The story I’ve been told about the action of viruses is confusing me. They get into our bodies, take over the nucleus of a cell, and use our genetic apparatus to manufacture more viruses, which go out and do the same. What we feel during the course of a cold or flu is largely the result of our immune system, and that it’s possible that without an immune system, the first symptoms of a viral infection might be the faltering of some major body system–heart failure or delirium, for example, if the heart or brain became compromised. Why do we have such a narrow range of symptoms? Fever, headache, congestion, sore throat, vomiting, tiredness, cough, maybe losing our voice–that’s about it, right? But why is there any variation, if what the virus does is the same? Why do we get a cough with one flu and not another?
questions
October 18, 2009
Another Question I Would Like Answered
Posted by Nathen under immune system, questions, sickness, Uncategorized, viruses[6] Comments
June 12, 2009
Honors Thesis Posted
Posted by Nathen under honors project, perspective taking, power, psycholinguistics, psychology, questions, school, science, writing[2] Comments
I just posted the last two papers of my undergraduate career: my honors thesis, “Differentiating the Effects of Social and Personal Power,” and my research project for Psycholinguistics, “The Relationship between Clarity of Enunciation and Idea Density.” They are under ‘writing,’ which is under ‘out’ in my sidebar.
I don’t recommend reading them unless you are a researching these topics (in which case, I do recommend reading them). If you’re not used to scholarly writing, just read the abstracts–the first paragraphs. They tell you everything you need to know. It’s kind of funny that I just worked really hard for over a year on something that almost no one will be interested in reading. It was an astounding amount of work, comparable to making a record, from songwriting and rehearsing to mastering. And a lot more work than some records. This was not a punk record.
Well, since I just said not to read it after I’ve been posting about it for months, I guess I should at least summarize it. Here we go:
Social power is power over other people. Any kind of power. There is a lot of research on what having social power does to you, and it’s mostly bad: more stereotyping, less perspective taking, seeing others as a means to your ends etc. It’s the kind of stuff that might keep powerful people in power. Reading this stuff is pretty alarming for a feminist like me. It’s way more complicated than that, of course, but you’re getting the super short version here.
Personal power is power over yourself. There hasn’t been much research on its effects, just enough to suggest that it’s what people really want when they are struggling for power over each other, the real goal is self-governance.
I tried to test whether personal power has similar or different effects on perspective taking than social power. I was not able to do that, for complicated reasons. I was, however, able to find evidence that people consider personal power a broader category than social power. That is, you can sink to greater depths and rise to higher heights of personal power than you can social power. Second, I found that without a salient reminder of personal power, people did not make a distinction between social and personal power. That’s pretty interesting, because if people are out there trying to claw their way up the hierarchy, it may just be because they haven’t made the distinction between what they probably really want–personal power–and what they are working for–social power.
That may seem intuitive and like “why would you want to spend a year finding evidence for something so obvious?” but for a scientist, coming across something that seems obvious that hasn’t been tested is a gold mine. All kinds of obvious things have turned out to not be true. That’s one cool thing about psychology–it’s a baby science, so those unlooked-at areas are all over the place. There is only one other scientist that I’m aware of that’s looking into this subject too, Marius Van Dijke, in the Netherlands. Luckily, he’s got resources and will likely have much more traction on it than I could as an undergrad with one year to work and a $100 budget.
April 18, 2009
Mental Effort
Posted by Nathen under being kind to myself, psychology, questions, thinking1 Comment
What is the sensation of exerting mental effort? It takes energy to think and focus attention, but we can’t directly feel what is going on in our brains. There are no sensory nerve endings in there. I can understand why we feel tired after thinking a lot, but I don’t understand why thinking hard feels effortful in the moment. It really does, though. Some of the thinking I’m doing feels like pushing a boulder up a hill, except more confusing, and my body aches with it–more than I would expect from just sitting and typing and looking at notes. My only idea is that I’m unconsciously flexing muscles when I think, especially in my face, neck, and back, and that produces the sensation of mental effort. What do you think? I’d sure like to be able to apply my brain fully without flexing any extra muscles.
March 12, 2009
I had my interview for the University of Oregon’s Couples and Family Therapy masters program today. I think it went really well, despite sleeping through my alarm and waking up three minutes before I was supposed to be there. I was interviewed by two of the heads of the program, one of whom went out of his way to tell me that I’d done well on two separate occasions during the day. He had asked three questions: What does diversity mean to you? What does it mean to be sensitive to diversity? What is cultural competancy?
January 10, 2009
Another Question I Would Like Answered
Posted by Nathen under drugs, food, questions, science1 Comment
Is there anything like an established unit of anti-inflammatory power? How is the effect of anti-inflammatory substances measured? By looking at samples of more or less inflamed tissue after a dosage, or by asking, “So, on a scale of one to seven, how much does your head hurt now?” How much anti-inflammatory power, for example, does a teaspoon of ground ginger in my morning oatmeal have compared to 500 mg of aspirin? How about 900 mg of omega-3 fatty acids from a mix of anchovy, mackerel, and sardine oil?
If you know, please leave me a comment with the information or a link to where I can find out with a minimal amount of reading. I don’t doubt the existence of inflammation, or anti-inflammatory substances, or the importance of both. Most or all of what I’ve read and heard on the topic, though, has been marketing or parroting of marketing, so I wonder what we actually know.
Oh, and I have the same questions for anti-oxidents.
November 3, 2008
Is there any non-anecdotal evidence for or against any of the various food combining schemes? I mean the ideas that you’re better off not eating protein with carbohydrates, protein with other kinds of protein, fruit with other foods, or even any food with any other kind of food. I’d also be interested in anything solid on more complex food schemes, like Ayurvedic or Chinese medicine. If you know of any, please point me towards it!
Nathen's Miraculous Escape 