By now you are probably well aware I am a big fan of watching videos on TED.com.
Again I would like to share with you another new 'invention' in medicine from this hub of great ideas.
Just a quick note on who Dr. Quyen Nguyen is from her bio on TED.
"Dr. Quyen Nguyen's research (working with Roger Tsien, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry) is focused on the development of fluorescently labeled probes for molecular navigation during surgery. Their first collaborative effort yieled a "smart" probe that makes tumors margins fluoresce, or "glow" and thus easier for surgeons to see and remove accurately during surgery. Their most recent joint effort resulted in another type of probe that can make nerves glow during surgery, thus helping surgeons repair injrued nerves and avoid inadvertent injury."
Now I won't bore you with the details. I highly suggest you watch the video and hear about it from her.
One other comment I would like to add is that I am salivating at the prospect this type of fluorescent marker can be used both successfully in surgeries and also in education. For years, I have been learning from color-coded textbook images and they do not pay proper respect to the complexity of anatomical and histological structures. In one of my first clinical anatomy classes, I was shocked at the lack of fine detail in the vessels, nerves, and other histological structures. Now wouldn't be cool if you could walk into a clinical class, turn off the light and see the body glow?
The advances in science and medicine has come a long way in the past 100 years and as we move further and further forward with technology, there should be a general excitement about what we can achieve. I just hope I can still be around as long as possible to see even great advancements from the frontiers of science.
So as the new year rolls in, I am sure everyone is beginning to think about their resolutions. I am not a NY resolutions type of guy, but this year I have found reason to make one.
A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science by Sleiman and Gundel et al. (2010) was undertaken to determine the effects of 'Third-Hand Smoke' (THS) and what chemicals are formed in this process (the paper was extremely littered with technical chemistry and I had to read it over and over again to make sure I got the understanding right). THS is a relatively new term coined to specify the type of lingering residue from tobacco smoke. More on this to come below. Their study also mentioned another by Matt, Quintana, and Hovell et al. (2004), who looked at contamination of indoor surfaces from environmental tobacco smoke (ETS or more commonly known as second-hand smoke) and it's effects on infants.
These two studies particularly frightened me because I can relate to them on a personal level. I have been a smoker for many years now while at the same time doing so indoors (in the confines of my room with the door closed) and have an infant (my young sister) among the household. Many friends have cautioned me to quit and while I have tried on numerous occasions, I have failed with the same amount of frequency. But these studies... they've struck a nerve.
The study by Matt, Quintana, & Hovell et al (2004) looked closely at 'second-hand smoke' and how it reacted to certain chemicals in the air to become respirable suspended particles that are difficult to filter by the protective mechanisms of the nose and throat. ETS is found to deposit on surfaces such as house dust, carpets, walls, furniture and other household objects. From there, they can be ingested by just about anyone. The main concern of the study however, was to study how it affects infants in households with indoor smokers, outdoor smokers, and a control of non-smokers.
The researchers found households had nicotine in the air of the living room (both in dust and from surfaces) and bedroom for both the indoor and outdoor smoking group. The biggest concern of the researchers was that infants had a higher respiratory rate, lower body weight, and spent more time indoors than adults. They explained this increased their likelihood and effects of exposure to ETS.
The second study looked more in-depth at the chemistry and what happens to nicotine once it had deposited on indoor surfaces (Sleiman & Gundel et al., 2010). They looked specifically at how nicotine reacted with ambient nitrous acid (HONO) to form carcinogenic tobacco-specific nitrosamines (TSNAs). (At this point you probably want to stop reading because of all these acronyms but every time I use one, it is to emphasize something terrible).
To save your sanity because I really want to drive home a certain message, I won't detail everything. The basic results of the study found that TSNAs (bad stuff) was found in significant amounts on the interior surface of a truck driven by a heavy smoker. The ETS from sorbed surfaces when exposed to HONO formed extremely carcinogenic TSNAs that were still evident after two-three hours. Exposure of this has many routes including ingestion and inhalation of contaminated dust and skin contact with contaminated surfaces. This again is more dangerous to infants than to adults.
Now that I've got the minor details out of the way. If you've managed to read up to now and considered my personal situation you can see why these studies alarmed me. While I consider myself to be fairly knowledgeable about health, I honestly did not believe my eyes when I read these articles. To some it might seem like common sense (a friend told me this recently) but it is difficult to know exactly how significant common sense is sometimes. So my warning for those who do smoke and don't wish to give it up, be considerate of where you smoke and how it might affect younger siblings and others.
In part 2 of this, I will try to look more closely at the psychological effects of quitting smoking. Hopefully I can find a few effective ways to help myself and more importantly others who wish to quit.
P.S. I found an interesting poem in the blogosphere about smoking. I have no idea what is says though because it's written in Spanish. While I find this raunchy sketch and the Spanish language extremely sexy, I particularly hate the image of a female smoking. (If you're Spanish, please feel free to translate the poem for me with comments below because Google seems to have failed me for once).
Reference:
Matt, G.E., Quintana, P.E.J., and Hovell, M.F. et al. (2004). Households contaminated by environmental tobacco smoke: sources of infant exposures. Tobacco Control, 13, 29-73.
Sleiman, M., Gundel, L.A., and Pankow, J.F. et al. (2010). Formation of carcinogens indoors by surface-mediated reactions of nicotine with nitrous acid, leading to potential thirdhand smoke hazards. PNAS, 107, 6576-6581.
As I watched this video I was reminded of a quote by Thomas Edison:
"The doctors of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his patients in the care of the human body, in diet, and in the cause and prevention of disease."
I first heard the quote when I was a first-year student at university studying Chiropractic. My first ever job was also in a chiropractic and physiotherapy healthcare clinic (who later became more than just my employers but the best of friends) where the use of ultrasound was first introduced to me.
This video reminded me of all those wonderful years. I have been able to see first-hand what ultrasound technology can do in it's current limited use and application. To have been able to hear Yoav Medan talk about the advancement of this technology and the possibility of it treating so many different but critical conditions is another great victory for science and medicine.
I personally don't understand a lot about how it all works, hence why no explanation in words. If you watch the video, you can see for yourself.
And to finish, I want to leave you with another of Edison's quotes that sums up the potential for advancement in medicine if we can just embrace research and ideas:
"From his neck down a man is worth a couple of dollars a day, from his neck up he is worth anything that his brain can produce."
I haven't had much chance lately to write a proper new post due to some time constraints this week. I did however, come across this little beauty of a creation in the blogosphere and thought I would to reshare it with everyone. I initially came across it from Mind Hacks but the original can be found here by Sara Asnaghi. Clever little idea isn't it?
Anyone have food on their mind after seeing this?
I will be posting some new stuff soon so stay posted. Enjoy the rest of the week everyone.
As the title of this post suggests, I will be explaining your ability to make decisions.
Now this area of psychology is perhaps one of the most studied, beginning in 1848 with a case-study of a patient named Phineas Gage. This however, is not the reason I am so interested in this topic today.
The book Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking was one of the first ever popular psychology books I have read in my life (which is why I am reading it again for the third time). It is also one of many prominent reasons I love human nature. To quote an excerpt from this book:
Thin-slicing is not an exotic gift. It is a central part of what it means to be human. We thin-slice whenever we meet a new person or have to make sense of something quickly or encounter a novel situation. We thin-slice because we have to, and we come to rely on that ability because there are lots of hidden fists out there, lots of situations where careful attention to the details of a very thin slice, even for no more than a second or two, can tell us an awful lot.
What Malcolm Gladwell writes about here is something I referred to in one of my earlier posts, but today I want to dig deeper into this idea called 'thin-slicing' (which by the way is an awesome name for a psychological concept). Thin-slicing is the ability of humans to make decisions in the blink of an eye without being consciously aware of how and why they have made the decision. In most cases, if the slices are coupled with experience, it can be a powerful and accurate tool. The trade-off however (there always is a disclaimer with everything isn't there), the accuracy of these decisions are more often than not wrong for complex choices.
Another issue of thin-slicing raised by Malcolm Gladwell is the concept of being unawares of making these decisions. In situations, your ability to make decisions is incredibly fast and frugal with preciseness while your behavior in response to this decision acts accordingly yet you continue to lack awareness. One such situation was an experimental study done by Antonio Damasio et al. (1997). The authors describe the Iowa Gambling experimental procedure as:
In a gambling task that simulates real-life decision-making in the way it factors uncertainty, rewards, and penalties, the players are given four decks of cards, a loan of $2000 facsimile US bills, and asked to play so that they can lose the least amount of money and win the most. Turning each card carries an immediate reward ($100 in decks A and B and $50 in decks C and D). Unpredictably, however, the turning of some cards also carries a penalty (which is large in decks A and B and small in decks C and D). Playing mostly from the disadvantageous decks (A and B) leads to an overall loss. Playing from the advantageous decks (C and D) leads to an overall gain. The players have no way of predicting when a penalty will arise in a given deck, no way to calculate with precision the net gain or loss from each deck, and no knowledge of how many cards they must turn to end the game (the game is stopped after 100 card selections). After encountering a few losses, normal participants begin to generate skin conductance responses (SCRs i.e. sweating in the palms) before selecting a card from the bad decks and also begin to avoid the decks with large losses. Patients with bilateral damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortices do neither.
What the researchers found is that in normal participants, most were able to discern the "advantageous strategy" at roughly 10 cards but were considerably unaware of this until about 50 cards where they would begin to have a 'hunch' about it. It took till 80 cards before participants were able to express knowledge about the strategy (Damasio et al., 1997). This study suggests your brain has the capacity to make blink-decisions by thin-slicing and refuses to tell you about it except through galvanic skin responses. However, even at the unconscious level, behavioral changes for beneficial strategies are likely to occur thanks in large part to your brain being able to make these decisions quickly. Like in many behavioral instances, for your daily lives to run smoothly, your brain has to have the capabilities to do immense calculations for rapid-fire decisions while your awareness is catching up.
Other research, and particularly anatomical studies of Phineas Gage, have implicated the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (if you don't know where that is just give yourself a face-palm slap above the meeting areas of the two eyebrows). In behavior studied with Gage and other patients with prefrontal cortex lesion, they can be seen to have difficulties learning from previous mistakes which causes repeated engagement in decisions that lead to negative consequences (Sanfey et al., 2003).
So if you've ever banged your head against a table or a wall for not making the right choices for simple questions in a quiz or multiple choice exam, you are more likely to make the same mistake again if you continue to let a hard surface damage your prefrontal cortex. And if you are the type that loves to be right, well then I guess you should learn to trust your thin-slicing abilities and pay extra notice to clues from your brain to your skin. You never know, it might get you a few more correct answers in a multiple-choice exam and that all important P.
Talking of P's, Phineas Gage is an interesting story. View the clip below for more:
References:
Damasio, A.R., Bechara, A., Damasio, H., and Tranel, D. (1997). Deciding Advantageously Before Knowing the Advantageous Strategy. Science, 275, 1293-1295.
Sanfey, A.G., Hastie, R., Colvin, M.K., and Grafman, J. (2003). Phineas gauged: decision-making and the human prefrontal cortex. Neuropsychologia, 41, 1218-1229.
On Friday 2nd December, Marshall Mathers III, more commonly known as Eminem and Slim Shady, will be touring Australia for the first time in over 10 years. That length of time is close to the same amount of years I have individually been a fanatic of this strange and genius hip-hop artist. In this post, I will attempt to explain the genius that is Slim with a few concepts studied in psychology. To start with, I would like readers to watch this documentary video based on parts of his life over the past 12 years.
Eminem has been a polarized figure for most of his life. Even before coming to fame, the difficulties of living in the Detroit neighborhood without a father and a drug addictive mother has had a major effect on his personality and life to date. In a review titled Metaphorical Conceptions in Hip-Hop Music, Crossley (2005) describes the Hip Hop culture as "predominantly African-American" and rap music "is the principle medium for the expression of the worldviews of African American youth." Despite Eminem being a European American, his successful use of the hip hop culture to elevate his status has been an enigma. However, in the same review, we can find clues to uncover this riddle.
Crossley (2005) writes that rappers use metaphors to construct views about their lives. The constructivism concept states that "the objective world is not directly accessible but rather constructed on the basis of the constraining influences of human knowledge and languages where metaphors aids in creating reality." Within this concept, Eminem's success is largely based on his ability to incorporate wordplay and bending of words to build metaphors that depict the harsh realities of his life. As shown in the 60 minutes documentary, his genius can be found in the way he refuses to accept the constraints in use of words such as 'orange'. The quick-fire example he provides is just one of many underlying reasons that separates him from other hip hop artists. His ability to remain within a largely African American scene is grounded in his talent for using constructivism in a number of creative ways and doing so better than other artists.
In another view, Slim has been polarized and successful at the same time because he is consistent with much of the perspectives expressed by hip hop artists. Crossley (2005) states that "a part of hip hop's immoral philosophy finds its origin in the fact that the civil rights movement did not fulfill its promise on Black America." He goes on to say that the rap community realizes the inconsistency of "the Black urban neighborhoods as mythically emblematic of the distance American society has not covered in its effort to end segregation" Based on this, the metaphors portrayed in rap music can be seen to exemplify how African Americans have become disenfranchised with US power structures. Here, Eminem has turned the conceptual view of hip hop music on its head because he represents the non-African American group that struggles with civil institutions and systems. In the songs The Way I Am and White America, Eminem expresses this representation with simplistic and exquisite accuracy. This has allowed him to become the voice of those 'white' Americans who represent the difficult and problematic white neighborhoods.
To further discuss why I believe Eminem has been so successful, I now draw your attention to a study that looked closely at creativity in relation to intrinsic motivation and personality traits - openness to experience, self-efficacy, and perseverance (Prabhu, Sutton, & Sauser, 2008). In this study and many others before it, the authors found that intrinsic motivation has a positive relationship in mediating creativity (Hennessey & Amabile, 2010). Furthermore, they also found that openness to experience and self-efficacy (self confidence) were closely related to creativity and helped enhance its expression when coupled with intrinsic motivation.
Intrinsic motivation can be defined as an individual's intrinsic task interest which the authors propose leads to voluntary investigation of new alternatives and ideas (Prabhu, Sutton, & Sauser, 2008). For Eminem, this notion goes a long way to explaining his ability to be creative. As he explains it, he was motivated internally to succeed and become 'respected' in the hip hop scene. This motivation coupled with his belief in himself that "no matter how bad (he) was at school, no matter how low (his) grades were sometimes, (he) was always good at English." The self-efficacy and confidence he displays as well as his intrinsic desire to be good at his craft are strong reasons for his success.
In my opinion, Eminem is one of the greatest rappers of all-time (a true GOAT as they say). There can be many different explanations drawn to explain it, I have endeavored to list just a subset of what I believe makes him so great. In saying that, you don't need to read this to see how talented he is, all you would need to do is listen to this...
References:
Crossley, S. (2005). Metaphorical Conceptions in Hip Hop. African American Review, 39(4), 501-512.
Prabhu, V., Sutton, C., and Sauser, W. (2008). Creativity and Certain Personality Traits: Understanding the Mediating Effect of Intrinsic Motivation. Creativity Research Journal,20 (1), 53-66.
