the evolving mind

Whenever a non-experimental study (one that doesn’t manipulate a variable to test its influence on another) reveals a link between variables, we’ve got to be critical. Not to reject it, just to question.

Sometimes the authors of the study themselves do the job for us. As in the case of this study: Video Games Linked To Poor Relationships With Friends, Family.

Yes, the researchers discovered a link -

A new study connects young adults’ use of video games to poorer relationships with friends and family.

But the lead author does remind us of something important.

“It may be that young adults remove themselves from important social settings to play video games, or that people who already struggle with relationships are trying to find other ways to spend their time,” Walker said. “My guess is that it’s some of both and becomes circular.”

In the same study, another statistical link was discovered. Let’s think critically about it.

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Technorati Links: critical thinking, mental health

The leaves on our banana “trees” (not really trees–they failed the botonists’ test and must ride the plant bus) got burned last week. Not by heat but by frost.

How do I explain it? No, it wasn’t the work of anti-phallic-fruit nano-demons. As I thought, cold messing with water molecules is the culprit.

Frost damage in plants results from the liquid inside individual cells freezing and forming ice crystals. The crystals then rupture the tough cell walls. When the cell walls open the fluid inside will not be contained so when the ice melts the fluids simply drain out causing the classic ‘cooked spinach’, wilted look. [source]

Technorati Links: biology

How’s this for a headline: Supermassive Black Holes Not Guilty Of Shutting Down Star Formation.

Personally, I’ve always considered black holes to be innocent.

Guilt is a social emotion that develops in human children sometime after they are up and walking but before parents hand them the keys to the car. Generally.

With that in mind, could one infer that supermassive black holes -

1. Are social beings?

2. Should never be given the keys to the car? (You would never get them back — that much is certain.)

Technorati Links: humor, science

This microscope pic is similar to yesterday’s. But different. Can you guess what made the mark? Look closely and you might find a clue. Answer below the fold.

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Technorati Links: microscope, puzzle

I love this finding – The Un-favorite Child: Adults Who Perceived Parents As Being Lenient With Siblings Still Happy Later In Life

Yes, null findings are news, yet they far too infrequently get reported. Worded another way, results that don’t rise to the level of statistical significance are significant in another way.

As for this psychological study -

Researchers found that between siblings in the same family, the effects of recalled negative early experiences such as conflict with parents and levels of discipline seem to have little influence over psychological well-being in mid-life.

To look for a connection between two variables and find one is noteworthy. As too is looking and not finding. If there isn’t a Journal of Null Results out there, someone ought to start one.

Technorati Links: mental health, philosophy, research

I like making excursions into wild nature. The outings seem to transport me out of daily concerns and all that incessant self-talk. My mind quiets when I take the time to just look, listen, feel and smell.

The wild is my cathedral (speaking poetically here). When in it I can perceive a bigger picture. One in which I am not the center of a universe, but just one creature moving around the face of planet Earth.

Technorati Links: boating, philosophy

Could atheists like myself be accused of not walking to the beat of an unseen deity? Try as I might, I just can’t hear the music. Are believers hearing things?

If, like me, you doubt the existence of a great being in the heavens, or under the couch, or beyond the rainbow, etc., you might be interested in checking out the Carnival of the Godless #109.

Just because it is Sunday, “a day of rest,” doesn’t mean you must rest your brain. Do you what you want. It’s your life.

Technorati Links: blog carnival

Remember that old fund raising song (for famine relief in Africa) by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, sung by a room full of celebrities “We Are the World”? It seems that schizophrenics might have difficulty singing that tune. More specifically, they may have a brain that makes normal social cognition difficult via “an exaggerated focus on self.”

Specifically, researchers

found that schizophrenia also involves an excess of connectivity between the so-called default brain regions, which are involved in self-reflection and become active when we are thinking about nothing in particular, or thinking about ourselves.

Twin studies have suggested that schizophrenia has a heritability of roughly 50%. Furthermore,

first-degree relatives of patients (who share half their genes) are 10 times more likely to develop the disease than the general population. The identities of these genes and how they affect the brain are largely unknown.

This is the part that most interested me -

“We think this may reflect an inability of people with schizophrenia to direct mental resources away from internal thoughts and feelings and toward the external world in order to perform difficult tasks,” Whitfield-Gabrieli explained.

The hyperactive default system could also help to explain hallucinations and paranoia by making neutral external stimuli seem inappropriately self-relevant.

Another day, another study finding, another potential step towards better understanding human psychology.

Technorati Links: consciousness, mental illness

Would your world come crashing down without it? Identity below the fold.

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Technorati Links: microscope, puzzle

To the delight of Star Trek fans, physicists have recently advanced the high-science of teleportation. They teleported not physical matter but information over a full 1-meter’s worth of a whopping chasm of space. Which may not seem whopping to you or me or any other incredibly massive creature. Well, incredibly massive when using “measuring sticks” more appropriate for the atomic realm.

The bad news is that less than an atom’s worth of information was teleported. Not even the dot of an “i” in a telephone book or a fragment of a human eyelash. Don’t expect Jet Blue Airlines to start offering teleportation to the Bahamas anytime soon. They’d probably lose your luggage anyway.

Here’s what the researchers succeeded in doing -

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Technorati Links: research