Dubious Inventions

The 10 most ridiculous college courses.

My dad, who is a college professor too, used to tease me sometimes about courses I took in college that did not meet his standards of academic rigor.  His favorite joke was to call them all "Underwater Basket Weaving."

In that same spirit, just a little comic relief  before the final.  By the way, Human Development is most certainly NOT ridiculous and NOT in this category at all.

Parrots and Scientists

There is some evidence that much as we are wired for language, and much as language is part and parcel of our humanity, music may also be coded in our neurobiology. Brain imaging suggests that the way we process musical "grammar" is akin to how we process language - the circuits overlap, the patterns mix together, language and music intertwine.

So our love of music may have something to do with our ear for the prosody - the beat and rhythm and tempo and pitch - of language. Oddly enough, we are not the only animals to enjoy a beat even though we are the only species with true generative language. Snowball the dancing cockatoo's rhythmic dancing to the Backstreet Boys' suggests that although other species may not have the best musical taste, they might share the joy of moving their bodies to a tune. Before Snowball's example emerged, it was considered to be a uniquely human behavior.

Although perhaps not one scientists are all that good at, as the following video illustrates nicely.

On getting older.

The brain. 
Not as bad as it was once thought to be, and even better than young brains at some things.

The brain, as it traverses middle age, gets better at recognizing the central idea, the big picture. If kept in good shape, the brain can continue to build pathways that help its owner recognize patterns, and, as a consequence, see significance and even solutions much faster than a young person can.

How do we keep it sharp?  Exercise, health, good relationship, and a bit of healthy disagreement apparently.

Happiness.
And there's more good news.

On the global measure [of happiness], people start out at age 18 feeling pretty good about themselves, and then, apparently, life begins to throw curve balls. They feel worse and worse until they hit 50. At that point, there is a sharp reversal, and people keep getting happier as they age. By the time they are 85, they are even more satisfied with themselves than when they were 18.

So hang in there if things are rough. Your knees may go, your back may ache, and you may need to cock your ear towards conversations to hear what people say. But apparently happiness is built out of more.

Sex.
And remember how I mentioned in class today that people except for my parents of course still have sex when they enter later adulthood? Here's some advice on how to get your groove on (pretty sfw by the way, despite the youtube warning).

A world opens

Here, a baby, hearing his mother's voice for the first time after a cochlear implant is activated, smiles in response. It will make your heart explode is very cute.

Links! Extra Credit! And more!

Hi all,
Two quick links.

First, a link to a questionnaires about the use of the ECHO video podcast system I used to videotape this quarter's lectures. Please note that this is not my questionnaire, but one being conducted by the university to find out how students feel about the system.  If you liked the video podcasts and want to see more of them, or if you hated them and want to see less, here's your chance to have your voice heard.  This questionnaire is not for extra credit.

Second, a link to a study being conducted by one of the graduate students in the Psychology Department at Portland State on personality and work.  You can earn a point of extra credit for completing it - just make sure you enter your first and last name at the end, as well as the class you are completing it for (this info will not be linked to your survey responses).

And then just for the hell of it, a video link.  Give it 90 seconds.  Really.  It just gets crazy.

Learning from our Enemies

We hear a lot nowadays about bullying; how to stop it, what it does to children, how it's linked to bad things like depression and suicide, and how the fast clip of technology and open world of social networking has led to the extension of these bad behaviors online.  But is it always bad?  Can we learn something from our enemies?

Well, most of the work on children who are rejected in childhood - children who are not liked by other kids - suggests that they are low in social competence, aggressive and depressed, and that many of these effects may persist on a relatively long-term basis. Not good.

But a new article in the New York Times suggests that these effects may be overstated, at least for the majority of children.  As it turns out, the research on our childhood enemies may have been skewed by our focus on rejected children.  Chronically disliked, highly aggressive, often impulsive and hostile - these children are a special, smaller group and may not accurately represent the influence of our more moderate adversaries. Many many of us had enemies in our childhood years - the mean kid, the one who threw your lunch or called you names, the friend who turned against you and laughed in your face, the foe who spread nasty rumors about you.  But most of us turn out okay.  In fact, not just okay.  Those interactions with our enemies may have actually led to increases in our social competence.  They may have actually helped us.

“Friendships provide a context in which children develop, but of course so do negative peer relations,” said Maurissa Abecassis, a psychologist at Colby-Sawyer College in New Hampshire. “We should expect that both types of relationships, as different as they are, present opportunities for growth.”

But how can this be?  What might enemies be teaching us? Well, we will always encounter people we dislike - the infinite variability of those around us ensures that to be true. And there will always be people who don't like us. Being able to identify this and respond appropriately is a skill, and it is a skill that can be honed in childhood as we navigate the land mines of the social world.  If someone hates you, it's actually adaptive to realize that and not waste energy on trying to be friends - a process that may ultimately be for naught.  And a shared enemy?  We've known for a long time that that helps us to strengthen our social bonds with our allies.

So we don't have to like our childhood enemies.  But we should perhaps thank them for teaching us some important, if unpleasant lessons.