916 / NOTHING IS NEGATIVE

By / / Leave a Comment

The oddest thing about stress is that people are likely to feel stressed about being stressed. Stress happens when we are stretched beyond the elasticity of our mind– when we push ourselves or are pushed by circumstances to operate at the edge of our familiar limits. But stress can result from both bad and good events — being fired is stressful but so is bringing a baby home for the first time, said psychologist Lisa Damour who has written a book on confronting the epidemic of stress and anxiety in girls. Stress can have an inoculating function, leading to higher than average resilience when we are pitted against new hurdles. Equally oddly, people could feel anxious about being anxious. Anxiety is an internal alarm system, handed down to us by evolution, that alerts us to threats both external and internal. Anything that has evolved in us intrinsically must be an article in the survival kit. If a client is worried about an upcoming test for which she has yet to prepare, Damour hastens to reassure her that it’s the right reaction and that she’ll feel better as soon as she hits the books.

SNEAK PEEK

  1. Frog theme: One

It’s about our inability to react to adverse changes occurring too gradually to be noticed. If you place a frog in hot water it will jump out at once, but it will get boiled if you put it in cold water and heat up the water slowly. Which 1996 novel has a chapter on the boiling frog?

  1. ‘The Story of B’ by environmentalist Daniel Quinn
  2. Frog theme: Two

To protect the eggs and tadpoles from fast waters and predators, goliath frogs make little ponds at the edges of fast-flowing rivers — by digging hard and moving stones. Who stated that the heavy work may explain “why gigantism evolved in these frogs in the first place”?

  1. Marvin Schafer (Berlin Natural History Museum)
  2. Bottleneck in saliva

When mosquitoes bite us, they transmit only a tiny fraction of the enormous bulk of the malaria-causing parasites that they carry. The parasites hit a bottleneck along the escape route in the insect’s spit glands. Who has it that a study of this barrier can help us curb malaria?

  1. Cell biologist Deborah Andrew (Johns Hopkins)
  2. Milk and meat kill

The rapid increases in meat and milk production result in sharp rises in land clearing in tropical regions that house high levels of biodiversity. Who found that a quarter of the regions could disappear by the end of the century unless meat and dairy consumption falls?

  1. Dr Roslyn Henry (University of Edinburgh)
  2. DNA methylation

Fish holds more DNA memories than we do. If DNA is a large book, then DNA methylation is the handwritten notes in the margins of its pages. These notes almost entirely are removed at each generation in humans but are preserved in fish. Who made this fab discovery?

  1. University of Otago Anatomy PhD student Oscar Ortega
  2. Everyday hits, too

In football, big hits are what everybody talks about, but big hits are definitely bad. With their focus solely on them, the public fails to see what actually causes long-term damages in players’ brains. “It’s not just the concussions. It’s everyday hits, too.” Who reported this?

  1. Neuroscientist Brad Mahon (University of Rochester)
  2. Take it easy, kiddo!

Older and younger adults are not dismayed similarly by the same negative images shown to them only for a fraction of a second. It looks like older adults view their world with a filter that bothers less about negative information than younger adults. Who studied this?

  1. Briana Kennedy (Emotion & Cognition Lab, USC)
  2. Disfigured is bad

Beautiful is good! This stereotype prevails everywhere. People have implicit negative biases against those who have disfigured faces, without knowingly harbouring such biases. Who, through several tests, uncovered an automatic “disfigured is bad” bias in the brain?

  1. Anjan Chatterjee (Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics)
  2. Plastic in snow!

Microplastic particles can apparently be transported over tremendous distances and are later washed out of the air by precipitation — particularly snow. But if this is true, it raises the question as to “whether and how much plastic we’re inhaling”. Who spotted the new threat?

  1. Melanie Bergmann (Alfred Wegener Institute)

[ANSWERS]

  1. ‘The Story of B’ by environmentalist Daniel Quinn
  2. Marvin Schafer (Berlin Natural History Museum)
  3. Cell biologist Deborah Andrew (Johns Hopkins)
  4. Dr Roslyn Henry (University of Edinburgh)
  5. University of Otago Anatomy PhD student Oscar Ortega
  6. Neuroscientist Brad Mahon (University of Rochester)
  7. Briana Kennedy (Emotion & Cognition Lab, USC)
  8. Anjan Chatterjee (Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics)
  9. Melanie Bergmann (Alfred Wegener Institute)

QUIZ No. 916

  1. Who suggested that if some people cheat it’s because they have a propensity to cheat?
  • Dr Marco Palma
  • Roger Wolcott Sperry
  • Torsten Nils Wiesel
  1. Dr Marco Palma
  2. To the brain, information is its own reward, useful or not. Who found it in an fMRI test?
  • Ming Hsu
  • Andrew Fielding Huxley
  • Roderick MacKinnon
  1. Ming Hsu
  2. The season you’re born biochemically influences your mood swings. Who noticed it?
  • David Hunter Hubel
  • Haldan Keffer Hartline
  • Xenia Gonda
  1. Xenia Gonda
  2. Who did silkscreen paintings depicting Campbell’s Soup Cans and Marilyn Monroe?
  • Andy Warhol
  • Ksenia Boguslavskaya
  • Piet Mondrian
  1. Andy Warhol
  2. “Call me Ishmael.” Which classic piece of literature opens with these simple words?
  • Moby-Dick
  • Notes from Underground
  • The Catcher in the Rye
  1. Moby-Dick

Leave a Comment