What Do You Worry About?

In the Time magazine cover story, "Why We Worry About the Wrong Things", author Jeffrey Kluger writes, " We pride ourselves on being the only species that understands the concept of risk, yet we have a confounding habit of worrying about mere possibilities while ignoring probabilities, building barricades against perceived dangers while leaving ourselves exposed to real ones. Six Muslims traveling from a religious conference were thrown off a plane last week in Minneapolis, Minn., even as unscreened cargo continues to stream into ports on both coasts. Shoppers still look askance at a bag of spinach for fear of E. coli bacteria while filling their carts with fat-sodden French fries and salt-crusted nachos. We put filters on faucets, install air ionizers in our homes and lather ourselves with antibacterial soap. "We used to measure contaminants down to the parts per million," says Dan McGinn, a former Capitol Hill staff member and now a private risk consultant. "Now it's parts per billion."

At the same time, 20% of all adults still smoke; nearly 20% of drivers and more than 30% of backseat passengers don't use seat belts; two-thirds of us are overweight or obese. We dash across the street against the light and build our homes in hurricane-prone areas--and when they're demolished by a storm, we rebuild in the same spot. Sensible calculation of real-world risks is a multidimensional math problem that sometimes seems entirely beyond us. And while it may be true that it's something we'll never do exceptionally well, it's almost certainly something we can learn to do better."

Watch Stephen Colbert's spoof on our tendency toward irrational fears in his report on the "Summer of the coconut" on the Daily show

What are some of the reasons, according to Kluger, that we "worry about possibilities while ignoring probabilities"? Do you find yourself falling victim to these errors of thinking and reasoning?  Give examples from your own experience.

Extreme Memory

"You have to begin to lose your memory, of only in bits and  pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives, life without memory is no life at all...our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action, without it, we are nothing..."

____Luis Bunel

What would life be like if you couldn't remember your past or imagine your future?  Clive Wearing is one of the most famous case studies in the field of memory.  He suffered an illness as an adult that destroyed  parts of his brain necessary for processing and storing memories.  

On the opposite end of the spectrum, can you imagine what your life would be like if you could never forget anything that you experienced?  Jill Price can tell you. 

Reflect on the opening quote, and discuss how the two extremes of memory discussed here give insight into how our memories are integral to our sense of self.  Be sure to address both the problems of no memory, and too much memory.

Visual illusions

Here is an interesting visual illusion. Hold your head steady and fix your eyes on the dot in the center of the picture. The colored dots will seem to disappear in a few seconds. The effect is due to retinal fatigue which occurs when the afterimage of an object cancels the stimulus of the object on the retina. The effect is most pronounced when the objects do not have well-defined edges that are detectable by small eye movements. See more interesting visual illusions here: Scientific psychic

Intrinsic v. Extrinsic Motivation

Please read the interview with Alfie Kohn titled Punished by Rewards in additon to watching these videos. Comment about how you feel about grades, school and learning. When was the last time you felt intrinsically motivated to learn something new, or excited about something you were learning? Do you agree that the hunt for grades is not about learning but about being told how well you are doing at 'learning'? If grades do not represent real learning, what do they represent? what should they represent? Is there any way to have a school without grades? How would that work? Is there anyway to foster an interest in putting effort into actually learning things rather than just fostering putting effort into getting grades?


podcast

Stress Response

Here is a video about the body's stress response.

And one about the body's immune response:

Based on the psychsim assignment, textbook readings, and these videos, assess your stress level. Be specific.

Based on your assessment, what health concerns do you or should you have?

What coping mechanisms do you find helpful in reducing stress in your life? Which ones don’t you use or have that may be beneficial?

More on DSM

My previous post indicates that the number of disorders identified in the DSM continues to increase, and is predicted to follow this pattern in the newest revision that is being undertaken. Thank you for you opinions on this. Here are some additional hypothesis to consider. Which of these do you think have merit? Do you agree or disagree with any of these? :

Hypothesis One: The DSM reflects an increasingly sophisticated and exhuastive compendium of all possible mental disorders.

Hypothesis Two: More psychological disorders = more people diagnosed with mental disorders = more money is siphoned off to hospitals, treatment centers, drug companies, mental health professionals, social workers, school counselors, etc. (Scientists who are currently working on the next version of the DSM have agreed to restrict their income from drug makes to $10,000 a year or less.)

Hypothesis Three: We are an increasingly rationalized society and all things are becoming increasingly listed, compiled, organized, and annotated.

Hypothesis Four: What is considered a “problem” depends on the social context. (”Homosexuality” used to be in the DSM, but it isn’t any longer.) Perhaps a shift in the last 50 years has created a social context that is less tolerant of difference, more insistent upon happiness, or requires a more compliant citizen.

Hypothesis Five: Grassroots activists get together and lobby scientists to include disorders in the DSM so that they can raise awareness and money for research.

Psychiatrists Revise the Book of Human Troubles

Benedict Carey writes for the New York Times:"The book is at least three years away from publication, but it is already stirring bitter debates over a new set of possible psychiatric disorders.
Is compulsive shopping a mental problem? Do children who continually recoil from sights and sounds suffer from sensory problems — or just need extra attention? Should a fetish be considered a mental disorder, as many now are?
Panels of psychiatrists are hashing out just such questions, and their answers — to be published in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — will have consequences for insurance reimbursement, research and individuals’ psychological identity for years to come.
The process has become such a contentious social and scientific exercise that for the first time the book’s publisher, the American Psychiatric Association, has required its contributors to sign a
nondisclosure agreement,."

Read the rest of this article here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/18/health/18psych.html?ref=health

And in the Wall Street Journal, Psychiatrists respond to the controversy:

http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2009/01/08/psychiatrists-bash-back-at-critics-of-diagnostic-manual-revision/

What do you think?