The social life of trees

According to a very popular book by Peter Wohlleben (Das geheime Leben der Baüme) trees have a social life too: the news — long known to biologists — that trees in the forest are social beings. They can count, learn and remember; nurse sick neighbors; warn each other of danger by sending electrical signals across a fungal network known as the “Wood Wide Web”; and, for reasons unknown, keep the ancient stumps of long-felled companions alive for centuries by feeding them a sugar solution through their roots. [] Reading up on the behavior of trees — a topic he learned little about in forestry school — he found that, in nature, trees operate less like individuals and more as communal beings. Working together in networks and sharing resources, they increase their resistance. By artificially spacing out trees, the plantation forests that make up most of Germany’s woods ensure that trees get more sunlight and grow faster. But, naturalists say, creating too much space between trees can disconnect them from their networks, stymieing some of their inborn resilience mechanisms. Intrigued, Mr. Wohlleben began investigating alternate approaches to forestry. Visiting a handful of private forests in Switzerland and Germany, he was impressed. “They had really thick, old trees,” he said. “They treated their forest much more lovingly, and the wood they produced was more valuable. In one forest, they said, when they wanted to buy a car, they cut two trees. For us, at the time, two trees would buy you a pizza.”

Another look at creativity

The NY Times has an article Scientists Move Closer to Understanding Schizophrenia’s Cause. They found a clear correlation between a gene connected to pruning brain cell connections and schizophrenia. This gene is far from the only cause, but the correlation is clear. It also explains why schizophrenia usually start in late adolescence or early adulthood when pruning is strongest. Now creativity is often correlated with schizophrenia. So it would be logical to assume that this might somehow be correlated with pruning too. One theory of creativity holds that creative people have so much links in their brain that other people don't have. That would suggest that they have less pruning. However, my view is that the main thing that discerns creative people is not more ideas but less filtering. In that context it looks like that all those extra links in less creative people serve as brakes that make that ideas are rejected at an early stage because some objection is found. Another article (How to Raise a Creative Child. Step One: Back Off) gave another clue about creativity - that training hampers our flexibility: First, can’t practice itself blind us to ways to improve our area of study? Research reveals that the more we practice, the more we become entrenched — trapped in familiar ways of thinking. Expert bridge players struggled more than novices to adapt when the rules were changed; expert accountants were worse than novices at applying a new tax law.

To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This

The NY Times has a piece about falling in love ("To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This"). It builds on research by the psychologist Arthur Aron more than 20 years ago to let two strangers fall in love in his laboratory. The candidates have to sit opposite each other and ask each other 36 questions of increasing emotional intensity. After that they have to look each other 4 minutes in the eye. It is a quick way to build an emotional connection. And it seems to work - at least sometimes...

Are religious kids more selfish?

A scientific research discussed at Salon: Are kids from religious backgrounds really more selfish than their nonreligious peers?. Quote: Here’s the zinger: according to Decety and his colleagues, kids from more religious households are less altruistic, and more apt to deal out punishment, than kids from non-religious households. Corollary zinger: on the punishment front, Muslim kids are even more vindictive than Christians. The article is critical of this claim and comes with a whole series of arguments, such as the artificialness of the situation, the difficulty to define religiousness and the question whether you can generalize this experiment beyond its setting. I doubt those explanations. My guess would be that this has to do with group strength. People have only a certain amount of altruism. And when they are in a strong group they will spend more of that altruism inside the group and less outside. Religions bind people in strong groups. And that applies even more to minority religions like Islam and Judaism.

iHunching

In Your iPhone Is Ruining Your Posture — and Your Mood the effect of iHunching is discussed. In fact, there appears to be a linear relationship between the size of your device and the extent to which it affects you: the smaller the device, the more you must contract your body to use it, and the more shrunken and inward your posture, the more submissive you are likely to become. Ironically, while many of us spend hours every day using small mobile devices to increase our productivity and efficiency, interacting with these objects, even for short periods of time, might do just the opposite, reducing our assertiveness and undermining our productivity. Finally, the next time you reach for your phone, remember that it induces slouching, and slouching changes your mood, your memory and even your behavior. Your physical posture sculpts your psychological posture, and could be the key to a happier mood and greater self-confidence.

The funny thing about adversity

In the article "The funny thing about adversity" the question is discussed whether suffering makes people more sympathetic to the suffering of others. The conclusion: in general yes. However, when the other experiences the same kind of problem that the subject once had he will be less understanding than usual. Possible explanations are that suffering makes the subject more aware of connecting with other people. However, having overcome a specific type of suffering gives him the impression that it is not that bad.

Anorexia a habit?

This article (Anorexia May Be Habit, Not Willpower, Study Finds quotes a brain study that sees with anorexia activity in the brain regions that are related to habits. Neither psychiatric medications nor talk therapies that are used successfully for other eating disorders are much help in most cases. And research suggests that 50 percent or more of hospitalized anorexic patients who are discharged at a normal weight will relapse within a year. The researchers used a brain scanning technique to look at brain activity in 21 women with anorexia and 21 healthy women while they made decisions about what foods to eat. The anorexic women were more likely than the healthy women to choose low-fat, low-calorie foods, and they were less apt to rate high-fat, high-calorie foods as “tasty,” the study found. As expected, both the anorexic and the healthy women showed activation in an area known as the ventral striatum, part of the brain’s reward center. But the anorexic women showed more activity in the dorsal striatum, an area involved with habitual behavior, suggesting that rather than weighing the pros and cons of the foods in question, they were acting automatically based on past learning. [] B. Timothy Walsh, the senior author of the report, said the study grew out of a theoretical paper he published in 2013. In that paper, he proposed that for women who are vulnerable to anorexia, weight loss initially serves as a reward, eliciting compliments, relieving anxiety and increasing self-esteem. Over time, though, the pairing of dieting with a reward — weight loss — may result in the act of dieting itself becoming rewarding. This theory, said Dr. Walsh, a professor of psychiatry at the psychiatric institute at Columbia, might shed light on why treatment is more successful the earlier it is offered and less successful the longer the illness has been established. He predicted in the paper that as an anorexic patient’s dieting became more habitual, the dorsal striatum would become more involved. [] But he noted that activation in the dorsal striatum had been associated with other aspects of anorexia, like anxiety.