Several Brief Topics

Several Brief Topics

By John Taylor; 8 March, 2006

Yesterday we reviewed Jules Verne's "Paris in the Twentieth Century,"
which he foresaw as a time of commercial and scientific prosperity at
the cost of the neglect and degradation of music and literature. I
ended yesterday's book review with an evocative Leonard Cohen song,
"Everybody Knows." Verne and Cohen's pessimistic anomie, with
variations, continues into this century. It contrasts with the
Master's understanding of the last century as the precursor of an age
of wonders, the Most Great Peace, as well as the end of a very long,
very dark period of barbarism and unbelief. Here is what the Master
said in 1912 about the "radiant" Twentieth Century:

"As this is the radiant century, it is my hope that the Sun of Truth
may illumine all humanity. May the eyes be opened and the ears become
attentive; may souls become resuscitated and consort together in the
utmost harmony as recipients of the same light. Perchance, God will
remove this strife and warfare of thousands of years. May this
bloodshed pass away, this tyranny and oppression cease, this warfare
be ended. May the light of love shine forth and illumine hearts, and
may human lives be cemented and connected until all of us may find
agreement and tranquility beneath the same tabernacle and with the
standard of the Most Great Peace above us move steadily onward."
(Promulgation, 116)

Both pessimists and optimists march forward under a standard or flag
blazoned with "Most Great Peace" on it.

I do not have leisure to continue this theme as it deserves today, so
I will quickly comment upon some news stories.

Every day I peruse the world's greatest newspaper, the Most Great
Meta-Journal, Google News. It is endlessly fascinating to see how
identical information is twisted around and given clever headlines in
various world newspapers.

For example, lately a group of University of Utah researchers examined
healthy couples in their 60's. They found, perhaps not surprisingly to
a Baha'i, that couples who consulted in a friendly, kindly manner
tended to have good heart health. On the other hand, the bickerers and
verbal sadists were inevitably teetering towards cardiovascular
breakdown. The prize for the cleverest introduction to their report on
this study goes to Melissa Healy of the Los Angeles Times, whose
article is called "Try a little tenderness." She writes,

"You care about your heart, so you don't smoke, you eat a healthful
diet and you exercise regularly. Maybe you should also lay off the
negativity and controlling comments when you talk to your spouse."
(March 6, 2006 http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-he-capsule6mar06,1,377351.story?coll=la-headlines-health&ctrack=1&cset=true)

She reports that there is a clear gender difference. Women's arteries
clog when there is general negativity and hostility. Men's problem is
control (presumably they mean bullying or "manhandling"), whether by
themselves or their spouse. In either case, "a low quality
relationship," the study concludes, "is a risk factor for
cardiovascular disease."

I have always thought this. It is a Cohen "everybody knows" thing.
Everybody knows we say things that wound, and that the wounds count as
stress, and that we should watch what we say and try to be kind to
others, to ourselves and especially to those who are close to us. I am
sure that the main reason multiple relationships are more attractive
than stable ones now is that in the early stages one has to be kind in
order to be attractive, and that this euphoric kindness is addictive,
desperately needed. But that need not be the case.

I have always thought that marriage counselors are wasting their time
sitting back and listening to what couples say about each other. They
should be more like personal trainers, involved in day to day
transactions. They should record everything a couple says to each
other in a week and run it through a relationship analysis computer
program (admittedly such a program does not exist, but if we can send
mirv missiles to blow out dozens of cities on the other side of the
planet, we can do this) which would label every statement. Then when
they meet the relationship coach each would have a score for the week
to work with. The husband might have, say, 40 percent hostile
comments, 30 percent controlling, and 30 percent kind. Needless to
say, I am not saying that if the wife scores 31 percent kind, she will
"win" for that week. A good scoring system would chart their progress,
compare it with an average for couples of that age, and allow them to
improve their score in comparison with that. It would at the same time
measure their physical progress, blood pressure, etc., as a control.

I'd like to briefly review a remarkable documentary, strangely titled:
"9/11: The Filmmakers' Commemorative Edition." This is the result of
two French brothers who started out filming the story of a rookie
firefighter in New York, but then they ended up in the middle of the
collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. By some
miracle, the whole firehouse was spared. The documentary is cleverly
made because you can watch it from start to finish and you still have
no idea how these guys were not most, if not all killed.

These fire jockeys were used to the WTC, and would often visit it
several times on a single shift. They were checking out a gas leak
around the corner and saw the first plane hit; being the first on the
scene it seemed to be like a routine fire and they treated it with the
usual methods. For the longest time, the lobby was filled with people
frantically talking on their old fashioned walkie-talkies. The WTC's
own security centre had been destroyed by the plane. The whole world's
media was focused on the WTC but they were wandering around with their
privileged com-links with absolutely no idea in what grave and
imminent danger they were in. Lots of talk and no communication. The
camera shows one poor official trying to hail someone in the
elevators; he comments, "There are ninety elevators in this building."
Ninety of them! What kind of disaster waiting to happen was this
building? There is no way a building should go higher than 18 floors,
and even that is pretty insane.

It is only by a hunch, a bad feeling that the chief happens to feel
(as the number of crashing bodies from high above increases all around
them), that he hits upon the decision to abandon ship, a choice that
saved all of their lives. This is an amazing document and I recommend
it.
Here is another article about the benefit of knowing several languages
that may be of interest.

Better living through video games? Globe and Mail,

<http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060209.gtbrains09/BNStory/AtPlay/>
CAROLYN ABRAHAM, MEDICAL REPORTER

When he snags downtime from his schoolwork, Ryerson University student
Brad Evans gabs with friends, grooves to Kanye West on his MP3 player
and races virtual hotrods on his Sony PlayStation. All at the same
time. Before you assume gadgets and video games fry the minds of the
future, consider this: Canadian researchers are finding evidence that
the high-speed, multitasking of the young and wireless can help
protect their brains from aging.

A body of research suggests that playing video games provides benefits
similar to bilingualism in exercising the mind. Just as people fluent
in two languages learn to suppress one language while speaking the
other, so too are gamers adept at shutting out distractions to swiftly
switch attention between different tasks.

A new study of 100 university undergraduates in Toronto has found that
video gamers consistently outperform their non-playing peers in a
series of tricky mental tests. If they also happened to be bilingual,
they were unbeatable.

"The people who were video game players were better and faster
performers," said psychologist Ellen Bialystok, a research professor
at York University. "Those who were bilingual and video game addicts
scored best -- particularly at the most difficult tasks."

The York study, which tested subjects' responses to various misleading
visual cues, is to be published next month in the Canadian Journal of
Experimental Psychology. Three other studies published in the past two
years have also concluded that action video games can lead to mental
gains involving visual skills and short-term memory. No one is certain
how this translates to general learning or everyday life. But Mr.
Evans, 21, an aerospace engineering student, said years of gaming have
added valuable dimensions to his thinking.

"I grew up with video games, starting with Nintendo and SuperMario . .
. from the age of 8 or 9," he said. "I know it helps with my
dexterity; it's good for co-ordination and faster reflexes."

Prof. Bialystok suspects video gamers, like bilinguals, have a
practised ability to block out information that is irrelevant to the
task at hand.

"It's like going to the gym," she said. "You build up the ability to
control impulses with practice."

Brain-imaging research released this week shows that the physical
inability to silence mental noise is key in making the elderly prone
to distraction and poor multitaskers. That study, published in the
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, shows the elderly lose the ability
to power up brain regions, such as the frontal lobe, needed to focus
on a task, and to turn down activity in inner brain regions that are
most active when a person is in idle or default mode.

"You can't turn off the extraneous things . . . the areas involved in
thinking of the self -- 'What do I have to do? . . . Gee, I have a
really bad headache," said study leader Cheryl Grady, senior scientist
and associate director at Toronto's Rotman Research Institute at
Baycrest.

In contrast, the brain images of people between ages 20 and 30
displayed a far more dramatic see-saw effect activating and
de-activating regions as they shifted out of idle to task. The study
found this pattern begins to dull in middle age and actually results
in cognitive deficits beyond age 60.

Dr. Grady said the results suggest that the brains of today's youth
might grow up differently.

"Young people using all of these gadgets all of the time, at the same
time, it may actually make a difference when they're old, like
bilingualism does," she said. "We know that practice changes the
brain, as with playing an instrument, a motor task -- it makes
physical changes in the brain. Maybe those kids who play video games
and who are also bilingual will be the best of older adults at
filtering out distractions."

Neuroscientist Shitij Kapur, chief of research at Toronto's Centre for
Addiction and Mental Health, said "it would be quite reasonable to
expect that these teens are good at multitasking, because they grow up
in a world that demands it."

But, he noted: "Today's teens may be better than their grandparents,
but when they are in their 70s, their grandchildren will say, 'Hey, he
can only play three games at the same time and I play seven.' It's
relative impairment. Their grandchildren will not think any higher of
them."

Prof. Bialystok first noticed bilingual children were proficient in
blocking out irrelevant information about 20 years ago. When asked to
identify a grammatically correct sentence, for example, both
bilinguals and monolinguals are, by age 5, able to choose, "Apples
grow on trees," over "Apple trees on grow" as the correct one.

But when it came to asking "Apples grow on noses" versus "Apples nose
on grow," only the bilingual children were able to choose the right
answer. Although the first sentence is grammatically correct,
monolingual children could not get over its silliness. "That's crazy,"
they'd shout, "You can't say that!"

"We have been able to show on a huge range of cognitive tests that
bilinguals are always better at problems with tricky, misleading
information," Prof. Bialystok said.

On average, she said, monolingual children take a year longer to learn
to block out irrelevant information and focus on a specific task.

Skeptics have argued that this matters little since monolingual
children eventually catch up to bilingual ones. As well, children
fluent in two languages can take slightly longer in tests identifying
objects and also go through a period when they might have smaller
vocabularies than those fluent in just one language. But for anyone of
two minds about learning a second language, researchers are finding
that bilingualism -- be it in French, Greek, Portuguese or Hindi --
has lifelong benefits.

"Does bilingualism protect you from cognitive decline? Every study
we've done suggests that it does," Prof. Bialystok said.

The York team recently compared 94 bilinguals and monolinguals between
the ages of 30 and 80. It found that while both groups started showing
cognitive decline by age 60, the rate of slowing for bilinguals was
much slower. Now young people who play video games are showing this
similar pattern of high performance in resisting irrelevant impulses.
The current report compared 50 avid players against 50 non-players and
then subdivided each group between bilinguals and monolinguals.

When asked to describe the colour of the word "blue," for example,
when it is written in green ink, non-players were far more likely to
choose the dominant impulse and say "blue," though the colour is
green. "The [video game players] are much harder to mislead, to
trick," Prof. Bialystok said. Although Prof. Bialystok is a strong
proponent of bilingual education, she is less enthusiastic about video
games. Recent studies have found overexposure to violent video games
may desensitize children to violence and that gaming can become
addictive enough to distract from other activities.

"I'd still be plenty concerned if my child played them all the time,"
Prof. Bialystok said. "Sure, they're getting better at rapid search
and response problems, but I really would prefer my child read a
book."

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com