Entries Categorized as 'Health'
May 6, 2012
2. Some of your worst days lie ahead. Graduation is a happy day. But my job is to tell you that if you are going to do anything worthwhile, you will face periods of grinding self-doubt and failure.
– Wheelan, 2012: 10 Things Your Commencement Speaker Won’t Tell You in The Wall Street Journal
Charles Wheelan provides an excellent perspective on what should be important in a commencement address.
I particularly like this warning about the danger of working only for rewards:
8. Don’t model your life after a circus animal. Performing animals do tricks because their trainers throw them peanuts or small fish for doing so. You should aspire to do better.
– Wheelan, 2012: 10 Things Your Commencement Speaker Won’t Tell You in The Wall Street Journal
And this point on conservation and the real meaning of being conservative:
3. Don’t make the world worse. I know that I’m supposed to tell you to aspire to great things. But I’m going to lower the bar here: Just don’t use your prodigious talents to mess things up. Too many smart people are doing that already.
– Wheelan, 2012: 10 Things Your Commencement Speaker Won’t Tell You in The Wall Street Journal
↬ The Dish
Citing this post: Urbano, L., 2012. A Better Commencement Address, Retrieved May 19th, 2012, from Montessori Muddle: http://MontessoriMuddle.org/ .
Attribution (Curator's Code ): Via: ᔥ Montessori Muddle; Hat tip: ↬ Montessori Muddle.
Posted in Health, PedagogyNo Comments » - Tags: Health, Pedagogy
April 25, 2012
During your adolescence, which lasts from your early teens into your 20′s, the brain changes rapidly, you develop new abilities and capacities, and the habits of mind and skills you develop will last long into adulthood.
Abilities: The last part of the brain to develop is the Frontal Lobe. It’s responsible for reasoning and judgement — aka Executive Function. So, it’s somewhat understandable that teens often have poor impulse control — their Frontal Lobe (the prefrontal cortex in particular) is still developing.
The parts of the adolescent brain.
However that’s not an excuse. It is essential for adolescents to be held to account, because it’s only by practicing responsibility that they get to learn how to use their Executive thinking skills.
Because that’s how we learn — by practicing.
When we’re learning something new, brain cells, called neurons, reach out and connect to form networks. As we practice and focus on specific things — certain patterns of movement or certain ways of thought — some of the unused connections get pruned away, while others become stronger. The axons that connect the most-used pathways get coated in myelin, which acts as an insulator to make sure signals can pass quickly and efficiently.
Neurons in the brain transmit information to each other along long axons and across the synaptic gap.
By reorganizing the connections between brain cells, the brain learns and becomes better at what you’re practicing. Thus we gradually transition from novices to experts.
However, there is a cost.
Making strong pathways makes for quicker thinking about the things we’ve practiced, but makes our brains somewhat less flexible at learning new things. We develop habits of mind that stay with us for a long time.
Some of those habits we might not actually want to keep; and there’s also the possibility that we might not develop some habits of mind that we really would like to have.
The development of the frontal lobe during adolescence opens a window of opportunity for learning good judgement/executive function, but it does not mean we actually will learn it. We need to actually practice it.
So, if you would like to know yourself, want to be able to control yourself, and, especially, want to shape the future person you will become, then you’re going to have to figure out: which habits of mind you want to be practicing and which ones you don’t.
Citing this post: Urbano, L., 2012. Control your Destiny: How the Adolescent Brain Works, Retrieved May 19th, 2012, from Montessori Muddle: http://MontessoriMuddle.org/ .
Attribution (Curator's Code ): Via: ᔥ Montessori Muddle; Hat tip: ↬ Montessori Muddle.
Posted in Health, Pedagogy, Personal WorldNo Comments » - Tags: adolescent development, cognitive development, neuroscience
April 24, 2012
April 18, 2012
Martha Herbert argues that diet and environmental toxins play a significant role in creating autism in an interview with Anne Strainchamps on To the Best Of Our Knowledge.
After much thought, I have come to the formulation that autism may be most comprehensively understood and helped through an inclusive whole-body systems approach, where genes and environment are understood to interplay.
– from Martha Herbert’s Website.
Herbert is the author of The Autism Revolution, and her website also hosts her scientific publications.
Citing this post: Urbano, L., 2012. What Causes Autism?, Retrieved May 19th, 2012, from Montessori Muddle: http://MontessoriMuddle.org/ .
Attribution (Curator's Code ): Via: ᔥ Montessori Muddle; Hat tip: ↬ Montessori Muddle.
Posted in Books, HealthNo Comments » - Tags: autism, Books, neurology
April 14, 2012
Sleep patterns change during adolescence, but unless you can alter the school day, students need to figure out ways to deal with their predilection for going to bed and waking up late. Jason at FrugalDad has a nice compilation of statistics about why we need sleep. Particularly useful is the section on different ways to get more sleep. (I also like the fact that he cites his sources at the bottom.)
Source: ᔥhttp://frugaldad.com
Citing this post: Urbano, L., 2012. Why We Need to Sleep, Retrieved May 19th, 2012, from Montessori Muddle: http://MontessoriMuddle.org/ .
Attribution (Curator's Code ): Via: ᔥ Montessori Muddle; Hat tip: ↬ Montessori Muddle.
Posted in HealthNo Comments » - Tags: sleep
December 4, 2011
Gum is an effective booster of mental performance, conferring all sorts of benefits without any side effects. … chewing gum is often a better test aid than caffeine. [However] gum chewers only showed an increase in performance during the first 20 minutes of testing.
– Lehrer, 2011: The Cognitive Benefits of Chewing Gum in Wired.
Jonah Lehrer has a fascinating article on, how chewing gum improves mental performance“. It does not seem to matter what type of gum, just as long as you’re chewing.
The benefits (briefly and probably overly simplified) of chewing gum:
On the other hand, while chewing might be good for most types of memory, one study found that chewing, and other rhythmic tasks reduces short-term recall of long lists (Kozlov et al., 2011).
Lehrer cites a 2004 review of the research on gum and memory, which describes chewing gum as, “a functional food with function but no food” (Scholey, 2004).
The takehome message for using gum while taking tests:
When taking a test, save the gum for the hardest part, or for those questions when you feel your focus flagging. The gum will help you concentrate, but the help won’t last long.
– Lehrer, 2011: The Cognitive Benefits of Chewing Gum in Wired.
Image via gocomics.com.
Citing this post: Urbano, L., 2011. Gum: "a functional food with function but no food", Retrieved May 19th, 2012, from Montessori Muddle: http://MontessoriMuddle.org/ .
Attribution (Curator's Code ): Via: ᔥ Montessori Muddle; Hat tip: ↬ Montessori Muddle.
Posted in HealthNo Comments » - Tags: cognition, gum, memory, performance
November 10, 2011
This research shows that profanity is not harmless. Children exposed to profanity in the media think that such language is ‘normal,’ which may reduce their inhibitions about using profanity themselves. And children who use profanity are more likely to aggress against others.
–Brad Bushman (2011) in a Brigham Young University Press Release.
Exposure to profanity in videogames and on TV appears to affect how teens view and use profanity, and makes them more aggressive. These are the key results of a paper by Sarah Coyne (Coyne et al., 2011). The full article is available online, but is summarized here.
While the first part, at least, of this result might seem obvious — that seeing profanity desensitizes, familiarizes, and leads to increased use — it’s nice to have some scientific corroboration.
The more disturbing result, perhaps, is the link between profanity and aggression. It’s a moderate effect, but the link appears similar to the connection between war games and aggression.
Profanity is kind of like a stepping stone. You don’t go to a movie, hear a bad word, and then go shoot somebody. But when youth both hear and then try profanity out for themselves it can start a downward slide toward more aggressive behavior.
– Sarah Coyne (2011) in a Brigham Young University Press Release.
Citing this post: Urbano, L., 2011. Media Profanity and Aggression, Retrieved May 19th, 2012, from Montessori Muddle: http://MontessoriMuddle.org/ .
Attribution (Curator's Code ): Via: ᔥ Montessori Muddle; Hat tip: ↬ Montessori Muddle.
Posted in Health, Pedagogy, TechnologyNo Comments » - Tags: adolescent development, aggression, media, profanity, video games
September 11, 2011
[A]nger … triggers a less systematic and structured approach to the creativity task, and leads to initially higher levels of creativity. … [However] creative performance should decline over time more for angry than for sad people.
– Bass et al (2011): Creative production by angry people peaks early on, decreases over time, and is relatively unstructured
Here are a couple of studies on the interaction between negative emotions and creativity whose implications require some very careful consideration. We want to encourage creativity, but how and at what cost to the student?
Social rejection was associated with greater artistic creativity
– Akinola and Mendes (2011): The Dark Side of Creativity: Biological Vulnerability and Negative Emotions Lead to Greater Artistic Creativity
Anger
Anger, it appears, leads to more unstructured thinking, thinking that is more flexible and able to make new connections among different categories of information. However, anger’s creativity boost does not last that long – strong emotions take a toll – and people soon revert back to a more normal baseline.
These results come from an initial study, and there are a lot of unanswered questions. In particular, I wonder just how much anger is useful for this beneficial outcome. I find it hard to believe that too much anger is terrible useful. And, I’m also curious about the negative consequences in terms of group interactions. Brett Ford points out that some studies have found that anger is useful in negotiation, but only when that negotiation is confrontational. Another study found that angry leaders were better at motivating groups of less agreeable people. Conversely, more agreeable people responded better to less angry leaders.
In a scenario study, participants with lower levels of agreeableness responded more favorably to an angry leader, whereas participants with higher levels of agreeableness responded more favorably to a neutral leader.
– Kleef et al. (2010): On Angry Leaders and Agreeable Followers
How Leaders’ Emotions and Followers’ Personalities Shape Motivation and Team Performance
It seems that the ability to project anger may be a useful skill to have in one’s toolbox, given the variety of people we will have to deal with in life.
Depression and Creativity
Modupe Akinola and Wendy Berry Mendes point out that highly creative people tend to introversion, emotional sensitivity and, at the extreme, depression and other mood disorders. Unfortunately:
[M]ood disorders are 8 to 10 times more prevalent in writers and artists than in the general population (Jamison, 1993).
– Akinola and Mendes (2011): The Dark Side of Creativity
On top of the general mood, strong, more transient, activating moods, like anger and happiness, also affect a person’s ability to be creative. Both positive and negative activating moods (the hedonic tone) enhance creativity, but in different ways:
- negative activating moods, like anger and fear, increase perseverance;
- positive activating moods, like happiness and elatedness, increase mental flexibility.
Curiously enough, although creativity is associated with a baseline of sadness and depression, these two are not among the activating moods that can spur the creativity of the moment.
A Matter of Control
The implications of these studies are complex. I certainly need to think about them a lot more, but it would seem reasonable, or perhaps responsible, to encourage students to carefully monitor their moods and to help them better understand themselves and their behavior. Ultimately, it is probably better if we are able to control how we use our emotions, rather than the other way around.
The pre-frontal lobe, which is responsible for formal thinking, is the part of the brain that can put the brakes on impulsive emotional behavior. It can also, to a degree, modulate how emotions are expressed. As adolescents’ pre-frontal cortex develop, they should be better able to control and use their emotions to their benefit. But to do so, they need to be aware of their emotions and the power of their emotions, which would suggest training in emotional awareness and control.
I’m not aware of any programs or curricula that delve all the way into how to use your emotions proactively, but I’d like to see something that particularly discusses how to use the different activating moods.
Citing this post: Urbano, L., 2011. Creativity, Depression and Anger, Retrieved May 19th, 2012, from Montessori Muddle: http://MontessoriMuddle.org/ .
Attribution (Curator's Code ): Via: ᔥ Montessori Muddle; Hat tip: ↬ Montessori Muddle.
Posted in Abstract Thinking, Art, HealthNo Comments » - Tags: abstract thinking, cognitive development, creativity, emotion, scientific research
