September 8, 2020
Good morning.
Salon reported news that I am sure surprises none of us.
Disaster movies like "Contagion" and "Outbreak" depicted pandemics as dramatic, even action-packed. It turns out the opposite is true: a nascent real-life pandemic problem, it seems, is that Americans are experiencing an uptick in boredom. In June, researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Harvard released "The US National Pandemic Emotional Impact Report," which found that 53% of Americans surveyed reported being more bored than before the advent of COVID-19.
I'm amazed that it's only 53%. The other 47% must make up the nation's collection of introverts.
In any case, the article author speculated that boredom is why people are deciding to ignore all the pandemic public health guidelines.
In the midst of the pandemic, Americans are having to learn how to deal with dullness — something they have been little accustomed to in recent decades. Our culture and our technologies have left us ill-equipped to deal with the monotony of staying home — of skipping parties, movies, amusement parks, and vacations, of cancelling the traditional excitements of summer, and instead accepting the repetitious routines of quarantine life.
In other words, boredom will be the death of many.
* * *
Sometimes there are exchanges on Facebook that go beyond the cat videos and food and drink photos. Impliedly apropos of wearing masks and resistance thereto, I posted a brief note and comment.
From an historian of education and professor at New York University, Diane Ravitch. Here, commenting on changing her mind about the privatization of K-12 education (from in favor to vigorously opposed), but her remarks are generalizable to much in life. "I wanted to explain why I changed my mind about so many policies that I once embraced," she continued. "For years afterwards, people asked incredulously why I changed my mind, as though this was an astonishing thing to do. It made me wonder why people dig in and stay dug in, long after they know they were wrong. To me, the question is not why people change their mind but why it doesn’t happen more often."
The post elicited some reactions. "Because as a species, humans are cynical and not as intelligent as we lead ourselves to believe. Myself included." "Many feel changing one's mind is a sign of weakness... or perhaps fear of jumping off the cliff with the other lemmings?"
I went back to Psychology 101 and cited an article in Psychology Today.
In psychology, cognitive dissonance is the mental discomfort experienced by a person who simultaneously holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values. The discomfort is triggered by a situation in which a person’s belief clashes with new evidence introduced to that person. To reduce the psychological discomfort, the person will have to change either their mind or their behavior so that the inconsistency or contradiction is resolved, thus restoring mental balance and emotional harmony. That is, cognitive consonance.
Hence, people continually reduce their cognitive dissonance to align their beliefs with their actions, thereby maintaining psychological consistency and feeling less mental stress.
This phenomenon, first described by Leon Festinger in 1957, helps explain why so many people will vigorously defend, excuse, justify, and keep their sacred beliefs even when confronted with irrefutable proof they are wrong.
Ideally, people would be rational beings who consistently adjust their beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors to align them with new information that is essentially incontrovertible. But that is not the case. Indeed, there are many who still maintain that the earth is flat; or only 6,500 years old; that vaccines are a health hazard; that evolution is a falsehood; or that climate change is a hoax.
Unfortunately, many people are unwilling to change their world view to account for new information that contradicts their cherished beliefs. Instead, they reduce dissonance by justifying their outlook rather than by changing their minds or behaviors. If science worked the way many people do, we would still be living in caves and dying in our 30s.
This excerpt, in turn, led down other paths. One of them: "Gary - yes, I agree with most of this, but I have never been convinced that primates evolved into humans - and I don't think I'm alone."
I responded (but then later contacted a long-time biologist friend from the University of Minnesota).
My understanding of the field of biology is that it is built in significant part on evolution and there have been thousands of research findings ever since Darwin that all support the proposition that humans are one form of primate. I believe that much of modern medicine is built on that assumption (genetic similarity of animals and humans) and there are very few reputable biologists who don't believe that humans are part of evolution (and still evolving, by the way). Any biologist reading this is welcome to chime in.
My biologist friend straightened me out.
[T]he response to the "I have never been convinced that primates evolved into humans" -- both truth and untruth in there. Since we are still primates, we didn't evolve from primates into humans, because we are still primates. "A primate is any member of the biological order Primates, the group that contains all the species commonly related to the lemurs, monkeys, and apes, with the latter category including humans." https://www.sciencedaily.com › terms › primate
"Primates have large brains (relative to body size) compared to other mammals, as well as an increased reliance on visual acuity at the expense of the sense of smell, which is the dominant sensory system in most mammals. . . . Except for apes and humans, primates have tails. Most primates also have opposable thumbs." https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Primate
We evolved PARALLEL to the other extant primates. (Extant = still in existence vs. extinct = no longer in existence.) We are related to, but did not evolve from the other extant primates.
Hope this helps some. But do tell your friend that they were correct in being skeptical about humans having evolved from the other existing primates, because we did not. With them, in parallel, from a common ancestor. Not from them.
And one other note: all living things on this planet have been evolving for the same amount of time -- since the beginning of life on the planet. Contrary to Shakespeare in Hamlet
What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!
humans are not the paragon of animals. Evolution did not occur in some directed way to culminate in the emergence of humans. The injured bunnies I took to the Wildlife Rehab center yesterday are just as evolved as I am. But alas, the bunnies were more susceptible to the actions of some predator, probably one of the stray cats in the neighborhood.
My friend also affirmed my parenthetical comment. "And yes, humans are still evolving. And note that when I [say] humans are still evolving, I mean the human population. Populations evolve, individuals do not (in the biological sense)."
My friend also included a couple of helpful graphics.
Another friend went off in another direction about cognitive dissonance. "It strikes me that if one is to be malleable enough to experience a change of mind, previously irrefutable, incontrovertible information would have to have been found in error."
I didn't agree. "I don't believe that's true. All knowledge is tentative, subject to new evidence. You go with the best available. Some (evolution, gravity, [the relationship between] education and income, etc.) are unlikely to change. One has varying degrees of confidence about knowledge. Some is more tentative than others. I regard all knowledge in economics as extremely tentative :-)"
It can be said that knowledge in the physical sciences is probably firmer than that in the social sciences. Much social science data is based on sophisticated inferential statistics because no one can canvas an entire population about whatever the question of interest might be, except maybe in Iceland. So there is sampling. Moreover, sometimes situations change because social circumstances change. As I understand things, if you put two atoms of hydrogen with one atom of oxygen, you will always get a molecule of water. Such things are not so predictable in the social sciences. It might been true 50 years ago that "Black voters . . ." or "rural White citizens . . ." or "the highest rates of disease are in . . ." And then those things are not true later. So good social scientists have to keep tabs constantly on what's going on in the country in their field.
Yet another friend, a faculty member, added that "We spend the first 5-7 years of our lives changing our perspective about the world and our beliefs continuously as we learn more and more about how the world works. Then we spend the next 70 years defending our strongly held beliefs!" I agreed. "Often in the face of massive amounts of evidence contradicting those beliefs."
* * *
The "advances in science and technology" department. I went in a few weeks ago for an eye exam in order to get an updated prescription for new glasses. Such appointments are typically neither here nor there nor worth writing about, but I learned new stuff that I found of interest (and those of a certain age might as well). The glasses I have are very old, and even though I only have them in case I lose a contact lens (which hasn't happened in decades), I would like to have a functional pair of glasses at hand, especially when we travel anywhere. Anyway, I went in and saw the same optometrist at the University of Minnesota that I've had for years; she's competent, knowledgeable, and personable.
While I was there, she did a routine eye check. I was impressed with the device for testing pressure in the eye, although I had no idea what that meant. I later Googled it and learned that she was measuring intraocular pressure which, depending on the result of the test, is a major indicator of glaucoma. In the past, as I recall, you had to rest your chin on a machine that shone a bright blue light in your eyes and that actually touched your eye. The gizmo she had this time looked like the black handheld "flashlight" that doctors always use to check your ears and up your nose. She just held it close to my eyes and took a reading. I later emailed her to confirm that she measured intraocular pressure and that she was doing so to detect glaucoma.
She wrote back promptly. "Correct - that device was measuring intraocular pressure. Previously we had to 'applanate' or put a larger probe against the eye to measure it, now this device (iCare tonometer) uses a much smaller probe to do it quicker and easier. It's measuring the 'rebound' effect of the eye to gauge the pressure. And yes - intraocular pressure is one of the big factors in determining if there is any suspicion for glaucoma."
At the same time, I'd emailed her a research brief that I saw the day after I'd been in for the exam. Odd the coincidences in life.
Researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) have for the first time identified stem cells in the region of the optic nerve, which transmits signals from the eye to the brain. The finding, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), presents a new theory on why the most common form of glaucoma may develop and provides potential new ways to treat a leading cause of blindness in American adults.
I asked if she'd see it. She had not.
"That's great news on that article—I know they are doing a ton of research on stem cells for macular degeneration, but I did not know they were using it for the optic nerve in glaucoma too. This new research is fantastic—previously once vision was lost to glaucoma or macular degeneration it was gone forever. Now this is hopefully paving the way towards rehabilitation on severely diseased eyes."
(I have no sign of either macular degeneration or glaucoma, although she did say I had just the faintest beginnings of cataracts, but nothing to worry about. She chuckled and said that a number of her patients wish for cataracts so they can have cataract surgery, which restores vision to 20/20 and eliminates the need for glasses or contacts altogether. You only need reading glasses after that.)
So, while I can still see this composition, I will send it.
Gary
