I’m not sure what kind of tree this is. I’ve recently developed an interest in capturing different patterns found in nature. Here I loved the 3 different colors of bark and how the tree seemed intent on outlining each. And seriously, how often do you see blue bark?
As a mom I’m always weighing the benefits to my sanity of letting the kids have more time on the Wii against the negative effects of video games with violence in them. Sure, at this age it’s just Lego figures cartoonishly battling with light sabres, but it’s still battling. I’ve heard it said that it’s no worse than the Road Runner and Looney Toons cartoons we watched as kids and we turned out alright, right? (Uh…right?)
But still, wondering about possible consequences makes me feel like a responsible parent and so I do. Last December Time Magazine came out with an article on this subject showing that the behavioral differences that have been observed in kids that play these kinds of games actually have physiological underpinnings. The parts of the brain that deal with emotion, attention and inhibition are all less active after playing violent video games. Luckily, this change didn’t seem to be permanent and after some time off from the games the study subjects regained most of the brain activity that had been lost.
This got me to thinking about returning war veterans. These men and women have witnessed and participated in real violence and it makes sense to me that the human brain evolved a coping mechanism that reduced emotional activity as a way of getting through violent and stressful times. But for individuals who are shipped off to war, or unwillingly find themselves in the middle of one, simply surviving the experience often means prolonged exposure to sometimes unimaginable violence. Can those parts of the brain dealing with emotion be regained? We all want that answer to be ‘yes’. But I wonder if the repression of the 1950s had something to do with the men returning from WWI and WWII resuming their expected positions in society without ever really emotionally reconnecting to it.
But more importantly I got to wondering about how this research related to violent video games could be used to help the veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. If witnessing and participating in violence disconnects us from our emotions and inhibitions, how can we reconnect?
This is the part where experiences collide in my brain. Wondering about this got me to thinking about how a friend of mine once told me that one of the best ways to get her teenage son out of those frequent teen funks was to have him help in buying, making and distributing a bushel of baked potatoes with all the fixings to the homeless that gather on the front steps of our main library branch. I think we can all remember how isolated and emotionally distraught and disconnected we can feel as teens. But making the effort to help those less fortunate helped to reconnect this teen his community, pulled him out of his self-imposed isolation and lightened his mood.
I think we’re doing a much better job this time around with helping our veterans return to society both at the government and community levels. Could this idea of service to others be a further path to full reintegration? If observing violence decreases neural activity in the parts of the brain that deal with emotion and inhibition, could observing kindness increase that activity? If participating in violence further dampens the ability to emotionally connect, can engaging in kindness to others be the way to reanimate that activity? And if it is, how best to facilitate that?
But now my in-between time is gone and I must get to sleep.
I stumbled across a story about slinkies from the interesting folks at Radiolab the other day. I’m always amazed that a radio program can do an entire show about something as visual as a slinky. Though I guess it shouldn’t surprise me since I spent 6 years getting two high-end degrees writing papers about visual art. But I digress.
So anyway, it turns out that a slinky can do this amazing thing that you wouldn’t expect. When you hold it high off the ground by just a couple of the rings and let it extend to it’s full length, a bit of magic happens when you actually let go of the top. Well, the top does just what you would expect it to do. It starts falling. But the magic part is at the bottom. After you let go of the top, the bottom does…nothing. It just hangs there in mid-air with nothing holding it up while the top of the slinky races toward it.
I’m including below the great video they had at the online version of the show in case you don’t believe me. There’s even a scientist of some sort who was as fascinated by this phenomenon as the story writers and he works out the math and computer model for how this can be physically possible. So here’s the part where my in-between moment happened. As I was watching that computer model it struck me that the physical laws that govern the magic of the non-falling bottom of the slinky are probably the same ones that governed the U.S. housing crash and Great Recession.
Now I like math as much as the next person (well, OK, maybe a little bit more), but definitely not enough to work out proof of this theory. But here’s my reasoning. The computer model shows that the center of mass for the stretched out slinky is way toward the bottom. That’s were most of us in the housing market or general economy are. We rely on whatever’s got the top anchored to keep us from crashing into the ground. We trust that someone else is keeping their eye on that ball because we’re busy down at the bottom making sure bills are getting paid and maintaining the status quo of the bulk of the coils.
In the video you can see as the scientist runs the model forward that from the moment that the top is released the center of gravity actually does start to move downward, but at a sleeping snail’s pace compared to the top section. Something tells me that there were economists or banking experts or regulation gurus somewhere who saw that the top of the economic slinky had been released and probably made loud noises about it, but those of us at the bottom didn’t believe them (if we made time to pay attention to them) because we couldn’t feel anything happening. I mean, we’re seriously busy down here getting things done, right?
So, to the doctoral candidate looking for a dissertation topic, have at that math for me, OK? I’ve got to get to carpool line.
Thoughts from in between 