Tuesday, May 27, 2008
The New York Times
May 27, 2008
Lotus Therapy
By BENEDICT CAREY
The patient sat with his eyes closed, submerged in the rhythm of his own breathing, and after a while noticed that he was thinking about his troubled relationship with his father.
“I was able to be there, present for the pain,” he said, when the meditation session ended. “To just let it be what it was, without thinking it through.”
The therapist nodded.
“Acceptance is what it was,” he continued. “Just letting it be. Not trying to change anything.”
“That’s it,” the therapist said. “That’s it, and that’s big.”
This exercise in focused awareness and mental catch-and-release of emotions has become perhaps the most popular new psychotherapy technique of the past decade. Mindfulness meditation, as it is called, is rooted in the teachings of a fifth-century B.C. Indian prince, Siddhartha Gautama, later known as the Buddha. It is catching the attention of talk therapists of all stripes, including academic researchers, Freudian analysts in private practice and skeptics who see all the hallmarks of another fad.
For years, psychotherapists have worked to relieve suffering by reframing the content of patients’ thoughts, directly altering behavior or helping people gain insight into the subconscious sources of their despair and anxiety. The promise of mindfulness meditation is that it can help patients endure flash floods of emotion during the therapeutic process — and ultimately alter reactions to daily experience at a level that words cannot reach. “The interest in this has just taken off,” said Zindel Segal, a psychologist at the Center of Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, where the above group therapy session was taped. “And I think a big part of it is that more and more therapists are practicing some form of contemplation themselves and want to bring that into therapy.”
At workshops and conferences across the country, students, counselors and psychologists in private practice throng lectures on mindfulness. The National Institutes of Health is financing more than 50 studies testing mindfulness techniques, up from 3 in 2000, to help relieve stress, soothe addictive cravings, improve attention, lift despair and reduce hot flashes.
Some proponents say Buddha’s arrival in psychotherapy signals a broader opening in the culture at large — a way to access deeper healing, a hidden path revealed.
Yet so far, the evidence that mindfulness meditation helps relieve psychiatric symptoms is thin, and in some cases, it may make people worse, some studies suggest. Many researchers now worry that the enthusiasm for Buddhist practice will run so far ahead of the science that this promising psychological tool could turn into another fad.
“I’m very open to the possibility that this approach could be effective, and it certainly should be studied,” said Scott Lilienfeld, a psychology professor at Emory. “What concerns me is the hype, the talk about changing the world, this allure of the guru that the field of psychotherapy has a tendency to cultivate.”
Buddhist meditation came to psychotherapy from mainstream academic medicine. In the 1970s, a graduate student in molecular biology, Jon Kabat-Zinn, intrigued by Buddhist ideas, adapted a version of its meditative practice that could be easily learned and studied. It was by design a secular version, extracted like a gemstone from the many-layered foundation of Buddhist teaching, which has sprouted a wide variety of sects and spiritual practices and attracted 350 million adherents worldwide.
In transcendental meditation and other types of meditation, practitioners seek to transcend or “lose” themselves. The goal of mindfulness meditation was different, to foster an awareness of every sensation as it unfolds in the moment.
Dr. Kabat-Zinn taught the practice to people suffering from chronic pain at the University of Massachusetts medical school. In the 1980s he published a series of studies demonstrating that two-hour courses, given once a week for eight weeks, reduced chronic pain more effectively than treatment as usual.
Word spread, discreetly at first. “I think that back then, other researchers had to be very careful when they talked about this, because they didn’t want to be seen as New Age weirdos,” Dr. Kabat-Zinn, now a professor emeritus of medicine at the University of Massachusetts, said in an interview. “So they didn’t call it mindfulness or meditation. “After a while, we put enough studies out there that people became more comfortable with it.”
One person who noticed early on was Marsha Linehan, a psychologist at the University of Washington who was trying to treat deeply troubled patients with histories of suicidal behavior. “Trying to treat these patients with some change-based behavior therapy just made them worse, not better,” Dr. Linehan said in an interview. “With the really hard stuff, you need something else, something that allows people to tolerate these very strong emotions.”
In the 1990s, Dr. Linehan published a series of studies finding that a therapy that incorporated Zen Buddhist mindfulness, “radical acceptance,” practiced by therapist and patient significantly cut the risk of hospitalization and suicide attempts in the high-risk patients.
Finally, in 2000, a group of researchers including Dr. Segal in Toronto, J. Mark G. Williams at the University of Wales and John D. Teasdale at the Medical Research Council in England published a study that found that eight weekly sessions of mindfulness halved the rate of relapse in people with three or more episodes of depression.
With Dr. Kabat-Zinn, they wrote a popular book, “The Mindful Way Through Depression.” Psychotherapists’ curiosity about mindfulness, once tentative, turned into “this feeding frenzy, of sorts, that we have going on now,” Dr. Kabat-Zinn said.
Mindfulness meditation is easy to describe. Sit in a comfortable position, eyes closed, preferably with the back upright and unsupported. Relax and take note of body sensations, sounds and moods. Notice them without judgment. Let the mind settle into the rhythm of breathing. If it wanders (and it will), gently redirect attention to the breath. Stay with it for at least 10 minutes.
After mastering control of attention, some therapists say, a person can turn, mentally, to face a threatening or troubling thought — about, say, a strained relationship with a parent — and learn simply to endure the anger or sadness and let it pass, without lapsing into rumination or trying to change the feeling, a move that often backfires.
One woman, a doctor who had been in therapy for years to manage bouts of disabling anxiety, recently began seeing Gaea Logan, a therapist in Austin, Tex., who incorporates mindfulness meditation into her practice. This patient had plenty to worry about, including a mentally ill child, a divorce and what she described as a “harsh internal voice,” Ms. Logan said.
After practicing mindfulness meditation, she continued to feel anxious at times but told Ms. Logan, “I can stop and observe my feelings and thoughts and have compassion for myself.”
Steven Hayes, a psychologist at the University of Nevada at Reno, has developed a talk therapy called Acceptance Commitment Therapy, or ACT, based on a similar, Buddha-like effort to move beyond language to change fundamental psychological processes.
“It’s a shift from having our mental health defined by the content of our thoughts,” Dr. Hayes said, “to having it defined by our relationship to that content — and changing that relationship by sitting with, noticing and becoming disentangled from our definition of ourselves.”
For all these hopeful signs, the science behind mindfulness is in its infancy. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which researches health practices, last year published a comprehensive review of meditation studies, including T.M., Zen and mindfulness practice, for a wide variety of physical and mental problems. The study found that over all, the research was too sketchy to draw conclusions.
A recent review by Canadian researchers, focusing specifically on mindfulness meditation, concluded that it did “not have a reliable effect on depression and anxiety.”
Therapists who incorporate mindfulness practices do not agree when the meditation is most useful, either. Some say Buddhist meditation is most useful for patients with moderate emotional problems. Others, like Dr. Linehan, insist that patients in severe mental distress are the best candidates for mindfulness.
A case in point is mindfulness-based therapy to prevent a relapse into depression. The treatment significantly reduced the risk of relapse in people who have had three or more episodes of depression. But it may have had the opposite effect on people who had one or two previous episodes, two studies suggest.
The mindfulness treatment “may be contraindicated for this group of patients,” S. Helen Ma and Dr. Teasdale of the Medical Research Council concluded in a 2004 study of the therapy.
Since mindfulness meditation may have different effects on different mental struggles, the challenge for its proponents will be to specify where it is most effective — and soon, given how popular the practice is becoming.
The question, said Linda Barnes, an associate professor of family medicine and pediatrics at the Boston University School of Medicine, is not whether mindfulness meditation will become a sophisticated therapeutic technique or lapse into self-help cliché.
“The answer to that question is yes to both,” Dr. Barnes said.
The real issue, most researchers agree, is whether the science will keep pace and help people distinguish the mindful variety from the mindless.
May 27, 2008
Lotus Therapy
By BENEDICT CAREY
The patient sat with his eyes closed, submerged in the rhythm of his own breathing, and after a while noticed that he was thinking about his troubled relationship with his father.
“I was able to be there, present for the pain,” he said, when the meditation session ended. “To just let it be what it was, without thinking it through.”
The therapist nodded.
“Acceptance is what it was,” he continued. “Just letting it be. Not trying to change anything.”
“That’s it,” the therapist said. “That’s it, and that’s big.”
This exercise in focused awareness and mental catch-and-release of emotions has become perhaps the most popular new psychotherapy technique of the past decade. Mindfulness meditation, as it is called, is rooted in the teachings of a fifth-century B.C. Indian prince, Siddhartha Gautama, later known as the Buddha. It is catching the attention of talk therapists of all stripes, including academic researchers, Freudian analysts in private practice and skeptics who see all the hallmarks of another fad.
For years, psychotherapists have worked to relieve suffering by reframing the content of patients’ thoughts, directly altering behavior or helping people gain insight into the subconscious sources of their despair and anxiety. The promise of mindfulness meditation is that it can help patients endure flash floods of emotion during the therapeutic process — and ultimately alter reactions to daily experience at a level that words cannot reach. “The interest in this has just taken off,” said Zindel Segal, a psychologist at the Center of Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, where the above group therapy session was taped. “And I think a big part of it is that more and more therapists are practicing some form of contemplation themselves and want to bring that into therapy.”
At workshops and conferences across the country, students, counselors and psychologists in private practice throng lectures on mindfulness. The National Institutes of Health is financing more than 50 studies testing mindfulness techniques, up from 3 in 2000, to help relieve stress, soothe addictive cravings, improve attention, lift despair and reduce hot flashes.
Some proponents say Buddha’s arrival in psychotherapy signals a broader opening in the culture at large — a way to access deeper healing, a hidden path revealed.
Yet so far, the evidence that mindfulness meditation helps relieve psychiatric symptoms is thin, and in some cases, it may make people worse, some studies suggest. Many researchers now worry that the enthusiasm for Buddhist practice will run so far ahead of the science that this promising psychological tool could turn into another fad.
“I’m very open to the possibility that this approach could be effective, and it certainly should be studied,” said Scott Lilienfeld, a psychology professor at Emory. “What concerns me is the hype, the talk about changing the world, this allure of the guru that the field of psychotherapy has a tendency to cultivate.”
Buddhist meditation came to psychotherapy from mainstream academic medicine. In the 1970s, a graduate student in molecular biology, Jon Kabat-Zinn, intrigued by Buddhist ideas, adapted a version of its meditative practice that could be easily learned and studied. It was by design a secular version, extracted like a gemstone from the many-layered foundation of Buddhist teaching, which has sprouted a wide variety of sects and spiritual practices and attracted 350 million adherents worldwide.
In transcendental meditation and other types of meditation, practitioners seek to transcend or “lose” themselves. The goal of mindfulness meditation was different, to foster an awareness of every sensation as it unfolds in the moment.
Dr. Kabat-Zinn taught the practice to people suffering from chronic pain at the University of Massachusetts medical school. In the 1980s he published a series of studies demonstrating that two-hour courses, given once a week for eight weeks, reduced chronic pain more effectively than treatment as usual.
Word spread, discreetly at first. “I think that back then, other researchers had to be very careful when they talked about this, because they didn’t want to be seen as New Age weirdos,” Dr. Kabat-Zinn, now a professor emeritus of medicine at the University of Massachusetts, said in an interview. “So they didn’t call it mindfulness or meditation. “After a while, we put enough studies out there that people became more comfortable with it.”
One person who noticed early on was Marsha Linehan, a psychologist at the University of Washington who was trying to treat deeply troubled patients with histories of suicidal behavior. “Trying to treat these patients with some change-based behavior therapy just made them worse, not better,” Dr. Linehan said in an interview. “With the really hard stuff, you need something else, something that allows people to tolerate these very strong emotions.”
In the 1990s, Dr. Linehan published a series of studies finding that a therapy that incorporated Zen Buddhist mindfulness, “radical acceptance,” practiced by therapist and patient significantly cut the risk of hospitalization and suicide attempts in the high-risk patients.
Finally, in 2000, a group of researchers including Dr. Segal in Toronto, J. Mark G. Williams at the University of Wales and John D. Teasdale at the Medical Research Council in England published a study that found that eight weekly sessions of mindfulness halved the rate of relapse in people with three or more episodes of depression.
With Dr. Kabat-Zinn, they wrote a popular book, “The Mindful Way Through Depression.” Psychotherapists’ curiosity about mindfulness, once tentative, turned into “this feeding frenzy, of sorts, that we have going on now,” Dr. Kabat-Zinn said.
Mindfulness meditation is easy to describe. Sit in a comfortable position, eyes closed, preferably with the back upright and unsupported. Relax and take note of body sensations, sounds and moods. Notice them without judgment. Let the mind settle into the rhythm of breathing. If it wanders (and it will), gently redirect attention to the breath. Stay with it for at least 10 minutes.
After mastering control of attention, some therapists say, a person can turn, mentally, to face a threatening or troubling thought — about, say, a strained relationship with a parent — and learn simply to endure the anger or sadness and let it pass, without lapsing into rumination or trying to change the feeling, a move that often backfires.
One woman, a doctor who had been in therapy for years to manage bouts of disabling anxiety, recently began seeing Gaea Logan, a therapist in Austin, Tex., who incorporates mindfulness meditation into her practice. This patient had plenty to worry about, including a mentally ill child, a divorce and what she described as a “harsh internal voice,” Ms. Logan said.
After practicing mindfulness meditation, she continued to feel anxious at times but told Ms. Logan, “I can stop and observe my feelings and thoughts and have compassion for myself.”
Steven Hayes, a psychologist at the University of Nevada at Reno, has developed a talk therapy called Acceptance Commitment Therapy, or ACT, based on a similar, Buddha-like effort to move beyond language to change fundamental psychological processes.
“It’s a shift from having our mental health defined by the content of our thoughts,” Dr. Hayes said, “to having it defined by our relationship to that content — and changing that relationship by sitting with, noticing and becoming disentangled from our definition of ourselves.”
For all these hopeful signs, the science behind mindfulness is in its infancy. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which researches health practices, last year published a comprehensive review of meditation studies, including T.M., Zen and mindfulness practice, for a wide variety of physical and mental problems. The study found that over all, the research was too sketchy to draw conclusions.
A recent review by Canadian researchers, focusing specifically on mindfulness meditation, concluded that it did “not have a reliable effect on depression and anxiety.”
Therapists who incorporate mindfulness practices do not agree when the meditation is most useful, either. Some say Buddhist meditation is most useful for patients with moderate emotional problems. Others, like Dr. Linehan, insist that patients in severe mental distress are the best candidates for mindfulness.
A case in point is mindfulness-based therapy to prevent a relapse into depression. The treatment significantly reduced the risk of relapse in people who have had three or more episodes of depression. But it may have had the opposite effect on people who had one or two previous episodes, two studies suggest.
The mindfulness treatment “may be contraindicated for this group of patients,” S. Helen Ma and Dr. Teasdale of the Medical Research Council concluded in a 2004 study of the therapy.
Since mindfulness meditation may have different effects on different mental struggles, the challenge for its proponents will be to specify where it is most effective — and soon, given how popular the practice is becoming.
The question, said Linda Barnes, an associate professor of family medicine and pediatrics at the Boston University School of Medicine, is not whether mindfulness meditation will become a sophisticated therapeutic technique or lapse into self-help cliché.
“The answer to that question is yes to both,” Dr. Barnes said.
The real issue, most researchers agree, is whether the science will keep pace and help people distinguish the mindful variety from the mindless.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
The New York Times
May 20, 2008
Findings
Comfort Food, for Monkeys
By JOHN TIERNEY
The ladies who lunch do not obsess about their weight in the rhesus monkey compound at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta. Food is freely available, and the high-status females do not pride themselves on passing it up. They don’t seem to stigmatize obesity — there is no equivalent of a Kirstie Alley joke — and they certainly don’t turn themselves into Social X-Rays.
In fact, the dominant females ordinarily eat a little more than the subordinates. The lower status monkeys can get as much food as they want but seem to have less of a desire to eat, perhaps because of the higher level of stress hormones in their brain. The anxiety of constantly toadying to their social superiors seems to curb their appetite, researchers suspect, at least when their regular high-fiber, low-fat chow is on the menu.
But suppose you tempted them with the equivalent of chocolate and potato chips and ice cream? Mark Wilson, a neuroscientist at Emory University, and a team tried that experiment at Yerkes by installing feeders with a constant supply of banana-flavored pellets — not exactly Dove bars, but they had enough sugar and fat to appeal even to human palates. (In the interest of science, I sampled a few pellets.)
Once these foods were available, the low-status monkeys promptly developed an appetite. They began eating significantly more calories than their social superiors. While the dominant monkeys dabbled in the sweet, fatty pellets just during the daytime, the subordinate monkeys kept scarfing them down after dark.
These results may not surprise any stressed-out wage slave who has polished off a quart of Häagen-Dazs at midnight while contemplating the day’s humiliations. But the experiment intrigues scientists studying human junk-food binges, which are hard to understand because there are so many confounding factors.
Monkeys’ cravings aren’t so complicated. The female monkeys weren’t dieters who tasted one forbidden food and then couldn’t stop themselves from binging. They were not rebelling against the thin mandate from tyrannical fashion magazines. They weren’t choosing junk food because they couldn’t find healthier fare. They weren’t seduced by commercials telling them they deserved a break today.
For the monkeys the situation seems simple. They get some sort of comfort that is particularly appealing to the subordinate monkeys. One possibility is that the fatty foods help block the monkeys’ stress responses. Studies with rodents have shown that high-calorie foods cause a metabolic change that tamps the release of stress hormones like cortisol.
Another possible explanation, the one favored by the Yerkes researchers, is that the snacks activated the reward pathways in the brain. They may have provided the same sort of dopamine reward as cocaine, which was studied in a previous experiment with monkeys by researchers at Wake Forest University.
In that experiment, the dominant monkeys didn’t show much interest in pressing a lever that administered an intravenous dose of cocaine. But the subordinate monkeys, who started off with compromised dopamine receptors, kept pushing the lever to get more cocaine, just as the subordinates in the new study kept munching on the fatty pellets. Dr. Wilson suggests that the snackers are reinforcing the dopamine systems that had been diminished by stress.
“Essentially, eating high-calorie foods becomes a coping strategy to deal with daily life events for an individual in a difficult social situation,” Dr. Wilson said. “The subordinates don’t get beat up, but they get harassed by high-ranking monkeys. If they’re sitting somewhere and a dominant monkey comes over, they give up their seat and move away. They’re always looking over their shoulders.”
These results seem to jibe with the famous Whitehall study of British civil servants, which found that lower-ranking workers were more obese than higher-status workers. Even though the subordinate workers were neither poor nor lacked health care, their lower status correlated with more health problems.
The new monkey data also jibe with an American study that looked at women’s snacking tendencies. After they worked on puzzles and recorded a speech, the women were tempted with an array of chocolate granola bars, potato chips, rice cakes and pretzels provided by the research team, led by Elissa Epel, a psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco.
The women who seemed most stressed by the tasks, as measured by their levels of cortisol, ate more of the sweet, high-fat snacks, the same pattern observed in the subordinate monkeys with high cortisol levels. But as Dr. Wilson and others caution, there are plenty of other factors besides status and stress that affect humans’ diets and waistlines.
Debra A. Zellner, a psychologist at Montclair State University, tested both men and women by putting bowls of potato chips, M&Ms, peanuts and red grapes on a table as the participants in the study worked on solving anagrams. Some of the people were given unsolvable anagrams, and they understandably reported being more stressed than the ones given easy anagrams.
The stress seemed to affect snacking in different ways for each sex. The women given solvable puzzles ate more grapes than M&Ms, while the women under stress preferred M&Ms. The men ate more of the high-fat snacks when they were not under stress, apparently because the ones who got the easy anagrams had more time to relax and have a treat.
Dr. Zellner says these gender patterns are probably because of a simple difference between the sexes: more of the women were on diets. Previous studies have shown that such “restrained eaters” are more likely than nondieters to keep scarfing snacks once they yield to temptation. This might be because they’re hungrier, but it might also be because all restraint disappears once a diet is broken — the “what the hell” theory of binging.
Humans are not as lucky as monkeys in one way. “Female humans report that they eat high-calorie foods to make themselves feel better when stressed,” Dr. Zellner says, “but they actually don’t feel better after eating them. Instead, because they are restrained eaters, they feel guilt and actually feel worse. Female monkeys don’t have that cognitive baggage.”
Only the monkeys, it seems, find comfort in comfort foods.
May 20, 2008
Findings
Comfort Food, for Monkeys
By JOHN TIERNEY
The ladies who lunch do not obsess about their weight in the rhesus monkey compound at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta. Food is freely available, and the high-status females do not pride themselves on passing it up. They don’t seem to stigmatize obesity — there is no equivalent of a Kirstie Alley joke — and they certainly don’t turn themselves into Social X-Rays.
In fact, the dominant females ordinarily eat a little more than the subordinates. The lower status monkeys can get as much food as they want but seem to have less of a desire to eat, perhaps because of the higher level of stress hormones in their brain. The anxiety of constantly toadying to their social superiors seems to curb their appetite, researchers suspect, at least when their regular high-fiber, low-fat chow is on the menu.
But suppose you tempted them with the equivalent of chocolate and potato chips and ice cream? Mark Wilson, a neuroscientist at Emory University, and a team tried that experiment at Yerkes by installing feeders with a constant supply of banana-flavored pellets — not exactly Dove bars, but they had enough sugar and fat to appeal even to human palates. (In the interest of science, I sampled a few pellets.)
Once these foods were available, the low-status monkeys promptly developed an appetite. They began eating significantly more calories than their social superiors. While the dominant monkeys dabbled in the sweet, fatty pellets just during the daytime, the subordinate monkeys kept scarfing them down after dark.
These results may not surprise any stressed-out wage slave who has polished off a quart of Häagen-Dazs at midnight while contemplating the day’s humiliations. But the experiment intrigues scientists studying human junk-food binges, which are hard to understand because there are so many confounding factors.
Monkeys’ cravings aren’t so complicated. The female monkeys weren’t dieters who tasted one forbidden food and then couldn’t stop themselves from binging. They were not rebelling against the thin mandate from tyrannical fashion magazines. They weren’t choosing junk food because they couldn’t find healthier fare. They weren’t seduced by commercials telling them they deserved a break today.
For the monkeys the situation seems simple. They get some sort of comfort that is particularly appealing to the subordinate monkeys. One possibility is that the fatty foods help block the monkeys’ stress responses. Studies with rodents have shown that high-calorie foods cause a metabolic change that tamps the release of stress hormones like cortisol.
Another possible explanation, the one favored by the Yerkes researchers, is that the snacks activated the reward pathways in the brain. They may have provided the same sort of dopamine reward as cocaine, which was studied in a previous experiment with monkeys by researchers at Wake Forest University.
In that experiment, the dominant monkeys didn’t show much interest in pressing a lever that administered an intravenous dose of cocaine. But the subordinate monkeys, who started off with compromised dopamine receptors, kept pushing the lever to get more cocaine, just as the subordinates in the new study kept munching on the fatty pellets. Dr. Wilson suggests that the snackers are reinforcing the dopamine systems that had been diminished by stress.
“Essentially, eating high-calorie foods becomes a coping strategy to deal with daily life events for an individual in a difficult social situation,” Dr. Wilson said. “The subordinates don’t get beat up, but they get harassed by high-ranking monkeys. If they’re sitting somewhere and a dominant monkey comes over, they give up their seat and move away. They’re always looking over their shoulders.”
These results seem to jibe with the famous Whitehall study of British civil servants, which found that lower-ranking workers were more obese than higher-status workers. Even though the subordinate workers were neither poor nor lacked health care, their lower status correlated with more health problems.
The new monkey data also jibe with an American study that looked at women’s snacking tendencies. After they worked on puzzles and recorded a speech, the women were tempted with an array of chocolate granola bars, potato chips, rice cakes and pretzels provided by the research team, led by Elissa Epel, a psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco.
The women who seemed most stressed by the tasks, as measured by their levels of cortisol, ate more of the sweet, high-fat snacks, the same pattern observed in the subordinate monkeys with high cortisol levels. But as Dr. Wilson and others caution, there are plenty of other factors besides status and stress that affect humans’ diets and waistlines.
Debra A. Zellner, a psychologist at Montclair State University, tested both men and women by putting bowls of potato chips, M&Ms, peanuts and red grapes on a table as the participants in the study worked on solving anagrams. Some of the people were given unsolvable anagrams, and they understandably reported being more stressed than the ones given easy anagrams.
The stress seemed to affect snacking in different ways for each sex. The women given solvable puzzles ate more grapes than M&Ms, while the women under stress preferred M&Ms. The men ate more of the high-fat snacks when they were not under stress, apparently because the ones who got the easy anagrams had more time to relax and have a treat.
Dr. Zellner says these gender patterns are probably because of a simple difference between the sexes: more of the women were on diets. Previous studies have shown that such “restrained eaters” are more likely than nondieters to keep scarfing snacks once they yield to temptation. This might be because they’re hungrier, but it might also be because all restraint disappears once a diet is broken — the “what the hell” theory of binging.
Humans are not as lucky as monkeys in one way. “Female humans report that they eat high-calorie foods to make themselves feel better when stressed,” Dr. Zellner says, “but they actually don’t feel better after eating them. Instead, because they are restrained eaters, they feel guilt and actually feel worse. Female monkeys don’t have that cognitive baggage.”
Only the monkeys, it seems, find comfort in comfort foods.
The New York Times
May 20, 2008
Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain
By SARA REISTAD-LONG
When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing number of studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong.
Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit.
The studies are analyzed in a new edition of a neurology book, “Progress in Brain Research.”
Some brains do deteriorate with age. Alzheimer’s disease, for example, strikes 13 percent of Americans 65 and older. But for most aging adults, the authors say, much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact, like a name or a telephone number. Although that can be frustrating, it is often useful.
“It may be that distractibility is not, in fact, a bad thing,” said Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book. “It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind.”
For example, in studies where subjects are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students. Although the students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when the words are related to the topic at hand. That indicates that they are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in and processing it.
When both groups were later asked questions for which the out-of-place words might be answers, the older adults responded much better than the students.
“For the young people, it’s as if the distraction never happened,” said an author of the review, Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. “But for older adults, because they’ve retained all this extra data, they’re now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they’ve soaked up from one situation to another.”
Such tendencies can yield big advantages in the real world, where it is not always clear what information is important, or will become important. A seemingly irrelevant point or suggestion in a memo can take on new meaning if the original plan changes. Or extra details that stole your attention, like others’ yawning and fidgeting, may help you assess the speaker’s real impact.
“A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation and the indirect message of what’s going on than their younger peers,” Dr. Hasher said. “We believe that this characteristic may play a significant role in why we think of older people as wiser.”
In a 2003 study at Harvard, Dr. Carson and other researchers tested students’ ability to tune out irrelevant information when exposed to a barrage of stimuli. The more creative the students were thought to be, determined by a questionnaire on past achievements, the more trouble they had ignoring the unwanted data. A reduced ability to filter and set priorities, the scientists concluded, could contribute to original thinking.
This phenomenon, Dr. Carson said, is often linked to a decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex. Studies have found that people who suffered an injury or disease that lowered activity in that region became more interested in creative pursuits.
Jacqui Smith, a professor of psychology and research professor at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in the current research, said there was a word for what results when the mind is able to assimilate data and put it in its proper place — wisdom.
“These findings are all very consistent with the context we’re building for what wisdom is,” she said. “If older people are taking in more information from a situation, and they’re then able to combine it with their comparatively greater store of general knowledge, they’re going to have a nice advantage.”
May 20, 2008
Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain
By SARA REISTAD-LONG
When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party, they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing number of studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong.
Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit.
The studies are analyzed in a new edition of a neurology book, “Progress in Brain Research.”
Some brains do deteriorate with age. Alzheimer’s disease, for example, strikes 13 percent of Americans 65 and older. But for most aging adults, the authors say, much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact, like a name or a telephone number. Although that can be frustrating, it is often useful.
“It may be that distractibility is not, in fact, a bad thing,” said Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book. “It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind.”
For example, in studies where subjects are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students. Although the students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when the words are related to the topic at hand. That indicates that they are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in and processing it.
When both groups were later asked questions for which the out-of-place words might be answers, the older adults responded much better than the students.
“For the young people, it’s as if the distraction never happened,” said an author of the review, Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. “But for older adults, because they’ve retained all this extra data, they’re now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they’ve soaked up from one situation to another.”
Such tendencies can yield big advantages in the real world, where it is not always clear what information is important, or will become important. A seemingly irrelevant point or suggestion in a memo can take on new meaning if the original plan changes. Or extra details that stole your attention, like others’ yawning and fidgeting, may help you assess the speaker’s real impact.
“A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation and the indirect message of what’s going on than their younger peers,” Dr. Hasher said. “We believe that this characteristic may play a significant role in why we think of older people as wiser.”
In a 2003 study at Harvard, Dr. Carson and other researchers tested students’ ability to tune out irrelevant information when exposed to a barrage of stimuli. The more creative the students were thought to be, determined by a questionnaire on past achievements, the more trouble they had ignoring the unwanted data. A reduced ability to filter and set priorities, the scientists concluded, could contribute to original thinking.
This phenomenon, Dr. Carson said, is often linked to a decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex. Studies have found that people who suffered an injury or disease that lowered activity in that region became more interested in creative pursuits.
Jacqui Smith, a professor of psychology and research professor at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in the current research, said there was a word for what results when the mind is able to assimilate data and put it in its proper place — wisdom.
“These findings are all very consistent with the context we’re building for what wisdom is,” she said. “If older people are taking in more information from a situation, and they’re then able to combine it with their comparatively greater store of general knowledge, they’re going to have a nice advantage.”
Saturday, May 17, 2008
The New York Times
May 17, 2008
Einstein Letter on God Sells for $404,000
By DENNIS OVERBYE
From the grave, Albert Einstein poured gasoline on the culture wars between science and religion this week.
A letter the physicist wrote in 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, in which he described the Bible as “pretty childish” and scoffed at the notion that the Jews could be a “chosen people,” sold for $404,000 at an auction in London. That was 25 times the presale estimate.
The Associated Press quoted Rupert Powell, the managing director of Bloomsbury Auctions, as describing the unidentified buyer as having “a passion for theoretical physics and all that that entails.” Among the unsuccessful bidders, according to The Guardian newspaper, was Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, an outspoken atheist.
The price makes the Gutkind letter one of the best sellers among Einstein manuscripts. That $404,000 is only a little less than the $442,500 paid for the entire collection of 53 love letters between Einstein and his first wife, Mileva Maric, at an auction at Christie’s in New York in 1996. At that same auction a paper by Einstein and his best friend, Michele Besso, attempting a calculation that would later be a pivotal piece of his crowning achievement, the General Theory of Relativity, went for $398,500.
Diana L. Kormos-Buchwald, a historian at the California Institute of Technology and head of the Einstein Papers project, said she was not surprised that the Gutkind letter, which was known to Einstein scholars, fetched such a high price.
“It is an important expression of Einstein’s thoughts and views on religion, on Judaism, on his views about God and religious texts,” she wrote in an e-mail message. She said the letter, which was not written for publication, was “concise and unvarnished” and more straightforward than the metaphors he usually turned to in public.
Gerald Holton, a historian of science at Harvard and a longtime Einstein expert, also was not surprised. He said Einstein’s marketability had been improved by the last few years of hoopla about the 100th anniversary of relativity, which included his selection as Time magazine’s Man of the Century in 2000, and several new biographies. Dr. Holton described the letter as “a feat of eloquent Credo in short form.”
Einstein, as he says in his autobiographical notes, lost his religion at the age of 12, concluding that it was all a lie, and he never looked back. But he never lost his religious feeling about the apparent order of the universe or his intuitive connection with its mystery, which he savored. “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is its comprehensibility,” he once said.
“If something is in me that can be called religious,” he wrote in another letter, in 1954, “then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as science can reveal it.”
Einstein consistently characterized the idea of a personal God who answers prayers as naive, and life after death as wishful thinking. But his continual references to God — as a metaphor for physical law; in his famous rebuke to quantum mechanics, “God doesn’t play dice”; and in lines like the endlessly repeated, “ Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind” — has led some wishful thinkers to try to put him in the camp of some kind of believer or even, not long ago, to paint him as an advocate of intelligent design.
Trying to distinguish between a personal God and a more cosmic force, Einstein described himself as an “agnostic” and “not an atheist,” which he associated with the same intolerance as religious fanatics. “They are creatures who — in their grudge against the traditional ‘opium for the people’ — cannot bear the music of the spheres.”
The problem of God, he said, “is too vast for our limited minds.”
Einstein’s latest words offer scant comfort to the traditionally faithful.
In the letter, according to the A.P. account, he wrote that “the word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.”
As for his fellow Jews, he said that Judaism, like all other religions, was “an incarnation of the most childish superstitions.”
He claimed a deep affinity with the Jewish people, he said, but “as far as my experience goes they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them.”
May 17, 2008
Einstein Letter on God Sells for $404,000
By DENNIS OVERBYE
From the grave, Albert Einstein poured gasoline on the culture wars between science and religion this week.
A letter the physicist wrote in 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, in which he described the Bible as “pretty childish” and scoffed at the notion that the Jews could be a “chosen people,” sold for $404,000 at an auction in London. That was 25 times the presale estimate.
The Associated Press quoted Rupert Powell, the managing director of Bloomsbury Auctions, as describing the unidentified buyer as having “a passion for theoretical physics and all that that entails.” Among the unsuccessful bidders, according to The Guardian newspaper, was Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, an outspoken atheist.
The price makes the Gutkind letter one of the best sellers among Einstein manuscripts. That $404,000 is only a little less than the $442,500 paid for the entire collection of 53 love letters between Einstein and his first wife, Mileva Maric, at an auction at Christie’s in New York in 1996. At that same auction a paper by Einstein and his best friend, Michele Besso, attempting a calculation that would later be a pivotal piece of his crowning achievement, the General Theory of Relativity, went for $398,500.
Diana L. Kormos-Buchwald, a historian at the California Institute of Technology and head of the Einstein Papers project, said she was not surprised that the Gutkind letter, which was known to Einstein scholars, fetched such a high price.
“It is an important expression of Einstein’s thoughts and views on religion, on Judaism, on his views about God and religious texts,” she wrote in an e-mail message. She said the letter, which was not written for publication, was “concise and unvarnished” and more straightforward than the metaphors he usually turned to in public.
Gerald Holton, a historian of science at Harvard and a longtime Einstein expert, also was not surprised. He said Einstein’s marketability had been improved by the last few years of hoopla about the 100th anniversary of relativity, which included his selection as Time magazine’s Man of the Century in 2000, and several new biographies. Dr. Holton described the letter as “a feat of eloquent Credo in short form.”
Einstein, as he says in his autobiographical notes, lost his religion at the age of 12, concluding that it was all a lie, and he never looked back. But he never lost his religious feeling about the apparent order of the universe or his intuitive connection with its mystery, which he savored. “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is its comprehensibility,” he once said.
“If something is in me that can be called religious,” he wrote in another letter, in 1954, “then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as science can reveal it.”
Einstein consistently characterized the idea of a personal God who answers prayers as naive, and life after death as wishful thinking. But his continual references to God — as a metaphor for physical law; in his famous rebuke to quantum mechanics, “God doesn’t play dice”; and in lines like the endlessly repeated, “ Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind” — has led some wishful thinkers to try to put him in the camp of some kind of believer or even, not long ago, to paint him as an advocate of intelligent design.
Trying to distinguish between a personal God and a more cosmic force, Einstein described himself as an “agnostic” and “not an atheist,” which he associated with the same intolerance as religious fanatics. “They are creatures who — in their grudge against the traditional ‘opium for the people’ — cannot bear the music of the spheres.”
The problem of God, he said, “is too vast for our limited minds.”
Einstein’s latest words offer scant comfort to the traditionally faithful.
In the letter, according to the A.P. account, he wrote that “the word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.”
As for his fellow Jews, he said that Judaism, like all other religions, was “an incarnation of the most childish superstitions.”
He claimed a deep affinity with the Jewish people, he said, but “as far as my experience goes they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them.”
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
The New York Times
May 7, 2008
Editorial Notebook
The Cost of Smarts
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Research on animal intelligence always makes me wonder just how smart humans are. Consider the fruit-fly experiments described in Carl Zimmer’s piece in the Science Times on Tuesday. Fruit flies who were taught to be smarter than the average fruit fly tended to live shorter lives. This suggests that dimmer bulbs burn longer, that there is an advantage in not being too terrifically bright.
Intelligence, it turns out, is a high-priced option. It takes more upkeep, burns more fuel and is slow off the starting line because it depends on learning — a gradual process — instead of instinct. Plenty of other species are able to learn, and one of the things they’ve apparently learned is when to stop.
Is there an adaptive value to limited intelligence? That’s the question behind this new research. I like it. Instead of casting a wistful glance backward at all the species we’ve left in the dust I.Q.-wise, it implicitly asks what the real costs of our own intelligence might be. This is on the mind of every animal I’ve ever met.
Every chicken that looks at you sideways — which is how they all look at you — is really saying what Thoreau said less succinctly: you are endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood by a formula more complicated than the problem itself. Thoreau himself would not dispute that he was hoping to recover the chicken’s point of view. He went to Walden Pond “to remember well his ignorance.”
Research on animal intelligence also makes me wonder what experiments animals would perform on humans if they had the chance. Every cat with an owner, for instance, is running a small-scale study in operant conditioning. I believe that if animals ran the labs, they would test us to determine the limits of our patience, our faithfulness, our memory for terrain. They would try to decide what intelligence in humans is really for, not merely how much of it there is. Above all, they would hope to study a fundamental question: Are humans actually aware of the world they live in? So far the results are inconclusive. VERLYN KLINKENBORG
May 7, 2008
Editorial Notebook
The Cost of Smarts
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Research on animal intelligence always makes me wonder just how smart humans are. Consider the fruit-fly experiments described in Carl Zimmer’s piece in the Science Times on Tuesday. Fruit flies who were taught to be smarter than the average fruit fly tended to live shorter lives. This suggests that dimmer bulbs burn longer, that there is an advantage in not being too terrifically bright.
Intelligence, it turns out, is a high-priced option. It takes more upkeep, burns more fuel and is slow off the starting line because it depends on learning — a gradual process — instead of instinct. Plenty of other species are able to learn, and one of the things they’ve apparently learned is when to stop.
Is there an adaptive value to limited intelligence? That’s the question behind this new research. I like it. Instead of casting a wistful glance backward at all the species we’ve left in the dust I.Q.-wise, it implicitly asks what the real costs of our own intelligence might be. This is on the mind of every animal I’ve ever met.
Every chicken that looks at you sideways — which is how they all look at you — is really saying what Thoreau said less succinctly: you are endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood by a formula more complicated than the problem itself. Thoreau himself would not dispute that he was hoping to recover the chicken’s point of view. He went to Walden Pond “to remember well his ignorance.”
Research on animal intelligence also makes me wonder what experiments animals would perform on humans if they had the chance. Every cat with an owner, for instance, is running a small-scale study in operant conditioning. I believe that if animals ran the labs, they would test us to determine the limits of our patience, our faithfulness, our memory for terrain. They would try to decide what intelligence in humans is really for, not merely how much of it there is. Above all, they would hope to study a fundamental question: Are humans actually aware of the world they live in? So far the results are inconclusive. VERLYN KLINKENBORG
New York Times
April 29, 2008
PERSONAL HEALTH; You Name It, and Exercise Helps It
By JANE E. BRODY
Randi considers the Y.M.C.A. her lifeline, especially the pool. Randi weighs more than 300 pounds and has borderline diabetes, but she controls her blood sugar and keeps her bright outlook on life by swimming every day for about 45 minutes.
Randi overcame any self-consciousness about her weight for the sake of her health, and those who swim with her and share the open locker room are proud of her. If only the millions of others beset with chronic health problems recognized the inestimable value to their physical and emotional well-being of regular physical exercise.
''The single thing that comes close to a magic bullet, in terms of its strong and universal benefits, is exercise,'' Frank Hu, epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health, said in the Harvard Magazine.
I have written often about the protective roles of exercise. It can lower the risk of heart attack, stroke, hypertension, diabetes, obesity, depression, dementia, osteoporosis, gallstones, diverticulitis, falls, erectile dysfunction, peripheral vascular disease and 12 kinds of cancer.
But what if you already have one of these conditions? Or an ailment like rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, congestive heart failure or osteoarthritis? How can you exercise if you're always tired or in pain or have trouble breathing? Can exercise really help?
You bet it can. Marilyn Moffat, a professor of physical therapy at New York University and co-author with Carole B. Lewis of ''Age-Defying Fitness'' (Peachtree, 2006), conducts workshops for physical therapists around the country and abroad, demonstrating how people with chronic health problems can improve their health and quality of life by learning how to exercise safely.
Up and Moving
''The data show that regular moderate exercise increases your ability to battle the effects of disease,'' Dr. Moffat said in an interview. ''It has a positive effect on both physical and mental well-being. The goal is to do as much physical activity as your body lets you do, and rest when you need to rest.''
In years past, doctors were afraid to let heart patients exercise. When my father had a heart attack in 1968, he was kept sedentary for six weeks. Now, heart attack patients are in bed barely half a day before they are up and moving, Dr. Moffat said.
The core of cardiac rehab is a progressive exercise program to increase the ability of the heart to pump oxygen- and nutrient-rich blood more effectively throughout the body. The outcome is better endurance, greater ability to enjoy life and decreased mortality.
The same goes for patients with congestive heart failure. ''Heart failure patients as old as 91 can increase their oxygen consumption significantly,'' Dr. Moffat said.
Aerobic exercise lowers blood pressure in people with hypertension, and it improves peripheral circulation in people who develop cramping leg pains when they walk -- a condition called intermittent claudication. The treatment for it, in fact, is to walk a little farther each day.
In people who have had transient ischemic attacks, or ministrokes, ''gradually increasing exercise improves blood flow to the brain and may diminish the risk of a full-blown stroke,'' Dr. Moffat said. And aerobic and strength exercises have been shown to improve endurance, walking speed and the ability to perform tasks of daily living up to six years after a stroke.
As Randi knows, moderate exercise cuts the risk of developing diabetes. And for those with diabetes, exercise improves glucose tolerance -- less medication is needed to control blood sugar -- and reduces the risk of life-threatening complications.
Perhaps the most immediate benefits are reaped by people with joint and neuromuscular disorders. Without exercise, those at risk of osteoarthritis become crippled by stiff, deteriorated joints. But exercise that increases strength and aerobic capacity can reduce pain, depression and anxiety and improve function, balance and quality of life.
Likewise for people with rheumatoid arthritis. ''The less they do, the worse things get,'' Dr. Moffat said. ''The more their joints move, the better.''
Exercise that builds gradually and protects inflamed joints can diminish pain, fatigue, morning stiffness, depression and anxiety, she said, and improve strength, walking speed and activity.
Exercise is crucial to improving function of total hip or knee replacements. But ''most patients with knee replacements don't get intensive enough activity,'' Dr. Moffat said.
Water exercises are particularly helpful for people with multiple sclerosis, who must avoid overheating. And for those with Parkinson's, resistance training and aerobic exercise can increase their ability to function independently and improve their balance, stride length, walking speed and mood.
Resistance training, along with aerobic exercise, is especially helpful for people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; it helps counter the loss of muscle mass and strength from lack of oxygen.
In the February/March issue of ACE Certified News, Natalie Digate Muth, a registered dietitian and personal trainer, emphasized the value of a good workout for people suffering from depression. Mastering a new skill increases their sense of worth, social contact improves mood, and the endorphins released during exercise improve well-being.
''Exercise is an important adjunct to pharmacological therapy, and it does not matter how severe the depression -- exercise works equally well for people with moderate or severe depression,'' wrote Ms. Muth, who is pursuing a medical degree at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Feel-Good Hormones
Healthy people may have difficulty appreciating the burdens faced by those with chronic ailments, Dr. Nancey Trevanian Tsai noted in the same issue of ACE Certified News. ''Oftentimes, disease-ridden statements -- like 'I'm a diabetic' -- become barricades that keep clients from seeing themselves getting better,'' she said, and many feel ''enslaved by their diseases and treatments.''
But the feel-good hormones released through exercise can help sustain activity.
''With regular exercise, the body seeks to continue staying active,'' wrote Dr. Tsai, an assistant professor of neurosciences at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. She recommended an exercise program tailored to the person's current abilities, daily needs, medication schedule, side effects and response to treatment.
She urged trainers who work with people with chronic ailments to start slowly with easily achievable goals, build gradually on each accomplishment and focus on functional gains. Over time, a sense of accomplishment, better sleep, less pain and enhanced satisfaction with life can become further reasons to pursue physical activity.
''Even if exercise is tough to schedule,'' Dr. Moffat said, ''you feel so much better, it's crazy not to do it.''
April 29, 2008
PERSONAL HEALTH; You Name It, and Exercise Helps It
By JANE E. BRODY
Randi considers the Y.M.C.A. her lifeline, especially the pool. Randi weighs more than 300 pounds and has borderline diabetes, but she controls her blood sugar and keeps her bright outlook on life by swimming every day for about 45 minutes.
Randi overcame any self-consciousness about her weight for the sake of her health, and those who swim with her and share the open locker room are proud of her. If only the millions of others beset with chronic health problems recognized the inestimable value to their physical and emotional well-being of regular physical exercise.
''The single thing that comes close to a magic bullet, in terms of its strong and universal benefits, is exercise,'' Frank Hu, epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health, said in the Harvard Magazine.
I have written often about the protective roles of exercise. It can lower the risk of heart attack, stroke, hypertension, diabetes, obesity, depression, dementia, osteoporosis, gallstones, diverticulitis, falls, erectile dysfunction, peripheral vascular disease and 12 kinds of cancer.
But what if you already have one of these conditions? Or an ailment like rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, congestive heart failure or osteoarthritis? How can you exercise if you're always tired or in pain or have trouble breathing? Can exercise really help?
You bet it can. Marilyn Moffat, a professor of physical therapy at New York University and co-author with Carole B. Lewis of ''Age-Defying Fitness'' (Peachtree, 2006), conducts workshops for physical therapists around the country and abroad, demonstrating how people with chronic health problems can improve their health and quality of life by learning how to exercise safely.
Up and Moving
''The data show that regular moderate exercise increases your ability to battle the effects of disease,'' Dr. Moffat said in an interview. ''It has a positive effect on both physical and mental well-being. The goal is to do as much physical activity as your body lets you do, and rest when you need to rest.''
In years past, doctors were afraid to let heart patients exercise. When my father had a heart attack in 1968, he was kept sedentary for six weeks. Now, heart attack patients are in bed barely half a day before they are up and moving, Dr. Moffat said.
The core of cardiac rehab is a progressive exercise program to increase the ability of the heart to pump oxygen- and nutrient-rich blood more effectively throughout the body. The outcome is better endurance, greater ability to enjoy life and decreased mortality.
The same goes for patients with congestive heart failure. ''Heart failure patients as old as 91 can increase their oxygen consumption significantly,'' Dr. Moffat said.
Aerobic exercise lowers blood pressure in people with hypertension, and it improves peripheral circulation in people who develop cramping leg pains when they walk -- a condition called intermittent claudication. The treatment for it, in fact, is to walk a little farther each day.
In people who have had transient ischemic attacks, or ministrokes, ''gradually increasing exercise improves blood flow to the brain and may diminish the risk of a full-blown stroke,'' Dr. Moffat said. And aerobic and strength exercises have been shown to improve endurance, walking speed and the ability to perform tasks of daily living up to six years after a stroke.
As Randi knows, moderate exercise cuts the risk of developing diabetes. And for those with diabetes, exercise improves glucose tolerance -- less medication is needed to control blood sugar -- and reduces the risk of life-threatening complications.
Perhaps the most immediate benefits are reaped by people with joint and neuromuscular disorders. Without exercise, those at risk of osteoarthritis become crippled by stiff, deteriorated joints. But exercise that increases strength and aerobic capacity can reduce pain, depression and anxiety and improve function, balance and quality of life.
Likewise for people with rheumatoid arthritis. ''The less they do, the worse things get,'' Dr. Moffat said. ''The more their joints move, the better.''
Exercise that builds gradually and protects inflamed joints can diminish pain, fatigue, morning stiffness, depression and anxiety, she said, and improve strength, walking speed and activity.
Exercise is crucial to improving function of total hip or knee replacements. But ''most patients with knee replacements don't get intensive enough activity,'' Dr. Moffat said.
Water exercises are particularly helpful for people with multiple sclerosis, who must avoid overheating. And for those with Parkinson's, resistance training and aerobic exercise can increase their ability to function independently and improve their balance, stride length, walking speed and mood.
Resistance training, along with aerobic exercise, is especially helpful for people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease; it helps counter the loss of muscle mass and strength from lack of oxygen.
In the February/March issue of ACE Certified News, Natalie Digate Muth, a registered dietitian and personal trainer, emphasized the value of a good workout for people suffering from depression. Mastering a new skill increases their sense of worth, social contact improves mood, and the endorphins released during exercise improve well-being.
''Exercise is an important adjunct to pharmacological therapy, and it does not matter how severe the depression -- exercise works equally well for people with moderate or severe depression,'' wrote Ms. Muth, who is pursuing a medical degree at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Feel-Good Hormones
Healthy people may have difficulty appreciating the burdens faced by those with chronic ailments, Dr. Nancey Trevanian Tsai noted in the same issue of ACE Certified News. ''Oftentimes, disease-ridden statements -- like 'I'm a diabetic' -- become barricades that keep clients from seeing themselves getting better,'' she said, and many feel ''enslaved by their diseases and treatments.''
But the feel-good hormones released through exercise can help sustain activity.
''With regular exercise, the body seeks to continue staying active,'' wrote Dr. Tsai, an assistant professor of neurosciences at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. She recommended an exercise program tailored to the person's current abilities, daily needs, medication schedule, side effects and response to treatment.
She urged trainers who work with people with chronic ailments to start slowly with easily achievable goals, build gradually on each accomplishment and focus on functional gains. Over time, a sense of accomplishment, better sleep, less pain and enhanced satisfaction with life can become further reasons to pursue physical activity.
''Even if exercise is tough to schedule,'' Dr. Moffat said, ''you feel so much better, it's crazy not to do it.''
Carl R. Rogers
On Becoming a Person
Note
These passages are from "On Becoming a Person", a collection of essays by Carl Rogers published in 1961.
The Good Life and the Fully Functioning Person (1953)
I have gradually come to one negative conclusion about the good life. It seems to me that the good life is not any fixed state. It is not, in my estimation, a state of virtue, or contentment, or nirvana, or happiness. It is not a condition in which the individual is adjusted or fulfilled or actualized. To use psychological terms, it is not a state of drive-reduction, or tension-reduction, or homeostasis.
The good life is a process, not a state of being.
It is a direction not a destination.
The direction which constitutes the good life is that which is selected by the total organism, when there is psychological freedom to move in any direction.
This organismically selected direction seems to have certain discernible qualities which appear to be the same in a wide variety of unique individuals.
The good life, from the point of view of my experience, is the process of movement in a direction which the human organism selects when it is inwardly free to move in any direction, and the general qualities of this selected direction appear to have a certain universality.
The characteristics of the process
1 - An increasing Openness to Experience
In the first place, the process seems to involve an increasing openness to experience. It is the polar opposite of defensiveness.
If a person could be fully open to his experience, every stimulus ? whether originating within the organism or in the environment ? would be freely relayed through the nervous system without being distorted by any defensive mechanism.
Thus, one aspect of this process which I am naming “the good life” appears to be a movement away from the pole of defensiveness toward the pole of openness to experience. The individual is becoming more able to listen to himself, to experience what is going on within himself. He is more open to his feelings of fear and discouragement and pain. He is also more open to his feelings of courage, and tenderness, and awe.
2 - Increasingly Existential Living
A second characteristic of the process which for me is the good life, is that it involves an increasingly tendency to live fully in each moment.
I believe it would be evident that for the person who was fully open to his new experience, completely without defensiveness, each moment would be new.
One way of expressing the fluidity which is present in such existential living is to say that the self and personality emerge from experience rather than experience being translated or twisted to fit pre-conceived self-structure. It means that one becomes a participant in and an observer of the ongoing process of organismic experience, rather than being in control of it.
It means a maximum of adaptability, a discovery of structure in experience, a flowing, changing organization of self and personality.
It involves discovering the structure of experience in the process of living the experience.
3 - An increasing Trust in His Organism
Still another characteristic of the person who is living the process of the good life appears to be an increasing trust in his organism as a means of arriving at the most satisfying behavior in each existential situation.
The person who is fully open to his experience would have access to all of the available data in the situation, on which to base his behavior; the social demands, his own complex and possibly conflicting needs, his memories of similar situations, his perception of the uniqueness of this situation, etc.. etc. The data would be very complex indeed. But he could permit his total organism, his consciousness participating, to consider each stimulus, need, and demand, its relative intensity and importance, and out of this complex weighing and balancing, discover that course of action which would come closest to satisfying all his needs in the situation.
The process of Functioning More Fully
I should like to draw together these three threads describing the process of the good life into a more coherent picture. It appears that the person who is psychologically free moves in the direction of becoming a more fully functioning person.
He is more able to live fully in and with each and all of his feelings and reactions. He makes increasing use of all his organic equipment to sense, as accurately as possible, the existential situation within and without. He makes use of all of the information his nervous system can thus supply, using it in awareness, but recognizing that his total organism may be, and often is, wiser than his awareness. He is more able to permit his total organism to function freely in all its complexity in selecting, from the multitude of possibilities, that behavior which in this moment of time will be most generally and genuinely satisfying. He is able to put more trust in his organism in this functioning, not because it is infallible, but because he can be fully open to the consequences of each of his actions and correct them if they prove to be less than satisfying.
He is more able to experience all of his feelings, and is less afraid of any of his feelings; he is his own sifter of evidence, and is more open to evidence from all sources; he is completely engaged in the process of being and becoming himself, and thus discovers that he is soundly and realistically social; he lives more completely in this moment, but learns that this is the soundest living for all time. He is becoming a more fully functioning organism, and because of the awareness of himself which flows freely in and through his experience, he is becoming a more fully functioning person.
On Becoming a Person
Note
These passages are from "On Becoming a Person", a collection of essays by Carl Rogers published in 1961.
The Good Life and the Fully Functioning Person (1953)
I have gradually come to one negative conclusion about the good life. It seems to me that the good life is not any fixed state. It is not, in my estimation, a state of virtue, or contentment, or nirvana, or happiness. It is not a condition in which the individual is adjusted or fulfilled or actualized. To use psychological terms, it is not a state of drive-reduction, or tension-reduction, or homeostasis.
The good life is a process, not a state of being.
It is a direction not a destination.
The direction which constitutes the good life is that which is selected by the total organism, when there is psychological freedom to move in any direction.
This organismically selected direction seems to have certain discernible qualities which appear to be the same in a wide variety of unique individuals.
The good life, from the point of view of my experience, is the process of movement in a direction which the human organism selects when it is inwardly free to move in any direction, and the general qualities of this selected direction appear to have a certain universality.
The characteristics of the process
1 - An increasing Openness to Experience
In the first place, the process seems to involve an increasing openness to experience. It is the polar opposite of defensiveness.
If a person could be fully open to his experience, every stimulus ? whether originating within the organism or in the environment ? would be freely relayed through the nervous system without being distorted by any defensive mechanism.
Thus, one aspect of this process which I am naming “the good life” appears to be a movement away from the pole of defensiveness toward the pole of openness to experience. The individual is becoming more able to listen to himself, to experience what is going on within himself. He is more open to his feelings of fear and discouragement and pain. He is also more open to his feelings of courage, and tenderness, and awe.
2 - Increasingly Existential Living
A second characteristic of the process which for me is the good life, is that it involves an increasingly tendency to live fully in each moment.
I believe it would be evident that for the person who was fully open to his new experience, completely without defensiveness, each moment would be new.
One way of expressing the fluidity which is present in such existential living is to say that the self and personality emerge from experience rather than experience being translated or twisted to fit pre-conceived self-structure. It means that one becomes a participant in and an observer of the ongoing process of organismic experience, rather than being in control of it.
It means a maximum of adaptability, a discovery of structure in experience, a flowing, changing organization of self and personality.
It involves discovering the structure of experience in the process of living the experience.
3 - An increasing Trust in His Organism
Still another characteristic of the person who is living the process of the good life appears to be an increasing trust in his organism as a means of arriving at the most satisfying behavior in each existential situation.
The person who is fully open to his experience would have access to all of the available data in the situation, on which to base his behavior; the social demands, his own complex and possibly conflicting needs, his memories of similar situations, his perception of the uniqueness of this situation, etc.. etc. The data would be very complex indeed. But he could permit his total organism, his consciousness participating, to consider each stimulus, need, and demand, its relative intensity and importance, and out of this complex weighing and balancing, discover that course of action which would come closest to satisfying all his needs in the situation.
The process of Functioning More Fully
I should like to draw together these three threads describing the process of the good life into a more coherent picture. It appears that the person who is psychologically free moves in the direction of becoming a more fully functioning person.
He is more able to live fully in and with each and all of his feelings and reactions. He makes increasing use of all his organic equipment to sense, as accurately as possible, the existential situation within and without. He makes use of all of the information his nervous system can thus supply, using it in awareness, but recognizing that his total organism may be, and often is, wiser than his awareness. He is more able to permit his total organism to function freely in all its complexity in selecting, from the multitude of possibilities, that behavior which in this moment of time will be most generally and genuinely satisfying. He is able to put more trust in his organism in this functioning, not because it is infallible, but because he can be fully open to the consequences of each of his actions and correct them if they prove to be less than satisfying.
He is more able to experience all of his feelings, and is less afraid of any of his feelings; he is his own sifter of evidence, and is more open to evidence from all sources; he is completely engaged in the process of being and becoming himself, and thus discovers that he is soundly and realistically social; he lives more completely in this moment, but learns that this is the soundest living for all time. He is becoming a more fully functioning organism, and because of the awareness of himself which flows freely in and through his experience, he is becoming a more fully functioning person.
Facing the heat of defensive behavior, 'stop, drop and roll'
The Business Journal of Milwaukee - by Joan Lloyd
Stop, drop and roll. You remember that safety phrase from childhood, when you were taught what to do if your clothes caught fire.
That phrase can also help you if you find yourself in a firestorm of defensiveness.
I was observing this recently during a team retreat, when some of the members of the group disagreed with a practice the leader had been using. While we all knew the leader had good intentions, the outcome was causing confusion and conflict.
The more they tried to point out the behavior that wasn't working, the more he tried to defend it.
Neither side was seeing the other's point of view.
Because I was the facilitator, it was easier for me to stay objective, analyze what was happening and figure out how to resolve it.
I used a technique I call "Stop, drop and roll." Like the safety tip, it enables both parties to react quickly and "safely" when defensiveness is causing things to heat up.
Here's how to use it with a person who is becoming defensive:
Stop:
As soon as you start feeling that telltale twist in your gut that tells you the other person isn't really hearing you and is focused on defending his or her own position, stop talking.
Stop pushing your point and stop thinking ahead to the next persuasive point you were going to counter with, as soon as he or she was finished talking.
Drop:
Drop your argument temporarily and start listening hard to what the other person is saying, so you can figure out what the person is really thinking or feeling.
The other person has stopped listening to you anyway, so you might as well tune in to find out what is causing the person to dig in his or her heels.
And you can't break this impasse until you figure out why the other person is feeling the need to defend him or herself.
Often, defensiveness is an emotional reaction to an outside threat to our self-esteem.
Because we don't want to admit that out loud, we defend ourselves with "rational" arguments and the "logic" behind our actions.
You need to drop down and look under the talk, to explore the feelings.
Once you drop your own need to push your point on the other person, you will start to figure out what is really causing the defensiveness.
Try out a few of your theories by posing them to the defensive person. "Are you feeling unappreciated?" "Do you think I don't trust you?" "Are you thinking that I don't think you're competent?"
Because you have dropped out of the confrontation momentarily, you will be able to probe underneath the surface behavior and see the underbelly — what is really causing the person to resist your idea and defend their position.
Roll:
You will need to roll with their response. By that I mean, however they respond to your questions, you will need to keep listening, paraphrasing, probing, until their defensiveness has drained away and they are in a position to hear you once again. Even mild-mannered people can become beastly when they are defensive. Like a lion, with you hanging on to their tail, they will thrash and rage and snap at you until you have hit upon the real reason for their defensiveness.
Often, the defensiveness is a result of being misinterpreted or misunderstood. Sometimes it is caused because we have inadvertently insulted someone or judged his or her work harshly.
Whether our perceptions are correct or we are dead wrong in our view can't be determined unless we hang on and roll with the emotions of the other person first, to get to the heart of the matter.
The next time you find yourself deadlocked with a defensive person, remember to stop, drop and roll.
Your relationships will be smoother and your reputation as an excellent communicator will grow. It's not everyone who knows how to put out a fire.
Joan Lloyd is a management consultant, trainer and professional speaker. Reach her at Joan Lloyd & Associates, 800-348-1944, info@joanlloyd.com or www.JoanLloyd.com.
The Business Journal of Milwaukee - by Joan Lloyd
Stop, drop and roll. You remember that safety phrase from childhood, when you were taught what to do if your clothes caught fire.
That phrase can also help you if you find yourself in a firestorm of defensiveness.
I was observing this recently during a team retreat, when some of the members of the group disagreed with a practice the leader had been using. While we all knew the leader had good intentions, the outcome was causing confusion and conflict.
The more they tried to point out the behavior that wasn't working, the more he tried to defend it.
Neither side was seeing the other's point of view.
Because I was the facilitator, it was easier for me to stay objective, analyze what was happening and figure out how to resolve it.
I used a technique I call "Stop, drop and roll." Like the safety tip, it enables both parties to react quickly and "safely" when defensiveness is causing things to heat up.
Here's how to use it with a person who is becoming defensive:
Stop:
As soon as you start feeling that telltale twist in your gut that tells you the other person isn't really hearing you and is focused on defending his or her own position, stop talking.
Stop pushing your point and stop thinking ahead to the next persuasive point you were going to counter with, as soon as he or she was finished talking.
Drop:
Drop your argument temporarily and start listening hard to what the other person is saying, so you can figure out what the person is really thinking or feeling.
The other person has stopped listening to you anyway, so you might as well tune in to find out what is causing the person to dig in his or her heels.
And you can't break this impasse until you figure out why the other person is feeling the need to defend him or herself.
Often, defensiveness is an emotional reaction to an outside threat to our self-esteem.
Because we don't want to admit that out loud, we defend ourselves with "rational" arguments and the "logic" behind our actions.
You need to drop down and look under the talk, to explore the feelings.
Once you drop your own need to push your point on the other person, you will start to figure out what is really causing the defensiveness.
Try out a few of your theories by posing them to the defensive person. "Are you feeling unappreciated?" "Do you think I don't trust you?" "Are you thinking that I don't think you're competent?"
Because you have dropped out of the confrontation momentarily, you will be able to probe underneath the surface behavior and see the underbelly — what is really causing the person to resist your idea and defend their position.
Roll:
You will need to roll with their response. By that I mean, however they respond to your questions, you will need to keep listening, paraphrasing, probing, until their defensiveness has drained away and they are in a position to hear you once again. Even mild-mannered people can become beastly when they are defensive. Like a lion, with you hanging on to their tail, they will thrash and rage and snap at you until you have hit upon the real reason for their defensiveness.
Often, the defensiveness is a result of being misinterpreted or misunderstood. Sometimes it is caused because we have inadvertently insulted someone or judged his or her work harshly.
Whether our perceptions are correct or we are dead wrong in our view can't be determined unless we hang on and roll with the emotions of the other person first, to get to the heart of the matter.
The next time you find yourself deadlocked with a defensive person, remember to stop, drop and roll.
Your relationships will be smoother and your reputation as an excellent communicator will grow. It's not everyone who knows how to put out a fire.
Joan Lloyd is a management consultant, trainer and professional speaker. Reach her at Joan Lloyd & Associates, 800-348-1944, info@joanlloyd.com or www.JoanLloyd.com.
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
The New York Times
May 6, 2008
Mind
I’m Not Lying, I’m Telling a Future Truth. Really.
By BENEDICT CAREY
Some tales are so tall that they trip over their own improbable feats, narrative cracks and melodrama. That one-on-one playground victory over Kobe Bryant back in the day; the 34 hours in labor without painkillers; the former girlfriend or boyfriend who spoke eight languages and was a secret agent besides.
Yes, uh-huh, really. Is it closing time yet?
Yet in milder doses, self-serving exaggeration can be nearly impossible to detect, experts say, and there are several explanations.
A series of recent studies, focusing on students who inflate their grade-point average, suggests that such exaggeration is very different psychologically from other forms of truth twisting. Touching up scenes or past performances induces none of the anxiety that lying or keeping secrets does, these studies find; and embroiderers often work to live up to the enhanced self-images they project. The findings imply that some kinds of deception are aimed more at the deceiver than at the audience, and they may help in distinguishing braggarts and posers from those who are expressing personal aspirations, however clumsily.
“It’s important to emphasize that the motives driving academic exaggeration seem to be personal and ‘intrapsychic’ rather than public or interpersonal,” said Richard H. Gramzow, a psychologist at the University of Southampton in England who has led much of the research. “Basically, exaggeration here reflects positive goals for the future, and we have found that those goals tend to be realized.”
Psychologists have studied deception from all sides and have found that it usually puts a psychological or physical strain on the person doing the dissembling. People with guilty knowledge — of a detail from a crime scene, for example — tend to show signs of stress, as measured by heart and skin sensors, under pointed questioning.
Trying to hold onto an inflammatory secret is mentally exhausting, studies have found, and the act of suppressing the information can cause thoughts of it to flood the consciousness. When telling outright lies, people tend to look and sound tenser than usual.
“Specifically, people are especially more tense when lying, compared to telling the truth, when they are highly motivated to get away with their lies and when they are lying about a transgression,” said Bella DePaulo, a visiting professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
But a study published in February in the journal Emotion found that exactly the opposite was true for students who exaggerated their grades. The researchers had 62 Northeastern University students fill out a computerized form asking, among other things, for cumulative grade point average. The students were then interviewed while hooked up to an array of sensitive electrodes measuring nervous system activation. The scripted interview covered academic history, goals and grades.
The researchers then pulled the students’ records, with permission, and found that almost half had exaggerated their average by as much as six-tenths of a point. Yet the electrode readings showed that oddly enough, the exaggerators became significantly more relaxed while discussing their grades.
“It was a robust effect, the sort of readings you see when people are engaged in a positive social encounter, or when they’re meditating,” said Wendy Berry Mendes, an associate professor of psychology at Harvard and senior author of the study. Dr. Gramzow and Greg Willard, then at Northeastern and now at Harvard, were co-authors.
The researchers videotaped the interviews, and independent observers rated how students looked and behaved. “The ones who exaggerated the most appeared the most calm and confident” on the ratings, Dr. Mendes said.
The grade inflation was less an attempt to deceive, the authors concluded, than a reflection of healthy overconfidence and a statement of aspirations. “It’s basically an exercise in projecting the self toward one’s goals,” Dr. Gramzow said.
In earlier studies, Dr. Gramzow and Dr. Willard found that students who bumped up their averages in interviews subsequently improved their grades — often by the very amount they had exaggerated.
The findings provide another lens through which to view claims, from Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s story of sniper fire in Bosnia to exaggerations of income, charitable contributions and SAT scores. As much as these are embroideries, they are also expressions of yearning, and for reachable goals.
In that sense, fibs can reflect something close to the opposite of the frustration, insecurity and secretiveness that often fuel big lies. That may be why they can come so easily, add up so fast and for some people — especially around closing time — become indistinguishable from the truth.
The Well column will return May 20.
May 6, 2008
Mind
I’m Not Lying, I’m Telling a Future Truth. Really.
By BENEDICT CAREY
Some tales are so tall that they trip over their own improbable feats, narrative cracks and melodrama. That one-on-one playground victory over Kobe Bryant back in the day; the 34 hours in labor without painkillers; the former girlfriend or boyfriend who spoke eight languages and was a secret agent besides.
Yes, uh-huh, really. Is it closing time yet?
Yet in milder doses, self-serving exaggeration can be nearly impossible to detect, experts say, and there are several explanations.
A series of recent studies, focusing on students who inflate their grade-point average, suggests that such exaggeration is very different psychologically from other forms of truth twisting. Touching up scenes or past performances induces none of the anxiety that lying or keeping secrets does, these studies find; and embroiderers often work to live up to the enhanced self-images they project. The findings imply that some kinds of deception are aimed more at the deceiver than at the audience, and they may help in distinguishing braggarts and posers from those who are expressing personal aspirations, however clumsily.
“It’s important to emphasize that the motives driving academic exaggeration seem to be personal and ‘intrapsychic’ rather than public or interpersonal,” said Richard H. Gramzow, a psychologist at the University of Southampton in England who has led much of the research. “Basically, exaggeration here reflects positive goals for the future, and we have found that those goals tend to be realized.”
Psychologists have studied deception from all sides and have found that it usually puts a psychological or physical strain on the person doing the dissembling. People with guilty knowledge — of a detail from a crime scene, for example — tend to show signs of stress, as measured by heart and skin sensors, under pointed questioning.
Trying to hold onto an inflammatory secret is mentally exhausting, studies have found, and the act of suppressing the information can cause thoughts of it to flood the consciousness. When telling outright lies, people tend to look and sound tenser than usual.
“Specifically, people are especially more tense when lying, compared to telling the truth, when they are highly motivated to get away with their lies and when they are lying about a transgression,” said Bella DePaulo, a visiting professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
But a study published in February in the journal Emotion found that exactly the opposite was true for students who exaggerated their grades. The researchers had 62 Northeastern University students fill out a computerized form asking, among other things, for cumulative grade point average. The students were then interviewed while hooked up to an array of sensitive electrodes measuring nervous system activation. The scripted interview covered academic history, goals and grades.
The researchers then pulled the students’ records, with permission, and found that almost half had exaggerated their average by as much as six-tenths of a point. Yet the electrode readings showed that oddly enough, the exaggerators became significantly more relaxed while discussing their grades.
“It was a robust effect, the sort of readings you see when people are engaged in a positive social encounter, or when they’re meditating,” said Wendy Berry Mendes, an associate professor of psychology at Harvard and senior author of the study. Dr. Gramzow and Greg Willard, then at Northeastern and now at Harvard, were co-authors.
The researchers videotaped the interviews, and independent observers rated how students looked and behaved. “The ones who exaggerated the most appeared the most calm and confident” on the ratings, Dr. Mendes said.
The grade inflation was less an attempt to deceive, the authors concluded, than a reflection of healthy overconfidence and a statement of aspirations. “It’s basically an exercise in projecting the self toward one’s goals,” Dr. Gramzow said.
In earlier studies, Dr. Gramzow and Dr. Willard found that students who bumped up their averages in interviews subsequently improved their grades — often by the very amount they had exaggerated.
The findings provide another lens through which to view claims, from Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s story of sniper fire in Bosnia to exaggerations of income, charitable contributions and SAT scores. As much as these are embroideries, they are also expressions of yearning, and for reachable goals.
In that sense, fibs can reflect something close to the opposite of the frustration, insecurity and secretiveness that often fuel big lies. That may be why they can come so easily, add up so fast and for some people — especially around closing time — become indistinguishable from the truth.
The Well column will return May 20.
The New York Times
May 4, 2008
Unboxed
Can You Become a Creature of New Habits?
By JANET RAE-DUPREE
HABITS are a funny thing. We reach for them mindlessly, setting our brains on auto-pilot and relaxing into the unconscious comfort of familiar routine. “Not choice, but habit rules the unreflecting herd,” William Wordsworth said in the 19th century. In the ever-changing 21st century, even the word “habit” carries a negative connotation.
So it seems antithetical to talk about habits in the same context as creativity and innovation. But brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks.
Rather than dismissing ourselves as unchangeable creatures of habit, we can instead direct our own change by consciously developing new habits. In fact, the more new things we try — the more we step outside our comfort zone — the more inherently creative we become, both in the workplace and in our personal lives.
But don’t bother trying to kill off old habits; once those ruts of procedure are worn into the hippocampus, they’re there to stay. Instead, the new habits we deliberately ingrain into ourselves create parallel pathways that can bypass those old roads.
“The first thing needed for innovation is a fascination with wonder,” says Dawna Markova, author of “The Open Mind” and an executive change consultant for Professional Thinking Partners. “But we are taught instead to ‘decide,’ just as our president calls himself ‘the Decider.’ ” She adds, however, that “to decide is to kill off all possibilities but one. A good innovational thinker is always exploring the many other possibilities.”
All of us work through problems in ways of which we’re unaware, she says. Researchers in the late 1960s discovered that humans are born with the capacity to approach challenges in four primary ways: analytically, procedurally, relationally (or collaboratively) and innovatively. At puberty, however, the brain shuts down half of that capacity, preserving only those modes of thought that have seemed most valuable during the first decade or so of life.
The current emphasis on standardized testing highlights analysis and procedure, meaning that few of us inherently use our innovative and collaborative modes of thought. “This breaks the major rule in the American belief system — that anyone can do anything,” explains M. J. Ryan, author of the 2006 book “This Year I Will...” and Ms. Markova’s business partner. “That’s a lie that we have perpetuated, and it fosters mediocrity. Knowing what you’re good at and doing even more of it creates excellence.”
This is where developing new habits comes in. If you’re an analytical or procedural thinker, you learn in different ways than someone who is inherently innovative or collaborative. Figure out what has worked for you when you’ve learned in the past, and you can draw your own map for developing additional skills and behaviors for the future.
“I apprentice myself to someone when I want to learn something new or develop a new habit,” Ms. Ryan says. “Other people read a book about it or take a course. If you have a pathway to learning, use it because that’s going to be easier than creating an entirely new pathway in your brain.”
Ms. Ryan and Ms. Markova have found what they call three zones of existence: comfort, stretch and stress. Comfort is the realm of existing habit. Stress occurs when a challenge is so far beyond current experience as to be overwhelming. It’s that stretch zone in the middle — activities that feel a bit awkward and unfamiliar — where true change occurs.
“Getting into the stretch zone is good for you,” Ms. Ryan says in “This Year I Will... .” “It helps keep your brain healthy. It turns out that unless we continue to learn new things, which challenges our brains to create new pathways, they literally begin to atrophy, which may result in dementia, Alzheimer’s and other brain diseases. Continuously stretching ourselves will even help us lose weight, according to one study. Researchers who asked folks to do something different every day — listen to a new radio station, for instance — found that they lost and kept off weight. No one is sure why, but scientists speculate that getting out of routines makes us more aware in general.”
She recommends practicing a Japanese technique called kaizen, which calls for tiny, continuous improvements.
“Whenever we initiate change, even a positive one, we activate fear in our emotional brain,” Ms. Ryan notes in her book. “If the fear is big enough, the fight-or-flight response will go off and we’ll run from what we’re trying to do. The small steps in kaizen don’t set off fight or flight, but rather keep us in the thinking brain, where we have access to our creativity and playfulness.”
Simultaneously, take a look at how colleagues approach challenges, Ms. Markova suggests. We tend to believe that those who think the way we do are smarter than those who don’t. That can be fatal in business, particularly for executives who surround themselves with like-thinkers. If seniority and promotion are based on similarity to those at the top, chances are strong that the company lacks intellectual diversity.
“Try lacing your hands together,” Ms. Markova says. “You habitually do it one way. Now try doing it with the other thumb on top. Feels awkward, doesn’t it? That’s the valuable moment we call confusion, when we fuse the old with the new.”
AFTER the churn of confusion, she says, the brain begins organizing the new input, ultimately creating new synaptic connections if the process is repeated enough.
But if, during creation of that new habit, the “Great Decider” steps in to protest against taking the unfamiliar path, “you get convergence and we keep doing the same thing over and over again,” she says.
“You cannot have innovation,” she adds, “unless you are willing and able to move through the unknown and go from curiosity to wonder.”
Janet Rae-Dupree writes about science and emerging technology in Silicon Valley.
May 4, 2008
Unboxed
Can You Become a Creature of New Habits?
By JANET RAE-DUPREE
HABITS are a funny thing. We reach for them mindlessly, setting our brains on auto-pilot and relaxing into the unconscious comfort of familiar routine. “Not choice, but habit rules the unreflecting herd,” William Wordsworth said in the 19th century. In the ever-changing 21st century, even the word “habit” carries a negative connotation.
So it seems antithetical to talk about habits in the same context as creativity and innovation. But brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks.
Rather than dismissing ourselves as unchangeable creatures of habit, we can instead direct our own change by consciously developing new habits. In fact, the more new things we try — the more we step outside our comfort zone — the more inherently creative we become, both in the workplace and in our personal lives.
But don’t bother trying to kill off old habits; once those ruts of procedure are worn into the hippocampus, they’re there to stay. Instead, the new habits we deliberately ingrain into ourselves create parallel pathways that can bypass those old roads.
“The first thing needed for innovation is a fascination with wonder,” says Dawna Markova, author of “The Open Mind” and an executive change consultant for Professional Thinking Partners. “But we are taught instead to ‘decide,’ just as our president calls himself ‘the Decider.’ ” She adds, however, that “to decide is to kill off all possibilities but one. A good innovational thinker is always exploring the many other possibilities.”
All of us work through problems in ways of which we’re unaware, she says. Researchers in the late 1960s discovered that humans are born with the capacity to approach challenges in four primary ways: analytically, procedurally, relationally (or collaboratively) and innovatively. At puberty, however, the brain shuts down half of that capacity, preserving only those modes of thought that have seemed most valuable during the first decade or so of life.
The current emphasis on standardized testing highlights analysis and procedure, meaning that few of us inherently use our innovative and collaborative modes of thought. “This breaks the major rule in the American belief system — that anyone can do anything,” explains M. J. Ryan, author of the 2006 book “This Year I Will...” and Ms. Markova’s business partner. “That’s a lie that we have perpetuated, and it fosters mediocrity. Knowing what you’re good at and doing even more of it creates excellence.”
This is where developing new habits comes in. If you’re an analytical or procedural thinker, you learn in different ways than someone who is inherently innovative or collaborative. Figure out what has worked for you when you’ve learned in the past, and you can draw your own map for developing additional skills and behaviors for the future.
“I apprentice myself to someone when I want to learn something new or develop a new habit,” Ms. Ryan says. “Other people read a book about it or take a course. If you have a pathway to learning, use it because that’s going to be easier than creating an entirely new pathway in your brain.”
Ms. Ryan and Ms. Markova have found what they call three zones of existence: comfort, stretch and stress. Comfort is the realm of existing habit. Stress occurs when a challenge is so far beyond current experience as to be overwhelming. It’s that stretch zone in the middle — activities that feel a bit awkward and unfamiliar — where true change occurs.
“Getting into the stretch zone is good for you,” Ms. Ryan says in “This Year I Will... .” “It helps keep your brain healthy. It turns out that unless we continue to learn new things, which challenges our brains to create new pathways, they literally begin to atrophy, which may result in dementia, Alzheimer’s and other brain diseases. Continuously stretching ourselves will even help us lose weight, according to one study. Researchers who asked folks to do something different every day — listen to a new radio station, for instance — found that they lost and kept off weight. No one is sure why, but scientists speculate that getting out of routines makes us more aware in general.”
She recommends practicing a Japanese technique called kaizen, which calls for tiny, continuous improvements.
“Whenever we initiate change, even a positive one, we activate fear in our emotional brain,” Ms. Ryan notes in her book. “If the fear is big enough, the fight-or-flight response will go off and we’ll run from what we’re trying to do. The small steps in kaizen don’t set off fight or flight, but rather keep us in the thinking brain, where we have access to our creativity and playfulness.”
Simultaneously, take a look at how colleagues approach challenges, Ms. Markova suggests. We tend to believe that those who think the way we do are smarter than those who don’t. That can be fatal in business, particularly for executives who surround themselves with like-thinkers. If seniority and promotion are based on similarity to those at the top, chances are strong that the company lacks intellectual diversity.
“Try lacing your hands together,” Ms. Markova says. “You habitually do it one way. Now try doing it with the other thumb on top. Feels awkward, doesn’t it? That’s the valuable moment we call confusion, when we fuse the old with the new.”
AFTER the churn of confusion, she says, the brain begins organizing the new input, ultimately creating new synaptic connections if the process is repeated enough.
But if, during creation of that new habit, the “Great Decider” steps in to protest against taking the unfamiliar path, “you get convergence and we keep doing the same thing over and over again,” she says.
“You cannot have innovation,” she adds, “unless you are willing and able to move through the unknown and go from curiosity to wonder.”
Janet Rae-Dupree writes about science and emerging technology in Silicon Valley.
