A little bit of good news...

Normally, every front page that you see is covered with some tragedy, scandal, or other horrible event, because newspapers have learnt that disaster sells. However, this has produced a very distorted view of the world and good news stories are often overlooked as irrelevant, but I think that they are necessary to allow people to believe in human kindness because if everyone believes that nobody would help them, they are unlikely to help other people and that cannot be a road that anyone can want society to travel down.

It is true though, that some people do seem devoid of the kindness that we expect that everyone has somewhere inside of them, such as the bus driver in Nottingham who would not let a 20 year old girl on the bus at 3 o'clock in the morning when she was only 20p short of the £5 bus fare. Even more shocking to me was that even after eight minutes of pleading nobody else on the bus offered to give her 20p. That girl was then attacked and raped while waiting to be picked up by her mother. Indirectly, all of the people on that bus were responsible for what happened to her because they all knew how dangerous it can be for young women when nobody else is around. It was not unreasonable to think that someone might have helped her, anybody could mistake £4.80 worth of change for £5 and they could all see what was going on.

I hope that this story can make people see how even a small act of kindness can have enormous consequences and how little it can take to change a life. It's not all doom and gloom though, there is good news out there, such as the news that 75% of the 1,200 tonnes of whale meat being autioned in Japan this year was not bought. This is amazing animal welfare news as it may indicate the beginning of the decline in the trade in whale meat and whale hunting.

Also in good news, steps have been made for more effective treatment of one of the world's most deadly virus, the ebola virus. It carries a 90% death rate because previously it could only be cured within 1 hour after infection, but as symptoms can take three weeks to appear, for most it is too late. However, a new treatment has been found that cured monkeys 24 hours after infection, a huge leap in the journey towards having effective treatment.

Lastly, and a piece of news that will affect most of us, is the decision by Walt Disney to ban junk food adverts from its television and radio stations. With the predictions that by 2050 half of the children in Britain will be obese, this news could not have come at a more crucial time and hopefully more organisations will follow suit.

Edgar Mueller - 3D Street Artist

I recently saw some of Edgar Mueller's work and I was really amazed by how real his illusions seemed. There is so much attention to detail which makes them even more convincing and I couldn't believe that his work will wash away when it rains because he works with chalk.

Enjoy!

The Cellular Mechanism of Learning

Long Term Potentiation

The brain is made up of cells called neurons and the brain sends messages to the rest of the body by sending electrical impulses along a series of neurons. For an electrical impulse to cross from one neuron to another it has to cross a gap between cells called a synapse.

When the impulse reaches the end of the axon, neurotransmitters are released into the synaptic cleft. The neurotransmitter crosses the gap and attaches to receptor cells on the dendrite. When the dendrite detects these chemicals on its receptors, the electrical impulse is stimulated and the message continues along its pathway.

A specific thought or action follows the same neuron pathway in the brain and these pathways can be strengthened or weakened by certain actions. The strenthening of the pathways can lead to learning as the impulses can travel faster so it is easier for us to complete a certain task, as the electrical impulses have an easier journey and we therefore find it easier.

To strengthen these pathways the synapses between the cells have to be strengthened by making them release more neurotransmitter more often and to make more and more sensitive receptors. LTP, or long term potentiation has been shown to be able to do this by stimulating specific synapses with high  frequency stimulation at certian intervals. The synaptic activity was then measured and showed that once an initial 'barrier' was overcome, the levels of activity increased significantly each time. This effect produced long lasting improvements and could be topped up by more stimulation.

These effects are thought to have been produced because receptors become 'tethered' to the neurotransmitters so it takes less new neurotransmitter to be realeased to stimulate the receptors enough to produce an impulse. It also produces better effects than learning by repetition becasue it stimulates the NMDA receptors which are harder to stimulate because they are normally blocked by magnesium. The high frequency stimulation gives the neurotransmitter enough energy to replace the magnesium and stimulate the receptors which are essential for LTP.

On this day in history...

Big Ben rang for the first time

Big Ben has universal significance as it keeps the world in time and many Londoners, myself included, could not imagine the city without it. It is a cultural icon and a survey of 2000 people agreed that it was the most popular lankmark in the capital city. This widespread popularity results in filmakers only needing to show the clock, perhaps with a London bus in the foreground, to let people know where the a film is set. One of the most famous uses of Big Ben is in The Thirty Nine Steps, when Richard Hannay attempts to save the day by hanging from the outside of the clock.

Big Ben started working on this day in 1859, and Edmund Beckett Denison, the designer of the clock, could not possibly have known what an legacy he was creating. Denison was chosen to create it after much of the Palace of Westminster was destroyed by fire in October 1834 and they wanted the standout feature of the new building to be a great tower with a clock on top.

However, Big Ben's performance was not always as stellar as it is today. The longest stoppage started on 5 Agust 1976, when the speed regulator of the chiming mechanism broke and the clock had to be shut for a total of 26 days over nine months and Radio Four had to use the pips instead of the chiming of the bell.The clock also chimed New Year ten minutes late in 1962 due to snow slowing it down, but they had a white Christmas, so they can hardly complain.

So Happy Birthday to the icon that is 153 today, it is much loved after surviving two World Wars and all the problems in between, and looks set to keep us in time for many years in the future.

60% of us would give someone a potentially lethal electric shock just because we were told to.

The Milgram Experiment

This seems an unlikely statistic, and before the experiment was carried out, psychologists didn't belive it either as they thought that only a small minority, less than 3%, would deliberately harm someone for a psychological experiment.

The studay carried out in the early 1960's proved very different results which have since been repeated with similar conclusions. The test subjects were told that they were taking part in an experiment about punishment and learning. They were to be the experimenters with the subjects in another room. They asked the 'subject', who was really an actor, a series of questions and each time the actor got a question wrong, they were told to press a switch. They were told that the switches delivered an increasingly painful electric shock to the subject, whom they could hear was in pain from the sounds coming from the other room. On beginning the experiment the actor told them that he had a weak heart, yet almost two thirds of people carried on giving the shocks until the highest level, even when the switches became labeled, 'danger:severe shock' and lastly, 'XXX'.

Most people became extremely distressed during the experiment and showed a wish to stop, but when the supervisor told them that they must continue, they kept going. There are several possible reasons for this blind obedience, such as the trust the subjects had in the safety of the experiment as it was conducted at Yale Univerity and the supervisor was supposed to be an expert. Furthermore, as the shocks went up in 15 volt jumps, it was hard for people to draw the line as the next shock was only slightly more than the one before. One of the biggest factors encouraging obedience was the physical presence of the supervisor telling them to continue and many participants found that they couldn't say no. 

At the time, this experiment had even more terrifying significance as the trial of WWII criminal, Eichmann had just begun, whose main defence was that he was just following orders. Looking at the results of this experiment was that simply the bottom line? and would any of us have done the same?

"The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act." –Stanley Milgram, 1974

On this day in history...

The Empire State Building was opened.

On this day, exactly 81 years ago, President Herbert Hoover opened the Empire State Building to the public by symbolically turning on its lights from a switch in the White House. Constuction had started on 17 March 1930 as part of a competition between Walter Chrysler and John Jakob Raskob to see who could build the highest tower. The project was extremely important to the American economy after the Wall Street crash in 1929 had left huge numbers of people unemployed. At its peak, the project employed 3000 people per day and due to this vast workforce, the structure could rise by an amazing 4 1/2 stories every week!


Health and safety was clearly more relaxed then today's mind blowing standards, however, only five people died during the construction, and only one from falling from the scaffolding, lets hope it was none of these luchtime daredevils.

 

Of the other four who died, one was hit by a truck, one fell down an elevator shaft, another was hit by a hoist and the last was in a blast area and was killed by an explosion. So maybe less health and safety would have evolutionary benefits by weeding the unlucky and those devoid of common sense from the gene pool.

The Empire State Building did win the competion, measuring in at 1454 feet compared to the Crysler Building which was 1047 feet tall. It has a staggering 102 floors and if you took complete leave of your senses and decided that you were going to walk all the way up there, you would be taking on a mammoth 1860 steps.

Since it has been built the Empire State Building has been a cultural icon, featuring in over 250 films, possibly the most famous being King Kong. It is clearly a much loved building, being voted 'Americas Favorite Architecture' by the American Institute of Architects in 2007 and I think that it represents to people the great things that can be achieved through inspirational thinking, hard work and brining people together.

Believing is Achieving

The way that we and other people see us can have a direct effect on what we can achieve, a theory wich was tested by two psychologists, Rosenthal and Jacobson in 1966 and is often called the Pygmalion effect.

 They went to a primary school in America and gave all the students an IQ test which was meant to measure their future expectations. However, the results of the IQ test were irrelevant as the 20% of students teachers were told who had achieved the best results were randomly selected. This meant that the teachers percieved an average group of students to be better than the rest and would treat them accordingly.

At the end of that academic year, the students all repeated the test. The results showed that, especially among first and second grade students, the 'top' 20% had improved much more than the rest of their peers. Rosenthal and Jacobson put this down to that the teachers expected more from the students so they subtly favoured them above the others, by showing more interest and enouraging them to stretch themselves more. The results showed a smaller, though still clear, divide as the students got older, most probably because they were less impressionable and the teachers knew them better so they already had an idea of who the bright students were in the class.

This is an example of a 'self fulfilling prophecy', where something happens because people believe that it will, rather than any direct action. Although there is still debate around this theory it is encouraging to see the power of positivity and optimism in creating an environment for ourselves in which we are most likely to thrive.

The Chris Donovan Trust-Learning how to forgive

Recently, I heard Ray and Vi Donovan speak about their son, Chris, who died just over ten years ago. They were truly inspirational so I thought that I would try and spread their message a little further. Chris died after he was beaten up by a group of young people and left on a main road, so he was subsequently hit by a car and died shortly afterwards from both sets of injuries.

Their main message was to encourage people to think about their actions, because many of those involved did not mean to kill him, but because they acted violently, he died and some members of the group were sent to prison for murder. As well as this message, Ray and Vi also talked about forgiveness and the journey they had taken to forgive those people who had killed their son. They spoke about how in order to really be free we have to apologise and forgive one another becasue otherwise we are poisoned by our own hate and we cannot begin to move forward from the things that we have done wrong and the wrongs that  other people have done to us. I found it incredible that they could forgive these people, but they told us that in order to make his death mean something and help other people, they had to stop being so angry and try and reach out to people to try and stop other similar tragedies.

Ray and Vi also talked about the importance of restorative justice and it's importance in trying to heal the damage done by crime. They spoke about the ripple effect, the amount of people that these crimes affect, from Chris' family, to the paramedics who tried to save him. Justice based around revenge, such as life imprisonment that is lifelong or capital punishment widens this ripple effect to so many more people, including the families of the criminals who have then also lost sons. They recognised that in some cases long term inprisonment does help to maintian the safety of society, however, in their case they felt like it only did more damage. They felt that a restorative justice programme that helped them to move onto the right track had to be more beneficial.

I think that Ray and Vi are incredible examples of people who have been able to try and use their loss to help others and make a positive impact on people's lives. They have shown people how to forgive the seemingly unforgivable and how it has set them free. They made everyone they spoke to feel worth something and that it is possible to make a change and not be held back by our problems. Out of the three men convicted for muder, they have met one and hope to meet the other two soon, so I wish them the best of luck with that and continuing to inspire other people.

The Sneakiness of Babies

As this is the very start of my blog, I want to talk about babies. It seems appropriate that at the beginning of this, I should write about the beginning of life and the way that psychologists think that babies are born to make the most of the limited capacity that they have.

Obviously, babies are born completely reliant on others, so they have to have the ability to communicate what they need to adults and inspire them to get it without actually speaking. This is why crying is specifically tailored to activate the nervous system in adults, which is the reason that people find the noise so disturbing and immediately respond. A study published in Acta Pediactrica showed that after adults listened to recordings of birdsong, adults in distress and a baby crying, they had a significantly higher reaction speed after the recording of a baby crying. Some research has suggested that this is due to the pitch as babies tend to have a higher pitched cry when they are in more distress, however, all three sounds were at a similar pitch, so this interpretation seems unlikely. Other research has suggested that it triggers the autonomic nervous system, which is the cause of the physiological resonse, such as the raised heartbeat, which in turn gave the adults a faster reaction time. Exactly which part of the composition of the cry it is that causes this response is unclear, but I think it is safe to assume that it is to do with the basic instinct for the continuation of the survival of the human species.

Another interesting area is the way that a baby is designed to form attachments to those people that interact with them best, even if these are not the people that they see most often. This is most likely to be because the people that spend the time to interact with them best are most likely to understand and care for their needs, so an infant will try and look to them for help. Most often these people are the parents and to maximise interaction with them babies eyes only have one focus when they are born, as the ability to focus their eyes nearer and further away only develops over time. The focus that they are born with is just the right distance to be able to see the face of the person that is holding them and a further way in which they sneakily manipulate adults into doing things for them, is smiling when they see a human face. This is hugely rewarding and therefore makes adults want to help them, again showing how although babies cannot do things for themselves, they are designed to be able to get other peple to do it for them. A newborn isn't fussy about who they smile at and will simle when they see a carboard oval with two dots for eyes, however, this all changes by the time they get to four months old, when they will only smile at a real face or a very good picture. This shows just how quickly babies learn to recognise things in their environment, which again helps them to survive.

So, my blog is born and of it develops as quickly as people, I would be very happy.