Happiness is enjoying sports together.
Here is what I am reading today:
“Feeling sociable or reckless? You might have toxoplasmosis, an infection caused by the microscopic parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which the CDC estimates has infected about 22.5 percent of Americans older than 12 years old. Researchers tested participants for T. gondii infection and had them complete a personality questionnaire. They found that both men and women infected with T. gondii were more extroverted and less conscientious than the infection-free participants. These changes are thought to result from the parasite’s influence on brain chemicals, the scientists write in the May/June issue of the European Journal of Personality.”
“Around 10 years ago, Malcolm MacLeod got interested in forgetting.
For most people, the tendency to forget is something we spend our time cursing. Where are my keys? What am I looking for in the refrigerator again? What is that woman’s name?”
“…Thomas Ågren, a doctoral candidate at the Department of Psychology under the supervision of Professors Mats Fredrikson and Tomas Furmark, has shown, that it is possible to erase newly formed emotional memories from the human brain. When a person learns something, a lasting long-term memory is created with the aid of a process of consolidation, which is based on the formation of proteins. When we remember something, the memory becomes unstable for a while and is then restabilized by another consolidation process.”
“…”Symptoms such as pelvic pain and abdominal bloating may be a sign of ovarian cancer but they also can be caused by other conditions. What’s important is to determine whether they are current, of recent onset and occur frequently,” said lead author M. Robyn Andersen, Ph.D., a member of the Hutchinson Center’s Public Health Sciences Division. Previous research by Andersen and colleagues has found that about 60 percent of women with early-stage ovarian cancer and 80 percent of women with advanced disease report symptoms that follow this distinctive pattern at the time of diagnosis. “
“In an early study in The FASEB Journal, nutrition scientists and obstetricians at Cornell University and the University of Rochester Medical Center found that higher-than-normal amounts of choline in the diet during pregnancy changed epigenetic markers — modifications on our DNA that tell our genes to switch on or off, to go gangbusters or keep a low profile — in the fetus. While epigenetic markers don’t change our genes, they make a permanent imprint by dictating their fate: If a gene is not expressed — turned on — it’s as if it didn’t exist.”
“A published study by researchers from the West Virginia University School of Public Health and Injury Control Research Center found that suicide has now passed motor vehicle traffic crashes as the leading cause of injury deaths in the United States. Additionally, the disease rate has been declining while the injury rate has been rising.”
“The paper, published in Human Psychopharmacology: Clinical and Experimental, is the first meta-analytic review examining the effects of Gingko biloba on healthy people across all age groups. The researchers led by Professor Keith Laws found zero impact on the cognitive functions whatever the age of the people, the dose taken or the length of time of taking Gingko biloba supplements.”
“Writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, WSU geneticist Patricia Hunt and colleagues at WSU and the University of California, Davis, report seeing reproductive abnormalities in rhesus monkeys with BPA levels similar to those of humans. By using an animal with the most human-like reproductive system, the research bolsters earlier work by Hunt and others documenting widespread reproductive effects in rodents.”
15 Comments
Lauren · September 26, 2012 at 10:19 am
I found the article about fear memories especially intriguing because I personally struggle with PTSD. After reading this article, I wish that someone had interrupted the reconsolidation process of my memories that now trouble me every day. If this technique truly works, I think that it should be practiced in fear-inducing or potentially traumatic situations. If I could go back in time, and it was an option, I would have preferred this treatment in the ambulance instead of the morphine that I received. The physical pain I felt does not compare to the emotional distress that I have to live with now, which ironically has caused physical ailments as well.
mminor · September 28, 2012 at 9:32 am
As with most anything that is new there is a lot of potential good that could be done if it is found that we can forget memories. I think that those with PTSD and those that have had other traumatic events in their life could benefit from treatment that could include therapy where painful memories were forgotten. There also could be potential negative results of forgetting memories. In the textbook it indicates that there may be reason to believe that the cerebellum is responsible for associating past cause and effect experiences with future behavior and consequences; if we purposefully forget memories will we be capable of changing the impact of our cerebellum?
dford · September 30, 2012 at 4:50 pm
I found the article on Ginko biloba very interesting. As a Nutrition undergrad, we’re constantly asked about certain supplements and their efficacy in warding off certain diseased, helping with memory, etc. Sometimes the evidence is definitive, but mostly it’s inconclusive. It’s nice to see that more reviews are being done so dieticians and heath professionals in general can recommend supplements based on evidence rather than opinion or hearsay.
Maria Kourjanskaia · September 30, 2012 at 8:25 pm
The article “My Parasite Made Me Do It” was definitely insightful. It’s interesting to think of personality as being influenced by a parasite rather than a person’s own mind. The article mentioned people above the age of 12 as affected, and I was not sure whether that was just the people studied or whether that age is when people often become infected. If people do become infected around 12, I feel as if it would be difficult to understand the change of personality because the person would be going through puberty at this time and would have a natural change in hormones. It would be interesting to know whether a change in a person’s personality is attributed to puberty or the parasite.
Maria Kourjanskaia · September 30, 2012 at 8:40 pm
The article “Learning to Forget” talked about how it is possible to condition yourself to forget things just as you can condition yourself to remember them. This article said that people did not forget facts but emotions associated with a certain memory. I believe that when people have either good or bad memories, they think about them and depending on the memory reinforce either a good or bad emotion associated with the memory. For instance the more I think about something embarrassing that happened last week the more embarrassing it seems to me. Using techniques from this article, if I start thinking about a brick wall for instance every time I remember my embarrassing moment this will eventually render my memory neutral.
tpoulin · October 2, 2012 at 1:49 pm
The article “Suicide Leading Cause of Injury Mortality in U.S.” is misleading when it explains that the number of suicidal related deaths have passed the number deaths from motor vehicle accidents. In the last decade, injury deaths from motor vehicle crashes have decreased significantly. However, there is still a significant amount of accidents that result in death. With the knowledge that there are more suicidal deaths than deaths from car crashes, there needs to be more effort to prevent suicidal thoughts in young people. The author of this article made the point that there have been many measures taken to ensure the safety of people operating motor vehicles. Those measures were successful, but now the same effort needs to be geared toward injury prevention.
ndjohnson · October 4, 2012 at 12:58 pm
In reading “what you eat changes who you are what you become?”, I thought it was interesting that such a simple supplement such as cholin can have such a positive impact on the body, especially in pregnant women. The fact that cholin is present in so many everyday foods, such as eggs, beans, and animal products, means that the incorporation of these foods into a person’s diet is feasible, affordable, and an easy option. It becomes a reliable way for mothers to participate in birthing healthy babies. Stress is an issue many people struggle with controlling, and this genetic marker can reduce stress in the fetus, a major plus for today’s population.
ndjohnson · October 4, 2012 at 1:05 pm
In reading “trends in suicide,” it is horrible to realize that taking one’s own life is becoming, in fact, a trend. The current report for suicide rates claims that there has been a dramatic increase in suicides in 2009 than compared to in 2000. In 2009, a girl from my high school committed high school from an overdose in pain medication. The article reported that the availability of painkillers has a high correlation with the rise in suicides. The harsh reality is that popping a bottle of pills seems less scary than pulling a trigger, and it does seem to happen in high occurrence.
Maria Kourjanskaia · October 5, 2012 at 12:12 pm
The article about cancer warning signs was promising to read. It’s good to know that a high recovery rate can occur from something as scary as ovarian cancer. Although it is hopeful that this cancer can potentially be caught early with a few simple questions, it is sad to know that some women are not aware of their disease.
Maria Kourjanskaia · October 5, 2012 at 12:19 pm
It is devastating to hear that the suicide rate increased in the recent years. Car companies are working on increasing the safety features in their vehicles, medicine innovation continues to grow, and overall it would seem as if death rates should decrease. For this reason it is sad to know that so much self inflicted harm has occurred recently despite all the work put into decreasing mortality rates.
crfan_21 · October 5, 2012 at 7:36 pm
The article about the parasite Toxoplasma gondii really interested me. I took developmental psychology over the summer and read a little bit about how pregnant women were advised not to clean the litter box because of this parasite, but I hardly knew anything about it, so I learned a lot from this article. Seeing how something as small as a parasite can effect our brains and personalities is crazy for me to think about. I believe that because the changes in personality that come as a result of the infection could be perceived as just part of how the infected person acts, it would be very hard to diagnose.
matthahn · October 6, 2012 at 1:16 pm
In reading “Learning to Forget,” I found that researchers could cause someone not to forget the memory that they focused (or unfocused) on, but the emotions attached to the memory. There was a woman who recalled an incident in which she was mocked for her fashion and she recalled how the incident caused her to feel self-conscious for the first time about how she looked. After using the psychologists’ forgetting techniques, it was found that she could forget how she felt about it, but not the incident itself.
This almost sounds like she was numbing herself from the incident rather than forgetting, but in practical application, as in for someone experiencing PTSD, this could potentially be very effective in helping them cope with whatever hardship they had gone through. Only time will tell if the study will hold any practical relevancy.
Sarah Dougherty · October 13, 2012 at 8:19 pm
BPA (Bisphenol) seems to be everywhere. People drink from plastic bottles all day every day, refilling them as needed. People open aluminum cans all day without knowing that they are lined with BPA and surprisingly cash register receipts also have this toxic substance. In the article “BPA is Harmful,” it is shocking to discover the consequences of BPA, especially to women. A pregnant woman can pass her BPA on to her female child, affecting the child’s eggs for her future births. Three generations affected. Consequences include miscarriages, birth defects and cancer. My family has been aware of some of these consequences and we do not buy plastic bottles, opt for organic foods instead of canned goods and do not take cash register receipts (tell the grocer to throw them away). Still, I was surprised to learn the consequences which have probably already affected me and any female child I might have. I think mom’s need to get together to protest BPA in all products.
Sarah Dougherty · October 13, 2012 at 8:49 pm
I found the article on erasing fear by the doctoral candidate Thomas Agren fascinating and it has left me with a lot of questions. According to his research, trauma memories are formed after a stimulus. They become long term memories through a consolidation of remembering the event, whereupon the fear reaction of the memory is stored in the amygdala and continued to be remembered with fear. By interrupting the consolidation process Agren discovered that the fear response could be negated. This would be helpful to victims of phobias and panic attacks, but I wonder about PTSD. If a crime has been perpetrated on a person, ending the fear response would affect testimonies in many court cases. It is almost scary to think that memory responses can be erased, but debilitating ones can become insurmountable to a person. I think I would try different therapies before trying to erase a fear memory because our memories are our life experience. A person would need to know all the ramifications of erasing their emotional reactions to memories. I can see that neutralizing phobias such as fear of a frightening barking dog (that can be generalized to all dogs) to be very beneficial.
BenSimon · October 20, 2012 at 7:52 pm
The article on forgetting traumatic memories was extremely interesting for me to read, as I have lots of painful memories from childhood to my first couple years at Cal Poly (but was never diagnosed with PTSD, and doubt I have it anyway). I also have an extremely powerful memory, so I tend not to forget things easily, and am curious if the techniques explained in this article would work on me in order to forget particular memories.
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