Sunday, December 13, 2009

“Adolescents more prone to substance abuse - Hindustan Times” plus 3 more

“Adolescents more prone to substance abuse - Hindustan Times” plus 3 more

fivefilters.org featured article: Normalising the crime of the century by John Pilger

Adolescents more prone to substance abuse - Hindustan Times

Posted: 12 Dec 2009 06:28 PM PST

A study into why teens become addicted to smoking more easily than adults and why adolescents are more prone to substance abuse has been carried out.

In an evaluation for Faculty of 1000 Biology, Neil Grunberg described the study, as "fascinating" and suggested it "may have implications to help understand why adolescents are particularly prone to drug abuse".

The study looked at dopamine levels in adolescent and adult rats after nicotine withdrawal. Nicotine increases the level of dopamine in the brain, a neurotransmitter that is responsible for feelings of pleasure and well being.

The authors found that the withdrawal signs (physical and neurochemical) seen in adolescent rats were fewer than those observed in adults.

The study provided previously unknown mechanisms as to why there are differences in nicotine withdrawal between adolescent and adult rats.

The key here, Grunberg stated, is "age alters [neurological] systems and interactions relevant to nicotine".

The reason that adolescents are prone to drug abuse (in this case, nicotine) is that they have increased sensitivity to its rewarding effects and do not display the same negative withdrawal effects as adults do, due to an underdeveloped dopamine-producing system.

Grunberg said since rats are not subject to cultural influences, "rat studies of nicotine ... have provided valuable insights that have led to practical behavioural and pharmacological interventions".

"These findings might also be relevant to other addictive and abuse drugs," he added.

The study has been published by Natividad et al. in Synapse journal.

fivefilters.org featured article: Normalising the crime of the century by John Pilger

Charles Darwin and economics - BusinessWorld Online

Posted: 13 Dec 2009 05:41 AM PST

Monday, December 14, 2009 | MANILA, PHILIPPINES

Opinion

Introspective -- By Raul V. Fabella

In the closing month of the turbulent 2009, we take time to reflect on the 200th anniversary of the birth (1809) of a scientific giant, Charles Darwin, who changed radically the landscape of knowledge more than almost anybody in the last two centuries. Isaac Newton changed the way we look at the heavens; Darwin changed the way we look at ourselves.

In 1859, Darwin published his monumental opus On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection, which demonstrated how new species can come from extant species by "natural selection," a process that weeded out the weak and allowed the fittest to survive. While evolution from lower forms was by that time being tossed about in undertones as an alternative to the creationist account of origins, it was Darwin who painstakingly marshaled the evidence that made the theory scientifically compelling in the face of a formidable ecclesiastical and humanistic opposition. In1871, he published the even more controversial Descent of Man, which added man as just another branch in the march of biological evolution.

The mechanism of "natural selection" which Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace co-discovered was a take-off from Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, which painted mayhem and death on the canvass of the human condition in the wake of ever tougher competition for food occasioned by rapid population growth. Darwin and Russell lived in the era of the then dominant if unpopular economic world view, laissez-faire, which celebrated unbridled competition as the wellspring of social progress. Alert commentators note that Marx's 1848 Manifesto was also a peerless paean to the constructive power of Capitalism, laissez-faire's alter ego, before it morphed into an equally peerless fulmination against its social depradations. Charles Dickens vividly essayed laissez-faire's inhumanity in Hard Times. Indeed, the eminent logician and philosopher Bertrand Russell observed that Darwinism was just "an extension to the world of animals and vegetables of laissez-faire economics."

One can confidently say that unique among the social sciences, Economics has the distinction of contributing to the birthing of the Darwin-Wallace theory of biological evolution. But Economics as a scientific discipline quickly slipped out of the orbit of Biology. Perhaps prompted by the complete discrediting of social Darwinism and eugenics thanks to Hitler and Nazism, it, instead, embraced the Paul Samuelson's notion that Economics should be an outpost of Physics in the social sciences. Darwin lost the fight for the soul of Economics to Isaac Newton. The result starting at the end of WWII was the rapid and some say unseemly mathematization of Economics. With it came the embrace of assumptions that allow neat formalization such as constant returns to scale, rational expectation, and the efficient market hypothesis among others. Hammering reality to fit the theory is a common practice in Economics. These in turn lead to an increasing exile from economic reality. That economic reality frequently exhibited ugly and disorderly manias, bubbles and crashes, white swans and fat tails is reality's problem. The physicized Economics cannot be bothered by such mischiefs. The 2008 global financial crisis was a reality check.

In the wake of this latest crisis, Economics as a discipline finds itself at the fork in the road. There is a severe schism at the heartland of the discipline and the verbal tussle is acrimonious and uncharacteristically bare-knuckle. Should Economics persist in identifying clever mathematics with truth as 2008 Nobel winner Paul Krugman claims or should it go down and dirty and take economic reality by the horns? The policy consequences of this battle are weighty. What role should the state play? How should "too big to fail" banks be regulated by the state? The Nobel committee weighed in the debate by awarding a share of the 2009 prize to Elinor Ostrom, whose ground zero research results have frequently come at loggerheads with the predictions of physicized Economics. Many feel that Ostrom is a return to the tradition of the Adam Smith that such committed reductionists as Alfred Marshall and Paul Samuelson marginalized. Ostrom's co-winner, Oliver Williamson, is a leader of the "new institutional economics" school of thought, which after a long lonely struggle finally put "governance" ahead of marginalist market efficiency at the heart of the growth and development debate. The multi-lateral institutions have started to come around to this view of the world and allocating resources accordingly. A crisis, it is said, is too valuable to waste and Economics to remain relevant must take advantage.

Tearing down the whole Neo-Classical edifice may not be what is called for. Many Nobel prizes have been awarded to celebrate its construction and the discipline rightly takes pride in some of those achievements. But others are not so sacrosanct. The big question is "What is the alternative?" A new synthesis is clearly called for, one that preserves the truly enduring achievements, jettisons the glorified tautologies, and finds room to encompass the anomalies. That in my mind will partly come from an incorporation of the insights from Darwin, modern genetics and evolutionary Biology.

Raul V. Fabella is the vice chairman of the Institute for Development and Econometric Analysis, a professor at the UP School of Economics, and a member of the National Academy of Science and Technology.

For comments and inquiries, please e-mail us at idea.introspective@gmail.com.

Winter a great time for gardeners to learn more about their craft - Scranton Times-Tribune

Posted: 13 Dec 2009 04:30 AM PST

Modern life causing brain overload - Newstrack India

Posted: 13 Dec 2009 03:25 AM PST

London, Dec 13 (ANI): With increasing exposure to media in modern times, an average person is every day exposed to information enough to overload a laptop, reveals a new study from University of San Diego, California.

 

According to the researchers, with email, the internet, television and other media, people are inundated with around 100,000 words a day - equivalent to 23 words per second.

 

 

They believe that the information overload may have detrimental effects on the brain.

 

They claim that the strain of processing so much data means we are becoming disconnected from other people and developing shorter attention spans.

 

The study showed that people are bombarded with 34 gigabytes of information a day.

 

"I think one thing is clear: our attention is being chopped into shorter intervals and that is probably not good for thinking deeper thoughts," the Telegraph quoted Roger Bohn, co-author of the study called How Much Information, as telling Sunday Times.

 

"Never before in human history have our brains had to process as much information as they do today," said Edward Hallowell, a New York psychiatrist and author specialising in attention deficit disorder.

 

"We have a generation of people who I call computer suckers because they are spending so much time in front of a computer screen or on their mobile phone or BlackBerry.

 

"They are so busy processing information from all directions they are losing the tendency to think and to feel.

 

"Much of what they are exposed to is superficial. People are sacrificing depth and feeling and becoming cut off and disconnected from other people," Hallowell added.

 

Experts believe that the information overload could prompt our brains to evolve in a new way.

 

"One of the things we have learnt over the past 20 years is that the brain does have a capacity to grow and increase in size depending on how it is used," said Colin Blakemore, professor of neuroscience at the universities of Oxford and Warwick. (ANI)

 

fivefilters.org featured article: Normalising the crime of the century by John Pilger
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