Science of the SpiritS


Cow

Cow hugging: More people are turning to a variety of animals for mental health

Elisa Mala
New York Times
Wed, 12 Jun 2019 19:37 UTC
cow cuddling
© Shane Lavalette for The New York TimesCow cuddling, as the practice is called, invites interaction with the farm animals via brushing, petting or heartfelt chats.
The best therapists for silly human problems don't say a word.

Even without a psychology degree, Bella's natural talents made her an excellent therapist: She is calm and accommodating of a range of personalities, with the patience to listen to endless problems without so much as a judgmental moo.

From a lush, secluded pasture on the Mountain Horse Farm, a 33-acre bed-and-breakfast in the Finger Lakes region of New York, 3-year-old Bella and 2-year-old Bonnie are the highlander-angus crossbred cows that provide animal-based therapy.

Cow cuddling, as the practice is called, invites interaction with the farm animals via brushing, petting or heartfelt chats with the bovines. The experience is similar to equine therapy, with one game-changing difference: Horses tend to stand, but cows spontaneously lie down in the grass while chewing their cud, allowing humans to get even more up close and personal by joining on the ground and offering a warm embrace.

As more people are turning to a variety of animals — dogs, ducks, alligators — for their mental health, states are cracking down on how and when therapy animals can be used. But cows? You can't take them with you.
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Hearts

Meditation: Wisdom in the silence

Wes Annac
Waking Times
Sat, 13 Jul 2019 14:41 UTC
meditation
© Goalcast
We all need a little peace, stillness, and balance to get us through life. Sadly, this doesn't jive with the social mold we're supposed to fit into. We're supposed to be good workers who value productivity above all else. This makes us incessantly tired, stressed, and anxious as we try to get through each day.

We have no time for rest, but deep down, most of us want nothing more than to stop and relax. We'd be happy to take a break even for just a day. Most of us can't, but we can all retreat into a calm inner space - one in which our thoughts, fears, and stresses fade away - whenever we want.

Meditation can be our vacation from everything in life that drains us. We can't pin it down to any specific practice; there are so many forms that it's best to find one that works for you. Whether traditional or new and radical, a meditation practice will leave you feeling like life doesn't have to be so harsh.

Comment: Additional information on Meditation and Its Benefits:

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Brain

Mindfulness meditation training may help people unlearn fearful responses

Eric W. Dolan
PsyPost
Tue, 16 Jul 2019 00:01 UTC
meditation
© 4frame group
Mindfulness meditation programs have shown promise for the treatment of anxiety. Now, new research may help explain why. According to a study published in Biological Psychiatry, mindfulness meditation appears to help extinguish fearful associations.

"Mindfulness interventions have been shown to reduce stress and improve emotion regulation skills in numerous studies, however the neural mechanisms are still largely unknown," said study author Gunes Sevinc, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

"One of the proposed mechanisms is based on the idea that mindfulness meditation provides a context similar to exposure therapy. During exposure therapy, individuals are exposed to otherwise avoided stimuli in a safe environment and gradually learn that these stimuli are no longer threatening."

Comment: See also:

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2 + 2 = 4

Latest study shows trigger warnings might actually make things worse

Shannon Palus
Slate
Fri, 12 Jul 2019 16:04 UTC
warning tigger
© Slate
"Trigger warnings just don't help," Payton Jones, a clinical psychology doctoral student at Harvard, tweeted alongside a preprint of his new paper. He further explained that the paper actually suggests that trigger warnings might even be harmful.

When I saw the tweet, my gut reaction was that Jones was wrong. I have been for trigger warnings even before the Year of the Trigger Warning, which according to Slate, was 2013. Opponents of trigger warnings tend to argue that they are an unnecessary concession that only serves to further coddle already sheltered college students. I figure they might be a good way to help people with mental injuries such as post-traumatic stress disorder stay safer as they move around the world, the same way that a person with a broken leg uses crutches. But after considering Jones' paper, and chatting with him, I've been convinced that we'd do better to save the minimal effort it takes to affix trigger warnings to college reading assignments or put up signs outside of theater productions and apply it to more effective efforts to care for one another.

Research that trigger warnings might not be all that helpful has been mounting over a few studies, including the one that Jones and his colleagues published last year titled "Trigger Warning: Empirical Evidence Ahead." Yes, that title is trollish, but here is what they did: They had a few hundred participants read several passages, some of which were potentially disturbing. Half received no heads up before the passages, and half got a label ahead of the iffy ones that read: "TRIGGER WARNING: The passage you are about to read contains disturbing content and may trigger an anxiety response, especially in those who have a history of trauma." The results suggested that trigger warnings could actually help generate anxiety, thus making them counterproductive. But there was a major limitation in that study: It didn't focus on people who had experienced trauma. Two studies written up in the New York Times in March had similar limitations (those both concluded that trigger warnings didn't do anything, good or bad).


Comment: This should have been obvious, simply for the fact that such a warning is a prime. It prepares the reader to become anxious. It would make more sense to write: "reading the following may make you calm and clear-headed."


Comment: Trigger warnings are discussed at length in Lukianoff and Haidt's latest book, The Coddling of the American Mind. See SOTT's recent discussion of the book here: MindMatters: How Universities Are Destroying Young Minds With Pathological Thinking



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Mr. Potato

More anti-free will idiocy from Darwinist Jerry Coyne

Jerry A. Coyne
Quillette
Wed, 17 Jul 2019 17:41 UTC
room
© Jan Genge on Unsplash.
It's hard to discern the main point of William Edwards's article The Academic Quarrel over Determinism, as his argument is discursive, confusing, contradictory, and sometimes misleading. In a first reading you may dimly perceive that he has a problem with determinism, and sees the negation of determinism as evidence for free will.

But what does he mean by "free will"? He's not explicit about it. Since he contrasts it with determinism, it appears that for Edwards free will means our physically uncaused ability to change our decisions so that, at a given moment, we could have done something other than what we did.

And what does Edwards mean by "determinism"? He seems fixated on biological determinism — the view that all our actions are coded in our genes, a "DNA-driven view of the social world," as well as a vision that "our future...is written in our DNA." Edwards sees little or no influence of the environment on our actions: "Our trials and triumphs...are encoded in our DNA sequence." But no biologist is a determinist in this sense, as all of us accept that the environment has a huge effect on our actions.

In fact, philosophical determinists — who reject free will because there's no mechanism for "decision" that is free of the physical substance of our brain — base their determinism not on DNA but on the laws of physics. Our brains are made of molecules; those molecules must obey the laws of physics; our decisions derive from brain activity; ergo, our decisions are subject not to an alterable "will" but to physical law. QED: no free will.


Comment: QED? There's no reason to believe the premises that our decisions derive from brain activity or that everything is reducible to physical law. That's scientistic nonsense.


And you needn't believe in pure physical determinism to reject free will. Much of the physical world, and what we deal with in everyday life, does follow the deterministic laws of classical mechanics, but there's also true indeterminism in quantum mechanics. Yet even if there were quantum effects affecting our actions — and we have no evidence this is the case — that still doesn't give us the kind of agency we want for free will. We can't use our will to move electrons. Physical determinism is better described as "naturalism": the view that the cosmos is completely governed by natural laws, including probabilistic ones like quantum mechanics.


Comment: We can't use our will to move electrons? What does Coyne think he's doing every time he tells his fingers to type one letter, word, or sentence, instead of another? Coyne is too much of an ideologically obsessed and possessed idiot to accept it, but there is another point of evidence humans can do such a thing: psychokinesis.

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Health

Swearing when hurt actually works, using F-word improves pain tolerance

Richard Jenkins
Mirror
Wed, 17 Jul 2019 21:51 UTC
F-bomb
© Getty
It's official - swearing DOES help us tolerate pain, according to scientific research.

A study found using the F-word when pain strikes, increases pain tolerance by up to a third.

A panel of experts including Keele University's senior lecturer in psychology, Dr Richard Stephens; language expert and author, Dr Emma Byrne; and acclaimed lexicographer Jonathon Green, explored how effective real and new, made-up swear words are in helping to increase pain tolerance and threshold.

The research was built on Dr Richard Stephen's original 2009 study which discovered that swearing can increase pain tolerance in the short term.
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Target

Why we see what we want to see: The neuropsychology of motivated perception

Marianna Pogosyan Ph.D.
Psychology Today
Tue, 09 Jul 2019 00:00 UTC
sight of eye
Obi-Wan Kenobi once advised Luke Skywalker to not trust his eyes, because "your eyes can deceive you." Most of us can recall an instance from our own non-Jedi lives when these words rang true. Think of a time when your eyes saw what they wished to see: a person you were thinking about in a busy street, a heart-shaped pebble you were looking for on the beach.

This phenomenon, called motivated perception, has been explored in psychological research for decades. Indeed, the world as we conceive it in our awareness is not exactly an accurate representation of what it truly is. Our perception is often biased, selective, and malleable.

Even our desires can affect what we see by impacting the way we process visual information. For example, when presented with an ambiguous figure that could be interpreted either as the letter B or the number 13, participants in one study were more likely to report seeing that which aligned with desirable outcomes over less desirable ones (in this case, drinking orange juice if they saw a letter or drinking a foul-smelling smoothie if they saw a number).

In an earlier study from 1954, when students from rival universities watched the same football game, controversy and disagreement ensued, since the students reported seeing more fouls committed by the other team.

Why are we prone to seeing what we want to see? Recent research published in Nature Human Behavior demonstrates how our motivations and desires can give rise to two biases: a perceptual bias (when our motivations have a top-down influence on our perceptions) and a response bias (when we report seeing what we wish to see). The study, led by researchers from Stanford University, explores how these biases affect our perceptions. It proposes underlying neurocomputational mechanisms that guide these judgments.
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Books

Seneca on the antidote to anxiety

Maria Popova
brainpickings.org
Wed, 17 Jul 2019 20:36 UTC
stoic
"The truth is, we know so little about life, we don't really know what the good news is and what the bad news is,"

Kurt Vonnegut observed in discussing Hamlet during his influential lecture on the shapes of stories. "The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it's really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad," Alan Watts wrote a generation earlier in his sobering case for learning not to think in terms of gain or loss. And yet most of us spend swaths of our days worrying about the prospect of events we judge to be negative, potential losses driven by what we perceive to be "bad news." In the 1930s, one pastor itemized anxiety into five categories of worries, four of which imaginary and the fifth, "worries that have a real foundation," occupying "possibly 8% of the total."

A twenty-four-hour news cycle that preys on this human propensity has undeniably aggravated the problem and swelled the 8% to appear as 98%, but at the heart of this warping of reality is an ancient tendency of mind so hard-wired into our psyche that it exists independently of external events. The great first-century Roman philosopher Seneca examined it, and its only real antidote, with uncommon insight in his correspondence with his friend Lucilius Junior, later published as Letters from a Stoic — the timeless trove of wisdom that gave us Seneca on true and false friendship and the mental discipline of overcoming fear.

Comment: Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius - timeless stoic philosophy that is essential to the human spirit

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Footprints

The dancing species - how moving together in time helps make us human

Kimerer LaMothe
aeon.co
Wed, 17 Jul 2019 15:16 UTC
dance
© Photo by Kate Holt/FlickrDancers in traditional dress, Kenya.
Dancing is a human universal, but why? It is present in human cultures old and new; central to those with the longest continuous histories; evident in the earliest visual art on rock walls from France to South Africa to the Americas, and enfolded in the DNA of every infant who invents movements in joyful response to rhythm and song, long before she can walk, talk or think of herself as an 'I'. Dancing remains a vital, generative practice around the globe into the present in urban neighbourhoods, on concert stages, as part of healing rituals and in political revolutions. Despite efforts waged by Christian European and American colonists across six continents over 500 years to eradicate indigenous dance traditions and to marginalise dancing within their own societies, dancing continues wherever humans reside. Any answer to the question of why humans dance must explain its ubiquity and tenacity. In so doing, any answer will challenge Western notions of human being that privilege mind over body as the seat of agency and identity.

Comment: Get off your duff and shake your stuff: The health benefits of dancing

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Butterfly

Nature heals: Viewing green spaces linked to more positive mindset and reduced cravings for harmful substances

John Anderer
Study Finds
Fri, 12 Jul 2019 00:00 UTC
Nature healing, green spaces
Spending more time outdoors has long been linked to a more positive mindset, but now a study has concluded that just seeing greenery on a day-to-day basis can put us in a better mindset and reduce harmful cravings.
So much of modern life happens indoors. From offices to apartments or homes, most people in today's day and age find themselves cooped up inside for most of the day. Spending more time outdoors has long been linked to a more positive mindset, but now a study has concluded that just seeing greenery on a day-to-day basis can put us in a better mindset and reduce harmful cravings for substances such as alcohol, cigarettes, and junk food.

According to the study out of the University of Plymouth, being able to see greenery and nature from your home will lead to less frequent, and intense cravings. The research builds off of previous work that has established a link between exercising outdoors and reduced cravings, but the study's authors assert that exercise isn't necessary to reap the benefits of nature.

The study is the first of its kind, and its authors say their findings stress the need for cities and communities the world over to invest in and protect public green spaces.

Comment: More on the benefits of nature:

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