Stress and Health

I recently watched a National Geographic documentary about stress and the harmful effects on health.  Robert Sopolsky has been researching the effects of stress on health for many decades and has received the McArther Fellowship genius grant for his research.  Every summer he would goes to Africa to study primates and their behaviors and found that the health of the Alfa baboons he was studying was particularly better than the more subordinate ones.  The weaker baboons, or the one’s lower on their social hierarchy had more fat around their abdomens, more buildup in their arteries and were in poorer health than the ones at the top.  Interestingly, the results seem to be duplicated when they studied the social hierarchy in people with Civil Service jobs somewhere in Britain.  The ones at the top, the ones with more autonomy and more control over their work -load and schedule, were in overall better health.  

Prolonged stress can also harm the hippocampus.  The hippocampus is the main place in the brain where learning and memory take place.  With the hippocampus being vulnerable, the cells are more susceptible to damage or death.  The dendrites in the hippocampus of chronically stressed people or primates shrink or die, thus, impairing memory or learning.  I was blown away by the research.  It seems very simple, very obvious.  People who are less stressed are happier, healthier, and maybe even smarter, but it provided the scientific evidence in such an interesting way.  I really recommend it.  Here’s a clip to tease you and encourage you to watch.  There were many different areas of research that are so intriguing but I do not have the capacity of knowledge to thoroughly explain them.  I encourage people to be aware of these things, and how science is so incredibly amazing.

Sleep Paralysis

It’s something that used to happen to me a lot.  I would work long, tiring bar shifts from 4pm to 1 am.  When I would wind down enough to finally go to sleep, I would be so still and ready to fall asleep… then suddenly I knew it was coming.  Seconds away and I couldn’t do anything about it.  I would fall into a sleep paralysis.  I would try so hard to get up, but couldn’t move anything.  Sometimes I would even imagine myself, visualize it, getting up and turning on the light, but when the light didn’t brighten the room I would realize that I was still asleep and I was back in bed with my eyes slit open slightly so I could kind of see the room but couldn’t move to do anything.  It would happen so often that I even tried to yell or shake my husband (boyfriend at the time), but nothing.  It was a scary feeling because I would feel a sudden rush of energy, sometimes it felt like it was right in front of me, but I couldn’t see it or confront it.  I started to do some research and realized that there is a perfectly scientific explanation for it. 

 

 

Sleep paralysis is when I person is having trouble transitioning from one sleep cycle to the next.  Usually, most of your sleep is in the NREM state (non-rapid eye movement).  Then later in the night or possibly early in the morning you transition to REM (rapid-eye movement).  During REM sleep, cells in your pons send messages that inhibit the motor neurons that control the body’s large muscles.  Usually when you wake up the cells shut off and you regain your muscle control, but occasionally the pons remain in the REM state for a few seconds or even a few minutes.  Before I researched what it was about, I knew that it had to be something like that.  I was conscious but couldn’t move. It’s a scary feeling especially because there really was a sense of evil or something lurking around you.  Even scarier when I started reading about how people in other cultures interpret it.  They all have explanations about ghosts, the devil, or demons sleeping on your chest, possibly trying to take your soul.  I just have to take a step back, calm down, and listen to science. Haha! Check out this link that explains it exactly as I experienced it.  With a few scholaraly quotes to accompany it. 

And a documentary trailer:

 

Sex and Gender

I am also enrolled in a Sociology of the Family class and found that the issue of gender to be crossing over in both psychology and sociology.  Living in this Western world, which is all we have ever known, makes us isolated from the beliefs of other countries and cultures.  We usually assume that we are doing things the right way, and this is the only way to be.  Go to school, grow up, get married with a person of the opposite sex and have children.  When we see another culture, with their different beauty ideals, clothes, religion, and style of living, most people assume that they are almost “savage” like.  In no way shape or form do I believe this to be true.  I consider myself to be a very culturally sensitive person.  I see the way that cultures adapts, and works together, forms communities and ways of living that are suited for them and they fulfill all their duties and responsibilities.  They are spiritually connected to a higher power and they are successful at continuing their culture.  I find it to be extremely beautiful. 

When I was trying to understand what the difference between sex and gender was, I realized that gender is a construction of people and society.  A man can have a female gender or vice-versa.  Sex is biological.  It has to do with hormones and physical characteristics.  In our Western society we have two sexes and three genders.  Male, Female and transgender.  The transgender is typically thought of as a person who was born one way, but altered there biology by undergoing a sex change operation and possibly receiving hormone therapy to successfully transition from one sex to the other.  Even if the change is successful, it’s hard for our society to see that person as a “true” male or female.  A society in Indonesia, known as the Bugis, has 5 genders.  This is really hard for me to wrap my head around because I always knew that there were males and females, and maybe even some people who switched it up, but five?!  That seems like a lot, and a lot to be acceptable.  NO TABOO?  How is that possible?   Well it is and here is a little video to help understand how they view the different genders.

 

 

Pheromones

I am a believer in Evolution.  Not to say that I do not believe in God, I do.  I don’t want this post to become a little too religious or philosophical but I want to point out how I see the beauty and messages of Science pop-up in everyday life.  Even when I’m doing a reading for your Biological Psychology class, I see evolutionary evidence that reinforces my Darwinist perspective.  Apparently, the vomeronasal organ is a set of receptors located near, but separate from, the olfactory receptors.  And VNO receptors are specialized to respond only to pheromones.  Adult humans have a VNO, but it is very small and doesn’t have receptors.  So why is it there?  Well, maybe it is vestigial, or left over from our evolutionary past. 

It’s not the only thing that humans have or can have that is vestigial.  We just recently learned about goose bumps and why we even have them? What purpose does it even serve? Well think about any time you might have gotten goose bumps, maybe you were a little scared or nervous?  Something might have spooked you or made you feel uneasy?  Then you get all these little bumps all over your body.  Our ancestors, maybe the Neanderthals or some primate, probably had more hair on their body than we do now.  They might have developed this trick to scare or ward off a dangerous animal or threat, because making yourself look bigger and scarier by fluffing out your body hair seems like a pretty clever thing to do.  In any case, we do not need to do that anymore because we have less hair now, at least on our bodies.  Oh and we have weapons like guns.  But it is still a function that we have and don’t necessarily need anymore.  There are others, like our appendix, which was believed to be an extra place for digestion of leaves in earlier versions of humans. 

Which brings us back to the VNO in humans.  Since there are no receptors there, why do we still respond to pheromones?  It’s been discovered that part of the human olfactory mucosa contains receptors that resemble other species pheromone receptors. Some of the best evidence of human response to pheromones is when two women who spend a lot of time together often have synchronized menstrual cycles. LOL this is Science!  I found this to be true, when I lived with a roommate and shared the same bathroom.  There are lots of studies that show evidence that human body secretions act as pheromones, the effects are probably not as strong as they are in animals but they are present.  They have a lot to do with finding and attracting mates.  And you need to ask yourself, “Why?”  The answer is a lot more complex than you might think, and involves a lot more science and history of human beings.  Do not dismiss it, it’s there and it’s real.  It does not discredit God or his teaching.  Science and Religion should be able to coexist, but it would be foolish to embrace one and ignore the other.