I have always wanted to learn how to speak another language.  My parents raised me to speak English but once I began taking Spanish classes in school, I became very interested in learning how to become a fluent Spanish speaker.  I am a student in the College of Communications and I am minoring in Spanish so being proficient in another language would definitely help me in the future with getting jobs since so many businesses are now going global.  However, would being bilingual help me in other ways too? Does it make you smarter?

            An article in the New York Times, published in 2012, states that being bilingual increases brain function.  It explains how many studies have concluded that being bilingual advances, “executive function — a command system that directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks. These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind.”  They later summarized this by saying that bilinguals are better at analyzing their environment than monolinguals.

   The article mentions a study that was done in 2009 by Agnes Kovacs of the International School for Advanced Studies in Triest, Italy.  In this study, Kovacs monitored 7-month-old babies that were exposed to two languages and he monitored 7-month-old babies that were only exposed to one language.  In this study, “both monolinguals and bilinguals learned to respond to a speech or visual cue to anticipate a reward on one side of a screen, only bilinguals succeeded in redirecting their anticipatory looks when the cue began signaling the reward on the opposite side. Bilingual infants rapidly suppressed their looks to the first location and learned the new response. These findings show that processing representations from 2 languages leads to a domain-general enhancement of the cognitive control system well before the onset of speech.”

            I personally feel that this study shows strong evidence that being bilingual can in some way improve one’s cognitive function.  However, there is room for error in this study.  Some of the 7-month-old babies that were monolingual could have already had some sort of learning disability that the scientists and/or parents were not aware of at that time.  This observational study allowed the scientists to compare monolinguals to bilinguals.  However, bilinguals could also have better cognitive function than monolinguals for a completely different reason or due to chance.  However, this study shows a direct correlation between cognitive function and being bilingual. I also feel as though, with the question that I am asking, it all depends on how an individual defines the word “smart” whether it be someone who is smart analytically or someone who is what I like to call “fact smart” or someone who is really good at school.  This study provides evidence that being bilingual improves your ability to analyze situations more quickly but it did not mention anything about figuring out factual related concepts.          

My boyfriend has been playing Rugby for many years.  Now that he plays at college, the amount of injuries that he gets has increased dramatically.  Whenever I get the opportunity to watch him play, it is always difficult to watch him ram his body into someone else or fall on his neck.  Needless to say the boy worries me! The other day he called me after his game and told me that he thinks he has a concussion.  I told him to go to the doctor and his response was, “No I don’t need to I get concussions all the time I will be fine.”  He continues to play when he thinks he has a concussion.

            A concussion is, “a type of traumatic brain injury that is caused by a blow to the head or body, a fall, or another injury that jars or shakes the brain inside the skull.”  If someone repeatedly gets concussions, it is very possible that they will get permanent brain damage.  I have heard that is even possible for speaking to become difficult for people that have experienced much head trauma.  This is something that worries me the most.  Having permanent brain damage effects not just the person with the brain damage, but the others around them as well.

However, there have been studies done to determine the types of long lasting effects that concussions can have on the brain.  I found one study in particular to be very interesting.  This study was done by Doug Terry, a third year Ph.D. student in Clinical Psychology at the University of Georgia.  He studied Rugby players in college and realized that their brains had no been affected by the concussions.  However, I like how he approached his study and said that, “If subtle damage or change occurred, over time it may have either an effect that can no longer be overcome by youth and high health, or an effect that worsens over time, to the point that 20 or more years later it begins to show up.  Of course, a third possibility is that having a series of concussions when you are young has no effect on you when in your 50s and 60s.”  This showed that Terry was considering that concussions may not even be related to brain health later in life.  However, to transform his study from observational to experimental, Terry decided to use a machine called the NeuroComm Balance Manager.   This machine provides, “objective measure of balance that uses two force plates to measure your center pressure.  It tests all your systems of balance. It can see if balance is impaired many years after a concussion occurs.” He still has not concluded if concussions have long-term effects.

            Even though there is not solid evidence of concussions having long-term effects on the brain, they are nothing to take lightly.  Studies are getting closer and closer to finding if concussions cause long term brain damage, especially with the use of the NeuroComm Balance Manager.  By having these studies go from observational to experimental, there is a lot more room for more data.  A concussion means damage to your brain, a vital part of the human body necessary to function.  If you damage that too many times, you could be in a lot of trouble. So to all you rugby players out there: Please be careful! 

Erno Rubik invented a toy that had a great impact on the lives of many people.  This was the Rubik’s cube.  The Rubik’s cube was officially released in Toy Stores in 1977 and has been stumping people ever since. For those of you who are unfamiliar, a Rubik’s cube was defined by Google as, “a puzzle in the form of a plastic cube covered with multicolored squares, which the player attempts to twist and turn so that all the squares on each face are of the same color.”  I am sure, now that you read the definition, many of you have either seen and/or tried solving the Rubik’s cube.  This is no easy task! 

After learning about the Monty Hall Problem class last week, I realized that this idea relates very much to the Rubik’s cube.  Figuring out how the Rubik’s cube can be solved (having one color on each surface of the cube) has been questioned by scientists for years now.  It just so happens that scientists have developed an algorithm that will solve a Rubik’s cube with any dimensions.  In an article posted on Engadget.com, it explains how Erik Demaine and his team, “the team grouped several cubies that all needed to go in the same direction, a tactic that reduced the number of moves by a factor of log n, with n representing the length of any of the cube’s sides. Since moving individual cubies into an ideal spot requires a number of moves equal to n�, the final algorithm is n�/log n.” 

How does this relate to the Monty Hall Problem?  First, both have very intricate math logic behind how to solve them.  People will not automatically turn to mathematics to figure out something that is supposed to be fun for them.  Meaning, they will not think when using the Rubik’s cube because using toy’s does not necessarily require “logical thinking”.  Also, just as our intuition is lousy when it comes to selecting to switch doors or keep the door you have already chosen, our intuition about how to go about solving the Rubik’s cube is also lazy.  Many people think that if they just continue playing with the Rubik’s cube that it will just solve itself.  Also, people are tricked by the simplicity of the Rubik’s cube structure.  Since it looks like such a basic toy, people will assume that there is an easy way to solve it and very quickly give up on solving it if their basic methods do not work. Rubik said in an interview with CNN, “Erno Rubik: I believe probably the most characteristic part of the cube is the contradiction between simplicity and complexity. I love the simplicity of the cube because it’s a very clear geometrical shape, and I love geometry because it’s the study of how the whole universe is structured.  I think probably that’s part of the key to the success of the cube — you are able to have a connection with this order and chaos.”  Have any of you solved the Rubik’s cube? If so, please tell me how!  I am not a math person so that Log formula would definitely not help me solve the Rubik’s cube at all. 

          I have heard rumors that the more attractive you are, the more likely it is for you to get a job even if someone else who is more qualified than you and less attractive also applies for the same job.  According to the book, Social Psychology: Third Edition, by Eliot R. Smith and Diane M. Mackie, people enjoy being around attractive people because they are pleasant to look at and they make us feel warm and good because we perceive them as more friendly or comforting than they really are.  Job positions are supposed to be given to the most eligible applicant and are not supposed to be chosen based on looks. IT is said that there are no physical biases when hiring an employee however, is this true?  According to recent studies, it is not.

            There was a study published in June 2011 addressing this concern entitled, Does Being Attractive Always Help? Positive and Negative Effects of Attractiveness on Social Decision Making.  Unfortunately, in order to read the entire study I would have had to subscribe and pay to download the PDF but I thought the abstract gave a good synopsis of what happened in the studies done by Maria Agthe, Matthias Sp�rrle and Jon K. Maner:  

“Three experiments assessing evaluations of potential job candidates (Studies 1 and 3) and university applicants (Study 2) demonstrated positive biases toward highly attractive other-sex targets but negative biases toward highly attractive same-sex targets. This pattern was mediated by variability in participants’ desire to interact with versus avoid the target individual (Studies 1 and 2) and was moderated by participants’ level of self-esteem (Study 3)”

            What they concluded from these three studies was that if the interviewee was the opposite sex of the interviewer and the interviewer found them attractive, they were more likely to feel as though the applicant was the most eligible.  However, if the interviewee was the same sex as the interviewer, the interviewer was less likely to see them as the most eligible.

            According to Associate Professor Comila Shahani-Denning, this is something known as the “what is good is beautiful stereotype.  In an article that the professor wrote entitled, Physical Attractiveness Bias in Hiring: What is Beautiful is Good , it says, “Research examining attractiveness bias in hiring decisions is important because of the extensive use of subjective appraisals in employment decision making. Given the legislation prohibiting employment discrimination based on non-job-related factors such as race, gender, ethnicity, disability and age, it is interesting that there is no legislation regarding physical attractiveness

            After reading all of this information and analyzing the different conclusions, I began questioning whether it is actually possible to prove that being attractive gets you a job easier than someone who maybe is not so attractive.  The observational studies that have been done to try and figure out the reasoning behind this have shown that there is a direct correlation between being attractive and the likelihood of that person obtaining a job position-the likelihood is very high.  When it comes to trying to understand people’s brain processes, it is very difficult to understand why people make certain decisions and like certain things.  The only reasoning that I could think of as to why people scientifically choose to be around people of the opposite sex that they feel are “attractive” is because when you find someone attractive, your body is analyzing compatibility for reproductive purposes.  Setting up legislation banning the hiring of employees based on attractiveness would be almost completely pointless because it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to make someone not be physically attracted to someone else.  A solution would be to train business people to hire people solely based on their eligibility for the positions.  However, this would too be almost pointless because humans are wired to have opinions and surround themselves with people compatible for them.  

All these years I have been hearing that chocolate is an aphrodisiac and I am not exactly sure if that is true.  According to an article in the New York Times, many people think that chocolate is an aphrodisiac because of, “two chemicals it contains. One, tryptophan, is a building block of serotonin, a brain chemical involved in sexual arousal. The other, phenylethylamine, a stimulant related to amphetamine, is released in the brain when people fall in love.” In reality, researchers do not think that the amounts of these chemicals that are found in chocolate are enough to completely influence someone’s desires. 

 This same article in the New York Times mentioned a study that was done on 163 women to see if chocolate made them more aroused.  This study was published in The Journal of Sexual Medicine and found that chocolate intake did not increase women’s sexual desire.  How this study was done was that there were advertisements posted in a local market in northern Italy that asked for volunteers.  There were 163 women (an average of 35 years of age) who participated and they were separated into two groups.  One group was women who had responded to a questionnaire saying that they usually eat chocolate daily and the other group was the women who had reported that they did not eat chocolate on a daily basis.  After the women answered the questions and the researchers went over the data they concluded that there was, “No differences between the two groups were observed concerning sexual arousal and satisfaction, sexual distress and depression. Our data also confirm that aging has a high statistically significant impact on women’s sexual function.”

            After reading this study, I came to realize that this was a very observational study in which there was room for some error.  First, only women were tested and no men were, so if this study were too conclude that chocolate did increase arousal, it would have to specifically mention that it increased arousal in women.  Also, some of the women could have over estimated or underestimated their sexual habits or chocolate intake.  But based on this observational study, it seems like the researcher’s conclusion was a false negative but I cannot really tell because they went into it very open minded and just wanted to see if there was a correlation between chocolate consumption and sexual arousal. Perhaps people feel that chocolate increases arousal because it is associated with the idea of love.  However, there is still much research to be done to actually discover if chocolate does significantly increase sexual arousal.  Do you guys think chocolate really causes people to feel in love? Tell me what you think! 

my photo in this post was taken from this site

I have often heard that having a healthy diet means that I will do better in school. At times, my diet, I will admit, is very poor but who can resist Insomnia cookies?  However, I have noticed that when I do eat healthy I tend to be less tired and can pay better attention in all of my classes.  The American Psychological Association feels that healthy diets lead to better academic performances and it claims that schools can be causing their students to perform poorly in classes, “too many schools offer poor nutritional choices in the form of unhealthy school lunches or even vending machines filled with candy, processed snacks and sugary beverages” (American Psychological Association). 

After researching all of this, I wanted to see if there was any solid proof of this claim that healthy diets lead to better school performance.  On a website called Reuters, I found a very intriguing article entitled “Healthy Diet means Better School Performance-Kids who eat better perform better in school, a new study of Nova Scotia fifth-graders shows”.  This article describes a study done by Dr. Paul J. Veugelers of the University of Alberta in Edmonton that observed 4,589 fifth-graders doing the Children’s Lifestyle and School Performance study. 

Scientific Daily states, “Information regarding dietary intake, height, and weight were recorded and the Diet Quality Index-International (DQI-I) was used to summarize overall diet quality…Students with an increased fruit and vegetable intake and less caloric intake from fat were significantly less likely to fail the literacy assessment. Relative to students in the group with the lowest DQI-I scores, students in the group with the best scores were 41 % less likely to fail the literacy assessment.” 

After reading this study, I realized many things:

1.                     This was not an experiment because what would have needed to be controlled was the fifth-graders intake of food before they took the literacy assessment.  Some of them could have lied about how healthy they eat because they know that they should eat healthy and want others to think that they do

2.                     Direct causation is very possible and so is reverse causation-performing well in school may be causing kids to make better food choices because their level of confidence is up with the good grades.  Also, outside factors could be causing the kids to perform better such as caffeine consumption, level of physical activity etc.  And chance is always a possibility

It just so happens that not many experiments have been done to prove this theory right.   However, Correlational studies done by scientists do provide strong evidence that healthy eating increases school performance.  However, until proper evidence is provided, it is hard to say that the physical make up of healthy foods benefits kids in the classroom.  However, I do believe that healthy eating helps me personally perform better in all of my classes.  

I have often heard that having a healthy diet means that I will do better in school. At times, my diet, I will admit, is very poor but who can resist Insomnia cookies?  However, I have noticed that when I do eat healthy I tend to be less tired and can pay better attention in all of my classes.  The American Psychological Association feels that healthy diets lead to better academic performances and it claims that schools can be causing their students to perform poorly in classes, “too many schools offer poor nutritional choices in the form of unhealthy school lunches or even vending machines filled with candy, processed snacks and sugary beverages” (American Psychological Association). 

After researching all of this, I wanted to see if there was any solid proof of this claim that healthy diets lead to better school performance.  On a website called Reuters, I found a very intriguing article entitled “Healthy Diet means Better School Performance-Kids who eat better perform better in school, a new study of Nova Scotia fifth-graders shows”.  This article describes a study done by Dr. Paul J. Veugelers of the University of Alberta in Edmonton that observed 4,589 fifth-graders doing the Children’s Lifestyle and School Performance study. 

Scientific Daily states, “Information regarding dietary intake, height, and weight were recorded and the Diet Quality Index-International (DQI-I) was used to summarize overall diet quality…Students with an increased fruit and vegetable intake and less caloric intake from fat were significantly less likely to fail the literacy assessment. Relative to students in the group with the lowest DQI-I scores, students in the group with the best scores were 41 % less likely to fail the literacy assessment.” 

After reading this study, I realized many things:

1.                     This was not an experiment because what would have needed to be controlled was the fifth-graders intake of food before they took the literacy assessment.  Some of them could have lied about how healthy they eat because they know that they should eat healthy and want others to think that they do

2.                     Direct causation is very possible and so is reverse causation-performing well in school may be causing kids to make better food choices because their level of confidence is up with the good grades.  Also, outside factors could be causing the kids to perform better such as caffeine consumption, level of physical activity etc.  And chance is always a possibility

It just so happens that not many experiments have been done to prove this theory right.   However, observational studies done by scientists do provide strong evidence that healthy eating increases school performance.  However, until proper evidence is provided, it is hard to say that the physical make up of healthy foods benefits kids in the classroom.  However, I do believe that healthy eating helps me personally perform better in all of my classes.  

I’m walking home from class one night and off in the distance I see a woman walking a little black lab puppy down the sidewalk near McLanahan’s.  As I approached her I could not resist asking her if I could pet her puppy.  She named her puppy Bella and she was just so adorable! She had such shot ears and little paws and the cutest little face I have ever seen! After the woman and I had a little bit of a conversation, we both continued on our way and I started to think, why do I get so happy when I see a puppy or dog?  Is it simply because they are my favorite kind of pet or is there actually something that happens in my brain when I see them that makes me feel instant happiness?  After researching this question, I found out that there is a chemical reaction in the brain that helps relieve stress.  This chemical reaction is the release of the hormone called oxytocin.  Oxytocin is associated with emotional bonds with others.  This makes sense when talking about puppies because when you see a puppy or dog you feel a bit of a connection with them, “When we feel good, we are more likely to smile. Whenever we smile, still more neurotransmitters are fired. That’s why experts say just smiling is good for us.” said Steve Dale from USA Today. 

There are ways that owning a dog can also improve your health.  Studies have shown that if you have a dog you are more likely to be more physically fit.  This is usually because of the dog’s need to get exercise daily.  There is a study that was done that proved that older people that had pets had better nervous systems than older people without pets .  Another interesting fact is that if you have children and you also have a dog, the child is less likely to have allergies when they get older because they are exposed to the pet dander at a younger age. Also, like I said in my previous blog about allergies, allergies are developed over time so exposing children to possible allergens early in life might be a good idea.  Overall, dogs relieve stress and they make people happy.  According to Jennifer Horton from How stuff Works , ” In fact, in one study, when people were presented with stressful tasks in four different situations — alone, with their spouse, with their pet, or with both their spouse and their pet — they experienced the lowest stress response and the quickest recovery in the situation where they were only with their pet [source: Grimshaw].”  Do puppies make you happy? Well, they always brighten my day!  Here is a Youtube Video of an adorable puppy named Harvey to brighten your day!

For my whole life, I have had allergies to something.  Sneezing, coughing, hives, swollen lips, vomiting; you name it, I have had that type of reaction to something.  Whether it was a pollen allergy or for allergy, I have experienced it all! Surprisingly I do not have a gluten or peanut butter allergy (well, as of right now I don’t) but I am allergic to many other things.  My list includes: kiwis, peaches, cherries, guinea pigs, rabbits, hamsters, pertussis vaccines and z packs (many people take z-pack when they have bronchitis in order to break up the mucus in their lungs that makes their chest feel heavy).  Even though I have had allergies for most of my life, I never really understood what exactly was happening in my body to give me allergies to certain foods.  According to Medical News Today , when someone has an allergy to something, it means they have a hypersensitive immune system that responds to certain things as if they are toxic pathogens entering the body and your body is trying to get rid of the pathogen.  Something interesting that I read was that usually people do not have allergic reactions immediately.  It could take someone a while to build up an allergy to something. For me, it took twelve years for my body to decide that it wasn’t going to let me eat peaches.  This process is known as sensitization.  This is when the body’s process of building up antibodies to fight the pathogen.

The other day, I was talking to one of my roommates.  Her name is Steph.  We were sitting in her room and I mentioned how much I liked the color combinations that she had in her room.  It is very bright with yellows and oranges and blues (it is very nicely decorated might I add).  She told me that she wanted to make sure that her room “gave off positive vibes” so that she was always very motivated every morning when I woke up.  I thought this was very clever and it got me thinking: can colors really have an affect on your mood or how you act in certain environments with certain colors?  Apparently the answer to this is yes!  At first I thought that maybe color psychology had a little bit of a placebo affect:  people only think certain colors give off certain vibes, therefore they act certain ways when they are exposed to certain colors.  Although there is not much evidence to prove that certain colors do in fact evoke certain emotions some effects have universal effects. However, there is some research that proves that colors can have an affect on mood.

Even though research has shown that colors can affect people’s moods I do not personally think that certain colors send these messages to your brain when you see them they put you in a certain mood. Rather, I think that since we have associated certain colors with certain moods because we have been told that colors have certain meanings, we believe that the colors do actually have the power to influence our outlook while being exposed to them. 

photo credit to this site