the classroom. Practitioners of inclusive pedagogy vary course design and assessments to give students a number of ways to demonstrate their mastery of the course content and skills. Inclusive teaching brings students’ experiences into the classroom. The instructor not only delivers the content but also develops the students. (3)
Multicultural education’s main focus can be said to be on what we teach, where inclusive pedagogy’s main focus is on how we teach. Where multicultural education has been mainly applied to race and, in its more broad moments, gender, inclusive pedagogy encompasses the totality of an individual’s identity, including learning preferences and lived experience. Quite simply, inclusive pedagogy asks us to know the stories in the room and to use those stories to engage the learner thus deepening the learning.
Inclusive pedagogy is brain-based and research informed. It relies on the importance of relevance (4) and novelty (5) in creating learning and aiding memory storage and retrieval. Our brains fire up when we can say, “Here is how this relates to me,” or “Here is why I need to know this,” or “Here is where I can connect my story with this information.” Our brains become more alert in those moments when we are encountering information that we have not previously considered. In the faculty lounge, we call it the power of “whoa!” and “a-ha!”
I have experienced “whoa” moments and “a-ha” moments often in my classroom. In that first week of Religion class, there are always a few. I am thinking of the student who, in describing her own spiritual beliefs to the class, disclosed that she was a medium. You could feel the interest build in the room. Some students were thinking, “Whoa! A medium! I wonder if there are spirits in this room. Does she see them?” Other students were thinking, “Whoa! What is a medium?” Novelty walked right in the room and excited their brains, and the learning happened. One student raised his hand to ask her, “What is a medium?” She answered confidently. Another wanted to know when she discovered her abilities, and another wanted to know if she was frightened by it. A fourth student asked, “Why is it called a medium?” And here is where, as a teacher, relevance and shared experience comes in.
I sneakily asked, “Where else have we heard the word medium?” Students responded that items are often sized small, medium, or large. They then recalled that medium is another term for being in the middle, and they decided that a medium is someone who is in the middle of this world and the spirit world, able to communicate with both. They will forget many things about Religion 6. That will not be one of them! Now, when this class discusses what it means to be spiritual, or if miracles exist, or what happens after life, they will have a different perspective than their own to consider.
Inclusive pedagogy’s call for multiple perspectives as a learning tool is nothing new. Dewey, the great educational philosopher of the early 20th century, already told us that “…it is the office of the school environment to balance the various elements in the social environment, and to see to it that each individual gets an opportunity to escape from the limitations of the social group in which he was born, and to come into living contact with a broader environment.” (6) Indeed, Horace Mann, the Father of American Education, began this dialogue in the 19th century when he urged us to see education as the great equalizer of diverse experiences. Inclusive pedagogy is applicable to each classroom and every discipline. There is always space to broaden the perspective and widen the lens.
My middle school Religion class always ends the same way. Students write an essay or produce a work of art that explains how their thoughts about God have either changed or been solidified since the start of the course. And in that way, the class ends in a different place for each student that I, as their teacher, must recognize and honor. By releasing myself from being a “sage on the stage” to become a co-creator of educational opportunities with my students, everyone in my classroom is a better teacher and stronger learner.
1) J.A. Banks. An Introduction to Multicultural Education 2nd ed. (Boston 1999).
2) S. Nieto. Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education (2nd ed.). (New York 1996).
3) S. Radford-Hill. “Practicing Inclusive Pedagogy. (2014). https://www.luther.edu/ideas-creationsblog/?story_id=548097
4) University College London. “Novelty Aids Learning.” ScienceDaily (4 August 2006). www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/08/060804084518.htm
5) Bernard, S. (2010) http://www.edutopia.org/neuroscience-brain-based-learning-relevanceimproves-engagement
6) J. Dewey (1916). Democracy and Education. New York: Simon & Brown (1997). | <urn:uuid:3a5fced2-978f-4c82-a785-aca81d08bf7f> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.thecttl.org/2020/09/24/teach-me-and-ill-teach-you-learning-as-an-equitable-exchange/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947475238.84/warc/CC-MAIN-20240301093751-20240301123751-00098.warc.gz | en | 0.954612 | 1,819 | 2.765625 | 3 | 15 |
In this note we are going to try to answer some of the most common questions about what a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is like and what it consists of.
The basics of a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is, first of all, a form of psychological treatment. It can be applied to many areas and problems, not just the office.
In the office, typically everything begins when a person does not feel well emotionally or has a behavior problem and therefore decides to consult a psychologist. Thus, the patient arrives and explains his problem to the psychologist who, based on what the patient tells him, will first try to understand it and then help him find a solution with the means of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
Next, we are going to develop a series of important points that describe how the treatment is carried out.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has three major stages
In Cognitive Behavioral Therapy we organize ourselves in three phases: evaluation, treatment and follow-up.
During the first stage, the psychological evaluation, we take care of knowing the patient and understanding the problems for which they consult. If there is a diagnosis such as Depression, Bipolarity or Social Phobia we try to find it at this time. In general, what we discover in these first interviews we explain to the patient, in this way he begins to know his problem and gives us his point of view. Very important: during this phase, the patient and the therapist talk and agree on the treatment goals and prioritize them. The psychological evaluation lasts between 3 and 5 sessions.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a scientific approach
Although it seems strange, not all therapies applied by psychologists have a scientific basis. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy itself is a scientific therapy, which does not mean that it is infallible but that the procedures applied are investigated with rigorous experimental methods, today closely linked to advances in neuroscience. That is why we are more likely to achieve the objectives. A scientifically validated procedure does not guarantee success but makes it much more likely.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is practical and works for objectives
In Cognitive Behavioral Therapy we focus on solving the current problems of the person, the reasons that afflict them today and make them suffer. In some cases, when it is necessary to understand the current problem, we ask for information about the past; But the accent of treatment is on solving today’s difficulties.
The dialogues between the patient and the therapist are guided by practical objectives. It is not at all a spontaneous talk without direction, but we orient ourselves by the reasons that brought the patient to treatment.
On the other hand, we don’t just talk. We teach the patient a set of exercises that will help him manage and solve problems.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a treatment approach applicable to different problems and areas. In the clinic, in the office, it is not only used for specific problems such as phobias or depressions but it is also effective in the treatment of vital crises, family and relationship problems, non-specific emotional distress. In addition, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is applicable to different areas of the office, such as school or work.
In short, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a form of practical-oriented psychological treatment, based on scientific knowledge and with a wide spectrum of application. Its main objective is to alleviate human suffering using procedures validated by science. | <urn:uuid:f6f35382-eb74-4463-a59e-1a146a5f7cfb> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.iaipwebsite.org/site/dg7tl8/bbhb/dim-witted-synonym | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947475897.53/warc/CC-MAIN-20240302184020-20240302214020-00098.warc.gz | en | 0.955802 | 675 | 3.046875 | 3 | 16 |
Some think big. But for Russ Kerschmann, thinking small has made all the difference. He’s the scientist who invented a brand new imaging technology that allows microscopists to view the three-dimensional (3-D) architecture of objects.
His is a grass roots success story that began on his kitchen table 15 years ago. Kerschmann, an anatomic pathologist, began work on a project that would eventually become the core technology of his company, Resolution Sciences Corporation, Inc. (Resolution), based in Corte Madera, California.
This forward-thinking technology is called digital volumetric imaging (DVI) and has altered the way microscopists study images by transforming biological tissue and materials science into high fidelity, 3-D digital replicas.
Before the introduction of DVI, all scientists and researchers were bound by the traditional glass slide-based method that offered only a two-dimensional (2-D) perspective of images. The amount of distortion introduced made it nearly impossible to re-assemble the hundreds or thousands of tissue sections into one good image. Instead, with the introduction of DVI, the entire sample is now stained with a fluorochrome dye, embedded in a specially formulated polymer, and physically sectioned on a precision-controlled robotic microtome.
“When it comes to doing 3-D reconstruction on samples of many cubic millimeters, serial glass slides were the predominant way that people tried to do that. No one in the 150 years of optical microscopy had been successful in making a truly high-fidelity rendering of a biopsy-size piece of tissue in 3-D,” Kerschmann said. Thanks to his creation, scientists can see inside the 3-D structure of samples many cubic millimeters in volume, and can conduct accurate measurements and analyses by investigating the approximately 1,000 to 3,000 virtual sections in each DVI set, that are imaged at as little as 1/4 of a micron resolution. An important tool in this process is the company’s software program RESView, that enables researchers to rotate samples in 3-D space and digitally cut into the data, examining a 2-D image along any axis, effectively establishing integrated 2-D and 3-D information. The price tag on this Windows NT or 2000 workstation is just under $24,000, and includes all the hardware, software, initial licensing fees, and upgrades. Customers can expect to pay $1,000 per sample for processing and will receive their images on CD-Rom or DVD. The tissues are dyed with a multicolored stain and technicians capture the color and bring it all the way through to the data.
The technology is exciting for many of Resolution’s clients including Douglas Chinn, Principle Member of the Technology Staff for Sandia National Laboratories, California. Sandia has incorporated DVI into its research and development protocols for imaging of micromachine parts, and Chinn has designed special structures for inclusion on his micromachine wafers. “The idea of having a 3-D image of a mechanical part clicked immediately, so I sent them one of our gears made with lithography electroplating and molding (LIGA) and they sliced it up and imaged it, and demonstrated the new part with their computer. It was obvious this would allow us to see things that we really don’t have any technique to see,” said Chinn. “What we can do with Resolution Sciences data sets that we can’t do with any other technology is match the 3-D data sets to a computer-aided design (CAD) model–and that is very powerful for the designers. Here we have a technique that effectively measures the entire surface of the device at once, so we get a color map out of the computer and the colors indicate how the real object varies from the CAD model.” He added that designers normally prepare drawings, and through an arduous and complex process, produce a real part. “There’s always some kind of variance, but now we can see instantaneously how the part varies from the design. The next step is to match data sets from each wafer to the other, so we can compare wafer 1 to wafer 2 and see how consistent our manufacturing processing is. This is very powerful.”
“I was looking at blood vessel networks in skin that had been irradiated with therapeutic laser light,” Kerschmann said of his days in the late 1980s as a research fellow for Wellman Laboratories of Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, “and the research group wanted to know where the threshold damage was occurring. They were asking me, for example, if the first damage occurs at the vessel branch points and all I had at the time was standard glass slides. It became clear I could not answer that question because vessel branch points are very three-dimensional in their arrangement in skin.” It was time to put his B.A. in neuroscience, M.S. in microbiology, M.D. from the University of Massachusetts, and clinical fellowship in pathology from Harvard to the test. Kerschmann began to develop DVI while working at the University of Massachusetts and later went on to work at the University of California, always hoping it would someday be valuable enough to stand on its own.
That day finally arrived in 1997 when the first investors appeared, and the result continues to please the inventor. Resolution was later awarded a $1.6 million grant from The National Institute of Standards and Technology, that partially funds its National Digital Tissue Repository (NDTR), a web-based collection of standard digital, biological tissue images available for purchase online. The program features high quality, 3-D DVI images of commonly used biological tissue samples that can be previewed interactively on the web. Resolution also won 5th place in Nikon’s Small World Photography Competition last year, for the submission of an image containing a sample of a coated magazine cover. Another winning image will appear in Nikon’s Small World Calendar later this year.
Though Resolution originally thought they would launch the innovative technology to the clinical field, they ultimately decided that commercializing it within the research community would be their focus. Today, their primary goal is to introduce the technology to more pharmaceutical and material manufacturing companies. They’re currently working with Genentech, Genetics Institute/Wyeth-Ayerst Research, Sandia National Laboratories, and GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals, among others.
Resolution’s relationship with Sandia National Laboratories continues to develop, and Chinn’s expectations keep growing. “What we have got is conventional scanning electron microscopy (SEM), optical microscopes, various surface profilometers, and some interferometer-type scopes. The problem with all of these imaging techniques is that they’re 2-D. Even the interferometry scopes–I call them 2 1/2-D, not true 3-D. We need information about all sides of the part. We need precision of measurement to better than a micron over these very distances of, say, a thousand microns. We also need to know information about surface finish and how the front of the part relates to the back of the part.”
Science and technology develop simultaneously, and, according to Kerschmann, the electronic age has been “absolutely critical” for his research and development. “I sat on this technology for almost a decade before trying to commercialize it. The amount of information generated is immense.” His company takes pride in teaching customers about their own products and helping them save money by providing “a better understanding of how the components of material fit together.” Manufacturers can potentially reduce the amount of materials needed to produce their products, and drive down their operating costs.
The DVI technology has applications in numerous areas of science, including genome research. Resolution works closely with collaborator Scott Fraser, director of the Biomedical Imaging Center at California Institute of Technology. Of Fraser, Kerschmann says, “He’s doing a lot of imaging of embryos with our systems, including vertebrae embryos, and he’s using it [our technology] to look at knock-out mutation changes in the entire embryo. We have the only technology that can image an entire embryo at cellular level resolution.” We’ve been able to image gene expression distributions in entire embryos using fluorescent proteins. They can use it to track the migration of different cell types in the development of embryos.”
Though Kerschmann proclaimed his discovery of how to make the chemistry and tissue block work to get a sharp image a “Eureka moment”, he’s not done yet. What does the future hold for this scientist turned entrepreneur? This time, he’s thinking big: “I’m hoping our technology will be widely used in industry and academia and will be the standard practice for 3-D microscopy of large amounts of samples.” | <urn:uuid:e0171b68-fb68-429f-8ddf-6b7baa6554e9> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.scanning-fams.org/scanabstracts/SCANNING02/24107.casestudy.html | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947475897.53/warc/CC-MAIN-20240302184020-20240302214020-00098.warc.gz | en | 0.955355 | 1,878 | 3.109375 | 3 | 17 |
As education leaders begin to look beyond the pandemic, some students are opting into online learning for good.
When officials at Fort Smith Public Schools in Arkansas began preparing an online-only option for fall 2020, they expected to have about 500 sign-ups from the district’s 14,000 students. Instead, online enrollment hit 3,500.
“As we got closer, we were surprised to see our estimate keep growing,” says Gary Udouj, director of career education and district innovation for FSPS. “We were very quickly training staff and getting our resources together to make sure all of our students had the technology they needed.”
The district paid teachers a $500 stipend to complete a virtual training program standardized on a single learning management system, and it implemented a third-party online curriculum. “We were definitely building the airplane as we were taking off,” Udouj says.
A remarkable achievement considering that, when the pandemic first hit last spring, many students lacked internet connectivity, and in trying to fill the gap, the district had to distribute 4,000 paper instruction packets each week.
Since then, FSPS educators have delivered 2,500 mobile hotspots to students and their families, turned school parking lots into Wi-Fi access hubs and ensured that all students have their own Chromebooks. Much of the district’s online instruction has been delivered via Zoom, and teachers frequently make use of free, game-based learning platforms such as Kahoot. “The students are very tech savvy,” says Samantha Hall, assistant director of district innovation. “When you teach them the basics, they learn very quickly.”
The district then hired teachers, many internally, specifically to staff the virtual program. Now, as officials plan to make the virtual option permanent, they are seeking ways to continuously improve. The district is running focus groups with parents to obtain valuable feedback, and next year teachers will create a district-built virtual curriculum around state standards.
“We’ve been looking at a virtual option for a few years,” notes Martin Mahan, deputy superintendent. “We’ve found there’s a certain population of students who thrive in a virtual setting, and the pandemic has forced us to look at things through a different lens. We’re trying to find the value in every assignment, and this really caused us to look more at what is being taught, and how.”
Virtual Learning Provides a Better Fit for Some Students
Fort Smith Public Schools is not alone. While many parents, students and teachers across the country have leapt at the opportunity to get back into physical classrooms as quickly as possible, others have found virtual learning to be a great fit.
This has led a number of school districts to seize the moment and accelerate plans for virtual-only schools that will continue to educate students remotely, even after the pandemic ends. A fall 2020 RAND survey of district leaders found that 1 in 5 schools have already adopted or plan to adopt virtual schooling after the pandemic.
“Many students who would never have seen themselves as online students realized the model was working better for them,” says Joseph South, chief learning officer for ISTE, an organization that advocates for technology in education. “Some are realizing that this is how they want school to go for them, and the districts realize they can either lose these students or open their own virtual schools at the district level.”
South notes that virtual charter schools have existed for years, but individual districts are just now starting to get in on the game. Students, he says, may opt for a district-run virtual school over other online options as a way to stay connected to their communities and participate in extracurricular activities with their friends. But, South says, it is important for new virtual schools to train teachers to tailor instruction for a remote model.
“Most schools have robust technology to support virtual learning for students,” South says. “The real issue is professional learning, so teachers can do this well. That’s what is ultimately going to determine their success or failure, much more than the infrastructure.”
Educators Emphasize Competency-Based Learning in Online Classes
Jordan School District in Utah is launching full virtual elementary, middle and high schools this fall, and it isn’t just replicating in-person instruction. Spencer Campbell, principal of Kelsey Peak Virtual Middle School, says that educators are moving to competency-based learning, letting kids take advantage of the flexibility offered by a remote learning model.
“We’re shifting away from an emphasis on the time spent in class,” Campbell says. “Typically, you get 45 minutes in a period, but we’re now looking at learning in terms of the whole week. So, a student who excels in a certain area can finish everything on Monday or Tuesday, and then spend the rest of the week working in an area where they struggle.”
The district is leaning on a mix of technologies — including a learning management system, Zoom, Chromebooks and online learning programs — to deliver remote instruction. But more important than the tools themselves are the ways educators are designing their instruction.
The district is in the process of implementing a consistent course design across all grades, so that students and parents will know exactly what to expect when they log in. Ross Menlove, principal of Rocky Peak Virtual Elementary School, says teachers are being intentional about getting their students to talk as much as possible.
“We recognize that kids need that social interaction,” Menlove says. “They need to be verbal, they need to be talking to each other. We have training around increasing student engagement through conversation.”
Menlove adds that students in the virtual schools can choose to come to campus for music class, STEM programs, physical education and one-on-one academic help.
This year, around 12,000 of the district’s 60,000 students opted for online learning. Officials expect that number to drop to around 1,200 next year — but, they note, those students will be in a remote model because they want to learn that way, rather than being forced into it by a raging pandemic.
“You have students who might not have made this leap on their own, but they’ve been successful with it,” Campbell says. “Going forward, there will be much more student choice, more flexibility and improved instructional design. Teachers will be able to adjust based on what they’ve learned over the past year.”
Schools Turn a Temporary Fix into a Permanent Fixture
Beth Rayl, chief academic officer at Plymouth-Canton Community Schools in Michigan, was a young teacher in the late ’90s when her principal asked her to learn to teach virtually. At the time, she thought there was no way her students could learn as much from her over the internet as they could in person.
Now, Rayl is helping lead the effort to turn P-CCS’ temporary virtual academies into permanent virtual schools. The district was already looking at launching virtual schools before the pandemic hit, Rayl says, as a way to help meet the needs of different learners.
“What I learned was, some of the kids who sit in a classroom and don’t share their voice have so much to share,” she says. “When you have a 55- minute bell schedule, it doesn’t always give students space to have that moment. With students for whom the existing system isn’t a right fit, we have to ask, what system could we build that would fit those students’ needs?”
For Rayl, the answer is online learning, which allows P-CCS to maximize student success. This year, 3,700 of the district’s 17,000 students participated in virtual academies, and Rayl expects between 700 and 1,000 students to choose virtual learning next fall.
To support success in online learning, the district deployed 4,600 new student devices (a mix of Chromebooks and tablets), bringing the district’s total to more than 12,000. It also partnered with Dell for a virtual desktop infrastructure initiative to provide remote access to robust computing resources. And last summer, the district offered 53 professional development sessions on technology and online learning.
Rayl has some advice for districts looking to create their own online schools: Listen to your students. For example, she notes that a previous virtual program she supported held an online learning lab at the unlikely hour of 8 p.m. on Fridays at the suggestion of students, and it was a hit. “Sometimes, we need to get out of our own heads as adults and have a conversation with young people and ask what works best for them,” she says. “When we have those conversations, surprising things happen.” | <urn:uuid:81b0cb01-f3cb-42ba-b8b3-283aaf5eb5d3> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | http://www.4education.org/2021/07/03/the-rise-of-virtual-only-k-12-schools/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947476413.82/warc/CC-MAIN-20240304033910-20240304063910-00098.warc.gz | en | 0.968528 | 1,856 | 2.65625 | 3 | 18 |
Dopamine is a feel-good chemical that’s produced in your brain. Essentially, it makes you happy. And your brain releases it with certain activities and behaviors ― many of which you already do every single day.
“Whenever we participate in activities that are considered essential from our body’s point of view, our brain releases a large amount of dopamine,” which is meant to encourage you to do this activity more, according to Dr. Kiran F. Rajneesh, the director of the neurological pain division and associate professor of neurology at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.
Throughout evolution, dopamine’s task was to “sense reward, learn the place and activity that leads to reward and also motivate you to go to those places to obtain [a] reward,” said Dr. Hitoshi Morikawa, an associate professor in the departments of neuroscience and psychiatry at the University of Texas at Austin. And that is still the case today. In essence, “dopamine is a reward sensor,” Morikawa said.
While this reward sensor was and is essential to human survival, evolution has made it so maladaptive behaviors also result in the release of dopamine in humans, both experts said.
“Generally, when neuroscientists talk about dopamine, we think about addiction because it is an addiction driver,” Morikawa explained.
The hormone makes you want to repeat certain behaviors, turning them into habits ― whether they are healthy or not. (Like substance misuse or smoking, for example.)
However, that’s not always the case. The release of this hormone is also part of your body’s daily function. While this is not a cure for any disease or condition, it can be helpful to know when dopamine is released — and when you can expect to feel a little mood boost as a result. Here are a few times when your body releases dopamine:
Our prehistoric ancestors knew that food was necessary for survival, in part because of the reward sensor that dopamine activated. This is still true today.
In fact, Rajneesh said that any activity that is “evolutionarily protective and essential for our well-being and survival” releases dopamine. Being able to find food and eat that food certainly falls into this category.
Some studies even say that eating results in a dopamine release twice: first when the food is eaten and again when the food is in the stomach.
Think about it: When you’re parched, a glass of water certainly feels like a reward, so it’s no wonder it also triggers the release of dopamine in your brain.
But not all sips of water will release dopamine, Morikawa noted. Instead, you have to really want or need the water — like after a tough workout or on a hot day.
“In the middle of summer in Austin, and you’re really thirsty, then drinking water should increase dopamine levels in the brain — that should be one of the most effective ways to increase them,” he said.
One really common way that dopamine is released is when praising children for good behaviors, Rajneesh said. Praise triggers a release of dopamine in kids’ brains — and the same goes for praising pets. In these situations, their good behaviors are reinforced by the feel-good nature of that dopamine release, he said.
The same is true when adults receive praise, Rajneesh added. So sending a congratulatory email to your colleague or a celebratory text to a friend is actually doing more good than you think.
This is especially important for people with certain conditions that are a result of low dopamine levels, like ADHD, according to ADDitude Magazine, an ADHD-focused publication.
Playing Video Games
Many studies have measured and found that playing video games results in the release of dopamine in the brain for some people, Morikawa noted.
While this in itself is not a bad thing, it can become negative if the feeling of playing video games is too positive or too fun, he added. When “elevating dopamine levels, sometimes you get really hooked [onto] certain activities,” Morikawa said.
In this case, that activity can be video games, which can lead to problems for people who aren’t professional gamers, he added. (For example, students who should be doing homework instead of playing.)
Sex causes a release of endorphins, as Dr. Elizabeth C. Gardner, an orthopedics sports medicine surgeon at Yale Medicine, previously told HuffPost. And studies show it also causes a release of dopamine.
During evolution, the dopaminergic system developed to promote the “survival and maintenance of our species,” Morikawa said. In other words, there’s an instinctual reason sex feels so enticing. Our brains are wired to know that sex is important for survival, and the neurons that release dopamine do so when they sense the reward associated with the act.
Activities That Enhance Your Well-Being
Meditating and other activities can also lead to a release of dopamine, Rajneesh said.
“Engaging in activities that enhance your well-being such as yoga, exercise, hobbies [and] games ... can help release dopamine in the brain and further enhance your sense of well-being and health as nature intended it to be,” Rajneesh said. | <urn:uuid:559d0282-aa25-4306-afb6-4b1462905355> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.huffpost.com/entry/activities-release-dopamine-in-brain_l_6377bf04e4b06d5b6094f0d7 | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947476413.82/warc/CC-MAIN-20240304033910-20240304063910-00098.warc.gz | en | 0.953341 | 1,117 | 3.4375 | 3 | 19 |
A large number of genes has been implicated in neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) such as autism, developmental delays, intellectual disabilities and epilepsy, but it is difficult to determine how these genes, individually and as a group, contribute to the disease.
A collaboration between the laboratories of Dr. Huda Zoghbi and Dr. Zhandong Liu provides a new level of understanding of NDDs through a novel approach that identifies expression patterns of involved genes in individual cell-types at specific stages of neural development.
One cell at a time
The team integrated single-cell RNA sequencing data from the developing human prefrontal cortex with genes mutated in NDDs. The analysis revealed that the expression of genes implicated in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and epilepsy was enriched in similar cell-types and cell-type transitions during gestational week 10, a period that is critical for neurons in the prefrontal cortex. This observation indicates a functional overlap between these genes. Further analysis revealed that during this developmental time, ASD genes regulate epilepsy genes, and likely other genes involved in other NDDs.
These are exciting findings because they offer a possible explanation for why ASD and epilepsy tend to occur together and provide a clue as to why certain symptoms like seizures are often present in both these disorders, as well as in other NDDs.
Although several similar studies have been conducted in recent years, the majority of them have relied on gene expression data collected from bulk brain tissue, making it impossible to identify co-expression patterns at the single cell resolution. An innovation of the Liu and Zoghbi study is that they looked at gene expression data in individual cells.
Analyzing single-RNA sequencing data of individual brain cells offered us an unprecedented opportunity to understand the genetic factors contributing to ASD and epilepsy at the single-cell level during a specific developmental time frame,” said Dr. Kaifang Pang, senior postdoctoral fellow in the Liu lab and lead author on the study.
“The beauty of this approach lies in its simplicity, which makes it robust and highly reproducible. We think this is an ideal computational framework for future investigations using single-cell RNA sequencing data for exploring the genetic and physiologic factors contributing to other NDD disorders,” said Liu, corresponding author of the work. He is associate professor of pediatrics and neurology at Baylor and investigator at the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children’s Hospital.
Read the complete study in the journal Genome Research.
Li Wang, Wei Wang, Jian Zhou and Chao Cheng at Baylor College of Medicine, and Kihoon Han at Korea University, also contributed to this work.
Zoghbi is professor of molecular and human genetics, pediatrics and neuroscience and Ralph D. Feigin, M.D. Endowed Chair at Baylor. She also is the director of the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children’s Hospital, an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a member of the Dan L Duncan Comprehensive Cancer Center.
The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Research Institute of Texas, Houston Endowment, Hamill Foundation, Chao Family Foundation, Huffington Foundation and Howard Hughes Medical Institute. | <urn:uuid:113d1915-9463-4d63-8fac-ea8a65e5e2a5> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://blogs.bcm.edu/2020/09/29/from-the-labs-dissecting-the-genetics-of-neurodevelopmental-disorders-one-cell-at-a-time/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707948235171.95/warc/CC-MAIN-20240305124045-20240305154045-00098.warc.gz | en | 0.939788 | 659 | 2.84375 | 3 | 20 |
Our research focuses on human learning – particularly in the perceptual and cognitive domains.
Topics of Interest
Task characteristics that encourage transfer of learning
Inter-individual differences that predict differences in learning generalization
Task characteristics that alter the rate with which new perceptual or cognitive tasks are learned
How individuals decide if they should engage in learning a new task or cease attempting to learn a previously experienced task
For more on the lab’s research…
I was recently a guest on the Here We Are Podcast, where I discussed video game and technology use during the physical/social distancing period, and what the lasting effects this period might have on the broader population using them.
Several years ago, I was also on an earlier episode of the Here We Are Podcast and discussed some of the work we do in the lab specifically, as well as the broader field of video game research. Click here to listen.
This is an accordion element with a series of buttons that open and close related content panels.
Video 1: The Curse of Learning Specificity
Video 2: The Effects of Action Video Game Play on Vision
Video 3: The Effects of Action Video Game Play on Speed of Processing
Video 4: The Effects of Action Video Game Play on Multitasking Abilities
Video 5: Conclusions - The Effects of Action Video Games on Perception and Cognition
You can also view this talk on how advancements in neuroscience are being combined with video game research, and how this may impact the scientific community. Panelists included myself, Dr. Adam Gazzaley of the University of California – San Francisco, and acclaimed video game developer Jonathan Blow. | <urn:uuid:88434c9d-2aa9-4a4c-8109-5a8990de3897> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://greenlab.psych.wisc.edu/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707948235171.95/warc/CC-MAIN-20240305124045-20240305154045-00098.warc.gz | en | 0.928235 | 330 | 2.515625 | 3 | 21 |
The neurophysiological training is based on neurofeedback technique, which helps to self-regulate your own brain activity and increases concentration, motivation, sleep quality, reduces anxiety and overall brain efficacy for any type of challenges.
The emotional coping program is inspired by the work of the philosopher Michel Foucault - "Knowledge is power". It is based on understanding the function of emotions to bring you a higher level of harmonie with your emotional self.
The mental preparation is build for athletes. It involves the relationship between the mind and the body and how to overcome mental blockages when the body is taken to the mind's limits.
What is Neurofeedback?
It's an intervention technique that uses the principals of cognitive-behavioral therapies and incorporates them into a practice based on neuroscience. It enables to re-balance the brain activity which is a reflection of all the psychological, emotional and physiological functions. It is a non-invasive technique without risks of major undesired secondary effects. | <urn:uuid:6a89f9ac-4ee4-4b93-b9bc-6125d449fe40> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.mentability.pt/english | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707948235171.95/warc/CC-MAIN-20240305124045-20240305154045-00098.warc.gz | en | 0.925533 | 202 | 2.578125 | 3 | 22 |
THE LINK BETWEEN EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE + RESILIENCE
Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize and understand our own emotions, the cause of them and the impact they have on our thoughts and actions and those of others. The skills of emotional intelligence are developable and hold the promise of well-being, happiness and performance. And who among us doesn’t want to feel well, be happy and be the best we can be?
In the workplace, research studies suggest that up to 60% of our success is attributed to emotional intelligence. Building the skills and competencies can support us in:
• Being self-assured and self-respecting knowing we have strengths and limitations;
• Pursuing meaningful learning and growth that is aligned to our personal values;
• Expressing ourselves in a way that respects our feelings, thoughts, beliefs, personal rights and values and allows the same for others;
• Building mutually satisfying relationships that are characterized by trust and genuine care
• Accessing clear thinking, elevated problem solving and decision making
• Being flexible in the midst of unpredictable circumstances, ideas and people
• Managing stress reactions in adaptive ways
• Adopting an optimistic perspective about the future.
“We are creatures of emotion
long before we are creatures of logic”.
Neuroscience supports the observation made by this pioneer of adult education and self-improvement. Humans are wired to MOVE TOWARD that which is rewarding and to MOVE AWAY from that which is perceived as threatening. In both scenarios a cascade of biochemicals are released into our bloodstream anchoring us to an emotional experience which either energizes/revitalizes us or drains/depletes us. And that’s where the Resilience part comes in.
Research shows that our emotions are reflected in our heart rhythm patterns which travel to the brain. When our patterns are coherent and in sync, the brain can think clearly and operate from a place of choice and responsible action. Emotions like happiness, satisfaction, joy, excitement, harmony, appreciation are feel-good emotions. When we feel good we tend to do better! When we are under threat, a stress reaction ensues, the heart rhythm pattern is chaotic, the brain shuts down and our ability to think clearly, to problem solve, to stay focused and to manage ourselves in the moment is difficult.
Think of a time you were stuck in traffic, running late for a meeting, had misunderstanding with a co-worker, a spouse, one of your children, an aging parent. Think of your emotional state at that time; were you worried, anxious, annoyed, frustrated, angry etc
• How well did I manage myself in that situation?
• Did I say or do something I wasn’t proud of or later regretted?
• Did I ruminate endlessly over what was said or done?
• At an energetic level, how did I feel?
Emotions experienced in a threat response help us when there is a real threat! Social psychologists however tell us that the brain can’t differentiate between a real or perceived threat. When we experience “negative emotions” we are drained and exhausted.
Now more than ever, people and organizations are under siege (aka; threat!); struggling with complex challenges and frequent change due to factors of which we have no real control. The ensuing stress reactions are derailing our individual health, the health of the teams we work on, the organizations we work for, indeed the very health and well-being of our families and society. We are increasingly operating from a deficit position.
Building your levels of resilience means you would have the capacity to prepare for, recover from and adapt in the face of stress, challenge or adversity.
Emotionally Resilient people are aware of their emotions and value the powerful messages they impart. They are able to name their emotions and shift and change their emotional states more quickly for better results. Emotional resilience underpins good decision making, strategic thinking, innovation, effective communication and improved relationships and as human beings we are hardwired to be connected, to collaborate and support one another. Just feels better doesn’t it! | <urn:uuid:d906da3e-fbf6-4a29-a43d-667decfa03ab> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://thealignmentproject.ca/emotional-intelligence/ | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473347.0/warc/CC-MAIN-20240220211055-20240221001055-00199.warc.gz | en | 0.953232 | 861 | 2.90625 | 3 | 23 |
The Science of Compassion
What makes us want to be good?
“Compassion is complex,” says Emiliana Simon Thomas, the former associate director of CCARE, the Center for Compassion And Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University.
Brian Knutson, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Stanford University, adds: “It’s not quite an emotion, is it? It’s more sophisticated.”
Emerging science is exploring how our minds feel for others.
“Can we see it?” asks Knutson. “Does it help people to extend compassion? That would be very exciting.”
We’re looking into the history of how we study human nature. And we’ll see how we can be better.
The news of the world can be depressing. Politics, poverty and war. We live in a seemingly endless cycle of strife, and we often bring it upon ourselves.
But there is more to life. The moments where we find something deeper. A relationship … a purpose … a connection.
Compassion, it turns out, can be cultivated.
Today, we’re exploring what makes us care. Through personal stories, new technologies, cross-cultural relationships, and education.
A Personal Story of Compassion
When Ken Ingram was about five years old, the arguing with his father began. He said his father called him into the room and asked, “Ken, what color is your mom?”
It was about 1968, during the era of civil rights. He said, “Well, she’s white.”
Actually, his mother is a fair-skinned black woman. At five, Ken didn’t understand the difference.
“He just turned it into this big argument that drove me nuts. I think that set the tenor of my relationship from that point on,” says Ken.
Years passed. Tension. Confrontation. Ken went to high school, and the conflicts escalated.
“He had this habit,” Ken says. “He would throw me on the ground and put his foot on my throat. Which just is incredibly insulting. But I would suck it up.”
Until one day when Ken’s rage caught up with him. In his room were cinderblocks from a makeshift cinderblock bookshelf.
“One of them was just sitting there, and I considered grabbing it and cracking him on the head and I knew I wouldn't stop if I started,” he says. “I remember looking him in the eye and it was just this hot, hot rage and the moment I went into kill mode, everything went cold. It just went utterly cold.”
In the next moment, Ken saw where he was headed: prison and a wasted life behind bars. Out of self-preservation, he stopped. He left the cinderblock on the floor.
The next day he signed up for the Marines. It got him out of the house – away from his father. But after two years as a soldier he again wrestled with his destiny. In his mind, it went like this: He could become a career military officer and kill for a living. Or he could try and find a less violent, more enlightened path. He finished his four-year tour of duty and went back to civilian life.
Some time later, he looked up the meaning of compassion.
“I realized I didn't really understand what the word meant,” Ken says. “So I went and looked it up in the dictionary.”
Compassion. Noun. Sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it.
He said in reading the words, there was just this spark of understanding.
“And I’m like, ‘Oh.’”
The Meaning of Compassion
If you look at the roots, “passion” means to endure, to suffer. So com-passion is to suffer with. That is, to feel or be in tune with someone’s suffering. Religions throughout the world speak about compassion. But the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, Tenzin Gyatso, is especially outspoken.
“So if you look at all of his messages in all of his central teachings, they go into the Mahayana concept of compassion and great compassion,” says Martin Verhoeven, a Berkeley-based Buddhist scholar and teacher.
“And this is called single substance, great compassion. It means the wisdom insight to see we are all interconnected, all interrelated, and therefore that’s the reality.”
Tibetan Buddhism is filled with mystical images and occult traditions, but the Dalai Lama says compassion is a human trait – innate to who we are. This ideal is somewhat contrary to our Western culture. Here in the West we take pride in individualism, self-reliance. But compassion is more about interdependence than independence – connection, rather than separation.
We asked a few experts to define compassion.
“Compassion is a meta-concept that has elements of empathy, sensitivity, kindness, of tolerance built into it,” says Verhoeven.
Simon-Thomas, the former associate director of CCARE, adds: “Compassion is complex. There is this empathic part. There is this reappraisal part. There is this caring, nurturing part.”
“Compassion is an embodied process. It’s not a disincarnate process. And through that experience of grounding, we’re actually able to perceive suffering,” says Joan Halifax, abbot of the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
“It’s not quite an emotion, is it?” asks Knutson, a Stanford University psychologist and neuroscientist. It’s more sophisticated…It might involve emotion, but then it involves other components, like taking another’s viewpoint, maybe. And thinking about how they might be different in the future, they might be relieved of suffering.”
Given this, “Why wouldn’t we want to promote this and make people understand that this type of action has a positive effect?” asks James Doty, CCARE’s founder and director.
A Center for Compassion
There’s a question on James Doty’s mind: “It always interested me why people behaved the way they behave.”
Doty is a neurosurgeon and the director and founder of CCARE, a center for compassion research and training started in 2009 at Stanford.
Doty says he grew up in poverty. “My mother was an invalid and my father was an alcoholic. We were on public assistance, essentially, my entire life.”
So he noticed when people did or did not offer help.
“I would see people who, even as a child, clearly were in a position where they could be very helpful and kind, yet chose not to,” Doty says. “Yet you would see people who were potentially even in more desperate straits in yourself, yet would reach out to you and be very kind. And this paradox always struck me.”
In November 2005, the Dalai Lama came to campus. He met some of the world’s top scientists in a public forum.
At the time, Bill Mobley was director of Stanford’s Neuroscience Institute. He asked, “Can neuroscientists with their tools and concepts bring to Buddhists, with their wonderful contemplative practices, something special? And vice versa? And can the two of them together be more effective in understanding brain and mind?”
A lifelong science fan, the Dalai Lama pushed for collaboration. “Doubt brings question,” he said. And question brings investigation. “Investigation brings satisfactory answer.”
James Doty wasn’t there. He had taken a leave from Stanford for a few years, but hearing about the Dalai Lama’s visit made an impression. He knew nothing about the field, and thought back on his own life.
“I just wanted to understand – are there ways that we can create techniques that make people more kind?” he asked.
Now Doty is a doctor, not a scientist.
But he’s got a certain brashness, or power of persuasion. He has a story about applying for medical school as an unlikely candidate – only a 2.53 GPA at UC Irvine and he needed a recommendation from the school’s pre-med committee.
“These professors showed up and, as I recall, the head of biological sciences was there and you could see that they were not particularly interested in having a conversation with me. But I had a conversation with them and my conversation was, who gave them the right to decide people’s futures? And where was the evidence that beyond a minimal academic performance, that having a higher GPA had any correlation with whether you were a good doctor, you cared about people? This conversation went on for about an hour, with primarily me talking. And at the end of it, they were actually crying. So what happened was that I ended up getting the highest recommendation they could give,” remembers Doty.
Doty is emotional recalling the story. He went on to become a neurosurgeon. He helped fund a medical device company, eventually became its CEO, made millions as an angel investor, and lost most of it in the stock market crash of 2000. This made him reflective. When he returned to Stanford after a leave, Doty began talking with Stanford scientists about how to research compassion. By 2008, he stood before the the Dalai Lama.
Doty explained his idea, “which was to really try to understand, in a rigorous way, utilizing the tools of neuroscience and psychology this complex behavior we call compassion and altruism, and see if there were ways we could cultivate it in people,” he says.
The Dalai Lama listened and then began talking excitedly with his translator Thupten Jinpa in Tibetan.
And at the end of it, Jinpa turned to me and he said, “Jim, his Holiness feels so strongly about the importance of this work that you’re undertaking that he wants to make a personal donation.”
The Dalai Lama donated “$150,000, which turned out to be the largest donation he ever gave to a non-Tibetan cause.
Two Silicon Valley investors donated another one million dollars each. By March 2009, Doty had enough to start a center at Stanford dedicated to compassion.
What would a more compassionate world look like? Would it lead to more understanding and less suspicion of one another? And would that lead to solving conflicts through compromise and empathy? With compassion, would we do better at solving the world’s problems, of malnutrition, poverty, natural disasters and disease? Or is that just a fantasy, and the dark side human nature is always inevitable?
If you think about it, the establishment of CCARE was quite remarkable. East meeting West on the prestigious grounds of Stanford. Eastern ideas of oneness co-mingling with Western ideas of science and reason. So how did we get here?
One person to ask is a man born to a Roman Catholic family in a Wisconsin town that produced both Joe McCarthy and Harry Houdini.
He has many titles: Adjunct professor of comparative religion at GTU, which is the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley; Professor of Buddhist classics, Dharma and Buddhist University; and also a teacher at the Berkeley Buddhist Monastery.
As a young Buddhist monk in the 70s, Verhoeven traveled widely in Asia. “I was kind of shocked by what I encountered,” Verhoeven says.
Buddhism, he discovered, was not one entity, but many. From country to country, and even region to region, it changed.
He says there were “Buddhisms.” There wasn’t a Buddhism.
He realized that as the religion migrated from its birthplace of India into other parts of Asia, there was a two-way impact: Buddhism on the culture; and the culture on Buddhism.
“So I began to think, well, what is going to happen, or what is happening as that comes into Europe and America? What’s going to be the mix? What’s going to happen as they encounter each other?”
The roots of that encounter, Verhoeven says, go back to Charles Darwin.
“If you want to trace it historically,” he says, “the interest in Buddhism almost goes directionally proportional to the crisis of faith that Westerners were experiencing with their religious systems.”
In 1859, Darwin published The Origin of Species. The new theory of evolution called into question fundamental Judeo-Christian beliefs.
It seemed science was questioning the very existence of God. If God did not exist, then for many, religion no longer had a place. This was a problem.
In 1893, the World Parliament of Religions met in Chicago. It was a pivotal moment. Eastern leaders saw Buddhism as the religion that could handle the growing split between science and faith. In the years that followed, a reverse missionary movement took place. Charismatic Eastern teachers came to the U.S. and artfully shaped their message for American consumption.
The teachers said Buddhism was “as American as apple pie,” Verhoeven says. “In the sense that it wasn’t incompatible with Judeo-Christian thought. And in fact, it was a transcendence, or a growth above and beyond that.”
As new scientific discoveries were made, Buddhist teachers continued to press the point.
They said that it did not have the conflict between religion and science that the Western world was experiencing. “They could be deeply spiritual and scientific and rational at the same time - they didn’t have to choose,” Verhoeven says.
And so it grew in the West.
Now of course, other cultural and historical factors influenced Buddhism’s entry into mainstream American culture. Immigration. The translation of Buddhist scriptures. The arts.
In the 1950s, alienated by post-war America, Bay Area Beat poets Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg incorporated Buddhist teachings into their writing.
Philosopher Alan Watts, with his books and popular KPFA radio addresses, helped break more ground in mainstream culture.
In the decades that followed, more and more Americans looked to Buddhism as a spiritual guide.
Today, the dialogue about science and faith continues. At this point in time, science is our holder of truth. The spread of Buddhism is not necessarily religious – the mindfulness aspects of it, the development of consciousness and compassion. They can be separated. They can be secular. Verhoeven says many Buddhist teachers – especially the Dalai Lama – understand this:
“And so he’s just being, in a sense, pragmatic and saying, look, most Westerners make sense of things through science. So let’s have the discourse here. That’s very uppaya, meaning “skillful means.” You don’t want to talk about mysticism at this point. You don’t want to talk about ghosts and spirits. That might be a discourse for another culture, but not the United States. So science becomes the one.”
Stanford neuroscientist Brian Knutson and I are peering through a window. On the other side is a futuristic, large, white, bleeping machine with a person’s legs sticking out. It’s called a fMRI machine where fMRI stands for functional magnetic resonance imaging. It costs $500 an hour to use, and Knutson depends on it. Instead of just asking subjects, “Do you feel compassionate,” he can look “deep in your brain on a second-to-second basis,” Knutson says. “You know, we didn’t have those kinds of measures over a decade ago. And now that we have functional magnetic resonance imaging, we can actually ask those questions.”
Knutson’s lab is one of about 15 groups to receive money from CCARE, Stanford’s center for compassion. They’re doing a pilot study to combine compassion research with brain imaging.
“It’s a very new area,” Knutson says. “And a lot of people are getting interested in this, but there are a lot of questions about how you measure this, how you elicit it and so forth."
All of this puts Knutson – and Stanford – on the cutting edge. Researchers have been studying the benefits of mindfulness meditation for a while now, but compassion research is brand new. Their peers include researchers at universities in Madison, Berkeley, Chapel Hill, Atlanta and Chicago.
Knutson didn’t set out to study compassion. He resisted when CCARE founder James Doty first approached him.
“Well, I was thinking that I’m not really the right one to do the research, and that I know much people who are much better than me at this kind of thing,” Knutson says.
Before heading up a laboratory of his own, Knutson studied under Paul Ekman, a famous emotion researcher. Like Ekman, Knutson is interested in emotions’ influence on how we act. And like Doty, he believes science had something to learn from Buddhism about this. So when Doty persisted, Knutson finally agreed.
“If we can look in the brain and say, ‘okay, so the Buddhists say these components are going into compassion. And we think those components may map onto something that’s happening in the brain. Do they? Can we see it? Does it help people to extend compassion?’ That would be very exciting,” Knutson says.
In some ways, Buddhism is like a science, he says. “But they have the brain imaging of introspection so there are very explicit views about what happens when you see something. You taste something. Or you encounter a person that you have a certain attitude towards. Many Buddhists are philosophers. That’s essentially how they’re trained. And so what philosopher wouldn’t be interested in actually empirically testing their worldview?”
Knutson and his colleagues recruited Stanford undergrads. In the basement of Stanford’s psychology department, they put them inside a fMRI machine.
They showed each undergrad photos of neutral faces. That is, people with neutral expressions. In half the cases, they asked the undergrads to stay neutral. In the other half, they asked the students to offer up compassion which they defined as identifying with the person’s suffering, and wishing them to be free of it.
“And you basically have 6 seconds to do this. So it’s not a lot of time,” says Knutson.
Six seconds to either stay neutral or conjure up some feeling of compassion for people you’ve never met and whom you don’t know anything about.
Knutson didn’t know if the undergrads could do it. After all, they’re not monks who train day in, day out, to feel compassion for all beings. But when asked to extend compassion, the undergrads said they did. And Knutson says it turns out they were right.
Here’s how they figured it out. There are three steps to this. One, they showed the neutral faces. Two, they showed a second set of pictures -- paintings of abstract art. Three, just before showing an abstract art picture, the experimenters quickly flashed a neutral face – one of the same faces to which the undergrads had previously either stayed neutral or extended compassion to. The researchers did this quickly, subliminally, so the undergrads wouldn’t notice.
Then they asked, on a scale of one to four, how did this painting make you feel?
“So if there’s a systematic bias, then that’s going to show up in how you rate the art that comes afterward,” Knutson says.
“If it’s a painting that has been paired with a face that you extended compassion, people tend to feel more positive [about those faces]. If it’s a painting that is paired with a face to which they extend neutrality, people tend to feel less positive about those paintings.”
In other words, the undergrads rated paintings higher if they felt compassion first. That suggests compassion is something that feels good.
“And what these results suggest to us, even though they’re very preliminary and on a small sample, is that even in unschooled undergrads who are not spending 30,000 hours in a cave doing compassion meditation, they can do this and there can be effects that carry over,” Knutson says.
Now this is unpublished data; it’s not yet vetted by the larger scientific community. But if it holds up, Knutson can continue using this set-up as a measure for compassion. He’s also analyzing the fMRI scans to see which parts of the brain light up while subjects feel compassion.
In addition, Knutson is screening people he calls the super-Olympians of compassion – people who have completed a secluded meditation retreat that lasts a total of three years, three months, and three days. He plans to compare their brain patterns with those of the undergrads.
Are their brains different? If so, that might give a hint for how the rest of us can do better, to develop our capacity for compassion. It’s not science for science’s sake. It’s science to help make the world a better place.
Remembering An Experiment on Evil
Obviously, human nature is complex. But to simplify – there’s good, and there’s bad.
Philip Zimbardo is a member of CCARE’s board, and an emeritus professor at Stanford. He considers himself a good person, but he’s spent most of his career focused on the forces of evil. He’s famous for a study called the Stanford Prison Experiment.
For one week in August, 1971, he and others took over the basement of Stanford’s psychology building. They turned it into a mock prison. Over an intense six days, otherwise well-adjusted college students transformed into helpless prisoners and cruel guards.
The Stanford Prison Experiment asked, in the context of a mock prison, what would happen if you gave some people authority, and took away privileges from others?
“Does the goodness of people dominate the situation, or does situations and the situations come to corrupt even good people?” asked Zimbardo.
In other words, are people inherently good or bad? Or can situations influence who they are? For the college students who volunteered, this was a job. Fifteen dollars a day for two weeks over summer break.
“It’s 1971,” said Zimbardo. “These kids are many of them hippies. Everyone has hair down, the play Hair came out in 1968. Many of these kids are anti-war activists. Many of these kids are involved in civil rights. All of these kids are involved in don’t trust authority of the 70s.”
Compassion wasn’t spoken of. The tenor of the time had more to do with mistrust. Against this backdrop, the experiment began.
Prisoners were stripped, de-loused and given a smock and stocking cap to wear. During the study, they would not be addressed by name, only by ID numbers. On day 2, the prisoners rebelled.
“They barricaded themselves in their cells,” Zimbardo said. “They ripped off their numbers. And suddenly, the guards come to me and they say, what are we doing to do? I say, it’s your prison, what do you want to do? They said, ‘We need reinforcements.’”
Role-playing had become real. The guards played psychological mind games on the prisoners.
“Just intuitively knowing what would make the prisoners feel helpless and hopeless. A guard would tell a joke and a prisoner would laugh and he would get punished,” Zimbardo said. “The guard would tell another joke, the prisoner wouldn’t laugh and he got punished for not laughing. So essentially what they did was on their own, and I hadn’t thought about it, was create an unpredictable environment, except if you followed the rules you would not get punished.”
Over the next few days, the cruelty of the guards grew. They shouted obscenities, they made prisoners clean toilets with their bare hands, and move boxes endlessly back and forth. Prisoners had to do countless numbers of pushups and jumping jacks in smocks with no underwear. Bad prisoners were given time in solitary – a small, dark closet. As punishment for the misbehavior of a comrade, other prisoners had to stand with their arms raised until they dropped from exhaustion. One prisoner decided to stage a hunger strike; he had to sit in solitary with sausages in each hand.
Zimbardo says he experienced a psychological transformation: “I think it’s half-way through, I transform from being the principal investigator of the research project, there to observe and collect data, to become superintendent of the Stanford Prison Experiment.”
His main concern was now taking care of the prison, not the students’ well being. “And I saw it when I looked at the video tapes where I’m walking down a row of prisoners with my hands behind my back, chest out. This is what military people – this is what authorities do when they’re reviewing their troops. It’s a position I never take. I didn’t even know who it was on the video.”
Visiting day. Day three. The parents of prisoner 1037, Rich Yacco, spoke with Zimbardo.
“The mother comes in and says I don’t mean to make trouble, sir, but I’ve never seen my son looking so terrible. Well, as prison superintendent, that’s a red alarm, she’s going to make trouble. She says she doesn’t want to make trouble,” said Zimbardo.
On Day 4, the guards’ sadistic harrasment escalated to include sexual humiliation.
On Day 6, Zimbardo stopped the experiment. But the repercussions went on for decades. Doug Korpi was the first prisoner to break down in the study. He went on to become a forensic psychologist. Another prisoner, Craig Haney, became a professor at UC Santa Cruz, and a leading authority on the psychological effects of incarceration.
In the immediate aftermath, Zimbardo testified before Congress about prison issues. Thirty-three years later, it came up again, when U.S. soldiers abused Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison.
“Almost anyone could be seduced into behaving in evil ways,” Zimbardo says. “Almost anyone could be a perpetrator of evil. Certainly the majority. That’s the conclusion of all the research.”
“People who do evil deeds, except when they’re in that situation, are just like the rest of us,” he says. “They don’t look different. They don’t act different. They look like your Uncle Charlie. They look like your Aunt Minnie. And it’s not until we put Eichmann in charge of Auschwitz that he did these terrible things. Everything we know about him before, everything we know about him since, he was normal. The psychiatrist at his trial in Nuremberg said, he’s more normal than I am.”
But it wasn’t until he started writing a book about the Stanford study that he started to think, “Well, what is the flip side of that? Isn’t it true that ordinary people in certain situations can be induced, inspired to do heroic deeds rather than evil deeds?”
He decided that instead of trying to find villains, he wanted to find heroes.
He says a hero is “somebody who takes action in defense of a moral cause, and you do it without expectation or gain.”
James Doty of CCARE asked him to sit on the compassion center’s board. The shift, from evil to good, took Zimbardo nearly 40 years.
“The problem is evil is fascinating,” Zimbardo says. “Good is boring. So it’s so easy. It’s easier to like Lucifer than the good angels. The Wicked Witch is more interesting than Glinda, the good witch. So I guess that was the attraction. You want to understand evil so you can undo it.
One summer, when CCARE founder James Doty was about 13 years old, he walked into a magic shop. He started talking with a woman there, the owner’s mother.
“She said, ‘You know, I like you a lot. If you come here every day for the next six weeks, I’ll teach you something that will change your life.’”
So Doty continued showing up. The woman taught him meditation. Doty describes it as a “mindfulness meditation practice in conjunction with a visualization technique, probably combined to some extent with the power of positive thinking and self-hypnosis.” He says the practice changed him.
“It changed my brain, if you will, in the sense that I stopped perceiving myself as a victim, but saw that, in fact, I was responsible for my destiny, and it was I who made the decisions and could control that destiny,” says Doty.
These days, Doty doesn’t meditate – and he doesn’t care about Buddhism so much. But he is interested in how its practices can help people become kinder and more compassionate.
Kelly McGonigal sits cross-legged on top of a lecturer’s table at Stanford University.
“We will start with a little bit of breathing, ” she says. “Relax the shoulders away from the ears.”
The students in this class are mostly middle-aged and older. They’re not at Stanford for any kind of degree. Rather, they’re here for CCARE’s compassion cultivation class. Where scientific research is CCARE’s right arm, compassion training is its left.
“This is a practice called the compassion image,” McGonigal says.
CCARE staff worked with the Dalai Lama’s interpreter, Thupten Jinpa, to design the nine-week class. Some of the exercises come from Western psychology, but many are drawn from Tibetan Buddhism. Even so, this is a secular class. There’s no chanting, no icons, no mention of the Buddha, or even Buddhism.
Strip away religion, and you make way for mainstream adoption. That’s the theory, anyway. And there’s a precedent. A program called MBSR, which stands for mindfulness based stress reduction. It’s a secular treatment for pain and anxiety that draws from Buddhist mindfulness practices. Started in the 1970s, it’s now institutionalized at hospitals and health centers all over the country.
CCARE wants to do the same, but for compassion. Already, it’s offered the compassion course at UC Berkeley, Stanford, the Palo Alto Veterans Administration, and Sharp Healthcare in San Diego. With a one-year teacher training program, the hope is that eventually those students, who come from a variety of backgrounds, including healthcare, education, mental health and public health, will teach the course in their communities.
This week’s theme in McGonigal’s class is self-compassion. The class started with the basics of mindfulness, and will end with a difficult practice called tonglen, which involves imagining you are breathing in the world’s suffering, and breathing love back out.
McGonigal says students often come to the course with misguided notions: “I’m still getting emails, people wanting to argue that, could we just exclude suffering from the definition of compassion because it would be so much better if we didn’t have to have suffering, and we could just feel compassion without suffering having to be present?”
But compassion demands an acknowledgment – that suffering is part of life.
“I think people stick it out because if they actually do the practices, you see that there’s something there,” McGonigal says. “You have the experience of touching something that is really interesting and also is not our habitual way of relating to the world.”
Deborah Defilippo heard about CCARE when she attended the 2010 discussion between scientists and the Dalai Lama. Researchers talked about the health benefits of meditation.
“I am, I guess you could say I’m a type A, high achieving person,” DeFilippo says. “And I’m now catching myself when someone in front of me is driving below the speed limit, saying the phrases that are in almost every single meditation practice that Kelly has. And that is, you say for each individual and yourself and the world, ‘May you be happy. May you be free from pain and suffering. And may you experience joy and peace.’ …It’s like taking a deep breath and a lot of calm does instill within me.”
Stanford’s CCARE program has its critics. Some worry this type of secular practice will lose something, and perhaps lack substance. Others say the aspirations of CCARE – to make a more compassionate world -- are too idealistic. They question how much students can learn in nine weeks.
But McGonigal says many students do connect what’s taught by CCARE with what’s occurring in their lives.
“One of my favorite stories was a man who was in a church setting and a homeless woman had approached this group that was meeting at the church.... And he could feel in himself that little bit of threat or stress arising that would normally have led him to maybe get rid of that person as quickly as possible so that she didn’t disturb the group that was meeting.”
The man remembered a lesson from the previous week in class.
“He considered the other ways of thinking about her,” McGonigal said. “That, just like him, she was human. She was suffering. Going down the checklist, does this person need help? Do I have the resources to help? And turns out that she had diabetes and she needed food and there wasn’t food available in that moment and the people in the group were able to get her something to eat and the whole thing ended very differently because he was using this framework from the study that we talked about … People can take something from a study and use it in everyday life.”
Which is exactly what CCARE founder James Doty wants. “So if we already know that these techniques clearly, and demonstrably, through science can have an impact on the brain, then why not use them?” he asks.
“And I would tell people if I could find a drug that would do this, I would use that, too. Or if I found something on the back of a chocolate bar wrapper and it worked, I would use that. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how we get there.”
Shifting the way people interact with each other, with the world, can seem – impossible. But Doty is the kind of person who thrives with impossible odds.
“My only interest is finding techniques, whatever they are that can accomplish this goal,” he says. “Which is to promote compassion, kindness, altruism, empathy, because I think fundamentally at the end of the day we are wired for this, it makes us feel better, it makes us healthier and it will allow our species to survive into the future.”
The Three-Inch Shift to Compassion
Years after Ken Ingram’s father asked him what color his mother was, after Ken joined the military and returned to civilian life, and after he first looked up the definition of the word “compassion,” his father’s health took a turn.
“Yeah, my dad got really ill. He got prostate cancer. And when he found out about it, it was in stage 3. I was still, at that point, really pissed at my father. Really, really pissed.”
It was around Labor Day weekend of 2009. Ken’s father was in hospice care. “And they called me and my sister and said, we’re not going to be able to take care of him over the weekend,” remembers Ken. “So I took over the first night and I stayed all night at his apartment.
Ken remembers his father needing help turning over in the bed. “And I had to pick him up and just shift him a little bit in this bed. And there was this moment of picking him up, all I can say is just, it was this spark of knowingness, like I got him in that moment. Being that close to him physically and getting to know him in that way,” says Ken.
Helping his father made him think:
“I realized – this is what compassion is. That in spite of all the anger and the righteous indignation that I had over things that he had done that weren’t so cool.”
He was trying to help me create my life. And so if I can let go of all the animosity about that, what’s there is that there actually was a connection, there was love. There was a sense of oneness and care.
And so compassion was being able to let go of that ego trip that I was on that I was owed something, that something was done to me, me, me, me, me. No, this is a human being who helped me come in the world, helped me learn how to be in the world, helped me learn how to survive in the world, and he needs my help.
Can I let go of my anger about it and help him? And it was such a small thing. It wasn’t like I had to move the world, or build a building. It was shift him three inches in the bed.” | <urn:uuid:0d1ba799-4a5d-4dab-bd4f-94d5b483997d> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.kalw.org/show/crosscurrents/2012-07-16/the-science-of-compassion | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473347.0/warc/CC-MAIN-20240220211055-20240221001055-00199.warc.gz | en | 0.971769 | 8,234 | 2.921875 | 3 | 24 |
Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory
Our neuroscience laboratories contain specialist brain imaging and stimulation equipment, IT, and software. Off-site we have a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) facility which is a shared resource through the Combined Universities Brain Imaging Centre (CUBIC).
Experiments undertaken in these labs can use purely behavioural experiments, cognitive modelling, psychophysics, or combinations of cognitive neuroscience (brain imaging, brain stimulation, neurophysiology) techniques. Using these techniques we study brain function and structure and how it supports behaviour throughout the life span. We also use a range of intervention techniques to investigate how the brain adapts to change and how we can improve and enhance functioning in health and diseases.
For more detailed information, please see the School of Psychology's Neuroscience Laboratories page (access for University of Surrey staff only), or the Brain and Behaviour Wiki (open to all).
Access the laboratories
If you want to participate in our research, or for discussion about collaboration and the use of our laboratories, training, technical support, or costs of research please fill in our contact form so we can respond to your enquiry appropriately.
University of Surrey School of Psychology staff and students
Details on how to access the laboratories and get the training required can be found on the School of Psychology Hub, particularly the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratories page, and the Brain and Behaviour Wiki.
- Electroencephalography (EEG):
- EEG monitors the brain’s electrical activity using small electrodes placed in a swimcap-like device. Data is recorded whilst participants perform a task, or in some cases when the participants are at rest or asleep.
- We have three wired Brain Products setups that allow use with MRI, TMS and tES, with up to 128 gel or saline based electrodes.
- We can also measure physiological signals (EOG, EMG, ECG, GSR, temperature, pulse, acceleration), and track other stimuli such as light or sound.
- There are five mobile Neuroelectrics (32 channel neurostimulator-EEG devices) and mBrainTrain setups and the School of Psychology has other mobile EEG setups with BIOPAC Mobita and more Neuroelectrics.
- Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI):
- MRI uses magnetic fields to allow investigation of brain structure, brain function, blood flow and chemical composition. This can be used to research how the brain performs certain functions, what structural or metabolic changes are apparent over time or between individuals, and any differences within clinical populations.
- As part of CUBIC we have access to a 3T Siemens Trio MRI Scanner with 32 channel head array, 12 channel head array coil, and CP head coils. We also have a Dummy scanner.
- Functional Near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS):
- fNIRS uses infra-red light to measure changes in oxygen levels in the blood (related to neural activity) in the brain.
- We have an Artinis wearable 24 channel fNIRS.
- Transcranial electrical stimulation (tES):
- tES uses a weak electrical current to modulate activity of a brain area. These currents are given by electrodes attached to the head, and can be done before or during a task with changes in behaviour or brain activity (see “brain imaging” above) observed.
- We have three DC Stimulator Plus, (with setups that allow use in MRI setting) and three Neuroelectrics 32 channel neurostimulator-EEG devices.
- Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS):
- TMS uses a magnetic field to stimulate a small area of the brain. We can use it to investigate how areas in the brain are involved in a task by observing small changes in behaviour or brain activity (see “brain imaging” above) after stimulation.
- We have two Magstim Rapid2 Stimulators with EMG interface, a variety of TMS coils (D70, D702,D50 Alpha B.I.), and two BrainSight Neuronavigation systems.
- High-performance computing cluster, PCs, laptops and screens for stimulus delivery, data acquisition and analysis. | <urn:uuid:2245d187-287f-4129-8504-023fa38829c7> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | https://www.surrey.ac.uk/brain-and-behaviour-section/cognitive-neuroscience-laboratory | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473347.0/warc/CC-MAIN-20240220211055-20240221001055-00199.warc.gz | en | 0.866336 | 854 | 2.5625 | 3 | 25 |
Decoding the Impact of Music on Productivity
In today's fast-paced world, the quest for enhanced productivity is a common thread connecting individuals and businesses alike. The role of music in enhancing workplace productivity has been widely investigated, yet remains an enigma to many. This blog unravels the fascinating relationship between music and productivity, exploring how different genres can shape our work habits and influence overall performance. Understanding these dynamics may be key to refining your personal workflow or even reshaping your company’s working environment. So let us tune into this melody of knowledge and decode the impact that music has on our productivity.
Let's delve deeper into the scientific mechanism underlying the influence of music on cognitive function and consequently, productivity levels. It's crucial to understand specific cognitive functions and mental processes that are triggered when we listen to music. Neurological studies have provided some compelling findings on this subject.
Inside the human brain, a complex network of neural pathways facilitate various cognitive functions. These pathways are significantly affected by auditory stimuli, such as music. There is a term in neuroscience called 'Neuroplasticity' which essentially refers to the brain's ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life. Music, with its intricate patterns of rhythms and melodies, stimulates these neural pathways and can lead to enhanced cognitive functioning.
In addition to this, music also influences mood, focus and creativity, all of which have a direct impact on productivity. Therefore, the science behind music and its influence on productivity is more than just an abstract concept. It's a dynamic interplay of neurological, cognitive and emotional processes.
Types of Music: Their Unique Impacts on Productivity
Commencing with an exploration of diverse music genres, this section delves into the distinct effects of various types such as classical, jazz, and pop on productivity levels. It is worth noting that different types of music can have disparate impacts on an individual's focus levels. Consequently, these variations can lead to differing levels of work output, contingent on an individual's predilections for certain music genres. The significant SEO terms within this context encompass 'types of music', 'productivity levels', 'work output', 'music genres', and ‘individual preferences’. Knowledge inputs from seasoned musicians or sound therapists could augment the understanding of this topic, with added value from using technical terminologies like ‘Timbre’.
Ambient Noise vs Silence: Boosting Creativity
In exploring the impact of music on productivity, an intriguing aspect to delve into is the constant debate between ambient noise and total silence. The primary question we aim to address is: Does ambient noise truly enhance creativity more than absolute silence does in the workplace?
To establish the context, it's paramount to understand the term 'Psychoacoustics'. This study focuses on how humans perceive sound, and it plays a vital role in crafting the ideal workplace environment.
Sound or noise levels, especially ambient noise, are seen as a significant factor influencing productivity and creativity levels. It's an area of expertise for acoustic engineers who specialize in designing workplace environments. Their knowledge and findings provide valuable insights into how the right balance of ambient noise can create an environment that stimulates creativity and productivity.
On the other hand, advocating for complete silence, some argue that eliminating distractions allows for better concentration, which is a different yet vital aspect of productivity. Regardless of the side, the core objective is to boost creativity and enhance overall productivity in the workplace by modifying its auditory environment.
Our musical preferences are largely shaped by the cultural milieu in which we grow up and live. The various musical styles that we favor can have a profound impact not just on our personal lives but also on our professional lives, specifically our work efficiency. This can be better understood by delving into concepts like 'cultural influence', 'musical styles', 'work efficiency', 'music preference', and 'cross-cultural study'.
The field of ethnomusicology, which studies music in its social and cultural contexts, can offer enlightening perspectives to understand this phenomenon. Experts in cross-cultural studies can provide valuable insights into how culture influences the types of music we are drawn to. They can also reveal the potential effects this might have on our productivity at work. This underlines the significance of paying attention to the cultural factors that shape our musical tastes. | <urn:uuid:523cd04c-26a8-4d55-ae93-2bbeb6118c64> | CC-MAIN-2024-10 | http://www.rodstewartonline.com/decoding-the-impact-of-music-on-productivity | s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2024-10/segments/1707947473735.7/warc/CC-MAIN-20240222061937-20240222091937-00199.warc.gz | en | 0.922468 | 876 | 2.609375 | 3 | 26 |
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in Dataset Viewer.
This is an extract from HuggingFace's Fineweb-EDU data set, specifically from the 2024-10 parquets.
The extracts where based on keywords: "ADDIE," "learning theory," "adult education," "neuroscience," "instructional design," and "educational psychology."
This is an all-in-one combination of the ADDIE and neuroscience datasets.
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