ann1sunny

[ann1sunny]

❤️❤️❤️ It's days like this that I really miss being home. #happymothersday #bestmomever #throwback #candid #toocute

[ann1sunny]

A Southern California man built a miniature version of his home village of Hajiabad, one of a cluster of Armenian enclaves in Iran dating back hundreds of years. 

"It slowly came to my mind that I wanted something that I could really show my children and my grandchildren, where we came from," Tony Aivazian says. "I want them to know that in a way that was more than just paper."

More about his project, plus additional photos, here.

Photos: Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times

[ann1sunny]

hey could you hold this for me a second *gives you my hand*

[ann1sunny]

Scary.

Autoimmune Disease Acts Like Demonic Possession

Susannah Cahalan started feeling a bit off. Numbness on one side of the body, losing sleep, crying hysterically one minute and laughing the next. She went to get MRIs but they showed nothing. Things were getting a bit more strange.

Her boyfriend told her how at one point while they were watching a show together she started grinding her teeth, moaning, and biting her tongue until she finally passed out. He took her to the hospital and they found out it was a seizure. Her first of many. Things got worse.

She stopped eating, became paranoid and delusional, had more seizures in which blood would spurt out of her mouth. She was hospitalized (one nurse recalls that in the middle of the night while she was getting blood, Susannah sat up straigh and slapped her). Numerous tests were done and the doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong.

That is until Dr. Souhel Najjar came into the picture. He asked her to draw a clock. When she showed him what she had drawn he knew exactly what was wrong with her. All the numbers were written on the right side of the clock face, and no numbers were on the left side.

She had anti-NMDAR encephalitis. The receptors in the frontal lobe, responsible for cognitive reasoning, and the limbic system, or the emotional center of the brain, are under assault by the immune system. In other words, her body was attacking her brain. Nearly 90% of people that suffer from this go undiagnosed and it is more common in women.

SOURCE

SOURCE

[ann1sunny]

Brain baloney has no place in the classroom

If you want to make a neuroscientist’s head explode, all you need to do is confidently and triumphantly tell them that humans only use 10% of their brains. Or that right-brained people are more creative than left-brained people. Or that jiggling your head around gets more blood to the brain so you can think more efficiently. These are myths about the brain that have now been around for so long, it’s a wonder they haven’t had a congratulatory message from the Queen.

Unfortunately, because they’ve been around for so long, neuromyths have taken hold in a broad range of aspects of everyday life. Nowhere is this more problematic than in the education system. A new article in Nature Reviews Neuroscience this week has cast a critical eye on the issue, and reveals some worrying statistics about the extent to which brain baloney have infiltrated the beliefs of teachers around the world.

The survey, conducted by Paul Howard-Jones at the University of Bristol, asked 938 teachers from five different countries whether they agreed or not with a number of statements relating to popular myths about the brain. The results paint a picture of a global epidemic of neurononsense. In the UK, 91% of teachers surveyed believed that differences in hemispheric dominance could account for differences in preferred learning methods for students – in other words, ‘left-brained’ students think in a different way to ‘right-brained’ students. Among Chinese teachers, 59% agreed that we only use 10% of our brains. Across all five countries – the UK, the Netherlands, Turkey, Greece and China – on average, a whopping 96% of surveyed teachers agreed that students learn most effectively when taught in their preferred learning style (visual, auditory or kinaesthetic).

But why is this the case? Howard-Jones argues that there’s a number of reasons why neuromyths persist, but they essentially all boil down to inadequate communication between neuroscientists, educators and policymakers.

In particular, an ongoing issue is that neuroscientific counter-evidence to dodgy brain claims are difficult to access for non-specialists. Often, crucial information appears in quite a complex form in specialist neuroscientific journals, and often behind an exorbitant paywall – for example, the Journal of Neuroscience charges $30 for one day of access to a single article. And yes, ironically it’s worth noting that the neuromyths paper is, frustratingly, also behind a paywall.

Another problem is misinterpretation – particularly when it comes to neuroimaging studies. Without a proper grounding in how to interpret scans of the brain, images showing different areas ‘lighting up’ perpetuates a misconception that these areas are active but isolated from each other, with the rest of the brain inactive at that point in time. “To non specialists”, Howard-Jones argues in the paper, “apparently well-defined and static islands on one side of a brain are more suggested of a new phrenology than of a statistical map indicating where activity has exceeded an arbitrary threshold.”

And so we’re left with a situation in which neuromyths have largely been left unchallenged in the education system. But, at least there’s a spark of hope that this is changing. Both teachers and neuroscientists alike are starting to see an increased need for better communication. A new field of ‘educational neuroscience’ is starting to develop, in part bolstered by a 2011 report from the Royal Society looking at some of the implications of neuroscience within a teaching and learning setting. And teaching unions are eager to look at the possibilities for using neuroscience – they just need to be careful that they do so in an objective, evidence-based way.

Two things spring to mind that can be done immediately. Wouldn’t it be great if Nature Reviews Neuroscience dropped the paywall for this article, and sent it to as many teachers and schools as possible? Alternatively, let’s give teachers a core textbook of their own: Christian Jarrett’s excellent book Great Myths of the Brain, which came out this week. Required reading before thinking about neuroscience-based education policies. And yes, it will be on the exam at the end of the year.

By the way, if you want to make a psychologist’s head explode, all you need to do is ask them if they can tell what you’re thinking. Or ask them whether it’s a proper science. Just don’t mention anything about p values or replication.

[ann1sunny]

Somewhere on the brink of insanity, I fell in love with the idea of destroying myself.

- (via invisible-depression)

[ann1sunny]

Do not mock a pain that you haven’t endured.

Unknown (via organicafe)

[ann1sunny]

Louis C. K.

Estudio Javier Jaen

[ann1sunny]

I’m almost never serious, and I’m always too serious. Too deep, too shallow. Too sensitive, too cold hearted. I’m like a collection of paradoxes.

Ferdinand de Saussure (via swimminginwonderland)

[ann1sunny]

[ann1sunny]

The Psychology of Music

- by University of Florida. 

[ann1sunny]

Why You Need To Be Interesting

[ann1sunny]

THE LANDSCAPE-SCARRING, ENERGY-SUCKING, WILDLIFE-KILLING REALITY OF POT FARMING: THIS IS YOUR WILDERNESS ON DRUGS»

[ann1sunny]

Lol pretty much

When I thought I wanted to do Sports Law for like 10 seconds

[ann1sunny]

Things base and vile, holding no quantity, Love can transpose to form and dignity: Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind: Nor hath Love’s mind of any judgement taste; Wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste: And therefore is Love said to be a child, Because in choice he is so oft beguiled.

Helena (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act I scene i)

[ann1sunny]

But really.

Why is it attractive to be a reckless, dangerous, messed-up, tragic, dark man but not a girl?

[ann1sunny]

Just another reason why your past is important to your future!

Epigenetics: The sins of the father

The roots of inheritance may extend beyond the genome, but the mechanisms remain a puzzle.

When Brian Dias became a father last October, he was, like any new parent, mindful of the enormous responsibility that lay before him. From that moment on, every choice he made could affect his newborn son’s physical and psychological development. But, unlike most new parents, Dias was also aware of the influence of his past experiences — not to mention those of his parents, his grandparents and beyond.

Where one’s ancestors lived, or how much they valued education, can clearly have effects that pass down through the generations. But what about the legacy of their health: whether they smoked, endured famine or fought in a war?

Read more