Love it or hate it, sleeping naked hits different. Not only is it less laundry to wash, but taking off those pajamas can do wonders for your health. While you may feel self-conscious at first, the openness of resting in the nude can actually boost your confidence and help you look your best self. 

There’s no right or wrong way to get ready for bed—it’s all a matter of preference. And while nakedness won’t miraculously cure all your sleep problems, experts say there are some modest benefits to going au naturel.

1. Younger-looking skin 

James Walker, a medical advisor for the healthcare platform Welzo, says sleeping without clothes gives your skin an opportunity to breathe, allowing for better airflow. He explains that clothes, especially tight-fitting ones, can restrict blood circulation, making it harder for your skin to receive vitamins and minerals needed for collagen production. Certain materials also might add to your discomfort in bed. Aditya Kashyap Mishra, a sex educator and relationship expert for Lustyboy, says synthetic fibers like spandex and nylon trap moisture in your skin—the added heat can make it hard to fall asleep. Other synthetic fabrics and pajamas with dyed cotton may cause skin irritation and acne from the fabric rubbing against you.

[Related: 5 surprising beauty benefits of running]

Tossing and turning from wearing the wrong clothing can affect your quality of sleep and your skin. The body makes collagen during sleep, which is essential for supple and younger-looking skin. Research shows that getting less than the recommended seven hours of sleep for adults increases skin aging and slows down recovery from sun damage.

2. A cooldown for your body

As you might expect, sleeping with your skin exposed helps regulate your temperature at night, says Walker. The drop in body temperature can prevent overheating—a real concern in summer and in places where winter is virtually non-existent. Research shows that feeling extremely hot at night increases wakefulness. Even if you manage to land some shut-eye, it will likely be less restorative with shorter cycles of slow-wave sleep and REM sleep. 

Feeling colder, on the other hand, can also help you fall asleep faster. Your body temperature is synced up with the light-dark cycles outside; it normally falls when the sun goes down. A lower body temperature from sleeping nude tells your biological clock it’s time to shut down.

3. Fewer fungal infections

Fungi and bacteria thrive in warm and damp areas like your nether regions. Mishra explains that trapped sweat from moisture-wicking clothing increases the risk of microorganisms building up, resulting in yeast infections and jock itch. Jock itch can also come from constant friction from clothes. Stripping down to nothing will allow more air circulation and keep your intimate parts from getting overheated.

4. Better emotional intimacy

Skin-to-skin contact between partners can strengthen your relationship. Research shows touching among consenting adults releases the “love hormone” called oxytocin. This chemical reduces stress and encourages openness and social bonding with others. One US marketing poll of more than 1,000 adults found that 57 percent of couples who regularly snoozed in the nude were happy in their relationship compared to 48 percent of pajama wearers. Getting used to baring it all in front of a partner can counteract self-consciousness of how you look in bed. Mishra says this openness is a huge stress reliever, and the added relaxation can help you sleep better.

What if you want to sleep in clothes?

If you’re still not convinced about sleeping naked, there are other ways to improve your slumber. Avoid tight or constricting apparel that would restrict your movement, irritate your skin, or otherwise cause discomfort. Walker recommends going to bed in loose-fitting and breathable fabrics like cotton or bamboo, or one simple layer like an oversized T-shirt and shorts to avoid overheating.

[Related: 11 ways to sleep better in unbearable heat]

There’s nothing wrong with slipping on a pair of socks before bed, Walker adds. Some people find it comforting and helpful in keeping their feet warm, especially during colder seasons. However, he warns against sleeping in socks that are too tight as they could restrict circulation. 

Whether you go to bed nude or in clothes, you should always remove your makeup and any heavy jewelry. Snoozing with makeup on can clog pores and lead to future breakouts. “It’s best to cleanse the face thoroughly before sleeping to allow the skin to breathe and regenerate,” advises Walker. Additionally, laying down in chunky necklaces, bangles, and other jewelry can be painful and might even leave abrasions on the skin.

“Ultimately, the key is to prioritize comfort and choose sleepwear that allows for optimal relaxation,” Walker says. “It’s always a good idea to listen to your body and make choices that help you feel comfortable and at ease during sleep.”

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Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface company Neuralink announced on Thursday evening that it has received FDA approval to begin conducting human trials. News of the major step arrives after years of research and numerous regulatory hurdles, as well as multiple investigations into potential safety and animal ethics violations.

“This is the result of incredible work by the Neuralink team in close collaboration with the FDA and represents an important first step that will one day allow our technology to help many people,” Neuralink wrote via its Twitter account on Thursday evening, with Musk retweeting the message alongside his congratulations.

[Related: Elon Musk hopes humans will test Neuralink brain implants in the next six months.]

Neuralink aims to create a line of computer implants that connect directly with users’ brains, initially in order to restore patients’ vision and help those with a “Stephen Hawking-type [neurological] situation,” explained Musk during a Neuralink presentation last November. For the majority of his life, Hawking suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which ultimately resulted in a near total body paralysis.

Neuralink first released footage in 2019 of a successful interfacing with rat test subjects. The company subsequently moved on to similar implants for sheep, pigs, and monkeys. In 2021, the company released footage of one of its test macaques playing Pong via a prototype “brain-machine interface.” Late last year, however, an exposé from Reuters revealed the company was under a federal investigation stemming from “internal staff complaints” regarding alleged animal-welfare violations, some of which pertained to over alleged 1,500 dead test subjects. Shortly thereafter, another report via Reuters indicated the FDA had rebuffed the company’s initial requests to begin human test trials, citing concerns over devices potentially overheating, as well as the possibility of damaging brain tissue upon implant removal.

[Related: Employees say Neuralink’s ‘hack job’ tests killed roughly 1,500 animals since 2018.]

As The Verge and DigitalTrends noted on Thursday, Neuralink is not the first company to receive regulatory greenlight on human brain-computer interface trials. Earlier this year, a company called Synchron—backed by the likes of Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates—announced it had successfully implanted their “Stentrode” neuroprosthesis device in four human subjects. BrainGate’s device has also previously allowed a paralyzed man to convert his imagined handwriting into text to communicate.

Per Neuralink, recruitment is not yet open for clinical trials, but the company promised “more information on this soon.” Last November, Musk stated during a company show-and-tell that “You could have a Neuralink device implanted right now and you wouldn’t even know,” adding that, “ Hypothetically in one of these demos, in fact… I will.”

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Following a similar report issued by the American Psychological Association (APA) earlier this month, the US Surgeon General released an advisory statement on Tuesday warning of social media platforms’ potentially harmful effects on minors.

While cautioning more research is still needed to understand the full scope of social media’s impact on children, adolescents, and teens, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s office makes clear they believe “ample indicators” show social media can represent a “profound risk of harm to [their] mental health and well-being.”

“We are in the middle of a national youth mental health crisis, and I am concerned that social media is an important driver of that crisis—one that we must urgently address,” Murthy said in a statement this week, citing the “growing evidence” supporting their worry. In one such study referenced, adolescents who spend over 3 hours per day on social media faced double the risk of mental health issues such as symptoms of anxiety and depression. Additional research cited by the Surgeon General’s report points towards particular harm for girls, who face cyberbullying and body-image issues.

[Related: APA releases youth social media guidelines.]

“At this time, we do not yet have enough evidence to determine if social media is sufficiently safe for children and adolescents,” the advisory states.

At the same time, the advisory statement makes it clear that children and adolescents utilize and are influenced by social media in vastly varying ways. The ways children are impacted by social media are often based on their particularly emotional and psychological strengths and vulnerabilities, as well as cultural, historical, and socio-economic factors. Some of these experiences on social media can prove beneficial, such as offering spaces for community and connection with like-minded individuals sharing “identities, abilities, and interests,” alongside offering access to important information and spaces for self-expression.

As The New York Times noted on Thursday, social media has also proven especially helpful to children and teens within the LGBTQ+ community. “[A] variety of research over the decade since social media became ubiquitous among teenagers has found that often, social media use has been more beneficial than not for LGBTQ youth,” the article states.

A Surgeon General’s advisory does not carry any legal weight, but often serves as a public statement calling attention to a health issue alongside subsequent recommendations for policymakers, businesses, and the public. Among other suggestions, the Surgeon General’s office urges lawmakers to enact legislation ensuring tech companies share relevant health impact data to independent researchers and the public “in a manner that is timely, sufficiently detailed, and protects privacy.”

Additionally, the report recommends the development and implementation of digital and media literacy curricula in schools, as well as encouraging policies that “further limit access—in ways that minimize the risk of harm—to social media for all children.”

[Related: How to use built-in parental controls on Instagram, TikTok, and more.]

Meanwhile, businesses such as Meta, Twitter, and TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, are pushed to maintain a proper level of transparency about their own internal research and methods for developing products used by minors—something that’s frequently proven difficult to realize. Parents are also strongly encouraged to discuss, educate, and monitor their children’s social media habits.

Earlier this month, the American Psychological Association released its first-ever health advisory report on youth and adolescent social media usage, which spoke broadly of potential developmental effects stemming from experiences on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. The APA’s 11-page outline described these apps as “not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people,” but stressed it was rather how minors used the apps that influenced them.

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This article was originally featured on KFF Health News.

In the past few years, 10,000 to 20,000 apps have stampeded into the mental health space, offering to “disrupt” traditional therapy. With the frenzy around AI innovations like ChatGPT, the claim that chatbots can provide mental health care is on the horizon.

The numbers explain why: Pandemic stresses led to millions more Americans seeking treatment. At the same time, there has long been a shortage of mental health professionals in the United States; more than half of all counties lack psychiatrists. Given the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that insurers offer parity between mental and physical health coverage, there is a gaping chasm between demand and supply.

For entrepreneurs, that presents a market bonanza. At the South by Southwest conference in March, where health startups displayed their products, there was a near-religious conviction that AI could rebuild health care, offering apps and machines that could diagnose and treat all kinds of illnesses, replacing doctors and nurses.

Unfortunately, in the mental health space, evidence of effectiveness is lacking. Few of the many apps on the market have independent outcomes research showing they help; most haven’t been scrutinized at all by the FDA. Though marketed to treat conditions such as anxiety, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and depression, or to predict suicidal tendencies, many warn users (in small print) that they are “not intended to be medical, behavioral health or other healthcare service” or “not an FDA cleared product.”

There are good reasons to be cautious in the face of this marketing juggernaut.

Decades ago, Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and considered one of the fathers of artificial intelligence, predicted AI would never make a good therapist, though it could be made to sound like one. In fact, his original AI program, created in the 1960s, was a psychotherapist named ELIZA, which used word and pattern recognition combined with natural language programming to sound like a therapist:

Woman: Well, my boyfriend made me come here.

ELIZA: Your boyfriend made you come here?

Woman: He says I’m depressed much of the time.

ELIZA: I am sorry to hear that you are depressed.

Woman: It’s true. I am unhappy.

ELIZA: Do you think coming here will help you not to be unhappy?

Though hailed as an AI triumph, ELIZA’s “success” terrified Weizenbaum, whom I once interviewed. He said students would interact with the machine as if Eliza were an actual therapist, when what he’d created was “a party trick,” he said.

He foresaw the evolution of far more sophisticated programs like ChatGPT. But “the experiences a computer might gain under such circumstances are not human experiences,” he told me. “The computer will not, for example, experience loneliness in any sense that we understand it.”

The same goes for anxiety or ecstasy, emotions so neurologically complex that scientists have not been able pinpoint their neural origins. Can a chatbot achieve transference, the empathic flow between patient and doctor that is central to many types of therapy?

“The core tenet of medicine is that it’s a relationship between human and human — and AI can’t love,” said Bon Ku, director of the Health Design Lab at Thomas Jefferson University and a pioneer in medical innovation. “I have a human therapist, and that will never be replaced by AI.”

Ku said he’d like to see AI used instead to reduce practitioners’ tasks like record-keeping and data entry to “free up more time for humans to connect.”

While some mental health apps may ultimately prove worthy, there is evidence that some can do harm. One researcher noted that some users faulted these apps for their “scripted nature and lack of adaptability beyond textbook cases of mild anxiety and depression.”

It may prove tempting for insurers to offer up apps and chatbots to meet the mental health parity requirement. After all, that would be a cheap and simple solution, compared with the difficulty of offering a panel of human therapists, especially since many take no insurance because they consider insurers’ payments too low.

Perhaps seeing the flood of AI hitting the market, the Department of Labor announced last year it was ramping up efforts to ensure better insurer compliance with the mental health parity requirement.

The FDA likewise said late last year it “intends to exercise enforcement discretion” over a range of mental health apps, which it will vet as medical devices. So far, not one has been approved. And only a very few have gotten the agency’s breakthrough device designation, which fast-tracks reviews and studies on devices that show potential.

These apps mostly offer what therapists call structured therapy — in which patients have specific problems and the app can respond with a workbook-like approach. For example, Woebot combines exercises for mindfulness and self-care (with answers written by teams of therapists) for postpartum depression. Wysa, another app that has received a breakthrough device designation, delivers cognitive behavioral therapy for anxiety, depression, and chronic pain.

But gathering reliable scientific data about how well app-based treatments function will take time. “The problem is that there is very little evidence now for the agency to reach any conclusions,” said Kedar Mate, head of the Boston-based Institute for Healthcare Improvement.

Until we have that research, we don’t know whether app-based mental health care does better than Weizenbaum’s ELIZA. AI may certainly improve as the years go by, but at this point, for insurers to claim that providing access to an app is anything close to meeting the mental health parity requirement is woefully premature.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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Forging strong social relationships can help mitigate the effects of traumatic childhood events in human adults, but also in baboons. A study published May 17 in the journal Science Advances drew on 36 years of data from almost 200 baboons in southern Kenya and found that even though early adversity can take years of their lifespans, stronger social bonds in adulthood can help get these years back. 

[Related: Baboon poop shows how chronic stress shortens lives.]

“It’s like the saying from the King James Apocrypha, ‘a faithful friend is the medicine of life,’” co-author and Duke University biologist and evolutionary anthropologist Susan Alberts said in a statement.

Studies have consistently found that people who go through more bad experiences growing up, such as neglect or abuse,  are more likely to die early. However, the mechanisms behind how early adversity leads to a premature death has been harder for researchers to pin down, according to Alberts. Some of the limitations to earlier research is the reliance on self-reported memories which can be imprecise and subjective. 

Enter our primate cousins. Baboons share more than 90 percent of their DNA with humans and researchers have followed individual baboons near Amboseli National Park in Kenya since 1971. 

In this new study, the researchers analyzed how early life experiences and adult social connections affected long-term survival in 199 female baboons between 1983 and 2019.

Baboon childhood is certainly different from human childhood, but young baboons still face hardships. The team in the study tallied up each female’s exposure to six potential sources of early adversity, including whether she had a low-ranking or socially isolated mother or if her mother died before she reached maturity. It was also noted if she was born in a drought year or into a large group, and if she had a sibling close in age, which could contribute to more competition for both maternal attention and resources.

The team found that stressful experiences are very common for the baboons growing up in the semi-arid and unpredictable landscape of Amboseli. Of the 199 baboons in the study, 75 percent suffered through at least one stressor, and 33 percent had two or more.

Their results confirm previous findings that the more hardship a female baboon faces, the shorter her lifespan. Monkeys who experienced more upheaval at a young age were also more socially isolated as adults.

[Related: Monkeys with close friends have friendlier gut bacteria.]

However, the researchers showed that 90 percent of the dip in survival was due to the direct effects of early adversity, not to the weakened social bonds that continued into adulthood.

No matter how strong their bonds were with other baboons, each additional hardship translated to 1.4 years of life lost. Those who went through four bad experiences growing up died close to 5.6 years earlier than those who didn’t face any. Since the average female baboon lives to age 18, this is a large drop in lost years.

But an unfortunate start in life does not mean that a baboon will absolutely live a short life. 

“Females who have bad early lives are not doomed,” co-author and biologist at SUNY Oswego Elizabeth Lange said in a statement. “We found that both early life adversity and adult social interactions affect survival independently. That means that interventions that occur throughout the lifespan could improve survival.”

In baboons, strong social bonds are measured by how often they groom with their closest friends. Those with strong social bonds added 2.2 years to their lives, no matter what adversity they had faced in their earlier years. The baboons whose mothers died before they reached maturity and then forged strong friendships in adulthood showed the best ability to bounce back. 

However, the flip side is also true. Weak social bonds can magnify early life adversity, according to the study. 

It is not clear yet if these results can be translated to adult humans, but it suggests that early intervention is not the only way to overcome childhood trauma and its lingering effects. 

“If you did have early life adversity, whatever you do, try to make friends,” Alberts said.

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One of the leading US mental health organizations, the American Psychological Association (APA), has issued its first ever health advisory report on social media usage for youth and adolescents. Published on Tuesday, the 11-page brief speaks in broad terms regarding the habits of children and teens on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter, describing them as “not inherently beneficial or harmful to young people.” Rather, the APA argues social media’s influences on minors are only part of a much wider, complex array of factors, and “likely depend on what teens can do and see online, teens’ pre-existing strengths or vulnerabilities, and the contexts in which they grow up.”

In short, the APA reiterates that, like every other aspect of psychological development, it’s difficult to pinpoint and quantify any single influence on an individual’s brain evolution. Instead, the association focuses on two major contributors to how social media can potentially affect younger users—parental oversight and awareness, as well as a platform’s own algorithmic structures.

[Related: Twitter may soon purge ‘inactive’ accounts.]

The APA recommends parents regularly review and discuss their children’s social media usage, particularly during early adolescence—usually defined as between 10- and 14-years-old. Educating children and teens on social media literacy and usage alongside fostering healthy online habits and relationships are also considered key methods of maintaining a safe experience on platforms like TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Meanwhile, the APA stresses the responsibility does not rest solely on minors’ parents. The advisory’s authors note that the tech companies’ algorithms determining how, when, and why users see certain content are built upon “centuries of racist policy and discrimination encoded.” Social media therefore often becomes an “incubator” of these inherent biases, and which can  introduce and exacerbate extremist socio-political and racist ideals. “The resulting potential impact is far reaching, including physical violence offline, as well as threats to well-being,” adds the APA.

Speaking to PopSci, Jeremy Birnholtz, a professor of communication studies at Northwestern University focusing on LGBTQ+ adolescent social media usage and the head of the school’s Social Media Lab, says he believes the APA’s “measured document” is a step in the right direction, but argues some of the guidelines are potentially difficult to follow for parents.

[Related: Is shyness something kids feel, or something kids are?]

In one section of the report, for example, the APA advises limiting the amount of time younger users spend comparing themselves to others the see on social media, “particularly around beauty- or appearance-related content,” pointing towards its potentially influence on “poorer body image, disordered eating, and depressive symptoms, particularly among girls.”

“The guideline is ‘teens should avoid using social media for social comparison.’ And it’s like, well, what does that mean? You shouldn’t look at your friends’ vacation photos? You shouldn’t follow the influencers that all your friends follow? I don’t think that’s realistic,” says Birnholtz.

Like the APA’s report, Birnholtz also argues social media’s negative effects are often symptomatic of broader, real world issues. Racism can be baked into social media—while that’s true, it’s also baked into society,” they say of platforms’ algorithmic biases. “Certain things like social comparison, no question, can be exacerbated by social media. But to suggest that they are a function of [it] is problematic, I think.”

Birnholtz goes on to explain that while it’s vital to take the APA’s suggestions into account, it’s important to remember the origins of many social media issues. “You’re detaching problems with social media from the problems that they represent in the broader society,” says Birnholtz. “You can fix it on social media, but as long as it’s in the [real world], you’re not going to fix it.”

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There are countless studies and copious amounts of research delving into how the internet can negatively impact your mind. But, new data indicates that there’s one way online time could actually benefit the brain. According to findings recently published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society from a team at NYU, it appears that regular internet usage may significantly reduce the risk of dementia in older populations.

As also highlighted by Gizmodo on Thursday, the study examined online habits of over 18,000 adults over the age of 50 for as long as 17 years (with a median of nearly 8 years) via data from the government’s biannual Health and Retirement Study. The dataset was subsequently broken down into two groups—those who were regular internet users, and those who were not. A second survey assessed their cognition at the study’s outset to use for reference over time. According to researchers, regular visitors to the internet “experienced approximately half the risk of dementia than non-regular users,” even when taking issues like pre-existing conditions into consideration. As Gizmodo also noted, those who reported using the internet in subsequent analysis displayed even lower risks of impairment.

[Related: How your daily screen time affects your wellbeing.]

But don’t take this as carte blanche to surf the web to your heart’s content just yet. When utilizing a smaller dataset of users that provided hourly usage rates per week, researchers discovered a potential U-curve situation between time and risk for dementia. Those who spend over six hours a day on the internet appear to possess a slightly increased chance to develop cognitive issues, much like those who rarely go online at all. This led researchers to hypothesize that “excessive online engagement may have adverse cognitive effects on older adults.” Despite the study’s caveats, however, the findings present an interesting look into the potential positives of online use, especially when people are often told to use the internet less.

The Goldilocks “not too much, but not too little” linkage between internet use and dementia falls in line with experts’ recent suggestions on how to best maintain cognitive health: lead an overall, decently healthy lifestyle, i.e. one with regular physical activity, a primarily plant-based diet, an aversion to bogus supplements, managing existing diseases, and reduced alcohol consumption. So, on top of all that, you can now possibly add a healthy hour or so of daily internet scrolling to the list. Just don’t fall too far down the rabbit hole.

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LIFE IS RARELY WORRY-FREE, but unprecedented angst has become a constant. Beyond the regular challenges of everyday existence—chaotic households, traffic jams, overbearing bosses—the looming presence of a deadly virus over the past three years has made even mundane decisions feel fraught.

Any number of things can spark stress, but they all share a common origin. “It’s when the demands on somebody outstrip the resources they have,” says Lynn Bufka, a senior director at the American Psychological Association (APA). The results of that are rarely good. Face a difficult situation, unrealistic expectation, or sudden conflict without the right skills or tools, and you risk melting down or freezing up. That danger increases when you are pressed for time or cannot influence a challenging variable. “The feeling of not having control is anxiety-provoking,” Bufka says. “It’s pretty overwhelming.”

Most people had no experience dealing with the kind of prolonged pressure that came along with the pandemic. But for those with some of the world’s most intense occupations, it’s all just part of the job. Losing their cool is simply not an option. The strategies they employ to keep calm while facing a classroom, saving a life, or defusing a bomb just might help the rest of us deal with whatever’s pushing us to the edge of reason.

The fishing boat captain

THE STRESSORS: In 2021, the people bringing in Dungeness crab, black cod, and other bounties of the earth—the workers in America’s fishing and hunting industries—had the second deadliest job in the United States, coming in just behind loggers, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. “It is extremely hazardous,” says Richard Ogg, captain of the troller Karen Jeanne, which is based in Bodega Bay, California. The gale-force dangers he and his crew face include rough seas, miserable weather, and sleep deprivation. Pulling in a catch big enough to earn the money they need weighs heavily on his mind too. Above all else, though, Ogg feels a sense of guardianship over his team, and finds the biggest challenge can be coping with conflicts that arise among a crew corralled on a 54.5-foot boat miles from shore. That’s no easy feat when dealing with workers who don’t necessarily respect the hazards, the gear, or each other.

THE COPING MECHANISMS: Effective communication is essential to keeping cool. Ogg tends to be egalitarian, even if he as the captain has the final say and will pull rank if he must. He often discusses problems or disagreements with everyone aboard, seeks their perspectives, and considers their viewpoints to zero in on the best solution. He finds that this approach, and accepting that things sometimes go sideways despite his best efforts, helps everyone stay on an even keel whenever things get choppy.

The air traffic controller

THE STRESSORS: Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport hosted nearly 2,000 flights on average every day in 2022, making it the busiest hub in the world last year. “Almost every bit of airspace that we have, there’s going to be planes there,” says air traffic controller Nichole Surunis. Shepherding those thousands of passengers in and out safely requires tremendous concentration and the ability to process information quickly. Variables like bad weather or an unexpected move by a pilot can make an already challenging task even more dynamic at a second’s notice. There’s no time to dwell on what’s at stake. “You have to focus on all these pilots you’re talking to, with all these people on these planes,” Surunis says. In total, there are about 2.9 million travelers who fly into or out of the United States on a given day—and costly delays add to the strain of those minding the traffic. It’s only after the craft are safe that a controller might notice their racing heart and realize just how tense they were.

THE COPING MECHANISMS: Training and experience are key to handling rapidly shifting situations, and Surunis, like all controllers, has lots of both. “You have your Plan A—but you also must have a Plan B and Plan C,” she says. The occupation requires practicing self-care too. Stepping away from her workstation is essential, and mandated: Controllers typically aren’t allowed to go more than two hours without a break. Surunis doesn’t hesitate to tap a union-run support service after an especially grueling day, and she makes a point of unwinding by making time for hobbies like baking. That helps ensure she’s rested and ready to focus on keeping the sky safe.

The trauma surgeon

THE STRESSORS: Doctors who specialize in emergency care rarely have two days that are alike. A routine case like a ruptured appendix can end up on their table as readily as massive trauma. “They can be injured all over their body,” says Daniel Hagler, a critical care surgeon at NewYork-Presbyterian Queens Hospital in New York. “What you do within seconds or minutes of them arriving can be the difference between life and death.” The tension ramps up if he must handle many patients simultaneously. Over time, the strain takes a toll: A study published in The Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery found that nearly one-quarter of doctors in Hagler’s shoes experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

THE COPING MECHANISMS: Keeping it together requires the ability to triage, focus on what’s important, and put lesser priorities aside. Hagler employs “deliberate and algorithmic thinking”: If you see this, do that. Trust your intuition, using past experience to guide you to the best decision—while accepting that you may be wrong. “Take a step to just ready yourself and settle your nerves, and do what needs to be done,” he says.

The bomb tech

THE STRESSORS: Pipe bombs are the most common homemade explosive devices on American soil, according to the Department of Homeland Security, but the people who specialize in preventing them from blowing up are rare. Techs like Carl Makins, formerly of the Charleston County Sheriff’s Office in South Carolina, often face incendiaries crudely fashioned in someone’s kitchen or basement, so the safest way of deactivating them isn’t always clear. It doesn’t help that the gear includes 85 pounds of hot, uncomfortable Kevlar, making it hard to move. But the biggest source of anxiety is not knowing if someone tampered with the suspicious package or tried to move it in an effort to be helpful before he arrived. “What did you do to it?” Makins often found himself wondering. “Did you make it mad?”

THE COPING MECHANISMS: Makins always tried to compartmentalize his feelings. “You can’t get angry,” he says. “That limits your ability to see everything that you need to see.” He also used humor to help defuse tense situations—pointing out that, say, handling a bomb next to that shiny new pickup might not end well for the truck. He also remained mindful of his limits. If he was too tired, too tense, or just not up to the task, he’d say so and let someone else on the team step in to do the job. “You just tap out,” he says.

The teacher

THE STRESSORS: Teachers—despite diminishing resources, growing technological distractions, and students who often want to be anywhere but the classroom—are nevertheless saddled with the responsibility of shaping the future. That’s a lot of pressure, which explains why Gallup polls put teaching in a dead heat with nursing for the most stressful profession in the country, and why a RAND Corporation survey shows stress is the number one reason educators quit. And that was before COVID-19 compounded their challenges. When Teresa BlackCloud’s high school students in West Fargo, North Dakota, began taking turns attending class in person and learning from home in the fall of 2020, for example, she had to divide her attention between the pupils in front of her and the “online kids” who might need tech support. “I felt like my brain was split in two,” she says. “If only there were two Miss BlackClouds.” Like many educators, she had to quickly pivot between helping the teens in the classroom and assisting those working remotely.

THE COPING MECHANISMS: Setting clear boundaries is key to handling trying circumstances. BlackCloud had to put the kibosh on responding to pings from kids at all hours because it limited her ability to recharge. “I had to get really good at setting boundaries,” she says. She strives to practice mindfulness and sets aside specific parts of her day for mentally wandering into stressy places. “While I’m brushing my teeth is my time to worry about things,” she says.

The Alaska rescue pilot

THE STRESSORS: Flying a rescue helicopter in Alaska is so intense the Coast Guard requires pilots to complete a tour elsewhere before they can get the gig. The assignment often demands they travel long distances—​Air Station Kodiak monitors 4 million square miles of land and sea, an area larger than the entire lower 48 states—in the dark and through extreme conditions. Due to the environs, the Last Frontier has an aviation accident rate more than twice that of the rest of the country. “It is very challenging,” says Lt. Cmdr. Jared Carbajal, who flies MH-60 Jayhawks and often dons night-vision goggles to navigate the inky sky. The haste of operations compounds the tension: Pilots must be airborne within 30 minutes of getting the call to pull someone out of danger. That leaves little time to prepare and sometimes gives Carbajal scant knowledge of what he’ll find when he arrives at the scene. (Carbajal now flies out of US Coast Guard Air Station Sitka, also in Alaska.)

THE COPING MECHANISMS: Managing complex and uncertain scenarios requires focusing only on what you can control. Everything else is a distraction. Carbajal concentrates on one task at a time—​calculating flight distance, estimating how much fuel he’ll need, requesting the necessary gear, and so on—​that he tackles systematically. He avoids looking too far ahead on his to-do list or fixating on situations he cannot influence, like unusually turbulent waves. “If there’s something that you can’t make a contingency plan for, don’t even waste your time on it,” he says.

An earlier version of this article appeared on popsci.com in January 2021, and this feature first appeared in the Spring 2021 issue. It has been updated since that time.

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An online coaching company recently teamed up with language researchers to amass the world’s largest publicly available dataset of two-person virtual conversations. Already in use by institutions at Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, and elsewhere, BetterUp Labs’ CANDOR Conversation Corpus includes over 850 hours’ worth of over 1,600 Zoom chats recorded between January and November 2020. Its authors hope to provide experts and scholars across an array of fields a deep trove of data offering insight into the myriad ways digital communication methods can affect everyday human interactions.

Zoom delays are the bane of many remote workers’ existence, but there’s a reason beyond the sheer annoyance. Zoom delays cause us to awkwardly talk over one another. According to a study published last year, it takes approximately 297 milliseconds for the human brain to process face-to-face, yes-or-no questions—ask those same queries over a video chat portal like Zoom, and that delay increases to upwards of 976 milliseconds. As Business Insider relayed on Monday, the previous study’s researchers theorized that even as little as a 30- to 70-millisecond audio delay (less than the blink of an eye) can disrupt conversation participants’ neural processing that underlies the very basics of human dialogue.

[Related: The best Zoom tricks and add-ons for your video chats.]

Enter BetterUp Labs’ “Conversation: A Naturalistic Dataset of Online Recordings,” aka CANDOR. With methodology and results recently published in Science Advances, CANDOR offers one of the most expansive archives of two-person audio and video conversations to date. The process was simple enough: compensated participants were asked to pair up with randomized fellow volunteers, who were then tasked to chat together for at least 25 minutes about whatever they wanted. Afterwards, they were surveyed about their feelings and thoughts post-chat. Both the audio and video of each conversation was also recorded, meaning that unlike most conversational corpuses, CANDOR didn’t merely archive their transcriptions. Speakers’ visual and audio information were also detailed, meaning every facial tic, verbal stutter, and subtle gesture was made available for researchers to parse and analyze.

Initial analysis of CANDOR’s data reveals some quick takeaways about what makes a solid Zoom conversationalist—generally speaking, higher rated and more well received participants were those who spoke faster, louder, and more intensely. As Insider explains, “people rated by their partners as better conversationalists spoke 3 percent faster than bad conversationalists—uttering about six more words a minute.” Although average volume didn’t change between positively and negatively reviewed conversations, the more nuanced notion of “intensity” factored heavily into opinions, as well as the variation between decibel levels. More variation meant a better view, while monotone conversationalists unsurprisingly didn’t score as well.

[Related: Zoom chats can be surprisingly therapeutic.]

The authors of the new CANDOR corpus freely admit the limitations to their initial work—the first version includes only American English conversations, and randomly pairing participants might have produced social anxieties and issues that skewed some of the data. Still, the CANDOR database offers one of the most expansive sets of two-person digital conversations ever amassed, and can serve as a launching pad for even more detailed investigations down the line. In order to do so, however, don’t be surprised if you find yet another Zoom invite in your email inbox in the near future.

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Love them or loathe them, selfies aren’t going anywhere. Humans are not even alone in this ability to capture themselves in a moment— bears,  and penguins have from time to time posed for a self portrait. These third-person images are an easy way to satisfy the social pressures of “pics or it didn’t happen” or the dreaded FOMO with one single click, but they may also have a deeper psychological component. 

[Related: Understanding the weird Biden-Carter photo could help you take better selfies.]

New research published April 27 in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science suggests that people use first-person photography—a photo of the scene from their own perspective—when they want to document a physical experience, but opt for third-person photos like selfies where you are in the scene to capture the deeper meaning of an event. 

Earlier research into the psychology of selfies focused on how the photo-taker wants to present themselves, while this new research takes people capturing memories into consideration. 

“Not only do we find that most people take both types of photos in different situations, but that people also differ across situations in whether their goal for taking photo is to capture the physical experience of the moment or the bigger meaning of the moment in their life,” said Zachary Niese, study co-author and psychologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany, in a statement.

The research included six studies involving over 2,100 participants. The team found that when the goal of a photo is to capture meaning, they’re more likely to take a selfie and that they find more meaning looking back at their own third-person photos compared with first-person. 

People also tend to like their photos more when the perspective matches their goal for taking the photo.

“Taking and posting pictures is a part of everyday life for many people. While there is sometimes derision about photo-taking practices in popular culture, personal photos have the potential to help people reconnect to their past experiences and build their self-narratives,” said Niese.

The authors warned against the assumption that photos taken from first or third person perspectives are better than the other. Their analysis shows that the most effective perspective depends more on an individual’s goal in the moment—whether that be to capture a physical experience like taking a tour of a museum or the deeper meaning of an event like a wedding or graduation.

[Related: Take better selfies with these lighting and angle tips.]

Going forward, the more understanding an individual has of the goal when taking a picture and the role that perspective plays in the photos and make amateur photographers better at preserving memories for later. 

“People’s photo-taking practices have the potential to serve a more fundamental human motive to develop and understand our sense of self, both in terms of the experiences in our life as well as their bigger meaning,” said Niese.

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Is shyness something you feel, or is it something that defines you? Child psychologists are still not fully convinced one way or the other. A small study published April 25 in the journal Society for Research in Child Development found that timidness, fear and nervousness in social situations or being at the center of attention, is a fairly typical childhood experience, whether it is an emotion or personality. 

[Related from PopSci+: Can dogs be introverts?]

Some long standing theories about shyness believe that there are two types of coy behavior. “Temperamental” shyness remains roughly the same throughout development, whereas “state” shyness is felt during a social situation and manifests more like an emotion. 

In this new study, researchers examined the behavioral, affective, and physiological responses to a speech task in 152 Canadian children (73 girls and 79 boys) ages seven and eight. The children were told that they would be giving a speech that would be filmed and shown to other children. Their parents completed online questionnaires about their child’s temperament, while the children were given an echocardiogram to check for physiological indications of nervous behavior.

The children prepared a two-minute speech about their last birthday and recited the speech in front of a video camera and a mirror. The researchers monitored the children for behaviors coded as avoidance or inhibition, self-reported nervousness, and respiratory sinus arrhythmia.

The team found that temperamental shyness may exist in a distinct group of children over time, and a larger group of children may experience shyness as an emotion during certain situations. 

About 10 percent of the children had a high level of stress giving the speech in addition to relatively high levels of shyness over time, according to the questionnaires filled out by their parents. According to the team, this provides evidence that shyness may be part of these children’s temperament. Being the center of attention may be stressful across time and in various contexts in this group. Future research could examine the consequences on how this shyness affects academic, social, and psychological well-being since shyness could be measured across time. 

Roughly 25 percent of study participants were not reported to be shy, but demonstrated a higher level of stress from giving the speech. The authors believe that it is likely that state shyness in response to a speech task is a relatively common, normative experience for children at this age.

[Related: Little kids drew their grim—and hopeful—reality of COVID.]

“Our findings provide empirical support for the long-theorized idea that there may be a subset of temperamentally shy children who manifest heightened behavioral, affective, and physiological reactivity in response to a social stressor, as well as a subset of children who may experience only the affective component which may reflect state shyness,” co-author and Brock University post-doctoral fellow and psychologist Kristie Poole said in a statement. “This highlights the multiple components and developmental course of temperamental shyness and the features that distinguish temperamental and state shyness in middle to late childhood.”

This study provides some empirical evidence for long-standing ideas about shyness that were first made by the late psychologist Jerome Kagan. In the 1990s, Kagan argued that temperamental shyness may exist as a distinct category for some children and the features that define this category are relatively stable across time and context.

The authors also noted some limitations to the research, namely that the study only measured these behavioral, affective, and physiological components at one point in time and the sample size was relatively small. Future research should also include a more racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse pool and focus.

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Is the phase “nice guys finish last” actually true? Unfortunately for all the soft-hearted among us, brutish behavior can be an effective path to power and dominance in both humans and chimpanzees. A study published April 24 in the journal PeerJ Life and Environment found that the male chimpanzees who exhibited greedy, irritable, and bullying personalities reached a higher social status. These rascals were also more successful at producing offspring. 

[Related: Adolescent chimpanzees might be less impulsive than human teens.]

However, the team is still plagued by a puzzling question from these findings: if being mean is the key to success, why isn’t every chimp a bully? 

For the study, the team followed 28 male chimpanzees living in Tanzania’s Gombe National Park. A previous study had found that  these particular chimpanzees had a few members that  are more sociable whereas others are loners. Some of the chimps had overbearing personalities, and some were more easy-going. And, of course, there are a handful that are more quick to pick fights with others. 

Tanzanian field researchers performed personality assessments on the chimpanzees based on years of near-daily observations of how each animal interacted with others and behaved among the group. They found that a personality combination of high dominance and low conscientiousness helped the male chimpanzees fare better in life than the others, but it still doesn’t answer the evolutionary puzzle of why personality differences exist at all. 

A long held theory is that different personality traits matter at different points in an animal’s life or that certain traits that are a liability when an animal is young may pay off in old age. 

“Think of the personality traits that lead some people to peak in high school versus later in life,” Alexander Weiss, co-author and comparative psychologist at the University of Edinburgh, said in a statement. “It’s a trade-off.” 

The team tested the theory using almost 40 years of data that goes back to famed primatologist Jane Goodall’s early research at Gombe. Across the lifespan, the same personality traits were linked to both high reproductive success and high social rank. 

[Related: Popular chimpanzees set hand-holding trends for the whole group.]

Something else must be behind the diversity of chimpanzee personality. The “best” personality to have could depend on social or environmental conditions. Gender could matter too—a trait that is beneficial to males could cost a female. If this is true, then “genes associated with those traits would be kept in the population,” Weiss said. Further study is needed to confirm this idea. 

The suggestion that animals have distinct personalities was considered taboo not too long ago, with Goodall herself accused of anthropomorphism with her descriptions. Scientists have studied animals ranging from squid to birds, finding evidence of distinct personalities. These quirks, idiosyncrasies, and ways of relating to the world around them remain reasonably stable over time and across situations.

Like with measures of human personality, personality ratings for animals have also been proven to be as consistent from one observer to the next. “The data just doesn’t support the skepticism,” Weiss said.

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Hana Iqbal drops her toddler off at nursery each day dressed in a raincoat, no matter what the forecast. Iqbal’s daughter goes to a forest school, where kids spend about half or more of their day outside, learning about the natural world. “Last week, my two-year-old was hammering nails into a piece of wood, wearing goggles and gloves,” she says.

Forest schools, also called nature pre-schools, outdoor pre-schools, and forest kindergartens, complement traditional education with a focus on environmental literacy. They vary in their cost, curriculum, and size, but generally mean that children spend a significant part of their classes outdoors and complete activities that help them learn about the nature around them. 

Iqbal describes herself not just as a forest schools convert, but an evangelist. “As a family doctor, I see so much heartbreaking mental health difficulty in young people every working day,” she wrote in a message to Popular Science. “I genuinely believe and hope that these streams of education—which allow children to develop mindfulness, body awareness, and relationship with nature, each other, and oneself—may be a little bit of an antidote to the challenges of modern life.”

She sends her daughter to a forest school in England, where the movement has flourished in recent years. In 2017, a shortlist of the best nurseries in the United Kingdom were all outdoor-focused. The schools are also common in Scandinavia, where the idea originated. Now, the trend is catching steam in the US as well. 

Forest schools have been around in the states since the 1960s, but have seen consistent growth since the 2010s, and a surge since the pandemic. Natural Start Alliance, which is a professional group for educators involved in environmental education, for newborns up to 8-year-olds, reports that it’s seen a big increase in interest in the past decade. In 2017, the organization logged about 275 nature preschools schools across the US; by 2022, that number had risen to more than 800 forest schools.

[Related: Homework might actually be bad]

Emily Van Laan, a communications specialist for Natural Start Alliance, attributes this to a few changes: increased conversation about the importance of early childhood development, the rise of play-based learning, concern over time spent on screens, and the spread of COVID-19 itself. She says that forest schools are scattered throughout the country, but have particularly high concentrations in California, Washington, and Minnesota.

“Sometimes people think about this approach to education as only being in places where the weather is always nice or always mild,” Van Laan says. “And that is definitely not the case. We see nature pre-schools in almost every state, including Alaska and Hawai’i, and definitely in every region of the US.”

Each school’s approach to outdoor learning will differ depending on the region. A program in Texas would think of exercises that keep kids cool during warmer months, or help them navigate snakes in the area. One in Minnesota would consider how children can stay warm and active when the temperature plunges, or teach them to forage for plants and fungi. 

“Every program will have guidance that is clearly communicated with parents in terms of the temperature barrier,” Van Laan says. For example, the forest school will tell parents how long children will spend outside in a certain temperature before going inside to take a break. Educators are also trained in risk assessment, like knowing the signs of when a child becomes too hot or cold.“The importance of having the right gear is a huge part of nature preschool,” Van Laan adds. “So they often do parent education on layering and a lot of programs often provide gear to the students that are enrolled.” 

Most programs are tuition-based and can be expensive, Van Laan says. But some offer a sliding scale or scholarships. One program in Wisconsin is free thanks to a partnership between a school district, nature center, and the YMCA. In Minnesota, 13 nature preschools are partially covered through public funding. 

Forest schools teach children how to be environmental stewards, something that is especially important as the world grapples with a changing climate. But there’s no research-based consensus on how to teach young children about climate change right now, Van Laan notes. (Even for older students, New Jersey is the only state with a mandated K-12 curriculum on climate change.) Van Laan says to start, educators should focus on teaching kids to connect with nature. “Certainly we’re not laying the responsibility of saving the planet on their tiny shoulders,” she says. 

[Related: Food forests can bring climate resilience, better health, and tasty produce to city residents]

At the same time, some forest schools have come face to face with the impacts of climate change. “The daily reality and urgency of climate change has increased,” she says. “And while we don’t want to introduce young children to ideas that frighten them, we also want to recognize their capacity for understanding. There are outdoor programs in California, for example, that have to close because of wildfires … Children are aware of these things. There’s no way to shield them from this knowledge, because they’re seeing it, they’re experiencing it.”

Iqbal says she’s happy her daughter has the unique opportunity to connect with nature daily—something she feels is made even more important with climate change. “My God, will the next generation need to know this and to look after this, after everything our generation and the generations before have created for them.”

Correction (April 24, 2023): The article previous said that Minnesota has 12 school districts with publicly funded nature preschools. The correct number is 13 nature preschools in total.

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How well do you know your pets? Pet Psychic takes some of the musings you’ve had about your BFFs (beast friends forever) and connects them to hard research and results from modern science.

ONE AFTERNOON several years ago, a Moluccan cockatoo named Harpo arrived at Midwest Avian Adoption & Rescue Services in St. Paul, Minnesota. As Galiena Cimperman sat quietly with him and scratched his head, the bird started to talk.

This was perfectly normal. Harpo, like others of his species and the parrot family to which it belongs, was a very vocal creature and gifted mimic. Cimperman, the sanctuary’s executive director, was accustomed to him keeping up a semicoherent monologue of under-his-breath babble. But a long while after their first meeting, he shared something unexpected.

“I hate this bird,” Harpo said, loudly and clearly. He repeated it twice more. “I hate this bird. I hate this bird.”

Harpo had certainly heard that insult before, likely in unpleasant circumstances. But what did the cockatoo mean by it? According to Cimperman, the words didn’t have the same significance for him that they would for us; Harpo was repeating the sounds, not using them as language. But that doesn’t mean the outburst was insignificant.

Cimperman believes the phrase reflected traumas the cockatoo experienced earlier in life and that uttering them was part of his recovery. “I’m hesitant to say, because I don’t have any scientific backing on this,” she explains, “but I think he was probably working through stuff.”

Her diagnosis of Harpo—and many other residents of MAARS, one of 100 or so sanctuaries in the US that provide lifetime homes to abused and abandoned parrots—indeed comes without a seal of scientific approval. Although there’s plenty of research on parrot memory, problem-solving, and communication (the cognitive sophistication of some species is likened to that of human children), the birds’ emotions are largely unstudied.

That makes the relationship between parrots and people all the more difficult. The birds’ intelligence, physiology, and social nature often makes it difficult for them to flourish in captivity—yet there are more than 50 million parrots in households and zoos worldwide. Many are ultimately dumped at overwhelmed rescue operations, where volunteers like Cimperman have to piece together their pasts to help them find solace in the present.

As for whether the animals’ suffering can lead to psychological trauma—defined as an ongoing emotional response to an intensely distressing event—there’s even less research on that than on their feelings. But between their emotions and their excellent long-term memories, they do possess the cognitive capacities necessary to experience extended trauma.

One of the only scientific papers about parrot trauma, in fact, emerged from a collaboration between MAARS caretakers and Gay Bradshaw, the psychologist and ecologist best known for identifying PTSD in orphaned elephants who witnessed their parents and elders being killed. Presented more than a decade ago at a conference of avian veterinarians, the paper describes how parrots at the sanctuary frequently meet the criteria for the disorder.

What Bradshaw learned is that the birds undergo intensely distressing experiences, beginning in most cases at birth. Unlike parrots in the wild, whose parents provide close, attentive care from hatching through fledging, commercially bred individuals often start life in isolation. They receive little attention except for intermittent tube feeding.

“I really think their whole lives are, in some form or another, traumatic,” Cimperman says. “The way people raise them is completely absent of everything they should have.” In a review of standard commercial breeding methods, bird vet Michelle Curtis Velasco likened them to the infamous Romanian orphanages where, in the near absence of human contact, infants went on to develop severe behavioral disorders.

Then, at an age when their wild counterparts meet other young flock members while continuing to receive parental instruction, fledgling parrots enter a human home. They have evolved to live in large groups, but as pets, just one or a few often-absent people become their entire social world. These situations are intrinsically fraught; even well-meaning guardians may ignore or punish their parrots after tiring of unwittingly powerful bites and earsplitting cries for company. Sometimes keepers are not so well-meaning, and the situation devolves into full-blown abuse.

The birds are ill-equipped to cope, says Cimperman, and stress is magnified by helplessness and an inability to escape. Many parrots, especially the larger ones, either have their wings clipped to prevent flight or never learn to fly at all; they lack the sense of security that mobility provides.

Little wonder that some parrots arrive at MAARS with symptoms of severe psychological disturbance: tics like picking their feathers out and even wounding themselves, extreme aggression, hypersensitivity to everyday noises, repetitive movements, incessant screaming, constant agitation, catatonic unresponsiveness, and so on. In extreme cases, parrots have stayed in their cages for years, avoiding eye contact and trembling when humans approach.

When seen in people, those behaviors raise concerns about PTSD. “I know this hasn’t been borne out scientifically to the degree that it should be, but I don’t know what else it adds up to,” Cimperman says. So MAARS adapts insights on human PTSD into its treatment regime. New arrivals are initially kept separate from the flock; as they begin to acclimatize, grooming, eating, and showing curiosity about their surroundings, caretakers work with them to develop a sense of trust in humans.

It’s important that the birds feel control over their own lives, says Cimperman. “So much of a parrot’s life in captivity is without choice,” she says. “We try to give everyone a sense of free agency as much as possible, closer to what they would have in the wild.” Later they may be exposed to reminders of past trauma—the sight of a garbage bag, for example, for a bird delivered to the sanctuary inside one—as they learn to regulate their feelings. The process may take months or even years.

In Harpo’s case, the details of his early life are murky. He had one guardian before arriving at a sanctuary in Texas; there Harpo killed several birds and left volunteers with wounds requiring medical treatment, at which point MAARS took him in. “We couldn’t have him out for more than five minutes. He would just kind of implode and start flying at your face or attacking anything he could get his beak on,” Cimperman recalls.

By the time Harpo said, “I hate this bird,” she had worked with him for three years. He still had episodes when “he would just kind of blank out and kind of go into attack mode,” but he was improving. He felt safe around Cimperman, and she saw that utterance—delivered with the pinned-back feathers and slit-eyed glare that signify intensely negative feelings—as part of the process. To her, it signified a mental reenactment of his past. “I think they store a lot of stuff that’s happened to them. And to be able to move forward, there has to be some getting out of stuff,” she says.

Erin Colbert-White, a comparative psychologist at the University of Puget Sound in Washington who has studied how African grey parrots use words, says she’s open to the possibility that parrots experience PTSD. She cautions, however, that Harpo’s invective is difficult to parse as a recollection of his trauma because we don’t know the context in which he first heard the disparaging phrase. “It’s such a complex conclusion to draw that I would want to somehow be able to study it systematically. I’m not saying it’s not true. I would just have more questions. The scientist in me says, ‘Proceed with caution.’”

Colbert-White also warns that the expectation that another species will “experience psychological disorders in ways that humans do is a big assumption.” Rigorous, without-a-doubt scientific evidence may be unobtainable, though; it would require inflicting trauma on captive parrots in controlled conditions. “There’s no way to ethically reproduce these sorts of situations,” Colbert-White says.

Even granting that uncertainty, just the possibility that parrots experience psychological effects that resemble humans’ adds to the urgency of protecting them—not just in captivity, notes Cimperman, but also in the wild. Half of all parrot species are declining, and one-quarter are threatened with extinction, yet they receive relatively little conservation attention. Thriving populations are frequently persecuted for the wildlife trade or in the name of “pest management.”

By the end of Harpo’s life in 2021, nine years after his arrival at MAARS, he was one of the friendliest feathered guests there. He ran to greet people and was positively joyful. “I think who Harpo was and who he ended up being were completely different birds,” Cimperman says. “He was literally unrecognizable.” And whatever he’d meant when he said “I hate this bird,” he had stopped saying it.

We hope you enjoyed Brandon Keim’s column, Pet Psychic. Check back on PopSci+ in June for the next article.

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If you’re reading this, you’re probably stressed. Never fear: We’ve dug through the evidence to reveal what science really says about finding zen—and holding onto it through tough times.

In 2013, Charlotte Figi made national news by becoming the youngest patient in Colorado to receive cannabidiol (CBD) therapy to soothe her seizures. The five-year-old had struggled with severe epilepsy since infancy, sometimes experiencing 50 or more episodes a day, with little relief from standard drugs and dietary tweaks. By the time her parents started consulting doctors about CBD extracts, she had difficulty walking, talking, and eating without help.

Figi’s neurologist put her on a low dose of a specially bred strain of medical cannabis, later dubbed “Charlotte’s Web.” The effects were almost immediate. The seizures slowed from daily to weekly events, and soon, the kid was living life almost normally. After close to two years of the oral treatment, the doctors decided to wean Figi off other epileptic medications.

Figi’s story represents one of the clearest, most well-documented cases of the healing potential of CBD. (The young pioneer died in 2020, due to complications of COVID-19.) Though people have used the plant-based chemical to treat migraines and other bodily aches for centuries, the science around its efficacy is still inconclusive because it’s tricky to study its direct effect on the nervous system. Regardless, the industry has boomed in the past decade. Today CBD can be found in a range of products—from lattes to bath bombs to dog treats—and is marketed as a cure-all for pain, anxiety, insomnia, and even AIDS.

So, what should a person who’s buying CBD expect? There’s plenty of information out there, but the bottom line is confusing. Here’s an overview of what medical experts say about the ingredient and whether it lives up to its hype.

What is CBD?

CBD is essentially cannabis, minus the strong psychoactive bits. The carbon-oxygen-hydrogen compound can be found in high concentrations in Cannabis sativa and less-potent hemp plants. Sometimes manufacturers mix it with traces of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the cannabis-based chemical that gets people high, but it generally doesn’t carry the same dopamine-heightening and possibly addictive properties.

Like THC, though, CBD works its “magic” by cozying up to the nervous system. From what molecular scientists know so far, it somehow changes proteins found all over the body that are responsible for managing pain, inflammation, mood, appetite, and even memory. It’s still unknown how extensively it affects that internal chemistry, especially when combined with other ingredients, says Johns Hopkins University food scientist Kantha Shelke.

Is CBD legal?

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently updated its regulations to state that it supports further research on benefits, safety, and use of CBD products. For now, the extract is considered a controlled substance if it comes from cannabis plants. It’s treated more like a dietary supplement or food additive when harvested from hemp.

[Related: Cannabis poisoning is on the rise in pets]

That seems relatively straightforward, but throw local laws into the mix and the standards become a lot more unwieldy. CBD is legal to sell and buy in one form or another around the US, though it’s harder to hawk across state lines because of the federal regulations. In places where it’s lawful, the ingredient can be added to any product as long as it contains less than 0.3 percent THC and is marketed correctly. If it’s labeled as a drug it has to undergo clinical tests and win FDA approval before it’s available for public use. The agency has only approved one CBD medication so far: Epidolex, which is used to treat the same genetic syndrome that Charlotte Figi had.

At the beginning of 2023, the FDA announced that it would work with Congress on a new set of CBD regulations, citing potential long-term risks to people’s livers, the male reproductive system, livestock, and more. Once they are passed, the substance will be in a separate class from dietary supplements and food additives. In the meantime, the agency cautions against giving CBD products to children, pregnant and lactating people, and pets.

What are the proven benefits of CBD?

Some of the best research on CBD’s therapeutic effects comes from treating childhood epilepsy (thanks to the Figi family), schizophrenia, sleep deprivation, and anxiety disorders. The chemical has shown strong results in relieving all four of these conditions, with “a clear calming effect,” according to one 2019 analysis. That said, most of the studies exploring this connection don’t include a control group, or a baseline for comparison.

When it comes to looking at CBD for pain relief, the research is even more flimsy. Tests have shown that it can be effective against arthritis in rats, and that it might work as well as opioids for multiple sclerosis and cancer patients. But many of these treatments also included some amount of THC, so it’s hard to say if CBD was the primary cause of relief.

There’s also the question of which forms of CBD are safe enough for consumers but strong enough to make a difference. For neurological conditions like anxiety or apnea, the chemical needs to be absorbed into the bloodstream to have maximum impact. That means it needs to be ingested, inhaled, or rubbed in at high concentrations. But as health reporter Sarah Jacoby wrote in Self while vetting her own CBD buys, many of the proteins that trigger pain and inflammation are located between the skin and veins. So, any cream or gel that wants to counter aching joints and tight muscles needs to be able to get through the dermis but not as deep as the blood vessels. That’s a tall order for any drugstore formula.

Overall, doctors are reluctant to call CBD a pain panacea. But companies keep putting it in gels, goos, tinctures, massage oils, and roll-on creams, and people continue to snap them up. (One market report put CBD sales at nearly $5 billion sales in 2020.) It’s clear that the ingredient is somewhat beneficial to human health—science just needs to understand how much.

Does CBD have any bad effects?

Medical researchers haven’t pinpointed any deadly patterns with CBD use yet. A few case studies have mentioned respiratory failure, but in many of those instances, the patients also had THC in their system. People have complained about nausea and gastrointestinal issues after taking high concentrations of CBD. The Mayo Clinic also mentions fatigue, dizziness, and loss of appetite as possible complications.

[Related: Can you overdose on weed?]

There are concerns that CBD might interact negatively with other drugs, specifically blood thinners like warfarin. But there’s no specific guidance on which medications to avoid mixing with the extract.

How much CBD should people take?

Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to calculate safe and effective serving sizes for CBD. Dosing depends on body weight, desired effect, and the way a person is taking it. CBD products often come with suggestions, but those can be misleading, given that the FDA doesn’t test every supplement against its labels and claims. (The agency has issued warnings to dozens of companies who’ve listed incorrect information about CBD and THC levels in their products; see the full list here.)

“With CBD, dosage matters,” Shelke says, as over-indulgence has been associated with ill effects. But without a fundamental understanding of the chemistry of the ingredient, and how the cooking process changes it, it’s hard to come up with scientifically backed dosing recommendations. With the limited information available, Shelke advises to go the “less is better” route with any unregulated CBD products.

Why is CBD so hard to study?

Because CBD is one of hundreds of compounds in hemp and cannabis, it’s tricky to extract and standardize. If the chemical is tainted or alternated in any way during the process, it can have a different set of effects. The way it’s consumed also plays a big part in the reaction. As Figi’s neurologist wrote back in 2014, cooking or smoking CBD means adding heat, which could break down the chemical and make it less beneficial. Pills and edibles, on the other hand, need to be carefully engineered so that they don’t get neutralized by stomach acid.

All that variability, both in the plants and the products that are derived from them, makes CBD more challenging to test for medicinal purposes. It’s also often mixed with THC when treating chronic pain or life-threatening illnesses, so it take many extra layers of research to isolate the purely physical perks from the psychoactive ones.

Is CBD safe to cook with?

Plenty of food brands, restaurants, and cookbook authors are now folding CBD into their recipes. But does the ingredient have the same therapeutic effect when it’s baked in a brownie pan at 360 degrees Fahrenheit or seared in a skillet with sea bass and lemon rinds?

“There are many unanswered questions about the science, safety, quality, and physiological effects of CBD that need to be addressed before one can identify the effects of various chemical reactions on its efficacy,” Shelke says. Part of the issue with cooking with the extract is that the purity and the concentration is often unknown. This makes it even harder to know how it will interact with other ingredients, and whether that combination will help or harm a person. Bottom line: It’s better to avoid highly processed products or prepared meals with CBD, especially if you’re new to the compound.

What’s the best way to see if CBD works for me?

If you’re looking for a supplement to help you go to sleep at night, relieve a light migraine, or unwind after a stressful event, try a low-stakes gummy or topical oil. Be sure to choose a well-reviewed and reputable product, Shelke says: Just because it says it contains CBD doesn’t mean it will live up to its promise.

To treat chronic pain, depressive disorders, or other serious illnesses, get your doctor’s recommendations first. They can take stock of the latest research specific to your needs and also track how CBD works with other prescriptions you’re taking.

[Related on PopSci+: The tasty chemicals flavoring the edible cannabis boom]

As you head into the experience, manage your expectations. Like most wellness products that are backed by tepid evidence, the results can be hit or miss. Stay within the recommended doses on the products’ labels and report any unexpected side effects to your primary-care physician.

The future of CBD seems full of potential, but in present times, there are more questions than answers.

Update (April 19, 2023): This post has been updated with new regulatory information from the FDA.

The post Can CBD help you chill? Here’s what we know so far. appeared first on Popular Science.

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Selfies occasionally go viral, but they’re not typically taken by an animal. So the fact that a black bear’s encounter with a motion-activated wildlife camera in Boulder, Colorado, in 2022 resulted in more than 400 of them—including an undeniably cute one with its tongue hanging out—is especially intriguing. Most creatures ignore camera traps. The question is: Why didn’t this bear?

​​It may be tempting to think of this selfie moment as an animal blunder, but this anecdote captures more than meets the eye. Research suggests bears, much like elephants and great apes, are more intelligent than previously assumed. The selfie bear is a unique reminder of a type of animal cognition scientists are just starting to understand. 

“Bears are probably more naturally curious about how things work than some other species,” says Jennifer Vonk, a psychology professor at Oakland University. 

Bears are generally impressive. They have an excellent sense of smell, seven times better than a bloodhound’s. Grizzly bears can run up to 35 miles per hour, beating the fastest human sprint by over 25 percent. Despite their bulk, bears are very dexterous—they can open screw-top jars, manipulate door latches, and even operate touchscreen computers with a talent that outpaces animals more closely related to people. 

Vonk discovered this when she and a colleague trained captive-bred black bears to select a larger or smaller set of dots that stayed in place or moved around the screen. Although the ability to count or distinguish between different quantities has been tested in many animals, scientists didn’t think ursines had this ability because they are a solitary, rather than social, species. The “social intelligence hypothesis” suggests social animals are likelier to be smarter than solitary species because interactive environments offer more cognitive challenges. 

[Related: Hibernating bears hold many secrets for better human health.]

The experiment proved otherwise. During the study, the size of the dots varied—in some trials, for example, the larger set of dots covered more area than the smaller set of dots. Conversely, the larger set could also cover a smaller area, which ultimately tested if black bears were making choices based on area or the number of dots. The animals performed above chance on all trials, showing they could use numbers to guide their choices. In other words, they could count. These results were published in the journal Animal Behavior. 

“I was surprised how quickly the bears took to responding on the computer because we were training animals that had never done any kind of experiments,” says Vonk. “On literally the first day we tested, the dominant male went right to the images that moved around the screen without making any errors. And with almost every task we gave him, he learned faster than the chimps and gorillas I was working with at the same time.”

While bears have one of the largest relative brain sizes of any carnivore, there’s surprisingly little research regarding their cognitive abilities. This oversight may be due to logistics more than anything else. Most cognitive research happens in a laboratory; the animals that do well in these environments are smaller creatures, like rats, mice, and pigeons. Facilities that allow controlled testing with bears are scarce. 

Despite these challenges, Vonk’s lab at Oakland University has worked to fill this gap in our understanding of bears since 2012. Another study conducted by Vonk suggests bears also recognize images on computer screens as real objects: During it, a captive black bear named Migwan was able to show that she prefers grapes over beets. While bears can recognize features of real objects in their virtual images, the researchers emphasized this doesn’t necessarily mean bears fully grasp what pictures are. 

Another touchscreen study from the Vonk lab suggests bears can distinguish between different categories of things, such as animals versus non-animals. The bears were trained (with the help of a few treats) to choose between two rather odd and different groups: supermodels and Planet of the Apes characters. After that task was mastered, the bears were tested on more difficult subjects. For instance, the studied black bears could tell polar bears from other species of bears, primates from hoofed animals, or a chameleon from a car. They performed surprisingly well, even for the most abstract categories of distinguishing animals from non-animals.

Other research suggests black bears aren’t the only intelligent bear. For example, in a study of tool use published in the Journal of Veterinary Behavior, brown bears had to manipulate logs and boxes to reach a tempting reward: glazed donuts. Six of the eight bears in the study successfully completed the pastry-acquiring task and usually did so out in less than two minutes, explains lead author Lynne Nelson, a professor of veterinary cardiology at Washington University. 

For decades, tool use was considered to be the defining characteristic of humans—something that proved how smart we are. The fact that bears can also use tools subsequently suggests some advanced intelligence.

Several factors may explain why bears are smart, though “more work needs to be done before we really know whether social structure or foraging ecology better predicts overall intelligence,” Vonk says. 

“I think people are only starting to recognize that it’s an interaction of all these things,” she adds.

For now, there are some promising theories. Overall most animals living in social groups, like primates, exhibit high levels of intelligence. Scientists hypothesize that social animals evolved to have mental abilities that help them cooperate and understand others’ intentions. But bears, generally, are solitary. Their brains are less of a response to their social situation and more of a response to the challenging environments that they live in. Their ability to make quick, adaptive responses to these conditions may explain why their brains are relatively large compared to their body weight—a proportion that suggests intelligence. 

Bear intelligence may also be the result of their early development; cubs start off life as curious little troublemakers. Gordon Burghardt, a professor of animal behavior at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, experienced this firsthand when two rescued black bear cubs stayed in his house for several weeks. He describes the inquisitive youngsters opening kitchen cabinets and sliding glass doors, climbing into the shower, and running off with purses. The cubs were also fond of playing with each other, which he posits helps with their development. Play is often thought to facilitate learning and mental development, as well as being a method of exercise and stress relief. 

Black bears and brown bears are both generalists, showing great versatility in the food they eat, how they get it, and where they find it, Vonk explained. They hunt, scavenge, and also seek out plants, nuts, and fruit. Bears also adjust to a seasonally changing environment, gaining weight in the fall and hibernating in winter. This variable and unpredictable environment may have led to bears’ greater intelligence. 

“Bears live in a vast range of environments from the deserts to the tropics and the Arctic,” Nelson adds. “Animals must exhibit a certain level of intelligence to be able to earn a living almost anywhere on the earth.”

[Related: What an ancient jawbone reveals about polar bear evolution]

The giant mammals face considerable challenges because of people too: the development of their habitats, hunting, pollution, cars, and climate change all put them at risk. Studying bear intelligence, in turn, does more than explain a natural wonder—it increases the likelihood that they’ll survive. Some scientists argue that people are more likely to protect animals when they realize the species are intelligent. 

Bears, meanwhile, will continue to be as curious as ever. After the selfie black bear went viral, Canadian park rangers tweeted out their own celebrity: the selfie polar bear.

The post Bears can count, take selfies, use tools, recognize supermodels, and even open car doors appeared first on Popular Science.

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Bilingualism is an advantageous ability in ways that go beyond simply being able to communicate with others. It literally changes the brain, inducing heightened neuroplasticity and protecting against cognitive decline. New research also suggests a little-understood brain region uniquely adapts to different written languages—a finding that sheds light on the mysteries of language recognition.

In a study published on April 5 in the journal Science Advances, researchers examined how bilinguals process their respective languages in written form. They discovered that a part of the brain called the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) activates differently for English-Chinese speakers compared to English-French speakers. 

While most research on bilingualism compares people who speak two languages to those who just speak one, this study compares bilinguals of different languages and writing systems. Scientists analyzed the brains of people who speak English and Chinese, along with the brains of people who speak English and French. While an fMRI machine measured their brain activity, participants viewed visual stimuli like letters, faces, and houses.

In both groups, the VWFA reacted likewise when shown English or French. But when English-Chinese participants read Chinese characters, distinct areas lit up in response. 

[Related: Learning a second language early may have ripple effects throughout your life]

The study team, in turn, discovered clusters of neurons specific to the Chinese language in English-Chinese bilinguals. In English-French bilinguals, their brain activity was the same regardless of language stimuli. Their research further demonstrates that the brain develops in response to an individual’s unique experiences. 

“My initial impression of [the study] is that it’s a real tour de force methodologically and in terms of design it’s comprehensive, thorough and ambitious,” says Dale Stevens, a York University neuroscience professor who was not part of the research. It also gives us “a more specific understanding” of the VWFA, he adds. 

What is the Visual Word Form Area?

The VWFA is the region of the brain that recognizes written words. It develops when people learn to read, which builds neural pathways between the visual and language systems. Without it, people would be unable to read. 

Minye Zhan, the first study author and a cognitive neuroscience researcher at NeuroSpin, a research institute in France, expected to find some neurological differences between dominant English speakers, dominant French speakers, and balanced English-French speakers. Instead, the 21 English-French bilinguals didn’t demonstrate any processing differences, despite their dominance in one language over the other. 

“It’s the same system,” Zhan says. “I dug hard and didn’t see any difference. It was a very big surprise.”

Meanwhile, the brains of the ten English-Chinese speakers reacted very differently when shown Chinese characters. In this group, Chinese was the dominant language. When the researchers scanned the brains of these participants, they found distinct activity: Chinese-specific clusters of neurons in the VWFA. 

How did researchers map brain activity?

Previously, pinpointing specific areas of brain activity challenged researchers. Now, high-resolution MRI machines, such as the 7-Tesla fMRI used in this study, allow for more detailed brain scans. The research team, in turn, could see that chains of neuron clusters activated when the study participants saw Chinese. Zhan describes it as “a galaxy, a constellation of areas.” 

“The interesting part is that there are these word patches that process both languages, even different languages like English and Chinese,” Zhan says. “They’re so different, but they are processed in the same area, although there are specialized Chinese-only language patches in the brain.”

Interestingly, brain response to Chinese stimuli overlaps with a region that helps with facial recognition. The difference might have something to do with cognitive processing. The brain can perceive visual stimuli as a whole or in parts, and the strategy it chooses depends on the language read. 

Why are there language-specific areas?

When you see a face, you don’t recognize eyes, noses, and a mouth as separate parts. Instead, you see a face as a face, a unified whole. Research has shown that native Chinese speakers process Chinese characters similarly, which have combinations of strokes and radicals. Meanwhile, part-based processing is more common in alphabetic languages, such as English and French. Individual letters, or letter combinations, are processed separately and then integrated to form a coherent word. 

Another explanation has more to do with language structure. Chinese, like Japanese and some Korean, is logographic. These writing systems use characters that correspond to concepts, ideas, and words. Phonetic languages, like English and French, use characters that correspond to sounds.   

[Related: Learning a new language? Here’s how to perfect your pronunciation.]

Most Chinese characters give few clues as to how they are read. New learners, including Chinese children, pick up character pronunciation using Pinyin, which uses the Latin alphabet to spell out sounds of Standard Chinese characters. Meanwhile, when children study French or English, both phonetic languages with a strong connection between spelling and pronunciation, they’re encouraged to sound out words letter by letter. 

Learning Chinese might place unique demands on neural pathways, resulting in different connections. Still, these explanations for the VWFA’s split are speculation for now. Researchers don’t know precisely why the brain reacts differently for English-Chinese bilinguals, just that these bilingual speakers have specialized brain activity unobserved in the English-French group. 

This research wouldn’t have been possible more than a few years ago. The experiment used a high-resolution 7-Tesla fMRI scanner, which has a much stronger magnetic field that can scan brain activity in greater detail compared to previous models (a Tesla is a unit of measurement to quantify magnetic field strength). The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved this model in 2017. 

In contrast, a hospital might use a 1.5 or 3-Tesla MRI machine. And while this resolution is the standard, it doesn’t reveal the same level of detail, Zhan says. 

The research raises many questions, says Zhan. Her team is interested in repeating the study with groups of participants who speak different native languages and use different alphabets. Zhan also wants to discover why these specialized patches of neurons emerge depending on what language a person can read. 

“So why do those special patches come up?” she says. “That we don’t know. We just observe them. So we report first and say that it needs more research.”

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Picture this: You’re at your desk working on a project when your phone chimes. A quick glance tells you a friend sent over a video on TikTok. Convinced you’re due for a break, you click the link to find a new dance video from Charli D’Amelio. Fast forward an hour later, and you’re still on your phone, except now you’ve gone from viral dances to animal videos to fitness gurus raving about a weight loss hack. 

If this scenario hits too close to home, you’re not alone. Most people on social media check it daily, and younger people are likelier to return to their favorite platforms multiple times a day. TikTok is especially popular with teenagers: A 2022 survey from the Pew Research Center suggests 67 percent of teens use it, while 16 percent use it almost constantly. 

So why do people spend so much time online? One underlying reason is that platforms like TikTok promote infinite scrolling. You might start off in one video only for the page to continuously load a never-ending stream of content. Absent-mindedly scrolling through content might seem like an innocent activity and a great excuse to waste time. However, research suggests it can negatively influence the brain and mental health.

Anyone can fall prey to mindless scrolling. Younger people are especially vulnerable since the brain is not fully developed until age 25, says Lisa Pion-Berlin, a psychologist and president of Parents Anonymous, a child abuse prevention nonprofit. While limiting access to social media (like this Utah bill requiring parental permission is trying to do) is one option, learning how to be a more active user can help anyone stop infinite scrolling and still enjoy social media.

Why infinite scrolling is bad for you

Social media platforms like TikTok are not comprehensively bad for you. Several studies suggest social media can prompt feelings of connectedness and positive well-being. Further, they allow for personal expression, which fosters positive mental health.

Ultimately, how social media makes people feel depends on how they use it. For example, excess social media use is associated with feeling more anxious, lonely, and generally bad about yourself. 

“The more attached we are to our devices, the more problematic it becomes,” says Lisa Strohman, a psychologist and the founder of Digital Citizen Academy, an education program that teaches children and teens how to have a healthy relationship with technology. 

[Related: Do you never feel FOMO? Time to meet its twin, JOMO.]

Moreover, Strohman says watching pictures and videos of everyone living their best life might make you worried or sad that you’re missing out. Some research suggests that comparing yourself to others on social media can result in aggression and anxiety, while other studies suggest a link between negative comparisons on social media and suicidal ideation.

Meanwhile, mindless scrolling can result in a state of mind similar to being in a trance state, says Pion-Berlin. She’s concerned that “mindless scrolling is a way to tune out” or dissociate from reality. Some research suggests that overuse of social media can result in negative psychological impacts: A 2023 study in the journal JAMA Pediatrics found that middle schoolers who constantly checked their social media feeds showed changes in how their brains responded to feedback and criticism from peers.   

Infinite scrolling can also lead to disrupted sleep patterns in adolescents and adults. The screen’s blue light can make it difficult to fall asleep, and the constant content prevents your brain from shutting down for the night. 

When we sleep, the brain sorts through and categorizes the information from the day and commits the vital stuff into long-term memory, explains Strohman. But mindless social media surfing before bedtime keeps giving it more data for the brain to process throughout the night, “and that’s what tends to lead to that insomnia,” she explains.

How infinite scrolling can hijack the brain

Mindless scrolling helps make social media an addicting habit because it takes advantage of the brain’s reward system, says Strohman.

An enjoyable TikTok, for example, can trigger the brain’s reward pathway. Subsequently, this causes the brain to release a chemical called dopamine, which Strohman describes “as a hit or a high” for the brain. The dopamine surge tells the brain that scrolling through social media is pleasurable and that we should do it again. Because another attention-grabbing Tiktok plays immediately when the first is over, this process starts all over again immediately. 

“The brain is rewarded every time because of how the feeds and algorithms are set up so that anytime we’re not on the app, we think we’re missing something,” explains Strohman. “That makes us want to go back on it again.:

The same process applies to adolescents—possibly to a more significant effect. Pion-Berlin explains that because the prefrontal cortex is one of the last brain areas to mature fully, younger people are more impulsive and have less self-control than adults. With less self-control, it may be easier for teens to fall into this rabbit hole of social media content, she says. In addition, the limbic system—a part of the brain involved in behavioral and emotional responses—is also more sensitive during our teenage years, which makes them likelier to prioritize pleasurable and desirable activities.

What are some ways to stop infinite scrolling?

While infinite scrolling isn’t great, that does not mean you need to quit social media altogether. On the contrary, there are some benefits to staying on the apps, such as building communities among people with a shared hobby or interest, maintaining relationships with family who live miles away, raising awareness for a particular cause, and learning from credible experts.

[Related: All the ways you can reduce screen time across your devices]

To make the most of your time, you’ll want to become an active rather than a passive user. Active users interact with others— in practice, this could look like commenting on posts or creating content. The high engagement gives you a specific purpose for being on the app, allows you to nurture and maintain online friendships, and is associated with improved well-being. 

Meanwhile, infinite scrolling is a passive activity because you’re socially disconnected from others and lurking in the background. Of course, sometimes you just want to take a break from life and watch some mind-numbing videos. In these situations, you’ll want to set a timer to limit the time you spend online and know when it’s time to log off, Strohman says. 

Another suggestion from Strohman is turning off notifications. People often fall into mindless surfing when notified or tagged in something. And while you might start out looking at the relevant post, you can easily find yourself lost in a comment thread or other recommended videos. 

“Have a clear purpose when accessing social media,” Strohman says. If a friend shares a post, tell yourself you will only watch this one video and not spend the next two hours on TikTok. 

“The more you scroll, the less settled you’ll be,” advises Strohman. “Be mindful, recognize your part in it, and try to do what you can to manage yourself in those online worlds.”

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When it comes to tackling the opioid crisis in America, there is no single solution. Public health officials have taken measures to prevent future overdoses by reducing the number of opioid prescriptions, curbing the flow of illicit drug trafficking, and raising awareness of the dangers of opioids. But for the three million people already addicted to this class of drugs, the emphasis has turned to a quick-working treatment: naloxone.

It’s possible to reverse an opioid overdose with an injectable or single-dose nasal spray called naloxone (also known by the brand name Narcan). Street drugs and prescription painkillers like heroin, morphine, and codeine target opioid receptors in the brain to induce a pleasurable high. But they can also affect neurons that control respiration, causing a person to stop breathing if they overdose. Naloxone blocks the brain receptors so that the drugs can’t reach them, preventing this deadly side effect. “There are very few things I would call a perfect antidote, but, in this case, Narcan is one of them,” says Ryan Marino, a medical toxicologist and addiction medicine specialist at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. He adds that naloxone works against synthetic opioids like fentanyl.

[Related: At-home test strips for fentanyl are just the first step to preventing overdoses]

In response to the growing number of opioid overdose deaths—75 percent of drug overdose deaths in the US in 2020 involved an opioid—the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved an over-the-counter version of naloxone. The decision makes the drug more accessible: People will be able to buy the nasal spray at places like their local pharmacy or gas station without a prescription. But while medical experts have lauded the FDA’s ruling, not everyone is happy with the news. There have been some concerns from the public about distributing naloxone and whether it encourages more drug use. PopSci spoke with medical experts on common misconceptions surrounding naloxone and its safety.

Myth 1: Naloxone encourages people to do more drugs

A common objection to expanding naloxone access is that it acts as a safety net for people with addiction to continue their drug habits with few repercussions. But Kathryn Cunningham, director of the Center of Addiction Research at the University of Texas Medical Branch, says research has shown no evidence that naloxone leads to more drug use. 

A well-known 2013 study in The BMJ journal found the number of opioid-related hospital visits did not increase in communities with programs distributing naloxone and those with less access to the nasal spray. Instead, naloxone helped in reducing the amount of risky drug activity in 19 communities that distributed it to residents.

Myth 2: Naloxone prevents users from getting treated for addiction

Think of naloxone as a fire extinguisher in your house, Marino says. You’ll likely use it if there’s a small blaze. But if you have repeated incidents or if your house becomes engulfed in flames, the fire extinguisher can only help so much. Eventually, you’ll have to call the fire department for help. Simply put, naloxone may actually convince people to find professional help because it gives them more opportunities to seek treatment and rehabilitation later in life. “You can’t seek medical services if you’re dead,” Cunningham explains. 

If there’s any deterrent to getting treatment, it’s the stigma surrounding substance use disorders. Research suggests laws hampering access to care and discrimination from medical professionals against patients with a history of drug use may discourage people from opening up about their addiction. Even when they seek out help, patients have reported being treated as if they were untrustworthy, intimidating, and immoral.

Myth 3: Only medical professionals can use naloxone safely

You do not need medical training to give naloxone to someone who’s overdosed. Marino says the over-the-counter nasal spray that the FDA approved was designed to be easy enough to be used by a child as young as 6. The box also has step-by-step instructions printed on the side. “It comes with this little nasal atomizer,” Marino adds. “You just take it out of the package, put it in someone’s nose, and press the pointer. That’s all there is to it.” If a person accidentally applies naloxone to someone who hasn’t overdosed, it will be benign.

[Related: How to break free of the bystander effect and help someone in trouble]

There is no age limit for being treated with naloxone. You can use it on a newborn with opioids in their system or even a toddler who’s exposed to fentanyl patches. The nasal spray expires after three years, and should be stored in temperatures between 77 and 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Naloxone freezes at temperatures below 5 degrees Fahrenheit, making it unusable until it thaws out.

Myth 4: Naloxone makes users violent

It’s been rumored that the sudden onslaught of withdrawal symptoms caused by naloxone might cause a person to become aggressive or lash out when they gain consciousness. That’s not typically the case. Cunningham says common side effects after treatment include headaches, disorientation, vomiting, and nausea—all of which are temporary, because it’s a short-acting drug. “Withdrawal is not life-threatening,” Cunningham notes. “Not breathing because of an opiate is life-threatening.”

Fact: Naloxone could save many lives if more people have it

The FDA’s decision (which doesn’t mention exact rollout dates) makes it so that anyone can be ready to jump in and prevent deaths from opioid overdoses. Marino says it’s best to think of naloxone as another item in your first aid kit in case of emergencies. “We might tell ourselves that no one in our life is using drugs or going to overdose, but you never want to have a situation where you need it and not have it.”

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Nothing prepared Linda C. Johnson of Indianapolis for the fatigue that descended on her after a diagnosis of stage 4 lung cancer in early 2020.

Initially, Johnson, now 77, thought she was depressed. She could barely summon the energy to get dressed in the morning. Some days, she couldn’t get out of bed.

But as she began to get her affairs in order, Johnson realized something else was going on. However long she slept the night before, she woke up exhausted. She felt depleted, even if she didn’t do much during the day.

“People would tell me, ‘You know, you’re getting old.’ And that wasn’t helpful at all. Because then you feel there’s nothing you can do mentally or physically to deal with this,” she told me.

Fatigue is a common companion of many illnesses that beset older adults: heart disease, cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, lung disease, kidney disease, and neurological conditions like multiple sclerosis, among others. It’s one of the most common symptoms associated with chronic illness, affecting 40% to 74% of older people living with these conditions, according to a 2021 review by researchers at the University of Massachusetts.

This is more than exhaustion after an extremely busy day or a night of poor sleep. It’s a persistent whole-body feeling of having no energy, even with minimal or no exertion. “I feel like I have a drained battery pretty much all of the time,” wrote a user named Renee in a Facebook group for people with polycythemia vera, a rare blood cancer. “It’s sort of like being a wrung-out dish rag.”

Fatigue doesn’t represent “a day when you’re tired; it’s a couple of weeks or a couple of months when you’re tired,” said Dr. Kurt Kroenke, a research scientist at the Regenstrief Institute in Indianapolis, which specializes in medical research, and a professor at Indiana University’s School of Medicine.

When he and colleagues queried nearly 3,500 older patients at a large primary care clinic in Indianapolis about bothersome symptoms, 55% listed fatigue — second only to musculoskeletal pain (65%) and more than back pain (45%) and shortness of breath (41%).

Separately, a 2010 study in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society estimated that 31% of people 51 and older reported being fatigued in the past week.

The impact can be profound. Fatigue is the leading reason for restricted activity in people 70 and older, according to a 2001 study by researchers at Yale. Other studies have linked fatigue with impaired mobility, limitations in people’s abilities to perform daily activities, the onset or worsening of disability, and earlier death.

What often happens is older adults with fatigue stop being active and become deconditioned, which leads to muscle loss and weakness, which heightens fatigue. “It becomes a vicious cycle that contributes to things like depression, which can make you more fatigued,” said Dr. Jean Kutner, a professor of medicine and chief medical officer at the University of Colorado Hospital.

To stop that from happening, Johnson came up with a plan after learning her lung cancer had returned. Every morning, she set small goals for herself. One day, she’d get up and wash her face. The next, she’d take a shower. Another day, she’d go to the grocery store. After each activity, she’d rest.

In the three years since her cancer came back, Johnson’s fatigue has been constant. But “I’m functioning better,” she told me, because she’s learned how to pace herself and find things that motivate her, like teaching a virtual class to students training to be teachers and getting exercise under the supervision of a personal trainer.

When should older adults be concerned about fatigue? “If someone has been doing OK but is now feeling fatigued all the time, it’s important to get an evaluation,” said Dr. Holly Yang, a physician at Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego and incoming board president of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine.

“Fatigue is an alarm signal that something is wrong with the body but it’s rarely one thing. Usually, several things need to be addressed,” said Dr. Ardeshir Hashmi, section chief of the Center for Geriatric Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic.

Among the items physicians should check: Are your thyroid levels normal? Are you having trouble with sleep? If you have underlying medical conditions, are they well controlled? Do you have an underlying infection? Are you chronically dehydrated? Do you have anemia (a deficiency of red blood cells or hemoglobin), an electrolyte imbalance, or low levels of testosterone? Are you eating enough protein? Have you been feeling more anxious or depressed recently? And might medications you’re taking be contributing to fatigue?

“The medications and doses may be the same, but your body’s ability to metabolize those medications and clear them from your system may have changed,” Hashmi said, noting that such changes in the body’s metabolic activity are common as people become older.

Many potential contributors to fatigue can be addressed. But much of the time, reasons for fatigue can’t be explained by an underlying medical condition.

That happened to Teresa Goodell, 64, a retired nurse who lives just outside Portland, Oregon. During a December visit to Arizona, she suddenly found herself exhausted and short of breath while on a hike, even though she was in good physical condition. At an urgent care facility, she was diagnosed with an asthma exacerbation and given steroids, but they didn’t help.

Soon, Goodell was spending hours each day in bed, overcome by profound tiredness and weakness. Even small activities wore her out. But none of the medical tests she received in Arizona and subsequently in Portland — a chest X-ray and CT scan, blood work, a cardiac stress test — showed abnormalities.

“There was no objective evidence of illness, and that makes it hard for anybody to believe you’re sick,” she told me.

Goodell started visiting long covid web sites and chat rooms for people with chronic fatigue syndrome. Today, she’s convinced she has post-viral syndrome from an infection. One of the most common symptoms of long covid is fatigue that interferes with daily life, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There are several strategies for dealing with persistent fatigue. In cancer patients, “the best evidence favors physical activity such as tai chi, yoga, walking, or low-impact exercises,” said Dr. Christian Sinclair, an associate professor of palliative medicine at the University of Kansas Health System. The goal is to “gradually stretch patients’ stamina,” he said.

With long covid, however, doing too much too soon can backfire by causing “post-exertional malaise.” Pacing one’s activities is often recommended: doing only what’s most important, when one’s energy level is highest, and resting afterward. “You learn how to set realistic goals,” said Dr. Andrew Esch, senior education advisor at the Center to Advance Palliative Care.

Cognitive behavioral therapy can help older adults with fatigue learn how to adjust expectations and address intrusive thoughts such as, “I should be able to do more.” At the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, management plans for older patients with fatigue typically include strategies to address physical activity, sleep health, nutrition, emotional health, and support from family and friends.

“So much of fatigue management is about forming new habits,” said Dr. Ishwaria Subbiah, a palliative care and integrative medicine physician at MD Anderson. “It’s important to recognize that this doesn’t happen right away: It takes time.”

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

The post Why fatigue is so common in older adults appeared first on Popular Science.

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Relationships are all about trust, and a new study shows AI-aided conversations could help build rapport between two people—but only as long as no one suspects the other is using AI.

According to a Cornell University research team’s investigation published this week with Scientific Reports, using AI-assisted responses (i.e. “smart replies”) can change conversational tone and social relationships, as well as increase communication speeds. And although more positive emotional language is often used in these instances, people who merely suspect responses to be influenced by AI are often more distrusting of their conversation partners, regardless of whether or not they are actually being used.

[Related: OpenAI’s newest ChatGPT update can still spread conspiracy theories.]

In the team’s study, researchers gathered 219 participant pairs and asked them to work with a program modeled after Google Allo (French for “hello”), the first, now-defunct smart-reply platform. The pairs were then asked to talk about policy issues under three conditions: both sides could use smart replies, only one side could use them, and neither could employ them. As a result, the team saw smart reply usage (roughly one in seven messages) boosted conversations’ efficiency, positive-aligned language, as well as positive evaluations from participants. That said, those who suspected partners used smart replies were often judged more negatively.

In the meantime, the study indicated you could also be sacrificing your own personal touch for the sake of AI-aided speed and convenience. Another experiment involving 299 randomly paired conversationalists asked participants to speak together under one of four scenarios: default Google smart replies, “positive” smart replies, “negative” replies, and no smart replies at all. As might be expected, positive smart replies begat more positive overall tones than conversations with the negative smart replies, or zero smart replies.

[Related: Microsoft lays off entire AI ethics team while going all out on ChatGPT.]

“While AI might be able to help you write, it’s altering your language in ways you might not expect, especially by making you sound more positive,” Jess Hohenstein, a postdoctoral researcher and lead author, said in a statement. “This suggests that by using text-generating AI, you’re sacrificing some of your own personal voice.”

Malte Jung, one of the study’s co-authors and an associate professor of information science, added that this implies the companies controlling AI-assist tech algorithms could easily influence many users’ “interactions, language, and perceptions of each other.”

This could become especially concerning as large language model programs like Microsoft’s ChatGPT-boosted Bing search engine and Google Bard continue their rapid integration into a suite of the companies’ respective products, much to critics’ worries.

“Technology companies tend to emphasize the utility of AI tools to accomplish tasks faster and better, but they ignore the social dimension,” said Jung. “We do not live and work in isolation, and the systems we use impact our interactions with others.”

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Update 04/06/2023: Comments from Monument’s CEO have been added to this article.

According to recent reports, two online alcohol recovery startups shared users’ detailed private health information and personal data to third-party advertisers without their consent. They were able to do so via popular tracking systems such as the Meta Pixel. Both Tempest and its parent company, Monument, confirmed the extensive privacy violations to TechCrunch on Tuesday. They now claim to no longer employ the frequently criticized consumer profiling products developed by companies such as Microsoft, Google, and Facebook.

In a disclosure letter mailed to its consumers last week, Monument states “we value and respect the privacy of our members’ information,” but admitted “some information” may have been shared to third parties without the “appropriate authorization, consent, or agreements required by law.” The potentially illegal violations stem as far back as 2020 for Monument members, and 2017 for those using Tempest.

Within those leaks, as many as 100,000 accounts’ names, birthdates, email addresses, telephone numbers, home addresses, membership IDs, insurance IDs, and IP addresses. Additionally, users’ photographs, service plans, survey responses, appointment-related info, and “associated health information” may also have been shared to third-parties. Monument and Tempest assured customers, however, that their Social Security numbers and banking information had not been improperly handled.

[Related: How data brokers threaten your privacy.]

Major data companies’ largely free “pixel” tools generally work by embedding a small bit of code into websites. The program then subsequently supplies immensely personal and detailed information to both third-party businesses, as well as the tracking tech’s makers to help compile extensive consumer profiles for advertising purposes. One study estimates that approximately one-third of the 80,000 most popular websites online utilize Meta Pixel (disclosure: PopSci included), for example. While both Tempest and Monument pledge to have removed tracking code from their sites, TechCrunch also notes the codes’ makers are not legally required to delete previously collected data.

“Monument and Tempest should be ashamed of sharing this extremely personal information of people, especially considering the nature and vulnerability of their clients,” Caitlin Seeley George, campaigns managing director of the digital privacy advocacy group, Fight for the Future, wrote PopSci via email. For George, the revelations are simply the latest examples of companies disregarding privacy for profit, but argues lawmakers “should similarly feel ashamed” that the public lacks legal defense or protection from these abuses. “It seems like every week we hear another case of companies sharing our data and prioritizing profits over privacy. This won’t end until lawmakers pass privacy laws,” she said.

“Protecting our patients’ privacy is a top priority,” Monument CEO Mike Russell told PopSci over email. “We have put robust safeguards in place and will continue to adopt appropriate measures to keep data safe. In addition, we have ended our relationship with third-party advertisers that will not agree to comply with our contractual requirements and applicable law.”

Tracking tools are increasingly the subject of scrutiny and criticism as more and more reports detail privacy concerns—last year, an investigation from The Markup and The Verge revealed that some of the country’s most popular tax prep software providers utilize Meta Pixel. The same tracking code is also at the center of a lawsuit in California concerning potential HIPAA violations stemming from hospitals sharing patients’ medical data.

Correction 04/06/2023: A previous version of this article’s headline stated Tempest and Monument “sold” user data. A spokesperson for the companies stated they “shared” data with third-party companies.

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Similar anatomy, not a shared sense of humor, might be key for experiencing deception from a pretty common magic trick. In a new study, a team of psychologists tested a sleight-of-hand trick called the French drop on three species of monkeys with different hand structures. In this trick, an object appears to vanish when a spectator assumes it is taken from one hand by the hidden thumb of the other hand.  

The monkeys without opposable thumbs did not fall for the assumption and were aware of the whereabouts of the treats a magician tried to “make disappear.” But, the monkeys with opposable thumbs were duped. The findings were published April 4 in the journal Current Biology.

[Related: A centuries-old magic trick is helping us make holograms we can feel.]

From the results, it appears that in order to deceive, a conjuror needs a similar anatomy to their audience. Sharing a particular biomechanical ability may be necessary to accurately anticipate and predict the movements of another with the same limbs. This phenomenon turns out to be true even when the apparently accurate predictions end in confusion at the hands of an illusionist. 

“Magicians use intricate techniques to mislead the observer into experiencing the impossible. It is a great way to study blind spots in attention and perception,” study author Elias Garcia-Pelegrin said in a statement. “By investigating how species of primates experience magic, we can understand more about the evolutionary roots of cognitive shortcomings that leave us exposed to the cunning of magicians.”

Garcia-Pelegrin, now a psychology professor at the National University of Singapore, has practiced magic for a decade and conducted these experiments during his PhD work at Cambridge University. 

The French drop is often one of the first tricks budding magicians set out to master. In the trick, a coin is displayed in one hand. The other hand then reaches over and grabs the coin. The palm of the second hand faces inwards, with the magician’s thumb concealed behind fingers. The viewer knows the thumb is lurking and ready to grip, so they assume the coin has been taken when it is no longer visible. Their attention then follows the second hand, only to find it empty. Meanwhile, the magician had secretly dropped the coin into the palm of the original hand.

In this study with monkeys, morsels of food replaced coins and the treats were given as a reward– but only if the monkey guessed the correct hand. Going into the experiment, the team predicted that monkeys with opposable thumbs would act like human audiences and assume that the hidden thumb had grabbed the treat, and then select the incorrect hand.

[Related: Time passes faster for smaller, quicker animals.]

The team repeatedly performed the French drop for 24 monkeys from three species– capuchins, squirrel monkeys, and marmosets. 

The eight capuchin monkeys were tested using peanuts. This species boasts noteable dexterity and uses stone tools to crack open nuts in the wild. Capuchins can also waggle each finger and have opposable thumbs which allow “precision grip” between thumb and forefingers.  They were fooled by the French drop about 81 percent of the time, mostly choosing the empty second hand.

While less dexterous than their capuchin counterparts, squirrel monkeys have limited thumb rotation, but can oppose their thumbs. They are typically familiar with a hidden thumb interacting with fingers, but they cannot cannot perform a precision grip the way capuchins and humans do. The squirrel monkeys were tested with mealworms and were fooled 93 percent of the time. 

Marmosets do not have opposable thumbs and have thumbs that align with their fingers to make five equidistant digits. These are ideal for climbing up thick tree trunks. They were fooled only 6 percent of the time. They chose the hand that initially held a tasty marshmallow was initially placed and stuck with it for this experiment.

The team tried to nullify the tricks by actually completing the hand-to-hand transfers, instead of using misdirection. When this occurred, the capuchins and squirrel monkeys anticipated correctly, while the marmosets missed out on their reward.

As a last step, the team devised their own version of the French drop called the “Power drop”. It utilizes a full fist grab, which is a hand action that all the monkey species could perform to varying degrees. They found that the power drop fooled all of the monkey species the vast majority of the time.

[Related: Monkeys with close friends have friendlier gut bacteria.]

“There is increasing evidence that the same parts of the nervous system used when we perform an action are also activated when we watch that action performed by others,” co-author and Cambridge psychologist Nicola Clayton said in a statement. “This mirroring in our neural motor system might explain why the French drop worked for the capuchins and squirrel monkeys but not for marmosets.”

The team adds that how fingers and thumbs move helps space the way an individual thinks and the assumptions made about the world around us. 

“Our work raises the intriguing possibility that an individual’s inherent physical capability heavily influences their perception, their memory of what they think they saw, and their ability to predict manual movements of those around them,” said Clayton. 

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This article was originally featured on KHN.

Some adults who take prescription medication for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder are required to have their urine tested for drugs several times a year. Others never are tested.

Such screenings are designed to check if ADHD patients are safely taking their pills, such as Adderall, and not selling them, taking too many, or using other drugs.

Several doctors told KHN there are varying opinions and no national standards on the role of urine testing to monitor adults who take ADHD medication. So patients face dramatically different requirements, depending on their clinics’ and health insurers’ policies.

“There really isn’t much literature to guide you on how to do this,” said Dr. Margaret Chaplin, a Connecticut psychiatrist who treats patients with ADHD, mental illnesses, or substance use disorders.

Chaplin first noticed the lack of testing standards about eight years ago, when she and colleagues proposed ways to prevent stimulant misuse in adult ADHD patients.

Her team recommended urine tests only if patients exhibit “red-flag behavior,” such as appearing intoxicated, repeatedly reporting lost prescriptions, or frequently switching doctors. Some doctors and clinics make testing decisions on a patient-by-patient basis taking into account those red flags or patient history. Others apply universal policies, which may be aimed at preventing discrimination. Some insurance companies and state Medicaid systems also have testing requirements.

ADHD stimulants, opioid pain medications, and some other drugs are classified as controlled substances, which are tightly regulated because they can be addictive or misused.

ADHD patients subjected to frequent drug screens say the tests can be time-consuming and expensive. Some feel stigmatized.

A.C. Shilton felt relieved when she was diagnosed with ADHD in her mid-30s. The farmer and freelance journalist from rural Tennessee said the diagnosis explained why she felt so disorganized and forgetful, and as if her brain were a motor running all day. Shilton said her medication slows that motor down.

The 38-year-old Jamestown resident said her first doctor ordered urine tests once a year. That doctor eventually closed his practice, and Shilton said her next physician made her take a test at nearly every visit.

“You go in to get the standard of care, which is this medicine, and you’re kind of treated like you’re a bad person again; there’s some shame associated with that,” Shilton said.

She was also upset after learning office staffers were incorrect when they told her that urine testing was required by law — something that other ADHD patients posting on social media forums said had happened to them too.

Shilton said few doctors treat adult ADHD patients in her rural community. She now drives more than an hour to a different clinic, which doesn’t require her to take as many drug tests.

Travis Gordon, 47, of Charlotte, North Carolina, has gone to the same ADHD clinic for more than 10 years. Gordon said he wasn’t drug-tested in the first few years. Then, for several years, he had to give a urine sample every three months. During much of the covid-19 pandemic, he wasn’t tested. Now, he’s screened every six months.

“We shouldn’t have to feel like street criminals to get drugs that are needed for our daily success,” Gordon said.

Gordon said it would make sense for doctors to order tests more frequently as they get to know new patients. But he said he doesn’t understand why such testing should continue for people like him, established patients who properly take their medication.

Traci Camper, 50, of northeastern Tennessee, said she has “never even tried a cigarette,” much less used illicit drugs, but her doctor has required urine tests every three months for more than 10 years. Camper said the process can be inconvenient but she’s ultimately OK with the tests, especially since she lives in an area with high rates of drug abuse.

The clinics that Shilton, Gordon, and Camper went to did not respond to KHN’s requests for interviews about their testing policies.

Adults are diagnosed with ADHD if they have multiple, frequent symptoms so severe they interfere with work, relationships, or other aspects of life. Treatments include therapy and medication, most often stimulants.

ADHD patients have been affected by the response to the opioid crisis, which has led to more scrutiny for all controlled medications. Some have reported trouble filling their prescriptions as drug distribution companies limit sales to certain pharmacies. Some patients, especially rural ones, could face obstacles if the federal government reverts to pre-pandemic rules that require at least one in-person appointment to receive controlled drugs via telehealth.

Chaplin said doctors who treat ADHD may feel the need to be extra vigilant with drug testing because of this increased scrutiny, or due to the risk of misuse.

An estimated 3.7 million Americans 12 or older misused prescription stimulants in 2021, and 1.5 million had a prescription stimulant use disorder, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Americans are more likely to misuse or be addicted to prescription opioids, sedatives, and tranquilizers, the agency said.

Adults with ADHD are more likely to have a substance use disorder than those without the condition, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Although there aren’t formal standards, several health care organizations and professionals have made recommendations to prevent and detect adult ADHD stimulant misuse. Suggestions include requiring patients to sign prescription-agreement contracts and regularly checking databases that show all controlled medications each patient is buying.

Chaplin said there’s little research into how effective any method is at preventing medication misuse.

A recent survey found that 42% of family physicians and 21% of college health professionals who treat adult ADHD require their patients to submit random urine drug screens.

Gordon, Camper, and some ADHD patients on social media forums said their drug screens have come at predictable intervals, instead of random ones.

Dr. Sidarth Wakhlu, a psychiatrist who specializes in treating substance use disorders at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, said some of his patients also have ADHD. He suggests drug-testing most ADHD patients once or twice a year. For “someone who has no addiction history, has no red flags, every three months is an overkill,” he said.

The cost of drug testing is as variable as the frequency.

For example, Dr. Michael Fingerhood at Johns Hopkins University uses urine tests that cost as little as $60 before insurance. Fingerhood makes testing decisions case by case for patients who take controlled substances to treat ADHD, pain, or opioid addiction.

Gordon used to pay $110 for each of his tests when he had insurance his doctor did not accept. Shilton’s insurance was billed $545 for a test. Shilton said she complained to a nurse who said, in the future, she could use a less expensive test.

Shilton said she replied, “Well, why aren’t we doing that to begin with? Why are we doing this extremely fancy drug testing?”

Wakhlu said the more expensive urine tests can identify specific types and quantities of drugs. Such tests are usually used to confirm the results of initial, less pricey tests, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Wakhlu said that when test results show a patient might be misusing stimulants, doctors should initiate a non-accusatory conversation to discuss the results and, if needed, offer help. He also said it’s important to emphasize safety, such as how taking too much ADHD medication or combining it with other stimulants, such as methamphetamine, can be dangerous.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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Consider three hypothetical women in their mid-70s, all living alone in identical economic circumstances with the same array of ailments: diabetes, arthritis, and high blood pressure.

Ms. Green stays home most of the time and sometimes goes a week without seeing people. But she’s in frequent touch by phone with friends and relatives, and she takes a virtual class with a discussion group from a nearby college.

Ms. Smith also stays home, but rarely talks to anyone. She has lost contact with friends, stopped going to church, and spends most of her time watching TV.

Ms. Johnson has a wide circle of friends and a busy schedule. She walks with neighbors regularly, volunteers at a school twice a week, goes to church, and is in close touch with her children, who don’t live nearby.

Three sets of social circumstances, three levels of risk should the women experience a fall, bout of pneumonia, or serious deterioration in health.

Of the women, Ms. Johnson would be most likely to get a ride to the doctor or a visit in the hospital, experts suggest. Several people may check on Ms. Green and arrange assistance while she recovers.

But Ms. Smith would be unlikely to get much help and more likely than the others to fare poorly if her health became challenged. She’s what some experts would call “socially vulnerable” or “socially frail.”

Social frailty is a corollary to physical frailty, a set of vulnerabilities (including weakness, exhaustion, unintentional weight loss, slowness, and low physical activity) shown to increase the risk of falls, disability, hospitalization, poor surgical outcomes, admission to a nursing home, and earlier death in older adults.

Essentially, people who are physically frail have less physiological strength and a reduced biological ability to bounce back from illness or injury.

Those who are socially frail similarly have fewer resources to draw upon, but for different reasons — they don’t have close relationships, can’t rely on others for help, aren’t active in community groups or religious organizations, or live in neighborhoods that feel unsafe, among other circumstances. Also, social frailty can entail feeling a lack of control over one’s life or being devalued by others.

Many of these factors have been linked to poor health outcomes in later life, along with so-called social determinants of health — low socioeconomic status, poor nutrition, insecure housing, and inaccessible transportation.

Social frailty assumes that each factor contributes to an older person’s vulnerability and that they interact with and build upon each other. “It’s a more complete picture of older adults’ circumstances than any one factor alone,” said Dr. Melissa Andrew, a professor of geriatric medicine at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who published one of the first social vulnerability indices for older adults in 2008.

This way of thinking about older adults’ social lives, and how they influence health outcomes, is getting new attention from experts in the U.S. and elsewhere. In February, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and the University of California-San Francisco published a 10-item “social frailty index” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

Using data from 8,250 adults 65 and older who participated in the national Health and Retirement Study from 2010 to 2016, the researchers found that the index helped predict an increased risk of death during the period studied in a significant number of older adults, complementing medical tools used for this purpose.

“Our goal is to help clinicians identify older patients who are socially frail and to prompt problem-solving designed to help them cope with various challenges,” said Dr. Sachin Shah, a co-author of the paper and a researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital.

“It adds dimensions of what a clinician should know about their patients beyond current screening instruments, which are focused on physical health,” said Dr. Linda Fried, an internationally known frailty researcher and dean of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.

Beyond the corridors of medicine, she said, “we need society to build solutions” to issues raised in the index — the ability of seniors to work, volunteer, and engage with other people; the safety and accessibility of neighborhoods in which they live; ageism and discrimination against older adults; and more.

Meanwhile, a team of Chinese researchers recently published a comprehensive review of social frailty in adults age 60 and older, based on results from dozens of studies with about 83,900 participants in Japan, China, Korea, and Europe. They determined that 24% of these older adults, assessed both in hospitals and in the community, were socially frail — a higher portion than those deemed physically frail (12%) or cognitively frail (9%) in separate studies. Most vulnerable were people 75 and older.

What are the implications for health care? “If someone is socially vulnerable, perhaps they’ll need more help at home while they’re recovering from surgery. Or maybe they’ll need someone outside their family circle to be an advocate for them in the hospital,” said Dr. Kenneth Covinsky, a geriatrician at UCSF and co-author of the recent Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences article.

“I can see a social frailty index being useful in identifying older adults who need extra assistance and directing them to community resources,” said Jennifer Ailshire, an associate professor of gerontology and sociology at the University of Southern California Leonard Davis School of Gerontology.

Unlike other physicians, geriatricians regularly screen older adults for extra needs, albeit without using a well-vetted or consistent set of measures. “I’ll ask, who do you depend on most and how do you depend on them? Do they bring you food? Drive you places? Come by and check on you? Give you their time and attention?” said Dr. William Dale, the Arthur M. Coppola Family Chair in Supportive Care Medicine at City of Hope, a comprehensive cancer center in Duarte, California.

Depending on the patients’ answers, Dale will refer them to a social worker or help modify their plan of care. But, he cautioned, primary care physicians and specialists don’t routinely take the time to do this.

Oak Street Health, a Chicago-based chain of 169 primary care centers for older adults in 21 states and recently purchased by CVS Health, is trying to change that in its clinics, said Dr. Ali Khan, the company’s chief medical officer of value-based care strategy. At least three times a year, medical assistants, social workers, or clinicians ask patients about loneliness and social isolation, barriers to transportation, food insecurity, financial strain, housing quality and safety, access to broadband services, and utility services.

The organization combines these findings with patient-specific medical information in a “global risk assessment” that separates seniors into four tiers of risk, from very high to very low. In turn, this informs the kinds of services provided to patients, the frequency of service delivery, and individual wellness plans, which include social as well as medical priorities.

The central issue, Khan said, is “what is this patient’s ability to continue down a path of resilience in the face of a very complicated health care system?” and what Oak Street Health can do to enhance that.

What’s left out of an approach like this, however, is something crucial to older adults: whether their relationships with other people are positive or negative. That isn’t typically measured, but it’s essential in considering whether their social needs are being met, said Linda Waite, the George Herbert Mead Distinguished Service Professor of sociology at the University of Chicago and director of the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project.

For seniors who want to think about their own social vulnerability, consider this five-item index, developed by researchers in Japan.

(1) Do you go out less frequently now than last year?

(2) Do you sometimes visit your friends?

(3) Do you feel you are helpful to friends or family?

(4) Do you live alone?

(5) Do you talk to someone every day?

Think about your answers. If you find your responses unsatisfactory, it might be time to reconsider your social circumstances and make a change.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

The post Social relationships are important to the health of aging adults appeared first on Popular Science.

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Scrolling through Instagram and TikTok on a Monday morning is an easy trigger for the dreaded fear of missing out–or FOMO. To push back against this need to never miss a party or fancy vacation, the term JOMO (joy of missing out) has been popularized for those who report a healthy level of enjoyment of solitude.

However, most people who also have high JOMO also report higher levels of social anxiety, according to a study published this month in the journal Telematics and Informatics Reports.

[Related: Seattle schools sue social media companies over students’ worsening mental health.]

For the study, a team from Washington State University looked at two 500-person samples of adults recruited through Amazon’s crowdsourcing platform MTurk. As a way to measure JOMO, they asked a slate of questions about enjoying spending time alone and experiencing disconnection. For example, whether subjects liked having time to self-reflect and if they were happy to see friends and family out enjoying themselves even if they weren’t there. Questions to assess loneliness, social media use, social anxiety, personality traits, and general life satisfaction were also included. 

The surveys revealed mixed results, with some evidence that there is actually some anxiety hiding behind the joy. 

“In general, a lot of people like being connected,” psychology professor and co-author Chris Barry said in a statement. “When trying to assess JOMO, we found that some people were enjoying missing out, not for the solitude or a Zen-like, calming experience of being able to regroup, but more to avoid social interaction.”

This avoidance might explain the correlation the team found between social media use and JOMO, which surprised the team. They anticipated that people who wanted to miss out on social gatherings would not care to check in to see what their friends or family were doing. Instead, they found that those who have social anxiety may find social media as a less intense way to connect instead of interacting in person. 

The study of the first sample group showed connections in those high in JOMO and social media and also general life satisfaction, but social anxiety actually had the strongest correlation.

[Related: Study confirms the obvious: youth have abandoned Facebook.]

After getting these mixed results, they designed a second study to see if there was a group of people high in JOMO, but without that anxiety. While they did find these blissful introverts, the group was small and represented only about 10 percent of the participants in the study. This group was not socially anxious, but still reported some moderate feelings of loneliness.

Previous studies have linked FOMO with low self-esteem and loneliness, but these findings indicate that the experience of JOMO is not as clear. The team believes that JOMO might be more of a momentary phase of needing to disconnect instead of a constant state of feelings. Other studies have also shown that continued exposure to anxiety triggers can help lessen stress later.

“There are a lot of unanswered questions like ‘what’s a good dosage of social interaction versus disengagement?’ I think that’s going to differ for everyone,” Barry said.  “The motives matter,” Barry said. “Why are people missing out? If it’s because they need to recharge, that’s maybe a good thing. If they’re trying to avoid something, that is probably not healthy in the long run.”

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Humans have been experimenting with mind-altering plants for many millennia now. . Modern-day drugs such as opium were being used in Europe around 5,700 BCE, and cannabis seeds started showing up in archeological digs in Asia some 10,000 years ago. Some studies have shown that ancient hominids have been using psychotropic plants and drugs as far back as 200 million years ago.

While tripping might seem like an exclusively human desire, it turns out that some of our closest great ape relatives might also find ways to switch up their state of mind—but instead of using plants and other substances, they just twirl around really quickly. For  research published today in the journal Primates, researchers watched 40 videos of great apes spinning around just to get dizzy. And they think these actions could have some clues into why people have often seeked innovative ways to get a little high, drunk, and what have you.

[Related: Why do humans talk? Tree-dwelling orangutans might hold the answer.]

“Every culture has found a way of evading reality through dedicated and special rituals, practices, or ceremonies,” study author Adriano Lameira, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Warwick, said in a press release. “This human trait of seeking altered states is so universal, historically, and culturally, that it raises the intriguing possibility that this is something that has been potentially inherited from our evolutionary ancestors.”

Inspired by a viral video of a male gorilla spinning in a pool, the team found dozens of videos of gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans going round and round, often using ropes or vines. The researchers then analyzed the movements, finding that on average the apes spun 5.5 times per session, with an average speed of 1.5 revolutions per second. Most animals then repeated the session three times in a row. This is about as fast as professional dancers, circus artists, and Dervish Muslims twirl, according to the authors. 

The apes themselves would often be so dizzy after a bout of twirling that they were noticeably dizzy and likely to lose their balance. To understand the feeling of euphoria after such a feat, the team tested out twirling at the same speed and intensity themselves, and actually struggled to get to the third round due to dizziness. 

[Related: These long-fingered lemurs pick and eat their boogers, just like humans.]

Previous studies on why humans crave self-induced dizziness have focused on alcohol and drug use, but the authors of this study argue that simple spinning could be worth a deeper look. After all, the ability to make or find mind-altering substances requires knowledge, skills, and tools that we aren’t sure humans or pre-humans had access to, Lameira added. Additionally, there could be links with mental state and boredom, as the videos recorded were mostly of captive apes. 

“What we wanted to try to understand through this study is whether spinning can be studied as a primordial behavior that human ancestors would have been able to autonomously engage in and tap into other states of consciousness,” Lamiera said. “If all great apes seek dizziness, then our ancestors are also highly likely to have done so.”

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This article was originally featured on KHN.

Anxiety is the most common psychological disorder affecting adults in the U.S. In older people, it’s associated with considerable distress as well as ill health, diminished quality of life, and elevated rates of disability.

Yet, when the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an independent, influential panel of experts, suggested last year that adults be screened for anxiety, it left out one group — people 65 and older.

The major reason the task force cited in draft recommendations issued in September: “the current evidence is insufficient to assess the balance of benefits and harms of screening for anxiety” in all older adults. (Final recommendations are expected later this year.)

The task force noted that questionnaires used to screen for anxiety may be unreliable for older adults. Screening entails evaluating people who don’t have obvious symptoms of worrisome medical or psychological conditions.

“We recognize that many older adults experience mental health conditions like anxiety” and “we are calling urgently for more research,” said Lori Pbert, associate chief of the preventive and behavioral medicine division at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School and a former task force member who worked on the anxiety recommendations.

This “we don’t know enough yet” stance doesn’t sit well with some experts who study and treat seniors with anxiety. Dr. Carmen Andreescu, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, called the task force’s position “baffling” because “it’s well established that anxiety isn’t uncommon in older adults and effective treatments exist.”

“I cannot think of any danger in identifying anxiety in older adults, especially because doing so has no harm and we can do things to reduce it,” said Dr. Helen Lavretsky, a psychology professor at UCLA.

In a recent editorial in JAMA Psychiatry, Andreescu and Lavretsky noted that only about one-third of seniors with generalized anxiety disorder — intense, persistent worry about everyday matters — receive treatment. That’s concerning, they said, considering evidence of links between anxiety and stroke, heart failure, coronary artery disease, autoimmune illness, and neurodegenerative disorders such as dementia.

Other forms of anxiety commonly undetected and untreated in seniors include phobias (like a fear of dogs), obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic disorder, social anxiety disorder (a fear of being assessed and judged by others), and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The smoldering disagreement over screening calls attention to the significance of anxiety in later life — a concern heightened during the covid-19 pandemic, which magnified stress and worry among seniors. Here’s what you should know.

Anxiety is common. According to a book chapter published in 2020, authored by Andreescu and a colleague, up to 15% of people 65 and older who live outside nursing homes or other facilities have a diagnosable anxiety condition.

As many as half have symptoms of anxiety — irritability, worry, restlessness, decreased concentration, sleep changes, fatigue, avoidant behaviors — that can be distressing but don’t justify a diagnosis, the study noted.

Most seniors with anxiety have struggled with this condition since earlier in life, but the way it manifests may change over time. Specifically, older adults tend to be more anxious about issues such as illness, the loss of family and friends, retirement, and cognitive declines, experts said. Only a small fraction develop anxiety after turning 65.

Anxiety can be difficult to identify in older adults. Older adults often minimize symptoms of anxiety, thinking “this is what getting older is like” rather than “this is a problem that I should do something about,” Andreescu said.

Also, seniors are more likely than younger adults to report “somatic” complaints — physical symptoms such as dizziness, fatigue, headaches, chest pain, shortness of breath, and gastrointestinal problems — that can be difficult to distinguish from underlying medical conditions, according to Gretchen Brenes, a professor of gerontology and geriatric medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

Some types of anxiety or anxious behaviors — notably, hoarding and fear of falling — are much more common in older adults, but questionnaires meant to identify anxiety don’t typically ask about those issues, said Dr. Jordan Karp, chair of psychiatry at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson.

When older adults voice concerns, medical providers too often dismiss them as normal, given the challenges of aging, said Dr. Eric Lenze, head of psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the third author of the recent JAMA Psychiatry editorial.

Simple questions can help identify whether an older adult needs to be evaluated for anxiety, he and other experts suggested: Do you have recurrent worries that are hard to control? Are you having trouble sleeping? Have you been feeling more irritable, stressed, or nervous? Are you having trouble with concentration or thinking? Are you avoiding things you normally like to do because you’re wrapped up in your worries?

Stephen Snyder, 67, who lives in Zelienople, Pennsylvania, and was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder in March 2019, would answer “yes” to many of these queries. “I’m a Type A personality and I worry a lot about a lot of things — my family, my finances, the future,” he told me. “Also, I’ve tended to dwell on things that happened in the past and get all worked up.”

Treatments are effective. Psychotherapy — particularly cognitive behavioral therapy, which helps people address persistent negative thoughts — is generally considered the first line of anxiety treatment in older adults. In an evidence review for the task force, researchers noted that this type of therapy helps reduce anxiety in seniors seen in primary care settings.

Also recommended, Lenze noted, is relaxation therapy, which can involve deep breathing exercises, massage or music therapy, yoga, and progressive muscle relaxation.

Because mental health practitioners, especially those who specialize in seniors’ mental health, are extremely difficult to find, primary care physicians often recommend medications to ease anxiety. Two categories of drugs — antidepressants known as SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) and SNRIs (serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors) — are typically prescribed, and both appear to help to older adults, experts said.

Frequently prescribed to older adults, but to be avoided by them, are benzodiazepines, a class of sedating medications such as Valium, Ativan, Xanax, and Klonopin. The American Geriatrics Society has warned medical providers not to use these in older adults, except when other therapies have failed, because they are addictive and significantly increase the risk of hip fractures, falls and other accidents, and short-term cognitive impairments.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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I STILL REMEMBER what my great-grandmother smells like. Even though she passed more than a decade ago, I know her favorite perfume just as well as I recall every contour of her face. Her scent came back to me recently when my boyfriend came over after spending several hours sitting in a room where incense was burning. The smoky aromatic blend fused with his clothing, and memories of my great-grandmother flooded in when I hugged him. I felt warm, loved, and safe.

This experience is not unlike the familiar story of someone walking through a department store’s perfume aisle and remembering an ex-lover, or getting a sniff of hair spritz or oil that evokes flashbacks of getting their scalp greased by a trusted elder as a child. It’s similar to the shared fondness my boyfriend and I have for the smell of freshly flat-ironed tresses—a peculiar odor that comforts us because it spurs the memory of watching our respective mothers press their hair when we were children.

Smell, alongside taste, is one of the oldest of the five human senses, and it plays a critical role in helping us assess the safety of our environment. Humans have approximately 400 cell receptors for detecting smells, compared to the 35 taste receptors used to sense flavors.This primitive, protective adaptation is deeply intertwined with our emotional and cultural experiences due to its direct connection to the amygdala-hippocampal complex. That immediate neurological throughline to the emotional epicenter of our brain is part of why our retention of smells first encountered in childhood is so strong.

That direct physiological connection between our noses and our brain’s emotional processing center is one reason we categorize aromas using the same terminology we use to describe sentiments, such as comforting, heavy, pleasant, or nauseating. It also explains why anosmia, a condition that leads to a weak or nonexistent sense of smell, can result in mental trauma. “For a lot of people, the loss of food pleasure is absolutely devastating,” says John Hayes, director of the Sensory Evaluation Center at Penn State, noting that smell plays a significant role in how food tastes. “But for other people, the loss of that emotional connection to smell can lead to feeling isolated.”

Experiences that occur between the ages of 3 and 11 have a profound effect on a child’s emotional intelligence. So developing a poignant association with a particular smell is likely part of the imprinting process nearly all humans go through, says Mike McBeath, a cognitive psychologist at Arizona State University.

“You want to remember smells when you first encounter them as a kid to learn the structure of the world around you,” he explains. “These associations might be something that helps us recognize where home is.” Children are also still learning to control their emotions, which means they might experience extremes. When such a feeling is tied to scent exposure, it might ingrain the connection deeper in a child’s memory. While newborns can recognize only a few odors, a child’s sense of smell will sharpen up until age 8. Then it levels out until about 20 years of age, when it starts a slow decline that continues to intensify with age.

While individual experiences with scent vary wildly, the process for the memory association is by and large the same. The olfactory nerve is the shortest cranial nerve, with only two synapses separating it from the amygdala, the emotion-processing area of the brain, says McBeath. From there, a smell has to hop only three synapses to the hippocampus, the brain’s working memory region. Aromas hit the backs of our brains more quickly than visual or auditory sensations, which require more processing in the prefrontal cortex before reaching the hippocampus.

Your initial experiences of smelling your grandmother’s perfume or the grease rubbed into your scalp remain stored in your brain so you know how to react if you whiff that substance again. Though there is no concrete evidence, an imprinted memory of smells is thought to be evolutionarily advantageous. According to experts interviewed for this article, it does make sense that when you first encounter a smell, your brain identifies it as good or bad to avoid potential future dangers. “That’s one reason you can often have these very strong associations,” says Claire Cheetham, an assistant professor of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh.

While humans are more likely to have pleasant smell associations, this isn’t always the case. Smells can trigger negative reflexes or even symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. One example is spoiled food. The smell of it prevents you from wanting to put it in your mouth to begin with. Some emotional cues are hard-wired to certain smells, such as, again, the repulsive stench of toxins or the sour odor of spoiled food (because we’re born disliking the taste profile of sour food to protect us from eating it). This innate wiring, according to McBeath, is part of the reason utility companies add a rotten-egg smell to natural gas, since the sometimes-poisonous substance otherwise evades our senses. (Though the first odorization of natural gas began in the 1880s in Germany, the practice became widespread following a gas explosion caused by an undetected leak at a Texas school in 1937.)

But many smell cues are learned in a lifetime. Babies, for example, don’t inherently think poop smells terrible. Instead, they learn to be disgusted by it from the facial reactions their caregivers make while changing their diapers, explains Hayes.

“We’re always looking for these novel cues in the environment,” which is why a lot of our childhood memories are based on first smells, he says. “Our brain pairs that new novel sensory experience with whatever was happening at the time. Our body is trying to protect us by helping us learn how to navigate through the world.”

Read more PopSci+ stories.

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As a New Yorker, there’s a difference in whether it’s cold or “brick” outside. Cold weather is when you throw on a sweater before heading out. When it’s brick, you try to stay home as much as possible to avoid ending up like a human glacier. But the local lingo didn’t apply much this winter, with record-low snowfall and above-average temperatures across New York City.

A warm winter is more than just losing a few snow days. It’s knowing that the world will be dealing with more scorching heat waves and droughts, and natural disasters like the deadly flooding caused by Hurricane Ian in Florida and Cuba last year.

Climate change is only one of humanity’s long list of problems. This month we mark the third anniversary of the COVID pandemic, a disease that has killed millions worldwide and is becoming more chronic like the flu. On top of that, Turkey and Syria are still facing the aftershocks of a historically deadly earthquake, and soaring food prices from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could worsen global hunger for years to come. 

[Related: How to manage your mental health as traumatic events pile up]

There seems to be no shortage of community-wide tragedies. Likewise, these events are taking a toll on people’s psyches. Whether conscious or subconscious, you might mourn a loss of safety and security, on top of the more obvious layers of sorrow. But these feelings can also help you be the change you need to move forward in this ever-evolving world.

Collective grief is both a shared and unique experience

Some tragedies, like a mass shooting or police brutality, resonate among an entire group of people. “Grief is a normal reaction to loss,” says Kriss Kevorkian, a thanatologist and founder of the counseling service, A Grieving World. “When it’s collective grief, we’re experiencing that on a larger scale with more people.”

Collective grief can take hold even if you don’t personally know the people directly affected. When the Uvlade school shooting occurred, there was a nationwide outpouring of anger and sorrow over the murders of the teachers and children. Violent events like these force you to rethink life and the safety of your family, says Kevorkian.

Younger generations have become the most vulnerable to collective grief, especially with environmental anxiety. Kevorkian says that government failure to stop climate change has caused children to become more helpless and apathetic. When young people like Greta Thunberg do speak out on climate change, they are mocked and subject to verbal abuse.

Your brain and body on grief

Grief doesn’t stay in one corner of your body—it consumes your entire being. You might feel more tired than usual from tossing and turning all night. Maybe you’ve lost your appetite or have trouble keeping food down. Research shows that the first few months of grief can affect your body’s immune system activity and increase your risk of blood clots.

When your mind is weighed down by sadness, anger, and loneliness, there is little space to focus on other matters. Having “grief brain” can make it feel like you’re in a fog. Everyday tasks such as watering the plants or taking out the trash become really challenging. As you try to process your loss, you might forget things like where you placed your keys or an important doctor’s appointment. 

Grief brain happens because your mind recognizes the stress and emotional trauma as a threat, triggering the entire body’s fight-or-flight response. Brain regions like the amygdala signal the alarm through stress hormones that elevate your heart rate and increase your blood pressure, upping your anxiety and panic to keep tabs on the stressor. 

When you don’t deal with the heavy emotion, your brain protects itself by going into constant survival mode. Believing it’s in danger, it allocates more energy and resources to fear centers like the amygdala. Your brain might also decide to escape the stressor by metaphorically running away. It might dissociate from daily happenings, for example, to give you a mental break from negative emotions. “Deciding how to approach your grief can foster healing as opposed to delaying it when we try to ignore or deny reality,” says Jasmine Cobb, a social worker specializing in grief and trauma at Visual Healing Therapeutic Services in Texas.

Consume your grief before it consumes you

The good news is that grief-related stress on the brain is reversible. Meditation and mindfulness can train you to focus on the present moment instead of reliving the past or dissociating from future threats. Going outside for a 30-minute walk instead of doom-scrolling or watching the news can help clear and calm the mind. Crying can also be a healthy release of stress as it releases feel-good hormones such as oxytocin and endorphins. 

There is no normal amount of time you’re supposed to grieve. You can spend months or years mourning, only for a news story or movie to trigger your pain all over again. “There are three words I really can’t stand, ‘get over it,’” says Kevorkian. “Grief never ends.” 

While time can help with the grieving process, it’s important that you’re actively working on your emotions and any unresolved issues related to the loss. Cobb says speaking with someone you can confide in is important, whether it’s a family friend, therapist, or a spiritual leader. There is also power in shared grief. People who have gone through a similar experience can help provide support in overcoming your grief. “Find your community who can hold a torch for you when you’re unable to do that for yourself,” advises Cobb.

Turning collective grief into collective action

Grief is one of life’s greatest teachers, says Kevorkian. It shows you how to live in the present and appreciate all that you have right now. Beyond acceptance, taking action can help you wrestle with some of the hopelessness you might feel when dealing with events out of your control, Kevorkian explains.

[Related: The biggest tool we have to fight climate anxiety is community]

One example of a group turning pain into lasting change is Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). In 1980, 13-year-old Cari Lightner was killed by a drunk driver—a man who had just gotten out of jail two days after his fourth DUI arrest. For the next few years, Cari’s mother, Candace, used her daughter’s photo and story of her accident to raise awareness and change California traffic safety laws. Candace went on to form MADD, a political-advocacy group that gives other grieving parents the opportunity to feel like their tragedy was not in vain. 

“It’s easy for us to stay in bed under the covers and wallow in despair,” says Kevorkian. But finding the courage to take action can help you get out of your head and connect with others sharing similar distress. Hopefully, with time and work, the world will seem a little less bleak.

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The month of March brings with it the third anniversary of COVID-19 shutdowns beginning in the United States. The year 2020 became synonymous with change and fear, as major sporting events were canceled, thousands were infected with the novel virus and died, and work and school shifted online for millions. The world changed forever–especially for children.

In a survey of parents conducted in the fall of 2022 by Pew Research Center, 48 percent of parents with children in grades K-12 said that the first year of the pandemic had a very or somewhat negative impact on their children’s emotional well-being. Additionally, a 2022 review of survey studies by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) found that “the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health of children and adolescents is multifaceted and substantial,” and urged more well-designed studies looking at the mental health effects of the pandemic. 

[Related: COVID-19 vaccines are still essential in preventing death in children and teens.]

Now, a group of researchers in Sweden is turning to children’s drawings and their own explanation of what they drew to get a better sense of their feelings, beliefs, and ideas about COVID-19. A small study published March 2 in the journal Acta Paediatrica found that the common themes were detailed images of canceled activities, illness, and death, and the children had quite a bit of knowledge about the disease.

The team collected 91 drawings from kids between the ages of four and six years-old that were submitted to the Swedish Archive of Children’s Drawings between April 2020 and February 2021. The project was part of investigations into children’s voices in the public space during the pandemic.

“It was a very fun study to carry out. I was actually quite uncertain as to whether a medical journal would publish the article, but they did, including the children’s drawings and everything,” co-author Anna Sarkadi said in a statement. Sarkadi is a physician specializing in children’s health and social medicine from Uppsala University in Sweden

They analyzed the drawings using a type of visual analysis called semiotic visual analysis which looks at the image’s denotation (what images represent and how) and connotation (the associated meaning). The analysis also looked at the child’s own explanations accompanying the drawings.

The findings revealed that even the youngest children were strongly affected by the pandemic. In addition to canceled plans and images showing sick and dying people, fear, worry, and missing grandparents were common themes among them. Coronavirus was often described as a monster, while other children described how to protect themselves from the virus. One drawing even showed two children in a sword fight against a giant virus.

[Related: It’s harder for kids with food allergies to catch COVID.]

“The drawings were often covered in a lot of snot. On one drawing, a child wrote, ‘You throw up, then you cough, then you feel better or die,’ with extremely clear illustrations,” explained Maria Thell, a co-author and doctoral student at Uppsala University, in a statement. 

The study found that the children also know quite a bit about the virus, including how it spread and its symptoms. Out of 91 drawings, 14 showed hand washing, 17 showed symptoms like coughing, and 44 showed a depiction of the virus itself. 

“As a researcher with a background in child and youth science, I would love to develop this method further,” said Thell.

This team’s research will continue and the drawings from seven to 11 year old children will be studied next. 

“By encouraging young children to draw pictures using open prompts, such as how a disease feels, looks like or what is different now, it is possible to understand their interpretations of a situation and related emotions,” the authors write in the study. 

Additionally, they write that pediatricians can use children’s drawings to gage emotional response to COVID-19 in addition to other health issues and get a unique glimpse into their world. This can help adults have a better idea of what kids understand or don’t understand and detect any “unhelpful fantasies’ they may have conjured up. 

A survey of children in the United Kingdom found that seven to 11 year-olds were highly aware of the social restriction, illness, and death caused by the virus and similar reviews of children’s drawings have been conducted in Spain and Greece.

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If you’ve ever been pleasant to a rude customer while waiting tables, smiled through a friend’s wedding despite disliking their choice of spouse, or graciously received a truly ugly sweater as a gift, you’ve participated in a display rule. This is hiding a negative emotion usually to promote harmony between two individuals and the rules differ by culture. However, they can have negative consequences for the person suppressing a negative emotion or opinion. 

As daily interactions become increasingly virtual, display rules are changing. A group of researchers from the University of Tokyo in Japan set out to answer the questions of how emojis are used to reflect emotions in different contexts, if the same display rules apply to emojis, and how they affect a person’s well being. 

[Related: Meet the newest Apple emojis: a goose, a moose, and another pink heart.]

“As online socializing becomes more prevalent, people have become accustomed to embellishing their expressions and scrutinizing the appropriateness of their communication,” said Moyu Liu, a PhD student studying emotional management in online spaces at the University of Tokyo, in a statement. “However, I realized that this may lead us to lose touch with our authentic emotions.”

Liu is the co-author of a small study published March 3 in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, that found that emojis were used to both express positive feelings and soften the more negative ones–such as not liking a friend’s piece of art.

Earlier research established that emojis serve as functional equivalents of facial expressions, but it didn’t look at the relationships between emotions expressed and experienced. It’s here that display rules can be problematic—if there is too much of a dissonance between the emotions that you experience and the emotions that you express, it can lead to emotional exhaustion. 

To try to answer this question, Liu’s study observed 1,289 participants who use Simeji, the most-downloaded emoji keyboard in Japan, and how the emojis were used to either express an emotion or mask it. 

The participants provided demographic data, answered questions about their subjective well being, and rated how often they use emojis. They were also given messages with different social contexts and asked to respond to them as they would normally, and then rated the intensity of the expression of their emotions.

[Related: AI moderators can’t keep up with vaccine disinformation’s newest language: emojis.]

The study found that texters chose to express more emotions via emoji with people in a private context or with a close friend. The respondents expressed the least amount of emotion with higher-status individuals. The most intense expressions of emotion came with matching emojis, unless the respondents felt the need to mask their true feelings, such as using a smiling emoji to mask sadness. 

Only when negative feelings were very strongly felt did the respondents use a negative emoji. Additionally, using emojis to express emotions was associated with higher subjective well being compared to masking emotions.

Liu would like to expand this study with a larger and more varied sample, including more males since the Simeji keyboard is more popular among young women and from different cultural backgrounds.

“First, the highly gender-imbalanced sample may have led to stronger results. Future research should explore potential gender differences in emoji display rules and examine the structural issues surrounding the formation of these emotion cultures,” cautioned Liu. “Second, Japanese culture’s emphasis on interpersonal harmony and concealment of negative emotions may have influenced the results.”

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When the wintry mix makes going outside unpleasant, the couch and a good book are tempting. But think: if you start your spring cleaning now, you’ll be able to enjoy the first warm days of the season outside smelling flowers instead of inside scrubbing floors.

Untidy spaces in particular seem to have a harmful effect on your mood and health. As a 2017 article in Psychology Today noted, clutter can interrupt “both your ability to move and your ability to think.”

[Related: A complete guide to digital spring cleaning]

Plus, it turns out people who regularly tidy up are getting a fair amount of light physical activity. That’s good if one of your New Year’s resolutions was to decrease the number on the scale, but cleaning also offers the benefit of space in your home to do things like rolling out the yoga mat or firing up an exercise video, doubling down on the physical benefits of a tidier space.

And if you start your spring cleaning now, it’ll give you an edge when warmer weather rolls around. Nearly 80 percent of households in the US ring in the new season with spring cleaning, and tackling what you can now means there will be less to do when you’d rather be outside. Some tasks, though, like washing windows, should probably still wait until you’re in significantly above-freezing temperatures.

Next, consider what you’ve accumulated—gifts, trinkets, and toys—over the past year and pare down items that serve similar purposes. For example, if you got a new phone or computer for Christmas, donate the old one. Be sure to include any cords and chargers, and consider including a pre-paid minutes card if you can afford it.

That said, don’t declare this the weekend you finally scour all the stain off every tile in your kitchen. Break a big task into more digestible chunks and tackle those grout stains a row or two at a time. Taking smaller steps will also let you know what “clean” and “tidy” mean to you—your place doesn’t have to look like an apartment straight out of #cleantok to be functional for you.

Give yourself a flexible deadline and bend the scope of the task to accommodate. Instead of having that shelf in order and the books to be donated out the door by the first day of spring, set a steady, regular pace that you can pick up and put down as you need. Even if the big stuff isn’t complete by the time the robins come back, it’ll still be much closer to being done than it was before.

Finally, consider tackling multiple projects on a rotating basis. A 2015 survey conducted by Microsoft in Canada showed that our attention spans have dropped substantially in the past decades—from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2013. But switching things up keeps us more productive for longer. For work that’s repetitive or doesn’t need your full attention, multitasking and doing it in “small bites” can also help.

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“I don’t want a lot for Christmas. There is just one thing I need.” You probably know the next line, even if you haven’t heard any other Mariah Carey song. In December, you either can’t avoid her, or you can’t help trying to hit the high notes with her.

Artists from Carey to AC/DC to Zendaya have recorded seasonal songs, hoping to break into the coveted and lucrative Christmas music market. Classic and modern carols generate roughly $170 billion a year, according to Billboard; more than 15 million people asked Amazon’s Alexa to play holiday tunes in 2020. In addition to Carey’s multi-decade chart topping, “All I Want For Christmas is You,” you also can’t escape hearing “Last Christmas” by Wham! or “White Christmas” by Bing Crosby before all the eggnog or coquito is gone.

[Related: ​​The psychology behind our love of Christmas movies]

In addition to being big business, there are some psychological drivers behind why so many of us feel drawn to this musical genre like ants to a gingerbread house. “A lot of Christmas repertoire is very nostalgic. We listen to much older music [now] than we listen to in the other 11 months,” says Joe Bennett, a forensic musicologist at Berklee College of Music in Massachusetts. “So, it’s that one time of the year where we are prepared to go back to this old repertoire.”

How Christmas music makes and sparks memories

One of Bennett’s research interests is the meta characteristics of holiday songs. He’s used both machine and human analysis to create a small database of 78 beloved Christmas classics from the UK music charts to identify common patterns. While performing what’s called a “corpus analysis” on the tracks, he found nine recurring themes in the lyrics. The most popular ones described the nostalgia of returning home, a feeling that many people experience as they travel back to loved ones for the season. “I speculate—and it is nothing more than speculation—that this is why we are prepared to keep coming back to this old music,” Bennett says.

Timelessness is one reason why you might see just as much Perry Como and Ella Fitzgerald on a holiday playlist as Michael Bublé and Ariana Grande. According to Bennett, pop music is socially functional, meaning young people in particular use it in whatever way they want to, whether that’s falling in love, wallowing in heartbreak, or dancing with friends. But the function changes a bit as they head home for the holidays and share the listening experience with their older relatives. “You are going to want pop music that appeals to multiple generations at the same time. Not something like EDM or emo for a heartbroken student,” says Bennett. 

Often, playing Christmas music in the background helps set that scene. But what stimulates those fuzzy feelings in the human brain? Amy Belfi, a neuroscientist at Missouri University of Science and Technology who studies autobiographical memory and how memories are evoked by music. Some of the future clinical applications of her work include studying how music could potentially help people with Alzheimer’s disease recover some memories. 

For Christmas music, Belfi agrees that our love for it all comes back to nostalgia. “I think that a lot of the reason why people love Christmas music is more about those associations than the actual sounds itself,” she tells PopSci. “There are Frank Sinatra versions of these songs that have been around for decades that our parents and grandparents and kids listen to. That is perhaps unique to Christmas music.”

[Related: Spotify is trying to figure out how our music preferences change as we age]

As Belfi’s research shows, music linked to memory activates an area of the brain located above the forehead called the medial prefrontal cortex. This section of the brain also has a stronger connection to autobiographical memories over historical memories: for example, baking cookies while wearing a festive apron in the family kitchen, and not the name of the US president when the song came out.

With Christmas music, autobiographical memory is often tied to our families and childhoods, resulting in what psychologists and neuroscientists call a reminiscence bump. Because many people form their musical preferences between the ages of 15 and 30, the music that was popular around that time of life is associated with a resurgence in autobiographical memories. 

Additional research suggests that the reminiscence bump can even be inherited in a way. “Undergraduate college students had a reminiscence bump for music that was popular when they were teenagers, but also when their parents were teenagers,” says Belfi. “There’s this intergenerational transmission that you’re nostalgic for music when you were a kid, but also your parent’s music.”

How Christmas music still evolves 

Not everyone feels joy when they hear carols. That could be because of a few different factors: bad memories associated with Christmas, constant repetition over the course of the holiday season (which some research suggests could be bad for retail workers’ health), and even a rare disorder called musical anhedonia. This condition isn’t common, but some people simply aren’t emotionally moved by music.

“It’s not a perceptual issue. It’s not like people say, ‘it sounds like nails on a chalkboard.’ They’re just like, ‘I don’t really like music,’ ” explains Belfi.

One study from the University of Barcelona measured this by watching people listen to different genres of music in an MRI. Afterward, they played a game where they could win money. “The [scientists] looked at the reward regions of the brain and found that the people with musical anhedonia showed normal responses to winning money, but not to music,” says Belfi. 

Beyond a few special individuals, however, holiday tunes are largely beloved. And one of the reasons for that may be changing over time.

“What I think is culturally interesting about Christmas music is that in recent decades, it reflects a more secular and multicultural America,” says Bennett. While the traditional religious carols like the tranquil “Silent Night” remain popular, other seasonal hits have filled up people’s playlists. The silly “Dominick the Donkey” by Italian-American artist Lou Monte has became a cult classic since its release in the 1960s. José Feliciano’s 1970 Spanish and English classic “Feliz Navidad” still draws billions of listens on the radio today. Run DMC’s “Christmas in Hollis” from the ‘80s, *NSYNC’s “Merry Christmas (Happy Holidays)” from the ‘90s, and Sia’s “Candy Cane Lane” from 2017 have only expanded the reach of the holiday music canon. It’s a medium that can truly connect everyone.

“There’s [music] in every culture across history,”  Belfi explains. “Almost everyone loves it and has some connection to it. It’s a large part of the human experience.”

Looking for a playlist to share with your loved ones this holiday season? PopSci has you covered. Check out our favorite songs (including some that we can almost guarantee you’ve never heard), and let us know your favorites.

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The death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of Memphis police earlier this year has set off new questions about what public safety really means in America. While the five former officers are being charged for Nichol’s murder, there’s been scrutiny over how EMS responders handled the victim’s injuries after arriving on the scene.

On the night of January 7, paramedics responded to a call of a person being pepper sprayed. Despite the man laying bloody and in distress against a police vehicle, they failed to make their own assessment of the patient beyond what the officers told them. It took another 19 minutes for the EMTs to bring a stretcher out for him. 

The mistreatment Nichols endured from people trained to save lives is a grave reminder that America is built on a system designed to treat minority communities differently. One in every 1,000 Black men in the US will be killed by law enforcement, estimates a 2019 criminal justice study. Among young Black men between 25 and 29, police brutality ranks as the sixth leading cause of death. And more than half of police brutality cases go unreported, especially when they involve Black people. 

[Related: Racism is undeniably a public health issue]

In the wake of Nichols’s murder, medical organizations like the Association of American Medical Colleges released statements condemning the violence. But they didn’t address the fact that fear of being harmed by figures of authority can also carry over to medical institutions and personnel. Sirry Alang, an associate professor of Black Communities & the Social Determinants of Health at the University of Pittsburgh School of Education, says police brutality must be considered a public health crisis. “Police brutality literally kills people. It causes death and disability and it shifts relationships with healthcare providers that make people less likely to seek care.”

The roots of medical mistrust

Medical mistrust is the belief that people working in the medical field want to harm you or don’t have your best interests at heart. Alang says it tends to come from the concern of being treated differently because you are affiliated with a specific racial or gender group. 

Medical mistrust has been justified through American history. From the 1930s to the 1970s, public health researchers with the Tuskegee syphilis study infected hundreds of healthy Black men and intentionally withheld treatment when penicillin became available. What’s more, the bogus science of eugenics promoted the forced sterilization of thousands of people of color in the 20th century. 

Mistrust has also arisen, in part, because of the prejudices workers at medical institutions hold against certain groups of people. For example, Black patients are less likely to be prescribed pain medication than white patients, even if they are experiencing the same level of pain, because of a deep-rooted stereotype that they have “thicker skin.” The US mortality rate among Black mothers from complications during pregnancy is also three times higher than that of white mothers, in part because of the failure of doctors to understand the pain of Black women.

“People don’t seek healthcare as individuals,” explains Alang—their choices are shaped by personal experience and the experiences of others in their community. “One bad experience can influence the expectations of others in that network and make it easy for medical distrust to spread.”

Cycles of violence, trauma, and more mistrust 

Experiencing police brutality creates traumatic racial experiences that can subvert a person’s belief on what to expect when dealing with a figure of authority. Think about the end of an abusive romantic relationship. Even if you moved on, you might always be wary of your new partner and whether they’ll behave just as badly. Similarly, a traumatic experience with the police keeps you on edge of being mistreated in other areas. 

“If people in authoritative roles have showed they don’t respect you, you’ll be more suspicious of other authority figures like healthcare providers,” says Georges Benjamin, the executive director for the American Public Health Association. What’s more, exposure to police violence can force survivors to develop feelings of hopelessness and worthlessness and further convince them to avoid care—even when they need it.

[Related: Teen girls and queer youth are facing a crisis of hopelessness]

Another issue is that healthcare institutions support a broken public-safety system that often works against those who need it. Take emergency medical dispatches, for example. First responders tend to talk to the officer at the scene first instead of speaking with the harmed individual to figure out what happened. “They then come to you like an object it has to fix instead of a person,” says Alang. 

Crumbling police-community relations

The stress and trauma that comes from the threat of police brutality can cause long-term stress that wears down the body over time. For example, a 2016 study of Black residents living in highly policed areas of New York City found they were more likely to have poor health outcomes such as high blood pressure, regardless of whether or not officers stopped them. Benjamin says that the perception that law enforcement is not actually there to protect you can create community stress that keeps your body in a constant fight-or-flight mode.

Constant stress contributes to a higher risk of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes, along with a number of mental health conditions. But when people are apprehensive about how they will be treated for “overreacting” to the constant threat of police brutality, Alang says they are more likely to skip out on seeing or talking to their doctor about the source of their stress and trauma. They might also be less likely to adhere to medication or treatment plan. “The relationship between a healthcare provider and a patient is one of fundamental trust,” Benjamin explains. “If you don’t trust that individual, you might have some suspicions on their advice or you may not believe what they told you.”

Building a safer public health system

Reducing police violence is just one part of fixing medical mistrust; hospital, EMS groups, and public health organizations need to actively build rapport with communities grieving the loss of their members. Alang says putting out anti-racist press statements after a violent incident does little to reassure the public. Instead, both she and Benjamin advise medical institutions to take action in ways that make people feel heard or supported. 

This can come from changes like hiring a healthcare workforce that represents the patient population it’s treating, and setting up accessible mental health programs focused on addressing trauma and stress. Benjamin adds that medical institutions can work with law enforcement to build out community-based policing, including teaching them how to interact with people under stress. “Public health is not going to [completely] solve this police violence problem,” he says. “But we are part of the solution.”

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For some workers, every weekend being a long weekend sounds like a dream. As it turns out, a  four-day work week trial from the United Kingdom analyzing nearly 3,000 workers across 61 companies is adding to the pile of evidence that demonstrates how a a reduction of hours is good for employees, the bottom line, and possibly the planet itself.

From June to December 2022, the studied employees worked 80 percent of their usual hours without a reduction in pay. In exchange, they promised to deliver 100 percent of their usual workload. According to 4 Day Week Global (4DWG) and 4 Day Week Campaign, the nonprofit organizations that organized the trial, this is the largest number of companies to participate in this kind of research. Researchers from the University of Cambridge, Boston College in Massachusetts, and workplace research group Autonomy oversaw data collection, interviews, and the analysis.

[Related: Essential tips and tools for working remotely—from anywhere.]

Employees were surveyed throughout the trial to gauge what an extra day of free time does for workers. The results were published today with 1,238 workers completing a final survey about their experience.

About 71 percent of employees reported lower levels of burnout, with 39 percent reporting less stress compared with the beginning of the trial. Sick days were reduced by 65 percent and there was a 57 percent drop in staff turnover compared to June to December 2021. 

Roughly 60 percent of employees found it easier to balance work and homelife. 62 percent of employees reported it easier to combine work with social life. 

“Before the trial, many questioned whether we would see an increase in productivity to offset the reduction in working time – but this is exactly what we found,” said sociologist Brendan Burchell, who led the University of Cambridge’s side of the research, in a statement. “Many employees were very keen to find efficiency gains themselves. Long meetings with too many people were cut short or ditched completely. Workers were much less inclined to kill time, and actively sought out technologies that improved their productivity.”

Company revenue barely changed, and even showed a marginal increase by 1.4 percent on average.

Additionally, male-identifying workers reported spending 27 percent more time taking care of their children, based on time diaries that were logged during the trial. Female-identifying  participants reported 13 percent increase in childcare.

“It is wonderful to see that we can shift the dial and start to create more balance of care duties in households,” Charlotte Lockhart, founder and managing director of 4DWG, told CNN.

[Related: Burnout is real. Here’s how to spot it—and recover.]

A day off in the middle of the week meant some savings on childcare expenses for some of the parents of young children. For parents with older children, it meant some more general free time. 

There were also some benefits for the planet. Simon Ursell, a founder of Tyler Grange, an environmental consultant group that participated in the trial, told the BBC, “On average we saw a 21 percent reduction in the number of miles traveled by car.” Tyler Grange cut out unnecessary meetings and travel and Ursell says some employees used additional days off to become more involved in volunteering.

The organizations that took part in the trial included a wide range of companies and sectors including online retailers, financial service providers, animation studios, housing, marketing firms, healthcare, and a fish and chip shop. About 92 percent of companies that took part in this pilot program said that they intend to continue a four-day work week and 18 companies confirmed the permanent change.

“We feel really encouraged by the results, which showed the many ways companies were turning the four-day week from a dream into realistic policy, with multiple benefits,” said David Frayne, a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, in a statement. 

As calls for a shorter work week have increased, some lawmakers in the United States are  willing to put the state behind it to test its merits. Maryland legislators have proposed a bill (House Bill 181) that will encourage qualifying businesses that have at least 30 employees to implement a 4-day work week (without reduction in pay), as part of a 5-year pilot program. Companies would receive a tax credit to help maintain wages. If it passes, Maryland will be the first state to encourage a 32 hour work week.

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Adolescence and its raging hormones and major physical and emotional changes has always been a fraught period of time. Add onto that the threats of climate change, constant mass shootings, the COVID-19 pandemic, and continued societal injustice and it’s a hard time to be young in the United States. The data collected in the 2021 Youth Risk Behavior Survey is revealing just how “engulfed” in violence and trauma teens are, especially teenage girls.

Nearly one in three high school-aged girls reported 2021 that they seriously considered suicide in 2021. This is a huge jump of nearly 60 percent from a decade ago, according to new data released from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on February 13. Teen girls additionally reported experiencing distress at twice the rate of teen boys. 

The YRBS also found increased rates of mental health issues and suicidal behavior among teens who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or questioning.

[Related: Some teenagers’ brains have been aging faster during the pandemic.]

“High school should be a time for trailblazing, not trauma. These data show our kids need far more support to cope, hope, and thrive,” said Debra Houry, CDC’s Chief Medical Officer and Deputy Director for Program and Science, in a statement. “Proven school prevention programs can offer teens a vital lifeline in these growing waves of trauma.”

The YRBS is conducted every other year, but this survey done in fall of 2021 was an especially crucial one. It is the first iteration of the survey where the COVID-19 pandemic was a factor. The pandemic has taken a toll on teenagers, many of whom were already struggling with mental health issues before the pandemic began. Many were dealing with social media pressures, family turmoil, the deaths of family members to COVID-19, and isolation. “These data make it clear that young people in the U.S. are collectively experiencing a level of distress that calls on us to act,” the authors wrote.

The survey asks teens about substance abuse, mental health, sexual behaviors, among other topics. The 2021 survey was also the first to ask about the social determinants of health (housing stability, food insecurity, etc.) and protective factors including parental involvement and connections with classmates. 

Youth mental health has continued to get worse over the three decades that the CDC has been gathering data on adolescents and the American Academy of Pediatrics declared a national emergency in child and adolescent mental health in 2021 and 2022. This new survey found particularly stark increases in widespread reports of harmful experiences among teen girls.

The report found that about 18 percent of teenage girls reported experiencing sexual violence. a 20 percent increase from 2017. More than 14 percent reported being forced to have sex, a 27 percent increase since 2019. 

“If you think about every 10 teen girls that you know, at least one and possibly more has been raped, and that is the highest level we’ve ever seen,” Kathleen Ethier, director of the CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health, told The Washington Post. She also said that the the rise of sexual violence almost certainly contributed to the glaring spike of depressive symptoms. “We are really alarmed.”

[Related: Gender-affirming hormones can improve teens’ mental health and life satisfaction.]

Worsening levels of persistent sadness or hopelessness were found across all racial and ethnic groups, with an increase in suicide attempts among Black and White youth. However, Black and Hispanic students were more likely than their White or Asian classmates to avoid school due to safety concerns. White students were also more likely to experience sexual violence than Asian, Black, and Hispanic students, and they were the only group to see an increase in sexual violence. Alaska Native and American Indian high school students were more likely than other racial or ethnics groups to have been raped.

Close to 70 percent of LGBQ+ students reported feeling persistently sad or hopeless and more than one in five had attempted suicide in the past year. The 2021 survey did not have a question assessing gender identity and did not highlight data specifically on students who identify as transgender, so the  “T” commonly used in the acronym LGBTQ+ was not included when referring to the data. However, the authors believe that strategies to improve adolescent health should be inclusive of all youth who identify as LGBTQ+.

Some of the positive findings of the new survey were that teens experienced lower rates of certain risky sexual behaviors (including general sexual activity and having multiple sex partners), substance abuse, and bullying at school.

The researchers wrote that schools can play a major role in helping address these issues through offering programs and connections that can protect against adverse mental health issues, such as youth development programs and inclusivity efforts. They also said that schools can link students and families with community resources and provide more mental, physical, and sexual health education. 

Contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline if you are experiencing mental health-related distress or are worried about a loved one who may need crisis support. Call or text 988. Chat at 988lifeline.org. Connect with a trained crisis counselor. 988 is confidential, free, and available 24/7/365. Visit the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline for more information at 988lifeline.org.

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When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down normal life in 2020, nature became a refuge for many people  cooped up inside. As pandemic related travel disturbances continued, the National Park Service saw record numbers of visitors, as spending time outdoors was safer in terms of virus spread.

Even when a pandemic isn’t raging, spending time outside reduces stress, improves cognition, and can help us sleep better. All of this can help people lead happy, healthy, and productive lives, which helps the economy and lowers healthcare costs. 

[Related: Nature saves us trillions of dollars in healthcare.]

Citizen science has been designed to use people power for the benefit of scientific knowledge, but it can also help the citizens doing the science as well. A study published February 9 in the journal People and Nature found that involvement in citizen science boosts wellbeing and connection to nature for participants. 

“People connect with nature in different ways, so it’s great to see nature-based citizen science can provide another form of active engagement that can strengthen the human-nature relationship,” said study co-author Miles Richardson from the Nature Connectedness Research Group at the University of Derby in the UK, in a statement. “When combined with noticing the positive emotions nature can bring, citizen science and help unite both human and nature’s wellbeing.”

The study was conducted during pandemic lockdowns in 2020 by the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH), the University of Derby, and the British Science Association. Five hundred volunteers from across the United Kingdom were randomly assigned to carry out a 10-minute nature-based activity at least five times over a period of eight days: a survey of pollinating insects, a butterfly survey, spending time in nature and jotting down three good things they noticed, or a combination of both. 

Researchers surveyed the participants both before and after the citizen scientists went out into nature, as a way to assess differences in connection to nature, well being, and pro-nature behavior. 

After completing their assignments, the researchers found that all volunteers showed increased scores in feeling connected to nature. 

“It gave me permission to slow down,” wrote one participant. 

“It made me more aware of nature in all aspects of the environment,” said another. 

“It reminded me that small things can make a big difference to my mood,” observed another volunteer.

[Related: Birders behold: Cornell’s Merlin app is now a one-stop shop for bird identification.]

The volunteers who wrote down the three good things they noticed while out in nature.Those who also combined those three positive things with nature recording activities (like counting pollinating insects) said that they were more likely to adopt more pro-nature behaviors beyond their involvement with this study. Some of those behaviors involved planting more pollinator friendly plants in their own gardens or helping build wildlife shelters. 

“Being in and around nature is good for our wellbeing, and we’ve shown that focused, active engagement with nature is just as important – whether that is ‘mindful moments’ in nature or taking part in citizen science,” said Michael Pocock, ecologist and academic lead for public engagement with research at UKCEH, in a statement. “This has been a valuable exercise for us in exploring how we can make citizen science even better. We now know that if we design future projects with additional nature-noticing activities, for example, we can enhance people’s own connection to nature, while still collecting valuable data.”

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County prosecutors charged former labor and delivery nurse Lindsay Clancy with first-degree murder and three counts of strangulation on Tuesday, after the alleged killing of her three children in Duxbury, Massachusetts. Clancy, who has pleaded not guilty, underwent a psychiatric evaluation before her arraignment. Clancy’s lawyer is arguing that the mother was not in the right state of mind at the time of the killing, citing “overmedication” for issues with maternal mental health.

Although there has been no official diagnosis yet, her defense attorney has suggested Clancy has a rare disorder called postpartum psychosis. A major symptom of the condition, which occurs once or twice among every 1,000 people who give birth, is that a person loses their sense of reality after pregnancy. 

People may develop postpartum psychosis quickly, immediately following the delivery or within the first week following birth, says Ariadna Forray, an expert in postpartum maternal mental health psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine. Although it can cause severe mental illness that, if left untreated, could potentially bring harm to the individual and others, Forray says “it’s rare for women to develop postpartum psychosis, and it’s even rarer to have women act out on their symptoms.” And while Clancy was reportedly taking treatments for postpartum depression, which is far more common, months before the killing, the condition itself is very different from postpartum psychosis.

What are the signs of postpartum psychosis?

People with the disorder show sudden mood fluctuations. One moment, they might feel jittery and highly energetic, and then the next moment, they may seem sluggish and more irritable than usual. “It’s your brain’s extreme reaction to having a baby,” explains Allison Lieberman, a marriage and family therapist who specializes in postpartum depression and psychosis at the online mental health platform Choosing Therapy. Chemical and hormonal shifts from childbirth, along with the stress of being a parent, can trigger a mother’s brain to have a “survival reaction,” she says.

Postpartum psychosis can be hard to recognize at first, because a mother’s physical and emotional changes often result from typical tasks like caring for a newborn baby. Parents rarely get much sleep in the first few months and often show dips in energy and appetite. 

[Related: Meditation isn’t always calming. For a select few, it may lead to psychosis.]

Specific risk factors associated with the condition are not well understood, because it’s so rare. But the most important symptoms to watch out for are confusion and disoriented thoughts that signal a loss of touch with reality. For example, parents may create delusions about the baby being sick when the child is perfectly healthy. They could convince themselves that the only way to help is to harm. “It’s the difference between knowing the intrusive thoughts are real versus not real,” says Lieberman. “Even if you think ‘I’m going to throw my baby down the stairs,’ that’s not necessarily psychosis if it disturbs you.”

However, both Lieberman and Forray stress that having postpartum psychosis does not automatically make you a violent person. In Lindsay Clancy’s case, the defense team is arguing she killed her children because a voice compelled her to do it. 

Is postpartum psychosis a symptom of postpartum depression?

No, they are unrelated to each other. The only connection is that both conditions occur after delivery. 

Postpartum depression is a medical condition where people who give birth experience intense feelings of sadness, hopelessness, and low mood within the first four weeks after delivery. Lieberman says it’s a longer and more intense version of the :baby blues,: because the condition interferes with a mother’s ability to care for themselves. “There’s this extra level of guilt that’s associated with not being able to be the parent you want to be and not enjoying parenthood,” Lieberman says. 

[Related: We don’t really know how many pregnant people are dying in the US]

Postpartum depression is common. It affects one in seven people who give birth, though many cases go undiagnosed because of the stigma and fear of being judged. Lindsay Clancy allegedly was taking 12 prescription drugs for multiple mood disorders, including postpartum depression. However, both Lieberman and Forray say it is not possible for postpartum depression to manifest into postpartum psychosis. 

While depression may cause new mothers to exhibit mood swings, postpartum psychosis is considered a type of bipolar disorder. “An estimated 70 to 80 percent of cases are related to bipolar disorder,” Forray says. Research suggests that having a history of the manic illness puts someone at a higher risk of developing postpartum psychosis after giving birth.

How is postpartum psychosis treated?

While delusions and hallucinations can take on many forms, the majority do not cause an individual to become violent. If there is evidence of postpartum psychosis in a patient, the best plan is to prevent the condition from worsening and avoiding escalation to acting out on these delusional thoughts. 

People with suspected postpartum psychosis need to be admitted to a psychiatric hospitalization where they can be assessed by a mental health expert, Forray says. Depending on the symptoms, they might then be prescribed medications such as a mood stabilizer or an antipsychotic. Another modern-day and safe alternative is electroconvulsive therapy. Research has shown the therapy helps to improve the severity of symptoms. “There’s a whole host of treatments that can be very effective,” Forray says. “And women start doing better as soon as treatment starts.”

With immediate medical intervention and the right support, it is possible to recover from postpartum psychosis. If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health crisis, consider texting HOME to 741741 to reach the National Crisis Text Line or dialing 988 to the National Suicide Prevention Hotline. The services are free, confidential, and equipped with staff trained to get you the help you need.

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KC DAVIS is famous for leaving dishes unwashed, forgetting to sweep, and, perhaps most of all, never folding laundry. But many of her 1.5 million TikTok followers credit her with helping them keep their homes cleaner than ever. Through her experience living with ADHD and her training as a licensed therapist, Davis has learned that a functional space isn’t always a tidy one. Her unique approach to what a well-kept dwelling should look like has helped followers, patients, and Davis herself radically reimagine how and why they clean.

Davis first started posting TikTok videos about parenting and housekeeping as a way to socialize during COVID-19 lockdowns. She’d just moved and had a second child on the way, and the added stressors of 2020 brought her lifelong dislike of cleaning tasks to a head. A pile of unwashed dishes didn’t used to be an ordeal, but now it meant scrubbing baby bottles while her children wailed for breakfast. “I’d always been messy, but my space had always been functional,” Davis says. Suddenly, the way she’d always managed chores just didn’t cut it. 

Davis noticed that many cleaning influencers celebrated sparkling floors and crumbless cabinets as inherently superior, while putting the onus on people with messier homes to stop being lazy and brute-force new habits to achieve the same perfection. It reminded her of a hard lesson she’d learned treating—and recovering from—substance use disorder: Focusing on total sobriety can keep someone from making progress at all. Davis, who spent 18 months in rehab as a teen, thinks the world of housekeeping should take cues from harm reduction—an approach usually associated with interventions like safe injection sites, which are intended to mitigate the risks of drug use for individuals who can’t or won’t abstain. In a similar way, she tries to show compassion to anyone (including herself) who can’t, realistically, do what might seem to be best for them, even when it comes to regular tasks at home. 

Davis knew from experience that entirely revamping her morning routine wasn’t going to rid her of her dread of doing the dishes. She also knew that she didn’t care about the optics of a pile of crusty plates. So she focused on figuring out how to have clean dinnerware on hand. She eventually placed a rack for soiled dishes near the sink, which cleared the faucet for washing an item or two as needed. 

By taking an all-or-nothing approach to tidiness, she explains, we set ourselves up to fail—and forget what the comforts of home are really about. For people dealing with disabilities, mental illness, or financial stress, Davis says, aspiring to complete domestic chores “properly” can mean not making the unglamorous changes that will help manage symptoms and responsibilities. Instead of focusing on turning a “dirty” room “clean,” she urges viewers to cut tasks down into individual, manageable steps that can markedly improve their lives. 

“You’re a person who deserves to have their suffering alleviated,” she says. “You’re a person who deserves to have help raising your quality of life based on the skills you possess today.” 

Davis generally encourages her viewers to play around with strategies that feel right for them—but she has a few widely applicable hacks to evangelize. One of her most universal, which went viral in September 2020, is her “five things” method. It boils down to the wisdom that every mess, no matter how intimidating, can be split into five buckets: trash, laundry, dishes, stuff that has a place, and stuff that needs one. Davis finds that dealing with one category at a time helps with her executive dysfunction—a common ADHD symptom that makes processes involving many decisions difficult. While cleaning, Davis used to get waylaid flitting from room to room, which slowed her progress. Tackling a few smaller messes is less overwhelming. “For my brain, at least, it becomes like I’m in a video game hunting down loot,” she says. 

The “five things” method also has five natural stopping points. If you bag your trash but then get tired or distracted, Davis explains, you’ve still made a real improvement to your space. Each step makes the room more usable, even if it doesn’t make it substantially prettier. Davis often reminds her viewers that there’s no shame in laboring less; following an order of operations that prioritizes hygiene and frequently used objects can accomplish much more than half-starting a deep cleaning routine over and over again. 

That’s how she finally tackled the mountain of rumpled clothes that used to cover the laundry room floor. Instead of pressuring herself to neatly fold and organize garments in closets, Davis asked what was actually wrong with the messy pile. She realized she was spending a lot of time and effort fishing things out of the heap. So she started sorting freshly dried items into bins—one for each household member—in a shared “family closet,” and it made a huge difference. 

“People say, ‘Oh, but stuff gets wrinkled.’ But it was already getting wrinkled on the floor,” she says, laughing. “I didn’t make anything worse!” 

In her 2022 book, How to Keep House While Drowning, Davis recalls that some of her early TikTok commenters called her lazy. But many more have expressed relief at seeing a therapist present chores as things worth doing imperfectly, if that means the helpful parts still get done. As Davis fondly shares: “Anything worth doing is worth half-assing.” 

Read more PopSci+ stories.

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Over the past seven years, Allegheny County Department of Human Services workers have frequently employed an AI predictive risk modeling program to aid in assessing children’s risk factors for being placed into the greater Pittsburgh area’s foster care system. In recent months, however, the underlying algorithms behind the Allegheny Family Screening Tool (AFST) have received increased scrutiny over their opaque design, taking into account predictive AI tools’ longstanding racial, class, and gender-based biases.

Previous delving into the Allegheny Family Screening Tool’s algorithm by the Associate Press revealed certain data points could be interpreted as stand-in descriptions for racial groups. But  now it appears the AFST could also be affecting families within the disabled community as well as families  with a history of mental health conditions. And the Justice Department is taking notice.

[Related: The White House’s new ‘AI Bill of Rights’ plans to tackle racist and biased algorithms.]

According to a new report published today from the Associated Press, multiple formal complaints regarding the AFST have been filed via the Justice Dept.’s Civil Rights Division, citing the AP’s prior investigations into its potential problems. Anonymous sources within the Justice Dept. say officials are concerned that the AFST’s overreliance on potentially skewed historical data risks “automating past inequalities,” particularly long standing biases against people with disabilities and mental health problems.

The AP explains the Allegheny Family Screening Tool utilizes a “pioneering” AI program designed to supposedly help overworked social workers in the greater Pittsburgh area determine which families require further investigation regarding child welfare claims. More specifically, the tool was crafted to aid in predicting the potential risk of a child being placed into foster care within two years of following an investigation into their family environment.

The AFST’s black box design reportedly takes into account numerous case factors, including “personal data and birth, Medicaid, substance abuse, mental health, jail and probation records, among other government data sets,” to determine further investigations for neglect. Although human social service workers ultimately decide whether or not to follow up on cases following the AFST algorithm results, critics argue the program’s potentially faulty judgments could influence the employees’ decisions.

[Related: The racist history behind using biology in criminology.]

A spokesman for the Allegheny County Department of Human Services told the AP they were not aware of any Justice Department complaints, nor were they willing to discuss the larger criticisms regarding the screening tool.

Child protective services systems have long faced extensive criticisms regarding both their overall effectiveness, as well as the disproportional consequences faced by Black, disabled, poor, and otherwise marginalized families. The AFST’s official website heavily features third-party studies, reports, and articles attesting to the program’s supposed reliability and utility.

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Serotonin and dopamine are often called the “feel good” or “happy” hormones for their role in boosting moods. There is even a “love hormone”produced in the hypothalamus called oxytocin. For decades, research has pointed to oxytocin receptors as a pathway essential to developing social behaviors like romantic relationships and attachments in mammals like humans and prairie voles.

However, a study published January 27 in the journal Neuron isn’t so sure that oxytocin is absolutely essential. It finds that voles can actually form enduring attachments with mates and even parent their young without oxytocin receptor signaling.

[Related: Prairie Voles Show Empathy Just Like Humans.]

Prairie voles are small rodents found in the Midwest and also are one of only a few monogamous mammal species. They show empathy and form lifelong partnerships called “pair-bonds” after mating. The bonded voles share parenting duties, show signs of preferring their partner over strangers of the opposite sex, and actively reject new partners. In previous studies, drugs used to block oxytocin from binding to its receptors caused voles to be unable to pair-bond. 

Neuroscientists Devanand Manoli from University of California, San Francisco and Nirao Shah from Stanford University and their team used the gene editing technique Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) to generate prairie voles that don’t have functioning oxytocin receptors to test if pair-bonding was really controlled by signaling oxytocin receptors. They then tested the mutant voles to see if they had the ability to form enduring partnerships with other voles.

The answer? Yes, these voles formed loving pair-bonds just as readily as normal voles.

“We were all shocked that no matter how many different ways we tried to test this, the voles demonstrated a very robust social attachment with their sexual partner, as strong as their normal counterparts,” said Manoli, in a statement.

The team then wondered if oxytocin receptor signaling is also as critical for functions like co-parenting, parturition (or childbirth), and milk release during lactation. The mutant voles, however, could give birth and even nurse. The male and female mutant voles were also both engaged in their usual parental behaviors of huddling, licking, and grooming. Mutant pairs could even rear their pups to weaning age.

The mutant voles did, however, have some difficulties. They had limited milk release compared to normal voles, and fewer of their pups survived to weaning age. Those that did make it to weaning age were smaller compared to the pups of normal prairie voles. 

[Related: ‘Love Hormone’ Also Boosts Feelings Of Spiritual Enlightenment.]

According to the team, this study is different from ones that have used drugs to block oxytocin receptor signaling because genetics studies like this one can be more precise. “Drugs can be dirty,” said Manoli, “in the sense that they can bind to multiple receptors, and you don’t know which binding action is causing the effect. From a genetics perspective, we now know that the precision of deleting this one receptor, and subsequently eliminating its signaling pathways, does not interfere with these behaviors.”

Another key difference  is that pharmacological studies suppress oxytocin receptor signaling in adult animals, but this study was able to switch it off when the voles were embryos. 

“We’ve made a mutation that starts from before birth,” said Shah. “It could be that there are compensatory or redundant pathways that kick-in in these mutant animals and mask the deficits in attachment, parental behaviors, and milk let-down.”

According to the team, this study shows that there likely isn’t a single treatment or silver bullet for something as complex and nuanced as social behavior. Their vole-specific molecular tools and protocols, however, can help open doors to other research in genetics and biology.

“We’re very happy to be part of a community and to have this technology that we can share,” said Manoli. “Now we have this trove that we can start to mine. There are so many other questions that prairie voles could be interesting and useful for answering, both in terms of potential clinical implications for models of anxiety or attachment and also for basic comparative biology.”

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Misinformation is rampant on social media, and a new study has shed some light on why. Researchers from Yale University and the University of Southern California argue that basically, some people develop a habit for sharing things on social media—whether they’re true or not. Although “individual deficits in critical reasoning and partisan bias” are commonly cited as reasons that people share fake news, the authors wrote in the paper, “the structure of online sharing built into social platforms is more important.” 

Previous studies have found that some people—especially older people—just don’t consider whether something is true before sharing it. Other research has shown that some people are motivated to share news headlines that support their identity and match their existing beliefs, whether the headlines are true or not—especially Conservatives. 

While the research team from Yale and USC accept these as contributing factors to the spread of misinformation online, they hypothesized that they may not be the only mechanisms that lead people to share fake news. Both the idea that people share misinformation because of a lack of critical thinking or that it’s a result of partisan bias assume that they would share less fake news if they were sufficiently motivated or able to consider the accuracy of the headlines they are sharing, however, the Yale-USC team’s research suggests that may not be the case. 

Instead, the team argues that “misinformation sharing appears to be part of a larger pattern of frequent online sharing of information.” To support that, they found that the people in their 2,476-participant study who shared the greatest amount of fake news stories, also shared more true news stories. The paper is based on four related, but separately conducted studies all aimed at teasing out how habitual sharing affects the spread of misinformation. 

[Related: The biggest consumers of fake news may benefit from this one tech intervention]

In the first study, 200 online participants were shown eight stories with true headlines and eight stories with false headlines and asked if they’d share them on Facebook. The researchers also measured how strong their habitual sharing was on social media using data on how frequently they shared content in the past and a self-reported index that measured if they did so without thinking. 

As the researchers expected, participants with stronger sharing habits reposted more stories and were less discerning about whether they were true or not than participants with weaker habits. The participants with the strongest habits shared 43 percent of the true headlines and 38 percent of the false headlines while those with the weakest habits shared just 15 percent of the true headlines and 6 percent of the false ones. In total, the top 15 percent of habitual sharers were responsible for 37 percent of the shared false headlines across this study. 

The second study, which contained 839 participants, was aimed at seeing if participants would be deterred from habitual sharing after they were asked to consider the accuracy of a given story.

While asking participants to assess the headline accuracy before sharing reduced the amount of fake headlines shared, it was least effective in the most habitual participants. When participants had  to assess the accuracy before being asked about whether or not they would share a sample of stories,they shared 42 percent of the true headlines and still shared 22 percent of the false ones. But, when participants were only asked about whether or not they would share the stories, the most habitual participants shared 42 percent of the true headlines and 30 percent of the false ones.

[Related: These psychologists found a better way to teach people to spot misinformation]

The third study aimed to assess if people with strong sharing habits were less sensitive to partisan bias and shared information that didn’t align with their political views. The structure was similar to the previous study, with around 836 participants asked to assess the whether a sample of headlines aligned with liberal and conservative politics, and whether or not they’d share them. 

Again the most habitual sharers were less discerning about what they shared. Those not asked to assess the politics of the headlines beforehand reposted 47 percent of the stories that aligned with their stated political orientation and 20 percent of the stories that didn’t. Even when asked to assess the political bias first, habitual sharers reposted 43 percent of the stories that aligned with their political views and 13 percent of the ones that didn’t. In both conditions, the least habitual sharers only shared approximately 22 percent of the headlines that aligned with their views and just 3 percent of the stories that didn’t. 

Finally, in the fourth study, the researchers tested whether changing the reward structure on social media could change how frequently misinformation was shared. They theorized that if people get a reward response to likes and comments, it would encourage the formation of habitual sharing—and that the reward structure could be changed. 

To test this, they split 601 participants into three groups: a control, a misinformation training condition, and an accuracy training condition. In each group, participants were shown 80 trial headlines and asked whether or not they’d share them before seeing the eight true and eight false test headlines similar to the previous studies. In the control condition, nothing happened if they shared the true or false headline, while in the misinformation condition, participants were told they got “+5 points” when they shared a false headline or didn’t share a true one, and in the accuracy condition they were told they got “+5 points” when they shared a true headline or didn’t share a false one. 

As predicted, both accuracy training and misinformation training were effective in changing participants sharing behaviors compared to the controls. Participants in the accuracy condition shared 72 percent of the true headlines and 26 percent of the false headlines compared with participants in the misinformation condition who shared 48 percent of the true headlines and 43 percent of the false ones. (Control participants shared 45 percent of the true headlines and 19 percent of the false.)

The researchers conclude that their studies all show that habitual sharing is a major factor in the spread of misinformation. The top 15 percent most habitual sharers across were responsible for between 30 and 40 percent of all shared misinformation across all studies. They argue that this is part of the broader response patterns established by social media platforms—but that they could be restructured by internal engineers to promote the sharing of accurate information instead. 

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Feeling flat or emotionally unavailable can be a common side-effect of serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), a widely used class of anti-depressants. About 40 to 60 percent of patients taking SSRI’s are believed to experience limited enjoyment or feel emotionally dull.

A small study published January 22 in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology is shedding light on why this “emotional blunting,” or the dulling of both good and bad emotions, may happen. The study finds that the drugs affect reinforcement learning, which allows us to learn from our environment and actions.

[Related: The first new FDA-approved antidepressant in decades goes up your nose.]

“Emotional blunting is a common side effect of SSRI antidepressants. In a way, this may be in part how they work—they take away some of the emotional pain that people who experience depression feel, but, unfortunately, it seems that they also take away some of the enjoyment,” said Professor Barbara Sahakian, a co-author and professor of psychology the University of Cambridge, in a statement. “From our study, we can now see that this is because they become less sensitive to rewards, which provide important feedback.”

SSRIs target serotonin, a chemical in the brain called the “pleasure chemical” or the “happiness molecule” that carries messages between nerve cells. According to the National Health Service (NHS), more than 8.3 million patients in England received an antidepressant during 2021 and 2022. In the United States, prescriptions for anti-anxiety and antidepressants increased by an estimated 21 percent following the COVID-19 pandemic.

A team led by researchers at the University of Cambridge and the University of Copenhagen looked into the long term clinical use of SSRIs. They recruited 66 healthy volunteers and gave 32 of them an SSRI called escitalopram and the other 34 took a placebo. According to the team, this drug is known to be one of the best-tolerated antidepressants available on the market and the study participants took them over 21 days.

The participants completed self-reported questionnaires and were given a series of tests that assessed learning, inhibition, executive function, reinforcement behavior, and decision-making.

In terms of attention and memory (also called ‘cold’ cognition), there were no significant differences. There also weren’t any differences in ‘hot’ cognition, or the cognitive functions that involve emotions.

The key novel finding of the tests was a reduced reinforcement sensitivity on two tasks for the group taking escitalopram compared to those taking the placebo.

[Related: A link to depression might be in your gut bacteria.]

The team used a probabilistic reversal test, where a participant was shown two stimuli (A and B). If they chose A, they would receive a reward four out of five times. If they chose B, they would only get a reward one time out of five. The participants weren’t told this rule, but would have to figure it out themselves. At some point during the test, the probabilities would switch, forcing participants to learn a new rule.

Compared with those taking the placebo, the participants taking escitalopram were less likely to use both the positive and negative feedback to guide their learning of the task. The participants on the antidepressants were 23 percent less sensitive to this stimuli switch, which suggests that escitalopram affected sensitivity to the rewards and the individual’s ability to respond accordingly.

This could also explain one big difference the team found in the self-reported questionnaires: volunteers taking escitalopram had more difficulty reaching orgasm when having sex, a widely-reported side effect of the medication.

“Our findings provide important evidence for the role of serotonin in reinforcement learning,” said Christelle Langley, a co-author also from the Cambridge Department of Psychiatry, in a statement. “We are following this work up with a study examining neuroimaging data to understand how escitalopram affects the brain during reward learning.”

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Human teenagers aren’t exactly known for their restraint. An incompletely developed region of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), which acts a bit like a parking break, can make adolescents more likely to engage in risky behaviors including reckless driving, substance abuse, and risky sexual behavior. It turns out, the same can be said for adolescent chimpanzees, except reckless behaviors for them may look more like increased aggression.

A study published January 23 by the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General from the American Psychological Association finds that while chimps and teens share these risk-taking behaviors, the chimpanzees may be may be less impulsive.

[Related: Squirrels gamble too—but with their genes.]

“Adolescent chimpanzees are in some sense facing the same psychological tempest that human teens are,” said co-author Alexandra Rosati, an associate professor of psychology and anthropology at the University of Michigan, in a statement. “Our findings show that several key features of human adolescent psychology are also seen in our closest primate relatives.”

Chimpanzees can live up to age 50 and their adolescence occurs from around age eight up to 15. Chimpanzees show rapid changes in hormone levels during adolescence, form new bonds with their peers, demonstrate some increases in aggression, and compete for social status just like their human counterparts.

In the study, the team of researchers performed two tests using food rewards on 40 wild-born chimpanzees at Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Sanctuary in the Republic of Congo in central Africa. It included 21 males and 19 females from six to 25 years-old and an average age of 15.

During test number one, adults and adolescent chimpanzees performed a gambling task and could choose between two containers. One of the containers always had peanuts, which chimpanzees somewhat like. The other had either a disliked snack (a cucumber slice) or their favorite, a banana slice. They had a choice between playing it safe and getting some the sort of delicious peanuts, or take a chance at getting the coveted banana with the risk of getting a yucky cucumber.

The team recorded the chimpanzees’ vocalizations and emotional reactions, including moans, screams, whimpers, banging on the table, or scratching themselves. To track hormone levels, they also collected saliva samples.

Adolescent chimpanzees took the risky option more often than the adults, but both expressed negative reactions if they got the cucumber.

Test number two was modeled after the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment performed on human children to examine delayed gratification. The chimpanzees could either get one banana slice immediately or wait for 60 seconds to receive three tasty banana slices.

[Related: Eurasian jays show masterful intelligence in human psychology test.]

Adult and adolescent chimpanzees both chose to delay gratification at a similar rate. In this situation, human teens tend to be more impulsive than adults and would more likely chose the instant gratification.

“Prior research indicates that chimpanzees are quite patient compared with other animals, and our study shows that their ability to delay gratification is already mature at a fairly young age, unlike in humans,” said Rosati.

What did separate the adolescent chimpanzees from the adults is that they threw more tantrums during the delay than the adults did.

According to Rosati, risk-taking behavior in both adolescent humans and chimpanzees appears to be biologically ingrained, but also certain increases in impulsive behavior may be more of a human thing. Additionally, future studies could look into differences in impulsive behaviors in male and female chimpanzees.

“We are currently looking at the development of several other cognitive abilities in chimpanzees, including capacities for self-regulation and the emergence of social skills that help chimpanzees form and maintain relationships,” Rosati told PopSci in an email.

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Content moderation is a notoriously nasty job, and the burgeoning labor outsourcing industry surrounding it routinely faces heated scrutiny for the ethics of its approach to subjecting human workers to the internet’s darkest corners. On Wednesday, Time published a new investigative deep dive into Sama, a company that recently provided OpenAI with laborers solely tasked with reading some of the worst content the internet has to offer.

Although the endeavor’s overall goal was to develop helpful and necessary internal AI filters for the popular, buzzworthy ChatGPT program, former Sama employees say they now suffer from PTSD from their tenures sifting through thousands of horrid online text excerpts describing sexual assault, incest, bestiality, child abuse, torture, and murder, according to the new report.  Not to mention, the report states that these employees, largely based in Kenya, were paid less than $2 an hour.

[Related: Popular youth mental health service faces backlash after experimenting with AI-chatbot advice.]

OpenAI’s ChatGPT quickly became one of last year’s most talked about technological breakthroughs for its ability to near instantaneously generate creative text from virtually any human prompt. While similar programs already exist, they have been frequently prone to spewing hateful and downright abusive content due to their inability to internally identify toxic material amid the troves of internet writing utilized as generative reference points.

With already well over 1 million users, ChatGPT has been largely free of such issues (although many other worries remain), largely thanks to an additional built-in AI filtering system meant to omit much of the internet’s awfulness. But despite their utility, current AI programs aren’t self-aware enough to notice inappropriate material on their own—they first require training from humans to flag all sorts of contextual keywords and subject matter. 

Billed on its homepage as an “the next era of AI development,” Sama, a US-based data-labeling company that employs workers in Kenya, India, and Uganda for Silicon Valley businesses, claims to have helped over 50,000 people around the world rise above poverty via its employment opportunities. According to Time’s research sourced via hundreds of pages of internal documents, contracts, and worker pay stubs, however, the cost for dozens of workers amounted to self-described “torture” for takehome hourly rates of anywhere between $1.32 and $2.

[Related: OpenAI’s new chatbot offers solid conversations and fewer hot takes.]

Workers allege to Time that they worked far past their assigned hours, sifting through 150-250 disturbing text passages per day and flagging the content for ChatGPT’s AI filter training. Although wellness counselor services were reportedly available, Sama’s employees nevertheless experienced lingering emotional and mental tolls that exceeded those services’ capabilities. In a statement provided to Time, Sama disputes the workload, and said their contractors were only expected to review around 70 texts a shift.

“These companies present AI and automation to us as though it eliminates workers, but in reality that’s rarely the case,” Paris Marx, a tech culture critic and author of Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About Transportation, explains to PopSci. “… It’s the story of the Facebook content moderators all over again—some of which were also hired in Kenya by Sama.”

Marx argues the only way to avoid these kinds of mental and physical exploitation would require a massive cultural reworking within the tech industry, something that currently feels very unlikely. “This is the model of AI development that these companies have chosen,” they write, “[and] changing it would require completely upending the goals and foundational assumptions of what they’re doing.”

Sama initially entered into content moderation contracts with OpenAI amounting to $200,000 surrounding the project, but reportedly cut ties early to focus instead on “computer vision data annotation solutions.” OpenAI is currently in talks with investors to raise funding at a $29 billion valuation, $10 billion of which could come from Microsoft. Reuters previously reported OpenAI expects $200 million in revenue this year, and upwards of $1 billion in 2024. As the latest exposé reveals yet again, these profits frequently come at major behind-the-scenes costs for everyday laborers.

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Access to gender-affirming hormones significantly improves the mental health and overall life satisfaction of transgender and nonbinary teens, finds a new study published January 18 in The New England Journal of Medicine. In one of the longest and largest studies looking at psychological outcomes, the authors’ conclusions further support the idea of gender-affirming care as a life-saving treatment.

“The authors provide a compelling defense for maintaining access to gender-affirming care for adolescents,” says Melina Wald, a child and adolescent psychologist and clinical director of the gender identity program at Columbia University Medical Center who was not affiliated with the study. For instance, the team found teens felt more comfortable in their bodies, who they are as it relates to their gender, and their mental state when they took therapeutic hormones. 

A June 2022 report estimates 1.6 million people over the age of 13 identify as transgender in the US. Among the 13- to 17-year-olds identifying as transgender or nonbinary, the number has nearly doubled from previous estimates in 2017. A common experience transgender youth wrestle with is gender dysphoria—a feeling of discomfort and distress when your sex assigned at birth does not match your gender identity. Left untreated, gender dysphoria is associated with an increase in suicide attempts and self-harm among trans teens. A branch of the National Institute of Health, the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, funded the latest study to try to address the issue.

“There has been a lack of awareness in the past about the unique health needs and research opportunities for transgender and gender diverse populations,” a representative of the institute told Popular Science in an email. “Research in this area is important for expanding the evidence currently guiding the clinical care of transgender and nonbinary youth.”

One of the most effective ways to combat gender dysphoria is to make a person’s physical appearance more in line with their gender identity, and hormone therapy can help. Gender-affirming hormones—such as estrogen, testosterone blockers, progesterones—are a common medical path for transgender individuals to develop feminine or masculine features that help them feel more like their authentic selves. However, one long-standing complaint from critics against gender-affirming care is that it can cause “psychological mutilation” with some arguing hormone therapy “indoctrinates” children to continue treatment as adults, speculating that they would have been happier to not. The misinformation surrounding the dangers of gender-affirming care have fueled transphobic legislation that withholds medical care from adolescents.

[Related: Exploring the common misconceptions regarding trans and non-binary identities]

“Gender-affirmative care is safe, effective, and even lifesaving,” argues Michelle Forcier, a professor of pediatrics specializing in gender, sexual and reproductive health at Brown University not involved in the study. “Children should not be pawns of politicians [who hold] safe, effective healthcare hostage for political and personal goals. Most legislators are not qualified as medical experts in gender-affirming care and have no business inserting themselves in the clinical setting.” 

Forcier says that a patient’s decision to start and participate in gender-affirmative care is a personal and private one that should only be discussed with the child, caregivers, and their medical team. Popular Science reached out to multiple study authors for comment, but they had either declined or did not respond in time of publication.

The current study recruited 315 transgender and nonbinary youth between 12 to 20 undergoing gender-affirming hormone therapy from clinical sites in Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. About 60.3 percent of participants were transmasculine and 58.7 percent were non-Latinx white. The teens started gender affirming hormones at different stages of development, with 25 already on puberty blockers before the study. From July 2016 to June 2019, psychologists used several psychosocial tests from the National Institute of Health to track any depression or anxiety symptoms the teens experienced, as well as positive effects from treatment and their life satisfaction every six months.

During the two-year study period, teens who felt their appearance reflecting more of their gender identity after gender-affirming care reported more propensity towards positive emotions  and greater life satisfaction. Youths that initiated gender-affirming care earlier already came in with lower baseline levels of depression and anxiety than those who started hormone therapy in late puberty. 

[Related: LGBTQ+ health networks helped make urban neighborhoods more resilient against COVID]

Regarding race, non-Latinx white youth showed a more significant decrease in depressive symptoms than other ethnicities and mixed race groups. However, the results may not be generalized to reflect the Black community, as there was an underrepresentation of Black participants in the study. In addition, Wald says that tracking and comparing the outcomes of youth who did not pursue hormone therapy at the study clinics would help inform any differences across transgender youth who do not have access to this type of care.

One notable observation was that transmasculine, but not transfeminine teens, showed a significant reduction in symptoms related to anxiety and depression. The differences may lie in the hormones they are receiving. Gina Sequeira, the co-director of the Seattle Children’s Gender Clinic who was not involved in the study, says patients taking testosterone see physical changes congruent with their gender identity at a faster rate than people taking estrogen. Estrogen takes longer to reduce testosterone’s masculinizing effects on the body and develop feminine features. 

“A patient on testosterone, for example, would start noticing a deepening of the voice usually within the first six months,” describes Sequeira. “For estrogen, changes like breast development take years and my suspicion is that patients may not have achieved the breasts they wanted at the two-year mark.” 

Despite all the benefits observed with gender-affirming hormone therapy, it is not a cure-all for gender dysphoria. In the study, 11 participants disclosed that they experienced suicidal ideation and two had died by suicide during the two-year period. All experts say the findings emphasize the need for a multifaceted approach to care. 

“Gender-affirmative hormones offer some benefit and relief, but youth are still navigating a potentially hostile world around them,” says Forcier, who adds that after the treatment, people may still experience a body that is not aligned with their gender identity. 

Having support at home and in the local community “can’t be understated,” says Sequeira. She adds that the more spaces a young person is affirmed in their gender identity—in healthcare settings, school, sports—the better their mental health.

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Colorado State University freshman Danika Fickler has drag racing in her blood—and her name. Her middle name, Carrera, is Spanish for “race,” and it was given to her by her drag-racing champion parents. Fickler’s father, Kyle, notched his most recent National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) win in 2019 at Heartland Motorsports Park in Topeka, Kansas and her mother, Debra, won her class at the same track from 2005 to 2007. In many ways, that track is their home. Kyle and Debra even honeymooned there, and now Danika Fickler is making a name for herself in the family business.

If you’re a drag racing fan, you’re familiar with a variety of vehicles on the strip in 75 classes from street roadsters, to souped-up sedans, coupes, trucks, and more. All of it is governed by the NHRA, which sets the rules for drag racing at facilities across North America. That includes Fickler’s home track, Heartland. 

Here’s a look at Fickler’s career so far as well as the Blazer’s history—and the tech that makes it go. 

400 horsepower (or more)

Piloting a 1986 Chevrolet S-10 Blazer, Fickler, who is 19 years old, spent part of her senior year of high school racing. Heartland Motorsports Park started a new High School Points class two years ago, and she signed up, eager to continue her trajectory as a racer. She and the Blazer found their way to an NHRA championship event in September of last year as she finished out her season and got ready to start college, so it’s been a great vehicle for her. But what really makes it special is that Fickler bought it from her godmother Beth Hyatt, a fixture in the drag racing scene herself.

Hyatt’s husband Tim, who died in 2015, had built out the Blazer with all the muscle it needed to be a hot rod. While the body, brakes, and fuel tank are original, just about everything else is built with aftermarket parts, including its powerful small-block 355-cubic-inch Chevy V8 racing engine.

[Related: This Florida teen is making a business out of rebuilding old-school auto tech]

The 1986 Chevy S-10 Blazer wasn’t born to be a track monster. It was originally built with a 2.8-liter overhead-valve V6 making 125 horsepower and 150 pound-feet of torque, which is a far cry from what Fickler’s drag racer gets with its 400-hp replacement engine. That horsepower figure is an educated guess, Fickler tells PopSci, because the engine has never been measured on a dynamometer. (A dynamometer, or “dyno” for short, measures torque, which allows for the calculation of horsepower with a standard formula: torque times revolutions per minute divided by 5,252.) 

It’s sturdy, too, and Fickler has learned to trust the vehicle and herself. 

“The only time [we almost] crashed the Blazer was when my dad and I first took it out to the track,” she says. “Other than that, I’ve felt the car break on me once and it had to sit for two months. It was scary to get back in the car because I didn’t want something to make the car break again. It’s a thing where you get in the car and pray, ‘Please shift, please shift.”

Even more important, Fickler learned how to take the laws on regular roads that exist for safety very seriously. When she was racing quarter midgets (a one-quarter-scale version of a midget race car, which is in itself a tiny car) and then junior dragsters as a kid, she practiced controlling the car in various situations to avoid potential mishaps. 

“You see so much bad stuff happening to other people [on the roads],” she said. “Speeding at ridiculous high speeds is dangerous, and there is ten times more danger doing that on regular roads.” 

The psychology of drag racing

Not everyone can be born into a racing family, and Danika encourages anyone with an interest to try it. She’s seen people show up at test and tune events (those are basically open call opportunities for anyone to try drag racing for fun) at Heartland and they get hooked. 

“It may seem complicated, at first,” she said. “If you’re not born into it, you might think it’s hard,  but the drag racing community is so helpful. If you indicate you need assistance, someone will help you.” 

For Fickler’s races, the vehicles line up at the staging area each with a “dialed” time that predicts the amount of time it will take for that car to complete a straight-line quarter mile. The cars don’t have to have the same dialed time; if one car is predicted to be slower, it starts first and the other jumps off the line after the difference has elapsed. 

“You’re either chasing or being chased,” Fickler told the Wall Street Journal last year. “If you go quicker than your dialed time, you are disqualified. So you want to beat the other person by the smallest margin possible. In order to do that, you are working both the gas and the brakes.”

After 10 years of motorsports, Fickler isn’t planning to stop any time soon. Now that she has her diploma and finished out the season that she started during her senior year of high school, she can no longer compete in the High School class. She is planning to get her Super Gas license, which means she’ll be able to race what the NHRA describes as “primarily full-bodied cars and street roadsters,” using electronic timers and throttle stops to “run as close to the class standard without going under.”

That means her 55,000-mile Blazer will be retired soon, but it’s staying in the family. Currently, the market for mid-80s Blazers is hot, but it’s special to the Fickler clan—so it’s not going anywhere. Meanwhile, Fickler is pursuing a degree in psychology, which might sound like an odd choice for a racing enthusiast until she notes that both of her parents were lawyers and drag racers at the same time. The college student is planning to come home to Topeka to race at Heartland to hone her skills and stay competitive while exploring new tracks across the country. 

“I was racing the three same guys over and over again,” Danika said. “The class will be much bigger for me, with more rounds. One of the biggest things I learned is that you don’t plan to win a race, you plan to win a round.”

In September, Fickler won an NHRA championship event and finished second in points for the season. 

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WHEN FORMER Google executive Alan Eustace dove more than 135,000 feet through the air, it was the culmination of three years of work: parachute and balloon design, test falls from 57,000 and 105,000 feet up, and flight simulations. On October 24, 2014, Eustace donned a custom high-pressure spacesuit and strapped himself into a helium balloon. He focused on his breath as he made his ascent, and calmed his nerves by thinking of his practice runs. Then he made skydiving history. The plunge from the stratosphere was 1.5 miles longer than the previous record, making Eustace the current record holder for the highest-altitude free-fall jump.

Few would have the stomach to drop at speeds hitting 822 mph from the top of Earth’s ozone layer with nothing but a parachute on their back. If you have an extreme fear of heights, just the thought may be enough to make your legs feel like jelly. But, as Eustace’s preparation showed, there are ways to gird yourself physically and mentally for that dread.

Dreading lofty elevations is a universal feeling—even daredevils occasionally get uneasy in such settings. Elizabeth McMahon, a San Francisco–based psychologist specializing in treating phobias, says Homo sapiens evolved this way to avoid perils from an early age. In a 1960 experiment, psychologists placed crawling babies on a table with a clear plastic panel at the end, which they called a “visual cliff.” The extension gave the illusion the infants would fall if they tried to reach for their mothers on the other side. Almost all of the subjects refused to crawl over the plastic.

A fear of heights, which in extreme cases is called acrophobia, most likely helped our ancestors avoid falling from life-threatening ledges, according to McMahon. The apprehension is hard-wired into human brains. When you are faced with a long drop, there is a strong response in the amygdala, a primordial brain structure. This almond-shaped region activates additional parts of the limbic system like the hypothalamus, which triggers the fight-flight-or-freeze response by signaling glands to release adrenaline and cortisol. The hormones act as a distress call to the body, causing physical changes like increased blood pressure, breathing rate, and heart rate.

Because these areas are so highly stimulated at the sight of a potential threat, brain activity elsewhere is dampened. One important area in particular becomes impaired: the more recently evolved cerebral cortex, which is involved in logic and reasoning. This makes it harder to think and make rational decisions, McMahon says.

Understanding what’s causing you to feel lightheaded and anxious is the first step toward overcoming a fear of heights. The next is to practice relaxation techniques such as deep-breathing or mindfulness exercises when doing an activity far off the ground. The first sends oxygen to the brain, indicating that you’re not in danger. The reassuring effect then activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which relaxes your muscles and instills widespread feelings of calm.

The final step is slowly exposing yourself to the source of trepidation. A psychologist specializing in phobias can use a technique called exposure therapy to help you teach your brain that heights aren’t a guaranteed death sentence. This research-based method brings you in repeated contact with the source of your fear, and your therapist will teach you how to manage your anxiety as you gradually encounter greater increases in elevation. McMahon also recommends combining exposure therapy with virtual reality programs, where you can start with something as small as simulated walks up a 20-floor staircase and eventually work toward more extreme scenarios, like being perched on top of a skyscraper.

“In my experience, five to eight virtual reality sessions have often helped people get over their fear of heights,” McMahon says. “They don’t even have to travel to the Grand Canyon.”

This story originally appeared in the High Issue of Popular Science. Read more PopSci+ stories.

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This article was originally published on KHN.

Controlled substances became a little less controlled during the pandemic. That benefited both patients (for their health) and telehealth startups (to make money).

Some potentially addictive medications — like buprenorphine and Adderall — are now far more available online to patients because of regulatory changes. Given the scarcity of qualified doctors to treat some of the behavioral health conditions associated with these drugs, like opioid use disorder or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, doctors’ new ability to prescribe online or, in some cases, by telephone is a huge change. But easier access to the drugs has both upsides and downsides, since they’re often dispensed without accompanying therapy that improves the odds of a patient’s success.

Pre-pandemic, patients sometimes traveled several hours for addiction care, said Emily Behar, director of clinical operations for Ophelia, a New York startup serving people with opioid addictions. Or patients might be struggling with multiple jobs or a lack of child care. Such obstacles made sustaining care fraught.

“How do you reach those people?” she asked.

It’s a question preoccupying much of the behavioral health sector, complicated by the reality that most patients with opioid use disorder aren’t in treatment, said Dr. Neeraj Gandotra, chief medical officer of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

Increased access to telehealth has started to provide an answer. Behar, the startup executive, says its patients can see expert providers at their convenience. Missed appointments are dropping, say many in the industry.

The startup has secured solid funding — nearly $68 million, according to Crunchbase, an industry database — but addiction specialists and other prescribers of controlled substances online are a mixed group. Some are nonprofits; others are large startups attracting scrutiny from the news media and law enforcement for allegedly sloppy prescription practices.

The influx of new providers is attributable to loosened requirements born of pandemic-era necessity. To help patients get access to care while maintaining physical distance, the Drug Enforcement Administration and SAMHSA waived restrictions on telehealth for controlled substances.

But whether those changes will endure is uncertain. The federal government is working piecemeal to codify new rules for prescribing controlled substances, in light of the health care system’s pandemic experience.

On Dec. 13, SAMHSA issued a proposal to codify telehealth regulations on opioid treatment programs — but that affects only part of the sector. Left unaddressed — at least until the DEA issues rules — is the process for individual providers to register to prescribe buprenorphine. The new rules “get us at least a little bit closer to where we need to go,” said Sunny Levine, a telehealth and behavioral health lawyer at the firm Foley & Lardner, headquartered in Milwaukee.

Congress also tweaked rules around buprenorphine, doing away with a long-standing policy to cap the number of patients each provider can prescribe to. Ultimately, however, the DEA is the main regulatory domino yet to fall for telehealth providers.

In addition, pharmacies are taking a more skeptical stance on telehealth prescriptions — especially from startups. Patients were getting accustomed to using telemedicine to fill and refill their prescriptions for medications for some controlled substances, like Adderall, primarily used to treat ADHD. A shortage of Adderall has affected access for some patients. Now, though, some pharmacies are refusing to fill those prescriptions.

Cheryl Anderson, one Pennsylvanian with ADHD, said she sought online options because of her demanding schedule.

“My husband is frequently out of town, so I don’t have someone to reliably watch the baby to go to an in-person appointment,” she said. It was tough, with three kids, to find the time. Telehealth helped for about half of 2022. Previously, the DEA and state governments imposed tough rules on obtaining controlled substances from online pharmacies.

But in September, after her doctor wrote a refill prescription, she got a phone call saying her local pharmacy wouldn’t dispense medications if the prescription came through telehealth. Other local pharmacies she called took the same position.

Those denials seem to reflect a broader cultural shift in attitudes. Whereas patients and politicians hailed telemedicine at the beginning of the pandemic — first for its safety but also for its increased convenience and potential to extend care to rural areas and neighborhoods without specialists — hints of skepticism are creeping in.

The telehealth boom attracted shady actors. “You had a lot of people who saw an opportunity to do things that were less than scrupulous,” particularly in the behavioral health market, said Michael Yang, a managing partner at the venture capitalist firm OMERS Ventures. Skeptical media coverage has proliferated of startups that, allegedly, shotgun prescriptions for mental health conditions without monitoring patients receiving those medications. “It’ll settle down.”

The startups pose quandaries for local pharmacists, said Matt Morrison, owner of Gibson’s Pharmacy in Dodge City, Kansas.

Pharmacists have multiple obligations related to prescriptions, he said: to make sure incoming prescriptions are from legitimate physicians and that they’re connected to an actual health condition before filling the order. The sense around the industry, Morrison said, is that prescriptions from startups are tricky. They might come from a distant provider, whom the pharmacist can’t contact easily.

Those qualms pose difficulties for addiction treatment. Persuading pharmacists to fill prescriptions is one of the biggest administrative tasks for Ophelia, Behar said. Still, the shift online has been helpful.

“Telehealth picks up the gaps,” said Josh Luftig, a founding member of CA Bridge, a program based in Oakland, California, that helps patients in emergency departments initiate treatment for substance misuse. The supply of care providers wasn’t enough to meet demand. “Across the board, there’s been a lack of access to treatment in the outpatient setting. Now all they need is a phone and to get to a pharmacy.”

Treatment is more efficient for patient and provider alike, providers say. “The majority of our patients prefer to have a telehealth experience,” he said. “The telehealth appointments are more efficient. It increases the capacity of each person involved.”

Well-established organizations also report success: Geisinger, a large mid-Atlantic health system, said 94% of participants in one maternity-focused program were compliant, spokesperson Emile Lee said.

Ophelia, which started up just before the pandemic, expected to treat patients both in-office and online. “We have an office in Philadelphia we’ve never used,” she said. Now the company labors every few months — in anticipation of the end of state and federal public health emergencies — to make sure that the end of the associated looser rules doesn’t lead to disruptions in care for their patients.

More clarity on the future of online treatment could result from permanent regulations from the DEA. What the agency’s rule — which would create a registration process for providers interested in prescribing controlled substances online — will say is “anyone’s guess,” said Elliot Vice, an executive specializing in telehealth with the trade group Faegre Drinker. That rule has been pending for years. “To see this still not move, it is puzzling.”

The agency, which declined to comment specifically for this article, pointed to previous statements praising increased access to medication-assisted treatment.

“There shouldn’t be any change in the rules for telehealth,” Luftig said. “It would be the most horrific thing in terms of access for our communities. It would be an unmitigated disaster.”

[Correction: This article was updated at 10:30 a.m. ET on Jan. 11, 2023, to correct the location of Foley & Lardner’s headquarters.]

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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Growing up with a family pet can have numerous benefits for kids beyond just having a playmate. They can help kids learn, with one study finding that children are more relaxed when reading to a dog instead of a peer or an adults. They can decrease a child’s risk of developing asthma and also help children become more nurturing.

But why do young children react to animals in certain ways?

A study published January 15 in the journal Human-Animal Interactions offers a glimpse into whether or not toddlers impulsively help dogs within certain scenarios.

[Related: The National Institutes of Health is studying dogs to learn more about aging and genetics in people.]

With the help of three friendly dogs named Fiona, Henry, and Seymour, a team studied how 97 toddlers (51 girls and 46 boys) between two and three years-old interacted with them in certain situations, particularly helping a dog reach a treat or toy.

In half of all events, the toddlers gave the dogs an out-of-reach treat and toy after a dog attempted and failed to get it themselves. By contrast, children offered dogs objects that had been previously ignored by the canines only 26 percent of the time.

The team found that the children were also twice as likely to help a dog reach a toy or a treat if the dog showed an interest in them. They also found that more lively dogs were also more likely to receive help and children helped the dogs get treats rather than toys.

“These findings lend support to our hypothesis that children’s early-developing proclivities for goal-reading and prosociality extend beyond humans to other animals,” said co-author and research leader Rachna Reddy, a postdoctoral fellow in evolutionary anthropology at Duke University, in a statement.

[Related: Humans have trouble anticipating aggressive behavior in man’s best friend.]

As expected, the researchers say, having a dog at home (44 of the children came from homes with dogs) increased a child’s likelihood to help. They also found that more engaged dogs and the out of reach object being food rather than a toy also increased the children’s likelihood of the helping.

“From several perspectives, children’s proclivities to attribute desires and goals to pet dogs during real-life, in-person interactions is unsurprising,” said Reddy. “However, we observed as early as 2 years of age, children behave in ways showing they are not only able to read the goal-directed behavior of another animal but can and do employ that knowledge to help an animal reach its own goal.

According to Reddy these early childhood behaviors may have an important evolutionary significance.

Future studies are needed to examine other psychological components of instrumental helping, including what emotions underlie a child’s motivation to help dogs, how culture and cognition shapes these motivations, and how these processes changes as a child grows older.

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THE ILLUSION typically starts the same way. You’ll hear a conversation between two familiar voices, or the lyrics to a beloved song. It’s alarming because, as far as you know, you’re alone, and there’s no music playing either. The only noise in the room is the uneven vibration of a fan or the sound of water rushing from your shower head. 

As disconcerting as this may be, don’t worry. You’re (probably) not tripping; you’re just experiencing audio pareidolia. 

Audio pareidolia is a weird but common experience that happens when you perceive words from a random noise. The trigger for the phenomenon varies from person to person. For some, it’s their fan or running water. Others might hear a melody within their aquarium filter’s bubbling, low-speed motors, airplane engines, or the noise from driving down the highway. 

While it feels somewhat like a hallucination, hearing and psychology experts assure us that it’s not. Instances of audio pareidolia are different from hallucinations in that you’re mishearing actual sounds in unusual ways. 

“When you’re born, your brain is basically a sheet of blank paper, but your brain is always looking for patterns, whether they’re visual, auditory, or anything else,” says Neil Bauman, the founder of the Center for Hearing Loss Help. The brain’s desire to find patterns it can recognize from random information is why pareidolia occurs in every sensory system. It’s why you see faces in the clouds overhead or feel something crawling on the surface of your skin even though nothing’s there. On a physiological level, your brain, which tries really hard to find meaning in all the sensory input it receives, goes digging into its archives to give meaning to an erratic jumble of noise. What you end up hearing is your brain’s rationalization of the background sound. 

“You don’t hear what your ears hear,” says Bauman, “you hear what your brain perceives you to hear.” 

Sometimes that’s a bit far off from what the actual noise is. Your brain is very good at finding patterns and adding significance to random input. That’s why you understand that loud noises are a sign that you might be in a dangerous situation—a useful evolutionary advantage. 

But the process behind audio pareidolia isn’t so helpful. Pareidolia is a glitch in your brain’s data-processing system: Your mind doesn’t turn random, meaningless noise into a train or car horn because what’s the use in that? Speech just happens to have a pattern that is most similar to that of the triggering sounds. 

“These patterns in question are ‘fuzzy’ in the first place, not ‘sharp,’” says Bauman of the deceptive background noise. “If the pattern was sharp, [your brain] would get a perfect match, and you’d hear the sound as a fan or motor sound. It’s the fuzziness of the sound that results in so much ambiguity.”

But there is a similarity between the fuzziness itself and the speech you manifest from it, explains Robert Remez, a professor of psychology at Barnard College. Experiments conducted during the 1950s attempted to see how well people understood speech with concurrent noise. Researchers took highly intelligible speech produced by a careful talker, and mixed in tones of equal intensity that were distributed randomly over the frequencies of the human auditory range—aka white noise. They found that when speech intelligibility fell by half due to the added hubbub, people were perfectly capable of understanding what was said, even when the speech was significantly quieter than the noise. 

“The reason, simply, is that speech is composed of sound that is constantly changing, and there do not appear to be moments that are uniquely informative about the spoken message,” says Remez. The snippets that a listener understands provide details about the speech segments being heard: their order and whether a piece of information is the start, middle, or end of a word. 

“It has to do with the way in which speech packs information into sound,” he adds. “So since that type of listening experience [from the experiments] is familiar to all of us, when we hear mostly noise, it’s not that different from hearing mostly noise with somebody speaking.” 

In a world full of noise and random events, it’s good that our brains have the ability to understand actual conversations through the noise—even if that function does produce occasional cognitive glitches like a Beyoncé lyric from the glub-glub of a pool filter.

“Your brain is pattern matching,” says Bauman. “That makes you human.”

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A free mental health service offering online communities a peer-to-peer chat support network is facing scrutiny after its co-founder revealed the company briefly experimented with employing an AI chatbot to generate responses—without informing recipients. Although they have since attempted to downplay the project and highlight the program’s deficiencies, critics and users alike are expressing deep concerns regarding medical ethics, privacy, and the buzzy, controversial world of AI chatbot software.

As highlighted on Tuesday by New Scientist, Koko was co-founded roughly seven years ago by MIT graduate Rob Morris, whose official website bills the service as a novel approach to making online mental health support “accessible to everyone.” One of its main services allowing clients like social network platforms to install keyword flagging software that can then connect users to psychology resources, including human chat portals. Koko is touted as particularly useful for younger users of social media.

[Related: OpenAI’s new chatbot offers solid conversations and fewer hot takes.]

Last Friday, however, Morris tweeted that approximately 4,000 users were “provided mental health support… using GPT-3,” which is the popular AI chatbot program developed by OpenAI. Although users weren’t chatting directly with GPT-3, a “co-pilot” system was designed so that human support workers reviewed the AI’s suggested responses, and used them as they deemed relevant. As New Scientist also notes, it does not appear that Koko users received any form of up-front alert letting them know their mental health support was potentially generated, at least in part, by a chatbot.

In his Twitter thread, Morris explained that, while audiences rated AI co-authored responses “significantly higher” than human-only answers, they decided to quickly pull the program, stating that once people were made aware of the messages’ artificial origins, “it didn’t work.” 

“Simulated empathy feels weird, empty,” wrote Morris. Still, he expressed optimism at AI’s potential roles within mental healthcare, citing previous projects like Woebot, which alerts users from the outset that they would be conversing with a chatbot.

[Related: Seattle schools sue social media companies over students’ worsening mental health.]

The ensuing fallout from Morris’ descriptions of the Koko endeavor prompted near-immediate online backlash, causing Morris to issue multiple clarifications regarding “misconceptions” surrounding the experiment. “We were not pairing people up to chat with GPT-3, without their knowledge. (in retrospect, I could have worded my first tweet to better reflect this),” he wrote last Saturday, adding that the feature was “opt-in” while it was available.

“It’s obvious that AI content creation isn’t going away, but right now it’s moving so fast that people aren’t thinking critically about the best ways to use it,” Caitlin Seeley, campaign director for the digital rights advocacy group, Fight for the Future, wrote PopSci in an email. “Transparency must be a part of AI use—people should know if what they’re reading or looking at was created by a human or a computer, and we should have more insight into how AI programs are being trained.”

[Related: Apple introduces AI audiobook narrators, but the literary world is not too pleased.]

Seeley added that services like Koko need to be “thoughtful” about the services they purport to provide, as well as remain critical about AI’s role in those services. “There are still a lot of questions about how AI can be used in an ethical way, but any company considering it must ask these questions before they start using AI.”

Morris appears to have heard critics, although it remains unclear what will happen next for the company and any future plans with chat AI. “We share an interest in making sure that any uses of AI are handled delicately, with deep concern for privacy, transparency, and risk mitigation,” Morris wrote on Koko’s blog over the weekend, adding that the company’s clinical advisory board is meeting to discuss guidelines for future experiments, “specifically regarding IRB approval.”

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Are people less connected to nature today than previous generations? And does a disconnect from nature influence how much we care about climate change, biodiversity loss, and other environmental issues? 

These are questions at the heart of a new study from the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research and the Theoretical and Experimental Ecology Station in France. Scientists reviewed existing studies that examine humans’ relationship with nature, and found that, overall, we have been interacting less with nature over the past few decades. They also revealed that humans worldwide live farther away from undeveloped land and live increasingly in urban areas, which have lost tree cover over time. The results were published in December in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. 

According to the theory “extinction of experience,” interactions with nature are vanishing in modern societies, leading to potential loss of care for it. The theory has long been popular in environmental psychology, but there is little empirical evidence to prove it. This recent review study attempts to narrow that gap. 

“The knowledge about these human-nature interactions is crucial, as they are key in the construction of our relationship with nature and our behaviors,” says Victor Cazalis, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research and Leipzig University, in a news release. 

Researchers reviewed studies from around the world that measure human interaction with nature. They also calculated other indices that could hint at the relationship, like how far the average person lives away from undeveloped land, how many people live in urban areas, and how many trees there are in cities. They defined an “experience of nature” as any interaction someone has with nature. It could include anything from visiting a national park, to seeing a fox in a city garden, to viewing a natural landscape in a Disney movie. 

[Related: Even if you live in a city, you can get health benefits from nature]

They found that human interaction with nature has declined in the past few decades. “What we showed basically is that North America and Western Europe are much more disconnected than the rest of the world to nature, but that the rest of the world is following the same trend,” Cazalis tells Popular Science. 

One key measure that stood out is that there are less representations of nature in cultural products. Disney movies increasingly depict purely urban landscapes, for example. “For urban populations, these cultural products can be a really important way to build your imagination about nature, especially as a kid, but also as adults,” Cazalis says.

The team, however, cautions there are still large gaps in the research. Still, Cazalis explains that there isn’t enough evidence to make any conclusive statements about the scope and extent to which human interactions with nature have declined. After searching through millions of studies in a database, only about 18 fit the parameters for their review. And a majority of those 18 studies were published in North America, Western Europe or Japan. 

The analysis also doesn’t consider the COVID-19 pandemic’s effect on human interactions with nature. While a couple of studies found that the pandemic increased people’s interactions with nature, the pandemic’s effect “was not representative of what we wanted to measure, with the idea that maybe it’s just a peak, and then later, the people start going back to the usual business,” Cazalis says.

The review authors also examined general trends on opportunities people have to connect with nature. People around the globe live a little farther away from undeveloped land, or land that has low human impact, than they did before. From 2000 to 2020, the average person lived about 5.6 miles away from undeveloped land, which increased to about 6 miles away by 2020. While this 7 percent increase in distance to nature may seem small, it’s still a notable change when looking at the bigger picture, says Cazalis. 

“I think 7 percent increase as a global average—for some countries the increase is much more important—is significant as this is only over the last 20 years and as this is hardly reversible.”

They also found that more of the global population lives in urban areas than before. In 1960, only 34 percent of people around the world lived in urban areas, but by 2020 that number rose to 56 percent. And in those urban areas, people have less access to green spaces than they did before. In 2000, among cities surveyed in 133 countries, at least 5 percent of urban areas were bulwarked by trees. But by 2020, almost all of those experienced some minor decline in tree canopy. 

[Related: Spending time outside is a cheap way to improve your health—if you’re rich.]

“I thought it was a carefully done and valuable study,” Susan Clayton, a psychology professor at the College of Wooster who has written about environmental psychology, told Popular Science in a statement. “The authors are right that claims of ‘extinction of experience’ need more empirical support, and more nuance about what is meant by experience of nature. There certainly are changes in the ways we experience nature, but as this paper shows, it’s not as simple as a universal decline.”

Environmental psychologists believe interactions with nature are important because they shape how we value these spaces, which can lead to pro-environmental behaviors. This is increasingly acknowledged on the world stage, Cazalis says. At the most recent global conference on biodiversity loss in Montreal, COP15, world governments said one of their targets is to increase access to green spaces in urban areas.

“All the literature in environmental psychology says that there is an impact of experiences of nature on the way we act, and more importantly, on our values and political views,” Cazalis says. “It doesn’t mean that you cannot have any concern about nature if you don’t experience nature, but it shows that caring about the way we interact with nature is key to the big societal challenges that we have.”

While, to some extent, a loss of interaction with nature might be an inevitable consequence of development, Cazalis says there are things people can do to mitigate it, such as increase access to green spaces in urban areas and increase representation of nature in cultural products, like novels, children’s books and Disney movies. 

“It’s not the most urgent. We need first to stop eroding biodiversity,” Cazalis says. “But for a more long-term perspective, we need to take care of that interaction, of the way we connect.”

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Excerpted from Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion by Dr. Wendy Suzuki with permission from Atria. Copyright © 2022 by Wendy Suzuki, PhD.

What does emotion regulation mean?

One expert on emotion regulation, James J. Gross, another psychology professor at Stanford University, defines emotion regulation as “the processes by which individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express them.” He also points out that regulation is a set of processes that exist on a “continuum from conscious, effortful and controlled regulation to unconscious, effortless, and automatic regulation.”

What does this mean in practice? The bottom line is this: Though anxiety might originate as some form of attention-getting signal to avoid danger, it doesn’t necessarily have to cause discomfort, distraction, or otherwise interfere with our natural drive toward well-being and balance. We can learn to use awareness to reframe a situation, remove the perception of danger, and reappraise it as an opportunity to overcome a challenge and create new responses. We have multiple options for managing both the attention to the signal and the anxiety (the feelings), and if it gets to that point, the response itself. Our brain is a wondrous thing!

[Related: Stress and anxiety wear down your brain. Here’s how to fight back.]

Our brain-body systems are in a constant drive toward homeostasis, that state of equilibrium between arousal and relaxation. Every system—from the nervous system to the digestive—is interacting and exchanging signals in order to respond to a stressor and then re-gain homeostasis. This is true of our emotional system as well. Our negative emotions arise to draw our attention to something that may be dangerous, and then make some sort of change or adaptation to feel better. In other words, they have a positive purpose. It is the same with anxiety: it’s the brain-body’s way of telling us to pay attention. Our built-in system for managing our negative emotions, of processing, responding to, and coping with negative emotions in particular, so we can maintain or return to homeostasis is called emotion regulation.

Let’s look at how emotion regulation plays out in real life. Say you are anticipating an important job interview after being let go from your former position six months prior. You are feeling pressure, self-doubt, and fear—fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of not measuring up. The interview is four days away but you’re already feeling nervous. When you even imagine walking through the door of the building, your hands start to sweat, your heart ticks up, and your breath becomes a tiny bit shallow. Next, you begin to imagine every possible thing that could go wrong: you might forget to bring your résumé, you might wear mismatching socks, or you might forget everything you know about why you’re applying for the job in the first place.

Situation selection

One option is to avoid a situation that you expect will bother you or exacerbate your anxiety. Avoiding the situation (skipping the job interview) may alleviate the fear and stress in the near term; however, it clearly will not help you if, in the long run, you want or need the job in question. Gross calls this strategy situation selection.

Situation modification

Another option is to modify the current situation so that the anticipation or anxiety is made more tolerable or bearable. For instance, if you’re experiencing anxiety about the pending interview, you could modify the situation by asking to do the interview over the phone or video conference. This enables you to exert some control over your anxiety and puts you more in charge of the feeling that it’s bigger than you. Gross calls this situation modification. I call it a shift from bad to good anxiety. Your nervousness has not disappeared; it’s simply under your control and being channeled.

Attention deployment

A third option is referred to as attention deployment, which includes several ways you can avert your attention from the anxiety-provoking situation to something else that absorbs your attention. Parents use this technique frequently with their infants and toddlers. If the young child is afraid of dogs, for example, a parent could direct the child’s focus to a funny face while the scary dog walks away. This is a kind of intentional distraction.

[Related: How to keep your anxiety from spiraling out of control]

Cognitive change

The fourth and probably most sophisticated of the strategies for emotion regulation is referred to as cognitive change. In this case, you actively and consciously reappraise or reframe your mindset or attitude: instead of thinking about the job interview as a horrible way to spend your Friday morning, you reframe it as an opportunity to show yourself and your potential employer how much you know about the role and the company or organization; it also builds your confidence. The reframe acts as a mental suggestion that reshapes the feeling of anxiety from one of dread and feeling overwhelmed to one of excitement and challenge.

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Of the trillions of microorganisms that call your gut home, 13 bacterial species may contribute to depression. A pair of studies published on December 6 in the journal Nature Communications identified bacteria linked to depression and a possible explanation for how they’re promoting depressive episodes. 

Depression is one of the leading causes of disability worldwide. About five percent of adults live with the condition. If left untreated, a depressive episode can significantly impair your life, from constant hopelessness to a loss of interest in day-to-day activities. Understanding just how these microbes contribute to our mental health could shape gut-driven approaches for managing the condition.

Certain gut bacteria could be causing a chemical imbalance in the brain 

In one of the studies, the authors examined the microbiome composition of 1,539 adults in the Netherlands. “Our biggest surprise was the strength of the relationship between gut bacteria and depression,” Robert Kraaij, a senior research scientist at Erasmus Medical Center Rotterdam in the Netherlands and study coauthor, wrote in an email to PopSci. Of the 13 microbial taxa linked to depression, people with a higher abundance of Sellimonas, Eggerthella, Lachnoclostridium, and Hungatella reported more depressive symptoms. 

The 13 microbial species help produce chemical messengers—glutamate, butyrate, serotonin, and gamma amino butyric acid (GABA)—which the levels are typically altered during the depression. The findings from the current study could help identify people who are most at risk for depression, explains Najaf Amin, a senior researcher at Oxford University and senior study author. 

In the future, Amin plans to study the levels of the four chemical messengers in the blood of people with and without depression to see how they compare. Doing so may help get a better sense of how gut bacteria influence a person’s brain chemistry and how the brain regulates mood.

[Related: Magic mushrooms help cancer patients deal with depression]

Differences across ethnicities in the gut microbiomes of people with depression

The second study investigated fecal samples of 3,211 individuals who resided in urban Amsterdam. The participants belonged to one of six different ethnic groups—Dutch, South-Asian Surinamese, African Surinamese, Ghanaian, Turkish, and Moroccan. The microbiome assessments showed changes in bacterial species associated with depressive symptoms, including those species from the Christensenellaceae, Lachnospiraceae, and Ruminococcaceae families. One interesting observation, however, was that not everyone with depression had the same amounts of each microbial species. About 18 to 29 percent of differences in depression-related bacteria was due to ethnic differences.

“This is pivotal research with interesting data on gut-brain [interactions], a burgeoning area of science and medicine now,” says Harvey Hamilton Allen Jr., chief gastroenterologist at Mohawk Valley Endoscopy Center at St. Luke’s Hospital, who was not involved in either of the studies.

What we know about the gut’s involvement in depression

One of the reasons depression is difficult to treat is that there seems to be no single cause. Prior research has linked depression to stressful or traumatic life events, while others have observed depression manifesting after chronic substance abuse. Genetic factors might also be at play, as people with a family history of depression are three times more likely to have it too. The gut microbiome might be another contributor at play. 

While the idea had been tossed around for centuries, biologists have only recently unearthed physical evidence of a gut-brain connection in the past couple of decades. The theory goes that humans have a “bidirectional” line of communication between the emotional and cognitive centers of the brain, explains Hamilton Allen Jr. Imagine a telephone wire running from your central brain to your enteric nervous system—a collection of neurons in the wall of the GI tract that controls your digestive system. The enteric nervous system is often called the “second brain” for its influence on the rest of the body. 

One important piece of evidence that the gut likely plays a role in depression is that about 95 percent of serotonin—often labeled the “happy hormone” for its mood-regulating effects—is made from gut bacteria. Paxil and Zoloft, two commonly prescribed medications for depression, block the body from reabsorbing serotonin to avoid the hormone’s levels from falling too low. 

Treating depression through the microbiome

A deep understanding of the ins and outs of the gut microbiome could revolutionize how we approach medicine, including how we treat depression. “If certain bacteria are part of the cause of depression, we can design treatments to modulate these bacteria,” says Kraaij.

One potential approach is through fecal transplants. While such a treatment might seem ripe for bacterial infections, it could help promote healthy gut bacteria in people who are unable to produce them on their own (there have been reported deaths from fecal transplants among immunocompromised people). Transporting the poop from a person with a healthy gut microbiota to someone with  an unhealthy gut has already become the standard of care for treating Clostridioides difficile infections. The procedure restores healthy bacteria back into the lower intestines. Just last week on December 2, the FDA approved the first pharmaceutical-grade fecal transplant to treat difficult intestinal infections.

[Related: Autism shapes the gut microbiome, scientists report, not the other way around]

There is also some growing evidence that fecal transplants could help with depression. In a small case study published in February 2022, two people with major depressive disorder underwent poop transplants in addition to their current treatment plan. Both showed a reduction in depressive-live behavior four weeks after the procedure. One of the patients continued to show improvement in their depressive symptoms for up to eight weeks after treatment, along with improvement in other GI problems. 

The two studies could make the fecal transplant process more efficient by knowing which of the 13 bacteria species need to be transferred to make the gut healthy again. What’s more, Hamilton Allen Jr. speculates the findings could even help fecal transplants to be more personalized to different ethnicities in the future. 

Still, gut microbes are one of many factors linked to depression, Hamilton Allen Jr. says. Without an experiment that could manipulate the microbiome to see how people fared with and without these microbes, scientists cannot definitively say a gut imbalance is a primary cause of depression. But he says, “this is definitely one of the new treatment modalities, and as we learn more about this organ, we are going to see more research going into treating the microbiome.”

Correction (December 12, 2022): This story has updated the genus name Clostridium difficile to Clostridioides difficile to reflect changes in taxonomic classification of the bacteria.

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Assisted living communities too often fail to meet the needs of older adults and should focus more on residents’ medical and mental health concerns, according to a recent report by a diverse panel of experts.

It’s a clarion call for change inspired by the altered profile of the population that assisted living now serves.

Residents are older, sicker, and more compromised by impairments than in the past: 55% are 85 and older, 77% require help with bathing, 69% with walking, and 49% with toileting, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics.

Also, more than half of residents have high blood pressure, and a third or more have heart disease or arthritis. Nearly one-third have been diagnosed with depression and at least 11% have a serious mental illness. As many as 42% have dementia or moderate-to-severe cognitive impairment.

“The nature of the clientele in assisted living has changed dramatically,” yet there are no widely accepted standards for addressing their physical and mental health needs, said Sheryl Zimmerman, who led the panel. She’s co-director of the Program on Aging, Disability, and Long-Term Care at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

The report addresses this gap with 43 recommendations from experts including patient advocates, assisted living providers, and specialists in medical, psychiatric, and dementia care that Zimmerman said she hopes will become “a new standard of care.”

One set of recommendations addresses staffing. The panel proposes that ratios of health aides to residents be established and that either a registered nurse or a licensed practical nurse be available on-site. (Before establishing specific requirements for various types of communities, the panel suggested further research on staffing requirements was necessary.)

Like nursing homes and home health agencies, assisted living operators have found it hard to retain or hire staff during the covid-19 pandemic. In a September 2021 survey, 82% reported “moderate” or “high” level of staffing shortages.

Dr. Kenneth Covinsky, a geriatrician and professor of medicine at the University of California-San Francisco, witnessed staffing-related problems when his mother moved to assisted living at age 79. At one point, she fell and had to wait about 25 minutes for someone to help her get up. On another occasion, she waited for 30 minutes on the toilet as overworked staffers responded to pagers buzzing nonstop.

“The nighttime scene was crazy: There would be one person for 30 to 40 residents,” said Covinsky, the author of an editorial accompanying the consensus recommendations. Eventually, he ended up moving his mother to another facility.

The panel also recommended staffers get training on managing dementia and mental illness, on medication side effects, on end-of-life care, on tailoring care to individual residents’ needs, and on infection control — a weakness highlighted during the height of the pandemic, when an estimated 17% more people died in assisted living in 2020 compared with previous years.

“If I were placing my parent in assisted living, I certainly would be looking not just at staffing ratios but the actual training of staff,” said Robyn Stone, senior vice president of research at LeadingAge and co-director of its long-term services and supports center at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. LeadingAge is an industry organization representing nonprofit long-term care providers. Stone said the organization generally supports the panel’s work.

The better trained staff are, the more likely they are to provide high-quality care to residents and the less likely they are to feel frustrated and burned out, said Dr. Helen Kales, chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at UC Davis Health.

This is especially important for memory care delivered in stand-alone assisted living facilities or a wing of a larger community. “We have seen places where a memory care unit charges upwards of $10,000 a month for ‘dementia care’ yet is little more than a locked door to prevent residents from leaving the unit and not the sensitive and personalized care advertised,” wrote Covinsky and his University of California-San Francisco colleague Dr. Kenneth Lam in their editorial.

Because dementia is such a pervasive concern in assisted living, the panel recommended that residents get formal cognitive assessments and that policies be established to address aggression or other worrisome behaviors.

One such policy might be trying non-pharmaceutical strategies (examples include aromatherapy or music therapy) to calm people with dementia before resorting to prescribed medications, Kales said. Another might be calling for a medical or psychiatric evaluation if a resident’s behavior changes dramatically and suddenly.

Further recommendations from the panel emphasize the importance of regularly assessing residents’ needs, developing care plans, and including residents in this process. “The resident should really be directing what their goals are and how they want care provided, but this doesn’t always happen,” said Lori Smetanka, a panel member and executive director of the National Consumer Voice for Quality Long-Term Care, an advocacy organization.

“We agree with many of these recommendations” and many assisted living communities are already following these practices, said LaShuan Bethea, executive director of the National Center for Assisted Living, an industry organization.

Nonetheless, she said her organization has concerns, especially about the practicality and cost of the recommendations. “We need to understand what the feasibility would be,” she said, and suggested that a broad study look at those issues. In the meantime, states should examine how they regulate assisted living, taking into account the increased needs of the residents, Bethea said.

Because the nation’s roughly 28,900 assisted living communities are regulated by states and there are no federal standards, practices vary widely and generally there are fewer protections for residents than are found in nursing homes. Some assisted living facilities are small homes housing as few as four to six seniors; some are large housing complexes with nearly 600 older adults. Nearly 919,000 individuals live in these communities.

“There are many different flavors of assisted living, and I think we need to be more purposeful about naming what they are and who they’re best suited to care for,” said Kali Thomas, a panel member and an associate professor of health services, policy, and practice at Brown University.

Originally, assisted living was meant to be a “social” model: a home-like setting where older adults could interact with other residents while receiving help from staff with daily tasks such as bathing and dressing. But given the realities of today’s assisted living population, “the social model of care is outmoded,” said Tony Chicotel, a panel member and staff attorney with California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform.

Still, he and other panelists don’t want assisted living to become a “medical” model, like nursing homes.

“What’s interesting is you see nursing homes pushing to get to a more homelike environment and assisted living needing to more adequately manage the medical needs of residents,” Chicotel told me, referring to the current pandemic-inspired reexamination of long-term care. “That said, I don’t want assisted living facilities to look more like nursing homes. How this all will play out isn’t at all clear yet.”

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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PSYCHEDELICS are having a moment. This past spring, Netflix’s How to Change Your Mind documentary series introduced the binge-watching masses to the concept of using trippy substances to reboot troubled brains. Numerous startups offer at-home ketamine therapy in glossy ads on Instagram. And in 2020, Oregon became the first state to vote to legalize psilocybin for therapeutic use.

The world of scientific research is buzzing too. Clinical trials on the use of MDMA to treat post-traumatic stress disorder have shown promising results and could lead to FDA approval in the next year or so. A recent study in the Journal of Affective Disorders suggested that administering ketamine before a cesarean section might mitigate postpartum depression in some patients. And in August 2022, a small study on substance use disorder in JAMA Psychiatry showed that when combined with therapy, two psilocybin sessions were associated with a sharp decrease in days of heavy drinking among participants.

While science is still homing in on why this works, we’re starting to form a preliminary understanding: Trippy compounds seem to affect how the brain regions responsible for mood, cognition, and perception respond to the neurotransmitter serotonin. Early research suggests this can lead to a boost in neuroplasticity—gray matter’s ability to learn things and adapt to change.

Though our clinical understanding of psychedelics is in its infancy, the drugs themselves are not. Even their therapeutic use is ancient. Mushrooms have been involved in the spiritual ceremonies of the Mazatec people in what’s now Oaxaca, Mexico, for thousands of years. Ibogaine, now touted as a therapy for substance use disorder, is derived from a plant that hunters in West Africa have long chewed for stimulation and focus while stalking game. Peyote has served as both a spiritual tool and a medicine in North America since at least 1000 B.C.E. And MDMA is derived from safrole, a compound in the oil of sassafras plants, whose recorded use by Native Americans dates to at least the 16th century.

Many Indigenous groups maintain an unbroken lineage of plant medicine use, while others now seek to reconnect with practices made difficult or impossible in the wake of colonization and other pressures. Federal drug policies in place since the 1970s, which many public health experts now agree to be misguided, have led to disproportionate punishment of BIPOC people and slowed or stopped research into the therapeutic benefits of compounds like LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin. Though decriminalization laws like Oregon’s are unwinding the war on drugs, some advocates also see trouble in the latest wave of enthusiasm.

They warn that psychedelic medicine’s renaissance, fueled by media hype and venture capital, could make the substances less accessible to the people who stand to benefit from them the most. That group includes Indigenous and other marginalized populations, who have disproportionately high rates of trauma and resulting illness but who lack equal access to basic treatment—let alone expensive clinics or drug tourism retreats.

The future of fair drug use in the US is a puzzle that will take many perspectives to solve. But these four visionaries—therapists, activists, educators, researchers, and entrepreneurs—are listening, learning, and changing minds.

Protecting resources during a boom

As a Newe—a member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes of Fort Hall, Idaho—Dawn D. Davis has many identities that share a common goal. As a researcher, educator, mother, farmer, fainting goat herder, and peyote user, she embodies a lifelong commitment to reciprocity with the substances that give us life. In her current postdoctoral work at the Idaho National Laboratory’s Energy Systems department, that means studying resource management, particularly as it pertains to water access and energy resilience in marginalized and rural communities. It has also meant laying the research groundwork for Lophophora williamsii, the squat cactus commonly known as peyote, to be treated with care both inside and outside Indigenous cultures.

The plant has recently caught the attention of psychedelics enthusiasts for containing the hallucinogenic compound mescaline, which studies suggest might help facilitate therapy for issues like addiction and trauma. But Davis’ ancestors and many other Indigenous North Americans have used it for spiritual ceremonies and general health applications, from soothing toothaches to treating wounds, for thousands of years. “It’s always been a part of my life,” she says.

As Davis grew up, however, she saw less and less available—and the cacti that were around appeared to be shrinking. L. williamsii also grows slowly, sometimes taking more than a decade to mature, and most of what is out there sits on private land. She and her family, like most traditional peyote users, access it through the ceremonies of a diffuse religious group called the Native American Church. After receiving degrees in museum studies and Native American studies, Davis began pursuing a doctorate in natural and water resources from the University of Idaho in 2013 to understand the scope of the problem. She’s since spent nearly a decade collecting data on where the plant grows to home in on its preferred vegetation and soil.

She hopes that her findings on peyote’s current distribution, which she earned a Ph.D. for in 2021, will help landowners and Indigenous users better understand the conditions in which the plant can thrive. While she’s still working to confirm and publish her data, it does indicate that the potential habitat for the slow-growing cactus in Texas and Mexico is “quite extensive,” suggesting that in situ conservation is entirely possible. But she cautions that bringing traditional knowledge into such efforts is key. In conducting her field research, she interacted with landowners and the earth in ways she didn’t learn in grad school: by sharing her intentions, introducing herself to the environment, and getting the permission of everyone and everything involved. To keep the plant’s population from dwindling further, she says, Western science will have to make room for people who engage with the earth in this way.

Conservation efforts may soon grow more pressing, as some psychedelics enthusiasts are pushing to have peyote widely decriminalized. Groups that include the Native American Church of North America, where Davis serves on the Legislative Committee, and the National Congress of American Indians, where she co-chairs the Peyote Task Force, argue that this will make the scant wild population even more vulnerable to outside parties, and have asked that peyote not be mentioned in any decriminalization efforts.

Some members of these and other advocacy groups have pointed out that there are other, faster-growing cacti, such as the San Pedro plant, that also produce mescaline and could be cultivated instead. While it is less potent, the tall cactus can grow all over the world. In the US, it’s a common sight on arid front lawns, where it’s legal to have but not legal to use for its mescaline. Davis, for her part, would prefer mescaline get left out of decriminalization bills entirely; she worries that such a loophole could mask peyote harvesting.

Davis emphasizes she’s one person from one tribe, so bringing many Indigenous voices into the conversation about psychedelic use is crucial. That’s as true for protecting a plant in peril as it is for respecting the reasons why tribes used specific flora and how they combine them. “I may be the only Native American peyote researcher,” she says. “I don’t know of any others. But that’s a hard space to be in, because I don’t consider myself a psychedelic researcher. I consider myself a medicine researcher. I see things from a very different perspective.”

Finding the sacred side of therapy

Danielle Herrera’s ketamine patients at Sage Integrative Health don’t get a very clinical experience. The Bay Area psychotherapist takes people for walks while they’re high, gives them sensory objects like feathers and bowls of water, and even sings with them. “That’s something that happens a lot in ayahuasca circles,” she says of the ceremonies involving the psychoactive South American brew. “Humming together can be really powerful.”

While Herrera, who identifies as mixed-Indigenous and part Filipino, tells people that her therapy is informed by traditional rituals, she doesn’t mean she treats every trip like a ceremony in the Amazon basin. She has at least two beliefs that buck the medical establishment: First, that every recreational drug has the potential to be beneficial, given the right therapeutic guidance and exploration. And second, that the process should look different for every patient—and for every therapist.

Her first work out of graduate school focused on treating children, though she was reluctant to turn her own childhood trauma, which stemmed from her parents’ struggles with substance use disorder, into a career. That is, until she found herself drawn to the Harm Reduction Therapy Center in San Francisco. The mobile clinics Herrera worked at would welcome people high on anything and give them whatever help they needed. Someone might be hungry, or have a wound that needed dressing, and she would also offer mental health support.

During that time, Herrera started training in ketamine therapy at the Sage Institute clinic. “Noticing what was happening in the intersection between harm reduction and psychedelic therapy allowed my relationship with my family to deepen,” she says. Her mother, who is now sober but used methamphetamines for years, opened up about her initial experiences with meth, which were intensely positive and spiritual. “Even drug counselors would just shame her,” Herrera says. “She told me, ‘If there was just one person who I could have talked to about my spiritual awakening on meth, I might not have fallen into the chaotic use and depression that followed.’”

Herrera has now facilitated integration—the thoughtful unpacking of insights gained while high—for “every drug you can think of.” And each session, she says, can be profound and unique. She pushes back against mainstream stereotypes of the psychedelic experience, which she feels can make patients think they should expect to find peace, that the drugs will calm their inner demons. Many of the people she treats, especially those who have endured lifelong racial aggression, actually become more in tune with their inner rage.

Perhaps most crucially, Herrera is always entirely herself. “When I was learning to become a therapist, I was really resistant to the colonialism I knew was entrenched in these systems,” she says of the perspectives that have typically informed modern psychiatry. “I was a real pot stirrer.”

Putting a new spin on pharmaceutical development

Jeeshan Chowdhury often reminds folks that his startup’s technology isn’t actually new. Mescaline, the compound Journey Colab recently synthesized, is best known as the psychedelic component of peyote. “While it feels like this is a new trend, it’s validated by thousands of years of use by Indigenous communities,” Chowdhury says.

The recent psychedelic boom has inspired a race to find—and patent—new chemical compounds that pack the same punch as ancient plant medicines. That sprint, of course, comes with the typical Big Pharma fears, from making treatments more expensive to leapfrogging traditional users by stamping trademarks. Journey Colab, which is exploring mescaline as a tool to treat substance use disorder, set itself apart from its beginnings in 2020: 10 percent of its founding equity is held in a perpetual trust overseen by representatives of Indigenous communities. “It’s actual ownership,” Chowdhury emphasizes.

Until about five years ago, Chowdhury, who was raised in a devout Muslim home, had never had much interest in drugs. But he eventually realized they could save him. “I was living these two very parallel lives,” he says. In 2017, he’d already earned an M.D. from the University of Alberta and a Ph.D. in health informatics as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and had dropped out of a medical residency to found, build, and sell his first startup—a digital platform to help coordinate care in hospitals.

But he was in the midst of a mental health crisis. “I felt like I was drowning,” he says. Offerings like antidepressants and talk therapy helped, but felt like life preservers. By the time he sold that first company, he says, “I wanted to let go and drown.”

Out of desperation, he tried psychedelic therapy for the first time. “In that state of consciousness, it was like the muddy waters I’d been drowning in my whole life cleared up,” he says. He decided to get training in psychedelic integration—the process of folding insights gleaned from the thoughts and feelings of a trip into one’s conscious, everyday life—and grew fascinated by how much work still needed to be done to marry centuries of tradition with new scientific insight.

Journey Colab’s focus on mescaline could help refine our understanding of why the compound works so well. Previous studies in mice have indicated that the substance increases neuroplasticity for around five or six weeks; ketamine’s effects, by comparison, taper off after a couple of days, and those of MDMA and psilocybin in a fortnight. Journey Colab now wants to quantify how mescaline could help grease the wheels of alcohol use disorder therapy specifically.

Despite such promising signs, Chowdhury prefers to call Journey’s offerings “psychedelic procedures” as opposed to straightforward therapy sessions. Given their risks, he thinks they should be taken as seriously as surgery—and that they require tailored support and therapy to be effective. “It’s incredibly important for us to learn from the people who successfully integrated these very powerful tools into their individual lives and cultures and societies,” he says. “It’s done with ritual, and it’s done with respect.”

Making ketamine accessible and sustainable

Courtney Watson is supposed to be working on her dissertation. But a chance encounter in 2018 sent her on a detour. A licensed marriage and family therapist, Watson was moderating a panel at a conference for BIPOC techies when a stranger—who’d shown up thinking the meetup was about techno—asked her if she’d like to be introduced to the psychedelic therapy community.

She was intrigued. Watson had learned about the practice in grad school around 2011, when the drugs had yet to see their modern resurgence. In a class about addiction, a professor had pointed out that many illicit substances had once been used as medicine, and that they’d even been studied by modern scientists, but the war on drugs had shut those inquiries down.

On the advice of her new techno-loving acquaintance, Watson attended a conference on psychedelics. She was interested in the cultural perspectives of BIPOC and marginalized communities, but was surprised to hear a lot of chatter about LSD and psilocybin. “Those are white people drugs,” she remembers thinking. “We don’t do that stuff.” But then presenters talked about the power of such medicines to help treat PTSD. Watson knew that research increasingly showed members of marginalized communities had higher rates of the condition—one 2016 study, for example, indicated that more than one-quarter of Black women with depression in Oakland, California, had PTSD—but no one onstage was talking about that. She signed up for psychedelic-assisted therapy training not long after the conference ended. “I was like, ‘There’s an opportunity for healing here, and no one that’s here is going to be able to do that.’”

She opened Doorway Therapeutic Services, a ketamine clinic in Oakland designed by queer and BIPOC people, in 2020. There she relishes opportunities to challenge the status quo of one-on-one therapy. For instance, she and many other practitioners point out that traditional use of mind-altering drugs, like an ayahuasca ceremony she participated in in South America, tends to involve whole families and communities who spend generations learning to facilitate the rituals together. She also wants to see more opportunities for traditional herbalists to get the same recognition and legal validation as mainstream therapists. “It might be a mess in the beginning,” she says of shifting the paradigm around drug use and access, “but I believe we can do it.”

Watson is quick to point out that psychedelics need a lot more change—from including more BIPOC leaders to taming the high costs of therapy—than one person can kick-start. Under the leadership of sci-fi author Ayize Jama-Everett and activist Kufikiri Imara, she participated in an inaugural plant medicine conference called A Table of Our Own in the hopes of helping address these and other issues. The program gathered a couple dozen Black artists, academics, clinicians, cultivators, and spiritual leaders to re-imagine how psychedelic spaces can look with Black people at the helm.

For now, she’s doing what she can with Doorway. She works to make the organization as collaborative as possible and prioritizes employee well-being. That means sustaining the clinic by charging market rate for ketamine therapy in the Bay Area: more than $5,000 out of pocket for a full course of treatment.

Understanding that high cost limits accessibility, Watson, who’s still a Ph.D. candidate at Widener University, started a nonprofit. Access 2 Doorways helps fund clinics run by and for BIPOC people to facilitate access to psychedelic therapy. “We need this,” she says. “And we’re not going to get it if we don’t offer it.”

This story originally appeared in the High Issue of Popular Science. Read more PopSci+ stories.

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This article was originally featured on The Conversation.

Imagine that a soldier has a tiny computer device injected into their bloodstream that can be guided with a magnet to specific regions of their brain. With training, the soldier could then control weapon systems thousands of miles away using their thoughts alone. Embedding a similar type of computer in a soldier’s brain could suppress their fear and anxiety, allowing them to carry out combat missions more efficiently. Going one step further, a device equipped with an artificial intelligence system could directly control a soldier’s behavior by predicting what options they would choose in their current situation.

While these examples may sound like science fiction, the science to develop neurotechnologies like these is already in development. Brain-computer interfaces, or BCI, are technologies that decode and transmit brain signals to an external device to carry out a desired action. Basically, a user would only need to think about what they want to do, and a computer would do it for them.

BCIs are currently being tested in people with severe neuromuscular disorders to help them recover everyday functions like communication and mobility. For example, patients can turn on a light switch by visualizing the action and having a BCI decode their brain signals and transmit it to the switch. Likewise, patients can focus on specific letters, words or phrases on a computer screen that a BCI can move a cursor to select.

However, ethical considerations have not kept pace with the science. While ethicists have pressed for more ethical inquiry into neural modification in general, many practical questions around brain-computer interfaces have not been fully considered. For example, do the benefits of BCI outweigh the substantial risks of brain hacking, information theft and behavior control? Should BCI be used to curb or enhance specific emotions? What effect would BCIs have on the moral agency, personal identity and mental health of their users?

These questions are of great interest to us, a philosopher and neurosurgeon who study the ethics and science of current and future BCI applications. Considering the ethics of using this technology before it is implemented could prevent its potential harm. We argue that responsible use of BCI requires safeguarding people’s ability to function in a range of ways that are considered central to being human.

Expanding BCI beyond the clinic

Researchers are exploring nonmedical brain-computer interface applications in many fields, including gaming, virtual reality, artistic performance, warfare and air traffic control.

For example, Neuralink, a company co-founded by Elon Musk, is developing a brain implant for healthy people to potentially communicate wirelessly with anyone with a similar implant and computer setup.

In 2018, the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency launched a program to develop “a safe, portable neural interface system capable of reading from and writing to multiple points in the brain at once.” Its aim is to produce nonsurgical BCI for able-bodied service members for national security applications by 2050. For example, a soldier in a special forces unit could use BCI to send and receive thoughts with a fellow soldier and unit commander, a form of direct three-way communication that would enable real-time updates and more rapid response to threats.

To our knowledge, these projects have not opened a public discussion about the ethics of these technologies. While the U.S. military acknowledges that “negative public and social perceptions will need to be overcome” to successfully implement BCI, practical ethical guidelines are needed to better evaluate proposed neurotechnologies before deploying them.

Utilitarianism

One approach to tackling the ethical questions BCI raises is utilitarian. Utilitarianism is an ethical theory that strives to maximize the happiness or well-being of everyone affected by an action or policy.

Enhancing soldiers might create the greatest good by improving a nation’s warfighting abilities, protecting military assets by keeping soldiers remote, and maintaining military readiness. Utilitarian defenders of neuroenhancement argue that emergent technologies like BCI are morally equivalent to other widely accepted forms of brain enhancement. For example, stimulants like caffeine can improve the brain’s processing speed and may improve memory.

However, some worry that utilitarian approaches to BCI have moral blind spots. In contrast to medical applications designed to help patients, military applications are designed to help a nation win wars. In the process, BCI may ride roughshod over individual rights, such as the right to be mentally and emotionally healthy.

For example, soldiers operating drone weaponry in remote warfare today report higher levels of emotional distress, post-traumatic stress disorder and broken marriages compared to soldiers on the ground. Of course, soldiers routinely elect to sacrifice for the greater good. But if neuroenhancing becomes a job requirement, it could raise unique concerns about coercion.

Neurorights

Another approach to the ethics of BCI, neurorights, prioritizes certain ethical values even if doing so does not maximize overall well-being.

Proponents of neurorights champion individuals’ rights to cognitive liberty, mental privacy, mental integrity and psychological continuity. A right to cognitive liberty might bar unreasonable interference with a person’s mental state. A right to mental privacy might require ensuring a protected mental space, while a right to mental integrity would prohibit specific harms to a person’s mental states. Lastly, a right to psychological continuity might protect a person’s ability to maintain a coherent sense of themselves over time.

BCIs could interfere with neurorights in a variety of ways. For example, if a BCI tampers with how the world seems to a user, they might not be able to distinguish their own thoughts or emotions from altered versions of themselves. This may violate neurorights like mental privacy or mental integrity.

Yet soldiers already forfeit similar rights. For example, the U.S. military is allowed to restrict soldiers’ free speech and free exercise of religion in ways that are not typically applied to the general public. Would infringing neurorights be any different?

Human capabilities

A human capability approach insists that safeguarding certain human capabilities is crucial to protecting human dignity. While neurorights home in on an individual’s capacity to think, a capability view considers a broader range of what people can do and be, such as the ability to be emotionally and physically healthy, move freely from place to place, relate with others and nature, exercise the senses and imagination, feel and express emotions, play and recreate, and regulate the immediate environment.

We find a capability approach compelling because it gives a more robust picture of humanness and respect for human dignity. Drawing on this view, we have argued that proposed BCI applications must reasonably protect all of a user’s central capabilities at a minimal threshold. BCI designed to enhance capabilities beyond average human capacities would need to be deployed in ways that realize the user’s goals, not just other people’s.

For example, a bidirectional BCI that not only extracts and processes brain signals but delivers somatosensory feedback, such as sensations of pressure or temperature, back to the user would pose unreasonable risks if it disrupts a user’s ability to trust their own senses. Likewise, any technology, including BCIs, that controls a user’s movements would infringe on their dignity if it does not allow the user some ability to override it.

A limitation of a capability view is that it can be difficult to define what counts as a threshold capability. The view does not describe which new capabilities are worth pursuing. Yet, neuroenhancement could alter what is considered a standard threshold, and could eventually introduce entirely new human capabilities. Addressing this requires supplementing a capability approach with a fuller ethical analysis designed to answer these questions.

The post US soldiers might control weapons with their thoughts someday. Here’s why that’s complicated. appeared first on Popular Science.

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The World Cup is in full swing, with countries duking it out on the soccer field for the championship and, of course, bragging rights. This World Cup has been anything but predictable. Fans were in uproar after Saudi Arabia beat out Argentina’s powerhouse team—the kingdom held a national holiday the day after to celebrate the win—while German fans were in disbelief after losing to Japan. And in a major upset, Mexico’s team was eliminated from the group stage, a first since 1978.

Whether or not you’re a soccer enthusiast, it’s hard to deny the excitement of seeing your home country move closer to the gold. And while not everyone can travel thousands of miles to the games held this year in Qatar, psychologists say there’s good reason to tune into a match. PopSci asked experts about the top five health benefits that come from rooting for a team, even if you’re just on the couch.

[Related: All the ways you can tune in to the 2022 Soccer World Cup]

You feel less lonely

Humans are, by nature, social creatures. This makes the world’s most popular sport a great opportunity to bond with others and find community. Carrie Wyland, a social psychologist at Tulane University in New Orleans, says there are two main reasons why. The first reason is that cheering for a team allows you to feel connected to something bigger than yourself. “Cheering for our favorite teams gives us a sense of identity,” she explains. This social identity is built on the small groups you’ve formed or connected with throughout your life. When you are deeply bonded with a group, your personal self shifts to a greater whole, creating a deeper sense of connectedness with others, explains Wyland. 

The second reason is collective joy. Whether you watch with family or go solo to a bar, your body experiences high arousal emotions, such as happiness and excitement, when you witness an event like your team scoring a goal. “When we experience and share these positive feelings with other people also watching the game, that actually allows us to enhance those emotions and have a greater emotional experience.”

And this social bond is felt through ups and downs—triumph and defeat. When your team loses, you might feel down for a few days, but there is an upside. Wyland says losing a game is still a collective experience and can continue to foster stronger bonds with others—whether in person, through a group chat, or even on social media—as you lament the loss together and figure out what went wrong.

You have higher self-esteem

A 2019 study in the journal Communication and Sport found that fans of winning sports teams reported higher self-esteem two days after the game. While more research is needed to confirm this link, Wyland says the boost in self-esteem after spectating a game may be from a psychological concept called “basking in reflected glory.” It’s when you associate another person’s wins with your own because of your close ties with this group. This can also be seen in fans who rejoice when their favorite music artist wins a Grammy or in supporters of a political party when their preferred candidate gets elected. In this case, a fan’s social identity in soccer may make them feel like they’re part of the team. So when fans cheer or perform rituals like wearing “lucky” socks, they feel like their support aided in the team’s victory.

You increase your life expectancy

There is some indirect support that cheering could help increase your lifespan. But this depends on how you cheer. Are you glued to the couch passively watching or are you physically getting up to jump and down or wave your hands when cheering? While it’s not near an actual physical workout, Wyland says small movements and gestures matter because it gets your body moving.

[Related: How to work out for your mental health] 

Socializing also positively impacts longevity. Social relationships—building friendships or feeling part of a community through sports—have been long associated with good physical and mental health. Regularly watching sports has even been linked to fewer depressive symptoms, which has been previously associated with a 10 to 12-year shorter lifespan in older adults. When you have that social support, there is evidence of a decreased risk of early death.

You relieve stress 

Getting swept away in the action of a game can help immerse yourself in the moment, especially in times of celebration, like when team USA’s Christian Pulisic scored that final goal against Iran to advance the team to the knockout rounds. 

“Sports are a celebration of life, and you are totally in the present—away from the regrets of the past or the anxieties of the future,” explains Eric Zillmer, a neuropsychologist and former director of athletics at Drexel University in Philadelphia. 

Watching and celebrating sports teams allows for a temporary escape from present reality. Zillmer says a game like soccer has rules and boundaries that can be therapeutic and easy to digest for people dealing with the unpredictability of life. Sports can also have people return to a simpler view of life: a triumphant comeback of the underdogs or the fairy tale moment of a superstar player carrying their team to the finals. 

“We know from studies on mindfulness and yoga that living your life in the present is very therapeutic for your health,” Zillmer says. “Sports make us feel alive, and it can be a catalyst for finding things that we hope to find in ourselves.” Sports are all about overcoming obstacles, he says; if those beating challenges exist in sports, they could exist in real life. 

[Related: The complex physics behind bending it like a World Cup player]

You are more motivated to exercise

Wyland says that seeing players zoom across the field and launch soccer balls into the air could inspire kids to get out and play the sport as well. Children may be energized after an exciting game and may want to play outside and emulate their favorite players like Argentina’s Lionel Messi or France’s Kylian Mbappé.

Adults can get in on the action, too, by channeling their excitement from watching the World Cup into their next workout. Zillmer advises linking high-probability behaviors (activities you like or enjoy doing) with low-probability behaviors (things you don’t want to do and may actively avoid). So if you’ve been meaning to exercise but can’t find the motivation to do it, think about your next session as a means to a reward. For example, if there’s a good chance you’re going to watch the USA versus Netherlands game (a high-probability behavior), then force yourself to engage in a low-probability behavior such as a walk around the block as a way of “earning it.” 

The post 5 ways cheering for your favorite World Cup team improves your health appeared first on Popular Science.

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Almost three years into the pandemic, the spotlight isn’t just on COVID medicine anymore. While booster shots and take-home antiviral pills gave us new tools to fight the infectious disease, health researchers and drug makers regained momentum in other crucial areas, like organ transplants, STI prevention, and white-whale therapies for alopecia and HIV. At the same time, AI deepened its role as a diagnostic aid, while mental health services got an accessibility boost across the US. We know the pandemic isn’t over—and other pathogens and illnesses are likely lurking undetected—but the progress we make in medical labs, factories, and care centers can help nurse societies back to health before the next storm hits.

Looking for the complete list of 100 winners? Find it here.

Grand Award Winner

AuriNova by 3DBio Therapeutics: A replacement ear that’s made from ear cells

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About 1,500 people in the US are born each year with absent or underdeveloped external ears. Traditional reconstruction techniques might fix the cosmetic issue, but a new 3D-printed ear transplant, called AuriNovo, offers a living substitute. The implant is made with proteins, hydrogel, and a patient’s own cells, giving it far more flexibility than any constructed with synthetic materials; plus, the procedure is less invasive than, say, transplanting tissue from a patient’s ribs. To build the replacement, a surgeon first takes a sample of an individual’s ear tissue to separate and culture the cartilage-making cells. Then, based on a 3D scan of the fully formed ear on the patient, the part is printed with collagen-based “bio ink” and surgically inserted above the jaw. A 20-year-old woman from Mexico was the first to get the implant this June. 3DBio Therapeutics, the New York-based regenerative medicine company behind AuriNovo, hopes to use the technology to one day create other replacement body parts, like noses, spinal discs, and larger organs. 

Paxlovid by Pfizer: The first take-home treatment for COVID-19

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COVID therapies have come a long way since the start of the pandemic, and now include several antiviral drugs and monoclonal antibodies. But Pfizer’s Paxlovid was the first oral treatment for the disease to receive emergency authorization from the FDA, meaning it can be obtained with a prescription. It’s also highly effective: Clinical trials show it reduces hospitalization and death from the virus up to 90 percent more than a placebo. The remedy is a combination of two pills: nirmatrelvir, which prevents the novel coronavirus from replicating, and ritonavir, which causes the body to metabolize nirmatrelvir more slowly. The drug does have downsides—it can interact with other medications and sometimes causes a foul aftertaste. Plus, rare cases of rebound COVID symptoms and positive tests have occurred in people following Paxlovid treatment, although research indicates that the latter might be related to the immune system responding to residual viral RNA. Still, it represents a crucial new safeguard for healthcare providers and the public.

EVO Visian Implantable Collamer Lenses by STAAR Surgical: Combining the perks of contacts and laser surgery

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Most cases of nearsightedness and astigmatism, which is blurred vision caused by an irregularly shaped cornea, can be fixed with laser eye surgery. But the procedure requires some corneal tissue to be removed and often leaves recipients with lingering dry eyes. EVO ICL provides an alternative with a minimally invasive new way to correct or reduce both conditions. During the approximately hour-long procedure, a flexible collagen-containing lens is implanted between the iris and natural lens. The implant is meant to sit in the eye permanently, but can also be plucked out by an ophthalmologist if needed. In published clinical trial results, close to 88 percent of patients reported 20/20 or better and nearly all achieved 20/32 or better distance vision after six months. The lenses also block some UV rays for added protection.

Olumiant by Eli Lilly and Incyte: Long-term relief for severe alopecia

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More than 300,000 people of all ages in the US live with severe alopecia areata, a condition that causes the immune system to attack hair follicles, leading to patchy baldness on the scalp and elsewhere. Hair loss in the nose and ears can affect patients’ hearing and allergies, and a lack of eyelashes can leave people vulnerable to eye irritation from dust. Olumiant, the first medication to secure the FDA’s approval for severe alopecia, can help hair grow back over the entire body. It belongs to a group of drugs called JAK inhibitors, which block certain inflammation-promoting enzymes. It was originally greenlit by the agency in 2018 to treat some forms of rheumatoid arthritis, but in clinical trials for alopecia, it helped roughly a third of participants to regrow up to 80 percent of their hair by 36 weeks, and nearly half after a year. Other JAK inhibitors in development could provide alternatives for patients who don’t fully respond to Olumiant.

AIR Recon DL by GE Healthcare: Sharper MRIs in half the time

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Laying motionless for an hour or longer in a magnetic scanner can be a claustrophobic and sometimes nauseating experience. A next-level neural network by GE Healthcare reduces the stress on patients, while filtering out visual noise from movement or faulty processing. The software combs through raw radio-wave data from MRI machines and turns the most accurate bits into high-resolution 3D images. Originally, the AI-reconstructed images had to be stitched together—but the updated tech, which received FDA approval this September, delivers in one go. The speedy precision can cut exam times in half, help hospitals and clinics serve more patients, and possibly improve the rate of diagnosis by giving radiologists a much cleaner view of tissues, bones, masses, and more.

ONE Male Condom by ONE: Latex that works for anal sex

ONE

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At first glance this condom isn’t all that different from those by other brands. It’s made from natural latex, comes in three thicknesses, and has a wide range of sizes for best fit. But the contraceptive is the first to also be clinically tested for STI protection during anal sex—and has proven to be extremely effective. In studies involving 252 male-male couples and 252 male-female couples, the condoms had a less than 2-percent chance of breakage, slippage, discomfort, and adverse events (which included urinary tract infections and bacteria and viruses spread during sex). With such a healthy showing, the company earned the FDA nod to label the product as “safe for anal sex.” With widespread availability, there’s hope that the condom can help beat back a record rise in chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis, and other STIs.

Bivalent COVID-19 vaccines by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech: A one-shot-fits-all approach

Ringo Chiu, AFP via Getty Images

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One of the niftiest features of mRNA vaccines such as Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID shots is that they can be tweaked and scaled up quickly to keep up with an ever-changing virus. This August, the FDA authorized the first bivalent COVID boosters, modified with new genetic data to target both the original version of SARS-CoV-2 and the Omicron sub-variants BA.4 and BA.5. Just how much added protection the bivalent shots offer against the latest versions of COVID remains to be seen, although in early results, the Pfizer-BioNTech booster increased antibodies against the BA.4 and BA.5 sub-variants by up to 11 times, while the Moderna booster did so by up to 15 times. Experts anticipate that the bivalent COVID vaccines, which are available to all adults and children ages 5 and older in the US, could save thousands of lives if the virus surges again this winter. 

Umbilical cord blood transplant for HIV by Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Weill Cornell Medicine: The right cells for viral resistance

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There are now three official cases of patients in long-term HIV remission—but this one might be the most promising for the millions around the world living with the virus. In 2017, an unidentified American received a blood transplant packed with genes that were resistant to the pathogen behind AIDS. More than four years later, her doctors at Weill Cornell Medicine confirmed that the procedure at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center had indeed made her free of the disease. The miraculous sample was specifically taken from a relative’s umbilical cord blood cells, which were still in the process of maturing and specializing, making it easier for the transplant to take. Previous attempts to cure the disease depended on bone marrow donations that carry a mutated gene only known in Northern Europeans. This alternative treatment makes transplants more accessible for patients from other ethnic backgrounds, so their bodies can fight HIV in the long run as well.

988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by SAMSHA: Streamlining the call for help 

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When you have a general emergency, you might call 911. But for people experiencing a mental crisis, the number has been a lot less intuitive. This July, however, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, run by the US Department of Health and Human Services since 2005, fully switched over to a three-digit code that’s easy to punch in: 988. The shortcut was years in the making, but required major collaboration with the Federal Communication Commission to connect every phone service provider to the alternative number. Since it went live, officials have reported shorter hold times and a 45-percent increase in use compared to August 2021, including on a specialized veteran hotline. The service shakeup also came with $177 million for states and tribes to support the transition in different ways, like alleviating surcharges, setting up call centers, and integrating crisis relief with existing or new emergency responses.

eCoin Peripheral Neurostimulator by Valencia Technologies: A discreet implant for bladder control 

Valencia Technologies

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Pads, vaginal seals, and skin patches can be a burden for anyone who has to deal with urinary incontinence on a daily basis. A new electrode device, about as small as a nickel and implanted above the ankle, nips the issue in the bud in a more private and convenient way. Incontinence typically occurs when the muscles in and around the bladder contract too often or too much. To prevent leaks and constant trips to the toilet, the eCoin sends low-key shocks through the tibial nerve, targeting the pelvic organs and relaxing the bladder wall. A doctor can control the intensity of the pulses with a remote, making the device more customizable for a broad range of patients. Neurostimulators have become a vanguard treatment for different nervous system conditions, including chronic back pain and even paralysis—but few are so adaptable as this.

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Between lockdowns, missing milestone events such as prom or graduation, and general worry over the state of the world in the past few years, times have been particularly tough on adolescents.

Reports of anxiety and depression in adults increased by more than 25 percent in 2020, and some new research suggests that mental health and the neurological effects of the pandemic on adolescents could be even worse than in their adult counterparts.

[Related: Neuroscientists are mapping all 100 billion cells in the human brain.]

Scientists are beginning to look at how the past two and a half years of pandemic life is affecting the brains of teens. A new study published today in the journal Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science, suggests that stressors related to the COVID-19 pandemic have physically changed teen brains, causing their brain structures to appear multiple years older than the brains of comparable peers before the pandemic.

“We already know from global research that the pandemic has adversely affected mental health in youth, but we didn’t know what, if anything, it was doing physically to their brains,” said Ian Gotlib, study author and psychology professor at Stanford University’s School of Humanities & Sciences, in a statement.

Changes in brain structure occur naturally as we age. During early teenage years and in puberty, the hippocampus (which controls access to certain memories) and the amygdala (which helps moderate emotions), go through growth spurts like the rest of the body. The tissues in the cortex, which controls executive functioning, becomes thinner at the same time.

To get a closer look, Gotlib and his team compared the MRI scans of 163 children that were taken before and during the pandemic. The study showed that during the COVID-19 lockdowns, this developmental process in the brain sped up in adolescents. According to Gotlib, an accelerated change in “brain age” has typically appeared only in children and adolescents who have experienced chronic adversity (family neglect, violence, family dysfunction, etc.). These kinds of early adverse experiences can be linked to worse mental health outcomes later in life.

However, it is still unclear whether the changes in brain structure that this study observed will be linked to changes in mental health later on in life.

“It’s also not clear if the changes are permanent,” said Gotlib. “Will their chronological age eventually catch up to their ‘brain age’? If their brain remains permanently older than their chronological age, it’s unclear what the outcomes will be in the future. For a 70- or 80-year-old, you’d expect some cognitive and memory problems based on changes in the brain, but what does it mean for a 16-year-old if their brains are aging prematurely?”

The results of this study could have implications for some of the longitudinal studies that have spanned the course of the pandemic. Scientists will have to account for abnormal rates of growth in the brain for any research down the road involving this generation, if those who experienced the pandemic generally show this rapid brain change.

“The pandemic is a global phenomenon—there’s no one who hasn’t experienced it,” said Gotlib. “There’s no real control group.”

[Related: We shouldn’t disregard the ideas that come from teens’ developing brains.]

Co-author Jonas Miller, an assistant professor of psychological sciences at the University of Connecticut, added that results like this may have serious consequences for this generation later in life.

“Adolescence is already a period of rapid reorganization in the brain, and it’s already linked to increased rates of mental health problems, depression, and risk-taking behavior,” Miller said. “Now you have this global event that’s happening, where everyone is experiencing some kind of adversity in the form of disruption to their daily routines – so it might be the case that the brains of kids who are 16 or 17 today are not comparable to those of their counterparts just a few years ago.”

Gotlib plans to follow the same cohort of teens from this study through later adolescence and into young adulthood, looking to see if the pandemic changed the trajectory of brain development long term, alongside their mental health. He also plans to compare the brain structures of those who were infected with COVID-19 and those who weren’t infected with the virus, with the goal of identifying any differences in the brain potentially caused by infection.

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When’s the last time you looked away from your computer? If you’re anything like me, it’s been a while, which might be slowing both of us down. 

Taking regular breaks can vastly improve your focus, according to a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign study published in March 2011, and that means you and I should really be stepping away from our screens more than we are. It doesn’t matter whether you’re working or in the middle of a gaming session—breaks will help you perform better. The problem: it’s hard to remember to take some time to regroup, so you may have to force the issue.

This advice will be even easier to follow if you make a habit out of it. You could take a walk every day at 10 a.m., or make yourself a cup of tea every afternoon at 2 p.m., and those are just two of countless examples I could list here. Build these breaks into a routine and you’ll find it’s easier to stick to. 

Try the Pomodoro Technique

Pomodoro, as you might know, is the Italian word for tomato. The Pomodoro Technique gets its name from the tomato-shaped kitchen timer used by its creator Francesco Cirillo when he started scheduling breaks into his day. The method is simple: decide on a task you want to accomplish, set a timer for 25 minutes, and get to work. When time’s up, take a five-minute break. After four such sessions, take a longer break, generally a half-hour or so. Then start over. A lot of people swear by this technique, which combines periods of intense focus with regular breaks—exactly why we mentioned it in our guide to overcoming procrastination.

You can use a regular kitchen timer for this, if you want, but most people today rely on apps. I recommend Pomodor for anyone who is curious. This simple application runs entirely within a web browser, meaning you won’t need to install anything. Hit the play button to start focusing on a task, then take a break when you get a notification to stop.

The reason I like Stretchly is that it pops up over whatever you’re doing, effectively forcing you to stop. Each time, the application also offers a suggestion for how to spend your break, like turning your head toward natural light or doing some basic stretching. 

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THE DEVIL found his first advocate in the church. In 1587, Pope Sixtus V established the role of Advocatus Diaboli, a Vatican official whose job was to combat any biases the pontiff might hold when advancing a candidate for sainthood. The Advocatus Diaboli would present counterarguments and dissect the validity of miracles thought to have been performed by the person in question.

The role has evolved since its religious beginning into a less formal but more sinister one in our day-to-day lives. Now psychologists know that playing devil’s advocate in a public meeting or Twitter thread can prove unnecessary and, in some cases, harmful.

From the historical church to modern boardrooms, the devil’s advocate was intended to be a crusader against groupthink, a phenomenon that can hinder proper decision making, explains Jeremy Jamieson, a psychology professor at the University of Rochester. Typically—say, during a business meeting on a new marketing campaign—the person playing the role is assigned to push back on the dominant ideation. The goal is to stop the group from reaching a decision without considering unintended consequences.

But when the conflict is fabricated, it may not be helpful. The work of Charlan Nemeth, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, indicates that the devil’s advocate isn’t as persuasive as a true dissident who believes what they’re putting forth.

The role can also have adverse psychological effects on the antagonist and those being antagonized.

In a 2014 study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Jamieson and his colleagues found that those assigned to deliver negative feedback to others experienced “psychological threat” to their sense of belonging and self-esteem. This discomfiting mental state arises when the advocate feels unable to address the stressors—such as potential negative social feedback—that come from pushing back against the group. As a result, the infernal stand-ins were overly conciliatory to the people whose points of view they were attacking. The study also noted that being on the receiving end of artificial flak was even more harmful: People felt as if they were being bullied.

The researchers also saw that the person commissioned to play the devil’s advocate frequently ended up apologizing, which could be a disadvantage to the role in itself, says Jamieson. “They’ll overcompensate in future interactions with those individuals that they had to be negative towards,” he says.

When Beelzebub’s proxy appears during everyday conversations, such compassion is often lacking. In these environments, the idea of a devil’s advocate has evolved into an insidious way of airing problematic stances. This can get particularly pernicious online, whether it be in a Facebook group or the open discourse under a news article. Under a real identity or an assumed one, social media users can easily pull others into fruitless arguments, often just to serve their own interests. “Anything that involves dissent or negative commentary is typically amplified in these settings,” Jamieson says. “People are often more willing to write aggressive, critical comments online than they would be to deliver such feedback face-to-face.”

Adopting a counterintuitive persona has also become a tool to air unpopular opinions. “More recently, when people want to say something they think might offend somebody, they might add, ‘hypothetically,’ or ‘playing devil’s advocate,’” Jamieson explains. But this doesn’t align with the proper definition of the role. Rather than exploring counterarguments, these impersonators might be trying to couch disagreements in hypotheticals or get others to accept the bigoted or generally unacceptable points of view they actually hold.

For instance, in conversations about racism, hiding behind the devil’s advocate’s mask can allow someone to undermine the experience of a person of color. Or, worse, gaslight someone about their lived experience.

Maya Rupert, a political strategist, wrote about such an incident in a 2017 Slate article. After she presented at a conference, a member of the audience told Rupert, who is Black, that she’d gotten into law school because of affirmative action. Later, one of Rupert’s white friends put on his horns and asked her to consider that person’s perspective. Maybe she hadn’t earned her spot in her law school, the friend said, but he justified his claim as a counterargument, not his point of view.

Rupert shut this down by letting her friend know that her school hadn’t used race-based admissions since 1996, and she highlighted how the conversation, and others like it, taxed her emotionally. When people act as the devil’s advocate in this way, Rupert concluded in her piece, it’s to run from accountability and hide behind the guise of unbiased logic or hypotheticals.

Jamieson’s research supports this conclusion: Having a personal conversation with someone who protests without purpose only makes for a counterproductive interaction.

In most scenarios, the devil doesn’t need an advocate.

This story originally ran in the Fall 2022 Daredevil Issue of PopSci. Read more PopSci+ stories.

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This article was originally featured on KHN.

As the covid-19 pandemic worsened a mental health crisis among America’s young people, a small group of states quietly withdrew from the nation’s largest public effort to track concerning behaviors in high school students.

Colorado, Florida, and Idaho will not participate in a key part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior surveys that reaches more than 80,000 students. Over the past 30 years, the state-level surveys, conducted anonymously during each odd-numbered year, have helped elucidate the mental health stressors and safety risks for high school students.

Each state has its own rationale for opting out, but their withdrawal — when suicides and feelings of hopelessness are up — has caught the attention of school psychologists and federal and state health officials.

Some questions on the state-level surveys — which can also ask students about their sexual orientation, gender identity, sexual activity, and drug use — clash with laws that have been passed in conservative states. The intense political attention on teachers and school curriculums has led to a reluctance among educators to have students participate in what were once considered routine mental and behavioral health assessments, some experts worry.

The reduction in the number of states that participate in the state-level CDC survey will make it harder for those states to track the conditions and behaviors that signal poor mental health, like depression, drug and alcohol misuse, and suicidal ideation, experts said.

“Having that kind of data allows us to say ‘do this, not that’ in really important ways,” said Kathleen Ethier, director of the CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health, which oversees the series of health surveys known as the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System. “For any state to lose the ability to have that data and use that data to understand what’s happening with young people in their state is an enormous loss.”

The CDC developed the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System in 1990 to track the leading causes of death and injury among young people. It is made up of a nationally representative poll of students in grades nine through 12 and separate state and local school district-level questionnaires. The questions focus on behaviors that lead to unintentional injuries, violence, sexually transmitted infections, pregnancy, drug and alcohol misuse, physical inactivity, and more.

The decisions by Colorado, Florida, and Idaho not to participate in the state-level questionnaires will not affect the CDC’s national survey or the local school district surveys in the states that have them.

Part of what makes the survey a powerful tool is the diversity of information collected, said Norín Dollard, a senior analyst with the Florida Policy Institute, a nonprofit research and advocacy group. “It allows for the analysis of data by subgroups, including LGBTQ+ youth, so that the needs of these students, who are at a greater risk of depression, suicide, and substance abuse than their peers, are understood and can be supported by schools and community providers,” said Dollard, who is also director of Florida Kids Count, part of a national network of nonprofit programs focused on children in the United States.

The CDC is still processing the 2021 data and has not released the results because of pandemic-related delays, said Paul Fulton, an agency spokesperson. But trends from the 2009 to 2019 national surveys showed that the mental health of young people had deteriorated over the previous decade.

“So we started planning,” Ethier said. “When the pandemic hit, we were able to say, ‘Here are the things you should be looking out for.’”

The pandemic has further exacerbated the mental health problems young people face, said Angela Mann, president of the Florida Association of School Psychologists.

Nearly half of parents who responded to a recent KFF/CNN mental health survey said the pandemic had had a negative impact on their child’s mental health. Most said they were worried that issues like self-harm and loneliness stemming from the pandemic may affect teenagers.

But the CDC’s survey has shortcomings, said health officials from some states that pulled back from it. Not all high schools are included, for example. And the sample of students from each state is so small that some state officials said their schools received little actionable data despite decades of participation.

That was the case in Colorado, which decided not to participate next year, according to Emily Fine, school and youth survey manager at the Colorado health department. Instead, she said, the state will focus on improving a separate study called Healthy Kids Colorado, which includes questions similar to those in the CDC survey and Colorado-specific questions. The Colorado survey, which has been running for about a decade, covers about 100,000 students across the state — nearly 100 times the number that participated in the CDC’s state-level survey in 2019.

Minnesota, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming, which also have their own youth surveys, either never participated or decided to skip the previous two CDC assessments. At least seven states will not participate in the 2023 state-level survey.

Fine said the state-run option is more beneficial because schools receive their own results.

In Leadville, a Colorado mountain town, a youth coalition used results from the Healthy Kids Colorado survey to conclude that the county had higher-than-average rates of substance use. They also learned that Hispanic students in particular didn’t feel comfortable sharing serious problems like suicidal thoughts with adults, suggesting that opportunities to flag issues early were being missed.

“I feel like most kids tell the truth on those surveys, so I feel like it’s a reliable source,” said high schooler Daisey Monge, who is part of the youth coalition, which proposed a policy to train adults in the community to make better connections with young people.

Education officials in Florida and Idaho said they plan to gather more state-specific data using newly created questionnaires. But neither state has designed a new survey, and what questions will be asked or what data will be captured is not clear.

Cassandra Palelis, a spokesperson for the Florida Department of Education, said in an email that Florida intends to assemble a “workgroup” to design its new system.

In recent years, Idaho officials cited the CDC survey data when they applied for and received $11 million in grants for a new youth suicide prevention program called the Idaho Lives Project. The data showed the share of high school students who had seriously considered attempting suicide increased from 15% in 2011 to 22% in 2019.

“That is concerning,” said Eric Studebaker, director of student engagement and safety coordination for the State Department of Education. Still, he said, the state is worried about taking up class time to survey students and about overstepping boundaries by asking questions that are not parent-approved.

Whatever the rationale, youth mental health advocates call opting out shortsighted and potentially harmful as the exodus erodes the national data collection. The pandemic exacerbated mental health stress for all high school students, especially those who are members of racial or ethnic minority groups and those who identify as LGBTQ+.

But since April, at least a dozen states have proposed bills that mirror Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, which bans instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade.

The law, which critics call “Don’t Say Gay,” and the intense political attention it has focused on teachers and school curriculums are having a chilling effect on all age groups, said youth advocates like Mann, the Florida school psychologist. “Some of these discussions about schools indoctrinating kids has bled into discussions about mental health services in schools,” she said.

Since the law was adopted, some Florida school administrators have removed “safe space” stickers with the rainbow flag indicating support for LGBTQ+ students. Some teachers have resigned in protest of the law, while others have expressed confusion about what they’re allowed to discuss in the classroom.

With data showing that students need more mental health services, opting out of the state-level surveys now may do more harm than good, said Franci Crepeau-Hobson, a professor of school psychology at the University of Colorado-Denver, who has used the national youth risk behavior data to analyze trends.

“It’s going to make it more difficult to really get a handle on what’s happening nationally,” she said.

KHN Colorado correspondent Rae Ellen Bichell contributed to this report.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

The post The CDC has surveyed teens on their health and behavior since the ’90s—but now some states are opting out appeared first on Popular Science.

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This article was originally featured on The Conversation.

Cecile McKee has received funding from the National Science Foundation and the James S. McDonnell Foundation. Her research on language production is in collaboration with Merrill F. Garrett (University of Arizona) and Dana McDaniel (University of Southern Maine).

Have you visited Yew Nork? Does your stummy ache? What dog of bag food will we get?

In case you’ve wondered what causes such speech errors or slips of the tongue, you might like to know that all speakers – of all ages and abilities – make them sometimes. Even people who use a sign language produce what some call “slips of the hand.” Slips are a common feature of language.

As a developmental psycholinguist who studies how people use language, I am interested in what speech errors tell us about the human mind. Research shows that language users store and retrieve different units of language. These include small ones like single consonants, and big ones like phrases made of several words.

Exchanges and blends of sounds and words

One way to think about speech errors is in terms of the linguistic units that each involves. Another way to think about them is in terms of the actions affecting these units.

The “Yew Nork” slip shows consonant sounds switching places – a sound exchange. Notice that each of the consonants is first in its own syllable. The “dog of bag food” slip shows a word exchange. Notice that both words are nouns. Vowel sounds can also switch places, as when a speaker who meant “feed the pooch” said, “food the peach.”

The “stummy” slip blends the synonyms “stomach” and “tummy.” Phrases can also blend, as in “It depends on the day of the mood I’m in.” The speaker who said this had in mind both “the day of the week” and “the mood I’m in,” but with only one mouth for the two messages to pass through, he blended the phrases.

Substitutions by meaning

Another way to think about speech errors is in terms of what influences them. Substitutions of one word for another can illustrate.

Someone who meant to refer to fingers said instead, “Don’t burn your toes.” The words “toe” and “finger” don’t sound alike, but they name similar body parts. In fact, Latin used the same word, “digitus,” to refer to digits of the hands and digits of the feet.

This word substitution – and thousands like it – suggests that our mental dictionaries link words with related meanings. In other words, semantic connections can influence speech errors. The speaker here was trying to get the word “finger” from the body-part section of his mental dictionary and slipped over to its semantic neighbor “toe.”

Substitutions by sound

Another type of word substitution reveals something else about our mental dictionaries. Someone who meant to refer to his mustache said instead, “I got whipped cream on my mushroom.” The words “mustache” and “mushroom” sound similar. Each word starts with the same consonant and vowel, denoted as “[mʌ]” in the International Phonetic Alphabet. Each word is two syllables long with stress on the first syllable. But the meanings of these two words are not similar.

This word substitution – and thousands like it – suggests that our mental dictionaries also link words with similar sounds. In other words, phonological connections can influence speech errors. The speaker here was trying to get the word “mustache” from the “[mʌ]” section of his mental dictionary and slipped over to its phonological neighbor “mushroom.”

Insights from variety

Psycholinguists who collect and analyze speech errors find many ways to categorize them and to explain how and why people make them.

I like to compare that effort with how Charles Darwin studied Galápagos finches. Studying speech errors and finches in detail reveals how tiny variations distinguish them.

Theories of how people talk seek to explain those details. Psycholinguists distinguish slips by the linguistic units that they involve, such as consonants, vowels, words and phrases. They describe how and when speakers use such information. This can help us understand how language develops in children and how it breaks down in people with certain impairments.

These theories also describe different stages for planning and producing sentences. For example, psycholinguists hypothesize that speakers start with what they want to convey. Then they retrieve word meanings from a mental dictionary. They arrange the words according to the grammar of the language they’re speaking. How words sound and the rhythm of whole sentences are later stages. If this is right, the “finger-toe” substitution reflects an earlier stage than the “mustache-mushroom” substitution.

The study of speech errors reminds us that glitches happen now and then in every complex behavior. When you walk, you sometimes trip. When you talk, you sometimes slip.

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No one enjoys tossing and turning through a nightmare, and now, sleep scientists from the University of Geneva in Switzerland may have found a way to make sure your rest stays peaceful and undisturbed. A new study published today in the journal Current Biology found that combining a cognitive technique called imagery rehearsal therapy with targeted memory reactivation during the REM stage of sleep reduces the number of nightmares a person experiences each night. The research included 36 people with moderate to severe nightmare disorder (having more than one episode a week)—a condition that affects 4 percent of adults around the world. 

“The study demonstrates again that imagery rehearsal therapy alone works to improve the nightmare disorder,” says Thomas Kilkenny, the director of the Institute Sleep Medicine at Northwell Health in New York City, who was not affiliated with the study. “But the new twist is that the addition of targeted memory reactivation to the imagery rehearsal therapy not only improves the nightmare disorder, but also increases the amount of positive dream experiences.” 

Individuals with nightmare disorder face more than the occasional bad dream. This rare type of sleep disorder causes people to have frequent nightmares, often causing problems falling and staying asleep. One reason sleep experts have trouble banishing nightmares for good is because they still don’t know why the phenomenon happens in the first place. There is no universally agreed upon reason why we dream, much less have nightmares, explains Kilkenny. He says one common belief behind dreaming is that they help store important memories, get rid of unimportant ones, and sort out complicated thoughts and feelings. Severe nightmares, in turn, are hypothesized to be dreams connected to unresolved anxiety and trauma.

[Related: For better sleep, borrow the bedtime routine of a toddler]

Imagery rehearsal therapy is already a commonly used tool for people who experience frequent nightmares. A psychologist will ask the individual to describe a recurring nightmare while awake and identify possible triggers for the experience. Afterward they work with the patient to “rewrite” a new ending to the dream with a more pleasant outcome. For example, if the nightmare involves someone chasing you down a dark alley, you may try to imagine a passerby you can flag down for help or visualize holding a weapon you can use to take down the assailant. The goal of rehearsing the ending is to change the nightmare to something less frightening and more peaceful.

The recent study hopes to enhance the success rate of imagery rehearsal therapy with another cognitive tool, which uses different external stimuli as a cue to reactivate more pleasant memories from earlier in the day. The authors used targeted memory reactivation to play a sound associated with a positive experience. Re-exposing those associations would, in theory, make the mind focus on consolidating them into long-term memory rather than a negatively charged memory fueling nightmares.

In the experiment, 36 people with nightmare disorder underwent an imagery rehearsal therapy session where they brainstormed alternative endings to their bad episodes. In addition, half of the patients were asked to complete an additional task: create a resolution to their nightmare and associate the happier ending with a sound. “The important point is to have the external stimuli be able to be associated with the thoughts one wishes to remember,” Kilkenny explains. In this instance, the sound was a one-second piano key that played every 10 seconds through headphones as patients imagined their positive endings over a five-minute period. For the next two weeks, the subjects practiced imagery rehearsal therapy every evening before bed while listening to the same sound. When they fell into slumber, a wireless headband would detect when they entered REM sleep—the stage for vivid dreams and nightmares. The headband would then transmit the piano note repeatedly while the person was in this particular sleep phase. 

The imagery rehearsal therapy helped reduce the number of nightmares for both groups. However, people with the additional targeted memory reactivation during REM sleep had the greatest reduction in weekly nightmares and were more likely to create dreams from positive memories. Those who went through the targeted memory reactivation continued to show a decrease in nightmares after three months. 

[Related: How lucid dreaming may help treat PTSD]

“We observed a fast decrease of nightmares, together with dreams becoming emotionally more positive,” said Lampros Perogamvros, a psychiatrist at the Sleep Laboratory of the Geneva University Hospitals and senior author of the study, in a press release. “For us researchers and clinicians, these findings are very promising both for the study of emotional processing during sleep and for the development of new therapies.”

The benefits of using targeted memory reactivation may go beyond nightmare disorder. The study authors note in their paper the combined therapy could prove effective for survivors with PTSD, anxiety disorders, and mood disorders who routinely experience insomnia and emotionally charged dreams.

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“There’s not actually a dinosaur constellation, right?” I asked aloud to no one as I peered up at the stars sparkling in the dark. 

Moments earlier I’d driven through the town of Dinosaur, Colorado. Now, as darkness settled around my car, I thought I spotted a sauropod in the stars through my driver’s side window. I chuckled to myself, feeling silly for seeing dinosaurs where there certainly were none, and chalked it up to the power of suggestion.

But, it turns out, I wasn’t just being silly. I was participating in a human tradition that extends back millennia, says Daniel Brown, associate professor in astronomy and science communication at Nottingham Trent University in England. The night sky, he says, is “an ideal canvas” for viewers to interpret and find visualizations of something that is relevant to their lives. “This is how we normally would start referring to constellations.”

But constellations aren’t just a sketch of every individual’s fanciful ideas. The way that the stars are splashed across the sky invites humans to see certain patterns. In fact, despite viewing the sky from distinct angles, many cultures around the world have identified groupings of stars in remarkably similar ways. Those parallels, and differences, offer a reflection of the astronomical dynamics playing out over the night sky, as well as the values and mindsets of the people who look up at it. 

One constellation, two stories

Constellations have long served as maps for navigation, canvases for storytelling, calendars for seasonal changes, and charts by which to impart knowledge and meaning. 

“Up until recently in human history, we didn’t have structured, written languages. Language was communicated orally,” says Duane Hamacher, associate professor of cultural astronomy at the University of Melbourne in Australia. “But the human brain evolved to be able to memorize enormous quantities of information. One of the ways that is done is through associating a memory to place, called the method of loci—which, he explains, includes the stars.

[Related: What would happen if the Milky Way died?]

By passing on knowledge of the constellations, deep cultural memories persist. Today, researchers have noticed a pattern: Many of the brightest stars are grouped together in strikingly similar constellations across cultures that historically had no known contact with each other. Western stargazers might know some of those star groupings as the Big Dipper, Orion, the Pleiades, and the Southern Cross.

These particular star groupings draw the eye with their brightness and proximity to each other in the night sky, attracting stargazers from both hemispheres, according to a team of researchers from the University of Melbourne. The researchers used a mathematical model to systematically group stars by their prominence and proximity, and compare those groupings against constellations from 27 different cultures around the world. This process tested what is considered a principle of how human visual perception works: The Gestalt law of proximity, which states that objects that are close together are perceived as unified groups, regardless of how different those objects may be individually. In a paper published earlier this year in the journal Psychological Science, the University of Melbourne experts found that those perception principles likely explain why so many different cultures have grouped the same stars together into constellations.

But the similarities don’t stop at which stars people visually group together. Humans have often mapped familiar images and stories over those pinpricks of light. And even those stories are often strikingly similar, despite being influenced more by cultural context than the characteristics of the stars themselves. 

For example, says Hamacher, who is an author on the Psychological Science paper, the male figure of Orion is often seen as a man or men pursuing a group of girls or women, whom the ancient Greeks called the Pleiades. A V-shaped grouping of stars, the Hyades, stands between them and Orion. There are subtle differences, he says, in cultural interpretations of this guardian constellation. The Greek version has the Hyades appearing as Taurus the bull preventing Orion from reaching the girls. Meanwhile, some Australian Aboriginal traditions tend to depict Orion as a womanizer who falls in love with the sisters—but their older sibling stands in his way. 

In many of the versions of the story, the details of this pursuit and defense reflect the motion and dynamics of the stars themselves. Because of the Earth’s rotation, these constellations move across the sky throughout the night, with Orion appearing to chase the Pleiades. Some Aboriginal cultures see Orion as upside-down with the red of the star Betelgeuse in his right hand as fire magic that the warrior creates to battle the elder sister, Hamacher says. Meanwhile, the red star Aldebaran in her left foot (often seen as the red eye of the bull in Greek traditions) is about to kick sand in his face. The fire magic flickers and grows as they face-off, reflecting how Betelgeuse, which is a variable star, dims and brightens over 400 days. 

From legends to machines

The period of time when people created stories about shapes in the sky also matters. For example, Brown says, many of the Western culture’s constellations as seen from the Northern Hemisphere are more mystical creatures and tales, based on Greek mythology. Those constellations were described in an anthropology of constellation stories written in the third century BCE, so many were likely identified long before that. Thousands of years later, Western explorers into the Southern Hemisphere documented the patterns they saw in the stars on their travels to include more technical tools, particularly instruments for navigation, like a sextant or a compass. 

“You’ll find loads of things that are far more associated with the Age of Discovery,” Brown says. “That’s not surprising because our cultural group started to explore the Southern Hemisphere at a time when all of these clocks and things would have been far more prominent.”

[Related: Dark energy camera gives a tasty view of a lobster-shaped nebula]

But what those Western explorers didn’t consider, Brown says, was those groups of stars that had been identified and named thousands of years earlier in the Southern Hemisphere night sky by the people who were already living there—with very different interpretations.

“This is why I always stress that the Western, Greek constellations are just one way in which these patterns can be interpreted,” Brown notes. Listening to the ways people around the world make sense of the patterns they see in the stars can illuminate aspects of their culture and what is relevant to them.

Hamacher and his colleagues are conducting experiments to see what kinds of constellations people make up on their own. In a planetarium, they present audiences with a simulated night sky with stars in fake positions. When modern viewers connect the dots to make shapes, he says, it reflects their culture and geography. “You’re not going to get a lot of Australians who are going to see a squirrel in the stars, and Americans are not going to see a koala,” Hamacher says. 

Constellations without stars

Stars aren’t the only thing visible in the night sky, Hamacher adds: There are also nebulae planets and the moon. And in some parts of the world, the night sky gets dark enough to see the dark voids where starlight is absent in the Milky Way.

In the Southern Hemisphere, those spaces are often traced into what are called dark constellations. Because the air is much less humid in Australia than many other parts of the world, the continent is a particularly good place to see some of the darkest night skies.

Some cultures also see similar patterns in dark constellations, too. For example, Hamacher says, Aboriginal cultures see an emu in the dark space of the Milky Way between the Southern Cross and Sagittarius. In South America, some people also see a large flightless bird called a rhea.

Many stellar patterns only appear during certain times of the year (others, that linger near the poles, are visible all year long). In Australia, the emu starts becoming visible in the evening during the same time of year when the birds are breeding, building their nests, and laying their eggs. Because people would typically go out and forage those eggs, Hamacher says, the seasonal appearance of the dark emu constellation also served as a sort of harvest calendar for people. 

[Related on PopSci+: This Colorado community fought to save its darkness]

Light pollution can be another factor in how different people view the stars. Today, the artificial bulbs that illuminate the night also interfere with starlight, washing out the Milky Way and all but the brightest stars for millions of residents in urban, suburban, and adjacent areas.

“But they don’t fade away entirely. I just need to look into my Stellarium app,” Brown says, referencing one app to help users identify constellations. “We still have access and knowledge about what’s in the sky. We engage with the sky now in a completely different manner, in this kind of virtual way.”

Constellation apps also offer viewers access to night sky knowledge from across the globe. Users can see the various cultural interpretations of the patterns in the stars splayed across their screens as they peer at the night sky. 

“You can learn about so many other cultures because you can look into the sky. You’re straightaway in touch with something that somebody in the depths of the Amazon might see, and that somebody might have seen when they were building the pyramids,” Brown says. “That’s our shared heritage.”

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LinkedIn may have a reputation as a relatively boring social network—a virtual version of a networking happy hour filled with people wearing lanyards—but it’s in the news thanks to some recent research it undertook and the interesting findings it led to. 

A group of researchers from Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and LinkedIn recently published the results of a five-year-long study on social connections and job mobility in the journal Science. 

From 2015 to 2019, LinkedIn played with its underlying algorithm that powered its “People You May Know” feature by randomly varying the amount of weak and strong contacts suggested as new connections to 20 million of its users. LinkedIn measured mutual connections and interactions between users in order to correlate “strong ties” to close friends, and “weak ties” to more occasional acquaintances. 

In a series of micro-experiments that it later analyzed with other experts, it found that people were more likely to get jobs through “weak ties,” especially in more digital industries. This finding is in line with an influential sociological theory proposed in 1973 that said that casual contacts tend to be more important sources of new information and opportunities than close friends.

LinkedIn, a platform owned by Microsoft, had intended to use these insights to make a better algorithm for all of its users. And in its privacy policy, the company does note that users’ personal data could be used for research purposes. But experts recently voiced their concerns to The New York Times that these behind-the-scenes tweaks could have long-term negative consequences for users.

“The findings suggest that some users had better access to job opportunities or a meaningful difference in access to job opportunities,” Michael Zimmer, an associate professor of computer science and the director of the Center for Data, Ethics and Society at Marquette University told NYT. “These are the kind of long-term consequences that need to be contemplated when we think of the ethics of engaging in this kind of big data research.”

[Related: The fascinating and fraught ways researchers are studying modern friendships]

Transparency is not the only issue that these companies are grappling with. LinkedIn has also been dealing with emerging incidents of connection fraud, as a recent investigation by MIT Tech Review showed that scammers with false identities took advantage of mutual connections to gain their victims’ trust.

It’s not unusual for tech companies to pilot test various features on small groups of users. However, large-scale, undisclosed social experiments by big tech companies have historically been met with mixed receptions. A 2014 Facebook study analyzing how user moods could be influenced by manipulating News Feed content, for example, was met with backlash. OKCupid, that same year, also fessed up to fudging with compatibility scores in order to see its effects on user behavior on the site. 

On the other hand, Spotify is conducting more passive, observational studies, and YouTube and Twitter have both been actively testing out features like misinformation-identification education and crowd-sourced content labeling in an attempt to help users have better experiences on the platform. 

Modern psychologists and sociologists, too, are looking to use the internet and its various applications as a way to study friendships, social networks, online culture and its impact on behaviors. But psychology, as a field, has long contended with issues surrounding ethics in experiments and the concept of deceiving its participants. Many of the classical studies from the 1900s would, thankfully, not be possible to conduct today (just think of the twin experiments and the Stanford prison experiment). Understanding where the boundaries lie between researchers, tech platforms, and unwitting users is in some ways, simply a 21st century iteration of this ongoing challenge. 

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Despite being a wealthy country, clean water crises continue to plague the US. Late last week, residents of Jackson, Mississippi filed a class action lawsuit over a major water crisis that left 150,000 people in the capital city without clean running water. The crisis started after major flooding in August, but follows years of neglect to the infrastructure in the majority-Black city. Simultaneously, an arsenic scare in New York City’s Jacob Riis Houses further sounded the alarm on critical updates to aging water infrastructure.

Arguably the biggest water wake-up-calls have come from the city of Flint, Michigan. On April 25th, 2014, the city government switched its water supply from Lake Huron and the Detroit River to the Flint River. The water supply then wasn’t properly treated to prevent lead and other elements from leaching out of the city’s old water pipes and into the drinking water. Virtually all Flint residents were consequently exposed to drinking water with unsafe levels of bacteria, disinfection byproducts, and lead (a neurotoxicant).

Now, a new study published in the journal JAMA Network Open reveals the serious mental toll that these water crisis can have on the residents affected. The study looked at data from the largest mental health survey of the Flint community. In the five years after the water crisis began, one in five adults (about 13,600 people) were estimated to have clinical depression, and one in four (about 15,000 people) were estimated to have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) five years after the water crisis began.

[Related: Michigan health director charged with involuntary manslaughter due to Flint water woes.]

“The mental health burden of America’s largest public-works environmental disaster clearly continues for many adults in Flint,” said Aaron Reuben, a postdoctoral scholar at Duke University who led the research, in a press release.

The drinking water in Flint wasn’t declared lead-free until January 24, 2017, but residents were cautioned that it could take over a year for the water to be completely safe. Tens of thousands of children and adults developed high blood-lead levels, putting them at greater risk for cognitive deficits, mental health problems, and other health problems later in life.

“We know that large-scale natural or human-caused disasters can trigger or exacerbate depression and PTSD,” said Dean Kilpatrick, a psychiatry professor at the Medical University of South Carolina and senior author of the study, in a press release. Kilpatrick noted that there was evidence of high rates of mental health problems in the community during the first years of the crisis. “What we did not know until now was the extent to which Flint residents continued to have mental health problems at the clinical diagnosis level five years after the crisis began.”

Past year rates of depression and PTSD identified in Flint and today they are three to five times greater than national estimates among US adults overall, according to Kilpatrick. This is likely due to a combination of higher base rates of mental health problems in Flint (lower incomes and systemic poverty, for example) before the crisis and significant exacerbation of problems resulting from the crisis.

[Related: The devastating effects of childhood lead exposure could last a lifetime.]

“The vast majority of our respondents were never offered mental health services despite clear indication that the crisis was psychologically traumatic. Now that pipes are being replaced, the time is right to begin a second phase of recovery from the water crisis – one that focuses on providing additional resources to heal psychological wounds,” Reuben added.

The findings in this study suggest that more should be done to provide mental health treatment for residents of Flint. “There is a clear unmet need. Nearly 100 percent of surveyed Flint residents reported that they changed their behavior to avoid consuming contaminated water during the crisis, and the vast majority still worry that the exposures they had may cause future health problems for themselves or their family members,” concluded Reuben.

While this problem isn’t unique to Flint, the city and its people shone a glaring spotlight on a nationwide issue. One of the enduring faces of this Flint crisis is Mari Copeny aka Little Miss Flint. At eight years-old, she wrote a letter to then President Barack Obama to draw attention to the crisis. The president shared that “letters from kids like you are what make me so optimistic about the future” and he visited Flint in 2016. Now 15 years-old, Copeny has continued to advocate for environmental justice and even launched a GoFundMe to raise money for Jackson residents.

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For the first time ever, a panel of health experts recommends that all adults under the age of 65 should be screened for anxiety. The new recommendations from the United States Preventative Services Task Force (USPSTF) come in the wake of high stress levels in this population that were prevalent even before the COVID-19 pandemic. USPSTF aims aims for this new guidance to help clinicians identify mental health disorders earlier so that they do not go undetected. It made similar recommendations earlier this year for children and teens.

It is common for anxiety disorders to go unrecognized an undetected in a primary care setting. The task force cited a study from the World Health Organization (WHO) that found the median time for initiating treatment for anxiety is 23 years.

“To address the critical need for supporting the mental health of adults in primary care, the Task Force reviewed the evidence on screening for anxiety, depression, and suicide risk,” says task force member Lori Pbert a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School, in a press release. “The good news is that screening all adults for depression, including those who are pregnant and postpartum, and screening adults younger than 65 for anxiety can help identify these conditions early so people can be connected to care.”

[Related: Mental health ‘first aid’ can give bystanders the skills to act in a crisis.]

The panel had been preparing the guidance since before the COVID-19 pandemic began, but Pbert called the guidance “very timely” given reports of an increase in mental health problems that are associated with pandemic isolation and stress. “COVID has taken a tremendous toll on the mental health of Americans,” Pbert told The Washington Post. “This is a topic prioritized for its public health importance, but clearly there’s an increased focus on mental health in this country over the past few years.”

According to a study from the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention (CDC) cited by the task force, the percentage of adults experiencing recent symptoms of a depressive or anxiety disorder jumped to 41.5 percent from 36.4 percent between August 2020 to February 2021. Between 2013 and 2018, only a few years before the pandemic, 8.1 percent of American adults 20 and older had depression in a given 2-week period and the number did not increase.

Currently, the guidance is in draft form and the public has opportunity to comment until October 17. While recommendations from USPSTF are not mandatory, they greatly influence primary care physicians across the US.

Some mental health care providers emphasized that programs that screen for anxiety and depression are are useful only if they can lead patients to effective solutions. Jeffrey Staab, a psychiatrist and chair of the department of psychiatry and psychology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota told The New York Times that at a time when the country is “short on mental health resources on all levels—psychiatrists, psychologists, and therapists—that’s a real concern. We can screen lots of people, but if that’s all that happens, it’s a waste of time.” Staab is is not on the task force.

According to the USPSTF, screening and followup care can help reduce the symptoms of anxiety and depression, but there there is limited evidence on the benefits and harms of screening adults over 65 for anxiety. It also called for more research into suicide prevention, which remains a leading cause of death in the United States, according to the CDC.

[Related: How to manage your mental health as traumatic events pile up.]

“The Task Force cares deeply about the mental health of people nationwide. Unfortunately, evidence is limited on screening adults 65 or older for anxiety and screening all adults for suicide risk, so we are urgently calling for more research,” said task force member Gbenga Ogedegbe, the inaugural and founding director of the Institute for Excellence in Health Equity at NYU Langone Health and a member of the National Academy of Medicine, in a press release. “In the absence of evidence, healthcare professionals should use their judgment based on individual patient circumstances when determining whether or not to screen.”

The panel also cited the “racism and structural policies” disproportionally affecting people of color. Black patients, for example, are less likely to receive mental health services compared to other groups, and more likely to be misdiagnosed.

The task force stressed that this is just a single step in addressing an urgent mental health crisis and the task force will read every comment during the comment period, according to Pbert. “We would like people to be honest, to provide their input and perspectives,” she told CNN. “It’s really important because it’s allowing us to hear from the public—and the public includes people who are specialists in these areas. We really value the input of other specialists who can give us their perspective and their comments.”

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Ritual enema ceremonies depicted in pottery. The synchronizing heart rates of new lovers. Scorpion constipation. Why the words in your iPhone “Terms of Agreement” are so complicated. Moose crashes.

Research into all of these burning topics and more was honored yesterday at the 2022 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony. Now in its 32nd year, the good-natured parody of the Nobel prize recognizes the most unique, silly, and downright bizarre research that “first make people laugh and then make them think.” The Annals of Improbable Research gives out the awards less than one month before the real Nobel prizes are awarded in Stockholm, Sweden.

The ceremony is usually held at Harvard University, but has been online since 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Per tradition, actual Nobel laureates handed out the prizes. The winners received a virtually worthless Zimbabwean $10 trillion bill.

And the winners are…

Art History: ancient Mayan enemas

Peter de Smet and Nicholas Hellmuth wrote “A Multidisciplinary Approach to Ritual Enema Scenes on Ancient Maya Pottery” in a 1986 paper, but withstands the test of time. The paper was adapted from de Smet’s doctoral dissertation and focuses on polychrome pottery of the late classic Mayan period (600–900 CE). Palace scenes, ball games, hunting parties, and dances associated with human sacrifice (via decapitation) are usually painted on this kind of pottery, but 55 years ago, scholars discovered one Maya jar showing the administration of an enema. Other discoveries of fine fecal art followed.

Applied Cardiology: syncing hearts with your crush

Eliska Prochazkova, Elio Sjak-Shie, Friederike Behrens, Daniel Lindh, and Mariska Kret discovered evidence that shows when two new romantic partners meet for the first time and feel attraction, their heart rates synchronize, publishing their findings in November, 2021. Prochazkova said she did not have problem finding matches on dating apps, but often didn’t feel that spark when they met in real life. She set people up on blind dates in real social settings and measured their physiological reactions, and found that the heart rates of the pairs with real chemistry synchronized. So, did the team discover “love at first sight”? “It really depends, on how you define love,” Prochazkova, a researcher at Leiden University in the Netherlands, said in an email to the Associated Press. “What we found in our research was that people were able to decide whether they want to date their partner very quickly. Within the first two seconds of the date, the participants made a very complex idea about the human sitting in front of them.”

Literature: Terms of Agreement are too tricky

Eric Martínez, Francis Mollica, and Edward Gibson, did what has long needed to be done by analyzing what makes legal documents unnecessarily difficult to understand. Taking a closer look at any Terms of Agreement on a new software or device is enough to make you want to eschew all new technology forever. Martínez, Mollica, and Gibson were frustrated by all of this legal jargon. Their analysis focused on some key psycholinguistic characteristics: nonstandard capitalization (those written out in boistrous ALL CAPS), the frequency of SAT words (aforesaid, herein, to wit, etc.) that rarely appear in everyday speech, word choice, the use of passive versus active voice, center-embedding, where lawyers embed legal jargon within convoluted syntax. “Ultimately, there’s kind of a hope that lawyers will think a little more with the reader in mind,” Martínez told the AP. “Clarity doesn’t just benefit the layperson, it also benefits lawyers.”

Biology: scorpion constipation

Solimary García-Hernández and Glauco Machado did the grueling work of investigating constipation affects the mating prospects of scorpions. Scorpions are better known for their deadly venom and creepy crawly pincers, not so much for their poop habits. In a process called autonomy, scorpions can detach a body part to escape a predator. However, they also lose the last portion of the digestive tract when they do this. This can lead to a constipation and eventually death and the long term decrease in the, “locomotor performance of autotomized males may impair mate searching,” they wrote.

[Related: Cockatoos are pillaging trashcans in Australia, and humans can’t seem to stop them.]

Medicine: ice cream as cancer therapy

A team of scientists at the University of Warsaw in Poland showed in their 2021 study that when patients undergo some forms of toxic chemotherapy, they suffer fewer harmful side effects when ice cream replaces one traditional component of the procedure. This sweet study looked at cryotherapy, where cancer patients often suck on ice-chips to prevent oral mucositis (which causes sores in the mouth, gums, and tongue, increased mucus and saliva, and difficulty swallowing). But this can become uncomfortable really quickly. This now prize winning study found that only 28.85 percent of patients who used ice cream cryotherapy developed oral mucositis, compared with 59 percent who did not receive the Ben and Jerry’s approved cryotherapy.

Engineering: knob turning technique

Gen Matsuzaki, Kazuo Ohuchi, Masaru Uehara, Yoshiyuki Ueno, and Goro Imura, discovered the most efficient way for people to use their fingers when turning a knob. The 1999 study stressed the importance of a good universal knob design, particularly for, “instruments with rotary control,” particularly in elderly people who might find rotary knobs and faucet handles easier to use than a lever. Subjects in the study were asked to turn a series of different sized knobs clockwise with their right hand. They found that the the forefingers and thumb were used most frequently and extra fingers were used as the knobs became wider.

Physics: keeping your ducks in a row

Frank Fish, Zhi-Ming Yuan, Minglu Chen, Laibing Jia, Chunyan Ji, and Atilla Incecik, dove into the world of understanding how ducklings manage to swim in formation. Getting your ducks in a row appears to be all about energy conservation. They found that the ducklings instinctively tended to “ride the waves,” generated by the mother duck to significantly reduce drag. They then use technique called drafting, like cyclists and runners do in a race to reduce drag. “It all has to do with the flow that occurs behind that leading organism and the way that moving in formation can actually be an energetic benefit,” Fish told the AP.

Related: 8 animals being naturally hilarious.]

Peace: the gossip conundrum

An international group of scientists ranging from Bejing to Ontario developed an algorithm to help gossipers decide when to tell the truth and when to lie. Essentially, their work can help determine when people are more likely to be honest or dishonest in their gossip, drawing on models of behavior signaling theory. “Signals are adaptions shaped by marginal costs and marginal benefits of different behaviors, and the ultimate function of the signaler’s behavior is to maximize their fitness,” wrote the authors. The gossiper may be willing to pay some personal cost (being labelled a gossip or losing trust) to provide a benefit to the receiver. That’s because the gossip could gain a secondary benefit as a result of the receiver gaining juicy new information.

Economics: it pays to be lucky

Alessandro Pluchino, Alessio Emanuele Biondo, and Andrea Rapisarda, used math to explain why success most often goes not to the most talented people but instead to the luckiest. The 2018 paper noted that the qualities most often associated as leading to success follow a normal Gaussian distribution around a mean. For example, the average IQ is 100, but nobody boasts an IQ of 1,000 or 10,000. “The same holds for efforts, as measured by hours worked,” the authors wrote. “Someone works more hours than the average and someone less, but nobody works a billion times more hours than anybody else.” However, the distribution of wealth follows a power law, where there are significantly more poor people than the few hugely wealthy billionaires. The study suggests simple, random luck is the missing ingredient based on the agent-based model the authors developed.

Safety Engineering: moose tracks

Magnus Gens developed a moose crash test dummy, and shockingly it is actually useful information. Sweden’s highways are the scene of frequent collisions between the large mammals and cars, which can result in injury or death to both the moose and human. This crash test dummy will allow car makers to use animal crashes in their safety testing. Gens tested the dummy at the Saab facility using one modern Saab and one old Volvo traveling at about 45 mph and a second Saab at 57 mph. Fortunately for car makers, the dummy is robust and able to be reused in multiple crash tests before it needs to be replaced.

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A UNIVERSAL human reaction occurs at the sight of something gross. Our nose scrunches, the upper lip raises as the lower curls downward, and our stomach starts to turn over onto itself, forming a telltale knot. Instantly, a wave of repulsion rushes in, creating a distinctive full-body experience that sometimes precedes a dash to the nearest receptacle to vomit. And if your brain perceives the sight as a significant threat, you might. 

Disgust is a complex emotion that can cause a physiological and psychological response. When people notice something gross, the sight triggers a host of nervous-system and other bodily cues that essentially cause us to turn away from the upsetting sight and provoke the gag reflex—which can potentially result in vomiting, explains Josh Ackerman, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. Most people who see something they find disgusting won’t go as far as hurling, but they probably will feel like they could. Actually vomiting is abnormal and unlikely. (One common exception is seeing someone else throw up. Our brains contain mirror neurons that allow us to react to and mimic actions we see completed by others. Unfortunately, this includes vomiting.)

“Everybody varies in how disgust-sensitive they are,” says Ackerman. “Somebody who is easily grossed out, they have many more of those physiological and psychological changes that can end up resulting in that actual vomiting reaction where the gag reflex goes from ‘Ew, gross, get it out of my mouth’ to ‘Ew, gross, get it out of my body,’ even though you haven’t ingested anything.” 

While proximity to the disgusting thing matters, for the more sensitive among us, it’s possible that watching a gore-filled scene in a film or seeing a photo of a maggot-riddled carcass could provoke vomiting. A 2020 study conducted by researchers at the Cambridge MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit found that viewing disgusting images can cause changes in stomach patterns and cause people to turn away from them. 

“It can cause spasming and cause your digestion to actually change, which can then trigger that vomiting response,” explains Tara Cepon Robins, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. “We’re not perfect machines. Evolution has given us some tools that are helpful to avoid things, but we don’t really process whether it’s real, whether it’s on TV, whether it’s right in front of us, or whether it’s actually a threat.” 

Humans likely evolved to feel revulsion—and this is where the research gets a bit speculative—to avoid potential contaminants and to provoke vomiting to immediately remove them once they’ve entered the body. The latter, while an extreme manifestation of that reaction, became advantageous. It’s unclear when, evolution-wise, people started to vomit out of revulsion. But Charles Darwin hypothesized in the late 1860s that vomiting occurred to prevent our ancestors from consuming things that could kill them. He also noticed that humans signify disgust similarly—scrunched up nose, raised lip, and tongue out “blah” face—regardless of cultural background. “Your whole body gets into the emotions,” says Mike McBeath, a cognitive psychologist at Arizona State University. “So the musculature that you have for disgust ends up being one that is sort of vomit-prone.” 

But perhaps the most fascinating thing about aversion is that we can be conditioned to feel it. 

According to Nancy Zucker, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University, memory and association can play crucial roles in what we find disgusting and how far we’re willing to go to avoid the sensation. If an object becomes associated with a trauma or illness, the item that typically wouldn’t make us feel nauseous may trigger disgust and, in extreme scenarios, vomiting. For example, if you vomited after eating a bell pepper, you may avoid the vegetable for years—even if that wasn’t what made you sick.

“It is powerful,” says Zucker. “That gut feeling that you have, it’s not shakable.”

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A study published Monday in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry found that some people who received intravenous ketamine across three private ketamine infusion clinics had “significant improvement” in symptoms of depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation.

Used primarily in hospital settings as an anesthetic, ketamine is a very powerful medication that also is used illegally by less than one percent of the US population. It can create intense highs, hallucinations, and distortions.

Ketamine has been emerging as a potential treatment option for several years, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a nasal spray derived from ketamine called esketamine for people with treatment-resistant depression in 2019. However, the FDA still hasn’t approved other ways of using ketamine to treat depression, such as IV infusion, shots in the arm, or lozenges. Some treatments using the medication are considered “off-label” and are npt covered by health insurance.

“While it’s wonderful to have new drugs, we remain reliant on serendipitous observation,” Steven Hyman, a psychiatrist at the Broad Institute, which partners in depression research with MIT and Harvard, told Popular Science in 2019. “We will have really turned a corner when we understand the mechanisms.”

[Related: Can tripping on ketamine cure PTSD? I decided to try.]

For this study, the researchers looked at data on 424 people with treatment-resistant depression (when symptoms of depression do not go away with traditional anti-depressants). The patients were treated between November 2017 and May 2021 at three ketamine infusion clinics in Virginia. These unregulated clinics specialize in treating suicidal ideation, depression, or anxiety. The patients filled out physical and mental health surveys during visits, and were given six ketamine infusions within 21 days.

The researchers say that half of the participants responded to the treatment within six weeks of beginning infusions and 20 percent had depressive symptoms in remission. After 10 infusions, response rates were 72 percent and remission rates were 38 percent. The team also saw a 30 percent reduction in anxiety symptoms over the course of the treatment and half of the patients who experienced suicidal ideation were in remission after six weeks.

This new study adds to a growing body of research into the its use in treating these types of illnesses. However, there are still no direct directives on how the drug should be used and private ketamine infusion clinics remain highly unregulated. Reporting from Bloomberg last year highlighted the growing market for psychedelic drug therapy “schools” charging large sums with little to no regulation.

Gerard Sanacora, a psychiatry professor at the Yale School of Medicine (who did not conduct the study) told CNN that the paper, “gives some more real-world data, which is incredibly important” because it helps show its potential to work in a more general population. He also explained that this study leaves some “critical gaps, including data on adverse effects and direct comparisons to other options, that make it difficult to conclude how it should be used.”

[Related: Two radically new drugs bring hope for people with depression. But psychiatrists are skeptical.]

Additionally, one of the main limitations of this particular research is that that it was not conducted as a blind study with a control group. It relied on patient-reported surveys and didn’t take into consideration those who declined to have ketamine infusions. The team also acknowledge that they didn’t systematically assess adverse events or side effects of the treatment.

“It’s an epidemic, and it’s been going on forever,” said Patrick Oliver, the study’s lead researcher, the medical director of MindPeace Clinics, and a former emergency room physician, in an interview with The Washington Post. “And we’ve found a medication that literally costs pennies to make and is fixing these patients.” Oliver claimed that ketamine therapy could potentially become a mainstream solution to depression and potentially other mental disorders that have long been undertreated.

According to data from the National Center on Health Statistics, nearly 46,000 Americans died from suicides in the United States in 2020 and it is the second leading cause of death for Americans age 10-34 as of 2020.

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DAN BLOCK has an easy charm and a twinkle in his eye—a natural charisma that would surely serve him in all manner of glamorous professions. That makes it all the more jarring to see him stick a power drill up his nose in front of a cringing crowd of onlookers.

After taking a moment to angle the machine just so, he turns it on, the bit rotating at dizzying speeds inside his head. The terrible whirring sound is enough to make even me—a stalwart masochist and the author of a book about the pleasure of pain—nearly black out from the rushing sensation of dread. But instead of straightforward revulsion or concern, my wooziness transmutes into a celebratory high. If the shocked silence that gives way to applause and relieved laughter is any indication, I am not alone in feeling a surge of something wonderful. The terrible act thrills performer and audience alike. But why?

First, there’s the question of what would compel someone—in this case my friend Dan—to put their body in peril. When he, a sideshow performer based in Austin, Texas, gets ready to use his face drill (or set a mousetrap off with his tongue, or inflate a balloon that’s been snaked through his nostrils, or hang weights from his eyelids, or…) his body senses the impending danger, and his gray matter gets to work. According to Arash Javanbakht, a psychiatrist and director of the Stress, Trauma, and Anxiety Research Clinic (STARC) in Detroit, Michigan, the two almond-shaped areas of the brain that form the amygdala oversee “salience detection and the creation of emotions.” In the most basic terms, he says, “Every time I see something, the amygdala decides if I should run away from it, attack it, eat it, or have sex with it.”

Faced with fear, excitement, and danger, this region calls other areas of the brain into action, gearing the whole noggin to fight-or-flight mode. This means doling out a blast of neurotransmitters like dopamine, increasing focus on the task at hand, and ramping up the sympathetic nervous system. The heart pounds, and blood pressure inside the muscles juices up the limbs in preparation for a chase or a rumble. “Breathing gets faster, mouth dries, we get a little bit sweaty,” Javanbakht explains. “I’m not suggesting that the daredevil doing some stunt is terrified, but there is that excitement.”

And, lucky for us, even bystanders can enjoy a secondhand rush. “We know that if you’re watching someone doing something related to fear or anger or aggression, you will have those same areas of your brain activate,” says Javanbakht. “That’s how empathy happens.”

This mirroring applies to movement as well. Using fMRI imaging, neuroscientists and physiologists have shown that when we watch someone do something, our brains seem to simulate the witnessed action. If we see a person jump into the air, for example, neurons light up in a similar pattern to the ones firing up when we jump ourselves—even if we are perfectly still. In that way, you can think of watching a stunt as a way to microdose the experience. Remember, for example, a time you saw a rock climber dangling off a cliff or a tightrope walker teetering in the sky. As an observer, you were in no real danger, but your body gave you some of the same signals it would set off if you were.

Internalized mimicry is helpful in that humans are very social animals, and we are constantly learning by observing each other. “There are great evolutionary advantages to being able to feel empathy. We don’t all need to have a near-death experience to appreciate that something is dangerous and we shouldn’t be doing it,” explains Brendan Walker, a former aeronautics designer and self-styled “thrill engineer” who tailors rides, installations, and other experiences to make them as evocative as possible.

Seeing another person cheat the reaper can also be instructive. “In nature, nothing happens for no purpose,” adds Javanbakht. When we watch someone defy death, be it by rock climbing or sword swallowing, we are present in the moment with them, participating from afar. “I’m actively in my own head, putting myself in that situation,” he says. “I’m practicing.”

Practicality aside, what’s the fun in activating your fight-or-flight response, or, stranger still, standing in awestruck wonder as someone else tongues the membrane between existence and the abyssal cleft of death? It turns out, there are major overlaps in how fear and excitement look and feel inside the body. What distinguishes the two is the context in which we experience those sensations. After all, Javanbakht notes, even something as pleasurable as falling in love comes with a pounding heart, shortness of breath, and clammy skin.

“What makes a difference in terms of being able to enjoy [the thrill] is the sense of control that we have,” he says. “Let’s say someone with a knife is chasing me on the streets. My feeling is very different than when someone with a fake knife is chasing me in a haunted house.” The important factor here is that one of the situations comes with the logical understanding of safety. Parts of our brain—the amygdala and other areas of the limbic system, or what Javanbakht calls “the animal inside of me”—sense the danger of the chase and get very worked up. But the prefrontal cortex, where we manage our emotions and think logically about how situations are likely to play out, understands theater and Halloween props and knows we are safe. That region helps us create a pleasurable context in which to enjoy the physiological cacophony of what feels like a brush with death.

Understanding why we aren’t necessarily afraid, however, doesn’t quite explain why we enjoy the sensation. Walker posits that the euphoric rush that comes with cheating death is also about “rewarding our persistence of life.” It’s a biochemical celebration of sorts—a way to feel joy and relief at continuing to exist. Evading danger, he says, creates a surge of happy-making transmitters, like adrenaline and dopamine. “I think it’s not even an emotion, it’s actually the movement of emotions,” he clarifies. “It is that movement, that rush of changing emotional space, that is what we term a thrill.”

Those fluctuations come in plenty of flavors, but we do have some sense of how they tend to unfurl over time. For example, when it comes to roller coasters, the high begins the moment you consider getting on, and it builds every time you make the choice to pursue that desire. Driving to the park, buying tickets, craning your neck to see the peaks and loops, waiting in line for your turn, all help psych you up for thrills. In 2007, Walker and a team of researchers from the University of Nottingham’s School of Psychology used wearable monitors and video cameras to measure physiological titillation on a ride consisting of one shocking, 180-foot vertical drop. They found something extraordinary: According to heart rate and sweat data, the most nerve-wracking, exhilarating part wasn’t clearing the precipice; it was the moment when the seat belt bar clicked into place. The actual experience of the drop registered at around 80 percent of the excitement of that moment of inevitability.

Even just anticipating someone enduring chills and spills can trigger a similar rush, thanks to our brains’ tendency to echo the feelings we observe in others. Even seeing an actor in a scary movie is enough to get our bodies worked up—a discovery that has given rise to the field of neurocinematics, or the study of how films affect our brains. “It’s a vicarious thrill,” says Walker. “You can live those emotions.”

We may not be able to do what the performer does, but through observing them, we have a chance to rejoice in death defied before our very eyes. It’s a way to feel fear, yes, but followed by a heady dose of mastery and control and jubilation. “Watching a performer playing at those dangerous edges is a form of entertainment,” said Walker. “[It] allows us to quite safely experience being alive.” Through witnessing the act, we feel the same fears, trials, victories, and, yes, thrills.

The secondhand jolt of another’s improbable persistence certainly has a compulsive draw for many of us. I asked Dan the drill sniffer, known to many as “The Amazing Face,” why he thought people were drawn to his shows of pain and derring-do. “I don’t think there is a singular reason,” he mused. “I think it’s like eating candy. Everyone has a sweet tooth, but we’re all looking for different things.” In his line of work, he sees people who wish they could emulate his acts, people who get a hit of fiendish glee at the thought of how bloody a high-stakes failure could be, and people who watch on with horror at feats that they themselves would never attempt. “Whatever we get out of it individually, everyone is looking to be entertained and to see the unbelievable.” Even knowing how Dan keeps his cranium intact doesn’t curb the terror. If you’re curious: He’s worked over the years to get to know—and subtly widen—the shape of his nasal cavity, and so has learned how to angle the bit to give it enough room to whirr without making contact. The real trick is not sneezing while it’s happening, which would-be blockheads on the Internet say takes lots of practice with less-lethal insertables.

Is it any wonder that we are drawn to witness the impossible made real? We as a species are facing a climate apocalypse, wars, pestilence, and famine. As pain clown poet laureate Steve-O of the Jackass franchise reminds us, escaping death is the ultimate unattainable fantasy: “Human existence is a prank on us because we only have one instinct, which is to survive,” he opined in the midst of a hot-wing-eating gag on YouTube in 2021. “And we only have one guarantee, which is we won’t.” Perhaps we are drawn to gawking at thrills because it allows us to snatch the joy of persistence from the jaws of certain death—even if just for a moment.

This story originally ran in the Fall 2022 Daredevil Issue of PopSci. Read more PopSci+ stories.

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A study published this week in the journal BMJ Open finds a possible link between inhaled and systemic glucocorticoids, commonly taken for ailments like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) or asthma, and structural and volume changes in brain gray and white matter. The medications, also sometimes known as corticosteroids, come in both an inhaled and systemic (pill or injection) form and are widely prescribed (their taken by roughly 1 percent of the general population). The Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America estimates that 25 million people (1 in 13 individuals) have asthma in the United States.

The study looked at data from the UK BioBank, a biomedical research center that followed half a million residents of the United Kingdom from 2006 to 2010. The researchers found 222 oral glucocorticoid users and 557 users of inhaled glucocorticoids (779 total) who did not have a previous diagnosis of any neurological, hormonal, or mental health disorder.

[Related: Your car’s exhaust is giving kids asthma.]

The team then performed cognitive and mental health testing on these 779 individuals and took diffusion MRIs of their brains. The team compared the MRI and cognitive findings with over 24,000 people in the database who did not use these steroids. They found reduced white matter integrity in the corticosteroid users, according to the study.

“This study shows that both systemic and inhaled glucocorticoids are associated with an apparently widespread reduction in white matter integrity,” wrote study author Merel van der Meulen, a postdoctoral student at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands. “The greatest amount of white matter damage was found in people who use oral steroids regularly over long periods of time, with inhalers having the smallest impact on brain matter.”

In the brain, white matter is a tissue that forms connections between brain cells and the rest of the nervous system. Less white matter in the brain can slow down its ability to process information, as well as attention span and memory. Some studies have connected lower levels of white matter with depression and irritability.

“This study shows that both systemic and inhaled glucocorticoids are associated with an apparently widespread reduction in white matter integrity, which may in part underlie the neuropsychiatric side effects observed in patients using glucocorticoids,” the team wrote.

Some of the neuropsychiatric effects patients using these steroids for a long term are anxiety, depression, mania, and delirium.

In an interview with CNN, Avindra Nath, the clinical director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, who was also not involved in the study said that, “there’s no reason for alarm.” Nath said physicians have long known that, if you give patients steroids, “the brain does shrink, but when you take them off the steroids, it comes back.” White matter has the ability to regenerate, thankfully.

[Related: Why Western states have the worst air pollution.]

The team pointed to certain limitations in the study. Only a few indicators of mood change were assessed and only for the preceding two weeks. They also reported that the changes might have been related to the condition for which steroids were prescribed rather than to steroid use itself. They also weren’t able to differentiate between steroid tablets and infusions for systemic users, all of which may have influenced the findings.

“Although a causal relation between glucocorticoid use and changes in the brain is likely based on the present and previous studies, the cross-sectional nature of this study does not allow for formal conclusions on causality,” they wrote.

This is another example of how correlation does not equal causation. Just because two things correlate does not necessarily mean that one causes the other. So if you’re an asthmatic taking one of these medications, make sure to talk to your doctor before considering any changes to your regimen.

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Health monitoring tech like Google Fit and the Apple Health app rake in millions of dollars every year. But they are primarily limited to physical aspects like fitness and sleep quality. Recently, however, multiple companies are attempting to tackle the psychological aspects of consumers’ wellbeing, raising numerous questions regarding privacy, accuracy, and ethics.

Both Fitbit and Tinder cofounder, Sean Rad, are offering new products billed as tools to better keep track and improve users’ mental health. The former’s newest item, the Sense 2, is a wearable akin to the Apple Watch that attempts to monitor your stress levels in realtime, then react accordingly. Aside from already ubiquitous datapoints like heart rate and skin temperature, Fitbit’s Sense 2 constantly measures electrodermal activity, aka sweat levels.

[Related: A beginner’s guide to Google Fit and Apple Health.]

Meanwhile, Rad’s Happy Ring company is already taking preorders for its new wearable designed that checks in with users whenever it notices stress-indicating fluctuations in biometrics. “Happy Ring makes no claims of being a diagnostic tool. Rather, the company believes it has cracked the code of monitoring wearers’ progress, in a kind of mental health analog to fitness trackers like Apple Watch and Oura,” explains TechCrunch in a recent writeup. “Much like those products, it purports to be a method for monitoring those vital readings and presenting actionable data to help get the wearer back on track.”

There is no upfront hardware cost to the Happy Ring—instead, consumers will pay for one of three subscription tiers ranging between $20 and $30 per month on a contract basis. When paired with its app, Happy Ring will monitor wearers’ biometric data in real-time, alerting them when it detects spikes in stress or tension and directing them to aid like cognitive behavioral therapy and breathing exercises, meditation prompts, and educational articles.

[Related: Tinder and the metaverse are breaking up.]

Many consumers may be intrigued by the idea of having comparatively cheap, constantly available digital counselor at their side, but there are numerous caveats to new products like these. First, as always, is understanding how customers’ data will be stored, utilized, and potentially sold to third-parties. None of these services are purely altruistic, and consumer health data is a goldmine to countless companies looking to hone their markets.

Secondly, an app’s recommendations are rarely a perfect substitute for actual mental health services and aid. While access to counselors and psychologists remains a major barrier for a huge portion of the country, products like Fitbit and Happy Ring won’t always be suitable alternatives. Then there’s the question of accuracy—inner psychological workings are much more complicated than physical exercise routines. It could be ineffective, potentially even dangerous, to think these intersectional issues can be broken down by apps and wearables. This isn’t to write off the industry entirely, but a healthy degree of skepticism is necessary when approaching what appears to be an inevitably massive industry in the years ahead.

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Psilocybin, the psychedelic compound that causes the trippy effects of magic mushrooms, could help people with alcohol use disorder drink less and potentially quit altogether. A new clinical study published August 25 in JAMA Psychiatry found that two doses of psilocybin combined with psychotherapy reduced the amount people drank compared with people who only received psychotherapy. Psilocybin’s effects persisted for at least seven months after the second dose, suggesting it could be a potential long-term treatment for alcohol addiction. 

“The findings are promising and exciting,” says lead study author Michael Bogenschutz, director of the NYU Langone Center for Psychedelic Medicine. “We saw large and very persistent effects that could help us find out what place psilocybin will play in the treatment of alcohol use disorder and potentially co-occurring mood and anxiety disorders.”

Though it enrolled fewer than 100 people, the trial “represents the largest psilocybin study to date, and the relatively robust outcomes in both overall drinking, and drinking-related behaviors in a study of this size are therefore noteworthy,” says James Giordano, professor of neurology and biochemistry at Georgetown University Medical Center who was not a member of the research team.

The Food and Drug Administration does not approve psilocybin as a treatment for any disorder. But in the past decade, a growing scientific movement has explored possible mental health benefits of psychedelics. Psilocybin, most notably, has shown to provide immediate and long-term relief for people with depression. Research suggests psilocybin’s effectiveness increases when combined with therapy, especially for treatment-resistant depression. The current trial tested psilocybin’s health benefits towards another condition: alcoholism. 

About 14.5 million people in the US have alcohol use disorder; alcohol is the third-leading preventable cause of death among Americans. Heavy drinking rates have also soared during lockdown, with an increased 25 percent of alcohol-related deaths in the first year of the pandemic. While some medications and psychotherapy can effectively manage alcohol abuse, Bogenschutz says their effects are small. Only one person out of 60 with alcohol use disorder actually seek medical treatment.

The new randomized, double-blind clinical trial is based on the results of a 2015 pilot study led by Bogenschutz, in which his team tested the effects of two doses of psilocybin plus psychotherapy on 10 participants with alcohol dependence. While the previous study was not well-controlled, Bogenschutz observed that the treatment substantially decreased people’s drinking and there were no noticeable safety issues.

[Related: Is Dry January the best way to cut back on drinking?]

To build off those results, the researchers enrolled 93 men and women diagnosed with alcohol use disorder. Each person received 12 psychotherapy sessions for 12 weeks and was randomly assigned to receive either two doses of psilocybin (48 patients) or an antihistamine placebo (45 patients). The team tracked the participants’ health outcomes and their daily drinking patterns for eight months. After the eight months, every participant was offered a third session where they would knowingly receive psilocybin.

People in the psilocybin group drank significantly less than people in the placebo group during the first 32 weeks. The rate of heavy drinking–four or more drinks in men and three or more drinks in women in a single day–in people who took psilocybin was 9.7 percent. For people who had the antihistamine, it was 23.6 percent. The last follow-up showed psilocybin’s effects persisted for another seven months.

Twice as many people in the psilocybin group stopped drinking altogether compared with those who were abstinent in the placebo group (48 percent vs. 24 percent). “My greatest expectations for this were to be able to manage my cravings, and this surpassed that,” said John Costas, one of the first participants enrolled in the clinical trial, in a press conference about the study. “[Psilocybin] eliminated all my cravings to the point where it cured my alcoholism, and I don’t categorize myself as an alcoholic anymore.”

Paul Mavis, another study participant who received the placebo but then psilocybin in the optional third session, said he feels comfortable again going out to dinner with friends who are drinking in front of him. “No one would have thought that I would not be drinking, including myself… I haven’t had a drink or a craving, it was as if I never drank in my life.”

[Related: What is a hangover? And can you cure it?]

“This is a very encouraging preliminary study of psilocybin-assisted therapy for alcohol use disorder,” says Keith Heinzerling, an addiction medicine specialist and director of treatment and research in psychedelics at Providence Saint John’s Health Center who was not affiliated with the study. Not only were there improvements in heavy drinking, but Heinzerling noted taking psilocybin did not cause any serious side effects. He pointed out, though, that the study had trouble hiding who had the hallucinogen and who did not; participants quickly realized which group they were in. “This is a challenge in all psychedelic clinical trials and may have biased the results in favor of psilocybin.”

The study has the potential to expand psilocybin use to co-morbidities often associated with alcohol dependence, Giordano says. But it would have been helpful to observe how psilocybin affected people by gender, ethnicity, and age, he adds.

Bogenschutz and his team are planning to expand their findings into a three-year trial with more than 200 participants at 15 sites. If all goes well, the trial may be one step closer toward FDA approval of psilocybin, which Bogenschutz says would be “a real breakthrough in the treatment of alcohol use disorder.”

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A strong defense against online misinformation may be to administer a digital vaccine: Exposing yourself to common deception methods may help you recognize sensationalized headlines, misleading TikToks, or social media fabrications in the future. In collaboration with Google and its tech unit Jigsaw, a team of psychologists added short videos to YouTube’s ad lineup, educating people about how to spot common misinformation tactics. In an online campaign, they found these clips were an effective way to get people to identify what’s real and what’s fake news.

People who watched the videos were better able to identify misinformation techniques than those who didn’t see the clips, as the team reports in a study published in the journal Science Advances today. “It’s very possible on social media to reduce vulnerability and susceptibility to being manipulated,” says Jon Roozenbeek, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge and the lead author of the study. “Maybe not all misinformation, but you can demonstrably improve people’s ability to detect when they’re being manipulated online.”

Misinformation happens when people spread false information, even if it wasn’t the person’s intention to mislead others. Misinformation happens regularly in our daily lives, says Sabrina Romanoff, a clinical psychologist who was not affiliated with the study, and it can be something as small as misremembering something you saw on television and telling someone else the wrong information. “You can think of it as analogous to the childhood game of ‘telephone,’” explains Romanoff, in which small errors become magnified through repetition. But through the megaphone of social media, wrong or misleading claims can become a harmful way to distort the truth.

[Related: The biggest consumers of fake news may benefit from this one tech intervention]

Anyone can fall prey to misinformation online, Romanoff says, though people who click on a story consistent with their pre-established beliefs are more susceptible. Being prone to impulsivity and feeling an overload of information could also make you more likely to spread fake news. 

The current study focuses on inoculation theory, where people learn about these types of misinformation techniques. Roozenbeek compares this theory to a vaccine: Introducing a weakened virus or virus-like material primes your immune system to recognize and destroy the pathogen in the future. Unlike fact-checking, which takes a more retroactive approach, inoculation theory stops people who are exposed to misinformation from spreading the content in the first place. “The idea was to inoculate people against these tropes, because if someone can successfully recognize a false dichotomy in content they’ve never seen before, they’re more resilient to any use of that particular manipulation technique on social media,” Roozenbeek says.

Roozenbeek and his team created five 1.5 minute videos covering common tactics used in online misinformation. To avoid any bias towards one group of people, the videos were designed to be nonpolitical, fictitious, and humorous. In the lab, the team invited over 6,000 participants to randomly watch either a video showing how to identify misinformation techniques or a neutral video that acted as a control. Afterward, the participants were shown 10 made-up social media posts that were manipulative or neutral. 

Roozenbeek then partnered with Google to expand the study. As part of a public ad campaign on YouTube, nearly 23,000 people watched one of two anti-misinformation videos. One video involved negative and exaggerated emotional language to encourage clicks and belief in fake news (Sample headline: “Baby formula linked to horrific outbreak of news, terrifying disease among helpless infants. Parents despair.”). The other one relied on presenting two points of views or facts as the only available options (The headline: “Improving salaries for workers means businesses will go bankrupt. The choice is between small businesses and workers. It’s simple mathematics.”). 

Within a day of seeing the video ads, one-third of people who watched the videos were randomly given a test question on YouTube where they were asked to identify the type of manipulation technique in a headline or sentence. People who watched the videos were better able to pick out misinformation techniques and misleading content.

“Finding a significant effect was actually quite surprising,” Roozenbeek says. This is because unlike a controlled laboratory setting, people on the internet can get easily distracted by other ads and videos. Additionally, there is no guarantee people actually watched the videos. While the videos were not allowed to be skipped, people could have turned off the sound or moved to another tab. “But despite all that, we still found a large and robust effect.”

[Related: Connecticut will pay a security analyst 150k to monitor election memes for misinformation]

Roozenbeek and other psychologists are wrapping up another study that looks into how long it takes for people to forget what they’ve learned from the videos. “It’s not reasonable to expect someone to watch a video once and remember the lesson for all eternity. Human memory doesn’t work that way,” he says. Ongoing results suggest ‌people might need a ‘booster shot,’ in the form of repeated video reminders. Another project in the works will use Twitter to see how watching these videos affects people’s behaviors, specifically how much they retweet misleading content.

To stay vigilant against misinformation as you scroll through the internet, Romanoff warns about these six common tactics:

• Fabricated content: Completely false or made-up stories
• Manipulated content: Information is intentionally distorted to fit a person’s agenda
• Misleading content: A person deceives others, such as presenting an opinion as a fact
• False context of connection: A person strings together facts to fit the narrative they are trying to convey, such as new stories using real images to create a false narrative of what happened
• Satire content: A person creates false but comical stories as if they were true
• Imposter content: A story is created through the branding and appearance of a legitimate news story, but is false such someone creating a video using someone else’s logo to seem legitimate

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This article was originally featured on The Conversation.

Taking oxycodone at the same time as certain selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), a commonly prescribed class of antidepressant, can increase the risk of opioid overdose, according to a study my colleagues and I published.

Doctors prescribe the opioid oxycodone to treat moderate to severe pain after surgeries and injuries or certain conditions like cancer. Opioids are also a common drug of abuse. In the U.S., over 70% of drug overdose deaths in 2019 involved an opioid.

Because many patients with depression also experience chronic pain, opioids are often coprescribed with antidepressants like SSRIs. Prior research has shown that certain SSRIs, namely fluoxetine (Prozac or Sarafem) and paroxetine (Paxil, Pexeva or Brisdelle), can strongly inhibit a liver enzyme crucial to the proper breakdown of drugs in the body, including oxycodone. The resulting increased concentration of oxycodone in the blood may lead to accidental overdose.

To see whether different types of SSRIs might affect a patient’s risk of overdosing on oxycodone, my colleagues and I examined data from three large U.S. health insurance claims databases. We included over 2 million adults who began taking oxycodone while using SSRIs between 2000 and 2020. The average age of the group was around 50, and a little over 72% were women. A little over 30% were taking the SSRIs paroxetine and fluoxetine.

We found that patients taking paroxetine or fluoxetine had a 23% higher risk of overdosing on oxycodone than those using other SSRIs.

About 30% of patients with chronic pain experience adverse drug interactions while taking opioids. Other types of drugs have been shown to increase the risk of overdose and other harmful interactions. These include some muscle relaxants commonly used to treat pain, benzodiazepines commonly used to treat anxiety or poor sleep and some antipsychotics commonly used to treat schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. Similarly, in 2019, the Food and Drug Administration required drugmakers to include new warnings on using gabapentinoids, a class of drugs commonly used to treat epilepsy and pain, concurrently with opioids and other drugs that suppress the central nervous system. This mandate was due to an increased risk of dangerously reduced breathing rates that can result in overdose and death when these drugs are taken together.

The findings from our study offer insight on which of the most commonly used antidepressants could most likely lead to opioid overdose. Further investigation of how other drugs interact with opioids could help doctors and patients better understand which drugs are safe to take at the same time.

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When you laugh, you can immediately reap the rewards—your mood improves and you relax. And it doesn’t stop there as in the long term, more chuckles can give your heart health a boost, and reduce stress. 

But with everything going on in the world, it can be hard to laugh. Spending time with the people, comedians, movies, or TV shows that make us laugh the most is a good start, but there’s an even easier way to get the benefits of some extra cackles: making yourself laugh through simulated laughter. 

Laughing is healthy

Neuroimmunologists, the scientists who study the interaction between our nervous and immune systems, have shown that laughter can help us get rid of stress faster. In a 1989 study published in The American Journal of the Medical Sciences, researchers took blood samples from 10 men watching a funny hour-long video and found that their levels of a stress hormone called cortisol decreased faster than those of the control group. A similar, larger study published in 2001 in Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, showed that people who watched a single, hour-long funny video had a significant boost in their immune response. This means laughter not only decreases stress but also has the potential to help fight other illnesses. 

[Related: Why does laughing feel so stinkin’ good?]

In the long term, minor drops in stress levels and an improved immune function can have a dramatic effect on your wellbeing. In 2016, public health researchers from Japan used data from the Japan Gerontological Evaluation Study—including self-reported data from 20,000 adults aged 65 years and older—to analyze cardiovascular risk. They found that even after controlling for other risk factors such as high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and body mass index, the prevalence of heart disease was 20 percent higher in those who said they rarely or never laugh, compared to those who reported laughing every day. 

You don’t need a joke to laugh

When we think of laughter, we normally think of spontaneous or stimulated chuckles. The former happens when we hear a funny joke, for example, while the second occurs when someone tickles us. But there are other types of laughter—it can be induced (with medications like laughing gas), pathologic (due to brain damage or certain psychiatric disorders), or simulated. 

That last one is different from other kinds of chuckles because you can generate it whenever you want, without any specific purpose. Unlike spontaneous laughter, simulated laughter allows you to retain total control of your body movements and the intensity and duration of your own cackle. The best part about simulated laughter is that it provides many of the benefits of spontaneous laughter, like lower blood pressure, improved sleep quality, and reduced chronic muscular pain.  

When it comes to mental health, simulated laughter may even be better than spontaneous laughter. In a 2019 meta-analysis published in Social Sciences & Medicine, researchers of behavioral psychology at Vrije University in the Netherlands examined 29 different studies that looked at both types of laughter. They found that simulated laughter was doubly effective at reducing depression and anxiety, compared to spontaneous laughter. 

If you want to start reaping the health benefits of simulated laughter, you can start now. Before you start, and whether you do it alone or in a group, there are a few things you should note to get the maximum benefit—laugh in sessions of at least three minutes, twice a week, or more, for a minimum of six to eight weeks. 

How to laugh on your own

It may sound completely silly, but simulated laughter can be fun to do by yourself. The easiest way to start is a fake laugh, which you can then try to turn into laughter that gradually becomes longer and louder. If you have trouble with this technique, begin with a loud “ha-ha-ha” or “ho-ho-ho”. With practice, you can slowly build yourself up to the recommended three minutes. 

If that doesn’t work for you, or you want some variety, there are a few other methods you can try. 

First, there is lion laughter. Start by looking in a mirror, opening your mouth wide, and sticking your tongue out. Continue by pretending your hands are paws by opening them up and swatting at the air. Then, roar like a lion, and in between roars, laugh as much as possible. 

A second technique is crying laughter. In this method, you repeatedly lean forward and pretend to cry, and then lean back and laugh as much as you can. 

Finally, you might want to try laughing with yourself. To do this, think about a silly mistake you made, acknowledge it, and just start laughing. 

If you need them, there are online videos and guides available for solo laughter sessions. Robert Rivest, a certified laughter yoga master trainer, has several YouTube videos that can guide you through a laughter yoga session if you want to chuckle and stretch at the same time. There are also many laughter meditation guides available online with different durations. One version by Melissa Eisler, is a simple 10-minute routine you can do on the go. 

Better to laugh as a group

As practical as solo laughter is, a lot of people like to get together and simulate chuckles in a guided group. 

But before you engage in collective laughter, experts recommend you follow some simple guidelines. First, make sure you’re comfortable at all times: wear comfy clothes and bring a cushion or mat if the group will be doing floor exercises. If any of the movements—or poses in the case of laughter yoga—are painful, it’s okay to skip them. Second, if the simulated laughter turns into spontaneous laughter or vice versa, that’s okay—it’s all beneficial. Third, maintain eye contact with those in the group, as it helps keep you present and transmit the laughter to others. Fourth, since the point is to laugh as much as possible, try to avoid talking unless it is part of the session. Finally, as much as possible, smile, laugh, and encourage laughter in others.

[Related: Laughter is a key part of play for many animals]

While laughter yoga is the most popular form of simulated laughter, there are other ways to do it in a group, such as laughter gymnastics or with music and other forms of art. 

Laughter is an expression of joy, and other than providing health benefits, it should help us be happier. Enjoy it. 

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Decades of environmental psychology research tell us that everything that surrounds us is crucial to our mental health, and nature has a particularly powerful role in making us feel good. Clinical studies suggest that natural light can significantly improve health outcomes for patients with depression and agitation. Likewise, cluttered spaces spike cortisol levels in the body resulting in stress and depression, but also make us more prone to making mistakes and giving in to our impulses. A 1984 study published in Science found that surgery patients recovered better in rooms with a view of trees rather than a brick wall. 

This all may seem obvious, but it’s easy to forget. Fields like architecture and design, whose main goal is to create pleasant and functional spaces for their inhabitants, haven’t always fully embraced these principles. 

There are, in fact, several easy and right-before-your-nose tweaks you can do to make your home a more hospitable space for your mental health. They are more than just scattering plants around, but they’re renter-friendly, and don’t require a large budget or the freedom to tear down walls.

Biophilic design is a novel understanding of the importance of natural elements in home design. Meaning “passionate love of life,” this architectural trend recognizes nature as the stage of our evolution as a species and incorporates that relationship into the spaces we inhabit. This, biophilic design scholars say, is one of the most effective ways to create spaces that are better for our mental health.

“In the last about 200,000 years, our brains haven’t changed much. Our bodies haven’t changed much—we are basically still the same species,” says Michal Matlon, an architecture psychologist who works with Olszewska on Venetian Letter, a mental health and design newsletter. He explains that our brains and bodies have developed to fit inside natural environments and we need to build spaces that reflect that. It’s not just about how they look aesthetically, but about how they stimulate our senses.

This is why light is one of the most important elements to keep in mind when designing our homes. Access to daylight improves sleeping quality and mental health, according to a study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. Another study published in 2020 by the same journal showed participants who had access to natural light scored 42 percent higher in cognitive assessments than those who didn’t.

If you own your home and have the resources, you could increase your daily dose of sunshine by adding some roof lights. But something as simple as opening the blinds or the curtains every day can make a huge difference, explains Ben Channon, an architect, and author of Happy by Design. Even just moving your desk under a direct source of natural light could do the trick of improving your performance and creativity.

“We know that we need natural light, but there has also been a lot of talk about circadian lighting,” Matlon says. 

Several studies have shown that avoiding artificial light as much as possible during the evenings, and blue lights, in particular, has a positive effect on our sleep cycle. This too, Matlon says, is an easy tweak. You can purchase smart light bulbs and set them to dim automatically as the evening comes, or you can seek out special blue-spectrum-reduced light bulbs to ensure the light around your home—especially in the bedroom and the living room—is warm. Introducing smaller task lights or zoned atmospheric lamps can help focus illumination only where you need it. Bouncing light off surfaces like walls or filters rather than pointing it directly at something, can also reduce the overall lighting in a room and get you ready for bed. 

You might also want to recreate the dynamism of light in the outside world. Olszewska recommends you try looking for lamps that mimic the effect of light traveling through a canopy, for example, or the reflection of moving water. Similarly, it makes sense that sunset lamps have been taking the internet by storm.

But Olszewska says it is not just about greens and blues to mimic the trees and the ocean. Since the idea is to bring the outdoors in, the colors you choose will depend on your home’s surroundings—this includes the urban design but also the geography of the place. 

“You want to have this kind of correspondence between the colors outside and the colors inside because you want to recreate a connection with the outside,” she says. 

Amber Dunford, a design psychologist at Overstock.com, says monochromatic color palettes can also help your surroundings remind you more of nature. And more nature means better mental health. In the design world, monochromatic palettes don’t mean just one hue, but families of colors that are close to each other, like orange going into yellow. 

“Monochromatic spaces elicit a calming effect on humans, as the transition in color changes are more subtle and easy to experience,” she says. “While contrasting colors such as red and green create an energizing effect, a monochromatic palette creates a soothing effect.” 

It’s not just the color that you paint the walls, but the tones of everything or at least the main elements in a room. Start with an anchoring piece like a rug or sofa, says Dunford, and then layer in smaller elements such as pillows, throws, and artwork in similar hues.

“There’s a need for visual complexity because we don’t like to be bored,” says Channon. 

Even just looking at pictures of nature can relax you as much as if you were looking at an actual nature landscape, according to a 2019 study published by the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. And if you don’t want to straight-up hang pictures of the oceans and forests on your walls, one easy trick to satisfy your need for visual complexity and nature is to use leaf, wood, or water patterns.  

“Living around wood texture can provide the same stress-reducing response we would experience from being out in nature,” says Dunford. “These surfaces provide a sense of warmth and safety, and are often described as being cozier and more welcoming in relation to other textures and materials.” 

A study published in 2017 in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, showed touching wood grain can calm prefrontal cortex activity and activate our parasympathetic nervous system, which induces relaxation. 

If you already have wooden furniture at home, consider exposing the natural wood by sanding it down to remove paint or shiny finishes, Dunford says. She also recommends foraging wood and using it as decor throughout your space.

 “A simple branch arrangement in a vase or a large piece of bark can act as an accessory when paired with other objects on a shelf,” she explains. 

You can also introduce small pieces like a carved wood bowl, wood frames, or larger elements like a wooden coffee table or furniture with wood arms. 

“You could buy furniture like a coffee table or a side table that’s maybe curved like a stub,” says Channon.

Nice rounded shapes can do the trick as well. 

Large empty spaces with echoes can be distracting and alienating because there usually aren’t any in nature, says Matlon. Instead, use textures and acoustic materials, like carpets and upholstery, to absorb the echo. You should also consider incorporating natural sounds into your spaces—a small table fountain can easily provide the song of a babbling brook. 

Similarly, technology can now emulate natural acoustics. Recently Matlon noticed his air conditioning unit had an option to mimic a natural breeze as if the windows were open, pushing air in unevenly and at different angles. “The air feels much more natural and comfortable,” says Matlon. Not everybody’s air conditioning does this, of course, but you can try out white noise machines, or even online platforms or smartphone apps, to add a little bit of natural ambiance to your space.

But transition spaces, such as corridors or entrances, are important too. They are often forgotten and neglected, but can serve as important points to recover your attention and find peace in between areas of your home, says Olszewska. 

[Related: 5 great spots for LED strip lights around your home]

For example, transition spaces can help you move from your workday to a relaxing evening. 

“Corridors or passage spaces could be a great opportunity for us to recover our cognitive resources,” says Olszewska, who is pioneering the movement of bringing corridors to the center of architectural design. In her study published in the Journal of Science-Informed Design, she analyzes the role of Japanese gardens as transition spaces that serve as restorative areas for the mind.

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WHEN I MET my cat Pearlita, she lived in an alley between my apartment building and a gas station. She drank from puddles polluted by engine leaks and ate whatever she could find. Ten years later, with Pearlita curled up on my lap, making it hard to type, I can still remember how she wolfed down the food I put in the alley and how easy it was to lure her inside with more.

But does she remember her life on the streets? And if so, which parts of it?

This question has probably occurred to almost anyone with an animal friend, but for simplicity’s sake, we’ll limit this discussion to our feline and canine companions. Certainly they behave as though they have memories—after all, your special furball doesn’t treat you like a stranger each time you walk through the door—and evolutionary theory suggests as much: It behooves any long-lived animal to have long-lasting recollections. There have been rigorous scientific experiments, too, not enough to fully understand our dogs’ and cats’ memories, but enough to confirm their existence and to raise some interesting questions about how they compare to our own.

“It is tricky, because we can’t directly ask them,” says Mikel Delgado, an animal psychology researcher from the University of California, Davis who now dispenses advice on cat behavior with the company Feline Minds. “The way I think about it is: What’s important for animals to remember?”

For a cat or dog—or human—to remember events from way back, they must first be able to recall what happened just a few moments ago. To study this in controlled settings, scientists devise experiments in which animals are rewarded for correctly identifying objects they previously saw, asked to avoid obstacles without looking at them, or monitored while searching for food they saw being hidden. These methods don’t capture everything that cats and dogs can recall, of course; they’re intended to tease out the basics of their cognition.

A few decades’ worth of data have shown that the species do indeed have short-term recall, and they convert certain events and interactions into long-term memories as they sleep and, crucially, dream. “Dreaming is often connected to the reorganization of memory,” says Ádám Miklósi, an ethologist and canine cognition specialist at Hungary’s Eötvös Loránd University. Both dogs and cats display the telltale neurological signatures of REM, short-wave sleep, and other patterns of snoozing that, in human and rat brains, are linked to the sorting of a day’s experiences.

One of the best-documented examples of long-term memories in dogs involves Chaser, a border collie famous for learning the names of more than 1,000 objects in three years. Impressive as that is, however, such semantic feats don’t necessarily mean that Chaser, who died in 2019 at the ripe old age of 15, could remember his puppyhood. That requires so-called episodic memories containing the details of an experience, the who-what-when-where.

Until recently, scientists thought the canine mind was limited to associative memories: recollections of the relationships between experiences or events, but not the intricacies of the experiences and events themselves. Were that the case, then every time my dearly departed dog Comet climbed into our car the moment my parents started packing it, she wouldn’t have remembered the canoe rides, swims, and roasted marshmallows of past trips. Comet would simply have learned to identify the preparations with fun.

But in recent years, research conducted by Miklósi and his colleague Claudia Fugazza has shaken the idea that canines are restricted to such Pavlovian recall. In 2016 they confirmed, by way of an experiment in which they asked dogs to imitate actions modeled by a human minutes earlier, that the pooches did remember specific elements of what they’d experienced. In follow-up experiments, dogs repeated their own actions long after they first performed them, a finding that added an autobiographical layer to their episodic memories. Their thoughts didn’t just contain a jumble of disparate details, but were woven together by a sense of self.

As for cats, tests of whether they returned to containers where they were previously fed lend scientific support to their version of episodic memory. “Cat memory is probably very much like dog memory,” says Miklósi.

Still, he and Delgado note that this kind of reminiscence might differ from our own. Humans can reflect on their memories in spontaneous, self-directed ways: I can think about the first concert I ever attended, a Pink Floyd show, without needing to see the ticket stub to remind me of it. How cats and dogs guide their own recall—if they need cues to trigger it or have a proclivity, like us, for wandering the halls of memory—is a mystery.

It’s also less clear how our furry companions relive their distant memories. Mine play like a movie in my mind’s eye, which fits, as contemporary humans are a visually oriented species. But cats and dogs are far more reliant on other senses, especially smell. Could their recall come together as scents rather than images? Two studies—of dogs in a dark room finding familiar objects with their noses, and of kittens recognizing their mothers by scent after years of separation—suggest as much. “Animals, I’m sure, are much more multisensory,” Delgado says. “Their memories might be scent or sound and not necessarily the images that we tend to picture when we’re replaying an episode in our minds.” I can still see my first encounter with Pearlita. Perhaps she can still smell it.

Delgado also raises the question of language. In addition to being visually driven, human memories are structured by words and complex grammar, which some experts think is crucial to the power of recall. And while dogs and cats don’t have full-blown human-style language, they are able to communicate and represent meaning through sounds, postures, facial expressions, and other signals. Maybe memories formed without language are simply different, not weaker. They could even be more intense: less complex but undiluted by linguistic abstraction or, as Delgado points out, the second-guessing, what-if scenarios that humans tend to indulge in.

This and certain other questions about how cats and dogs perceive the past might prove impossible to illuminate scientifically and ethically. To empirically determine, for example, how adopted animals recall their people, we’d need to separate them from family for months—even years. “I’m okay with mystery,” Delgado says. “I’ve learned to live with the fact that there’s still so much we don’t know.” The details may be blurry, but it’s enough to know that our cats and dogs remember.

We hope you enjoyed “Pet Psychic,” Brandon Keim‘s new monthly column. Check back on PopSci+ for the next article in August.

The post Do cats and dogs remember their past? appeared first on Popular Science.

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The typical pimple is caused by clogged oil glands or bacteria in our skin, and while most pimples aren’t harmful, they can become infected (and painful), especially when they’re opened up to the outside environment. Still, so many of us cannot resist pinching them away. 

To get to the root of the pimple popping divide, we can look to one of our most basic emotions: disgust. 

Disgust evolved to protect humans from infectious diseases and poisons, Daniel Kelly, professor of philosophy at Purdue University and author of a book called Yuck! The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust, told PopSci in an interview. For instance, we’ve learned to avoid common repulsive items, like rotten meat or poop, because they can contain microbes that are known to make us sick if ingested. Developing this internal ick-detector was important in keeping our ancestors alive, Kelly says, because we can’t actually see the tiny pathogens like viruses and bacteria that make us sick. 

However, some bodily fluids like blood, spit, or pus—including the oily ooze from a pimple—are often only seen as disgusting when they come out of our bodies. In this case, Kelly explains that our disgust is acting  like a bouncer enforcing a no re-entry policy: Once our bodily fluids are out in the big bad world, they can potentially be contaminated by bacteria or other pathogens, so we don’t want to put them back inside of us. This aversion towards disease is also why people recognize the tell-tale signs of sickness in others around them, like sweating or coughing.

But unlike snotty noses, you might be surprised to find that squeezing those angry whiteheads doesn’t always evoke the same yuck reaction—in fact, there’s a whole community of people that finds that final burst oddly satisfying.  

Popping on the brain

We obviously don’t all react in the same way when we see pus coming out of a pimple. And on a basic, primal level, even popping fanatics get at least a little disgusted. It’s all about whether your enjoyment outweighs your instinctive revulsion.

There might also be levels to one’s love (or disgust) of poking those blemishes. Some people are into watching YouTube or TikTok videos of pimple popping, but wouldn’t be tempted to squeeze their own zits. Watching it happen to someone else through a screen controls exposure—the viewer is not in any real danger of coming into contact with potential pathogens. A similar phenomena can be seen when horror fans watch scary movies. No matter how frightening or gross a film is, we know a zombie isn’t actually going to pop up and eat our brains. 

Even for people doing actual in-person popping, either on themselves or on someone else, there’s still an element of control involved. It’s not the same as suddenly coming upon an infected wound; while your conscious mind might immediately respond with an initial feeling of ick, your lizard brain and past experiences not getting sick from zit pus help you recognize that a simple pimple likely won’t put you in danger. 

[Related: The mites that breed on our faces are getting clingier by the day]

Differences in our brains also help explain why some people like pimple popping more than others. How each person reacts to pimple popping depends upon their brains, according to a 2021 paper in the journal Behavioural Brain Research. Scientists from the University of Graz in Austria had 38 popping enjoyers and 42 non-enjoyers watch 96 video clips that showed either pimple popping, water fountains, or steam cleaning. The fountain videos were used as controls because water coming from a fountain mimics pus coming from a zit, according to the researchers, while the steam cleaning videos served as oddly satisfying controls. 

The researchers had study participants complete a survey before the experiment to determine their pimple popping enjoyment, their disgust sensitivity, and their reward and punishment sensitivity. Then, participants watched the clips while their brain activity was measured in a functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, machine. 

The team found that people who liked zit squeezing videos reported a greater sensitivity to being rewarded, as well as better disgust regulation skills, than those who didn’t. In other words, pimple popping fans were more likely to feel arousal when rewarded with the satisfaction of pus spurting from a pimple and could better modulate the amount of disgust they felt while watching. Those self-reported qualities matched up with what the researchers found in the brain imaging part of the study.

[Related: What is a hangover? And can you cure it?]

The fMRI scans also revealed parts of the brain most responsible for making us a fan or hater of pimple popping: the nucleus accumbens and the insula. The nucleus accumbens is part of the brain’s pleasure system, and has been shown to modulate people’s responses to the things they dislike. When people who didn’t enjoy pimple popping watched the videos, their nucleus accumbens was deactivated and showed little to no activity. And while the nucleus accumbens was also deactivated in people who liked pimple popping videos, it was more active than in their pop-hating counterparts. The insula is another part of the brain that’s activated when we’re disgusted. The level of connectivity between the nucleus accumbens and insula also varied between the two groups, with the pimple popping fans having greater connectivity. The researchers hypothesized that the increased connectivity of the insula with the accumbens might be tied to better disgust regulation. 

Don’t worry pimple popping fans—just because you have a higher tolerance of disgust for zit squishing doesn’t mean you’re less likely to pick up on actual harmful things that will make you sick. Plus, even the most hardcore pimple popping fans still have that innate ick-response: the 2021 paper found that ultimately all participants were at least a little grossed out by pimple popping.

To pop or not to pop

Unfortunately for popping fans, dermatologists say you really shouldn’t DIY this particular task, regardless of how tempting it is to get rid of unsightly zits. Pimple popping breaks the skin and can cause infections and scarring. Blackheads and whiteheads should be left alone, although home treatments like benzoyl peroxide can help them clear up more quickly. If you’ve got a Vesuvius-level whitehead you really want to get out, go to a dermatologist because they’re trained to handle extractions properly. If you still have a squeeze craving, there are plenty of videos around the internet to satisfy you safely.

Is your head constantly spinning with outlandish, mind-burning questions? If you’ve ever wondered what the universe is made of, what would happen if you fell into a black hole, or even why not everyone can touch their toes, then you should be sure to listen and subscribe to Ask Us Anything, a podcast from the editors of Popular Science. Ask Us Anything hits Apple, Anchor, Spotify, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every Tuesday and Thursday. Each episode takes a deep dive into a single query we know you’ll want to stick around for.

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Headlines appear in the news about the latest natural disaster tied to the effects of climate change nearly every day, such as Yellowstone National Park’s flooding and Lake Mead’s shrinking water levels. The impact of climate change is only expected to worsen, and large portions of the public report feeling distressed about their future. 

Studies have shown that about two-thirds of Americans experience “climate anxiety.” This form of anxiety, caused by climate change-related fears, is pervasive among younger people who will see many of the effects of climate change in their lifetimes. 

Traditionally, combatting anxiety can mean going to therapy, meditating, and exercising more, according to mental health experts. However, climate anxiety is a creature of its own. While conquering generalized anxiety is a personal journey, experts say communities must unite to defeat this mental health threat.

Sarah Jaquette Ray, a professor of environmental studies at California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, tells Popular Science that climate anxiety isn’t the same as generalized anxiety. Climate anxiety connects to a threat that affects us all, though in unique ways.

She says one crucial way is for people to discuss their feelings about climate change cooperatively. One way communities can do this is through support groups. Several organizations, such as the Good Grief Network and Climate Awakening, have methods and programs that allow people to come together and work through climate-related anxiety. There are also online tools for starting your own climate support group for your workplace or community through the All We Can Save project. Resources also exist to connect people to climate-aware therapists. 

[Related: 4 new myths about climate change—and how to debunk them.]

“I would like to see collective therapy,” Ray says. “The causes of stress and the causes angst are in fact social and political, therefore the arena that the solutions need to happen in and the services need to happen in ought to be at the collective level as a way to get people to simultaneously address their emotional distress and also build the kind of structures that are going to be needed to adapt to and mitigate climate change.”

Ray authored a 2020 book called “A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety,” which goes in-depth on the causes and potential solutions to climate anxiety. She says that one of the best ways for people to handle their climate anxiety is to take climate action. Feeling like they’re part of a group doing something about the problem can provide relief to an anxious individual and build a community of similarly climate-minded individuals.

“The vast majority of Americans care about climate change and are worried about climate change but just don’t know what to do about it,” Ray says. “They feel like it’s such a big problem that they have no way of controlling it, and that can make them completely check out. A different story needs to be told that what you do matters, and you can get a sense of purpose from it. You can build community while you do it, and it’s happening all over the place.”

Research has shown that young people who engage in climate activism or join environmental organizations tend to be less anxious about climate change. Ray adds that people involved in these collective actions are more capable of helping fight climate change because they are experiencing less anxiety about it.

“The mental health of a populace is necessary for significant climate action and social change,” Ray says. “The fact that people are mentally despairing actually increases their ineffectiveness. If we’re going to be effective in dealing with this stuff, we need to actually have our mental health intact.”

If you aren’t feeling anxious about climate change but know someone who is, there are a few ways to be effective in helping them. First, Ray says, don’t tell those experiencing it that climate change is not a problem they can solve and to just not worry about it. This type of advice is called “toxic positivity,” when someone hears to stay positive regardless of their circumstances and feelings. Being told to “think positively” can have detrimental effects on anxiety patients. 

“I think there’s a real need to accept the fact that this is going to involve some pretty uncomfortable emotions and learn the skills needed for dealing with those emotions,” Ray says.

On a grander scale, governments and other big players can do two things to help with a climate anxiety crisis: do more to solve climate change and fund mental health programs. A significant source of this anxiety comes from people feeling like not enough is being done to address the issue. But considering the climate will continue to get worse no matter how quickly governments act, people will still need support. 

If you’re finding yourself depressed or anxious about climate change, you aren’t alone. Luckily, chapters of existing climate organizations like 350.org or the Sunrise Movement are worldwide. Getting involved, talking to other people struggling with climate anxiety, and using those emotions to push for real change can help heal and strengthen your mind. 

The post The biggest tool we have to fight climate anxiety is community appeared first on Popular Science.

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After nearly three years of planning, the shortcut for the National Suicide Prevention Hotline, 988, is going live on every landline, smartphone, and online dial pad in the US. First recommended by the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) and other national agencies, including the Department of Veteran Affairs, the three-digit number is meant to make 1-800-273-TALK easier and more accessible to use for individuals of any age experiencing a mental crisis. After speaking to the experts on the hotline, they will be connected to local services that best fit their needs, whether it be in-person counseling centers, mobile emergency teams, or substance abuse therapists.

Those seeking help will be able to call or text 988 with any provider they have. Some larger companies, like Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile, adopted the shortcut within months of the FCC finalizing its plan in summer of 2020. July 16 is the deadline for every phone provider, including digital-only ones, to connect the three-digit code. The commission also allowed some buffer time for trained staff at more than 180 crisis centers around the country to gear up in case of an influx of messages.

[Related: How to manage your mental health as traumatic events pile up]

The streamlined number comes during a national mental health crisis and stark rise in suicide attempts among teenagers. While the hotline is still largely the same beyond the new 988 option (for example, veterans can still select “1” to be directed to more specificalized counselors), federal groups are pushing states to set aside funds so that callers and texters can get local medical support, therapy, and more. One way states and territories can generate revenue is by mimicking the small 911 fee (anywhere from a few cents up to $2) that most customers already have on their monthly phone bills. But so far, few governments have elected to add this surcharge or create a designated 988 funding pool. Among them, Washington, Nevada, Colorado, and Virginia have passed the most impactful hotline legislation, according to a tracker by the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

Mental health support groups are still concerned that public awareness around the 988 update is still low. As PopSci and others reported earlier this year, a survey conducted by the Trevor Project, a nonprofit that works on suicide prevention for LGBTQ+ youth, found that 70 percent of 2,000 adult respondents knew little to nothing about the shortcut. Still, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline has seen higher call and text volumes during the pandemic, and officials are expecting even higher numbers once 988 is available for everyone.

[Related: Mental health ‘first aid’ can give bystanders the skills to act in a crisis]

Other mental health and suicide hotlines continue to exist for people with specific needs. The nonprofit Crisis Text Line (741741 by SMS) has long provided a support system for teens and kids, but was recently criticized for sharing anonymized data with a customer service company. Other services provide help in different scenarios, like domestic abuse or PTSD after natural disasters; international crisis centers provide a better range of language options (988 is only available in English and Spanish).

“There is still much work to do. But what matters is that we’re launching,” US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said during a press conference on July 1. “If you are willing to turn to someone in your moment of crisis, 988 will be there. 988 won’t be a busy signal, and 988 won’t put you on hold. You will get help.”

The post 988, the shortened National Suicide Prevention Hotline number, is live appeared first on Popular Science.

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The habit of doomscrolling—idly flicking through social media, consuming content that isn’t necessarily good for our mental health—is all too easy to fall into. At the back of our minds we know there are more productive ways to fill our time, and yet we keep on opening the same apps and refreshing them again and again.

Part of the problem is that our phones are always with us and easy to reach. Another issue is that there are many short intervals in the day, whether it’s waiting on a subway platform or getting ready to go to sleep, where we’ve got nothing better to do but to open up our apps and see what might be new. 

But it doesn’t have to be this way. There are apps that can bring us all kinds of benefits and positive vibes as an alternative to doomscrolling. And what’s more, you can use them in short snippets throughout the day, whenever you have a spare couple of minutes.

Invest a few minutes here and there throughout the day and they can quickly build up into hours of practicing your reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills in another language. At all times you can keep track of your progress and mix up the kinds of tests and challenges you’re doing.

The gold standard here is Duolingo (iOS, Android), because of its intuitive interface and its quick, simple lessons. You can use it for free or pay $7 a month to remove the ads and get more types of exercises. Babbel (iOS, Android) and Rosetta Stone (iOS, Android) are top quality alternatives.

If you’re on iOS you’ve got Apple Books, and if you’re using an Android phone there’s Google Play Books & Audiobooks. There are also third-party alternatives like the Amazon Kindle app (iOS, Android) to consider. All of these apps are free to download and use, and you’ll find plenty of free e-books, too—especially out-of-copyright classics.

When it comes to replacing doomscrolling, you might be surprised at how much reading you can get through with just a handful of minutes a day. At a glance, you can see how far through each e-book you are and how much reading you’ve got left.

Importantly for this particular list, most podcast players include a timer function that lets you set how long you want to listen to a particular episode for. So, if you know you’ve got a five-minute break or 10 minutes before bed, you can set the timer accordingly and forget about having to stare at the screen.

If you’re on an iPhone, the obvious podcast player choice is Apple Podcasts. For Android users, it’s probably Google Podcasts (which is also available on iOS, by the way). There’s a whole host of other podcast players available, too—we especially like the free Pocket Casts (iOS, Android).

You can save articles to Instapaper (iOS, Android) very easily from any web browser. The app cuts out ads, navigation bars, and other distractions, leaving you with a simplified reading interface. Even better, it shows you at a glance how long each article is, so you can pick and choose accordingly. For $3 a month you can get extra features such as full text search and no limits on the notes you add to articles.

Feedly (iOS, Android) is also worth considering. This RSS reader can collate new articles from your favorite sites, giving you a straightforward interface to read them on, and adding features such as tags and highlights. You can follow up to 100 feeds for free, and after that, paid plans start at $6 a month.

You could just put on a relaxing playlist, for example, and let your thoughts drift—a quick search on YouTube (iOS, Android) or Spotify (iOS, Android) will return plenty of options for you to pick from. YouTube can offer you lots of free guided meditations, too: Include a time limit in your search that matches how long you’ve got.

Then there are dedicated meditation apps you can turn to. One of the most well-known is Headspace (iOS, Android), which has hundreds of guided meditations to pick from—it costs $13 a month, but you can try it free for a week. Calm (iOS, Android) is also worth a look, with its own vast library and a choice of meditation lengths: A limited amount of content is available for free, with a premium subscription costing $15 a month.

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Everybody knows smells can evoke vivid memories. You might hear a tune and struggle to place it, or see a face and not quite be able to summon the corresponding name, but catch a whiff of meat cooking on a distant grill and your mind will instantly cue up a decades-old but sharply recollected summer cookout.

While these involuntary blasts of intense nostalgia are the most obvious examples of the power of scent, the link between pungent odors and memories functions in subtle ways throughout our daily lives. These associations can even affect our habits and behaviors in ways most of us take for granted. If you understand how these associations form, though, you can intentionally use them to help you build new habits.

Every habit begins with a cue. Often these cues come from our environment, like how the aroma of coffee may alert you that it’s time to work, or how the odor of metal and sweat in a gym might get your brain ready to exercise. For a lot of us, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic stripped away the environmental cues that drove our behavior in the outside world and replaced them with the much smaller roster of triggers inside our homes, making habit formation difficult. I solved this problem for myself with intentional olfactory conditioning, and you should be able to apply the same process as you work to establish new routines.

How I Pavlov’d myself into being a functional person

In 2021 I moved out of the apartment where I’d spent the first year of the pandemic and into a new place with its own smells, hoping to shake off the stasis of lockdown and get a fresh start. But when I took my first shower in my new home with the same Cremo Bourbon and Oak soap I’d used before, I realized I associated the smell of that soap with being stuck in my apartment for months. I had intended to form new habits, but I had brought a cue for old habits with me, and the scent memory just made me want to lie down and take a nap. So I got new soap, free from any emotional associations, then wrote an article about how to use it.

Before I sat down to write this article, I brewed a cup of coffee and sprayed my wrists with Duke Cannon’s Lincoln cologne scent. I do this every time I sit down to work. Even in the best of times, the struggle with working from home is that it can blur boundaries between work life and home life to an extent that makes it hard to figure out where one ends and the other begins. Given that the desk where I work is the same place where I play video games when that work is done, scent association has made it dramatically easier to shift gears between the roles of the multipurpose spaces in my home. When I smell Lincoln, my brain knows it is time to open Google Docs rather than Steam. When this article is complete, I’ll wash away the cologne as I wash my hands to prepare making dinner, at which point its scent will likely be replaced with a great deal of garlic.

Studies have shown that scent-induced nostalgia causes stronger positive psychological effects than merely reminiscing about the same memory. It’s one cognitive process to think about grandma’s cooking, and a whole other thing to smell it all over again. In the same way, it’s one cognitive process to think “I should work out,” and a whole other thing to smell the gym—or the deodorant you’ve tricked your brain into associating with kettlebell swings.

How you can use smells to form new habits

First, identify the habit you intend to change. In my case, it was reestablishing pre-pandemic habits that had become much more difficult without their original environmental cues. Consider whether the habit has a scent association that needs to be replaced, or if you need to find one. You can also employ different scents at different times to delineate the varied purposes of a single space—like I do with my desk.

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This article was originally featured on KHN.

When Pat Paulson’s son told her he was feeling anxious and depressed at college, Paulson went through her Blue Cross Blue Shield provider directory and started calling mental health therapists. No providers in the Wisconsin city where her son’s university is located had openings. So she bought a monthly subscription to BetterHelp, a Mountain View, California, company that links people to therapists online.

Her son felt uncomfortable with his first BetterHelp therapist. After waiting several weeks, he saw a second therapist, whom he liked. But she wasn’t available the following week.

Despite the switch and the wait, Paulson is grateful she was able to find her son help. “He was getting to the point where he was ready to give up trying to find someone,” she said.

Many U.S. adults aren’t able to find help because of a shortage of therapists. Nearly 40% are struggling with mental health or substance abuse issues, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

So millions of people are turning to online companies like BetterHelp that have sprung up in the past several years, advertising quick access to therapy. Often backed by venture capital firms, these for-profit businesses offer a wide mix of services, including one-on-one and group video therapy visits with licensed professionals, supportive texting, coaching videos, and prescriptions for medications.

In their ads, some of the companies feature testimonials from celebrities like Olympic athletes Simone Biles and Michael Phelps. But veteran therapists and officials from leading mental health professional associations say there’s limited evidence of the new online providers’ effectiveness.

“There are fundamental questions about what these companies are doing and whether they are reaching people who really need help,” said Dr. John Torous, director of the digital psychiatry division at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s Health Information Technology Committee. “They may be doing wonderful work, but it’s hard to know when we don’t have that data.”

Dr. Varun Choudhary, chief medical officer at Talkspace, an online and mobile-based therapy provider, said online companies can help patients who face financial, cultural, and accessibility barriers to traditional therapy. He said clients may want the convenience of getting care online at home.

“By bringing together patients on a teletherapy platform, Talkspace expands capacity to deliver treatment,” he said. The company, headquartered in New York, says it has served more than a million people with 3,000 providers across all 50 states, and it charges $400 or more per month for four weekly live sessions.

Research suggests therapy delivered online can be effective and, spurred by the covid-19 pandemic, many individual therapists are offering sessions with their patients online. But the rapid proliferation of the online commercial therapy industry worries some traditional mental health professionals who have raised concerns about aggressive advertising for online services and whether patient care is compromised by inadequate training and pay for therapists working at some digital companies. In addition, news reports have detailed questionable prescription protocols, after which federal law enforcement launched probes of one company.

“Online companies inundate the internet with appealing ads that make promises about treating depression and anxiety,” said Marlene Maheu, a clinical psychologist and founder of the Telebehavioral Health Institute, who trains practitioners in best online practices and evaluates services for employers who may want to offer them as benefits to workers. “But can you trust them with your kid who’s in trouble?”

Therapy via text

Studies have found face-to-face video psychotherapy visits and other mental health sessions to be just as effective as in-person encounters. But veteran mental health professionals are skeptical of some online providers’ texting practices and services that do not involve real-time video therapy. Research support for the efficacy of texting and similar services is scarce. On its own sites and publications, the American Psychological Association has barred advertising from one online mental health company on the grounds that its services do not meet the APA’s criteria for evidence-based therapy.

“Our concern there is that a patient will leave a text and it might be hours before the therapist responds,” said Vaile Wright, senior director for innovation at the American Psychological Association. “We don’t have peer-reviewed research to support that this is effective.”

Psychologist Bradley Boivin, who worked as an independent contracting therapist with BetterHelp for three months last year, said he had such strong concerns about the extensive use of texting for therapy that he told his clients he wouldn’t do it.

Boivin, who now works for a private practice in Scottsdale, Arizona, said other BetterHelp therapists told him they felt pressured to reply to client texts at all hours of the day. A BetterHelp compensation sheet obtained by KHN shows therapists get paid by the number of text words they read and write.

Alon Matas, founder and president of BetterHelp, which spent more than $7 million in December to advertise on 556 podcasts, defended the use of texting, saying his company’s therapists are not expected to respond immediately to clients’ texts. Each therapist uses professional judgment to decide when is the right time to use messaging and “how it’s best suited for each individual member,” he said.

Many therapists working at online companies are independent contractors, with no liability insurance or health insurance from the company, according to officials at associations for mental health professionals.

The online companies often attract therapists who are less experienced because the pay is typically lower than what therapists in private practices generally earn, according to Laura Groshong, director of policy and practice for the Clinical Social Work Association. “This is a way for new clinicians to get a foot in the door, and that’s something people should know,” she said.

The BetterHelp compensation sheet shows that the company pays therapists on a sliding scale based on how many hours per week they work — $30 per hour for the first five hours, $35 for the next five, etc., topping out at $70 per hour for any hours in excess of 35. That’s less than the typical $100 to $200 per session that private-practice therapists around the country charge clients.

Matas said the sheet does not reflect that therapists’ base hourly compensation by his company may be supplemented with monthly stipends, payments for group sessions, bonuses, and caseload incentives. BetterHelp has more than 25,000 therapists in its network, and Matas said it effectively pays up to 60% more than the median compensation for licensed therapists in every metropolitan area where it has therapists.

A virtual pharmacy

There also are concerns about online companies whose clinicians prescribe psychiatric drugs — either controlled substances that are potentially addictive such as Adderall, or antidepressants such as Zoloft that are not addictive but have potentially dangerous side effects.

Federal law requires doctors to see a patient in person before prescribing controlled drugs, which are those tightly regulated by the government because they can be abused. The federal government waived that provision under public health emergency rules issued early in the covid pandemic. Officials are considering whether to extend that waiver whenever the public health emergency period is over.

That review has been roiled by recent law enforcement actions following news reports in March. The Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration are investigating Cerebral, a San Francisco online-prescribing company, for possible violations of the Controlled Substances Act for its prescribing of Adderall. The company told news organizations it has not been accused of violating the law and it would pause prescribing Adderall and other controlled drugs for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. In a statement to KHN last month, it said, “Cerebral is fully cooperating with the Justice Department investigation.”

The DEA declined to comment on the probe, and the Department of Justice did not respond to KHN.

In a letter to the editor responding to a Bloomberg News article describing practices at Cerebral that included short patient appointments, aggressive advertising, and pressure on providers to prescribe drugs, Cerebral’s founder and CEO, Kyle Robertson, said his company did not give quotas or targets to clinicians to prescribe drugs. Cerebral “follows clinical prescribing guidelines based on the latest research,” he wrote.

The company’s directors removed him from his position in May.

The Cerebral allegations are “a wake-up call to everyone in the industry,” said Thomas Ferrante, an attorney at Foley & Lardner, which represents some online companies. “It’s a reminder that health care is a highly regulated space.”

“Companies like Cerebral are wrecking telemedicine for everyone,” said Piper Buersmeyer, a psychiatric nurse practitioner who is the majority owner of Med Rx Partners, an online and in-person service that evaluates patients and prescribes medications in Vancouver, Washington. “They are destroying trust.” She said she was concerned that some companies do not adequately evaluate patients’ mental health issues before prescribing medicines.

Other companies also advertise directly to consumers about aid in obtaining medication. For instance, Hims & Hers, another San Francisco telehealth firm, has run ads offering to provide “medication for anxiety and depression in less than 24 hours” after clients fill out a short form and connect online with a Hims & Hers provider. A spokesperson for the company, Sam Moore, said providers prescribe drugs only after following “evidence-based clinical protocols.”

Dr. Bob Kocher, president of Lyra Clinical Associates in Burlingame, California, said the optimal treatment pairs talk therapy with medication when needed. That generally works better than medication alone, he said. But he is concerned that some online therapy providers may not perform an adequate clinical evaluation of patients before and after they prescribe, may rely too much on patients’ self-diagnosis, and may not provide enough talk therapy.

“It’s not always clear it’s depression,” said Kocher, a practicing internist. Prescribing medications without adequate diagnostic work or continuing talk therapy, he added, would be “worrisome, because antidepressants are not without their own serious risks, including suicide.”

Based on her experience reviewing some online companies for employers and training therapists in online settings, Maheu is concerned that companies may not give their therapists training in how to deliver safe, effective, and ethical therapy online. As a trainer of online providers herself, she teaches therapists how to de-escalate suicidal or other crisis situations over the video screen. Meanwhile, there’s little government or professional regulation to protect consumers, she added. “What’s happening is a corporate takeover of behavioral health care by digital entrepreneurs,” Maheu warned. “This industry is a catastrophe waiting to happen.”

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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This article originally featured on The Conversation.

Denise Bodman is a principal lecturer in Social and Family Dynamics, Arizona State University; Bethany Bustamante Van Vleet is a principal Lecturer in Family and Human Development, Arizona State University.

Babies don’t come with instruction manuals. Children are at once joyful, sad, confusing, predictable, generous, selfish, gentle and mean. What’s a parent to do when faced with such perplexing offspring? Given the complex interactions of parent, child and surroundings, parents often feel lost. Many may seek answers in parenting books.

Parenting books are big business, and there are tens of thousands of titles for sale. The big question, though, is: Do parenting books help?

How effective they are is a matter of debate, especially given the lack of scientific evidence regarding their usefulness. Limited research has found that problem-focused self-help books may be helpful to readers—think tips about time management or healthy eating. And studies find that using books independently to improve well-being—what psychologists call bibliotherapy—is somewhat effective for addressing stress, anxiety and depression.

So it makes sense that reading a parenting book could be useful. In terms of quality and usefulness, however, they exist on a continuum.

We’re scholars of human development, have taught thousands of students about parenting and write about family, parenting and development through the lifespan. One of us (Bethany) is the mother of six little ones, while the other of us (Denise) has two adult children, one of whom is Bethany. We believe that parents can become critical thinkers and choose the books that will be most appropriate for them. Here are five questions to think about when you’re looking for the best parenting book for you.

1. Who wrote it and why?

A good parent doesn’t need a PhD; neither does an author. However, an advanced degree in an area related to parenting helps in understanding and interpreting relevant research.

Another consideration is the experience of the author. Having one or a dozen children does not make someone an expert. Doing more parenting doesn’t necessarily make you better at it. Not having a child doesn’t disqualify someone from being an expert, either, but should be thoughtfully considered. We taught parenting classes before having children, and it’s fair to say that our own parenting experiences have added depth, insight and even grace to what we teach.

The reason someone wrote a parenting book can also be informative. Advice from authors who write out of angst about their own upbringing or who failed at parenting should be taken with a grain of salt.

Finally, don’t let celebrities’ books fool you. Most of these are written by ghostwriters and are primarily designed to sell books or build a brand.

2. Is it based on science?

Psychology researcher and parenting expert Laurence Steinberg writes that scientists have studied parenting for over 75 years, and findings related to effective parenting are among the most consistent and longstanding in social science. If you notice inconsistencies between parenting books, it’s because “few popular books are grounded in well-documented science.”

How can you tell if a book is grounded in science? Look for citations, names of researchers, sources and an index. Also, learn the basic principles of effective parenting determined through decades of research and outlined by Steinberg. They include: set rules, be consistent, be loving, treat children with respect, and avoid harsh discipline.

If the book you’re considering is not consistent with these guidelines, rethink its parenting advice. Likely it’s based not on science but opinion or personal belief. Opinion and belief have a place, but science is better in this space.

3. Is it interesting to read?

If the book is not interesting, you are unlikely to finish it, much less learn from it. Before taking a book home, read the first page and flip to a page in the middle to see if it grabs your attention. Try to find books that you can read in small bites, skip around in, and return to in the future.

Avoid books that contain “psychobabble,” pseudoscientific jargon that has an air of authenticity but lacks clarity. For example, the publisher’s description of the book “The Indigo Children: The New Kids have Arrived” reads, “The Indigo Child is a child who displays a new and unusual set of psychological attributes that reveal a pattern of behavior generally undocumented before. This pattern has common yet unique factors that demand that parents and teachers change their treatment and upbringing of them in order to achieve balance. To ignore these new patterns is to potentially create great frustration in the minds of these precious new lives.” Pass.

4. Is it realistic?

Run, don’t walk, from any book that tells you its method always works or any failure is because of you—or worse yet, ignores failure.

It’s impossible to provide advice for every single parent, child and situation! An effective parenting book appreciates context and complexity and informs the reader that not all answers are in the book. No parent is perfect, but recognizing weaknesses and failures leads to growth and improvement, and no child is completely malleable. Even parents who do everything right may have children who become wayward.

Make sure the book provides you with detailed instructions and things to do, as well as ways to track improvements. In other words, make sure it is actionable.

Finally, a parenting book should respect a parent’s instincts.

5. Does it motivate and inspire hope?

Some parenting books offer insights related to general behavior, like “Raising Good Humans.” Others offer insights for specific issues, like “Safe Infant Sleep: Expert Answers to Your Cosleeping Questions.” Likely, you will be more motivated to read a book that reflects your specific needs and values and leaves you feeling hopeful.

A word of caution, however. One study found that parenting books that stress strict routines for infant sleep, feeding and general care might actually make parents feel worse by increasing depression, stress, and doubt. Parenting research does not support overly strict routines, and it’s easy to understand why most of these parents did not find such books useful.

Remember to trust yourself

When you read a parenting book, the goal is to feel empowered, more confident, excited and even relieved. You are not alone, nor are you the only parent with questions.

Psychologist Edward Zigler described parenting as “the most challenging and most complex of all the tasks of adulthood.”

Yes, parenting can be tough. In your parenting adventures, you’ll likely need all the resources and tools you can muster. With thoughtful and critical explorations, you can find books that enhance your personal wisdom and intuition to help in raising these delightfully complicated little humans.

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Fireworks and Independence Day are synonymous for many—the pyrotechnic shows that reverberate across the nation on and around the Fourth of July are often one of the most anticipated events of the holiday. Yet they can also be difficult for people who suffer from some types of PTSD.

The loud noises, bright flashes, and pungent scent of gunpowder that accompany fireworks can be a trigger for people who have served in the military, are refugees of war, participated in protests, or survived a natural disaster, to name a few of the groups who may struggle this weekend. For some, these aerial explosions can trigger a full-body response, ranging from heightened anxiety to complete dissociation and hallucinations.

This doesn’t mean that somebody with PTSD cannot or will not be able to enjoy life during firework season. Avoiding the ubiquitous pyrotechnics altogether, after all, isn’t a long-term solution. What will make it easier is if they and those around them take a couple extra steps to ensure the long weekend is more pleasant than not. 

Hoff also recommends looking at the National Center for PTSD’s website, which has a wealth of information for the public, including screening questions you can bring to your doctor if you think you might have undiagnosed PTSD.

You can also try to practice some deep breathing. “Just doing five slow deep breaths will do wonders for calming, and you don’t need any fancy gizmos or instruction,” says Hoff. Other helpful grounding techniques include the 5-4-3-2-1 exercise: in your head, list five things you can see, four things you can hear, three things you can feel, two things you can smell, and one positive thought, she explains. 

Even a simple phone call can be a positive coping mechanism—Weiss specifically recommends making a list of friends and family members you can dial up during the day for emotional support.

Heck, maybe just hang out with your dog in the bathtub. “Having a friendly animal around in a safe space may be just the ticket, and if you are calming your dog down, you might be a little distracted from your own anxiety,” says Hoff.

“As you might expect, there are no easy or simple tricks that friends or family should try,” says Black. “Because PTSD symptoms are complex and can be unpredictable, little tricks can—and often will—backfire.” You can help by asking your loved one how much or how little they want to be involved in fireworks-related festivities, by listening without judgment even if you can’t fully understand their needs, and by respecting and supporting their choices about how much or how little they want to do, says Black. Let them take the lead. 

And as always, if you or someone around you is experiencing a crisis or is feeling suicidal, contact the national suicide hotline or the Veterans Crisis Line for Veterans at 1-800-273-8255. Telephone, text, and chat options are available 24/7.

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The message of spending time in nature to elevate our mental health pops up everywhere: self care books, blogs, and even on some of the most authoritative medical websites. But like so much data, the information we have on nature’s role in human well-being is incomplete.

New research out last week in the journal Current Research in Environmental Sustainability found that out of 174 expert-reviewed studies on nature and mental health benefits published between 2010 and 2020, 95 percent occurred in high-income countries across North America, Europe, and East Asia. Research based in the Global South was more or less absent—and only 4 percent of studies took place in medium-income countries, with none in low-income nations. Additionally, 62 percent of the studies didn’t report participant ethnicity.

“I can’t say that we were hugely surprised,” says Rachelle Gould, a professor at the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources and an author of the new paper. “Unfortunately, we anticipated that this might be the case.”

The skew in mental health research is notable, primarily because most people live in parts of the world that aren’t in the Western Hemisphere, formally educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic, otherwise known as WEIRD zones. Still, a huge number of universal conclusions are based on data collected from inhabitants of these areas. And when it comes to our relationships with nature, the cultures around us play a heavy factor.

“It is really important to know the details of how nature impacts us in intangible ways,” Gould says. “There’s some of it that probably is universal, but there are also maybe some that are culturally specific.”

Cultural differences can be as simple as what we perceive nature to be. In Western traditions, people may associate nature with forests or parks. But for others, including lead study author Carlos Andres Gallegos-Riofrío, the connection can look very different. Gallegos-Riofrío is from Ecuador, and his vision of nature includes the high-altitude grasslands of the Andes that provide water for millions of people. But this landscape is incredibly unique to his region. Denizens of other parts of the world might have desert landscapes as part of their “nature,” in stark contrast to the greenery that’s typically considered “natural.”

[Related: Nature saves us trillions of dollars in healthcare]

“All the time it’s forest and parks,” Gallegos-Riofrío explains. “[It’s] another sign of how dominant the cultural mark of [Western culture] is in this type of work.”

Additionally, the way that we see nature in relation to ourselves varies greatly by how we’re raised. While most everybody can enjoy a walk in the park, for some cultures, particularly in non-Western ones, the relationship with nature can be familial, adds Gould. For Indigenous groups, nature might represent more than a physical part of the world: It is kinship, she says, and often a “profound experience”.

“I see it in my regular world when I’m working with Indigenous populations, what people call Pachamama, which is Mother Nature,” says Gallegos-Riofrío. “In Ecuador, they are referring to something that is so fundamental to their existence. Pachamama is everything, including people. Pachamama is your field, where you grow the food. Pachamama is your whole territory.” 

This research also matters in the context of climate change, which is already directly harming people of color and poorer nations the most. Climate anxiety is a burgeoning field of assessing how people are responding to the destruction of the environment: Within that, it’s crucial to understand how different cultural factors play into the anxiety. So far the field of study is mostly a “largely white phenomenon,” Gould says.

Gallegos-Riofrío says that environmental destruction can bring about extremely different responses in different cultural groups. For example, he worked with an Indigenous population that had to be relocated due to a volcanic eruption, and found that they were distressed because they could not stay with the land, even in its last livable moments. 

“Especially the elders, they said, ‘no, I prefer to stay here and die here rather than to move, because this is me. These spaces are all me, these animals. How can I leave them behind?’” he says. “It was so cruel, so sad. We are not capturing these things in [nature and well-being research], but we must.”

[Related: We can’t truly protect the environment unless we tackle social justice issues, too]

Our relationship with nature is far from static, Gould adds; especially in times when the climate is changing rapidly, it’s crucial to know how different people feel and react to their own natural surroundings. While a landscape being destroyed can be disheartening for most people, it might take on a whole new meaning of grief for those who have lived there for centuries. 

“Part of it is that it’s sort of looking at the flip side that yes, nature is really good for our mental well-being. But when nature is being degraded and with climate change, it hurts,” says Gould. “I think understanding the diversity and variation in that hurt is just as important as understanding the diversity and variation in the positives that nature gives us.”

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No matter the distance, getting from point A to point B with a little one in tow is always its own unique travel challenge. I’ve trekked to the very ends of the earth, through 28 of the 50 US states, and explored 14 countries with my now 4-year-old, and I always tell fellow parents that if you have what it takes to carefully plan and execute a successful family outing to a park on the other side of town, you can apply the same strategy to longer adventures with a young child in tow.

Such multi-day excursions include the classic family road trip, which can be intimidating due to the logistics of planning mealtimes, sleep times, and activities to keep your kid entertained while away from the comfort of your home, not to mention all of the unknown variables that may arise. As someone who has logged thousands of miles with my little one across the continental US, including a cross-country drive, I have learned what it takes to keep young passengers active and engaged. But anecdotal advice can only go so far, so I’ve also asked childhood development and health experts to weigh in on what may be going on inside your toddler’s mind and body during a long car ride and what you can do to ensure everyone stays happy, healthy, and safe.

Your long trip will go much more smoothly if your child knows what to expect, Trachtenberg says. Be sure to talk to them about where you’re going, what’s safe to do in the car and what’s not, and how long the ride will take compared to something they’re familiar with, like reading a book or listening to a song, she adds.

Familiar routines can help, which is why it’s important to stick to your child’s regular sleeping and eating times (more on this below) and plan lots of fun activities they’ll enjoy.

Activities are key because you can trick your child’s brain into thinking the drive is shorter by taking the focus off the journey itself and keeping them occupied with things like games, looking for objects out the window, listening to music, singing songs, and sleeping, Trachtenberg says.

Our family’s faithful standbys include a stack of picture books, lots of coloring supplies, building blocks, and games, keeping our child busy with only one item at a time to maximize the novelty and thrill of each new form of entertainment.

To break the trip into achievable segments, you can create a travel reward chart and offer your little one positive reinforcements, such as a gold star, for every 15 minutes that pass, Trachtenberg suggests.

Stick to your child’s sleep routine as best as you can

Everything’s easier and more enjoyable when everyone in our family (adults included) is well-rested. That’s why we make it a general routine to hit the road no earlier than our usual wakeup time and arrive at our final destination ahead of our toddler’s regular bathtime, nightly storytime, and bedtime.

[Related: For better sleep, borrow the bedtime routine of a toddler]

We also factor naps into the equation, making sure we either can be settled into our destination for the day ahead of naptime or set the stage for a successful car-time nap if we’ll be driving during the day.

“Maintaining sleep routines is huge,” says Mary Sheedy Kurcinka, childhood educator and author of the books Raising Your Spirited Baby, Raising the Spirited Child, and Sleepless in America.

Skipped naps can cause your little one to get overtired, making it harder for them to fall asleep at night, she explains. Disrupted sleep routines can throw off their circadian rhythms, melatonin cycle, and body clock, creating jet lag in their brain, which can affect everything from their mood to their appetite, Sheedy Kurcinka explains. 

To help your little one sleep in the car, Trachtenberg recommends playing soft, soothing music and using window shades in the back to block out the sun. We also make sure to stick to our pre-sleep time rituals, like reading stories and bringing our child’s favorite stuffed animal and blanket along for the journey.

Plan healthy meals and snacks

As with getting good rest, we also all have a lot more fun when we’re well-hydrated and fed. We stick to our child’s usual mealtimes, planning stops or what we pack around ensuring our toddler has lots of water and a healthy, filling breakfast, lunch, and dinner, plus nutritious snacks. It’s not always easy to find anything other than junk food on the road, so we’ve learned to pack things like yogurt, avocados, nuts, apples, string cheese, pretzels, hummus, and hard-boiled eggs to make up for the dearth of options.

This is in line with what both Trachtenberg and Sheedy Kurcinka recommend: avoiding sugary foods and drinks, junk food, and caffeine. These can cause a variety of problems, including sleep disruption, stomach pain, bloating, and gas. On the other hand, snacks that offer a mix of proteins, healthy fats, fiber, and complex carbs can help regulate your little one’s mood and blood sugar levels. 

But be careful to avoid having young kids (under the age of 5) eating in a moving vehicle, which is a choking hazard, Trachtenberg warns. Some items that can be particularly dangerous in the car include popcorn, chips, carrots, nuts, seeds, peanut butter, and marshmallows, to name a few, she says.

Try to make things as comfortable as possible

We found out the hard way that our child is susceptible to motion sickness, a common problem for young ones because they’re still in the process of learning how to balance the cognitive dissonance of being physically transported elsewhere and watching the world move by while sitting stationary in a car seat, Sheedy Kurcinka explains.

“The eyes and ears are saying, ‘We’re moving,’ and yet we’re sitting in this seat,” she says. “Your body has learned how to make these adjustments and understand it. Children don’t necessarily have those skills yet.”

That’s why even sitting can be hard work and cause dizziness and nausea for your toddler. 

[Related: Motion sickness is proof your body is functioning as evolution intended]

Having your child wear sunglasses, using sunshades to block out the sunlight, placing the car seat so it avoids direct sun, regulating the temperature of the car, and placing your toddler’s feet on something solid, like a pillow—versus having their feet dangling in the air—are all things Sheedy Kurcinka and Trachtenberg say you can do to help your little one maintain a sense of balance and feel more comfortable in the car. 

Still, you should keep your car stocked with plenty of trash bags, wipes, and a change of clothes for your little one and any adults in the event your toddler does get sick.

Be realistic about what you can accomplish and expect things to take longer

There’s no way around it: Driving with a small human will simply take longer. 

That’s because you should plan on stopping more often and taking longer breaks than you might otherwise. Sheedy Kurcinka recommends getting out of the car every 1.5 to 2.5 hours for at least 10 to 15 minutes, not just so everyone can go to the bathroom (or have diaper changes) but also to fit stretching and movement into the day.

She also recommends eating meals picnic-style outside and bringing toys that promote movement, both of which will encourage your little one to get their energy out.

A change of scenery gives everyone a chance to clear their heads and offers a much-needed reset, says Trachtenberg, who also suggests trying out jumping jacks, marching, singing “Head, shoulders, knees, and toes,” and playing “Simon Says” during these rest stops.

No matter how much preparation you do, you may not feel up to going the same distances you would travel on your own or in the company of other adults or older children, and that’s OK. But if you have the time, stretching the trip out can add to the adventure and create even more family memories together. 

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These days, TikTok users are measuring their “creativity scores” and posting videos about the results. But what seems like just another fun internet trend is actually based on solid psychology.  

And that’s not the only place where creativity is trending. A 2018 McKinsey Global Institute study found that by 2030, the demand for creativity and other higher cognitive skills in the American workforce will rise by 19 percent. But can such an abstract concept be quantified in a workforce, let alone in an individual?

According to behavioral science, it can. Jay Olson, a postdoctoral scholar of psychology at McGill University in Canada, helped create a simple creativity test that asks participants to name 10 unrelated nouns. By doing so, the questionnaire is able to assess a person’s divergent thinking skills, or their ability to generate multiple original ideas and solutions. Olson says that by measuring the strength of an individual’s divergent thinking, the test may measure a facet of a person’s creative strength.

“It plays a role whenever you’re trying to find a general solution to some problem that doesn’t have one obvious way of solving it,” Olson says. “We naturally use divergent thinking all throughout the day.”

[Related: IQ is a really stupid concept]

Some common examples of testing divergent thinking include finding surprising uses for paper clips or coming up with as many furniture layouts in a room as possible. On the flip side of creative cognition, however, is convergent thinking, which seeks to find an optimal solution to a well-defined problem. One test for measuring that skill is the Remote Association Task, where participants find the link between three words. But Olson says that due to the nature of convergent thinking, he finds the open-ended nature of divergent thinking more interesting to study.

“It’s a little bit more like a logic test that you would do or a test that you would do in school,” he explains. “There’s a single right answer. I’m less concerned about finding the one right answer, and more how we can quantify this massively complicated idea of choosing any idea out there.”

While Olson has been contemplating the divergent association task for nearly seven years, he says that the idea initially came from a childhood game. He and his friends would attempt to think of unrelated words, and as he studied psychology later in life, he realized that they may have been quantifying their own divergent thinking. With the help of Stanford’s GloVe learning algorithm, which replaces vocabulary with numbers to compare and contrast uses, Olson’s test measures the semantic difference between the nouns in people’s answers. The greater the difference between words, the higher the creativity. Yet Olson warns that a low score does not equal a lack of imagination.

“We are measuring just a small part of creativity and how it looks,” Olson says. “This does correlate with these other measures, generally. The task is just an automated way of trying to capture that [divergent thinking] very quickly, and some people find that as fun as well.”

[Related: Beat Wordle with these 5 expert tips]

Olson’s team published the test and a supporting journal paper in July of 2021—but they’ve received a flood of new participants more recently, thanks to social media. Influencer Kamri Noel recently posted a TikTok of her 94.49 score, which is higher than 99.32 percent of other test-takers. Her followers also shared their results in the hundreds of comments under the video. Olson, however, encourages others to not be discouraged after seeing others’ high scores. 

“Twitter was the first big [platform] where that happened, and now we have thousands and thousands of people posting, and almost all of them are posting above-average scores,” Olson says. He thinks this is because some users may take the test multiple times, and artificially bump up their performance by preparing answers. “It’s kind of funny that often people will take the task over and over and over, and then they’ll post them,” he says.

He adds that he enjoys all that the test reveals on the particular ways humans think and that the results can be a reliable measure of divergent thinking. That said, while it’s fun to take (and share) the assessment, there’s no one way to measure creativity.

“Creativity is the production of something novel,” Ellen Langer, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, said in an interview with CNN last summer in response to Olson’s research. “When you’re being mindful, you produce something that is novel for you.”

As the test makers might put it, multiple approaches often lead to better results.

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P. J. Risdon slides into an armchair in University of London’s physiological laboratory, where a small army of vacuum tubes surround the room, their hot coils humming and glowing in the shadows. “Compose yourself and smoke,” the doctor tells Risdon. 

A lab assistant moves towards him holding an aluminum disk tethered to a wire. Risdon notices the assistant’s hands are badly scarred. The doctor’s doing, the assistant confirms with an affirmative nod. He dips a swatch of blotting paper in saltwater and places it on Risdon’s left hand. The wires connect to a sprawling tabletop apparatus centered around a galvanometer—a machine to detect current. 

Electricity surges through the electrodes, and a bead of light jumps across a graduated scale on the meter. The scale indicates the strength of the current passing through Risdon’s hand, establishing a baseline for his conductive activity. Without warning, the doctor grabs a pin about four inches long and lunges at Risdon’s right hand but pulls back just before jabbing it. Risdon recoils. The white light spikes. “The passage of an electric current varies according to the emotional condition of a subject,” the doctor explains. The more aroused, the higher the current.

The man behind the pin is the University of London’s physiological laboratory’s director, Augustus Desiré Waller, who’d recently invented the first practical electrocardiogram (Willem Einthoven later won the 1924 Nobel prize for perfecting the ECG, also EKG). Risdon subjected himself to these experiments voluntarily while reporting an article for the February 1921 issue of Popular Science (“such is the duty to one’s editor”) to see firsthand how Waller’s latest machine accomplished the feat of quantifying human emotions. In his account, he noted that the device was not sophisticated enough to tell the difference between “anger, sorrow, and fright,” but that it could measure their presence and intensity, even if the subject tried to conceal them. 

Over the course of this experiment, Risdon would also suffer being startled by a loud horn, burned with a match, and threatened with a “red-hot poker.” He was even asked to “think of something (other than red-hot pokers) which had been a cause of worry and anxiety.” Naturally, Risdon “began to wonder what the editor would think of [his] adventure, and the bead of light traveled out of sight.” 

Waller’s unwieldy emotion-measuring apparatus marked the beginning of a wave of technological advances that, in 2021, transects a growing appeal for the encouragement of empathy. “I can learn about emotions by using my sensors as a lens,” says Elliott Hedman, founder of mPath, a design consulting firm that applies biosensors in classrooms, shopping centers, and other real-world settings to measure everything from student engagement to consumer reactions. “But what the sensors are better at doing is communicating people’s emotions to other people.” By quantifying emotions, his sensors encourage empathy.

We find ourselves a century after Waller’s first emotion-tracking attempts faced with a confluence of crises—novel pandemic, social unrest, economic distress, widespread disinformation, and climate devastation—whose successful resolutions clamor for us to set aside our differences, gather our resources, and work together. Accomplishing that, however, requires something that’s been increasingly hard to come by: an ability to share one another’s emotions, feel one another’s “anger, sorrow, and fright,” and act on one another’s behalf, especially in times of duress. 

A few years after Risdon’s encounter with Waller, American inventor Leonarde Keeler first developed what he called an Emotograph, a machine designed to detect deception. By 1935 the Keeler Polygraph, which monitored blood pressure, pulse, and respiratory rate, secured its legacy in a criminal court case in Portage, Wisconsin, the first time the results were used to obtain a conviction. By the 1950s, it had been enhanced to incorporate skin conductance, a phenomenon in which the dermal layer becomes a better conductor of electricity whenever external or internal stimuli trigger physiological arousal. (Chalk one up for Risdon.)

The polygraph represents perhaps the most widely used application of biosensors designed to detect an emotional state, specifically deception. But its track record has been controversial. According to a 2003 study conducted by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council, “overall, the evidence is scanty and scientifically weak” to support the use of polygraph tests for “security uses.” They based their conclusion on the findings that “the physiological responses measured by the polygraph are not uniquely related to deception.”

Hedman agrees—mostly. “Lie detectors do not detect lies,” he explains, “that is a misnomer, but that doesn’t mean they don’t work.” Emotions are complex, making it nearly impossible for devices like a polygraph to isolate a discrete emotion. Rather, they detect physiological arousal, or what Hedman calls “your reptilian response.”

Today’s emotion sensors—made by companies like mPath, Empatica, and Emotiv—measure everything a traditional polygraph did and more: sweat gland output, body movement, speech patterns, facial expressions, and neurological activity. Plus, they’ve been packed into wearables like wristbands, gloves, glasses, headbands, and jewelry. Companies often apply machine learning to interpret the data and make predictions. Empatica probes the feelings of autistic children, mPath quantifies student engagement, and Emotiv measures employee levels of stress. 

Yet despite their compelling emotional insights, the gadgets remain imprecise. The problem is that physiological arousal alone is not a clear-cut indicator. Anger will elevate heart rate but so will fear. When monitoring someone remotely, how do researchers tell the difference? “Context matters,” Hedman says. “Video plus skin conductance tells a much deeper story.” In fact, emotion-sensing researchers rely on multiple inputs in an approach called emototyping. For his work, Hedman employs a combination of video, eye-tracking glasses, skin conductance—and people.

But if humans are still needed to establish context, then what value does an array of biosensors really add when it comes to measuring emotions? It would seem that even after a century nothing beats the uniquely human ability to determine the mental states of others based on subtle biological cues and their context. Daniel Goleman’s 1995 book, Emotional Intelligence, promoted the decades-old notion that people who readily discern between emotions have a heightened sense of empathy. That enables them to connect with the experiences of others, making them better partners, parents, coworkers, leaders, and friends. 

Through his research, Hedman has demonstrated that when he shows a person’s skin conductance results to other people, they are seven times more likely to believe that the person is having a strong emotional reaction and to empathize with that person. 

“If you see the data of someone else’s stress, it is so much more potent. You really believe it when you put emotions into a quantitative measurement. It actually creates a sense of empathy in people.” But does Hedman believe there’s an opportunity to deploy emotion sensors widely, at a level that our shared crises demand? “These sensors,” he admits, “are bumping into a culture that isn’t really ready to have emotions first and foremost at every piece of the conversation.”

When Risdon eased himself into Waller’s laboratory chair in 1921, he could not have foreseen how the unwieldy apparatus sitting on the table beside him would help inspire an entire emotion-sensing industry a century later. Nor could he have guessed that the most compelling case of all for emotion-sensing devices might be to heighten our collective sense of empathy at a time when it seems in short supply.

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There may be some truth to the common saying that magic mushrooms will open up your mind. New research shows that psilocybin, the psychedelic compound naturally found in some fungi, can help patients with depression by changing their brain-wave patterns.

Researchers in the United Kingdom told patients with major depressive disorder that they would receive some dosage of psilocybin. Those 43 patients were randomly assigned to receive two doses of either 25 mg or 1 mg—an amount that is considered negligible—of psilocybin. The doses were spaced three weeks apart, and patients did not know which dosage they received. After the first dose, each patient was told to take daily capsules for six weeks. Those who got the 25 mg psilocybin dose received placebo pills each day, while those who got just 1 mg of psilocybin received pills of escitalopram, a common antidepressant drug. 

Participants given escitalopram reported mild improvement in their symptoms at the end of the six-week treatment. By contrast, those who were given the high dose of psilocybin reported rapid improvement in their depression. Their fMRI scans showed heightened brain connectivity—and those improvements persisted for weeks. Psilocybin creates a liberating effect in the brain, the study authors write, breaking it out of the rut of depressive thinking. The findings were published on Monday in Nature Medicine. 

Healthy individuals tend to have highly connected brains, but in people with depression, “we sort of see the opposite of that—a brain characterized by segregation,” first author Richard Daws, a doctoral student at Imperial College London at the time of the study, told Live Science. Their study supports psilocybin use as a potential therapy for depression by way of boosting connectivity between different brain networks.

[Related: Oregon just voted to legalize magic mushrooms. Here’s what that actually means.]

But other experts who study neurocognitive effects of psychedelics say there are many more questions to be answered, especially given this new report’s small sample size and limited time frame. 

“This is an important contribution though I’m more interested in what happens in three months or six months,” Stephen Ross, associate director of the NYU Langone Center for Psychedelic Medicine, who studies psilocybin’s antidepressant effects in cancer patients, told The New York Times. “It’s a little bit like looking out into the universe with a telescope and seeing interesting things and then starting to build theories based on that.”

Depression remains one of the most common and most challenging mental health concerns in the US—an estimated 21 million adults (8.4 percent of all US adults) reported a major depressive episode in 2020, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. The COVID-19 pandemic has also triggered a 25 percent rise in anxiety and depression worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. While widely used antidepressants are a boon to many, they do not work for everyone and often have significant side effects. As many as one third of patients have “treatment-resistant” depression. 

Researchers have turned to unconventional, mind-altering drugs as potential alternate therapies for the patients for whom antidepressants fall short. Psilocybin, as well as LSD and MDMA, are major research targets of interest for psychiatric disorders including PTSD, anxiety, and eating disorders.

The study authors caution that while their findings are encouraging, people with depression should not attempt to self-medicate with psilocybin.

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The following is an excerpt adapted from Breaking the Code: How your beliefs about aging determine how long and well you live by Becca Levy.

A: Increase Awareness

Awareness starts within

Success in changing our negative age beliefs hinges on our ability to identify them. Monitor your age beliefs by checking yourself for portrayals of older people that feel like negative stereotypes and classify these portrayals as such. If you find yourself behind the wheel, muttering under your breath about the elderly driver in front of you, remind yourself that older drivers have fewer accidents and are less likely to text while driving. You can also think about the many excellent older drivers, such as NASCAR’s Morgan Shepherd, who raced at the age of 78.

[Related: Is there any truth to anti-aging schemes?]

Awareness of the impossibility of age blindness

Many news stories and health studies either exclude older people or place them in a homogenous demographic. This makes it impossible to take a closer look or create policies and programs that could better direct resources to this age group. It also makes it easy for us to avoid considering the remarkable diversity of the aging process.

Awareness of invisible age stereotypes in everyday life

In addition to looking within and studying your portrayal of others, look for age stereotypes everywhere else. At first, it may feel like you are searching for something that’s invisible. In my Health and Aging class at Yale, students start the semester with relatively little awareness of ageism, but three months later, they can’t pick up a newspaper, look at social media, or talk to others without noticing the negative age stereotypes lurking everywhere in their lives.

It’s difficult, when you are young, to accurately picture being older, especially if you don’t have close contact with someone who is older. Resisting old age and avoiding older people is one way many young people learn to act, often without their awareness, in an ageist society. A better way of approaching aging is through active intergenerational contact, which is a win-win. Seek out older people, be it in the form of intergenerational yoga classes, an online book club, public spaces that welcome all ages, or an age-justice group like the Gray Panthers, whose motto is “Age and youth in action.” 

B: Place blame where it belongs

Once you’ve become aware of your own age beliefs and of those permeating your culture, you’re ready to start reshaping your understanding of aging. This involves redirecting the blame from oneself to the proper target of blame: the ageism itself and its societal sources. A good place to begin is by recognizing that it is often ageism that makes being old difficult, not the aging process itself.

C: Challenge negative age beliefs

We have found in our research that older people who actively cope with ageism by confronting rather than ignoring it are less likely to develop depression and anxiety. Challenging ageism means calling it out when you see it. This can start early. When I was raising my daughters, I tried to expose them to positive age beliefs, by reading them books that featured compelling and interesting older characters. And I chose TV shows that featured a diversity of ages. I also tried to protect them from absorbing negative age beliefs by encouraging them to point out examples of ageism when they slipped in. 

She decided to find a way to complete it in the United States. While figuring out how to adjust her dissertation topic, she got a phone call from the head of research at a large ad agency that was hoping to recruit social scientists to give his firm an edge. Susan hesitated for a few days before taking the plunge. She accepted the advertising job.

“I was placed on the McDonald’s account,” she says, laughing. Within weeks, she went from her plan to study how social support factors influence well-being on an island in the South Pacific to trying to figure out “why the Burger King’s Whopper was suddenly outselling Ronald McDonald’s Big Mac.” It was an adjustment. Susan found her new world dizzying and thrilling.

Unfortunately, the deep theme in most of these ads is that aging is a time of debilitation, decline, and problems. The issue isn’t that loneliness or diabetes don’t exist in later life, but that there’s no counterpoint to it. Older people just get bombarded with these negative messages. Not the flip side, not the broader view, not the multidimensional view of aging.

Susan blames the ad industry for this view since these age stereotypes don’t square with what Susan viscerally knows to be true about the diversity and strengths of aging. Ads reflect the beliefs of the people the agency hires to create them: the average age of employees at advertising firms is 38. In Susan’s own firm, executives frequently staffed client-facing teams based on how young employees looked, and older employees were often excluded from participating in the creation of ads. 

Susan decided that if she was going to stay in advertising, she needed to shake things up and challenge commonly held assumptions.

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Excerpted from Wired for Love. Copyright © 2022 by Stephanie Cacioppo. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books, a division of Macmillian Publishers. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Before I came along, only a few other researchers had tried to use the tools of neuroscience to study love. One reason for this is that it is an exceedingly difficult subject to tackle. The way the brain encoded the connection between two people was not something we could easily discover, much less measure or put into a mathematical equation. I felt a bit like Newton contemplating gravity, an invisible force that I knew existed but could not yet explain.

There was also another, more delicate, problem: skepticism from my fellow neuroscientists about whether exploring the neural basis of love was even a worthy subject in the first place.

“The neuroscience of love? Please tell me this is a joke,” sneered one of my faculty advisers in Geneva. “It’s career suicide. No one will fund you. No one will publish you.”

To him, it was almost as if I were creating the scientific equivalent of cotton candy, as if anything related to romance wasn’t sufficiently serious and substantive. He wouldn’t be the last man to tell me that love was too fluffy a topic for a serious scientist, but he was probably the most direct. And because he got to me while I was still in grad school, he had the best chance of altering my course.

“You are working so hard to get your PhD. Why would you throw it away on a subject that’s so common, so . . . simple?”

Simple? His description shocked me. The formula to make salt in chemistry is simple—one part sodium, one part chloride. The formula to make lasting love? That was way more complex. And broad-minded scientists understood that. I wish I had known then about the work of Peter Backus, an economist who had calculated that there are likely more intelligent alien civilizations in the universe than there are eligible women for him on planet Earth.

Love was anything but simple. As this adviser was talking, I was thinking of the many female social scientists who came before me, pioneers like Elaine Hatfield, Ellen Berscheid, Barbara Fredrickson, Lisa Diamond, and Susan Sprecher who had paved the way to study the psychology of love with rigor.

After politely listening to the professor’s lecture, I excused myself, gently shut the door to his office, and then whispered under my breath: “Bite me.” How could a self-respecting scientist dismiss something clearly significant to the human experience just because of how it sounded, or how it looked? Wasn’t it our job as scientists to pose the questions that other people hadn’t even thought to ask?

In his defense, there was a legitimate technical question about whether the thing that people called “love” was too vast, too unspecific, too subjective to study effectively. Was it just a compound of more basic feelings like attraction and attachment, a “secondhand emotion,” as Tina Turner once sang? Maybe “love” meant entirely different things to different people based on personality, or class, or culture? Maybe I would be better off narrowing the scope of my research?

Such a view was neatly illustrated by a grant proposal that I submitted with the word “love” in the title. It was rejected. I later sent in the same proposal, nearly word for word, with one change: I substituted “love” with “pair bonding,” and received the grant money.

While there may have been some initial hesitation among academics about the value of studying love, the popular press was very quick to embrace my work—especially around Valentine’s Day, when I got interview requests from magazines like Scientific American and National Geographic. After the first few articles, colleagues began teasingly referring to me as “Dr. Love.” The media coverage also attracted the attention of undergraduate students, who soon developed a personal stake in my research, thinking it could help them navigate their own budding campus romances.

By 2006, I had moved from Geneva to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, where I was doing research in the department of psychological and brain sciences with the world-renowned neuroscientists Scott Grafton and Michael Gazzaniga. A new language, a new culture, a new climate—I was lost until I found my way into the laboratory where they kept the brain scanners and computers and I could spend my nights and weekends poring over data.

Very often, during office hours, a female student would show up at my door with a special request. Usually, she had a friend or two with her for support. She had heard about my work from the flyers I put up in the library: wanted: women in love.

After a tentative knock on my office door, I heard some awkward throat clearing. “Excuse me, uhhh, Stephanie . . . do you have a minute for a chat?”

While I could write scientific papers in English, I was still learning the everyday language, and the word “chat” threw me, since in French it means “cat.” But I got the sense that she wanted to talk.

“Please, have a seat.”

The student sat down, dug her hands into her jean pockets, and began to blush. Her friends gave her a nudge.

“Go on, just ask!”

“OK!” she said, before turning to me to make a request I would hear over and over again that year: “Do you think I could use your Love Machine?”

On my patent application I actually called it a “System and Method for Detecting a Specific Cognitive-Emotional State in a Subject,” but the students preferred “Love Machine,” so that was the name that stuck. It was a 10-minute computer-based test that I designed, which, the students believed, could help them make up their minds when deciding between two potential romantic partners. If a student was torn between the popular guy with a six-pack and the awkward geek with an endearing smile, this program seemed to be able to peer into her heart and divine which guy (or gal) she truly liked.

I had not set out to develop a dating gizmo for undergrads. After my experience in Geneva studying patients like Huguette, I wanted to test the power of positive emotions on the brain in a systematic way. Huguette had used her love of painting to overcome the brain damage caused by a massive stroke. I saw how the associations she had formed with this beloved vocation literally improved the function and plasticity of her mind. The results of our work together were impressive, but ultimately anecdotal—like any patient’s case history.

I wanted to see whether her experience and similar ones I observed with other patients in the neurology ward weren’t isolated incidents but rather illuminated some general feature of the brain. I wanted to see whether positive emotional stimuli like love and passion (for a sport, for instance) could improve brain functioning in all people.

Most of the neuroscientists I knew had focused their interest on the opposite side of the emotional spectrum—the Dark Side. Much research had been done, including by some of my colleagues in Geneva, on how negative stimuli sped up the reaction times of certain brain regions. Subconscious priming experiments were conducted where patients were flashed an image of a snake or a spider at a speed that was too fast for people to consciously register but not too fast to escape notice by the amygdala, a brain region that is exquisitely attuned to threats.

Derived from the Greek word meaning “almond”—because of its small, oval shape—the amygdala is buried beneath the cerebral cortex in one of the most ancient parts of the brain, the limbic system, and is designed to receive and act on information about threats blazingly fast, long before such information reaches our consciousness. From an evolutionary standpoint, being alert to a negative stimulus makes perfect sense. If I am an early human foraging in the jungle, I need to be able to rapidly discern whether that long, dark object lying on the forest floor is a twig—or a snake. I need also to be able to see a person in the brush and detect that he is a stranger with hostile intent, so I can run away.

This evolutionary response happens through what the neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux calls a “low road”—a direct emotional pathway designed to elicit defensive responses without conscious thought. It is like an expressway connecting the visual input of the threat from your eyes to the amygdala, triggering the hypothalamus to turn on the “fight-or-flight response,” the body’s self-defense mode.

All this occurs in the blink of an eye—or about a hundred milliseconds—which is preconscious. (Conscious thought processes kick in at about three hundred milliseconds, or a third of a second.) That’s why you might flinch or jump or raise your arm to a threat almost automatically, before you even perceive what it is you’re responding to.

The function of the amygdala was perhaps most dramatically illustrated by the neuroscientist Ralph Adolphs’s patient S.M., whose amygdala had been destroyed because of a genetic disorder. As a consequence, she could not experience any fear. Incidentally, this was a frightening state of affairs for S.M., since without the ability to detect threats she could not steer clear of dangerous situations, which explains in part why she was the victim of several violent crimes.

Yet as much as the amygdala registers fear, it really is out to detect saliency, changes in the environment that are worth noticing. The brain, as a general rule, is wired to detect change. Typically, when a situation is stable it is safe. When it is rapidly changing, not so much. This is why the amygdala is famous as a threat detector when, in fact, it picks up on all kinds of changes, positive or negative.

I once conducted a study with epileptic patients who had electrodes implanted into their amygdalae. They were flashed subliminal messages of both negatively and positively charged emotional words. As predicted, the negative words triggered the amygdala’s famed threat detector, but what was fascinating to me was that the positive words also triggered the amygdala—just not as quickly. (And by “not as quickly” I mean a difference of a few hundredths of a second.)

The results suggested that, just as we are hardwired to detect and react to danger, we are also hardwired to respond to the opportunity for positive experiences, things we don’t want to move away from but toward. The need for love might be less immediate than the need to avoid danger, but it is by no means a luxury. As we’ve learned, humans evolved because of love, and we evolved to love. So perhaps love had its own ancient pathway—another one of LeDoux’s “low roads”—to the brain.

The “Love Machine” was designed to find out if this was true. Here’s how it worked: A participant, say the student who visited me that day at Dartmouth for dating advice, would supply the program with the names of the two people she was interested in. Let’s say: Blake and Shiloh. Then the test would begin. Her screen would flash. She could see the flash but could not detect that she had just been subliminally primed with the name of Date #1, Blake, which appeared on the screen for twenty-six milliseconds. That is not enough time for the brain to consciously perceive the word, yet it is enough time to relay a subliminal message that activates the amygdala and triggers whatever emotions are associated with the name Blake.

Once this subliminal association is triggered, the participant then completes a series of lexical tasks—sorting out real words from fake ones. By carefully tracking her response times, we can measure tiny differences that statistical analysis revealed to be significant—and meaningful. When the student was primed with Date #1, Blake, she recognized the real words almost 20 percent faster than when primed with Date #2, Shiloh. And randomizing the order—so that Shiloh appeared first—still showed the same speedy reaction to Blake.

But did this necessarily mean that she had an unconscious preference for Blake? What if, instead, she preferred Shiloh and the positive associations triggered by that name actually distracted her from the lexical task, making Blake only seem like the favored date? To eliminate this possible confound, I also conducted a “Love Machine” experiment on women who declared that they were madly, deeply in love with their partner. I put the names of the women’s partners in the Love Machine along with those of a friend whom they had known for the same amount of time as their beloved. This would ensure that their brain was not simply responding to the familiarity of one name over the other. The result: People performed significantly better on the lexical task after being primed with the name of the person they undoubtedly loved.

Now my question was why. Why was this happening? Why should love improve how quickly a person can read? I guessed that it had to do with the way the brain is interconnected. When the name Blake flashed before the student’s eyes and excited neurons in the brain because of the name’s positive associations, it activated the brain’s “reward” system. As the chemical messenger dopamine poured out from several areas, including the ventral tegmental area and the hypothalamus, it sent a rush of joyous energy coursing through not only the regions that process blissful feelings but also other connected areas, like those that help us parse written language. The student didn’t decide for any of this to happen—the reaction and its effects were not something within her will or control or even conscious knowledge. The test, in other words, revealed her true feelings, her genuine preference, the fact that her brain had made positive associations with Blake that did not exist for Shiloh. A colleague summarized the upshot of the study this way: “I guess, ‘When you know, you know—even when you don’t know.’”

The question then became: Why were these feelings inscrutable to her? Why did she need the “Love Machine” to unlock them? This program actually worked similarly to an implicit association test (or IAT), which measures whether people have an unconscious bias favoring one gender or race, for example, over another. Such tests can reveal feelings that are buried deep within—those that you might wish to conceal, even from yourself.

Yet, just like the research my colleagues in Geneva were doing on negative emotions, these tests are typically focused on the Dark Side, unpleasant unconscious reactions, the kinds that are involved in discrimination. Bias is something we need to control and root out. But love is something that we often need to set free. Frequently, it is our unconscious preference (“what the heart wants”) that will make us happiest. As Blaise Pascal put it, “the heart has its reasons that the reason does not know.”

The problems, the Romeo and Juliet–style drama, usually occur when something gets in the way. Interestingly, when I told the students their results, the response was often some variation of “I knew it!”

“So why did you need the Love Machine?!”

Most students, if they were honest with themselves, had a gut feeling about which guy or girl to go with, but their frontal lobes— which include regions that act like “parents” in the brain, telling us “don’t do that”—were standing in the way.

The student sitting in my office would feel a sense of empowerment when she learned that the Love Machine had confirmed her gut feeling. I gently reinforced this feeling and reminded her that the decision to act—or not—on that news flash from her brain was hers, and only hers. She smiled, and walked away from our session with a triumphant attitude—chin up, her two girlfriends following behind.

Buy Wired for Love by Stephanie Cacioppo here.

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Sarah Hellewell is a Research Fellow at the Faculty of Health Sciences and the Perron Institute for Neurological and Translational Science at Curtin University. This post was originally featured on The Conversation.

Far from the respiratory disease it seemed at first, COVID can impact almost all parts of the body, including the brain. For a small number of people, COVID infection may be accompanied by an episode of post-COVID psychosis, a break from reality which can be frightening for the patient and their loved ones.

Psychosis is a condition characterised by confused thoughts, delusions, and hallucinations. People with psychosis can struggle to tell what’s real from what isn’t. Psychosis occurs in “episodes” which may last for days or weeks. Since the start of the COVID pandemic, reports of post-COVID psychosis have come from all over the world.

Post-COVID psychosis is different to psychosis seen in other brain illnesses and diseases. So-called “first episode psychosis” is usually seen in teens or young adults in the development of schizophrenia, or alongside dementia in elderly people.

But people experiencing post-COVID psychosis are typically in their 30s, 40s and 50s, and are experiencing psychosis for the first time. They usually do not have any family history of psychosis. People with post-COVID psychosis also frequently have insight into the way they are feeling. They can recognize this is not normal for them, and something has changed in the way they are thinking.

Features in common

Based on the small number of reports so far, the start of psychosis has been days, weeks or even months after COVID diagnosis. While the symptoms of post-COVID psychosis can be varied, there are some commonalities: people usually have problems sleeping, followed by paranoid delusions and hallucinations. Some people feel compelled to hurt themselves or others.

The scientific evidence of post-COVID psychosis comes mostly from “case reports”, which are research papers describing symptoms and recovery of individual patients.

In the first and most widely reported case, a 36-year-old American woman developed psychosis approximately four days after she started having mild COVID symptoms. She became delusional, thinking that her partner was trying to kidnap her children. She was convinced she was being tracked through her mobile phone.

After trying to pass her children through a fast-food restaurant drive-through serving counter to protect them, she was taken to hospital for care. After one week of in-patient care to treat her psychosis, she was discharged. Her delusions did not return.

In another case, a 43-year-old Bulgarian man began experiencing psychois two days after he was discharged from hospital for severe COVID.

He believed the doctors had faked the results saying his COVID illness had resolved. He also had delusions that he had already died and his organs were rotten. He became a danger to his family, believing he should kill them to “spare them the same slow suffering”. After two weeks of treatment in hospital, his psychotic symptoms resolved and did not return.

Other case studies have reported people having delusions that patients in the hospital were actors and medical staff were trying to harm them, hearing voices speaking in foreign languages or telling them to take on grand tasks, like saving the earth.

Changes in the brain

The cause of post-COVID psychosis is not well understood. Some scientists think it could be due to persistent inflammation in the brain, prolonged inflammatory signals in the body or due to changes in blood vessels in the brain.

There is new evidence that brain areas undergoing change in mild COVID infection may also be areas that change in people who are at risk of, or who are experiencing, first-episode psychosis (that is, not after COVID infection). These areas are the orbitofrontal cortex at the front of the brain, and the parahippocampal gyrus–a key memory region deep in the brain. These regions may shrink in both mild COVID and psychosis.

However, more research is needed to understand this link.

Not the first time

COVID is not the first virus to be linked to psychosis. During the “Spanish flu” influenza pandemic of 1918 there were reports of post-viral psychosis.

Psychosis has been reported after infections with the other human coronaviruses, like those that cause Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). Links between coronaviruses, immune system activation and psychosis have also been found, suggesting COVID may not be the only coronavirus capable of causing psychosis.

Just how common is post-COVID psychosis? The evidence to date suggests it is rare, occurring in about 0.25% of COVID cases who are not hospitalized (and likely have a mild infection), and 0.89% of people who are hospitalized for COVID.

Because there have been so many cases of COVID worldwide, isolated reports of post-COVID psychosis may stand out more. The frightening nature of what people might experience means we might hear more and more about them on social media and in the news.

Although the risk of post-COVID psychosis is low, people who have had COVID and their families should look out for any sudden changes in personality, paranoia or delusions in the days, weeks and months following infection.

If these signs are noticed, seeking medical help is vital. Most cases of post-COVID psychosis resolve quickly with proper psychiatric care and treatment with medication.

If you or someone you know are in crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741.

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Perhaps you find yourself caught in an endless scroll on social media, or closing apps just to immediately reopen them. Perhaps you pick up a book only to put it back down shortly after because none of the words are registering. Perhaps you have so much on your plate that your mind keeps jumping from thought to thought without actually finishing any of them. 

If any of that resonates, you’re not alone. The ongoing, prolonged pandemic has unbalanced our health and wellbeing in every sense, including our ability to focus and pay attention. The good news is that this damage is (for the most part) reversible. 

Stress and anxiety are among the most well-understood factors influencing memory. When we experience immense or chronic stress, it’s normal for our brains to stay in survival mode, says Carmen Sandi, a neuroscientist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. It’s an evolutionary adaptation where as soon as our nervous system senses danger, it prioritizes the areas of the brain in charge of keeping us alive, to detriment of other processes, such as critical thinking. Also a result of going into “survival mode” is our instinct to dart our attention around, as we must be hyper-aware of incoming threats. 

[Related: How to manage your mental health as traumatic events pile up]

But that doesn’t mean that any amount of stress is bad—“to perform well, to learn and to be efficient, a bit of stress is quite good,” says Sandi. Small doses of stress put your nervous system slightly on alert, heightening your focus and attention. But it works in an inverted “U” shape—once stress levels pass a certain threshold, the effect reverses and your nervous system starts to only pay attention to basic survival needs rather than complicated thought processes. Anything that causes you acute or chronic stress and anxiety—like being a parent, or suffering from a physical or mental health condition—can worsen your ability to remember things or pay close attention to the world around you. 

People with long-COVID often have difficulty concentrating. What’s worrying is that not every source of stress is controllable on an individual level. The pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, inflation, and other economic stressors all pile on top of the persisting pressures of everyday life. This makes bouncing back and recovering our mental functions a difficult task, but there are small things we can do to get there.

An important first step is noticing any changes in yourself, says Shishir Baliyan, a doctoral student in psychobiology at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia in Spain who studies stress and empathy. But being aware of your own stress levels is harder than you might think. 

“The amount of stress that you feel, and the amount of stress that your body is going through are two different things,” says Baliyan. One is physiological stress, which is the mix of stress hormones and other sensory input occurring in your body, he explains. The other is psychological stress, which is the perception you have of how well you’re doing. The problem is that they rarely match up perfectly.

Take stock of your condition by stopping and asking yourself some questions: Is your memory worsening, and if so, how quickly? Did the onset of this decline coincide with stressors in your life? Being mindful of your own condition is important, Baliyan adds—you can’t fix a problem you’re not aware of. 

Memory is something that you can, actually, improve, but it’s important to know that it may take time. If they don’t see results fast enough, says Sandi, some people may start feeling a lack of control or a sense of failure, which can be problematic if it turns into a cycle. When that happens, the feeling of hopelessness adds more stress and worsens the problem. 

“Memory and working memory require practice,” she says. “One can train them.”

For example, research shows that mindfulness exercises like meditation can theoretically help attentional control, though there is not enough data to definitively say whether these practices directly improve attention span. There is mixed evidence on the effectiveness of games and exercises designed to improve working memory and attention, generally, the consensus is that our memory and attention spans are not fixed—they can be improved through discipline. 

Training your attention and memory has other benefits, too. In one study in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, psychologists found that those with greater attentional control developed fewer symptoms of depression and anxiety during the onset of the pandemic. 

Finding ways to live with a shorter working memory and attention span is just as important as working towards improvement. Rather than beating yourself up for forgetting things, go easy on yourself and find workarounds. Strategies like writing notes to yourself, setting up more frequent reminders, and practicing different approaches, like the Pomodoro technique, can help you stay on top of things without straining your brain.

Feeling good can sometimes mean thinking well: “emotional and cognitive processes, they go hand in hand,” Baliyan says. If you’re feeling emotionally bogged down, that may be a sign you’re also not in the best cognitive state, and vice versa. 

Friends, family, and community can help by taking things off your plate—perhaps by taking your kids for a day, or cooking a meal when you don’t have the time. They can also provide emotional support for the stresses you are currently experiencing, and preemptively build up your sense of resilience in anticipation of future stresses. 

Improving your attention span and working memory is a journey with no guaranteed results, especially if stressors in your life do not change. But take comfort in the knowledge that your attention span and memory are plastic. Just as you may have seen them shorten and decline, it is possible to build them back up again with discipline and patience. They are not fixed in stone.

The post Stress and anxiety wear down your brain. Here’s how to fight back. appeared first on Popular Science.

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