Saturday, September 18th, 2010
WYNNE PARRY, Senior Writer - Live Science
Stephan: This study has been published in the Sept. 17 issue of the journal Science.
The anatomy of your brain reflects your introspective capacity, or ability to self-judge the merits of your decisions, new research indicates.
The study found that people with stronger reflective, or introspective, ability appear to have a higher volume of gray matter, the outer layer of the brain, in the part of their brains sitting behind their eyes. This region is called the anterior prefrontal cortex.
This discovery fits with previous work that showed people with damage to this brain region had trouble assessing their own decision-making, even though their performances on a task were unimpaired.
‘In terms of looking at variation across a population of healthy individuals, our study is the first to say how [introspection] might link to structure,’ said study researcher Stephen Fleming, a neuroscientist at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London.
There was a second anatomical connection as well. Fleming and his colleagues also found a connection between introspective ability and the integrity of the white matter that connects with the anterior prefrontal cortex. In other words, better white matter was also linked with a greater ability to think about thinking.
Self-assessment
In the study, 32 subjects were given a series of choices. On a screen, they were […]
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Friday, September 17th, 2010
RONI CARYN RABIN, - The New York Times
Stephan:
People with chronic pain who took just a puff of marijuana three times a day got some mild pain relief and, with rare exceptions, did so without getting high, a Canadian study reports. (Yes, they inhaled.)
The patients, who suffered from persistent nerve damage that did not respond to other pain drugs, also reported better sleep and less anxiety, the researchers said.
The study is one of the first randomly controlled clinical trials to test the pain-relieving properties of smoked marijuana and of its active ingredient, tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, said Dr. Mark A. Ware, a pain researcher at McGill University in Montreal who was lead author of the paper, published in The Canadian Medical Association Journal.
Twenty-one adult volunteers, all of them with intractable pain, completed the trial, which compared three different formulations of marijuana with various concentrations of THC - along with a placebo version, a formulation with no THC at all.
Each volunteer was given a titanium pipe to take home along with quarter-teaspoon capsules of cannabis that they were instructed to open, tip in to the bowl of the pipe, light and then inhale, holding the smoke in their lungs for 10 seconds before exhaling.
The cannabis with the highest concentration […]
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Friday, September 17th, 2010
RON SCHERER, Staff Writer - The Christian Science Monitor
Stephan: Further evidence of the demise of the American middle class. Never in my lifetime has the long term economic outlook for the average American family looked bleaker.
NEW YORK — The deepest recession in modern times has sharply increased the ranks of the poor during the past year, with 1 in 7 people in America officially counted as living in poverty.
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The news from a US Census Bureau report released Thursday underscores how deeply the Great Recession has affected the nation’s standard of living. The key findings of report, which compared income, poverty rate, and health-care insurance coverage in 2009 with 2008 numbers, include the following.
1) Some 43.6 million people were living in poverty last year – the highest number since 1959, five years before President Lyndon Johnson declared his War on Poverty. The poverty rate was 14.3 percent, up from 13.2 percent in 2008 and the highest level since 1994. Hispanic households took the hardest hit: Their poverty rate rose 2.1 percent from 2008’s level, compared with a 1.1 percent jump in the rate for blacks and whites. (The US government considers an annual income of $21,756 to be the poverty line for a family of four.)
2) A record number of Americans, 50.7 million, were not covered by health-care insurance in 2009. At the same time the survey was being taken, Congress passed […]
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Friday, September 17th, 2010
Stephan:
WASHINGTON — Fifty million; 50.7 million to be precise.
If there is a magic number that will turn the tide of public opinion now arrayed against President Barack Obama’s health care legislation, could the latest dismal report on Americans without health insurance coverage be it?
In a border report on poverty, the Census Bureau announced today that the ranks of uninsured people reached an all-time high, rising from 46.3 million in 2008 to 50.7 million in 2009, or 16.7 percent from 15.4 percent the year before.
The increase was expected, given the economic downturn. It tracks with high jobless rates that have stayed stubbornly stuck at just under 10 percent and the fact that most Americans get their insurance through work. According to the annual report:
* The number of people with private health insurance dropped from 201 million to 194.5 million, while the number covered under government programs — Medicare, Medicaid and CHIP — climbed from 87.4 million to 93.2 million.
* The percentage of people with private coverage, 63.9 percent, is the lowest since 1987, the first year the bureau collected health insurance data. The percentage covered by government programs, 30.6 percent, is the […]
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Friday, September 17th, 2010
Stephan: Several readers have written to me asking why so much of the material I have published recently reflects a bleak vision of the future. Why don't I publish more upbeat material? In fact I try to. I search diligently for the pulse of positive trends. And when I find one I publish it. The problem is these occur principally in science, medicine, and the green transition, and are not embraced in governance, being displaced by ideology. The Schwartzreport is not what I wish would happen, but about the trends that are happening.
We stand at cross roads, every major social trend I see describes an America in decline, an America abandoning over two centuries of commitment to the creation of a vibrant middle class, which is the essential ingredient to a successful democracy. Why?
The very rich, as is always true, have the means to just do much as they wish; they do live in a different larger world. The poor in most systems of government, have a very small voice except in revolutions. It was the genius of the Founders to give voice to the poor by creating a mechanism encouraging the creation of a middle class.
Perhaps because their own family's immigration was still very much a part of their personal narrative they fully recognized that we are all immigrants -- and always have been. It is America's deepest chord. Everyone, including Native Americans came from somewhere else at sometime. Immigrants collectively creating a middle class by emphasizing upward mobility, is the impulse behind the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Benjamin Franklin saw this clearly, envisioning America as a land of upwardly mobile technologically gifted immigrants each aspiring to improve themselves. The American dream -- I can be whatever I wish to be, as long as I am willing to work for it -- is a statement of upward mobility.
The difference between one billionaire and another may be meaningful to them, but to the other 99 per cent of the country it is a distinction without a difference, and meaningless. To make a democracy work you have to a large group of people affluent enough to create small businesses, and employ people, but not so rich that they can accomplish all they envision alone. The middle class has an investment in stability and peace, and its members recognize from their own lives that social change occurs through joint effort. Rotary and Kiwanis, library guilds, youth centers, and local parks all exist as expressions of this intention. This is what has created the America we mean when we say America. And few trends now support this.
The only way these trends are going to change is if you, everyone of you who is an American of an age to vote, do so, and vote for life-affirming policies that help support a vibrant middle class. I publish these stories so that you will understand in objectively measurable terms exactly what is at risk. There are more of us who are life-affirming. If all of us vote we can change these trends to ones that are healthful, financially secure, and in harmony with the great systems of the planet.
VOTE!
-- Stephan
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