Sleep

Everyone, I suggest you start sleeping..

Can You Catch Up on Lost Sleep?

You've given up your fair share of sleep—will you ever feel rested again?

By Molly Webster

 
 

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Let's do some sleep math. You lost two hours of sleep every night last week because of a big project due on Friday. On Saturday and Sunday, you slept in, getting four extra hours. Come Monday morning, you were feeling so bright-eyed, you only had one cup of coffee, instead of your usual two. But don't be duped by your apparent vim and vigor: You're still carrying around a heavy load of sleepiness, or what experts call "sleep debt"—in this case something like six hours, almost a full nights' sleep.

Sleep debt is the difference between the amount of sleep you should be getting and the amount you actually get. It's a deficit that grows every time we skim some extra minutes off our nightly slumber. "People accumulate sleep debt surreptitiously," says psychiatrist William C. Dement, founder of the Stanford University Sleep Clinic. Studies show that such short-term sleep deprivation leads to a foggy brain, worsened vision, impaired driving, and trouble remembering. Long-term effects include obesity, insulin resistance, and heart disease. And most Americans suffer from chronic deprivation.
 
A 2005 survey by the National Sleep Foundation reports that, on average, Americans sleep 6.9 hours per night—6.8 hours during the week and 7.4 hours on the weekends. Generally, experts recommend eight hours of sleep per night, although some people may require only six hours of sleep while others need ten. That means on average, we're losing one hour of sleep each night—more than two full weeks of slumber every year.

The good news is that, like all debt, with some work, sleep debt can be repaid—though it won't happen in one extended snooze marathon. Tacking on an extra hour or two of sleep a night is the way to catch up. For the chronically sleep deprived, take it easy for a few months to get back into a natural sleep pattern, says Lawrence J. Epstein, medical director of the Harvard-affiliated Sleep HealthCenters.

Go to bed when you are tired, and allow your body to wake you in the morning (no alarm clock allowed). You may find yourself catatonic in the beginning of the recovery cycle: Expect to bank upward of ten hours shut-eye per night. As the days pass, however, the amount of time sleeping will gradually decrease.

For recovery sleep, both the hours slept and the intensity of the sleep are important. Some of your most refreshing sleep occurs during deep sleep. Although such sleep's true effects are still being studied, it is generally considered a restorative period for the brain. And when you sleep more hours, you allow your brain to spend more time in this rejuvenating period.

As you erase sleep debt, your body will come to rest at a sleep pattern that is specifically right for you. Sleep researchers believe that genes—although the precise ones have yet to be discovered—determine our individual sleeping patterns. That more than likely means you can't train yourself to be a "short sleeper"—and you're fooling yourself if you think you've done it. A 2003 study in the journal Sleep found that the more tired we get, the less tired we feel.

So earn back that lost sleep—and follow the dictates of your innate sleep needs. You'll feel better. "When you put away sleep debt, you become superhuman," says Stanford's Dement, talking about the improved mental and physical capabilities that come with being well rested. Finally, a scientific reason to sleep in on Saturday.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=fact-or-fiction-can-you-catch-up-on-sleep&sc=rss

Bad news to the girls out there

Turns out that getting rid of that fat there in the body really can be no mean feat. Especially now with new researches coming out that tells you that you might be in for more trouble than expected:

Fat cell numbers stay constant through adult life

Even serious weight loss doesn't reduce your overall number of fat-holding cells.

Michael Hopkin

The number of fat cells in your body remains constant throughout your adult life, a new study has found. The discovery suggests that the process of weight gain may be fundamentally different in adults and in children.

Adults who gain or lose weight may do so through changes in the size of the fat cells, also called adipocytes, that constitute fatty deposits in the body. Children, on the other hand, may put on extra fat by increasing the overall number of these cells in the body.

This may mean that people who got fat during childhood may find it more difficult to shift the weight later in life, compared to those who piled on the pounds as adults, suggests Kirsty Spalding of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, who led the new research.

Although the number of fat cells remains constant in adulthood, Spalding and her team found that it is not the same cells persisting for ever. There is a dynamic process of cell death and replenishment.

Fat by numbers

Spalding and her team took biopsies of belly fat from 687 people, both lean and obese, and recorded the number and size of fat cells, as well as the subjects' age, sex and body mass index. Combined with previous similar data from children, they showed that the average number of fat cells rises until the age of about 20, and then remains relatively constant, and is closely linked with body mass index.

The researchers also measured 20 people who were obese and had 'stomach stapling' surgery to reduce food intake. When Spalding and her team measured these volunteers again two years after the procedure, they found no reduction in fat-cell number: the subjects still had over 80 billion individual fat cells in their bodies, Spalding and her colleagues calculate. This despite losing an average of 18% of their body weight. It was the volume of each individual fat cell that was reduced, rather than the number, they report in Nature ¹.

Nevertheless, fat cells are constantly dying and being replaced, even in adults, Spalding and her team found. They determined this by studying fat extracted during liposuction procedures from 35 people who had lived through the period of Cold War atomic bomb testing, from 1955–63, when the atmosphere was briefly more radioactive than normal. Food grown and eaten during this period had elevated levels of an isotope called carbon-14.

Fewer fat cells showed a heavy dose of carbon-14 than might be expected if these cells were never replenished, the team reports. This shows that the cells have been subject to turnover in the intervening decades.

Cutting down

If cell biologists can work out exactly how this cell replenishment is regulated, it might be possible to design drugs to interfere with this process — potentially helping people to keep weight off once they have lost it.

Spalding says that such a treatment would best be given only after patients have undergone serious weight-loss therapies such as gastric surgery. "You need to be really cautious about applying this," she warns.

"It would be very dangerous to give people these drugs while they're still obese," Spalding adds. Cutting the number of fat cells while people still have a high fat volume would place extra strain on the fat cells that are left over, leading to metabolic complications such as diabetes, she explains.

"I don't think it's going to be as simple as 'take a pill, lose weight, problem solved'," Spalding adds.

Perhaps most important, Spalding says, is the confirmation that fat cells can proliferate in childhood, although not in adulthood. The factors behind this are likely to be both genetic and dietary, she says.

So although obesity tends to run in families, avoiding getting fat at a young age will help to establish a healthy number of fat cells for life. "The best take-home message is for people with kids to ensure they have a healthy lifestyle," Spalding says.

• References
  
  • Spalding, K. L. et al. Nature advanced online publication, doi:10.1038/nature06902 (2008).
    

What do we do?

Antarctic ice threatened by ozone-hole recovery

Global winds could accelerate melting.

Amanda Leigh Haag

The ozone hole (here shown in September 2006) may have delayed Antarctic warming.NASA

Recovery of the ozone hole above Antarctica could warm the Antarctic and cause more ice to melt in coming decades, researchers say. As the ozone hole heals, wind patterns that shield the interior of the polar region from warm air may break down, causing warming in the Antarctica as well as warmer and drier conditions in Australia.

Despite global temperatures rising, the interior of Antarctica has experienced a unique cooling trend during its summer and autumn over the last few decades. Scientists attribute this cooling to the hole in the ozone layer, which alters atmospheric circulation patterns and strengthens the westerly winds that swirl around the continent. These winds have isolated the Antarctic interior from the warming patterns seen on the continent's peninsula and throughout the rest of the world.

"The warming of the Antarctic may have been delayed because of the ozone hole," says atmospheric scientist Judith Perlwitz, a climate scientist at the of the University of Colorado at Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

But thanks to the 1987 Montreal Protocol that banned the release of ozone-depleting substances, most scientists agree that the ozone hole has probably reached its largest and that ozone levels will recover by the end of the century.

Model system

Perlwitz and her colleagues simulated the interaction between stratospheric ozone dynamics and atmospheric conditions between 1950 and the end of the twenty-first century. They conclude that as ozone levels recover, the lower part of the stratosphere above Antarctica — some 10-20 kilometres above Earth's surface — will absorb more ultraviolet radiation, and rise in temperatures by as much as 9ºC, reducing the existing strong north-south temperature gradient¹.

Along with balmier temperatures in Antarctica, a weakening of the westerly winds could also produce warmer and drier temperatures in Australia and increased precipitation in South America.

Climate models, including those used in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) fourth assessment, have not accounted for these details of ozone chemistry. Most models do not extend beyond 30 kilometres above the Earth's surface, and adequate representation of the stratosphere would require modelling up to 60 kilometres. "This paper opens the discussion about how ozone depletion and recovery in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries can be included in climate models," Perlwitz says.

"If we get the feedbacks and the ice-melt wrong in our climate models, then that means we could be really wrong in terms of what a safe level of carbon dioxode is," says Theodore Shepherd, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Toronto, Canada, who was not involved in the study. Biological productivity of the oceans is driven largely by ocean and atmospheric circulation patterns, so the next step, he says, is to couple ocean dynamics to ozone chemistry and climate.

• References
  
  • Perlwitz, J., Pawson, S., Fogt, R. L., Nielsen, J. E. & Neff, W. D. Geophys. Res. Lett. 35, L08714 doi:10.1029/2008GL033317 (2008). | Article |
    

Ok I mght get into trouble for posting this entire article on the net, but I think it is more important for everybody to know about their world. We were worried that the growing hole in our ozone layer is resulting in many dangerous effects. Now, we realize that the closing of this hole is also having detrimental effects. Are we really unable to right a wrong? Did that mistake really result in a dead end for us? Now, what do we do? Stop the closing of the hole? Keep letting it close? Both seem to be resulting in very bad results so far. Closing the hole would mean 9 extra degrees increase in the poles. Keeping it open would mean constant bombardment of cosmic rays on the continent, possibly being detrimental to Antarctic ecosystems as well. What do we do?

Free Will?

Changing belief in free will can cause students to cheat

Category: Reasoning • Research • Social
Posted on: April 22, 2008 3:31 PM, by Dave Munger

Do we have free will? While some may see the question as trivial, it's a challenging topic that has been actively debated for centuries. Whether or not you believe a god is involved, a case can be made that free will is simply an illusion, and that every "decision" we make is completely controlled by factors outside of an individual's control.

Yet others have argued that a belief in free will is essential to morality. If we don't actually have any control over the decisions we make, how can we be held accountable for them? Several studies have suggested that when kids believe their achievements are due to innate ability rather than their own effort, they are less likely to persist at similar tasks in the future. But until recently, no study has attempted to directly study belief in free will and how it affects behavior.

Kathleen Vohs and Johnathan Schooler have found a way to study this question (though they can't tell you whether they were predestined to do it or they came up with the idea through their own independent efforts!). They had 30 students read one of two passages by Francis Crick. The first passage argued that most scientists now recognize free will as an artifact of the way the brain works, that free will is simply an illusion and our actions are determined solely by genetics and the environment. The second passage discussed consciousness and did not bring up free will at all. Then the students were given a test to measure their belief in free will versus determinism.

Finally, the students were asked to take a computerized mental arithmetic test with twenty questions like 1 + 8 + 18 - 12 + 19 - 7 + 17 - 2 + 8 - 4 = X. Next came the key to the experiment: the experimenter told them there was a small computer "glitch" that caused the answer to be displayed shortly after the question appeared. To avoid the glitch, students had the space bar as soon as they saw each question. In fact, the computer recorded both the answers and whether or not the space bar was pressed. Here are the results:

Students who read the passage advocating determinism and against free will "cheated" significantly more often than those who read the passage on consciousness that didn't mention free will. These students also were significantly more likely to believe in determinism compared to the other group, so it seems likely that this increased belief in determinism led directly to the "cheating" behavior.

But arguably this is just passive cheating -- the students didn't do anything wrong, they just didn't take active steps to avoid an ambiguous moral situation. In a second study, Vohs and Schooler addressed the question of overt cheating with 122 new student volunteers.

This time, instead of just reading a passage, two groups of students read a booklet fifteen phrases such as "A belief in free will contradicts the known fact that the universe is governed by lawful principles of science," and were required to ponder each phrase for a full minute before turning to the next page. Another group read similar statements advocating free will, and another group read neutral statements. A final baseline group didn't read any statements at all. Everyone was given the same test, which was composed of 15 problems from the GRE exam, a rigorous test designed to assess applicants for graduate school.

One determinism group, the free will group, and the neutral group took the test in sets of 2 to 5 individuals. For these groups, a tempting possibility of cheating was introduced. The experimenter told them that she had to leave the room for a meeting, and that they were to take no more than 15 minutes to take the test, which they should grade themselves. She would not see their test sheets: they were to be destroyed in a document shredder in the room. Then they could award themselves $1 for every correct response from an envelope of coins she left on a table in the room.

The other two groups (the second determinism group and the baseline group) were tested individually, the experimenter graded their tests, and paid them based on their actual scores. Here are the results:

The beauty of this experiment is that the experimenter honestly didn't know how much money each person in the "cheating possible" groups took. She could only count the money after they left and find the average take per person. She couldn't even assess their answers on the test -- those were shredded. Yet those who had read the determinism statements took significantly more money when they were given the opportunity to cheat. The fact that reading about determinism didn't lead to higher scores when cheating was not possible suggests that indeed, cheating was going on, not just super-performance due to reading about determinism.

Does this study also demonstrate that free will itself doesn't exist? The authors won't go that far, but it's pretty clear from this demonstration that external factors had a very strong impact on these students' behavior.

One might also be tempted to use these results to argue that belief in free will is important from a moral perspective (whether or not it actually exists). Yet many religions have very strong deterministic traditions and also strong moralistic traditions, so clearly belief in determinism isn't the only influence on moral behavior. Nonetheless, the results of this study are fascinating. I look forward to hearing what our commenters think about them.

Vohs, K.D., Schooler, J.W. (2008). The Value of Believing in Free Will: Encouraging a Belief in Determinism Increases Cheating. Psychological Science, 19(1), 49-54. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02045.x

 

So, the people are worried about free will? Determinism affects scores? Helplessness increases probability of cheating? Why does this make absolutely no sense?

Ok, since I'm not really sleepy, I shall go abit into some of the IMOs of free will, morality and the common misconception of relating the lack of the former to complete collapse in society. This is the perfect example of the correct action for the wrong reason. Many believe that free will is really the most important thing to us. They even came up with this cool blockbuster where there is this cool guy that can change physics in a computer generated world. why did Morpheus and his team constantly plague the matrix? Because they are hiding the reality from us? Because they are restricting the freedom of man? Seriously, what freedom is Morpheus looking for? The people in the matrix, yes they are governed by this huge computer program that decides what is right and what is wrong, but in the end, they have the choice to make whatever decisions they want, whether to become an actor, live out as a beggar on the streets, become a world famous company CEO, fake as they may be. Most importantly, they are granted the freedom to live and the freedom of safety. What Morpheus and his team condemned themselves to is to the freedom to starve, to run away for eternity from a computer security system. Is that really freedom? Do we really mind sacrificing freedom, however fake it is, for a painful truth that would not affect anything or anyone if it was not known? True, the inconvenient truth or the convenient lie. But if the lie really does not endanger us, or force us to degrade, is living in a lie really that bad? What is reality? Morpheus asked. If what we smell, touch, feel, taste is reality, then reality is simply electrical impulses in the brain. And truly it is. Plato spoke about a true reality, that we are simply living in a cave, staring at a shadow, thinking it is reality. If we were to simply turn around and to see the reality, what happens then? What if turning around and looking out of the cave exposes us to the dangers of a degrading eyesight? What if walking out of the cave exposes us to heavy beasts? Is this reality actually worth the cost of happily looking at a shadow till death? Of course if the beast has the ability to enter the cave, then of course, walking out is the better choice. But if it does not? Al Gore's question of the inconvenient truth rightly speaks this. This convenient lie is one day going to turn around and kill us before we even know what hit us. But if the truth is not more painful but rather worse off than the lie, is the end worth the sacrifice? Bringing this back to the question of free will. If we one day realize free will does not exist, what changes? Only our perception of life. Really, the lie that free will exists actually regulates and enforces laws. All of laws are based on moral right and wrongs. These are of course based on the assumption that we choose to do things. Thus, we are to be punished for choosing the morally incorrect path. Now if we realize that free will does not exist, it means we could not choose the morally correct path to begin with, and thus we cannot be punished. Or not? Writing this article might sow questions about morality, thus possibly leading to a state of chaos. Based on that argument, I cannot be punished because I had no choice not to do so. That I had no ability to stop myself from doing so. Reading about the above article lead me to think about free will, coupled with a rebellious nature as well as a conditioning to use logic, I come to the conclusion that free will does not exist. Thus, I had nothing to do with it. WRONG. I wrote this article while being perfectly conscious. This means that even if there are minor changes to the environment such as this water bottle hitting the ground, it would not change the fact that I am going to post this. If this article results in an increase in chaos to society, thus I am to be punished for doing so. This fear would change the conditions for future people and would thus reduce the probability of other people coming to the same conclusion or gathering up the courage to post a similar article. In other words, punishment to benefit the society and not because of a moral implication. Now many will say, if I insist that there are no need for morals and the concept of choice, but yet come to the same conclusion as before, that punishment must be met out, by my own argument ½ a paragraph ago, it really should not matter whether the truth of whether free will exists or not should be told. Now if one day, someone suddenly comes to a realization that free will DOES NOT exist, the same as the above article, people would tend towards chaos. Why? Simply because the basis of morals rest on decision. If order of society were to rest on such a fragile value, its loss will destroy society. But if order of society were to rest on advancement, nothing can destroy society. Of course, suddenly thinking that advancement is bad would result in collapse, but it would regardless of the presence of morals. Determinism? Irrelevant. Free will? Pointless. So, it appears that a wrong backing does lead to a fragile will.

Living?

Following up from the previous post on life and evolution:

Nanobacteria theory takes a hit

Tiny 'living' particles may just be lumps of limestone.

Michael Hopkin

They look like tiny bacteria, have been implicated in several diseases and have even been hailed as a completely overlooked branch of the tree of life. But are 'nanobacteria' genuinely alive? New research suggests that the answer is probably no.

Ever since they were first described in the early 1980s, nanobacteria — which can be just 50 nanometres, or millionths of a millimetre, across — have captured the imagination of everyone from health experts to space biologists. A panel convened in 1998 by the US National Academy of Sciences concluded that the particles are too small to be alive, but that didn't stop people from being fascinated by them, and some companies even say that they can detect nanobacterial infections.

Some scientists have argued nanobacteria could be the source of life on Earth.

But now the nanobacteria theory has taken a blow. New research suggests that, besides being too small to be alive, they may also be made of something not much more complex than simple chalk.

Death knell?

Jan Martel of Taiwan's Chang Gung University and John Young of Rockefeller University in New York created particles that look exactly like nanobacteria by incubating human serum with the chemical ingredients of simple calcium carbonate, or limestone.

The researchers then compared their creations with naturally occurring 'nanobacteria-like particles' from human blood samples. The particles not only looked identical to the limestone mix, they also showed no traces of DNA or RNA. The researchers then blasted the particles with enough radiation to slaughter any bacteria, and found that the particles still looked the same.

"I am pretty confident this will put an end to the biotic mechanism for nanobacteria," says Young, who reported the research in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ¹.

But why were some biologists so eager to believe that these were genuine life forms? Because the particles grow in such a life-like way, says Young. They even split in two in a way that resembles dividing bacteria. "They seem to grow, to propagate, and divide — you would swear they are a biological organism — but they're not," he says.

What is most intriguing about nanobacteria is that, although they seem to form by a chemical reaction between calcium and carbon dioxide — both of which are found naturally dissolved in blood — they are not simple lumps of chalk. "We believe what we have found is a complex of organic molecules and minerals," Young says.

That means that nanobacteria probably become coated with proteins or other organic molecules, which stop them from growing like a regular, jagged limestone crystal and instead look like round blobs.

It is these organic coatings that might have tricked experts into thinking that nanobacteria are alive, suggests John Cisar, a microbiologist at the US National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. "But the simpler explanation is that they are not life forms," he says.

Commercial interest

Still, biological tests are commercially available for nanobacteria. One company, Nanobac Pharmaceuticals of Tampa, Florida, offers immunological tests to detect antibodies against nanobacteria, or 'calcifying nanoparticles', as it calls them, in human serum or plasma.

But when Martel and Young tested this product as part of their study, they found that the antibodies detected by the test also react with albumin, a protein widely found in blood serum. Young therefore suggests that many nanobacteria in the blood may be coated in albumin, and the test detected these.

Brady Millican, a representative of Nanobac, says "there are lots of rogue proteins associated with the structure itself". He says the test kit marketed by the company, which contains two different antibodies, is an assay that "captures more of the surface of the calcifying nanoparticle".

Young does believe, however, that nanobacteria can cause disease. Given the right chemical conditions, they "aggregate like crazy", he says. Perhaps this is a cause of extra-skeletal calcification, a painful and debilitating condition in which a kind of 'bone' forms in body areas such as tendons.

Cisar, on the other hand, thinks that although calcium carbonate deposits in the body can cause some ailments, nanobacteria are probably benign because they are so widespread in the body. "Every place you look for these things you find them," he says. "There's no particular pathology."

• References
  

  • Martel, J. & Young, J. D.-E. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 105, 5549-5554 (2008). | Article | PubMed |
    

 

Nanobacteria, only 50nm across, considered too small to be alive. Also does not contain RNA/DNA. Does that mean not alive?

The criteria that viruses fail to fulfill to be considered alive, nanobacteria does. So why is it considered to be not alive? Is there a minimum size requirement to be considered alive? Who are we, then to say that bacteria are large enough?

Just something to think about..

Climate change: Losing Greenland and dumb things smart people say about saving the earth

http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080416/full/452798a.html

Are we looking the wrong way? A rise of seven metres would effectively take out a significant portion of our landmass. Should we be worried?

Greenland is losing 150 billion tons of ice into water every year! That is enough water to feed how many Singapores? This amount of water loss is increasing. When the water salinity changes, we are going to lose our climate. When that much of water is turned from ice below freezing temperature to room temperature water, guess how much heat is removed in this short period of time? Thermodynamics recap: specific heat capacity =4180J/kg, heat of fusion = 333 550 J/kg. Q=mcT, and Q = mL. yea, we are going to have a lower global temperature, at the expense of a significant part of land. Will we only be satisfied when that happens?

Looks like 5 degrees can change the world. We are losing our home! Unless NASA has a plan to colonize every planet out there, this is where humanity was born and where it will fall. We need something to fall on damn it!

Some Americans have really interesting ideas on how to reduce global warming, half of them really pissing me off because of the sheer impracticality or the short-sightedness of it all.

Their methods all have something to do with reducing the effect of the sun on us. Is that a good idea? One thinks that the best way would be to send trillions of 1 feet radius "sunshades" into space to deflect or absorb the sun's rays. With the reduced intensity of the radiation on earth, it can reduce global warming. Yea right, like that's gonna work. Something of that scale would just deplete our planet's resources yea? Another thinks that cloud seeding would help reflect more light away from the earth. Good idea, except what's the big idea doing that in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean? The surface of the sea reflects 60-90% of the sun's rays back into space, absorbing the rest into its massive heat container, and at the same time, providing the temperate countries with warm air. What do you think would happen when we disrupt this? Also, assuming I accept such a short-sighted idea, seeding by spraying the air with a fine mist of sea water is just plain stupid. That would just get salt crystals into the air and cause the creation of massive sized clouds that would just head toward land and fling tones of salty water onto land, killing all land plants, causing freshwater animals to die out. Also, with 70% of the world's oxygen being produced by the phytoplankton in the sea, how do you think that would affect our oxygen factories? The last idea I heard before going nuts and changing channel to a show on devoted catholic Filipinos was even worse. He said that the Mt. Pinatubo eruption released so much sulfur into the air that the next year recorded a drop in global temperature of 0.6 degrees. So he wants to emulate a volcano. -.- That's not even the bad part. He wants to do that by sending many rockets into space, and when it reaches the stratosphere, it would start burning hydrogen sulfide. Is that the worst idea I had ever heard off? Not only does that, should it go massively wrong, send us into the next stone age, except that the surviving species would be the cyanobacteria since they are the only ones that can survive in a hydrogen sulfide atmosphere, it's just gonna block the sun from reaching the plants, cutting off our oxygen, it's gonna rain sulfuric acid on them to add salt to wounds. Now how bad can that get? We only lose whatever that remains of our rice plantations, dooming the rest of humanity. Is this where millions of dollars worth of research funds go to every year? So much for America being the land of innovation eh? While you're at it, why don't you just set off a massive EMP burst that fries electronic equipment globally, forcing us into the stone age and thus halting carbon dioxide emission and letting the earth heal itself? Can't bear to do that eh? We need to do more damage to the earth so that we can "save it" since we're too arrogant to let go of technology, is that it? What about simple things like reducing waste or reducing the use of carbon dioxide emitting processes? Looks like this is the price of being too stuck up to move with the environment instead of moving it yea?

Side note, today, volcanic eruption in Indonesia.

Does "counting your blessings" really help?

How often do you take time to reflect on the things you're grateful for? Once a month? Once a week, at church, perhaps? Maybe you say "grace" at mealtime every day. But even prayers that do express gratefulness, such as a traditional mealtime prayer, are often expressed by rote. Growing up, my family wasn't very religious, but when we had dinner with family or friends, we'd usually say grace. I was probably well into my teens before I understood what "blessusolordforthesethygiftswhichweareabouttoreceivefromthybounty" actually meant.

While many would agree that "counting your blessings" is a worthwhile practice, there hasn't been much experimental research on whether gratitude really has a positive impact on our lives. Several studies have found that gratitude correlates with positive emotions such as happiness, pride, and hope, but experimental work -- showing that gratitude causes these things -- is scarcer.

Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough figured it would be worthwhile to explore this notion. Their method of study was both ingenious and simple: they would ask 201 students in a health psychology class to respond to a weekly questionnaire. Everyone rated their well-being, was tested on a measure of gratefulness, and reported on their physical health and level of exercise. The key to the study was a division into three groups. The first group listed five things they were grateful for each week. The second group listed five hassles or irritants from the past week. The final group simply wrote down five "events or circumstances" from the past week. This continued for ten weeks.

What sort of things did they write?

Some students said they were grateful for "waking up this morning," or "for wonderful parents," or "the Lord for just another day." Hassles were things like "hard to find parking," "messy kitchen," or "having a horrible test in health psychology."

As you might expect, the students in the gratefulness group scored significantly higher than the hassles group on the gratefulness measure. But they also were more positive about the upcoming week and their life as a whole. They were even healthier than both the hassles and events groups, and they reported significantly more hours of exercise (4.35) than the hassles group (3.01). On the more rigorous measure of positive affect, which assesses many different dimensions of positive emotion, there was, however, no significant difference between the groups.

Emmons and McCullough suspected the reason positive affect differences weren't observed was that the respondents only reflected on things they were grateful for once a week. So they repeated the study on two different groups: a new batch of 166 health psychology students, and 65 adults with neuromuscular diseases. This time participants completed their questionnaires daily for 13 days (students) or 21 days (NMD patients). In of these studies, a significant effect of positive affect was found: Just writing down the things you are grateful for each day appears to cause to improve your overall emotional outlook. In the NMD study, respondents in the gratitude group also reported getting significantly more sleep and feeling more refreshed when they woke up in the morning.

The researchers speculate that simply enumerating things you are grateful for might be a treatment for mild forms of depression. They certainly seem to have confirmed the worth of the "count your blessings" platitude, and this research may offer some insight into research showing that religious adherents tend to be happier than non-religious people. Perhaps simple gratitude is one of the keys to the success of religion.

Emmons, R.A., McCullough, M.E. (2003). Counting blessings versus burdens: An experimental investigation of gratitude and subjective well-being in daily life.. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(2), 377-389. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.84.2.377

 

 

An interesting article. Perhaps the only thing that differentiates the great from the weak is this?

Maybe mind over matter really is that powerful. We should count our blessings for such an insight ^^