Don’t Worry, Be Happy...It’s Not in My Genes!

Eternally happy people get on my nerves (but then again, the perpetually morose ones who spout doom and gloom do too.) We all know someone like this. The sky could be falling and they would see a silver lining. You run into them on Monday morning, all chirpy...annoying. 

It does take all types to make the world go ‘round as people say. Diversity, here, like in most things, is a good thing. Most of use fall in between the aforementioned two extremes.

Maybe she’s born with it -Maybelline

Studies have shown that money can buy happiness up to a point, but after that no one is happier than the next middle class/ rich guy. According to Sonja Lyubomirsky, a Professor at the University of California at Riverside, only 10% of happiness is due to external factors, such as amount of money. That leaves 90%. Lyubomirsky says that 50% is due to genetics, while the remaining 40% is under our control...through actions and thoughts. 

As for 50% of happiness being genetic, I can see that. Some people have to work at pretending to be happy, because by nature, they are not. I am firmly convinced people are born with certain personalities and dispositions. I have 4 kids, not one of them is alike. They all have distinct personalities. What if there is an actual gene for happiness!?

Controversial research has shown a relationship between happiness and the mutation of a gene that controls serotonin (remember our happiness chemical?) Some studies have found that people with a shorter (mutated) copy of this gene report lower happiness levels. For example, the researchers looked at people in 30 countries and compared how many people had the mutation in each country. They found that Denmark and the Netherlands have the lowest percentage of people with the mutated shorter copy of the gene, and also ranked the “happiest”. Italy, with the highest percentage of people with the mutation, ranked the least happy of the 30 countries.

So basically, 60% of our happiness is out of our control. What about the remaining 40%...things that we supposedly can control: our thoughts and actions. There are many articles, in print and on the web that suggest there are things to do and ways to modify your thoughts, etc. to have a happier life. For example, see "8 Life-Changing Lessons From TED Talks on How to Be Happy."

1. Here's some of what the TED speakers advise:

   1. Don't expect happiness to be one-size-fits-all. ...
   2. Stop chasing things like success, fame, and money. ...
   3. Keep challenging yourself. ...
   4. Be generous. ...
   5. Be grateful. ...
   6. Train your mind. ...
   7. Smile! ...
   8. Tell the truth.

Also, happier people tend to be healthier and live longer. A review of more than 160 studies of human and animal subjects has found evidence that, with all else being equal, happy people/animals tend to live longer and experience better health than their unhappy peers. (Diener & Chan, 2011) We can’t control our genes and shouldn’t let other stuff that we cannot control bother us. So we should take a more proactive approach to lead to happier lives. Find your bliss.

Check out this amusing info graphic. Check out the happiness benchmarks for all 50 states!

Sources

Diener, E., & Chan, M. Y. (2011) Happy people live longer: Subjective well-being contributes to health 

         and longevity. Applied Psychology: Health and 

 Well-Being. 3(1), 1-43.

Oswald A.J. & Proto E. (2014). National Happiness and Genetic Distance: A Cautious Exploration. 

        IZA DP No.   8300. 

Do You Want To Play A Game? Math, Game Theory and Evolutionary Biology

“Why do I need to learn this?” This question is often heard by teachers from students since the beginning of schooling. From math to biology, they just do not see the importance of these disciplines on their real lives or future lives. “Education provides humanity with a means to share previous knowledge with future generation through discovery and interactions.  Teachers provide the very thread that sustains and enhance our very existence.” (Fairbank, 2010) Teachers supply the link from content/theory to application. For example, I had twin brothers that took two of my science classes since I was hired. One was an artist and into gaming, and the other was into game development. I took this knowledge of interests and made whatever I was teaching relevant to them (they are now starting their first year at the Art Institute of Tucson.

For my master’s in biology I had to take a course in mathematical modeling, but it was taught by my ecology mentor and thesis professor. It was made interesting because we studied how we could use mathematical modeling in studying population and evolutionary biology. We learned the history of Game Theory, the mathematicians and, later, biologists who further applied it to their studies. 

We studied John Maynard Smith and his books (see reference section below) were our textbooks. John Maynard Smith (1920-2004) was one of the most influential evolutionary biologists in recent history. He studied under J. B. S. Haldane, also a well-renowned biologist.

Smith, along with George R. Price (1922-1975), another population geneticist, introduced the concept of evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS), which was the cornerstone in game theory. In ESS a player’s complete algorithm for playing a game (i.e. strategy, which are any of the options a player can choose in a setting where the outcome depends not only on his own actions but also on the actions of others), which tells a player what to do for all possible situations during the game.

This lead us to apply Evolutionary Game Theory (EGT), to our research. EGT is the application of game theory to evolving populations of lifeforms in biology. It is useful for defining a framework of contests and analytical strategies into which Darwinian competition can be modeled. 

So let’s get to know our students. Teach them what they need to know but make it relevant to them.

Interest in Game Theory piqued? Recent thoughts on games and evolutionary game theory can be found here:

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/networks-book-ch06.pdf

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/networks-book-ch07.pdf

http://ess.nbb.cornell.edu/ess.html

References

Easley, David and Kleinberg, Jon. 2010. Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World. Cambridge University Press, chapters 6 and 7.

Fairbank, Mark. 2010. Answering the Essential Student Question: Why Do We Need to Learn This?                        Homeroom: The official blog of the U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved from 

http://www.ed.gov/blog/2011/01/answering-the-essential-student-question-why-do-we-need-to-learn-this/

Maynard Smith, J., 1974 Models in Ecology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.

Maynard Smith, J., 1978 The Evolution of Sex. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.

Maynard Smith, J., 1982 Evolution and the Theory of Games. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.

Maynard Smith, J., 1989 Evolutionary Genetics. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Now Where Did I Put Those Keys?

I recall being able to work 4 part-time jobs, go through ROTC and take 17-18 credit hours a semester and still remember a list of things to do …in my head! I never had to write anything down and I could recall it later. Now I am back in school, working a full-time job, taking care of a husband and 4 kids, my mom and a menagerie of animals. I now have to make grocery lists…which I, of course more often or not, forget at home!

So do kids have better memories than adults? Why do we become so forgetful as we get older, barring any pathology? It only seems like it. It is not the beginnings of Alzheimer’s or senility, I believe it is that we adults are more stressed, overworked and sleep-deprived! An article by Paula Spencer Scott (caring.com) points to five culprits that create symptoms of memory loss that have nothing to do with dementia.

The first is chronic stress (deadlines, family issues, bills, etc.). It causes the release of cortisol and adrenaline that doesn’t turn off. This damages cells in the hippocampus which leads to memory lapses. The hippocampus, we learned, is involved in long-term memory storage.

Second, sensory overload or too much information can cause memory loss. You just cannot process it all. According to researchers at Concordia University in 2011 (reporting in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology), those adults who have difficulty decluttering their minds have a harder time retrieving information on call (“What is that song title? I know it starts with an ’s’!”)

Third, lack of sleep is another (well, duh!) With all that we do, it is hard to get enough sleep. How many of us are dog-dead tired, go to bed, and then cannot sleep? Better yet, we fall asleep only to wake up at midnight and cannot go back to sleep. In 2011 a British study in the journal Sleep found that middle-aged adults who who did not get enough sleep at night are at risk for a decline in brain function.

Fourth, multitasking is another culprit. As we read in this week’s lesson on memory. The brain doesn’t focus on several things at the same time. Switching back and forth can create memory loss (“now where was I?”)

Finally, distraction keeps us from focusing enough on something to allow details to get processed. Distraction may also prevent you from retrieving memories.

Some people find it hard to stop and smell the roses, take breaks and often resent people who seem to be having all the fun in life, while others slave away. I am not saying which category I fit into, but you could probably guess.

"Word Association" -Sigmund Freud (Dan Aykroyd) and Anna Freud (Laraine Newman) Saturday Night Live 

Everyone has a theory...or so it seems in the field of psychology. In our first week of our TEDV 527 class, we studied the major theories explaining the stages of human development and behaviorism. Some theories have fallen out of favor or discredited, while others remain widely accepted, but for the most part they have all have contributed to our understanding of human behavior and thought processes (APA Monitor, 1999).

Freud was a significant figure in the history of psychoanalysis and to psychology in general. When I first had to study him in freshman level psychology class in college, his theories made no sense and made me uncomfortable. Not just because I was uncomfortable with the psychosexual nature of the stages, but where was the proof of the stages of development he presented? His fantastic theories (fantastic, not in a good way) for the most part, were discounted. Freud is still famous, but because he is now part of the popular culture. I recall the Saturday Night Live episode about Freud (starring Dan Aykroyd as Freud and Laraine Newman as his daughter) and his daughter’s dream about bananas (“Sometime’s a banana is just a banana, Anna.”) Jokes and puns about Freud abound. “‘Your Freudian slip’ is showing!” He has become a parody of himself, but wasn’t he just a part of how science works (though people still debate whether psychology is really a science because it is difficult to quantify some data (i.e. how much pain are you in?) or should work? Scientists propose, test and provide a falsifiable theories? The so-called hard sciences and math are not absolutely quantifiable...hello Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.) But did Freud “do science” correctly? Not only did he have poor methodology and was wrong in some of his conclusions, he even falsified data. His theories on female sexuality and homosexuality have even proved damaging (Dvorsky, 2013).

As I read I continually found reasons why Freud was wrong. But what did he get right? Is his legacy to be a founding giant who set the framework for studying development, but got it wrong? Even Lamarck (famous for his theory on inheriting acquired traits and vilified in textbooks) got some things right. And today, experiments in the emerging field of epigenetics are showing some support of transgenerational inheritance! (Hughes, 2014) Three examples of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance can be found here.

The existence of the unconscious mind (which was proposed by French psychiatrist Pierre Janet, but and later broken down even further by Freud) was one thing he got right. Before the turn of this century, brain scanning technology has revealed much evidence for the reality of the unconscious. As just one example, it has shown how complicated tasks that demand all our concentration become progressively more "unconscious" as we practice them, with activity in areas of the brain used to coordinate complex tasks quickly diminishing. How many have us have gone on “autopilot” after a long day to find ourselves almost home and not remembering the trip? (Matthews, 2008) Perhaps we are not “masters of our own domain.” (a Seinfeld reference)

So Freud and Lamarck got some things wrong but so have many other scientists. The key is not have such memorable or  “out-there” theories that, if you really are off the mark, not many people will remember you for it.

Works Cited:

American Psychological Association. December 1999. “Behaviorism: The Rise and Fall of a Discipline” APA Monitor, Vol. 30, 11            

               Dufresne, Todd. (2004, February 28). Psychoanalysis Is Dead ... So How Does That Make You Feel? The Los Angeles Times. 

Retrieved from http://articles.latimes.com/2004/feb/18/opinion/oe-dufresne18

Dvorsky, George. (2013, August 7). Why Freud Still Matters, When He Was Wrong About Almost Everything. Retrieved from        http://io9.com/why-freud-still-matters-when-he-was-wrong-about-almost-1055800815              

Hughes, Virginia. (2014, March 6). Epigenetics: The sins of the father. Nature 507, 22–24. 

doi:10.1038/507022a

Matthews, Robert. (2008. November 16). Freud: he wasn’t all wrong. The National. 

Retrieved from 

http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae-news/science/freud-he-wasnt-all-wrong#full

Westen, Drew. (1998). The Scientific legacy of Sigmund Freud toward a psychodynamically informed psychological science.      
      Psychological Bulletin, 124(3), 333-371.