Mind Space – Page 73 – Things Are Good

Study: Sisters Protect Their Brothers

New research shows that siblings are very important and that they provide different benefits to one another. One finding that seems pretty neat is that having a sister can protect brothers from depression.

Padilla-Walker’s research stems from BYU’s Flourishing Families Projectand will appear in the August issue of the Journal of Family Psychology. The study included 395 families with more than one child, at least one of whom was an adolescent between 10 and 14 years old. The researchers gathered a wealth of information about each family’s dynamic, then followed up one year later. Statistical analyses showed that having a sister protected adolescents from feeling lonely, unloved, guilty, self-conscious and fearful. It didn’t matter whether the sister was younger or older, or how far apart the siblings were agewise.
Brothers mattered, too. The study found that having a loving sibling of either gender promoted good deeds, such as helping a neighbor or watching out for other kids at school. In fact, loving siblings fostered charitable attitudes more than loving parents did. The relationship between sibling affection and good deeds was twice as strong as that between parenting and good deeds.

Keep reading at Science Daily

And a big thank you to my sister!!!!!

Expanding Education

Liz Coleman is the president of Bennington, a college in the USA, and she has some wise things to say about education. She suggests that the more classical take on a liberal-arts education has fallen short of creating the proper citizens for the 21st century and her solution is to broaden the school’s concept of education itself.

Faces of the G20

Readers of this site should be aware that the G20 came to Toronto and caused a bunch of noise. Some sad news came out of that in terms of how the police acted (the largest mass arrests in Canada’s history). As a direct reaction to the abuse that occurred that weekend some people have turned to the net.

The Faces of the G20 is a place for people who have been affected by police brutality during the G20 to share their stories.

It is always good to see communities protect one another in the face of oppression. These people are looking to educate others while changing the system so that what happened to them cannot happen to others:

We are a small group of citizens affected by the G20 weekend in a variety of ways. We want to get our stories out, and to build a knowledge base as to what exactly happened before, during and after the weekend of July 26th, 2010.

Thanks to Dave!

Using YouTube to Study Effects of Drugs

Researchers have noted that people like to get high and post video of themselves doing drugs. As a result some researchers are looking at YouTube videos to understand what salvia does to the brain and body. Strange, I know, but apparently these people sharing their drug trips can help us understand a little more about pharmacology.

They created a systematic coding scheme which researchers used when watching the videos. This allowed them both to categorise the effects and check that each viewer was agreeing on what they saw.

After watching 34 videos, each of which was selected to show an entire trip from the initial hit to when the effects wore off, the team categorised the effects into five main groups:

(1) hypo-movement (e.g. slumping into a slouched position, limp hands, facial muscles slack or relaxed and falling down), (2) hyper-movement (e.g. uncontrolled laughter, restlessness, touching or rubbing the face without apparent reason or thought), (3) emotional effects included being visibly excited or afraid, (4) speech effects (unable to make sense, problems with diction, problems with fluency, inability to speak, and having problems recalling words) and finally (5) heating effects related to being hot or heated (e.g. flushed, or user makes a statement about being hot or sweating).

Read the rest at Mind Hacks.

Thanks Trevor!

Soldiers to Use Virtual Reality

Canadian soldiers returning from the war in Afghanistan will soon be using virtual reality to help recover from the survivable wounds of war. It should only be a matter of time before others are able to access this advanced technology too.

People learning to use an artificial limb or recovering from a stroke will be able to walk, drive or even swim through a variety of virtual environments without leaving the safety of the hospital â€” almost like on the holodeck of the fictional Starship Enterprise.
…
“With [post-traumatic stress disorder], the therapy is often on reintroduction of the scenarios that caused it in the first place,” he said.

“With this, you can virtually create the scenario that caused it in the first place â€” whether it’s on the battlefield, a car accident â€” and gently re-introduce the individual. That’s what allows a person to get back into their real life without the fear of constant flashbacks.