Jan 27, 2020 06:11 PM
(This post was last modified: Jan 27, 2020 07:04 PM by C C.)
Why procrastination is about managing emotions, not time
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/202...s-not-time
EXCERPT: . . . According to traditional thinking – still espoused by university counselling centres around the world, such as the University of Manchester in the UK and the University of Rochester in the US – I, along with my fellow procrastinators, have a time management problem. By this view, I haven’t fully appreciated how long my assignment is going to take and I’m not paying enough attention to how much time I’m currently wasting on ‘cyberloafing’. With better scheduling and a better grip on time, so the logic goes, I will stop procrastinating and get on with my work.
Increasingly, however, psychologists are realising this is wrong. Experts like Tim Pychyl at Carleton University in Canada and his collaborator Fuschia Sirois at the University of Sheffield in the UK have proposed that procrastination is an issue with managing our emotions, not our time. The task we’re putting off is making us feel bad – perhaps it’s boring, too difficult or we’re worried about failing – and to make ourselves feel better in the moment, we start doing something else, like watching videos.
This fresh perspective on procrastination is beginning to open up exciting new approaches to reducing the habit; it could even help you improve your own approach to work. “Self-change of any of sort is not a simple thing, and it typically follows the old adage of two steps forward and one step back,” says Pychyl. “All of this said, I am confident that anyone can learn to stop procrastinating.” (MORE - details)
How smart were our ancestors? Turns out the answer isn’t in brain size, but blood flow
https://theconversation.com/how-smart-we...low-130387
EXCERPT: How did human intelligence evolve? Anthropologists have studied [...] changes in brain size measured from fossil skulls. However, working with colleagues at the Evolutionary Studies Institute of the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, we have found a new way to estimate the intelligence of our ancestors. By studying fossil skulls, we determined how much blood – and how much energy – the brains of ancient hominins required to keep running. This energy use gives us a measure of how much thinking they did. We found the rate of blood flow to the brain may be a better indication of cognitive ability than brain size alone.
[...] In humans and many other living primates, the rate of internal carotid artery blood flow appears to be directly proportional to brain size. This means if the size of the brain doubles, the rate of blood flow also doubles. This is unexpected because the metabolic rate of most organs increases more slowly with organ size. In mammals, doubling the size of an organ will normally increase its metabolic rate only by a factor of about 1.7.
[...] Between the 4.4 million year old Ardipithecus and Homo sapiens, brains became almost five times larger, but blood flow rate grew more than nine times larger. This indicates each gram of brain matter was using almost twice as much energy, evidently due to greater synaptic activity and information processing. The rate of blood flow to the brain appears to have increased over time in all primate lineages. But in the hominin lineage, it increased much more quickly than in other primates. This acceleration went side by side with the development of tools, the use of fire and undoubtedly communication within small groups. (NORE - details)
Horror movies manipulate brain activity expertly to enhance excitement
https://www.utu.fi/en/news/press-release...excitement
RELEASE: Finnish research team maps neural activity in response to watching horror movies. A study conducted by the University of Turku shows the top horror movies of the past 100 years, and how they manipulate brain activity. The findings were published in the journal Neuroimage.
Humans are fascinated by what scares us, be it sky-diving, roller-coasters, or true-crime documentaries – provided these threats are kept at a safe distance. Horror movies are no different. Whilst all movies have our heroes face some kind of threat to their safety or happiness, horror movies up the ante by having some kind of superhuman or supernatural threat that cannot be reasoned with or fought easily.
The research team at the University of Turku, Finland, studied why we are drawn to such things as entertainment? The researchers first established the 100 best and scariest horror movies of the past century (Table 1 [see article]), and how they made people feel.
Firstly, 72% of people report watching at last one horror movie every 6 months, and the reasons for doing so, besides the feelings of fear and anxiety, was primarily that of excitement. Watching horror movies was also an excuse to socialise, with many people preferring to watch horror movies with others than on their own. People found horror that was psychological in nature and based on real events the scariest, and were far more scared by things that were unseen or implied rather than what they could actually see.
This latter distinction reflects two types of fear that people experience. The creeping foreboding dread that occurs when one feels that something isn’t quite right, and the instinctive response we have to the sudden appearance of a monster that make us jump out of our skin, says principal investigator, Professor Lauri Nummenmaa from Turku PET Centre.
Researchers wanted to know how the brain copes with fear in response to this complicated and ever changing environment. The group had people watch a horror movie whilst measuring neural activity in a magnetic resonance imaging scanner.
During those times when anxiety is slowly increasing, regions of the brain involved in visual and auditory perception become more active, as the need to attend for cues of threat in the environment become more important. After a sudden shock, brain activity is more evident in regions involved in emotion processing, threat evaluation, and decision making, enabling a rapid response.
However, these regions are in continuous talk-back with sensory regions throughout the movie, as if the sensory regions were preparing response networks as a scary event was becoming increasingly likely. Therefore, our brains are continuously anticipating and preparing us for action in response to threat, and horror movies exploit this expertly to enhance our excitement, explains Researcher Matthew Hudson.
The research was funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and the Academy of Finland.
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/202...s-not-time
EXCERPT: . . . According to traditional thinking – still espoused by university counselling centres around the world, such as the University of Manchester in the UK and the University of Rochester in the US – I, along with my fellow procrastinators, have a time management problem. By this view, I haven’t fully appreciated how long my assignment is going to take and I’m not paying enough attention to how much time I’m currently wasting on ‘cyberloafing’. With better scheduling and a better grip on time, so the logic goes, I will stop procrastinating and get on with my work.
Increasingly, however, psychologists are realising this is wrong. Experts like Tim Pychyl at Carleton University in Canada and his collaborator Fuschia Sirois at the University of Sheffield in the UK have proposed that procrastination is an issue with managing our emotions, not our time. The task we’re putting off is making us feel bad – perhaps it’s boring, too difficult or we’re worried about failing – and to make ourselves feel better in the moment, we start doing something else, like watching videos.
This fresh perspective on procrastination is beginning to open up exciting new approaches to reducing the habit; it could even help you improve your own approach to work. “Self-change of any of sort is not a simple thing, and it typically follows the old adage of two steps forward and one step back,” says Pychyl. “All of this said, I am confident that anyone can learn to stop procrastinating.” (MORE - details)
How smart were our ancestors? Turns out the answer isn’t in brain size, but blood flow
https://theconversation.com/how-smart-we...low-130387
EXCERPT: How did human intelligence evolve? Anthropologists have studied [...] changes in brain size measured from fossil skulls. However, working with colleagues at the Evolutionary Studies Institute of the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, we have found a new way to estimate the intelligence of our ancestors. By studying fossil skulls, we determined how much blood – and how much energy – the brains of ancient hominins required to keep running. This energy use gives us a measure of how much thinking they did. We found the rate of blood flow to the brain may be a better indication of cognitive ability than brain size alone.
[...] In humans and many other living primates, the rate of internal carotid artery blood flow appears to be directly proportional to brain size. This means if the size of the brain doubles, the rate of blood flow also doubles. This is unexpected because the metabolic rate of most organs increases more slowly with organ size. In mammals, doubling the size of an organ will normally increase its metabolic rate only by a factor of about 1.7.
[...] Between the 4.4 million year old Ardipithecus and Homo sapiens, brains became almost five times larger, but blood flow rate grew more than nine times larger. This indicates each gram of brain matter was using almost twice as much energy, evidently due to greater synaptic activity and information processing. The rate of blood flow to the brain appears to have increased over time in all primate lineages. But in the hominin lineage, it increased much more quickly than in other primates. This acceleration went side by side with the development of tools, the use of fire and undoubtedly communication within small groups. (NORE - details)
Horror movies manipulate brain activity expertly to enhance excitement
https://www.utu.fi/en/news/press-release...excitement
RELEASE: Finnish research team maps neural activity in response to watching horror movies. A study conducted by the University of Turku shows the top horror movies of the past 100 years, and how they manipulate brain activity. The findings were published in the journal Neuroimage.
Humans are fascinated by what scares us, be it sky-diving, roller-coasters, or true-crime documentaries – provided these threats are kept at a safe distance. Horror movies are no different. Whilst all movies have our heroes face some kind of threat to their safety or happiness, horror movies up the ante by having some kind of superhuman or supernatural threat that cannot be reasoned with or fought easily.
The research team at the University of Turku, Finland, studied why we are drawn to such things as entertainment? The researchers first established the 100 best and scariest horror movies of the past century (Table 1 [see article]), and how they made people feel.
Firstly, 72% of people report watching at last one horror movie every 6 months, and the reasons for doing so, besides the feelings of fear and anxiety, was primarily that of excitement. Watching horror movies was also an excuse to socialise, with many people preferring to watch horror movies with others than on their own. People found horror that was psychological in nature and based on real events the scariest, and were far more scared by things that were unseen or implied rather than what they could actually see.
This latter distinction reflects two types of fear that people experience. The creeping foreboding dread that occurs when one feels that something isn’t quite right, and the instinctive response we have to the sudden appearance of a monster that make us jump out of our skin, says principal investigator, Professor Lauri Nummenmaa from Turku PET Centre.
Researchers wanted to know how the brain copes with fear in response to this complicated and ever changing environment. The group had people watch a horror movie whilst measuring neural activity in a magnetic resonance imaging scanner.
During those times when anxiety is slowly increasing, regions of the brain involved in visual and auditory perception become more active, as the need to attend for cues of threat in the environment become more important. After a sudden shock, brain activity is more evident in regions involved in emotion processing, threat evaluation, and decision making, enabling a rapid response.
However, these regions are in continuous talk-back with sensory regions throughout the movie, as if the sensory regions were preparing response networks as a scary event was becoming increasingly likely. Therefore, our brains are continuously anticipating and preparing us for action in response to threat, and horror movies exploit this expertly to enhance our excitement, explains Researcher Matthew Hudson.
The research was funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and the Academy of Finland.