Homing Pigeons

I'm sort of a podcast addict. I regularly listen to several and one of my favorites is RadioLab, a science program on NPR. Over the weekend I listened to an episode titled "Lost and Found." They explored questions related to direction, how do we know where we are? I had recently read about a language in which directions were a key element. So you might say "Could you please move your chair NNW? It is in my way." This same group was highlighted in the RadioLab discussion. The people who speak this language develop this ability at an early age and seem to naturally be able to sense their direction at any point in time.

Something new for me, however, was a story on homing pigeons. How do they find their way "home?" Turns out we don't really know how their directional sense works. But, it works quite well. Scientists have tried a variety of experiments--anesthesia, turntables, frosted contact lenses--and still the best explanation is that they have some type of metal in their beaks that allows them to use magnetic forces to find their way.

So, why are they called "homing" pigeons? At the root of the story, for me, was the idea of finding your way "home." That for the pigeons this was a physical location, a place. We all know that home can be a more abstract concept, a feeling, a sense of belonging. How closely are those two tied? As someone who spent her whole childhood in one house, a house in which her father still lives, home as a very strong physical connotation. Going home means something very specific. I wonder what the sense of loss will be when that physical space is no longer available to me.

I thought I had resisted the notion that home needed to be a physical location. I wanted to think that "home is where the heart is," that moving to a new location didn't change my sense of home. Now, as my children leave home, I'm not sure how successful I've been at that resistance. I clearly identify my house as my home.

One interesting note about pigeons. They are monogamous, mating for life. One way to encourage a male homing pigeon to return home faster is to place another male in the cage with his mate. The husband, knowing that his mate is possibly taking up with an outsider, returns "home" faster than if his mate is left alone. So, maybe pigeons aren't so different after all......

Academically Adrift

I have not read this book, but it is certainly getting a lot of attention in academic and political circles. Written by two sociologists, Arum and Roska, the study uses data from the Collegiate Learning Assessment. This standardized test is given to college students in their first semester and then again at the end of their second year. The goal is to measure how much students have learned in 2 years of college. Their finding--students don't do much better in critical thinking, complex reasoning, or writing after spending 2 years in college.

What are students doing in college? Socializing and working it seems. At the same time, colleges apparently put little emphasis on these skills. As a professor I know that assigning work that will take a lot of time to grade gives me pause. There are so many other demands on my time, that I want to minimize the time spent grading. Does this mean my assignments are more simplistic? Perhaps.

A few questions I will want to investigate. Did college students in the past learn more? Have things changed? In the past colleges were more selective in their admissions and fewer students went to college. Did those students learn more, or did they come to college with those skills already? And, are these the skills we want college to emphasize? Are there other things college students are learning that are important?

Around the same time as Academically Adrift was released another study looking at writing in Texas colleges was published. That study found that students did little writing in their college courses.

I think about my own courses. I think the writing skills of students definitely improves over time. Most of my seniors are writing better than my first year students. But, I don't have a lot of writing in my courses. Maybe I need to think about increasing the writing components. I would like to find ways to increase complexity without increasing significantly the time I spend grading.

Too much news

This has been a busy week, first week of classes, getting ready for an NIH meeting, students back on campus, faculty meetings back on the calendar....and so many interesting news stories to choose from. Here are 3 that I'll talk about today or tomorrow:

The Tiger Mother, a book about extreme parenting
Academically Adrift, a book about how universities fail students
The death of Sargent Shriver

I guess I'll start with the last, because it is the one I have the least to say about. Shriver is someone I had only a passing knowledge of or interest in. I have always been fascinated with the ideas of the Peace Corps, but that was the extent of my background on Shriver.

The thing, though, that struck me this week was thinking of Shriver in his final years and his struggle with Alzheimer's Disease. In an article published in The Atlantic, Scott Stossel, author of a Shriver biography, describes a visit with Shriver. In the visit Shriver regales Stossel with a story about an author who is writing a book about him. Shriver goes into great detail about the project, the ideas of this biographer, and Shriver's excitement about the project. It is only after several minutes that Stossel realizes that Shriver is discussing HIM and HIS book. It is one of the frustrations of AD that some events are remembered only in part--Shriver knew a book was being written and details about it, but did not connect the man standing in front of him as the author.

I had a similar experience this week with a friend. He also has early dementia and came to meet me for lunch. But, he forgot that the lunch date was with me. Instead he came to my office asking for my help in figuring out who he was supposed to be meeting. At first, I thought he was talking about a lunch date for another day, afterall he clearly knew who I was. After going through some names, I realized that it was our lunch date he was trying to remember. He remembered lunch, remembered me, just didn't remember that the two went together.

My reaction was mixed. At the time, we both laughed at the mistake and went on to have a pleasant lunch. Later, I was struck to realize the extent to which he depended on me, and trusted me. It seems like a rather large responsibility.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/01/the-good-works-of-sargent-shriver/69677/

Walking

I love to walk. Certainly as a health researcher I am well aware of the physical and psychological benefits of walking and think long walks are essential. One of my favorite places to walk, because of its convenience and paucity of visitors, is a county park near my home. I very rarely encounter another walker there. I have a regular route I walk, consisting of a couple of big loops, one through the forest, one through an open field. I like the contrast between the two. The wooded trail is much hillier, but the trees, leaves, and stream are pretty. The field is more flat but you can see far into the distance, the view of the surrounding hills is interesting regardless of the season. I usually do the woods loop first, then the field, get the hard part out of the way early. But sometimes in the summer it is fun to go the other way, from the heat of the field to the cool of the woods. Either way, the transition is noticeable in terms of terrain, view, and temperature.

Transitions are part of our lives. Moving from hills to flat fields, from hot sun to cool shade. I've been trying to look at those changes like the changes on my walk, differences to be enjoyed for their stark contrasts, not new encounters to fear.

Mediterranean Diet

The Mediterranean diet has attracted attention for years for its relationship to lower rates of heart disease. It is one of the reasons for the surge in the use of olive oil in the U.S. and the increased consumption of red wine. The diet is heavy on fish, fruits and vegetables, and whole grains--all of the foods that are recommended by dieticians. Although the diet is high in fat, they are the "good" kinds of fat, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated.

As a graduate student, I almost did my dissertation on aspects of the Mediterranean diet. My advisor had built his career on studying the relationship between cigarette smoking and mortality rates at the national level. He was really pushing me to do a similar study with fish oil. I wasn't all that excited by omega-3 fatty acids and went in a different direction.

One of the problems with studying the effects of diet on health is that it is so variable and uneven. Nobody eats exactly a Mediterranean diet, not even people who live around the Mediterranean Sea. Still, there seems to be a high correlation between the elements of the diet and lower rates of heart disease.

Now, a study in Chicago has shown that the diet also is associated with better cognition. Those who most closely followed a Mediterranean diet had cognitive scores 2 years better than those who did not follow the diet. Another good reason for having a glass of wine when I get home tonight!

Santa Claus

Now that the Christmas season has passed it is safe to write about Santa Claus. During a holiday luncheon there was a discussion about children and when they stopped believing in Santa Claus. I was amazed when one woman mentioned that this year her daughter admitted that she no longer "believed." I did some rough calculations in my head, and said, "Isn't your daughter like 11 years old or so?" Turns out I was right. Could an 11 year old be expected to still believe in Santa? In this world?

I didn't think my sons every really believed in Santa. We never made a big deal of it--or of the Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, or other mythical creatures. I wouldn't say we went as far as the mom in "Miracle on 34th Street." We read lots of fairy tales, told stories, wondered at the magic of life and story. Still, I just couldn't get excited about creating this imaginary world of creatures who did good or evil things to kids.

I asked my boys about their memories of Santa. They admitted that they had, for a time, believed in Santa, but that they didn't remember any great shock when they realized the story wasn't true. It seemed a reasonable conclusion and a natural outgrowth of their maturity. They figured that by 5 or 6 they had lost their belief.

What purpose do those stories serve in our society? What types of myths do we continue to believ in about people, events, and motives?

What time is it?

When I was in elementary school I remember a teacher having us put our heads down on our desks and then asking us to sit up when we thought one minute had passed. I can't remember the pedagological reason for this exercise, it probably was just a way to keep us quiet for a few minutes. Some of us used the "1 one hundred, 2 one hundred" method of counting off the sixty seconds, others relied on their gut instincts. A few were able to hit the minute mark directly, but most of us missed one side or the other.

I'm sure we have all had the experience of feeling like time was either moving very quickly or very slowly. Last night in my exercise class the one minute of wall sitting felt like an hour, but the one minute of time I have for playing Bejeweled whizzes by. Why is that? How can we perceive time so differently when it is an objective measure?

Turns out our brains are not very good time keepers at all. I just read an article by Annalee Newitz in the Dana Foundation's Brain newsletter. She talks at length about the research on our ability to "tell time." Our bodies use an internal biological clock that doesn't run as consistently as an external, digital clock. So, while crossing a street may take 60 seconds, our body may register this as 50 "pulses" or 100 "pulses" depending upon what drugs (legal or illegal) we have taken to what other things we are paying attention to at the time. Our brains register these events as two different times.

With enough experience, we build up a probability distribution of these internal times. On average, our estimation of time will be accurate based on the normal distribution of times we have stored. But, sometimes we will pull from the distribution an outlier, a time that is out of step with the external world. As Annalee says, "Your intuitive sense of how much time something will take is taken at random from many distorted memories of objective time."

It reminds me of a quote I think I wrote about here once before, "decisions that people make for teh future are sometimes guided by erroneous evaluations of the past."

You have to wonder to what extent our predictions about the world and all of its components, are based on underlying distortions of some objective reality.


http://io9.com/5646561/how-do-you-really-know-what-time-it-is

Dementia care

Early in my career my research focused on family caregiving for the elderly. Since I was trained as a demographer, my interests were in how many caregivers an older person might have, where they might live, what services they might provide. Other researchers focused on issues of "caregiver burden," what it meant to be a caregiver and the stresses encountered. I was not particularly interested in those aspects of care at the time, and gradually my research moved away from caregiving altogether. I felt that there wasn't much new to say there.

Yesterday's NY Times had an interesting story about dementia care. The article highlighted an unusual approach taken by a nursing home in Arizona that attempted to provide individualized care for every patient. Surprisingly, they felt that by understanding the PERSON, they might be able to provide better care. They tried to find activities that appealed to the past hobbies of the patient, rather than playing bingo. For instance, one man who had loved to fish was given a plastic tackle box and tackle that he could arrange every day.

One of the features of Alzheimers is often a sense of distress and sadness. This is accompanied sometimes by behavior problems. Strangely, this nursing home found that creating positive emotional experiences for Alzheimer’s patients diminishes distress and behavior problems. It seems that emotions persist after cognition declines. So, creating positive emotions helps to create positive behaviors in those with dementia. Food, too, is critical. From the article, Comforting food improves behavior and mood because it “sends messages they can still understand: ‘it feels good, therefore I must be in a place where I’m loved,’ ”

As I start to deal more personally with the effects of dementia in my life, through family and friends, it is helpful to think about the value of positive emotional experiences in creating the best possible environment. But, then these messages apply to more than dementia, don't they?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/01/health/01care.html?emc=eta1